Wellspring (Paskagankee, Book 3) (12 page)

“But
what?”

“But
Dan swears there were
three
bodies
down there when he made the discovery.”

Mike
ran a hand through his hair. “What? How long was the hole left unattended?”

“Melton
says he called us on his cell from the cab of the earthmover the minute he discovered
the bodies, and that he waited for the arrival of the cruiser—Sharon
responded, by the way—in front of the bar.”

“How
long did it take her to get there?”

“She happened
to be in the area on patrol at the time, so she was very close. Mike, she
radioed in on arrival at the Ridge Runner not five minutes after Gordie took
Melton’s call.”

“Let me
get this straight. Someone stole a dead body that no one even knew existed
until this morning, within five minutes of its discovery, with Dan Melton right
around the corner? And Dan didn’t see a thing? That’s impossible, Pete.”

“I know
that. Even if someone had been watching Melton dig the hole and had snuck down
there the minute his back was turned, it just would not have been possible to
bring the body up from the bottom of the hole and spirit it away without being observed.”

“So
what happened? The corpse got up and walked away by itself?”

“Melton
says that’s exactly what happened.”

6

Mike was inside his car and on
the way to the Ridge Runner five minutes later. He had been a Paskagankee
resident long enough by now that navigating the winding, remote roads, often roads
badly in need of repair, was second nature and required little conscious
thought. As he drove through the fuzzy afternoon drizzle, he considered Dan
Melton’s odd claim that three bodies had been at the bottom of the hole when he
called the police, and only two were there upon Sharon’s arrival just minutes
later.

The
obvious conclusion was that Melton was mistaken, that he had been so shaken up
by his gruesome discovery that he had counted wrong in his shock and his haste
to notify the authorities. It was the only thing that made sense.

But
Pete Kendall was not a stupid man; he wouldn’t have needed Mike’s input to
figure that one out. If Pete had gone to the trouble of calling Mike, then he
obviously felt there was more to the story. Something else was going on, or at
least Pete thought so.

Mike
pulled into the gravel lot and parked as close to the front of the Ridge Runner
as possible. Scowling out through the bar’s front plate-glass window was Bo Pellerin,
clearly unhappy with this latest development. The owner of the Ridge Runner
wasn’t the easiest man to get along with under any circumstances, and
three-plus days of lost revenue—with who knew how many more to be tacked
on to that total now—had undoubtedly pushed his patience right to the
breaking point.

Pete,
Sharon and Dan Melton were gathered in a tight cluster in front of the door, apparently
preferring the cold, wet weather outside the bar to having to listen to Bo
complain inside. Mike offered a smile and nodded to each of them as he stepped
out of the car. Sharon looked exhausted, but she returned his smile brightly,
and for maybe the ten thousandth time in the last two years he thanked God for
her and wondered how he had ever gotten so lucky to wind up engaged to the
beautiful young patrol officer.

“So,”
he said, shaking hands with the two men and kissing Sharon lightly on the
cheek. It felt awkward, but he had given up his position as police chief to
avoid the appearance of impropriety that came from sleeping with a subordinate,
and he felt he had earned the right to a little PDA. Sharon didn’t seem to
mind. “We started out with three bodies and now we have two?”

“That’s
right,” Melton replied defensively, like he was tired of being second-guessed.
Probably he was. Mike looked him in the eye and winked, trying to put the man
at ease. The last thing they needed was a witness who had grown tired of
cooperating.

“I’m
sure you guys have had enough for one day,” he said, speaking mostly to Melton,
“but would you mind slogging out to where the bodies were discovered one more
time?” No one objected, at least not out loud, and the group began walking
along the front of the bar.

As soon
as they turned the corner Mike could see the massive yellow Caterpillar
earthmover parked in the open field behind the Ridge Runner. It sat just beyond
the edge of a rectangular-shaped pit, with a big mound of muddy earth piled up beside
the hole and a stack of concrete baffles next to the dirt. The Cat seemed to be
settling into the mud on its tracks, as if in anticipation of a long stay. Two
halves of a thick beam, partially rotted away, lay on the far side of the
mound.

At the
edge of the pit, Mike looked down and saw what did, indeed, appear to be a room
dug out of the earth adjacent to and a few feet away from the granite-block
foundation of the Ridge Runner. With his earthmover, Melton had neatly stripped
part of the reinforced ceiling of the room away while digging the new septic
system leach field.

Two
sets of bones lay in the mud, positioned in close proximity to each other, and
the ruined remains of what might at one time have been rudimentary
furniture—perhaps a table, a few chairs, and some shelving, now collapsed
and almost entirely rotted away—littered the space. Tree-roots had grown
through the ceiling and thrust downward into the room in a tangled mess,
suggesting to Mike that this was no recent construction, but had been buried
next to the Ridge Runner, undetected, for years, maybe decades. The obvious question
was had the bones been down there the entire time, or were they a more recent
addition?

Mike
straightened and turned to Pete Kendall. “Has anything been disturbed?”

Kendall
shook his head. “Nope, not a thing. Soon as we’re done here, I’ll transport the
remains to Dr. Affeldt, but I didn’t want to move anything until you had had
the opportunity to examine it on site.”

Mike
nodded thoughtfully and then turned to Dan Melton. “And you saw a third set of
remains, which have now gone missing, before you called for help?”

“Well,
yes and no. They weren’t remains. It wasn’t a set of bones like these.” Melton
gestured in the general direction of the construction site. “It was an actual
body, Mike. A man, and he was naked, sort of draped across that table-thing
down there, like he had fallen asleep without getting dressed first.”

Mike
was watching Melton closely as the man spoke. Dan saw Mike’s look and said, “I
know what you’re thinking, but you asked me what I saw. That’s what I saw. You
can believe me or not; I don’t really care. But that’s what I saw.”

Mike
raised his hands in a calming gesture. “I’m not questioning what you saw, Dan,
I’m just trying to figure out what possible explanation there could
be
for what you saw, especially given
the fact that this naked man is now missing. You didn’t see anyone come or go
in the time between your call to the station and Officer Dupont’s arrival?”

Melton
shook his head. “I already had this conversation with Officer Dupont, and then
again with Chief Kendall.
Nobody
came
and
nobody
went, at least not from
the front of the Ridge Runner. I can’t speak for what was happening behind the
building, because I wasn’t back there.”

Mike
knelt down on his haunches and examined the sidewalls of the subterranean room,
as well as the much newer pit Dan Melton had been digging before making his
gruesome discovery. If someone had stolen human remains out of the bottom of
that hole, they would have had to climb in and out somehow, and the distance
from ground level to the hard-packed dirt floor of the newly unearthed secret
room had to be close to ten feet.

The
grade of the sidewall was steep, nearly ninety degrees, but thanks to the roots
that had forced their way through the ceiling and walls, there were plenty of
hand-and-foot holds available. It would not have been impossible for a
determined climber to work his way down there and back out again.
Why
he would do so was anyone’s guess,
but it would definitely have been possible.

Any
evidence of such a climb, though, had disappeared hours ago. The steady-falling
drizzle had turned the entire pit into a morass of sticky mud, eliminating
potential boot or shoe tracks any intruder might have left behind and rendering
the hole practically inaccessible. Mike didn’t envy Pete Kendall the job of
retrieving the remains, but was glad the new chief hadn’t assigned the job to
tiny Sharon Dupont.

He rose
to his feet and wiped his hands on his jeans, smearing mud on the now-rain-saturated
denim. He glanced at the three people gathered in a rough semicircle around him
and smiled. “You guys look like drowned rats.”

“Speak
for yourself,” Sharon said, smiling at him.

“So
what do you think?” Pete said.

“I wish
I could give you some insight, but I’m as baffled as you are. Maybe when the autopsies
are complete on these remains, we’ll get some idea how long ago they were
killed and how long they’ve been down there. I assume you’re going to light a
fire under our esteemed ME?”

Kendall
nodded. “I’ll ask him to put a rush on the lab work, but you know Dr. Affeldt.
He’s about as cooperative as a hibernating bear most of the time.”

Mike
thought back to some of the run-ins he had had with the County Medical Examiner
while he was running the department. Pete Kendall’s description of the man was as
accurate as any he could have come up with. “Okay,” he said. “If you’d like my
assistance, keep me apprised of any developments and I’ll help in any way I
can. For now, though, I’m afraid I’m useless to you.”

The
small group trudged through the wet field to the front of the Ridge Runner and
parted company. The last thing Mike saw as he backed out of the lot was Bo
Pellerin, still gazing out the bar’s plate-glass window. He looked as though he
had just bitten into a lemon.

7

Bronson Choate swam up to
consciousness like a diver breaking the surface of a lake. The first few
moments consisted of a dark void, followed by utter confusion as he began
processing information again. His brain’s first order of business was to advise
him he was suffering from one whopper of a headache and would likely continue
to do so for the foreseeable future. Its second was to instruct him to open his
eyes.

The
world swam and blurred and his head throbbed, but his vision slowly cleared. He
blinked and glanced around slowly to minimize the pain. He was inside his
cabin. Tied to a chair, hands lashed behind his back.

He
craned his neck and turned his body as much as possible, which was not much, but
enough to see that a length of electrical cord had been ripped out of a floor
lamp and used to tie him up. The cord was stiff and not terribly pliable, and
Bronson thought that with a little effort he might be able to loosen it enough
to free his hands. He wondered why anyone would have used it in the first
place. He began working at the wire, feeling with his fingers, picking at the
knot.

From
down the short hallway he heard the heavy clomping of footsteps, and then a man
emerged from his bedroom, dressed in a pair of his jeans and work shirts. And
his boots. Bronson assumed this was the same man who had attacked him outside
his front door, but everything out there had happened so fast he couldn’t be
sure.

The intruder
saw that he was conscious and stopped in his tracks, eyeing him suspiciously. “What’s
that buggy out there?” he said, nodding in the direction of the front yard.

“Buggy?”
Bronson repeated, confused.

“That’s
right, the buggy you were riding in when you arrived here. What is it?”

“Are you
talking about my Jeep?”

“Jeep,”
the stranger said hesitantly, trying the word out, repeating it like a man
might mimic something in a language he had never heard before.

“Yeah,
that’s right,” Bronson said, “and if you want it, you can have it. It’s all
yours, just take it and go.”

“Take
it? How? Where’s the horse?” the man asked, as if he hadn’t heard a word
Bronson said.

Bronson
shook his head slowly, wondering if his injuries might be more severe than he
realized. His attacker wasn’t making any goddamn sense. “Horse? What horse?”

“Don’t
play stupid,” the man said menacingly. For the first time, Bronson noticed he was
clutching an ancient pistol in his hand, a revolver. The gun was rusted badly,
corroded to the point where it had to be unusable. “The horse that pulls your
carriage. Where is it?”

“There’s
no horse. It’s just a car. You know, you drive it. A car. With an engine.”

“Car,”
the man said, and the word seemed as foreign to him as “Jeep” had. Bronson
wondered if he might be mentally challenged. He examined the man’s face and
noticed two thin scars running in parallel lines across his right cheek. The
lines disappeared under the collar of the shirt the man had taken out of
Bronson’s closet.

He
wondered what the man was planning to do to him.