His men brought over their tools and sat on their haunches. The bulldozer swung around and dipped its cup into the earth, pawing away a few feet. The bulldozer- not the old rust-pocked one Herschel had died on, but another, shining red and twice as large- dug a long channel in the earth. The backhoe bucket dragged shallow scoops of topsoil, its operator skilled and meticulous. The patch of earth was about twenty feet by twenty feet. The work went quickly once he got through the topsoil into the sand beneath it.
"Like digging at the beach," Marceno noted.
Five minutes later the operator caught the teeth of the scoop on something, noticed, then cut the engine. "There," he hollered, pointing at the hole in the earth. "Look!"
At that moment I saw a car speeding along the new road, kicking up dust. It turned off the road, bumped over the field. Martha Hallock emerged from the door and stood uneasily ten feet away.
"Stop!" she screamed. "Stop!"
But Marceno didn't. And within a minute his men had scraped their shovels across a rusted flat piece of metal, which upon further digging curved downward at the edges. It was rusted through and the original paint had flaked away entirely. Then the men jumped down and dug until the curved ends of the metal became a chromed edge that then fell away to glass; we were looking at a buried vehicle of some sort.
"No, no!" cried Martha Hallock. "This, this-"
But the men kept digging, and whatever might be inside what now looked to be an old subcompact was obscured by the dirt on the windshield and a hanging forest of mushrooms inside. Marceno ran his thumb over the grille markings. Toyota Corolla. Or, spelled KROWLA, if you were semi-illiterate, drunk, and maybe suffering from a mild concussion. The men concentrated on digging away the dirt in front of the car to get access to the front axle, and after they did this, the bulldozer was able to haul the car up and out of the earth, the rotten and collapsed tires not spinning but dragging flabbily up the incline of dirt until the car lay perched over the lip of the hole. Then, with one more tug of the dozer, the car lurched forward ten more feet, prehistoric in its rusted ruin, yet all the same utterly recognizable as from our era, our modern time, the blurry then-and-now, a car that was once new and driven off a dealer's lot, used and lived in for the carrying of people and children and groceries and whatever else we use cars for, and the fact that the inside of it was dark, the windows smeared as I have said with earth on the outside and spores and molds on the inside made all of us stand back in sickened wonder.
"Open the door," Marceno ordered one of his men.
"No!" cried Martha Hallock. "No!"
"Open it this second!"
But the man, slope-shouldered and miserable as a dog that dares to disobey its master, just shook his head in meek defiance, whispering something fearful and worried. Marceno turned to another man, who agreed to touch the door with his shovel- experimentally, jabbing it like it might writhe in response, but this was all he could do.
"Don't," said Martha Hallock. "You mustn't. Enough is enough. I demand you stop."
I looked at Marceno and spoke in a low voice. "If you are decent, you will escort her away from this, no matter what is or isn't inside there. It's terrifying her."
"Yes," Marceno nodded. "Of course." And he signaled to his men to help Martha Hallock back into her car, where she sank into the cushioned seat and wept.
Then I turned to Marceno. "I'll do it," I said.
"You?"
"Yes," I told him. And I did.
I put my hand on the driver's-side door and pulled the handle. Nothing happened. I yanked, quite hard, and the door fell away, right off the car, hinges rusted to nothingness. I jumped backward. Inside the driver's side we saw an enormous mass of mushrooms crowding against each other, falling with thick abundance over the seat and floor and everywhere, covering like a thick blanket whatever might be below them, and I felt just strong enough to step forward and brush my hands against them, and what I saw made all of us understand that we were gazing not just into a buried car but a dripping, imperfectly sealed crypt- what I saw was a woman's watch and a curled brown athletic shoe and a rotten swath of a flowered material such as might be used to make a summer dress. What I saw was what remained of Jay Rainey's mother.
Yes, as the official tests would later prove- some remaining teeth, a bit of hair, the serial number in the car's engine blockthis was what was left of Jay's mother, aged thirty-nine years old when she died, a woman who had not abandoned her only child, her strapping, beautiful son, but- judging from the position of the car in the field- had gone looking for him, perhaps catching a taint of herbicide floating on the night air, which meant that she found her death.
Marceno's men lay a section of plastic sheeting on the ground and on it they put what they found: one earring, a wedding ring, the running shoes, a necklace of semiprecious stone, and a small clay dog. Marceno examined it and handed it to me. It was heavy in the hand, and I wiped the dirt from it. The creature had a certain crude sweetness and had been glazed. I turned it over, my thumb finding the lettering on the belly: JAY R. 4TH GRADE.
We pried open the trunk of the car, and in it were the following items: a plastic gasoline can, a beach chair, an aluminum baseball bat, and rubber flip-flops. No suitcases, no items suggesting a flight from a bad marriage. I turned to Marceno. He and his men stood silently, understanding what the artifacts meant, tribally respectful of them and the earthen rituals of death.
Martha Hallock sat in her car, weeping fitfully. "My girl," she sobbed. "My sweet girl." How had I not figured out that she was Jay's grandmother?
Marceno and I walked away from the car toward the ocean.
"She sold me the land, you know," he said. "He owned it but she sold it to me."
"I think she knew somebody was buried here, feared it might be true."
"Who?"
"Her daughter, Jay Rainey's mother. Her nephew, Poppy, knew for sure, must have been the one to bury her. There was an accident with herbicide. The mother disappeared that same night, everyone thought she'd left the husband. But Martha knew, somewhere inside her."
Marceno ran his fingers through his hair, demoralized by the waste and stupidity of everything. "Poppy was just putting a little more earth on top of the car, that's all?"
"It looks that way."
"And this man Herschel happened along," confirmed Marceno. "Said what are you doing? And they got in a fight. That could cause a heart attack right there."
"Or Poppy told him what he was doing. Or Herschel figured it out. Or Herschel knew what had happened and was afraid it'd be discovered."
Marceno studied the rusted hulk of the Toyota.
"Poppy was desperate," I went on. "Once the vineyard was planted it would be a very long time, if ever, before the car would be discovered."
"He would be dead."
"More importantly, Jay Rainey would be dead."
"I don't understand."
"Poppy was probably the one who left the herbicide sprayer on. He killed Jay's mother. Found her, panicked, buried the car."
"Even if the ground was soft, that would still take hours."
"He had a bulldozer. He could've found her a few hours before dawn."
Marceno knelt down to touch the earth. "So he was trying to spare Jay Rainey from finding out?"
"I think he probably didn't want to face manslaughter charges. You could begin there."
"But did Rainey know?"
"I don't think so. At least not until recently," I said. "He found out in the Havana Room."
Marceno dusted off his suit and faced me, ever the tidy international businessman. "So, are we done then?"