The heavy sideboard and two end tables were coated with the same dark paint as the doors and kitchen cupboards. Had Sammie bought a barrel of the stuff and kept painting until it was all used up?
The receiver of the phone had miraculously remained in place but when Joe pushed it off and listened, the line was dead. With all the letters jammed in the mailbox, it was likely Sammie hadn’t paid her bills; the phone company wasn’t charitable about such oversights. The cats, prowling and poking, lost track of time as they dragged stacks of debris aside to search among the next layer. Together they fought out heavy drawers, looked under the couch and chairs, burrowed beneath the cushions, wondering what Emmylou had been doing in here. Outside the grimy windows, the pines pressed against the house heavy and dark, the night sky beyond forming small, pale islands between the shaggy limbs.
“This is dumb,” Dulcie said. “Emmylou wouldn’t hide anything in here. Why would she, when whoever was here might come back?”
Joe was silent, rummaging in the little closet. “Come smell this,” he said, his voice muffled from beneath a bag spilling out old towels and linens. She bellied under, and then into the bag. Over the smell of very old cloth, she breathed in the scent of smoke and wet ashes.
But there was no box, nothing like hard metal beneath their seeking paws.
“If she did hide it there,” Joe said, “then moved it again, why would she? Unless it was of value?”
“Well, it’s gone now,” Dulcie said crossly. “I just know, if we have to toss a house, I’d rather search anywhere else than this depressing mess. How could she live like this?” Lashing her tail, she looked down with disgust at the old metal vent set into the carpet. “Even the heat vents are rusty and dirty and . . .” She paused, and approached closer. She sniffed at the metal grid then backed off, making a flehmen face.
“What?” He was beside her in one leap, sniffing at the grid and then backing off, too, with the same grin of disgust.
She said, “Maybe it’s a dead raccoon. Or . . . Oh, not one of the cats. One of Sammie’s cats? Oh, the poor thing can’t have gotten trapped down there, trapped under the house?”
“I don’t know, Dulcie,” he said impatiently. While the smell was certainly of something dead, of a body left to perish, the faint stink wafting up from the basement could be anything. Gopher? Ground squirrel? Dead dog?
But whatever it was that lay moldering down there, there was only one way to find out. “Come on,” he said, and headed back through the kitchen, through the homemade cat door and out, to find a way underneath.
23
The wind had stilled as Joe and Dulcie prowled outside the house looking for a way into the dank cellar, to the source of the dead smell. The thin rain was sullen, and colder, hiding any hint of moon or stars. It was strange, fitful weather, its penetrating cold made them shiver and move closer together beneath the dense bushes; and even under the wet bushes the smell of death clung in their nostrils. Easing around to the far side of the house where they hadn’t yet explored, where the land dropped down, they at last found a small door into the basement, a crude affair built of matching wooden siding and crowded by early-budding mock orange bushes whose sweet scent blended strangely with the stink of decay. The door was locked.
Leaping up, Joe pawed at the rusty hasp and padlock hoping the screws might be loose. He knew that, in his desire to get inside, he was destroying fingerprints with his grasping paws, but it couldn’t be helped. He was fighting the lock when Dulcie said, “Wait, Joe. Come this way.”
He could see only her backside, she was halfway under the house where the siding had rotted, leaving a ragged slit barely high enough for her to wriggle through. Joe dropped down, and joined her, pushing under, the wood so soft that pieces of desiccated siding clung to their fur as they bellied through into the dark, earthen cellar.
Drooping cobwebs hung down from the floor joists, so thick and long they brushed their ears. The dead smell led them into the blackness toward the front of the house, where the ground rose.
“If it is a human body,” Joe said, “there’s not much room for a cop to crawl back in there.” In most of the cellar, there was hardly belly space for a cat. Only where a swale ran along between the rough wooden wall and the earth, was there room for a human to move, bent over. The thought of a human body stuffed up into that claustrophobic crawl space made Joe’s fur rise along his back. Hard clods of dirt bit into their paws. Splintered scraps of wood and bent nails cut their pads, and the longest cobwebs clung to their whiskers like sticky tape. “This is what we do for entertainment?” Joe said.
“No. This is what we do because we can’t help ourselves. Because we’re cats. Because we’re cursed with too damn much curiosity.” She moved ahead of him into the blackness like a stalking tiger, every fiber honed to the quarry. He could see the ancient furnace deep in, a hulking black box sprouting fat pipes that led up through the floor, a squat, low affair beyond which Dulcie vanished.
Soon he could hear her digging. He picked out her dark shape, half hidden, clawing at the earth. How could she stand the stink? When she gave a sudden squeak and flew backward, he jumped nearly out of his skin.
When he pushed up against her, she was shivering. When he nosed at her, her paws smelled so bad he backed away. Hastily she pawed at fresher earth, trying to wipe the smell off, unwilling to lick her paws and force the taste into her mouth. “Fingers,” she said, looking at him.
“Fingers?”
“Human fingers, Joe. A hand, an arm. I left them half buried. Let’s get the hell out of here. We need to call the station.”
They fled for the crack where icy air wafted in together with the clean cold smell of rain. This wasn’t the first body they’d dealt with, they’d reported plenty of deaths over the years, but this one smelled the worst, sent them scrambling out beneath the rotted siding sucking fresh air and then racing straight up a juniper, inhaling its sharp, clean scent.
Only high in the branches did they stop, looking down, and consider the implications if they called the department. To report what appeared to be a murder, to report those frail skeletal fingers and arm—to try to explain how the department’s two best snitches, supposedly human snitches, had “just happened on” a body buried in a space hardly high enough for a child, half hidden behind a furnace in a pitch-black cellar that could be entered only through a padlocked door.
Whatever they said, or didn’t say, was going to generate any number of unanswerable questions. Queries to which they couldn’t even imagine a believable reply. Uncomfortably they looked at each other, trying to figure out how to handle this new level of deceit, this even more complicated web of lies, to the very officers they wanted only to assist.
The rain had all but stopped, the drops seeming to have slowed until they were almost floating. The midnight village was wrapped in a strange silence, even the rhythm of the sea hushed. High in the hills, Kit could hear not even a passing car; no sound at all until suddenly a great horned owl boomed, too close to her. From her tree house she watched him descend above her and on down over the village gardens; he would be sensing the warmth of some small creature. Not me, Kit thought, you won’t take me, you daren’t come in my tree house, you’d snatch nothing in here but a beakful of pillows—and my claws in your face.