Palindrome (12 page)

“This looks like a pretty advanced battery,” Courtney says, shoving his own head in after I'm done looking. “Storing solar power for literal rainy days is fairly new technology. Quite pricey. Silas must have really needed dependable power for whatever he was doing.”

“Tattooing?” I ask.

Courtney just clicks his tongue and makes a sound like
hrmph.
Then we abandon the shed and walk back to the cabin. My hands are numb from cold; the latex gloves aren't helping much in that arena.

The basement is the only room that hasn't been overrun by teenagers and other thrill-­seeking visitors. We know this because the entrance has been sealed, presumably by the cops. At least a foot of thick cement has been poured over the doors and surrounding area. That's a new one.

From what I can tell, it used to be one of those two-­doored entrances that protrudes from the ground at an angle—­the kind that usually opens to a descending staircase. We've been referring to the area beneath the house as a
cellar
or
basement,
but it's clear that the more appropriate term might be
bunker.

Something about the cement looks off. I spent a summer working construction in high school—­mixed enough buckets of cement to know the way this material is catching the dying daylight isn't normal. While Courtney snaps pictures of the cement-­sealed entrance from every conceivable angle, I kneel down to inspect it.

“Court, you have a magnifying glass?” I ask.

He removes one from his bag and hands it to me. Then squats down next to me and raps a knuckle against the grey cement coating.

“Still hard?” I ask.

He blushes and returns his hand to his pocket. Just watches me in silence as I get down on my stomach for a closer look at the grain of the material.

“You ever heard of cops sealing a crime scene like this?” I ask.

“No,” Courtney says. “Locals must have really been defiling this place. They didn't want anyone messing around down here,
ever
. Don't know why they didn't just put a padlock on the door. What about trying to dig around the door, Frank? The ground is soft from the rain, and if the foundation down there is soft, rotting wood—­”

“It's not,” I say. “There's concrete that extends around the perimeter of the house a few inches under the dirt.” I scoop some mud away with my gloved hand to show him. “Cement foundation.”

“I guess we'll need a jackhammer, then,” he says.

“Well that's just it,” I sigh, once I've confirmed my initial suspicion. “A jackhammer wouldn't do it. It's not pure cement. It's mixed with some sort of metal alloy. This stuff won't crumble.”

Courtney stands up and tries to rub the mud off the knees of his skinny blue jeans but succeeds only in spreading it around into a chocolatey-­looking mess.

“So?” he asks.

“I think we'd need an industrial-­strength waterjet saw to blast through,” I say, grunting as I rise to my feet. “Would cost upwards of ten grand, plus we'd need a truck or big van to carry it up that driveway.”

Courtney stares at the bunker, which looks built to withstand a direct impact from a barrage of missiles.

“It would take a full day, at least, and obviously we'd need more cash,” I say.

Courtney's face is truly pained.

“What do you think?” he asks. “Do we need to get in there? We have tons of pictures in the police file.”

I bite my lip. I definitely don't
want
to get in there. Tough to separate those two. The bottom of the grey sun flirts with the upper tips of the tallest pines. Icy droplets sting my cheeks. I can't help imagining that Savannah's body, impossibly, is still down there, immaculately preserved.

B
ACK IN THE
Honda, I turn on the ignition just to warm up. Unspeakable relief just at putting a mere driveway length between me and that house. Courtney seems emotionally drained too. Feels like we were looking around that cabin for a lot longer than two hours.

I wasn't getting reception at the cabin, but back in the car, my phone tells me I have a missed call from Orange. I get the feeling he's gonna be hassling us pretty regularly for updates. I'll let him sweat it out a bit.

Instead I use my one bar of ser­vice to call Greta. Need to show her some progress and ask for money for the water saw. Five rings, then a generic message. I hang up.

“No dice,” I say.

Courtney flares his nostrils.

“Leave a message!” he says once it's obviously too late. “It looks professional.”

“Nobody leaves messages anymore. If you'd owned a phone in the last decade, you'd know that.”

The windshield starts steaming up a little. I feel a weariness in my bones, a tension in my neck and back that I haven't felt in a long time.

“How you feeling about all this?” I ask Courtney.

He blinks a few times, pushes a long breath out through his chapped lips. “I've never dealt with anything like this. A girl killed, you know. Your dream . . .”

I shift uncomfortably in my car seat.

My phone starts vibrating. Blocked number. A little adrenaline shoots up from my gut, my chest tightens. I answer it on speakerphone.

“Did you find it?” Greta's voice is raspy and strained, tingling with desperation.

Courtney stares at the phone in disgust, raises an eyebrow and shoots me a look like
wow
.

“It's only been two days.” I try to stifle a nervous laugh. “I'm calling to ask you for cash for an expense. The cellar door to the cabin is sealed up real good. We'll need around ten thousand for a waterjet saw to bust in there. We figure there's, well, not a
good
chance Silas stashed it down there, but we gotta have a look around.”

We can hear her breathing heavily into the phone. Impossible not to think of sex; what she'd sound like as I brought her closer and closer to orgasm. I try to force the thought from my mind.

“You don't have to go down there,” she finally says. “It's not down there.”

Courtney is grinding his teeth, looking at me like
where did you find this lady?

“How do you know?” I ask, throat dry.

“Because I went down there myself to look.”

“Before it was sealed up?”

She lets my stupid question hang in the airwaves for a moment, punishing me by forcing me to replay it in my head a ­couple times.

“I didn't even know anyone sealed it up,” she says. “I went there shortly after the trial.”

“But maybe you missed it—­”

“You need to ask Silas,” she says, her voice firming up like tofu in the fryer. “He's the only one who knows where it is.”

Courtney shakes his head, then takes a deep breath and leans over the phone.

“Hi Greta. This is Courtney Lavagnino, the tracker working with Frank on this project. I'm just wondering why you wouldn't tell Frank that you'd already been in this cabin, and already searched the basement. You could have saved us some time.”

“I didn't think it was pertinent.”

We exchange a look of disbelief.

“Well, with all due respect, ma'am,” Courtney says, “we'll decide what's pertinent and what's not. Now, is there anything else you know that you think might help us find this tape for you?”

Again she lets us suffer in silence. I'm breathing harder than I would like. I turn off the heat, roll down my window and suck down some fresh Maine air.

“I found a stack of blank, unused cassette tapes down there,” she says. “The police must have seen them but just left them there.”

Courtney tugs at an eyelash. “So then—­”

“The tape
exists,
” Greta practically growls.

How do I not have bourbon? Next grocery store we drive past, I'm pulling over.

“And only Silas knows where it is.”

“I understand that—­” Courtney starts, but she's already hung up.

He stares at me.

“Quite a little ray of sunshine, isn't she?” I smile weakly.

He shakes his head, stunned, speechless.

“You should see her in person though,” I add. “Looks like an angel.”

I throw the car into gear and, after spinning in mud, catch some traction and ease out onto the empty two-­lane highway.

“Where to now?” Courtney asks softly. He seems almost hurt by that interaction.

“You heard the lady. Let's go talk to this fucker.”

N
EXT MORNING
I
'M
wearing a suit—­and not in a courtroom—­for the first time I can remember. We stopped at Walmart and picked them up for forty bucks apiece last night. Loony-­bin staff aren't paid enough to tell the difference.

Courtney takes the Accord over I-­80 down a four-­lane highway lined on either side by pines, truck stops and farmland. Courtney swerves around a pickup truck pulling a trailer with two horses sticking their heads out of the back, catching the breeze.

Now I get to make the easiest phone call of the week.

“Tammy? It's Frank. Is Sadie there?”

“Hi Frank! Yeah just a minute, I'll get her.”

I gaze out the window. Mist rising from yesterday's rain. The tires sound slick beneath us. My heart feels a little lighter with every mile we put between us and that cabin. Plus, the dream feels a little more distant today.

“Dad?”

“Hey, sweetheart. How are you? How is the Feinsods'? Having fun hanging out with Ben?”

“It's fine but . . .” Sadie lowers her voice into the phone. “She's an even worse cook than you.”

“You'll live.”

“When are you coming back?”

I suck on my teeth. “Not sure, maybe another few days.”

“Is it going okay?”

“I'll tell you about it all when I get back, alright?”

“Alright.” I imagine her pouting on the other end. “How's Courtney?” she asks.

“I wish you could see him now,” I say. “You wouldn't even recognize him.”

We woke up at five to apply each other's disguises. Courtney's thin hair is dusted a light shade of grey, and I chopped off his ponytail and parted the rest down the middle. Then I gave him a clean shave and aged him about thirty years with ultrathin rubber patches that make him look wrinkled. Powder to blend it all together, a few liver spots and thick rimmed glasses, and we have a convincing charade. The frown and blue bags under his eyes are his own.

I admire my work; you'd have to get pretty darn close to Courtney's face to notice anything amiss.

“How's school going?” I ask.

“Good. We're learning about the layers of the Earth. Did you know there's basically lava under everything?”

“I . . . I guess I knew that.”

“Cool, huh? You just have to dig and you'll get to lava.”

I rub my eyes. “We'll try that when I get home, okay? I'll get us both shovels, and we'll dig till we hit lava.”

“Don't make fun of me.”

“Okay, I gotta run, sweetie. I'll try to call tonight, okay?”

“Alright. Bye.”

Courtney talks out of the side of his jowled mouth. “How's she doing?”

“Fine.”

I inspect my own face in the rearview mirror and don't recognize the man staring back. The blond wig set us back four hundred, but a shitty one is too easy to spot. Blue-­colored contacts, crow's-­feet drawn on with a makeup pencil, and a mustache. Courtney's not as good at applying makeup as I am, so we had to get creative.

We drive in silence for a few minutes. Courtney weaves past a twelve-­wheeler. I review the notes we gathered last night.

The Berkley Clinic is located on a 255-­acre property that was originally an apple orchard. In 1915 the land was acquired by an oilman named Hugh Brandsworth, who built a munitions factory, as well as a dormitory for the workers. Then, in the fifties, it was converted into a penitentiary, a large percentage of its inmates World War II vets with PTSD. They built a central administration building, put metal screens over the windows in the dormitory, and turned the factory into a cafeteria/common area. Today there are three buildings that house the five hundred-­plus inmates (all male): the original, hundred-­year-­old dorm is low security—­guys whose families put them there. Nervous breakdowns, mild schizophrenia, bipolar;
Cuckoo's Nest
stuff. Next up is a newer building, which is home to a hundred or so petty criminals, who may or may not have mental issues. Public nudity, unarmed robbery—­mostly first-­time offenders.

And then the third building, presumably home to our man, Mr. Silas Graham: the Sachar Center. Place is home to some of the nastiest, nuttiest men in the Northeast; the real sickos who need more care than your run-­of-­the-­mill maximum-­security complex can provide. A hodgepodge of pedos, rapists and murderers assigned here as part of their plea bargain. Most of them are serving life sentences—­most will die here, and society will be all the better for it. They get a little therapy—­both group and individual—­plus meds for those who need them, which I'm betting is the vast majority. Visitations are strictly controlled for these perps. That could be an issue.

“Even if we get in there to talk to him, there will be guards around,” Courtney says, artificial jowls turned down; this old man look is actually pretty natural for him. “Will you be able to interrogate him if ­people are watching?”

“If you have a better idea, I'm all ears.”

“I still think bribery could work.”

I fidget in my seat. My seat belt feels too tight.

“If this goes south, we can always try bribery. I've got five thousand wrapped up in my groin.”

Courtney glances at me, like he's sizing me up for the first time. “But you think this will work right?”

“I think this has as good a chance of working as anything else.”