Miss Clausen stepped out, an oversize slicker dragging behind her like a cape. “Thought you’d be finished by now. I was wondering why you didn’t bring back my key.”
“We’re going to be here for a while.”
Miss Clausen eyed the vehicles in the driveway. “I thought you just wanted to take another look around. What’s the crime lab doing here?”
“This is going to take us a little longer than I thought. We may be here all night.”
“Why? Your sister’s clothes aren’t even here anymore. I boxed ’em up for you so you can take them home.”
“This isn’t just about my sister, Miss Clausen. The police are here about something else. Something that happened a long time ago.”
“How long ago?”
“It would have been about forty-five years ago. Before you even bought the house.”
“Forty-five years? That’d be back when…” The woman paused.
“When what?”
Miss Clausen’s gaze suddenly fell on the box of excavation tools that Maura was holding. “What are the trowels for? What are you doing in my house?”
“The police are searching the cellar.”
“Searching? You mean they’re digging down there?”
“They may have to.”
“I didn’t give you permission to do that.” She turned and thumped up the porch, her slicker dragging behind her on the steps.
Maura followed her inside, trailing after her into the kitchen. She set the box of tools on the counter. “Wait. You don’t understand-”
“I don’t want anyone tearing up my cellar!” Miss Clausen yanked open the cellar door and glared down at Detective Yates, who was holding a shovel. Already he had dug into the earthen floor, and a mound of dirt was piled up near his feet.
“Miss Clausen, let them do their jobs,” said Maura.
“I own this house,” the woman yelled down the steps. “You can’t dig down there unless I give my permission!”
“Ma’am, we promise we’ll fill in the hole when we’re done,” said Corso. “We’re just going to take a little look here.”
“Why?”
“Our radar shows a major bounce-back.”
“What do mean, bounce-back? What’s down there?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out. If you’d just let us continue.”
Maura tugged the woman away from the cellar and closed the door. “Please let them work. If you refuse, they’ll just be forced to get a warrant.”
“What the hell got them digging down there in the first place?”
“Blood.”
“What blood?”
“There’s blood all over this kitchen.”
The woman’s gaze dropped to the floor, scanning the linoleum. “I don’t see any.”
“You can’t see it. It takes a chemical spray to make it visible. But believe me, it’s here. Microscopic traces of it on the floor, splattered on that wall. Running under the cellar door and down the steps. Someone tried to wash it away by mopping the floor, wiping down the walls. Maybe they thought they got rid of it all, because they couldn’t see it anymore. But the blood is still here. It seeps into crevices, into cracks in the wood. It remains for years and years and you can’t erase it. It’s trapped in this house. In the walls themselves.”
Miss Clausen turned and stared at her. “Whose blood?” she asked softly.
“That’s what the police would like to know.”
“You don’t think I had anything to do with-”
“No. We think the blood is very old. It was probably here when you bought the house.”
The woman looked dazed as she sank into a chair at the kitchen table. The hood of her slicker had slipped off her head, revealing a porcupine’s ruff of gray hair. Slouching in that oversize raincoat, she seemed even smaller, older. A woman already shrinking into her grave.
“No one will want to buy this house from me now,” she murmured. “Not when they hear about this. I won’t be able to give the damn thing away.”
Maura sat down across from her. “Why did my sister ask to rent this house? Did she tell you?”
No reply. Miss Clausen was still shaking her head, looking stunned.
“You said she saw that FOR SALE sign out on the road. And she called you at the realty office.”
At last a nod. “Out of the blue.”
“What did she say to you?”
“She wanted to know more about the property. Who’d lived here, who’d owned it before me. Said she was looking around at real estate in the area.”
“Did you tell her about the Lanks?”
Miss Clausen stiffened. “You know about them?”
“I know they used to own this house. There was a father and son. And the man’s niece, a girl named Amalthea. Did my sister ask about them, too?”
The woman took a breath. “She wanted to know. I understood that. If you’re thinking of buying a house, you’d want to know who built it. Who lived here.” She looked at Maura. “This is about them, isn’t it? The Lanks.”
“You grew up in this town?”
“Yeah.”
“So you must have known the Lank family.”
Miss Clausen did not immediately respond. Instead she rose and pulled off her raincoat. Took her time hanging it up on one of the hooks near the kitchen door. “He was in my class,” she said, her back still turned to Maura.
“Who was?”
“Elijah Lank. I didn’t know his cousin Amalthea very well, because she was five years behind us in school-just a kid. But we all knew Elijah.” Her voice had dropped to nearly a whisper, as though she was reluctant to say the name aloud.
“How well did you know him?”
“As well as I needed to.”
“It doesn’t sound as if you liked him very much.”
Miss Clausen turned and looked at her. “It’s hard to like people who scare the hell out of you.”
Through the cellar door, they could hear the thud of the shovel hitting soil. Digging deeper into the house’s secrets. A house that, even years later, still bore silent witness to something terrible.
“This was a small town, Dr. Isles. Not like it is now, with all these new folks coming in from away, buying up summer places. Back then, it was just locals, and you got to know people. Which families are good, and which ones you should stay away from. I figured that out about Elijah Lank when I was fourteen years old. He was one of the boys you stayed the hell away from.” She moved back to the table and sank into a chair, as though exhausted. Stared at the Formica surface, as though looking into a pool at her own reflection. A reflection of a fourteen-year-old girl, afraid of the boy who lived on this mountain.
Maura waited, her gaze on that bowed head with its stiff brush of gray hair. “Why did he scare you?”
“I wasn’t the only one. We were all afraid of Elijah. After…”
“After what?”
Miss Clausen looked up. “After he buried that girl alive.”
In the silence that followed, Maura could hear the murmur of men’s voices as they dug deeper into the cellar floor. She could feel her own heart throbbing against her ribs. Jesus, she thought. What are they going to find down there?
“She was one of the new kids in town,” said Miss Clausen. “Alice Rose. The other girls’d sit behind her and make comments. Tell jokes about her. You could say all kinds of mean things about Alice and get away with it, because she couldn’t hear you. She never knew we were making fun of her. I know we were being cruel, but that’s the sort of thing kids do when they’re fourteen. Before they learn to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Before they get a taste of it themselves.” She sighed, a sound of regret for childhood transgressions, for all the lessons learned too late.
“What happened to Alice?”
“Elijah said it was just a joke. He said he always planned to pull her out after a few hours. But can you imagine what it was like, being trapped inside a hole? So terrified that you wet yourself? And no one can hear you screaming. No one knows where you are except the boy who put you in there.”