In silence they drive to the outskirts of Hameln, past trailers with vegetable gardens in the side yards, with chained dogs lying on the tops of homemade plywood doghouses that during the day are protected from the sun by scraggly trees trying to survive the dogshit.
“Why did you take me to that house where those two blind women live?” Lyon finally asks her.
Claire makes a sound, a sighing groan, that indicates she has been dreading this question.
“What was the point?”
She speaks reluctantly. “When I was a teenager, my grandparents would occasionally visit those women, bring them things from town, and whenever I was in a room with them, with those two women … it’s when I first felt invisible, felt the power of being invisible. I was hoping …” Claire shakes her head. “It was stupid. It was embarrassing for you, for me, for the women, just totally inexcusable.”
“But you started to say you were hoping. Hoping for what?”
Claire doesn’t answer.
“I’m not criticizing, I’m trying to understand.”
“I was hoping to show you what it felt like, being invisible. I was hoping you’d think I was, that I was different from any woman you’ve ever met, that I —”
“You are different from any woman I’ve ever met, there’s no doubt —”
“I was hoping to stop you from leaving me.”
They are just driving into Hameln proper when it occurs to Lyon that he and Claire have no tools with which to disinter a coffin. No stores open either, not on the Fourth of July. He is jolted by hope, because without tools they’ll have no choice except to call off tonight’s adventure.
But when he mentions this to Claire, she says they’ll simply steal some shovels out of a garage.
Lyon mutters a curse.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s just one thing after another, isn’t it? I mean, now we’re going to precede the obscenity of grave robbing with a little breaking and entering, theft — what else?” His famous face is twisted with worry.
Claire is worried too. She doesn’t want to lose Lyon over this, especially not after the way he stormed out on her following the debacle at that house where the two blind women live. “We could try going through official channels,” Claire suggests. “Maybe petition a judge to issue a disinterment order.”
“Based on what?” he snaps back. “Your grandmother’s accusations have been thoroughly discredited, I’d break down crying in the judge’s chambers, you would disappear before —”
“All right, John.”
Driving the side streets of Hameln, he realizes he doesn’t know where he’s going, what he’s looking for. The town is deserted, Lyon passing no cars, seeing no one walking. Most of the houses and trailers are dark; there are no streetlights.
Then in the middle of one quiet residential block, Claire orders him to stop.
Lyon does, asking her what’s wrong.
“See the garage to the side of that house?”
He turns around in his seat.
“Just pop in there and grab a couple shovels. The house is dark, no one’s home. We’ll bring the stuff back after we’re done. Not stealing, John, borrowing.”
But he makes no move to get out of the car.
Claire nudges him. “Taking a shovel from a garage is not the worst of what we’ll be doing tonight.”
“I know. God, I should’ve had a drink back at the cabin. Several.” He settles for taking deep breaths. “When I was a little boy I was attacked by a dog. Got put in the hospital.” His mouth is dry. In the past few days Lyon has thought a lot about that episode. “Did you notice those trailers we passed on the way in, all the dogs? Everyone in this town has dogs. There’s probably two or three in that garage. Waiting for me.”
“You stay here,” Claire says, opening her door.
“No.” He gets out, closes his door, and then turns around to talk to Claire through the open window. “Slide over here so you can drive, make a quick getaway if it comes to that. And if you see anyone near that garage, anyone at all, give the horn two short honks. Make sure that passenger door stays unlatched so I can get in fast if I have to.”
Claire reaches up to the window and takes his hand. “You’ll be in and out of there in thirty seconds.”
He nods, looking up over the car’s roof to watch the garage for a moment, then bending down to speak to Claire again. Except he can’t think of anything else to tell her.
Finally Claire says, “Why don’t I just dash in there and —”
“No, no. I’ll do it.”
Lyon has on his face a little boy’s expression — I’m trying to be brave about this — as he nods a farewell to Claire and pushes off from the car, walking around the back of it and heading for the garage, blowing air through pursed lips as if to whistle.
At the driveway leading to the garage, Lyon pauses. Still no cars, no pedestrians, all the houses on this street dark. Where has everyone gone? Maybe people are afraid to be out at night because that’s when Quinndell roams the town, finding his way through these yards by memory or being guided by Carl, the two of them looking for victims. Lyon actually shudders — fifty years old and still scaring himself the way he did when he was a kid. Doesn’t this ever change?
He reaches the side door to the garage and looks in one of the four panes of glass. No car there but Lyon can see a long row of tools hanging along one wall: shovels, axes, hoes, everything you could possibly need to dig up a grave. Turning the handle, he finds that the door is unlocked.
Two steps into the garage, however, and Lyon is attacked by a dog.
It has him by the pants leg, this fiercely yapping little fur ball clamped down on Lyon’s cuff, shaking its head and ripping the material as Lyon bounces backward on one leg, dragging the creature with him, reaching the door and hopping out on that one leg, closing the door on his leg so the dog can’t escape, finally able to retrieve his leg and then shut the door between him and the Pomeranian.
Looking through the glass, Lyon sees the fluffy red bastard sitting on the other side of the door staring up at him with a malevolent grin, a strip of trouser material hanging from the dog’s pointy mouth.
If it were a real dog in there, a German shepherd, for example, Lyon would simply return to the car and tell Claire to forget this particular garage — but he can hardly admit to her that he was held at bay by a Pomeranian.
He opens the door a crack and yells, “Sit!”
The dog does.
Opening the door a little wider, Lyon orders, “Stay!”
And the creature acts as if it’s going to obey that too.
When Lyon finally screws up enough courage to step into the garage he draws out a warning, “Staaayyy,” the Pomeranian opening his mouth to pant, dropping the swatch of material and keeping his eyes on Lyon — but the dog stays.
Moving gingerly, Lyon makes his way to where the tools are hanging, selecting two shovels, a pick, an axe, and a crowbar. Bundling these tools under his left arm, Lyon turns now for the open door, reminding the dog, “Staaayyy.”
He is halfway to the exit when the Pomeranian bolts from the sitting position and runs to the doorway, the dog’s red fur bristling, the animal suddenly angry at Lyon, growling and then yapping, the Pomeranian in the doorway obviously prepared to make a Horatius-like stand.
Lyon tries out a variety of commands on the dog — Sit, Stay, Get outta here, Go home, Fetch — but nothing works. He tries feinting in one direction and then the other, only infuriating the dog all the more. Lyon is worried that someone is going to hear the barking and come out here to the garage with a gun. He tries speaking softly to the dog, asking him to be quiet, using babytalk — nothing works.
Lyon takes out the shovel. He’s going to have to brain the little mutt. But can he do it?
Raising the shovel overhead, he approaches the Pomeranian, which continues that maddening yapping, Lyon hefting the shovel to gauge its weight, its deadliness. He’ll probably only wound the little beast with the first blow, have to keep hitting and hitting, maybe use the axe to cut off its head. Ghastly business. Can he do it?
Within shovel range now, lifting it high with his right hand, the other tools still tucked under his left arm, the dog ignoring the overhead weapon, staring boldly into the man’s eyes, Lyon assuming a firm grip on the shovel’s handle, about to strike when a shadow — black and white — moves in from the side of the doorway.
It’s Claire, bending over to scoop the Pomeranian into her arms, petting the dog’s head and then when the creature continues barking at Lyon, she puts her hand over its snout and holds its mouth closed. “Oh, John, what were you going to do?”
He looks up at the raised shovel, guilty.
The tools are in the trunk, Lyon is in the front passenger seat. When Claire, who is driving, starts to speak, he stops her by holding up one finger, “Not a word.”
Fighting to contain her laughter, she says, “At least you got the shovels.”
“Yeah, so far it’s going like fucking clockwork.”
The entrance to Cemetery Road is blocked by a single steel pipe hinged on one end, chained and padlocked at the other. To the middle of that pipe is taped a hand-lettered sign: CLOSED ON THE FOURTH.
“I guess that pretty much kills the plan for tonight,” he says hopefully.
“Don’t be silly. This is good. Now we know no one else will be up there to bother us, to see what we’re doing, this is perfect.”
“Except how do we get in?”
She answers him by slipping the car into gear, depressing the accelerator, and bumping into the pipe — making a terrific racket but not breaking the chain. Claire backs up and hits the pipe a second time, harder, snapping the chain and causing the pipe to fly open and then bounce back against the car, shattering a headlight.
“Damn!”
But Claire is unconcerned, driving forward to push the pipe out of the way and then calmly telling Lyon, “Go back and close it, wrap the chain around the end so no can tell it’s been broken.”
He obeys, wondering, if Claire is so goddamn resourceful dealing with dogs and chained gates, then why the hell does she need him to dig up the grave?
Cemetery Road continues on up the side of a ridge, Claire driving the steep incline slowly but without using the single headlight she has available to her. When Lyon suggests she should at least turn on the parking lights, Claire tells him, “We don’t want anyone to know we’re up here.”
“Right,” he replies, gripping the armrest and seat edge, waiting tensely for Claire to drive off the side of the shadowy road and plunge them into the darkness below.
The cemetery itself is on four sloping acres just down from the crest of a hill high over the town of Hameln. Claire and Lyon walk one of the paths to the edge of the cemetery, seeing there at the base of Cemetery Hill a hundred cars and perhaps five hundred people around an open field so far below the cemetery that Claire and John Lyon feel as if they’re looking down from an airplane.
“Fireworks,” Claire informs him. “That’s why no one was in town, they’re all waiting for the fireworks to begin.”
“Good, I hope they stay down there. I’ll go get the tools. I assume you’ve already selected a grave for desecretion.”
She flashes him her big eyes.
“Now listen to me, Claire, if we open the coffin and find that the body … I can’t believe I’m really going to do this. If the body is intact, if there’s no indication that the baby was butchered by Quinndell, then we put everything back and go home — yes?”
“That’s the plan.” Except Claire sounds as if she’s keeping her options open.
“You don’t have any alternative plan in mind, do you?”
“Of course not.”
He doesn’t believe her.
She takes his hand. “Claire always said that the babies themselves would bring Quinndell down, that his victims are waiting to indict him. I’m trusting that she knew what she was talking about.”
“I’m not doing this for your grandmother, I’m doing it for you.”
“I know,” she says softly. Then more businesslike, “Go get the tools and the flashlight, I’ll find the grave. I know all those children’s names by heart, Claire drilled them into me.”
A few minutes later they are standing by the grave of Nancy Masters, who died six years ago at two months of age.
“What’s going to be left after six years?” Lyon asks.
“Well, we can continue talking the rest of the night about what we might find, what it’ll mean, whether we should even be here, what our alternatives are — or we can simply do it.”
“Right. I guess I just start digging, huh?”
“Yes.”
The project turns out to be nothing at all like it is shown in the movies, where graves are dug up in the middle of the night with seemingly little effort, the dirt loose and sandy, in one scene the digging is started and then in the next scene the gravedigger is at the bottom of a neatly rectangular six-foot hole, his shovel blade hitting dramatically against the coffin.
Lyon soon discovers that the reality of opening a grave is brutally hard work, jumping on the shovel to get the blade in and then struggling to wrest free a clump of dry clay soil. After a half an hour of it Lyon is exhausted, totally soaked through with sweat, and discouraged by what he has created, a roughly oblong hole about the size of a bathtub and barely a foot deep. Now he knows why he was needed for this project.
The flashlight Claire is holding for him is going yellow. Lyon rests there in his modest hole as the sounds of a school band drift up from the field far below. He looks around, the large trees and well-kept grounds striking him as peaceful rather than scary.
Claire suggests that he had better start digging again, he still has a long way to go.
Muttering, Lyon shovels, using the pick when that becomes necessary, coming across tree roots that he has to cut out with the axe, shoveling some more, discovering at one point that he has piled the dirt too close to the hole, disheartened when a bushel of that dirt falls into the hole and he has to take it out a second time. He digs and sweats and rests and digs. Claire takes over for a while but Lyon is frustrated watching her bring out only a handful or two of dirt with each trip of the shovel. He gets back in the hole and digs some more.
Lyon is waist deep into the ground when he tells Claire that at this rate it’s going to take him all night to reach the coffin. “And speaking of coffins, I never did find that little white one your grandmother gave me. She said as long as I kept it in my possession, Quinndell couldn’t hurt me.”
“I took care of it.”
“How so?”
“Just dig, John — this town has eyes.”
He somehow knows what she means by that, Lyon resuming the digging, grumbling and digging, expanding the hole’s perimeter, throwing dirt up and over the pile that threatens to slide again into the hole, shoveling and picking, back muscles tightening, going deeper, finding rocks that have to be dug around and then pried loose with the crowbar and lifted up over the edge, Lyon unaccustomed to prolonged physical labor, digging and finally resting in a hole that is now chest deep.
Claire is sitting on the ground, leaning back against the infant’s headstone, occasionally hitting the flashlight in an attempt to jar some life into its failing beam.
Leaning on the shovel, Lyon says, “You always read that murder victims are found in ‘shallow graves.’ I know why that is now — because the murderers get too goddamn tired to dig a deep grave, that’s why. I mean, if we were burying someone tonight instead of digging someone up, I would’ve stopped a long time ago. Push the body in, kick some dirt over it, go home and have a drink. Enough of this shit.”
“More digging, less talk, John.”
He goes back to it, eventually finding himself in a hole over his head. When the shovel hits against something hard, Lyon thinks it’s another rock, but as he digs away more dirt he realizes he has uncovered the domed top of a small brass coffin.
“Claire!”
She peers in over the top of the hole.
“Give me the flashlight.”
“You found it?” she asks.
“Yes! It’s set in some kind of form, I’ll need the crowbar too.”
She passes down the crowbar and the flashlight, telling Lyon that the batteries are almost shot.
He continues digging and prying, handing debris up to Claire, finally exposing enough of the coffin that he should be able to pry it open.
“I’ll have to smash off the latches.”
When she realizes he’s hesitating, Claire tells him, “Go on, John, you can’t hurt that baby anymore.”
“Yeah.” He pounds the latches until they break, working the edge of the crowbar under the lid, prying and grunting and straining until he feels something like a sigh: the lid giving. “This will be the second coffin I’ve opened in the past three days, I don’t know if I want to —” Hearing a brief commotion overhead, Lyon grabs the flashlight and shines its yellow beam upward, seeing nothing. “Claire?” No answer. She couldn’t have left him again, not now.
Finish this business with the coffin first, he tells himself, getting his fingers under the edge of the lid and lifting slowly, holding his face back, excited and curious and scared all at the same time, Lyon’s heart bass-drumming as he opens the lid enough to shine some light in.
“Claire! Do you see this? Claire!”
Still holding the coffin lid open with one hand, Lyon is looking up when a brilliant light fills the grave, blinding him. He thinks Claire has found another flashlight somewhere — but why is she shining it right in his eyes?
“Claire?”
And why doesn’t she answer him? Damn her anyway.
“CLAIRE!”
Then something reaches down into that grave and grabs Lyon by the collar of his shirt.