Page 14 of In the Bones
Tim was starting to get nervous, and one glance at his colleagues told him Shana and Sol felt the same way. He held Shana’s gaze, and she gave a quick nod. “OK,” Tim said, stepping aside. “Show us what you found.”
Jenny Smith directed them to the door that led to what Tim could only describe as fodder for nightmares. The staircase took them to a low-ceilinged room with ancient stone walls and two tiny rectangular windows that let in a feeble wash of grass-green light. When Tim glanced at the exposed beams inches above his head, spying evidence of deactivated knob and tube wiring, he could feel the weight of the house bearing down on him.
The basement smelled of fresh paint; the reno crew had made an effort to sanitize and refresh the space, coating the wooden staircase and rock walls with a bright shade of white. There was no furniture, and no shelving either. The cement floor was bare.
“That way.” Jenny wobbled as she pointed out a second door, this one at the back of the long, wide room. Tim gotahead of her to turn the knob, feeling the woman shrink away. This was the end of the road for primer. The rest of the basement was dingy and dim, the walls a mishmash of filthy stone and fat, flaking bricks.
His fingers groped for a light switch. A bare bulb dangling from the ceiling cast the space in a bilious yellow light. Tim saw a furnace and hot water tank, which hulked in the center of the room like twin giants at rest. Rust marks on the pitted walls near the exposed pipes reminded him of bloodstains. Vermilion, with a hint of copper wire.
It was only when Jenny nodded to a spot in the corner that Tim noticed the floor. The outline of a wooden square, flush with the cement. The dust that had covered it, camouflaging the board with the rest of the floor, had been disturbed.
“Down there.” Shaking hard, Jenny took several steps back, keen to distance herself from whatever lay inside.
Tim withdrew his flashlight and crouched down beside the door. No lock was visible. No handle, either. All he could see was a hole bored into the primitive slab of wood.
Steeling himself, he pushed his finger into the cavity, and pulled.
He stumbled back. Behind him, Jenny let out a pitiful cry. Tim could feel Sol and Shana close, knew they could see what he was seeing, every gruesome detail illuminated by the beam from his flashlight. Under the house lay a vast crawlspace, but what Jenny Smith had found was directly below the door. Shoved, it seemed, through the hole in the floor and shut into the hollow darkness below.
“Jesus,” Tim said, the word a cold hiss.
“What the hell?” That was Shana, hovering over him, her hair tickling the top of his head. He could smell the soap the whole family used on his wife’s skin, and here, now, the perfume that permeated his daily life made his stomach heave.
“Get her back upstairs,” Shana told Sol. “Quickly. We need to seal this room.”
When Tim finally tore his gaze away from the crawlspace to look at Shana, her expression teetered on the edge of confusion and unalloyed dread.
THIRTEEN
Molly
Nine months ago
“Why Cape Vincent?”
“Why not?” Gigi asked, swinging around to face me. Sable hair tucked behind her ears, which glittered with pinhead diamond studs, she was folding a pile of yoga tops where she stood at the counter. I already knew she was thinking of nicking one. Even new employees did inventory work at the store, and she understood how to get around security. If I knew Gigi, she would snag one for me too. It was what she’d call a victimless crime, pressing her left eye into a wink, though I didn’t think our manager would agree. “Cape Vincent is less than two hours away,” she informed me. “It’s on the water. I used to go there as a kid.” For a tick, her gaze dropped away. “It’s in the Thousand Islands.”
“Never been. Is it nice?”
“The nicest. And that’s not just the nostalgia talking.”
I believed it. When Gigi’s dad was still alive, her family traveled a lot—Spain, Germany, Beijing; all places I’d never seen and probably never would. I’d only known her since the spring, when she took the job at Wins, but Gigi was a reliable barometer for nice. If she was excited about a place, it was a place worth seeing.
“I could use a break from my mom anyway,” she went on, pleating an errant sleeve that had escaped the pile.
“Having second thoughts about moving back home?” The decision to stay with her mom for a while had come days after her father’s death, but they were six weeks into the arrangement now, and I’d picked up on the signs that she was getting antsy.
“I don’t know. Not always.” Gigi said it tenderly. “She’s just so … depressed, I guess? I feel bad for her, obviously, and I’m dealing with all of the same shit, but she shuts down, you know? I thought it would help for me to be there, but she hardly even talks to me.”
As I listened, I eyed a couple of teens at the front of the store. They were rummaging through a rack of sweatshirts looking for their size, yanking them off the hangers in the process. Another mess for me to clean up. “I’m sure she’ll come around,” I told her. “Your mom’s still grieving. You both are. Maybe a couple days away is exactly what you need.”
Her face lit right up. “That’s exactly what I was thinking. Mom’s going to her sister’s in Ithaca for the long weekend, and I already told her I have to work. Let’s see if we can get someone to cover for us.”
“Seriously?” I hadn’t been expecting the plan to develop so quickly. We’d been bouncing around the idea of a trip for a while, since one night when we met up for drinks and I confessed I hadn’t done much traveling. Gigi was determined to help me make up for lost time, and had been tossing out suggestions. I was partial to Niagara Falls, charmed by photos of people in yellow rain slickers and rainbows slicing across the gorge, but I’d agreed to let Gigi take the lead. She’d opted to give the planning a rest after her dad’s death, which I totally understood. I wasn’t close with my own dad, who remarried a year after the accident, but I knew the throbbing ache of loss, along with the gut-deep guilt that fell upon the living. If she was ready now, if she thought some distance from her mom could help her heal, I was all for it.
I had another motive for wanting that shared experience, too. Our time together at Wins would be ending soon. Gigi had an interview lined up for a really good job, and I had this feeling she was going to get it. That didn’t mean we couldn’t still be friends, but the store was what connected us, and if I’m honest, I worried that she’d outgrow me. Take her beauty and stories and hypnotic smile somewhere else, where she’d find people with far more promising futures than me.
The Thousand Islands. I took in the name from all angles,imagining a glittering sheet of green water studded with jagged blue rocks, something straight out of Scotland or Thailand. Foreign and dreamy and strange.
