"S" is for Silence (21 page)

The third floor was inaccessible. Yellow
CAUTION
tape had been stretched across what was left of the stairs. Gaping holes in the stairwell traced the course of the fire as it ate its way through the rooms above. There was something unbearably creepy about the ruin everywhere. I returned to the second floor and made a circuit, pausing at many of the windows to take in the view. Aside from the field across the road, there wasn't much to see. One field over, a new crop of some kind was sprouting through layers of plastic sheeting that served to keep the weeds down. The illusion was of ice. Closer to the house, Tannie's battle with the brush had uncovered meandering brick paths and a truck garden now choked with weeds. During the summer, a volunteer tomato plant had resurrected itself, and it sprawled over a wooden bench, cherry tomatoes in evidence like little red ornaments on a Christmas tree. I could see the outlines of former flower beds and trees stunted by lack of sun for all the overgrowth.

To the left, at an angle, I gazed down at an ill-defined depression that might have been a sunken pool, or the remnant of an old septic system. There wouldn't have been sewer lines in place in the early 1900s when the house was built. A mound of newly cleared snowball bushes was visible along one edge. The uprooted plants boasted once bright blue blossoms as big as heads of cabbage. I felt bad at the sacrifice of bushes that had grown so impossibly grand.

In the side yard of the lot where our trailer had sat, my aunt had planted hydrangeas much the same color, though not quite so lush as these had been. The neighbor's hydrangeas were a washed-out pink, and Aunt Gin took delight in her superior blooms. The secret, said she, was burying nails in the soil, which somehow encouraged the shift from pink to the rich blue shade.

Afterward I felt I'd been incredibly dense, taking as long as I had to add that particular two plus two. I stared down at the cracked and slightly sunken oblong of soil and felt a flash, the sudden gelling of facts that hadn't seemed connected before. This was where Winston had last seen the car. Amid dirt mounds, heavy equipment, and orange plastic cones, he'd said. A temporary road barrier had been erected, denying access to through traffic. No sign of Violet, no sound from the dog, but from that night forward, the Bel Air was never seen again.

Perhaps because it was buried here. Maybe all these years, the rich blue hydrangeas had been feeding on the rust.

I drove to the service station near Tullis and used the pay phone to call Schaefer. I told him what had occurred to me and asked how we might confirm or refute my hunch about the oblong depression in the earth. Schaefer was dubious but said he had a friend who owned a metal detector. He agreed to call the guy. If the guy could help, they'd meet us at the property as soon as possible. Failing that, he'd drive out on his own and assess the situation. I hadn't told Tannie what I was up to, but now that I'd set the wheels in motion, I worried I was making a colossal ass of myself. On the other hand, oh well. There are worse things in life and I've been guilty of most.

By the time I pulled up at the house again, she'd finished her business with Bill Boynton and he was gone. “Where'd you disappear to? I thought we were having lunch.”

“Yeah, well, something's come up. I want you to take a look.”

“Can't we eat first and then look?”

“This won't take long.”

She followed me to the side yard and I pointed to the irregular rectangle that had attracted my attention. At ground level, the depression wasn't as defined as it appeared from above, especially with half-dead hydrangea bushes piled to one side. At close range, it looked more like a mole had been tunneling across the yard. The soil was uneven, but it took a bit of squinting to see that it was sunken in relation to the surrounding lawn. This was about the same as staring at the night sky, trying to identify Taurus the Bull by visualizing lines between stars. I never saw anything remotely resembling livestock, a failing I attributed to my paltry imagination. Yet here I was pointing like a bird dog, saying, “Know what that is?”

“Dirt?”

“Better than dirt. I think it's Violet Sullivan's grave.”

Tannie stared down at her feet. “You're shitting me.”

“Don't think so, but we'll find out.”

We sat on the porch steps waiting for Tim Schaefer. Tannie had lost her appetite and neither of us was in the mood to talk. “But I got dibs on the braunschweiger once we get around to the sandwiches,” she said.

At 1:10 Schaefer drove up in his 1982 Toyota and pulled into Tannie's drive with his metal-detecting pal. The two got out, car doors slamming in unison, and crossed to the porch. Schaefer carried a shovel and a long steel implement, like a walking stick with a point on one end. He introduced his friend, whose name was Ken Rice, adding a two-line bio so we'd know whom we were dealing with. Like Schaefer, he was a man in his early eighties, retired after thirty-eight years with the Santa Maria Police Department, working first as a motorcycle officer, then foot patrol, Narcotics, and later as the department's first K-9 officer. For the past twenty years, his passion had been the location and recovery of buried relics, caches of coins, and other forms of treasure. We shook hands all around and then Rice turned on his detector, which looked like the two halves of a toolbox, connected by a metal rod. “Let's see what we got.”

The four of us trooped across the property to the side yard, me tagging behind Rice like a little kid. “How does that work?”

“System has a directional transmitter and directional receiver built into these interlocking cases. Powered up, it emits an electromagnetic field that penetrates the soil. This is the same equipment used by public-utility employees looking for pipes underground. When the search pattern encounters metal, the signal is interrupted and that generates an audio response.”

“How far down?”

“The Fisher's capable of revealing a target as far down as twenty feet. Depending on soil mineralization and ground conditions, it's possible to detect an object even deeper.”

When we reached the spot, the three of us watched as Rice swept the detector across the ground. He'd put on a headset, and I gathered the device made a continuous sound that grew louder when he made a find. On his first pass, I saw the needle on the gauge leap hard to the right and stay there as though glued. He pressed a hand to his ear, frowning to himself as he continued sweeping across the area. Having finished, he said, “You've got something the size of a boxcar down there.”

I laughed. “We do?”

“Schaefer tells me you're looking for a car, but this might be something else.”

“Such as what?”

“A Dumpster, underground storage tank, a chunk of sheet metal roof.”

“So now what?” I asked.

“That's what I'm trying to figure out.”

He and Schaefer conferred and then Schaefer returned to his car, where he opened the trunk. He came back bearing a ball of twine and a plastic bag full of the golf tees he used in recaning chairs. While Rice made a series of passes with his box, Schaefer followed in his wake and stuck golf tees in the ground, roughly conforming to the signal Rice was picking up. Tannie and I each took a turn listening, passing the headset from one to the other. If Rice moved the device too far left or right, the tone diminished. Schaefer ran a line of twine from tee to tee. When they finished mapping, the string was laid out in a rectangle eighteen feet long by approximately eight feet wide. I could feel the skin pucker on my arms at the notion of an underground object of that size. It must be equivalent to sailing on the ocean and realizing a whale was on the verge of surfacing under your boat. The very proximity seemed ominous. Unseen and unidentified, it radiated an energy that had me edging away.

Schaefer picked up the metal bar he was using as a probe. He chose a spot and pushed down, leaning his weight into the rod. It sank eight inches, but not easily. The soil in this part of the state has a high clay content, larded with numerous rocks and sizeable sandstone boulders. This makes digging tedious under the best of circumstances. Strike a boulder with a shovel blade and the impact will reverberate all the way up your arms.

Rice added his weight to the job. The probe sank another foot and a half and stopped. He said, “What do you think?”

“Let's see if it's rock or we're hitting something else.”

Schaefer took his shovel and set to work, cutting into the hard-packed topsoil. I'd thought the ground would yield, but it proved to be slow going. Twenty minutes of steady effort produced a trench eighteen inches wide and about three feet long. Frail roots were exposed and hung from the perpendicular sides of the cut like a living fringe. The dirt pile beside the hole mounted.

At a depth of twenty-six inches, he made contact with an object, or a portion of an object. The four of us paused to stare.

“I've got a trowel if you want to dig by hand,” Tannie said.

“Might be smart,” Rice replied.

When she returned, she said, “May I?”

Schaefer said, “Have at it. It's your land.”

Tannie got down on her hands and knees and began to scrape away the dirt. The object might have once been chrome though it was so badly rusted it was difficult to tell. I found myself tilting my head, saying, “What
is
that?”

By the time she'd dug down and cut an additional five inches, she'd uncovered something with a metal lip that extended over a shallow curve of glass. She looked up. “It's a headlight. Isn't it?”

Schaefer rested his hands on his knees and leaned closer. “I believe you're right.”

Tannie scraped away another narrow trough of dirt, revealing what looked to be the rusted metal curve of a front right fender.

Rice said, “One of us better call the station and get some help out here.”

 

By 3:00 there were eight officers at the site: an ID detective and a young deputy from the Santa Maria Sheriff's Department; a sergeant, two homicide detectives, and two nonsworn officers from Santa Teresa. In addition, an investigator had driven up from the State Crime Lab, which is located in Colgate, near the Santa Teresa Airport. A temporary parking area had been set up for official vehicles, including the crime scene van.

The first officer on the scene, the young Santa Maria deputy, had secured the area, relegating Schaefer, Ken Rice, Tannie, and me to a spot twenty-five yards away. Anyone in a secured crime scene is considered the same as a primary witness and might be asked to testify in court, which was why we were kept at such a distance. In addition, if this turned into a homicide investigation, there was always the risk that unauthorized persons might contaminate the site.

The lead investigator, Detective Nichols, came over and introduced himself, then briefed us on strategy for the excavation. He was a good-looking man in his forties, wearing a dress shirt and tie with a windbreaker, but no sport coat. He was slim, his light brown hair trimmed short. He glanced in my direction. “You're Miss Millhone?”

“That's right.”

“Could I speak to you?”

“Of course.”

We moved some distance away so we could talk in private.

“I understand Daisy Sullivan hired you to find her mother. You want to tell me how you came up with this?” he asked, indicating the site.

I backtracked, filling him in on my conversation with Winston and the tidbit he'd given me about spotting the car. I told him I'd been bothered by the fact that after that last sighting, the car was never seen again. “I was touring the house and when I looked down from one of the second-floor windows, I spotted the depression in the ground. At first I thought I was looking at an old planting bed, but then the car popped into my head. I called Sergeant Schaefer and he drove out with Ken Rice.”

“You had no information in advance?”

“None. In fact, I had only the dimmest recollection of Violet Sullivan's disappearance. I'd read the occasional newspaper account, but I hadn't paid much attention until Daisy contacted me this past Monday. Tannie was the one who introduced us, which is how I ended up here.”

He settled a look on me that was friendly enough, but had a no-nonsense undertone. “Anything else you find, you make sure I hear about it first.”

“Absolutely.”

We returned to the others. The five of us watched while one of the ID techs photographed the area and the other tech took measurements and drew a rough sketch, depicting what was believed to be the angle and orientation of the car. Given what they could see in the early phases of the work, the speculation was that whoever engineered the burial had used a bulldozer with an eight-foot blade, probably creating a ramp at a twenty-to thirty-degree angle. The car had been backed into the hole and then covered with fill. According to calculations, it would have taken approximately fifty feet of ramp to a maximum depth of fifteen feet in order to get the whole of the car underground with the front end sunk deep enough to prevent discovery. Now I could see what that pesky high school geometry class was about. There was no point in going to all the trouble of burying a car if the hood ornament was going to wash clear in the first big rain storm. If the job were poorly done, the car would emerge, little by little, over a period of time until it looked like an island in the middle of the lawn. Assuming the whole of the vehicle was there. Maybe we were looking at the bisected front end with nothing else attached. Detective Nichols excused himself and went back to the dig.

If speculation about the depth and angle was correct, the car was tilted beneath the surface like a sunken submarine, hung up on an underwater shelf. That being the case, the roof of the car and the top edge of the windshield would be approximately two paces back and some two and a half feet deep. To test the theory, Nichols whistled the young deputy over, handed him the shovel, and directed him to dig. He set to work, keeping his cuts shallow. Fifteen minutes later, the blade of his shovel scraped the surface of the roof.

There was a long debate about the use of an excavator, a motion that was quickly ratified. The idea of freeing the vehicle by hand was out of the question. The ID detective radioed and a deputy was dispatched to A-Okay Heavy Equipment to ask Padgett if he had one available. This generated an additional delay while the excavator was located, loaded on a low-boy flatbed truck, and driven out from town.

Tannie and I retired to her car, now parked a hundred yards down the road. We sat with the windows rolled down and ate our deli sandwiches, calling it lunch though it was already 4:00
P.M.
I had no idea how word got out, but a trickle of people appeared, and before long the road was lined with vehicles. Two deputies controlled public access to the scene, which had been sealed off with tape. Steve Ottweiler arrived and he joined us, talking to his sister through the open window of her car. She said, “Does Pop know?”

“I called him and he's on his way out. Let me go see what Tim Schaefer has to say. He'll know more than we do.”

Steve crossed the road. Schaefer was standing in a small knot of men. During the course of their conversation, the flatbed truck arrived. Tom Padgett had followed in his car, and he supervised the off-loading of the compact John Deere excavator, after which the equipment operator was the only one allowed in the magic circle. Padgett was relegated to the sidelines in the same way we were, which seemed to annoy him no end. For the next hour, we watched in amazement as the operator maneuvered his equipment with the delicacy of a surgeon. He was directed by whistles and hand signals, his skill such that he could scrape as little as an inch or as much as a foot of dirt from the hole on command.

Ken Rice found a ride home while Schaefer remained. He stood sipping coffee from a foam cup someone managed to provide. Even retired, he was drawn to the drama unfolding before our eyes. Jake Ottweiler pulled up and parked his car down the road. His son walked out to meet him and the two returned to Tim Schaefer's side. Having worked for the sheriff's department for thirty-some-odd years, he was the reigning civilian expert. I noticed BW McPhee was on hand, having appeared at some point. I also caught a glimpse of Winston, but didn't have a chance to make eye contact before he disappeared again. A local TV station sent a crew, and Detective Nichols gave a brief, uninformative statement, essentially referring the reporter to the sheriff for further comment.