Body Double (29 page)

Miss Clausen’s gaze suddenly fell on the box of excavation tools that Maura was holding. “What are the trowels for? What are you doing in my house?”

“The police are searching the cellar.”

“Searching? You mean they’re
digging
down there?”

“They may have to.”

“I didn’t give you permission to do that.” She turned and thumped up the porch, her slicker dragging behind her on the steps.

Maura followed her inside, trailing after her into the kitchen. She set the box of tools on the counter. “Wait. You don’t understand—”

“I don’t want anyone tearing up my cellar!” Miss Clausen yanked open the cellar door and glared down at Detective Yates, who was holding a shovel. Already he had dug into the earthen floor, and a mound of dirt was piled up near his feet.

“Miss Clausen, let them do their jobs,” said Maura.

“I own this house,” the woman yelled down the steps. “You can’t dig down there unless I give my permission!”

“Ma’am, we promise we’ll fill in the hole when we’re done,” said Corso. “We’re just going to take a little look here.”

“Why?”

“Our radar shows a major bounce-back.”

“What do mean,
bounce-back
? What’s down there?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out. If you’d just let us continue.”

Maura tugged the woman away from the cellar and closed the door. “Please let them work. If you refuse, they’ll just be forced to get a warrant.”

“What the hell got them digging down there in the first place?”

“Blood.”

“What blood?”

“There’s blood all over this kitchen.”

The woman’s gaze dropped to the floor, scanning the linoleum. “I don’t see any.”

“You can’t see it. It takes a chemical spray to make it visible. But believe me, it’s here. Microscopic traces of it on the floor, splattered on that wall. Running under the cellar door and down the steps. Someone tried to wash it away by mopping the floor, wiping down the walls. Maybe they thought they got rid of it all, because they couldn’t see it anymore. But the blood is still here. It seeps into crevices, into cracks in the wood. It remains for years and years and you can’t erase it. It’s trapped in this house. In the walls themselves.”

Miss Clausen turned and stared at her. “Whose blood?” she asked softly.

“That’s what the police would like to know.”

“You don’t think I had anything to do with—”

“No. We think the blood is very old. It was probably here when you bought the house.”

The woman looked dazed as she sank into a chair at the kitchen table. The hood of her slicker had slipped off her head, revealing a porcupine’s ruff of gray hair. Slouching in that oversize raincoat, she seemed even smaller, older. A woman already shrinking into her grave.

“No one will want to buy this house from me now,” she murmured. “Not when they hear about this. I won’t be able to give the damn thing away.”

Maura sat down across from her. “Why did my sister ask to rent this house? Did she tell you?”

No reply. Miss Clausen was still shaking her head, looking stunned.

“You said she saw that
FOR SALE
sign out on the road. And she called you at the realty office.”

At last a nod. “Out of the blue.”

“What did she say to you?”

“She wanted to know more about the property. Who’d lived here, who’d owned it before me. Said she was looking around at real estate in the area.”

“Did you tell her about the Lanks?”

Miss Clausen stiffened. “You know about them?”

“I know they used to own this house. There was a father and son. And the man’s niece, a girl named Amalthea. Did my sister ask about them, too?”

The woman took a breath. “She wanted to know. I understood that. If you’re thinking of buying a house, you’d want to know who built it. Who lived here.” She looked at Maura. “This is about them, isn’t it? The Lanks.”

“You grew up in this town?”

“Yeah.”

“So you must have known the Lank family.”

Miss Clausen did not immediately respond. Instead she rose and pulled off her raincoat. Took her time hanging it up on one of the hooks near the kitchen door. “He was in my class,” she said, her back still turned to Maura.

“Who was?”

“Elijah Lank. I didn’t know his cousin Amalthea very well, because she was five years behind us in school—just a kid. But we all knew Elijah.” Her voice had dropped to nearly a whisper, as though she was reluctant to say the name aloud.

“How well did you know him?”

“As well as I needed to.”

“It doesn’t sound as if you liked him very much.”

Miss Clausen turned and looked at her. “It’s hard to like people who scare the hell out of you.”

Through the cellar door, they could hear the thud of the shovel hitting soil. Digging deeper into the house’s secrets. A house that, even years later, still bore silent witness to something terrible.

“This was a small town, Dr. Isles. Not like it is now, with all these new folks coming in from away, buying up summer places. Back then, it was just locals, and you got to know people. Which families are good, and which ones you should stay away from. I figured that out about Elijah Lank when I was fourteen years old. He was one of the boys you stayed the hell away from.” She moved back to the table and sank into a chair, as though exhausted. Stared at the Formica surface, as though looking into a pool at her own reflection. A reflection of a fourteen-year-old girl, afraid of the boy who lived on this mountain.

Maura waited, her gaze on that bowed head with its stiff brush of gray hair. “Why did he scare you?”

“I wasn’t the only one. We were all afraid of Elijah. After . . .”

“After what?”

Miss Clausen looked up. “After he buried that girl alive.”

In the silence that followed, Maura could hear the murmur of men’s voices as they dug deeper into the cellar floor. She could feel her own heart throbbing against her ribs. Jesus, she thought. What are they going to find down there?

“She was one of the new kids in town,” said Miss Clausen. “Alice Rose. The other girls’d sit behind her and make comments. Tell jokes about her. You could say all kinds of mean things about Alice and get away with it, because she couldn’t hear you. She never knew we were making fun of her. I know we were being cruel, but that’s the sort of thing kids do when they’re fourteen. Before they learn to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Before they get a taste of it themselves.” She sighed, a sound of regret for childhood transgressions, for all the lessons learned too late.

“What happened to Alice?”

“Elijah said it was just a joke. He said he always planned to pull her out after a few hours. But can you imagine what it was like, being trapped inside a hole? So terrified that you wet yourself? And no one can hear you screaming. No one knows where you are except the boy who put you in there.”

Maura waited, silent. Afraid to hear the story’s ending.

Miss Clausen saw the apprehension in her eyes and shook her head. “Oh, Alice didn’t die. It was the dog saved her. He knew where she was. Kept barking his fool head off, led people right to the spot.”

“Then she survived.”

The woman nodded. “They found her late that night. By then, she’d been in the hole for hours. When they pulled her out, she was barely speaking. Like a zombie. A few weeks later, her family moved away. I don’t know where they went.”

“What happened to Elijah?”

Miss Clausen gave a shrug. “What do you think happened? He kept insisting it was just a prank. The sort of thing the rest of us kids were doing to Alice every day in school. And it’s true, we all tormented her. We all made her miserable. But Elijah, he took it to the next level.”

“He wasn’t punished?”

“When you’re only fourteen, you get a second chance. Especially when people need you at home. When your dad’s drunk half the day, and there’s a nine-year-old cousin living in the same house.”

“Amalthea,” said Maura softly.

Miss Clausen nodded. “Imagine being a little girl in this house. Growing up in a family of beasts.”

Beasts.

The air suddenly felt charged. Maura’s hands had gone cold. She thought of Amalthea Lank’s ravings.
Go away, before he sees you.

And she thought of the scratch mark clawed into her car door.
The sign of the Beast.

The cellar door creaked open, startling Maura. She turned and saw Rizzoli standing in the doorway.

“They’ve hit something,” Rizzoli said.

“What is it?”

“Wood. Some kind of panel, about two feet down. They’re trying to clear away the dirt now.” She pointed to the box of trowels on the counter. “We’ll need those.”

Maura carried the box down the cellar steps. She saw that piles of excavated earth now ringed the perimeter of their trench, extending almost six feet long.

The size of a coffin.

Detective Corso, who now wielded the shovel, glanced up at Maura. “Panel feels pretty thick. But listen.” He banged the shovel against the wood. “It’s not solid. There’s an air space underneath.”

Yates said, “You want me to take over now?”

“Yeah, my back’s about to give out.” Corso handed over the shovel.

Yates dropped into the trench, his shoes thudding onto the wood. A hollow sound. He attacked the dirt with grim determination, flinging it onto a rapidly growing mound. No one spoke as more and more of the panel emerged. The two flood lamps slanted their harsh light across the trench, and Yates’s shadow bounced like a marionette on the cellar walls. The others watched, silent as grave robbers eagerly awaiting their first glimpse into a tomb.

“I’ve cleared one edge here,” said Yates, breathing hard, his shovel scraping across wood. “Looks like some kind of crate. I’ve already dinged it with the shovel. I don’t want to damage the wood.”

“I’ve got the trowels and brushes,” said Maura.

Yates straightened, panting, and clambered out of the hole. “Okay. Maybe you can clear off that dirt on top. We’ll get some photos before we pry it open.”

Maura and Gary dropped into the trench, and she felt the panel shudder under their weight. She wondered what horrors lay beneath the stained planks, and had a terrible vision of the wood suddenly giving way, of plunging into decayed flesh. Ignoring her pounding heart, she knelt down and began to sweep dirt away from the panel.

“Hand me one of those brushes, too,” said Rizzoli, about to jump into the trench as well.

“Not you,” said Yates. “Why don’t you just take it easy?”

“I’m not handicapped. I hate standing around doing nothing.”

Yates gave an anxious laugh. “Yeah, well, we’d hate seeing you go into labor down there. And I wouldn’t want to have to explain it to your husband, either.”

Maura said, “There’s not much maneuvering room down here, Jane.”

“Well, let me reposition these lamps for you. So you can see what you’re doing.”

Rizzoli moved a flood lamp, and suddenly light beamed down on the corner where Maura was working. Crouched on her knees, Maura used the brush to clear soil from the planks, uncovering pinpoints of rust. “I’m seeing old nail heads here,” she said.

“I’ve got a crowbar in the car,” said Corso. “I’ll get it.”

Maura kept brushing away dirt, uncovering the rusted heads of more nails. The space was cramped, and her neck and shoulders began to ache. She straightened her back. Heard a clank behind her.

“Hey,” said Gary. “Look at this.”

Maura turned and saw that Gary’s trowel had scraped up against an inch of broken pipe.

“Seems to come straight up through the edge of this panel,” said Gary. With bare fingers, he gingerly probed the rusted protrusion and broke through a clot of dirt crusting the top. “Why would you stick a pipe into a . . .” He stopped. Looked at Maura.

“It’s an air hole,” she said.

Gary stared down at the planks under his knees. Said, softly: “What the hell’s inside this thing?”

“Come out of the hole, you two,” said Pete. “We’re going to take photos.”

Yates reached down to help Maura out and she stepped back from the trench, feeling suddenly light-headed from rising too quickly to her feet. She blinked, dazed by the flashes of the camera. By the surreal glare of floodlights and the shadows dancing on the walls. She went to the cellar steps and sat down. Only then remembered that the step she was now resting on was impregnated with ghostly traces of blood.

“Okay,” said Pete. “Let’s open it.”

Corso knelt beside the trench and worked the tip of the crowbar under one corner of the lid. He strained to pry up the panel, eliciting a squeal of rusty nail heads.

“It’s not budging,” said Rizzoli.

Corso paused and wiped his sleeve across his face, leaving a streak of dirt on his forehead. “Man, my back’s gonna pay for this tomorrow.” Again he positioned the tip of the crowbar under the lid. This time he was able to jam it farther in. He sucked in a deep breath and threw his weight against the fulcrum.

The nails screeched free.

Corso tossed aside the crowbar. He and Yates both reached into the trench, grasped the edge of the lid, and lifted. For a moment, no one said a word. They all stared into the hole, now fully revealed under the glare of flood lamps.

“I don’t get it,” said Yates.

The crate was empty.

They drove home that night, down a highway glistening with rain. Maura’s windshield wipers swept a slow, hypnotic beat across misted glass.

“All that blood in the kitchen,” said Rizzoli. “You know what it means. Amalthea’s killed before. Nikki and Theresa Wells weren’t her first victims.”

“She wasn’t alone in that house, Jane. Her cousin Elijah lived there, too. It could have been him.”

“She was nineteen years old when the Sadlers vanished. She had to know what was happening in her own kitchen.”

“It doesn’t mean she’s the one who did it.”

Rizzoli looked at her. “You believe O’Donnell’s theory? About the Beast?”

“Amalthea is schizophrenic. Tell me how someone with a mind that disordered manages to kill two women, and then goes through the very logical step of burning their bodies, destroying the evidence?”