I shut the trunk lid, put the keys back into the ignition, closed the driver’s door. There were no other sections of crushed or bent grass in the area; the person who’d driven the car in here had walked back out along the wheel tracks, without detouring anywhere. I went back that way myself, around to the other side of the collapsed building. There wasn’t anything to find over there, no tracks of any kind. The Toyota had been brought here and abandoned-that was all.
Okay, I thought. The rest of it was up to the police and the FBI. I’d done all I could without overstepping myself again; and I had dug up enough circumstantial evidence of a link between Hannah Peterson and Lester Raymond, or at least that something fishy was going on, to stir up official interest.
I hurried back along the lane. When I reached the clearing I started across it at an angle toward the front of the house.
And that was when I noticed the blood.
It was a few yards away on my right, a sun-streaked blob of it that shone a dull red-brown against the bright chlorophyll green of the grass. I had seen too much blood in my life not to recognize it, even from a distance. Ah Jesus, I thought, Jesus. I veered over there and bent down to examine it. A big splotch, dry and dark and flaky to the touch; it had been there a while, but not too long-a day or so. Animal blood, maybe. Only it wasn’t animal blood; I felt that down deep where the gut feelings, the bad feelings, always come from. It was human blood and somebody had spilled a lot of it here yesterday. Too much for any kind of superficial wound.
The tension, now, was like a hand clutching the back of my neck. I could feel the pain of it the length of my bad left arm, and in the tender bruised place on my scalp. Straightening, I began to walk a slow, widening spiral outward away from the splotch. The second bloodstain, smaller than the first, was ten feet to the west. The third, smaller still, was back to the north. The fourth and fifth lay in that direction, too, forming an irregular and grisly trail.
And where the trail led was straight to the old stone well.
It had been long abandoned, that well. If it had ever had a windlass of any kind it was gone now; there was nothing above ground except a foot or so of its circular shaft with a wooden lip cemented on top. Two wooden covers, like halved circles, had been built to fit over the lip, but neither was in place; they had been dragged off and were lying on the ground nearby. On the near side of the lip was a small thin smear of dried blood.
I leaned over to look inside the well. But the overhanging tree branches blotted out the sun, and it was too dark in there for me to make out much except for the gleam of water. I trotted around to my car, taking care to avoid the bloodstains in the grass, and unhooked the heavy-duty flashlight from its clip under the dash. But when I got back to the well and aimed the light down inside I still couldn’t see much. There was water in it, all right, maybe a dozen feet below ground level-scummy and brown, its surface scabbed with dead leaves-but nothing else was visible, and there was no way of telling from up here how deep the water was.
Leave it to the cops, I thought. Let them fish around and find out what’s in there. What could you do anyway? Tie a rope around yourself and one of the trees and climb down inside like some sort of screwball Tarzan?
But I did not want to go away from here without knowing what was in the well. I had to know, damn it. I splashed the light around the sides. The well had been built of rough-edged fieldstone, caked now with moss, and the diameter of the shaft was about four feet. No handholds. No ladder of any kind…
Ladder, I thought.
I shut off the flash and crossed to the house, to where the lightweight aluminum ladder I had noticed earlier was propped. It was a ten-footer, and at the top was a pair of those metal hooks so that the ladder could be anchored for use on steep roofs. I carried it back to the well and lowered it inside. The wooden lip surmounting the outer rim was narrow enough for the hooks to fit over: the ladder hung straight and steady against the inner wall. The lip seemed strong enough to support my weight, and when I tested it by swinging over and standing on one of the ladder’s upper rungs, it proved out that way.
There was one more thing I needed, and I went and hunted it up from the building materials near the house-a cut piece of two-by-two about five feet long. I took that back to the well, swung over onto the ladder again, and began to climb down. I did it slowly, a rung at a time, with the length of wood in my left hand, the flashlight in my pocket, and my right hand wrapped tight on the ladder.
The smell in there was bad down near the water, dank and fetid. It was cold, too, colder than you’d expect only a few feet below ground. I could feel myself sweating from the tension, the sweat turning clammy in the cold darkness. I made myself breathe through my mouth.
When I got to the bottom rung I was only a couple of feet above the scummy surface of the water. Carefully I eased my body around until I was facing away from the ladder. Then I clamped the two-by-two under my arm, maneuvered the flash out and switched it on. Opposite and below to my right, one of the stones jutted out a little; I stretched my right leg down there and anchored my shoe against the projection. It was an awkward stance-one foot on the stone, one foot and one hand on the ladder-but it was stable enough so that I could put the flash away again, take the two-by-two in my left hand, and reach down to probe the water.
The first thing I discovered was that it was no more than three feet deep. The board went down that far and thunked against a solid floor, which meant that the well had been filled in with more rocks or maybe cement and the. stagnant water was what had seeped in during the last rain. I started to stir around with the wood-and almost immediately it bumped against a heavy yielding mass that shifted sluggishly under the water.
I tried to snag it, to hoist it up to the surface. But my left arm was weakening from all the exertion, and I couldn’t seem to get any purchase. I shifted the two-by-two over to my right hand and wedged my hips back against the ladder so that I would not have to hold on with the left hand. The sweat was in my eyes now, stinging; I swiped it away before I probed again with the wood.
This time I managed to catch it on some part of the underwater mass. And when I heaved up and back, the thing down there bobbed into shadowy view and I was looking into white staring eyes like peeled eggs, at matted blond hair and a bloated face that had once been pretty.
Hannah Peterson.
My stomach turned over; I had to tighten the muscles in my throat to keep from gagging. I jerked the two-by-two back to release it from the jacket she wore, to let the body sink again. When it pulled free it sliced through the water and struck something else-another heavy yielding mass directly under the ladder.
Christ! I worked the wood down there, in movements that were a little agitated now, thinking: It can’t be another corpse; how could it be? But it was. The board caught in clothing again and up it came for me to stare at in disbelief.
The second body was that of Lester Raymond.
I was still staring when there was a sudden violent jerk on the ladder from up above. It was so violent and so unexpected that I had no chance to brace myself. My right foot slipped off the projection of stone; I dropped the length of wood and tried to twist around to clutch at the ladder, but it jerked again and that dislodged my left foot. I yelled, flailing with my arms-and in the next second I was in the water, half-submerged, struggling wildly to get my head out so I could breathe. Some of the foul stuff poured into my mouth, funneled into my throat; I retched it up. It was fifteen seconds or so before I got my legs down and my head up, and when I blinked my eyes clear and peered upward, all I saw was rough stone, blue sky, tree branches. The ladder was gone.