Whom Dog Hath Joined (4 page)

“Sure. But be careful; that handle gets slippery.”

I turned the blade ninety degrees and began sawing downward.
I wasn’t that handy as a kid; my father used to get nervous when I hung around
his workbench, afraid I’d impale myself on a putty knife or cut my arm off with
the circular saw. But becoming a homeowner, in California and then back in Stewart’s
Crossing, had brought out some latent talent my father hadn’t seen.

The drywall was old and rotted, which made it tougher to cut
a straight line. Flakes peeled off and fell to the ground, dandruff of the
dead. When I finished, I scooted back from the wall. I gave the saw back to
Rick to complete the cutting, but instead he reached in and pulled the piece
away by the two open sides.

“Flashlight?” he asked.

I handed it to him and he shone it into the narrow space
between the drywall and the outside wall. I leaned over his shoulder to look
in. It was about six feet deep, and maybe ten feet long. As Rick had mentioned,
there was a very old ladder inside, leaning against the far wall.

“How the hell did somebody get a body in there, if the only
way in or out is through that trap door?” I asked.

“Whoever belongs to those bones had to have climbed up a
ladder in the closet, like I did, gone up through the ceiling and down the old
ladder inside,” Rick said. “Maybe to hide. I remember learning in school that this
Meeting House was one of the stops on the Underground Railroad.”

“Nineteenth-century slaves didn’t wear Chucks,” I said,
using our old nickname for the Chuck Taylor-branded sneaker Rochester had
found. “Could you search through missing persons reports for somebody wearing
that kind of shoe?” I backed away and stood up.

“It’ll be a nightmare,” he said. “We have no time frame yet,
and no real geographic restraints. This guy could have gone missing in Alaska,
for all we know. And there’s no way to search by a single criteria, like kind
of shoe. I’d have to read through every report for the last forty years. I’m
going to wait until I have more information.”

He stood up and brushed his pants. That motion reminded me
of my dad, finishing up at his basement workbench, clearing curls of metal and
wood before going upstairs to rejoin the family. “There are a lot more
questions than answers in that little space. And the next one is who knew that about
this false wall. That could lead us somewhere.”

“The Meeting House is a public building,” I said. “Anybody
can walk in, especially on a day like today when the whole town is here.”

“But you’d have to know that this space was here. Someone
who was familiar with the Meeting House knew about the false wall, and this
area behind it.”

“One of the Friends? That’s so out of character. And the
body’s too old to be connected to the construction project.”

 “Just because you wear a button that says, ‘Hi, I’m a
Quaker’ doesn’t mean you wouldn’t kill someone,” Rick said.

We stepped back into the hallway, and saw two guys in plain
clothes approaching, each carrying what looked like a heavy bag. “Afternoon,
detective,” one of them said. “Crime scene in there?”

Rick nodded. “You’re going to need to remove more of the
wall to get clear access.” He turned to me. “Thanks for your help, but the
cavalry is here now.”

“Sure. You still want me and Lili to hang around?”

“Nah, I’m good. I know where to find you.”

I did want to hang around and snoop – but I knew that
without a badge, I would be in the way. I walked back out into the brilliant
sunshine, shading my eyes from the glare. I couldn’t help considering which of
the people in the crowd might have a hidden crime in his or her past. The
Latino guy in hospital scrubs, his wraparound sunglasses on the back of his
head? The bald guy in the Metallica T-shirt? The plump grandmother in a
souvenir Hawaiian muumuu? Could one of the elderly volunteers be hiding a dark
secret behind their "friendly" badges?

4 – Physician for the Circus

I shivered despite the autumn heat, and looked around for
Lili and Rochester but couldn’t see them. That was curious. Was she taking
pictures somewhere? Had she gone back to Gail’s to help out?

As I prowled, I passed a table of old tools that reminded me
of my father, and I thought again about the owner of the sneaker. If he’d been
a young man, would his parents still be alive, wondering what had happened to
him? When I’d gone through the boxes my father left behind after his death, I’d
found a tarnished copper POW-MIA bracelet, and I recognized the last name on it
as one of my father’s co-workers. I vaguely remembered the man had a son who
went missing in Vietnam, and wondered if my father had ever worn the bracelet,
or had purchased it out of solidarity.

I couldn’t remember what happened to that bracelet, and I
didn’t know if the son had ever been found. But from what I remembered of the
father, the boy had never been  forgotten.

I stopped in front of a table with a sign that read “Semper
Fiber.” The woman behind it had created needlepoints of the Marine motto and
other symbols. The next table was occupied by that cadaverous old man Edith had
mentioned, selling an array of scented candles and soaps. There was something
discordant about the soaps wrapped in pretty paper and tied with ribbon and the
creepy affect of the man, so I hurried past.

People had gone back to their enjoyment of the fair, pushing
aside the discovery of the body like an uncomfortable article in the
Boat-Gazette
.
How could they, I wondered? Didn’t they realize that there had been a person
who ate, drank, lived, who was now dead? Was there someone out there with a
hole in his or her heart where the memory of that person belonged?

I scoured the property until I found Lili and Rochester beneath
the shade of an ancient oak tree at the very back.

“What’s going on?” Lili asked when I reached her. “You look
like you’ve been prospecting in a mine.”

Rochester popped up like a puppet on a string and placed his
front paws on my pants. I could see he was still annoyed that he’d been left
out of the investigation. I pushed him back down, but then scratched behind his
ears and told him he was a good boy.

“I had to help Rick get the wall open,” I said, when I
straightened up.

“What did you find? A whole body?”

“I guess so. A skull, some bones, and some faded old
clothes. And the other shoe.”

“You think someone broke in during the construction and left
the remains there?”

I shook my head. “The bones were covered in dust. They’ve
been there a long time.” I looked around. We were at least twenty feet from the
nearest table, at the edge of the woods I had explored as a kid, collecting
pine cones, chasing squirrels. Smell of leaf mold, crunch of dead leaves,
dappling of sunlight amid shadow. “How about you? What are you doing way back
here?”

“I’m hiding from Peter Bobeaux.” She gave the name an
exaggerated French pronunciation. “The new assistant dean for the humanities.
He and his wife were walking their yappy little poodle and I knew Rochester
would go wild, and I’d get roped into some boring conversation.”

 I couldn’t get past the guy’s name, and for the first time
since I saw the sneaker in Rochester’s mouth I laughed. “Professor Bobo?” I
asked. “Sounds like he teaches at the clown college.”

“Dr. Bobeaux, if you please,” Lili said, and spelled it. “He
grew up in West Virginia, but he got his Ph.D. in French literature from a
university in Canada.”

“Better yet,” I said. “Doctor Bobo, physician for the
circus, wearing a white lab coat and a round red nose.”

Lili snorted with laughter and took my arm. “You are very
bad. Now every time I see him I’ll be thinking that.”

“How’d you get a new assistant dean anyway?” The woods
formed a kind of horseshoe around the Meeting House property, and we began
walking along the edge of the lawn toward Main Street. “I thought Dr. Jellicoe
was pretty entrenched in that position.”

“Fran? Her husband retired in June, and they decided they’d
always wanted to join the Peace Corps and see the third world.”

“Which you’ve seen plenty of.”

She nodded. In her career, photographing and writing about
everything from blood diamonds to Somali pirates to ethnic strife in the former
Soviet Union, she had been to almost every shady place on earth. The only spots
she’d missed were the ones favored by tourists—she’d never spent much time in
Western Europe, for example, never been to Hawaii or Tahiti or Alaska. I was
happy there were at least a few sights we could see together for the first
time.

 “We were lucky to get someone with good credentials as a
last-minute hire,” Lili said. “He’s the interim assistant dean right now; we’ll
have to do a full search this year.”

“I wonder what he was doing that he could jump into a job on
such short notice.”

“He was working for a private university in one of the Gulf
Coast emirates, and when the owner got in trouble with the authorities, they
shut the place down on short notice.”

As we approached Main Street, and the edge of the Harvest
Festival, she stopped and pointed toward a couple of farm stands, rough wooden
tables piled with cascades of eggplant, neat rows of tomatoes with bits of vine
still attached, lettuce and mushrooms and sweet corn still in the husk.  “I want
to get some produce for dinner tonight.”

“What are we having?”

“Whatever’s fresh.”

I followed her along the edge of the lawn toward Main
Street. I saw her scanning the crowd and assumed she was trying to avoid the
amusingly named Dr. Bobeaux. I imagined a man in a graduation gown with a
mortarboard squashed over an exuberant red fright wig.

When we reached the farm stands, Lili examined the
vegetables as if they were expensive jewels. “I’m going to slice this zucchini
and load it with sliced tomatoes and parmesan cheese,” she said, handing me a
pile of the speckled green vegetables. “You can grill it for me. As a main
course, I thought we’d do a big salad with grilled chicken, if that’s good for
you.”

“Sounds delicious.”

While I stood back with a tight rein on Rochester to prevent
him from gobbling up whatever was at his level, Lili gathered her ingredients.
She picked out three kinds of lettuce, red and yellow tomatoes, raw mushrooms,
and green and yellow peppers. “Strawberry pie?” she asked. When I agreed, she
had me pick out a couple of good pints.

“We’re going to be working all afternoon to get this meal
together,” I complained.

She raised an eyebrow. “You have something else planned?”

“No, nothing,” I said, holding up my hands. “Just helping
you.”

“Good answer.”

We managed to leave the festival grounds without running
into Lili’s new boss and with Rochester in the lead, we walked back up to my
car. Traffic still crept, safety-conscious parents in their boxy Volvos and
Saabs, soccer moms in massive SUVs, older guys with trophy wives in expensive
convertibles. Crinkled leaves in the gutters, an abandoned paper plate of
half-eaten funnel cake, tiny pink ballet slipper, Barbie having to go en pointe
missing one toe shoe.

I’d parked in my secret spot, at the rear of the hardware
store behind a screen of maples. My dad was a friend of the store’s owner when
I was a kid, and we’d parked there for every parade and festival throughout my
childhood. I had a feeling I was one of the few people in town who knew about
those three spaces, tree roots pushing up under the blacktop, hidden to all but
the
cognoscenti
.

We had to wait a long time for a break in traffic so I could
pull onto Main Street, and as I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel I
thought again about the body we had discovered. Who was he? What was he doing
at the Meeting House? I kept gnawing away at those questions, without finding
any answers, all the way home.

I pulled up in my driveway and we unloaded the car. “All
that fresh air has made me sleepy,” Lili said as she put the veggies away. “You
feel like a nap before dinner?”

“Great idea.” We went upstairs and snuggled together, with
Rochester on the floor by my side of the bed. Lili slipped off quickly, but I sat
up, thinking about my life.

Lili was aware of my background, that I’d spent a year in a
California prison for hacking, and that I was still on parole after that
conviction. After my ex-wife Mary’s first miscarriage, she’d nearly ruined us
with retail therapy, and when we lost the second child, I thought by breaking
in to the major credit bureaus and placing a red flag on Mary’s account I could
keep her from running up thousands of dollars in new charges. That hadn’t
worked out the way I expected, ending in jail time and divorce.

Lili had also seen me use my hacking skills in helping the
police in the past. But she had grown worried that my itchy fingers and my
arrogance would get me into trouble again, and she and Rick had staged an
intervention a couple of months before. I acknowledged that I had a problem,
gave Rick the laptop I’d been using for hacking, and joined an online support
group for ex-hackers.

After prison, where my time was controlled, I had been lost,
not sure what I wanted to do with my freedom. Rochester had been a mixed blessing,
because when he came into my life I had to become responsible for him. I got his
unconditional love, but sometimes I resented having to wake early on a cold
morning and walk him, the way when I was surfing online, he would put his head
in my lap to get me to play. Didn’t he know how freeing it was for me when  my
hands were on a keyboard and my brain was exploring cyberspace?

I no longer resented those interruptions; I reminded myself
how much I enjoyed being with him, and how my life had become so much better
once he joined me.

I still loved to forget myself in a flurry of online
activity – reading emails, following Facebook links, searching for arcane
information. But now I also wanted to be with Lili, and there was a tension
between those two desires. Fortunately, she needed her space as much as I did, and
I had no complaints when she disappeared into a darkroom or wandered off with
her camera in search of inspiration.