by Sue Henry
With one last glance at the grimace in the wall, she straightened her shoulders and marched up Peterson’s ramp.
Across the yard, a Winnebago motor home belonging to Vic Prentice was parked for the summer building season. During the day, she shared part of it with him as project office, but the rest of the time, at his suggestion, she was living there. It contained the telephone she now needed in order to call the state troopers, who would know what was legally required in such unusual and disquieting circumstances.
Troubled, her anxiety mixed with a spark of anger, knowing that what she had discovered would result in another construction delay, Jessie went to make her call.
3
IN THE BRILLIANCE OF A SUNNY MORNING, JOHN TIMMONS, assistant coroner from the state crime lab in Anchorage, peered upward at the skull that gazed sightless out of the dirt wall of the basement excavation for Jessie Arnold’s new log cabin. A frown beetled his heavy brows as he strained to examine it, gave up, and whirled his wheelchair around to face the two state troopers who had laid planks over the ramp and the muddy bottom of the pit, so he could wheel down to inspect the evidence.
“Dammit! Get something to raise me high enough to have a look at the thing,” he demanded. “Those wooden forms in the yard will do, two or three of them.”
Watching from above, Jessie smiled to herself at the sound of his gruff voice, remembering a past comparison to the sound of gravel shaken in a tin can, and at the frustration with which he was now scrubbing at his fuzzy hair.
The skiing accident that had paralyzed Timmons from the waist down had not affected the attitude with which he would hurl himself and those around him headlong at this problem, like everything else in his life. Every challenge was an all-or-nothing proposition.
The two troopers immediately headed for the access ramp, intending to lug down the forms as directed. But Hank Peterson, who had been leaning against one wheel of his Bobcat to watch the interesting goings-on below, tossed away a cigarette and hopped onto his machine. Deftly wheeling it to the pile of forms, he loaded four across the bucket and transported them easily into the excavation where Timmons was expressing impatience. Leaving the Bobcat rumbling in idle, and with assistance from the troopers, he stacked three forms into a platform on the ground below the skull in the wall and slanted the fourth against one side to make a ramp for the wheelchair.
“Good man,” Timmons growled and, perched on this jury-rigged accommodation, returned to his inspection of Jessie’s macabre discovery of the night before.
A phone call from Phil Becker had not alerted the assistant coroner until after dark, so he had instructed the trooper to close the area and to expect his arrival when he could examine the remains in daylight. He had wasted no time that morning, however, showing up in his van in time to have coffee with Jessie while they and the aide he had ferried along awaited the arrival of Becker and a second trooper from the Palmer office. Hank Peterson had also turned up early, and was soon followed by Vic Prentice and the rest of the construction team, ready to resume work but fascinated by the cause of the delay. Vic put them to work sorting out the forms they would need to use later that day; then they stood around watching while the investigation proceeded.
“Jesus, Jessie. Doesn’t anything ever go normally for you?” Hank had asked, with a crooked grin and a shake of his head.
He had then asked John Timmons a dozen questions about the work of the crime lab and how he was able to accomplish it on wheels. Timmons had enthused about the excitement of wheelchair racing, with which he had replaced skiing after his accident. Some mechanical genius—or madman—had built him a four-wheeled version of a dirt bike, and he now raced off-road as well as on, whenever he had the chance, though winter restricted his opportunities. Halting his animated recital in midsentence, Timmons had tossed Jessie the empty cup he was waving and wheeled off in determined fashion toward the basement excavation.
“About time, Phil. Let’s get a look at what Jessie’s got for us this time.”
As the three civilian spectators—for Jessie and Hank were soon joined by Vic Prentice—watched from around the pile of wooden forms, Timmons peered at the enigma embedded in the dirt wall, which appeared to stare back at him from its empty eye sockets with a maniacal grin of its yellowed teeth. When he had examined all that was visible, including the teeth, he selected a tool from the contents of his field kit and carefully dug away the soil from around the top and sides of the skull, leaving it on a rough dirt shelf, released to further inspection. “Hmm,” he muttered, digging away more soil beyond the jaw. “Ha!”
“What?” Becker asked.
Timmons, focused on his work, continued the slow disinterment process without speaking. Gradually, as he expanded the cavity, more bones were uncovered—the vertebrae of the neck and then the left clavicle. A bit more digging and the top of the flat scapula of the left shoulder could be seen, along with several short upper ribs.
A trickle of loose soil preceding a chunk the size of a baseball followed his next attempt with the digging tool. It came abruptly away from the wall and fell into his lap, scattering dirt over his pants as it broke up.
“Enough,” Timmons declared, dropping a hand to brush at his bony knees and squinting as he intently inspected what he had unearthed so far. “The wall will collapse if we don’t cut down from ground level to get the rest out. Man your shovels, boys.”
Swinging the chair around to face his fascinated audience, he gave Becker a wicked grin.
“Here’s your chance to actually dig for clues, Phil.”
It took the rest of the morning; and Jessie had brewed several pots of coffee by the time the skeleton had been more or less unearthed.
Timmons halted the work when less than an inch of soil remained over the bones and once again descended into the basement excavation and onto the platform, where he worked for another hour, carefully removing the rest of the dirt a little at a time to expose the whole skeleton.
It lay on its right side, facing into the pit from a semifetal position, as if the person it had been had simply fallen asleep comfortably, knees bent in a 45-degree angle, arms pulled in close to the rib cage and crossed at the wrists. As the flesh had decomposed and melted away into the soil, some of the earth that covered it had fallen in to partially fill the cavity left behind. Without muscles and tendons to hold them together, the vertebrae of the spine had sagged into misalignment. A few scraps of fabric, now greasy and discolored, could be discerned as underwear shorts that clung and defined the pelvic girdle.
Timmons growled under his breath at what he had found but made no comments until, with help, he had wheeled back up out of the hole and stopped at the edge of the pit, where Jessie came to stand beside the chair.
“Old,” he said, after a minute or two of collecting his thoughts. “Not ancient—not archaeological, I mean—but old. Historic remains don’t wear boxer shorts.”
Toward noon, when he had done everything he could for the time being, Timmons accepted a sandwich from Jessie and settled at the edge of the basement excavation, where he could keep an eye on the rest of the proceedings. Phil Becker and the second state trooper helped the young lab assistant carefully remove the skeleton to a waiting van for transportation to the Anchorage crime lab.
Jessie had smiled at his assessment of the underwear but was more concerned with what he might have learned from his examination. “Can you tell yet what killed him?” she asked.
Timmons glanced up sharply to peer at her from under his shaggy brows. “What killed him? No, not yet. It’s an odd position to bury someone in. Most people lay bodies out straight and formal. I’ll probably be able to figure out the cause of death, but I doubt very much if we’ll ever know who did the burying on one this old, dammit. Probably long gone anyway. And what makes you think it’s a him?”
Jessie, who had just taken a bite of her own sandwich, gave him a startled look and swallowed hard. “Isn’t it?”
“Well…yes. I’d say
it’s male, but that’s not official till I get the remains into the lab. Just wondered about your assumption.”
Jessie had spent a restless night, unable to stop thinking about the silent witness keeping her company in the pit next door to the motor home. As she had tossed and turned, trying to shut off her thoughts and questions, it had occurred to her that for years she had been sleeping almost directly above the bones that lay buried less than a dozen feet below. If her cabin had not burned, and if she had not decided to replace it and include a basement, she would never have discovered the skull. It would have remained at rest, peaceful or not, four feet beneath the surface, perhaps another seven or eight below her bed.
It was a disconcerting concept, but it had never entered her mind that the buried remains were anything but male. Now she wondered why not. Women died and were buried too. Interesting—and gruesome. But the skeleton was wearing men’s underwear.
She turned back to Timmons with another question from her restive night. “What will you do with the…remains? After you examine them, I mean.”
“They’ll be held at the lab while we try to identify them. If we can’t, they’ll be buried as a John Doe, unless someone claims the body.”
As the troopers and the lab assistant finished loading the bones into the van, Timmons swung his wheelchair around to face her directly. “How long have you owned this place, Jessie?”
“Almost ten years.”
“Tell me what you remember. Who did you buy it from? Were there any buildings here?”
Jessie closed her eyes, visualizing the area before a lot of hard work and the help of a few friends had built her first cabin there and turned the yard into a kennel for her sled dogs.
“The clearing was a lot smaller,” she told him, opening her eyes and waving a hand toward the dog yard. “I cut at least a dozen trees to make room for my mutts. There was an old prospector’s cabin—a one-room sort of thing in pretty bad shape. The sod roof was falling in. We tore it apart to make room to build my cabin and used some of the logs for a shed.”
“So no one was living in it.”
“No. There’d been an old man, I think, but he died. It must have been his son who sold me the place. I don’t remember his name or where he was going, except that it was out of Alaska—someplace warmer. I only met him once, briefly. Mostly I talked to the loan and title people.”
“Well, we can go through the records and find out who it was. Where was that old cabin exactly?”
Jessie frowned and surveyed the clearing in an attempt to recall how it had appeared before all the changes she had made in a decade. The dog yard now took up the majority of the space, with individual boxes for her more than forty sled dogs and room for them to move outside them on their restraints. The footprint of the cabin that had burned down three months earlier overlapped the space on which the new one would rise, but had been situated a few feet to the north. As she remembered, the old prospector’s cabin had stood almost exactly where they were building the new one.
“You could almost have set it in the hole for the basement,” she told Timmons.
“So this body would not have been buried by digging up the floor.”
“I don’t remember it that way. It seems about a yard from where the south wall stood.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “I thought so. And that grave was dug from the surface. The fill dirt was a slightly different color than what was around it. Some topsoil got mixed in as it was shoveled back. You can see some color and texture difference if you look closely. A hole that deep means the body was probably buried when the ground wasn’t frozen.”
He looked up and nodded to Phil Becker, who had come across the yard from the van and stood listening to the last of this recital. He scowled at the question the trooper asked next.
“Is this a natural death, John? You think there could be any others? Should we be digging up more of this yard?”
At the incredulous expression on Jessie’s face, Timmons’s frown turned to a chuckle. “Don’t panic. We’re not going to put your construction project on hold with more digging. I think it’s probably a single burial. Could be that the son simply buried his father next to the cabin he lived in and didn’t want to move the grave. Wouldn’t be that unusual. I’ll check the records and see if the old man was buried somewhere else. We’ll have to date the bones, but it’s probably the old guy.”
She thought about that for a minute, not understanding how anyone could bury a parent and then sell him along with the property, leaving no marker and making no mention of the grave’s location.
“If this was his father, isn’t it weird that he didn’t tell someone about it? And why would he bury him with no clothes on?”
Timmons considered her question thoughtfully. “I should have known you wouldn’t miss that one. He might have thought mentioning it would put the sale in jeopardy. I don’t know, Jessie. People react all kinds of ways to death. It might have had something to do with their relationship—if it wasn’t a good one. It’s a little unusual, but don’t worry about it. You can be sure we’ll be doing some background checks and I’ll let you know what we find out. Don’t dig any more basements until I let you know, though. Okay?”
She agreed and let it go, but the idea still nagged at her.
Ten minutes later, after the van and the patrol car had turned from her driveway onto Knik Road, she glanced around her yard, contemplating the unwelcome thought of other bodies beneath the ground. The idea gave her another shiver, so she determinedly thought about something else: getting her cabin building under way again.
“Hey, Jessie,” Hank Peterson called from the hole, where he was about to start up his Bobcat to complete the excavation. “If you want, we can put a basement window in this space they dug out. Whaddaya think?”
“Forget it,” she told him emphatically. “I don’t want to look out a window and remember that I found a skeleton there. Fill it in.”
4
FOLLOWING THE DEPARTURE OF THE FORENSICS TEAM, the construction crew was half a day behind schedule in forming up to pour the concrete that would be delivered by a subcontractor the next morning. Taking advantage of the extended June daylight, they worked until after seven, Jessie laboring along with Vic Prentice’s crew of four, while Hank Peterson used his Bobcat to level the ground and move forms into position.
It was an interesting and experienced crew that went efficiently about their business, stringing chalk lines to establish the exact location of the basement footings in the excavation, then assembling the forms in the shallow trenches that would hold them. As she helped by carrying tools and lumber back and forth, Jessie learned their first names.
Vic’s foreman, Bill, a stocky, moonfaced man in his forties, who rocked about on short, stumpy legs, spoke with a surprisingly soft voice. He was clearly respected by the men, however, for his few suggestions—impossible to call them orders from their tone—were followed to the letter.
Jason, whom they all called J.B., was the exact opposite in appearance, tall and thin. He had a voice like a foghorn that could almost always be heard pouring out good-humored if off-key scraps of song, as he warbled along with the tape player he had attached to his utility belt. To Jessie’s amusement, he seemed to know the words to every show tune ever written for the Broadway stage.
The other two crew members were new this season and tended to be more seen than heard. Dell was neatly bearded and wore his hair long, tied back in a low ponytail. He had the build of a football quarterback, slim and agile, with muscled arms and shoulders that he liked to show off by tearing the sleeves out of the sweatshirts he wore. He spoke little but seemed aware of everything, moving instinctively to where he was needed.
Redheaded Stevie, in her twenties the youngest, also went competently—and more energetically—about her business, with little direction from Bill. She wore her hair short and tied colorful bandannas around her head as sweatbands. Stevie caught Jessie’s attention now and then with an infectio
us grin or a humorous comment muttered almost under her breath as she passed.
When they finally quit for the day, all was ready for the pour next morning, and Jessie was tired, dirty, and hungry. Waving good-bye to Vic and Hank, last to drive away, she headed for the motor home and a shower before finding something easy, quick, and probably canned to heat for dinner.
Billy Steward, her kennel assistant, had showed up late in the afternoon to feed and water the dogs, so she had no canine chores waiting. But wanting some company that wouldn’t shout directions over the roar of a Bobcat, she unhooked her lead dog, Tank, from his restraint and took him into the Winnebago with her for the evening.
As she stripped off her filthy jeans and sweatshirt, he sat patiently awaiting her attention. All day, he and the other dogs had watched the unusual activity from their places in the yard, some leaping up to lie on top of their boxes, which gave them a better view of the proceedings.
“Hey, buddy. This is all pretty strange for you guys, isn’t it?” she asked, grabbing a towel with one hand and leaning down to give him a hug and rub his ears. “But I need a box to sleep in too.”
He reached up to give her an affectionate sloppy lick from chin to ear, making her grin.
“Okay, I can take a hint. Shower time.”
Getting clean felt so good she stayed in the compact shower space until she ran out of hot water, washing her hair along with the rest of her. Satisfied with a quick towel dry, she ran her fingers through her wavy honey-blond hair, pulled on a favorite old pair of sweats and an Arnold Kennels T-shirt, and headed for the galley. There, she considered a can of chili but opted instead for one of several serving-sized containers of stew from a batch she had made a week or so before and frozen for just such an undemanding meal. Dumping it from its plastic container into a saucepan, she added a little water and turned the stove burner on low to thaw and heat it slowly. Some French bread went into the oven, buttered and encased in aluminum foil. Five minutes later, she had slipped Loreena McKennitt’s The Book of Secrets into the CD player and settled at the table with a shot of Jameson’s Irish for sipping and a sigh of contentment.
