Wellspring (Paskagankee, Book 3) (9 page)

Dan sighed
heavily and agreed. His concern about the Cat was still just as valid as it had
been three days ago, but that goddamn Pellerin had just worn him down, plain
and simple. Dan Melton didn’t like arguing—although he supposed Mary
might dispute that claim—and besides, Pellerin did have a point. A
business owner could only keep his doors closed for so long just because of the
weather.

So now,
the Cat slipped and slogged through the mud, rain falling on and around the
enclosed cab, while Dan tried not to fall asleep. So far the earthmover seemed
to be maintaining traction, and maybe with a little luck he would be able to drive
the thing out of here when he was finished, which he very nearly was.

The
leach field was laid out in a rectangular grid pattern; each corner marked with
a red stake. Dan had scraped the top couple of feet of earth off the baffles,
and then carefully removed each one with a chain connected to the Cat’s big
bucket. He had piled all of the baffles neatly together and was now in the
process of digging the pit a little deeper in order to satisfy zoning
requirements that had changed in the decades that had passed since the old
system was constructed.

And he
was almost finished. He had dug in a pattern, starting with the land farthest
away from the back of the Ridge Runner, and working his way in toward the
building. Now, though, he was running into a problem. He sighed. It figured.
That guy Murphy had really had his shit together when he invented his Law.

The
teeth of the Cat’s iron bucket had snagged on something just under the surface
of the earth. Dan swore softly under his breath and manipulated the bucket,
maneuvering it back and forth like a driver trying to free his car from a snowbank
in the winter.

Finally
the bucket lurched free and Dan extended it a little farther before trying
again. This time it plowed through the obstruction, the Cat’s big diesel engine
straining for just a moment.

Dan
stared through the windshield. It looked as though someone had buried a massive
beam in the ground at some point in the distant past. It had to have been a
long time ago, because the beam was splintered and eaten through by rot. Had it
been solid, Dan knew there was no way the Cat’s bucket would have been able to
split it like it had.

He
stared for a moment and then shrugged. It was strange, but no stranger than a
lot of other shit he had seen or heard about in this weird-ass town. He
muttered, “Ain’t that the damnedest thing you ever seen,” aware that he was
alone but not caring.

He clambered
out of the cab and into the pit, hooking the chain around the biggest section
of rotted wood. Then he climbed back up, lifted the beam, and deftly swiveled
the bucket, dropping his discovery onto the ground next to the big hole. He
would bring it to Bo Pellerin’s attention tomorrow, or whenever the hell it
stopped raining. He sure wasn’t about to stand around in this shitty weather
and talk about a rotting piece of wood.

Dan
turned his attention back to the big hole in the ground and smoothly ran the
bucket along the edge nearest the building, filling it with mud and preparing
to dump the load on top of the massive mountain of dirt he had already
manufactured. When the bucket was halfway to the pile, something now visible at
the bottom of the hole caught his attention.

The
bucket filled with saturated earth hung suspended in the air, forgotten, as Dan
gaped in slack-jawed surprise at the unlikely sight visible through the Cat’s
rain-drenched windshield: there was a hole
under
his freshly-dug hole.

A
second hole.

It was
big, and deep, and had the vague appearance of a rudimentary room. It looked as
though it had been there – a man-made rabbit hole – for a very long
time.

And
that wasn’t all. There were bones lying at the bottom of the hole. From his
position up in the cab of the Cat, Dan thought they looked like human bones.
Two sets.

Dan
Melton was no expert on human skeletal structure, but both sets of bones
appeared intact and complete. They also both appeared at one time to have been
clothed, as little bits and pieces of tattered fabric remained, the rest having
long-since rotted away.

Dan
swallowed hard.

He was
suddenly very cold.

Because
as bizarre as it was to find bones lying at the bottom of the newly dug,
suddenly-much-deeper-than-it-should-have-been septic system pit, they weren’t
the strangest thing down there. Lying next to the two sets of apparently complete
human skeletal remains was a third body.

An
actual body.

Its
clothing, too, had rotted mostly away, but the body itself looked whole, alive
even. It was a man, complete with flesh-colored skin and a full head of hair.
The body was unmoving, lying in repose with its eyes closed, but from Dan’s
perspective looked an awful lot like a nearly naked guy taking a nap.

At the
bottom of a hole.

A hole
that, until moments ago, no one knew existed.

A hole
that, until moments ago, had been buried under tons of Paskagankee earth.

Dan
Melton shut down the Caterpillar. The earthmover’s diesel engine fussed and
complained and eventually gave up the ghost. Dan gaped out the windshield a
moment longer, the chill in his bones deepening, and wished very much he was
not alone right now. He was suddenly sure the man lying at the bottom of the
whole would pivot at the waist and rise. He would rise and open his eyes and
fix them on Dan’s face, and the eyes would be alive but also dead, devoid of
any humanity, any compassion, and then the man would climb out of the muddy
hole and come for Dan, and when he did, Dan knew the result would be worse than
bad. The result would be horrifying.

Dan
took a deep breath to steady himself. It came out shuddery and paper-thin, like
an old man’s. He knew he was being ridiculous but couldn’t help himself. He
glanced back down at the bottom of the hole, half-convinced the body would be halfway
to the Cat, but it wasn’t. It was still unmoving, lying in the septic system
pit like a nearly naked guy taking a nap.

He
reached for his cell phone and wondered when he would be able to finish this
job. It appeared suddenly quite obvious it would not be any time soon.

2

Sharon Dupont shut down her
cruiser and shrugged into her rain gear. She gazed glumly across the Ridge
Runner parking lot to where the back half of a gigantic yellow earthmoving
vehicle was visible beyond the building. Its corrugated iron tracks had sunk
into the mud halfway up their hubs, and she wondered briefly how in the world
Dan Melton was going to get his equipment out of there.

Then
she sighed and stepped out of the vehicle. Sharon was intimately familiar with
the Ridge Runner, both from her days spent holding down a bar stool inside the
place before getting her shit—and her life—together, and from the
investigation last year into the strange case of former drinking buddy Earl
Manning’s disappearance.

But her
familiarity with the place didn’t translate into any overwhelming desire to be here.
The Ridge Runner represented a time in her life Sharon would just as soon
forget. Just driving past the place never failed to bring her back to her lost
days before meeting Mike McMahon, when she was rudderless and adrift, alone and
doing her best to drink herself into an early grave, exactly as her father had
done.

Meeting
Mike had changed all that, and while it wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say
she had never again thought about drinking, avoiding her old demons was a much
easier proposition now that she found herself in a stable relationship with the
older ex-cop.

Sharon
crunched across the gravel lot past two pickup trucks parked nose-in to the
closed bar, like horses outside an old-West tavern. One of them she recognized
as Dan Melton’s vehicle, the other she assumed belonged to Bo Pellerin, owner
of the Ridge Runner. The men stood waiting for her at the corner of the
building, Pellerin currently involved in an animated, mostly one-sided
conversation with Melton that included hand waving, angry gestures, and the
occasional finger stabbed into Melton’s chest for emphasis.

She
wondered how much more verbal abuse Melton would put up with before hauling off
and slugging Pellerin. From the look on his face, she guessed the answer was
not much. The last thing she wanted was to have to break up a fight between two
men who each outweighed her by eighty or more pounds, and she picked up her
pace.

“Gentlemen,”
she said sharply, skidding to a stop in the wet scrub grass. Pellerin flinched
in surprise; he had been so involved in haranguing Melton that he hadn’t even
noticed her drive into the lot. “Someone reported the discovery of a body?”

“That’d
be me,” Melton said, raising his hand in a little half-wave as if maybe Sharon
might need help determining who had spoken. “And it’s not just one body, exactly.
It’s more like…well…”

Sharon
scratched her head. “Well, what? How many bodies did you find? Aren’t you
sure?”

“Maybe
you should just take a look and see for yourself,” Melton said.

Sharon
looked at him quizzically. “Okay,” she said. “Lead the way.”

They
began walking along the side of the building in the direction of the
earthmover. “I still don’t know why you couldn’t have called me first,”
Pellerin said, apparently resuming the conversation that Sharon’s arrival had
interrupted. “Thanks to you, I’m going to be out of business even longer now.”

Melton
stopped on a dime and turned. Sharon was surprised such a big guy could move so
nimbly. Pellerin had been directly behind him and nearly ran into him. “There’s
dead people lying in a hole in the ground right behind your bar,” Melton said,
his voice rising in volume as he spoke. “What would you have wanted me to do,
just cover them back up and pretend I never found them?”

Sharon
had known Bo Pellerin a long time and knew without a shadow of a doubt that was
exactly what he would have preferred Melton do. “Of course not,” Bo said after
a long pause. “I just think that since this…incident…occurred on my property, I
should have been notified first.”

Melton
shook his head, exasperated, and said, “Just give it a rest, Bo, and let me
show Officer Dupont the hole so we can all get the hell out of the rain.”

All except me,
Sharon
thought.

They
rounded the corner and Melton waved a hand in the general direction of the
portion of the hole closest the back wall of the Ridge Runner. “You can see it
for yourself,” he said uneasily, refusing to look into the pit.

Before
turning her attention to the hole, Sharon let her gaze linger on Dan Melton’s
face, scrutinizing him. His skin was pale, his lips a grayish-white, and it occurred
to her with stunning clarity that he was afraid.
This is more than just being shaken up by the discovery of a dead body.
Melton’s actually terrified.
She knew the contractor would never open up
with Bo Pellerin standing right next to him, though, and made a mental note to
talk to him later, alone.

She
turned her attention away from the heavy equipment operator and at last looked
into the pit he had dug. It was nearly finished, measuring roughly ten feet
long by eight feet wide, maybe four feet deep.

Except
for the area in question. That portion of the hole was much deeper, extending
perhaps another six feet
below
the
four feet Melton had already excavated. It opened up into what at one time had clearly
been a small room. Melton had dug right through the ceiling and exposed the
hidden room by stripping away the layer of earth covering it.

She squatted
down on her haunches in the wet grass and looked more closely and saw what
Melton had called the station to report: the bones of two skeletons, sprawled on
the hard-packed dirt floor of the room. The falling rain and drizzle had turned
the floor into a gooey, muddy mess, but the off-white bones were still easily
recognizable from above.

The
flesh surrounding the bones had long-since disappeared, meaning either the
bodies had been down there a very long time, or the victims had died somewhere
else and been transported to their present location only after decomposition
was complete. Sharon guessed it was the former, as small bits of muddy, mostly-decomposed
fabric—presumably the clothing the victims had been wearing when they
died—still clung to the bones and lay scattered in the immediate
vicinity.

She
furrowed her brow and looked up at Melton. He had turned his back on them and
was staring resolutely in the direction of the parking lot. “Dan,” she said
softly.

He
turned and cast a questioning look in her direction. Sharon noticed he still
did not look into the pit. “Two bodies,” she said. “Why didn’t you just tell me
there were two?”

“Two?”
he answered. “What about the other guy?”

“Other
guy? What other guy?” Sharon dropped to her knees now and examined as much of
the room as she could. The steel-grey light provided by the glowering skies made
it nearly impossible to see much of anything besides the bones through the relatively
small gash in the room’s ceiling.