Mom held the phone’s receiver away from her ear but I could hear Pat Harris’s excited voice all the way across the room.
Pat must have taken a deep breath and tried to control herself because I could no longer hear her. My mother nodded. “Yes, yes, I see. You think there is something under your garage floor?”
Laying my screwdriver on the cabinet, I went to stand beside her. She and I had been trying to replace cabinet doors since the earthquake and it was a slow process. Screwdrivers and I were not best friends and I had a bloody thumbnail to prove it.
“What is it?” I mouthed the words as Mom looked at me. She shook her head.
“Uh-huh. I see. You want Darcy and me to come? It sounds as if you need a repairman, Pat. Or maybe Jasper could help? Darcy and I don’t seem to be much good at fixing things.”
Pat’s voice rose again and I heard her high-pitched words. “No, no, Flora, I don’t need a handyman. Just hurry up and get out here, you and Darcy, too.”
Mom replaced the telephone and turned to stare at me. Her eyes were troubled. “I know that earthquakes do strange things, like tornadoes do but I’ve never heard of a tornado scrambling someone’s mind.”
“Is that what you think happened to Pat? What did she say?”
My mother sat down at the kitchen table. “She said . . . she said that she hadn’t moved her truck out of the garage for a few days until just now. She pulled it out and the tires bumped over a rough place. She got out to look and she thinks there is something under her garage floor.”
“Something under . . . that doesn’t make sense. Her garage is on ground level, just like her whole house. How could there be anything under it?”
Mom pressed her fingers against her forehead. “She had that garage re-built only about two years ago. She told me she had a brand new floor poured. I remember she was bragging about how the concrete looked so pretty and smooth, not cracked at all.”
“So, does she think the earthquake damaged the garage?”
“I guess so.”
“Why on earth does she want us to come? What can we do? We can’t even take care of repairs on our own house.”
“Pat has always run to hysteria when something goes wrong. You’ve heard that misery loves company? Well, Pat does not suffer in silence. She called Earlene Crowder and Earlene was sympathetic but she didn’t offer to come help. All our lives, we were girls together, you know, Darcy, Pat has wanted me to come if she’s upset.”
I checked the coffee pot. Empty. “She didn’t call for you when people suspected Jasper might have something to do with Ben Ventris’s death.”
“No, that’s different. She is very protective of her son.”
“I’m tired, Mom, and I’m sure you are. Why don’t we just forget about Pat’s phone call? Maybe she’ll calm down.”
Mom went down the hall to the coat closet. “No, I don’t think she’s going to calm down until I go out there. I don’t know what she thinks is under her garage floor, Darcy, but I have the feeling we’d better go. She sounded like she was wound as tight as . . . as . . .”
“As one of her pin curls?”
“Good description. Grab your coat, Darcy. Let’s go.”
Pat was waiting on the porch when we pulled into her driveway. She hurried down the steps and began talking before she reached my car. She was twisting her hands inside her apron and when she spoke, her words ran together.
“Oh, Darcy and Flora, thanks so much for coming. I just didn’t know what to do. I don’t see any damage to my house, but when I was cleaning up some limbs and trash from the yard and I backed out the pickup to haul that stuff down into the woods, well, there it was. With the truck out of the garage I could see there were four big cracks and some little ones in the concrete floor, and when I looked down into the biggest crack . . . .” She paused and shook her head. “There’s something under there.”
Murphy, the large red hound who lived with Pat and Jasper, thrust his wet nose into my hand.
“There’s no need to get upset about it,” I told her. “Lots of floors in Ventris County probably have cracks after that quake. Even if it looks bad, I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard for a professional finisher to fix.”
“Yes, but it’s not just the cracks. It’s . . . .” Her eyes were as round as Artie’s pancakes and her voice dropped to a whisper. “I think there’s something under my garage floor.”
Mom punched me in the ribs and spoke around her hand. “See what I mean?”
“Miss Pat, there are things under everybody’s garage floor. Tree roots reach under the cement after it has been poured. Rocks, maybe even some small animals like moles and gophers could dig under there or—uh . . . .” I looked at Mom. “Trash that was washed under the floor by heavy rains, maybe?”
“I know, but . . .” She circled around her old Ford pickup and headed toward the single garage. “I don’t think this is any of those things. I would say it is definitely not trash. No, no.” She shook her gray curls.
“Now, Pat,” Mom put her arm around her old friend’s shoulders, “why would there be anything under your garage floor that’s not under every other garage floor in the country?”
“What do you think is under there, Miss Pat?”
She pushed Murphy out of the way and kept walking. “I don’t want to say ’cause if it’s not what it looks like, you’ll think I’m crazy. Come and see for yourself.”
Like most homes in Levi, the Harris house was old, probably built in the thirties or before. It was white frame and small with a narrow front porch squarely in the middle. The tiny detached garage had been added after the house was built. I remembered seeing that the garage looked fairly new, at least a lot newer than her house, back in the spring when Mom and I came to talk to Pat about Jasper in connection with Ben Ventris’s disappearance. Mom remarked after that visit that it probably cost more to re-build Pat’s garage than her old house had cost originally.
There was no automatic opener for Pat’s garage door, only two wooden panels that closed in the middle with a sliding bar. Both sides were now propped open by two-by-fours.
The three of us and Murphy stepped inside. Sunlight filtered through, lighting the front of the garage but throwing the back into shadows. I glanced at the ceiling. No light bulb hung there; only a bare socket where the bulb should be.
Pat was right about the cracks; there were several good-sized ones but what caught my attention was the fact that most of the cracks were on the left side of the floor, zigzagging out from what appeared to be a sunken spot in the concrete. That area interested Murphy, too. He immediately plodded over and started nosing and pawing at the cracks.
“My floor is only a couple of years old. The first floor they poured cracked, so they came out and made a whole new floor and rebuilt the garage, too. They said the cement they used at first must not have been any good.”
We stepped closer to the damaged area. Mom and I knelt down to look into the biggest crack. I pushed the inquisitive Murphy aside. The morning sun created a glare that nearly blinded me.
I probed the sunken spot with my fingers. “Have you got a flash-light handy, Miss Pat? Some of these cracks are pretty deep and I can’t see anything.”
Pat stood on tiptoe and reached up to a shelf at the back of the garage. She brought out a big flashlight. As she gave it to me, her hand was shaking. “I couldn’t see anything either at first, until I used this light.”
Poking around on a garage floor while this near-hysterical woman fluttered above me was not my favorite way to spend the day. Why couldn’t she just say what she thought? I leaned closer to the largest crack. “Whatever is in there, if there’s anything at all, I don’t think it’s going to jump out and grab you.”
Mom nudged me with her foot. “Darcy.”
“Sorry,” I muttered. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Well, I’m just not exactly sure what I saw, Darcy. You know what I mean? And I don’t want to say what it looked like yet until I get a second opinion. You and Flora know how to keep your mouths shut. ’Cause if it is what I think it is, I sure don’t want the whole county to know.”
My ever-practical mother spoke. “Now, Pat, don’t get yourself all in a lather. Darcy and I are here to help you no matter what you saw. First of all, show us where you were when you saw whatever it is that’s upset you so much.”
Pat did not move. Wordlessly, she pointed to the spot where I was crouched.
Mom continued, “Now, tell us what it looks like. What color is it? What shape is it? How far down in the crack is it? Can you see most of it?”
Pat closed her eyes. “Oh, Flora, it was glinty. It caught the light and when I looked closer, it sure looked like gold to me. There! I said it.”
Gold? The woman had a wild imagination. “Now, Miss Pat, what would gold be doing under your floor? Have you lost a ring? Maybe something fell down in the crack while you were examining it.”
Pat laughed. “Are you serious? The only piece of gold I’ve ever owned is my wedding ring and I put that in a drawer a long time ago. If I had any gold, Darcy Campbell, it’d be in a safety deposit box at the bank.”
Was Mom listening? I hoped so. She didn’t believe in safety deposit boxes and kept all her valuables in a cedar chest in her room.
Angling the flashlight’s beam at the largest crack, I slowly played it across the floor. Aha! Now I saw something. The object Pat was trying to describe was perhaps ten inches down. She was right; it was kind of glinty. It was also dirt-covered. But I needed to see more. I pulled myself up, hoping that my popping knee joint didn’t have anything to do with my age, and went out into the yard. I picked up one of the broken twigs from the maple. Murphy ambled out of my way as I came back into the garage.
“I could go get an old rug for your knees,” Pat offered.
“No, that’s okay. I’ll just take a quick poke down here. Mom, can you hold the flashlight for me?”
My mother grabbed the light and I began scratching away some of the dirt from the glinty object that had Pat so unstrung. The thing was hard and seemed to be stuck. Normal, I guessed, since it was under concrete.
“Maybe I could get it out of there if I had a hook. Do you have a wire coat hanger, Miss Pat?”
“Sure.” Pat disappeared into the house and came back with the black hanger. I bent it into a longish shape and carefully pushed it into the crack.
“I think I’ve grabbed onto that shiny thing,” I said. I tugged but nothing happened. If it was gold under Pat’s garage floor, it seemed to like its location. It refused to budge. I could only glimpse what was holding it down; something long and hard and white. I swallowed. No, I would not even go there. I did not want it to be what it looked to be.
After probing around for a good ten minutes, I pulled to my feet and rubbed my aching back. “It is fastened onto something, Miss Pat. If you are really interested in seeing what it is, I think you are going to have to get somebody out here to further tear up your floor. It’s stuck under there and besides that, I think it may be too big to come through the crack.”
I did not want to say aloud the reason I feared it would not come through the crack. Pat needed only a nudge to completely go over the brink into full-blown hysteria. I caught her questioning stare. Did she think it might be something a lot more sinister than gold? Was that the reason she was so upset?
She scuffed the floor with the toe of her canvas shoe. “I think I’ll just have more concrete poured over it and forget it. As you said, it’s probably just a tree root or something. I don’t want any trouble at all. Uh-uh.”