“You look like hell,” she said. “From the rumors around here—and you know how much I like to believe the kids—you’ve been a bit of a hard ass, too.”
I could have told her about the articles. About Jerry’s last message to me: they want to be whole. I could have told her about the theme of human sacrifice and bodily mutilation, ancient Egyptians removing organs from their dead before mummification, all of the grisly detail in Jerry’s notebooks. Jerry had been scared of something as a kid. Whatever it was scared him again as an adult. He scribbled little notes in the margin. They want to be whole, he’d scribbled again and again along with one other word: underground. Underground as in basements—even if the basement is a tired, over-wrought trope. Poe buried more than one character in a basement wall, some while they still breathed. But that was fiction. Fiction. Jerry’s last message: they want to be whole. He didn’t just die. He’d been killed, murdered.
“I haven’t been sleeping well,” I said.
“No shit. You want a drink? We could go to my place, forget about this for a while.”
Any other time, yes. Yes, Heather, I want to meet at your place and have a drink. But the thoughts of two weeks ago, the notion of being alone with Heather, alone with motive and opportunity to do more than imagine the two of us, together, had been buried under a mountain of black stone and Jerry Larson’s body.
She frowned before I spoke. “Jerry, right?”
“Of course. He was afraid, Heather. I think he knew he was going to die.”
“It was unexpected. A tragedy.”
“He knew. He sent me a message,” I said.
“What’d it say, ‘I’m gonna die’? That’s nuts.”
I frowned. they want to be whole
“Look, I’m sorry about Larson. He was a helluva guy.” She touched my arm. “When you get your head on straight, the drink offer is still good.”
I glanced at the floor. The students had long since cleared the halls. “I think something came out of his basement.”
She pulled away, crossing her arms. “Look, don’t play at this horror bullshit anymore. It isn’t funny.”
“He had all these articles, back in his bedroom, where he grew up. He gave me another notebook the night he died. Two scrapbooks of articles…some mentioned ancient civilizations. Burial rituals. Human sacrifice. Jerry left some notes. Some of the—”
“What? Aaron, that’s National Enquirercrap.”
“No...he found something in your basement. Said your place had been there since before the raid. He had a few articles about Quantrill’s Raid. Right here in Lawrence during the Civil War. One article spoke of a woman who was killed, the only woman to die in the massacre. Her body. What was left of it was buried in the basement of a house on your street—”
“Forget it.” She started to walk away. “Get some sleep. Get over this, okay?”
Certain things, like the unease which had begun to fester in my stomach, to grow and nearly develop a life of its own, were not simply “gotten over.”
Yellow police tape still covered Jerry’s door, which of course would be locked solid anyway. It wasn’t the first floor which concerned me, though. I parked across the street and hurried along the side of the house. Because school let out at three, I was at Jerry’s by a quarter to four, before most of his neighbors would be home from work. The basement windows on the east side of the house were locked solid, so I checked the rear. Tall trees shaded the backyard, providing a nice amount of cool cover. Both rear windows were shut tight and the same for the opposite side of the house. I’d begun to sweat despite the shade. My hands shook.
Go home, I thought. Get rid of the scrapbooks. Forget about it, like Heather said. The choppy logic which began to draw a line from Jerry’s obsession with the dead, the unhappy dead, toward Heather’s basement brought me to his house. The uneasiness won. I had to see Jerry’s place for myself. See if what he scribbled in his scrapbook was true. I broke one of the basement windows. I kicked out the glass with my shoes and broke each tiny fragment free of the frame so I could safely slide through the opening. The shards fell to the floor below with soft tinkles. Grabbing the flashlight from the truck of my car, I slunk back to the open window. The time hovered just before four. Still enough time to slip in and look around without being noticed, I imagined. I dropped in, landing on the broken glass with a crunch.
The basement floor was concrete but old and cracked in several places, showing wide gaps of two to three inches and dark soil beneath. The slab couldn’t have been more than three or four inches thick. A set of simple wooden steps led to the first floor. Jerry’s place. Boxes and a few pieces of dust-covered furniture littered the area. In a corner, I found something which froze my blood.
A section of the floor had been removed and now rested against the far wall. A pick ax, sledgehammer, and spade leaned next to it. I pointed the yellow beam of my flashlight at the gap. Dirt, I thought at first. Nothing but dirt. I walked closer. I felt, for a moment, as though I might choke on my heart.
The hole was deep enough to lose my flashlight beam across the surface. A tiny pile of dirt sat next to the hole, but not nearly enough to fill it.
I knelt and looked down, pointing the light. Shadows flitted inside. I thought I saw something move. The light reflected off something in the hole, something pale and yellow. A sound skittered through the basement behind me, a basement which, at that time of year, was growing very dark by four in the afternoon. The sun would set by five. I pushed off the ground and scrambled to my feet. Surely the sound was just a rat or even fat mouse, but in the dark, in the house where one of my friends and colleagues died, it proved enough to fire bolts of fear through my chest. I held my breath. The room fell silent again. I looked at the hole. When my eyes lifted, I found it on the ground near the shovel, half in shadow so I hadn’t noticed it before. A fragment, really, but a bit of bone, a rather long phalange if my memory of human anatomy held.
As I said, it was dark. Getting darker by the moment. But tiny splotches of brown—a reddish-brown of dried blood—marred the tip of the bone. I staggered toward the window and climbed out of the opening with the aid of a wooden kitchen chair as a stool.
Panting in the front seat of my car, I noticed a new text message on my phone from Steiner:
meet me at pats about your friend 7 pm
I looked at my hands, both covered with dirt, and back toward Jerry’s place.
Steiner had picked a bar not far from downtown. The sign out front advertised Pat’s in flickering red neon, and a quarter inch of grease painted almost every surface in the interior. It was a quiet place, though. The kind of bar in which two or three regulars are married to their stools and they all possess an unfriendly eye for strangers. After a few moments of awkward “catching up,” Steiner, still as scrawny and short as I remember from undergrad, cut right to the reason for our reunion.
“Your buddy, this Larson guy, he was thoroughly messed up.” He lit a cigarette, took a long puff, and settled his black eyes on mine. “Real bad.”
“I don’t understand?”
He leaned forward, hands on the table and said, “The final coroner’s report sort of fudged on cause of death. I think they put down aneurism or something. Totally bogus. I’ve got a buddy who works records—he feeds me all sorts of juicy tidbits.”