The closer Harry got to Ice Lake, the more his bravado ebbed away. He wondered how serious the captain had been about leaving the county and if maybe there was even an APB out on him. He passed a state trooper sitting in a speed trap on the Turnpike and waited to be pulled over for not being in Philadelphia.
Past Oaktree, Harry slipped in to the Horseshoe Road and consulted the map on his phone. Lakespur Road began just after the entrance to Ice Lake. He thought he could get there without passing the mayor’s house and, hopefully, any cops.
The house at number eight Lakespur Drive had a gravel driveway that wrapped around to the back. Harry pulled all the way around so his car couldn’t be seen from the road. If ever a nondescript house had been built this was it. It was a simple one-storey rectangle, painted an innocuous blue-grey. There was a furniture-free porch at the front and a set of wooden steps leading to a back door. The thorny vines mentioned in Billy’s letter had been recently cut away. Through the dusty windows Harry saw that the inside was as indistinctive as the exterior. It wasn’t empty but it certainly wasn’t lived in. There was simple wooden furniture, a sofa, and a coffee table, but nothing to indicate that a human dwelt within.
Nonetheless, Harry knocked. After receiving no answer, he went around back. The kitchen looked no more lived-in than the living room. After getting no reply from a knock, Harry threw a rock through the window.
If you asked him why he did it, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you. It happened on impulse, as if the mind of some criminal from his past had possessed him for a moment. Maybe it was the injustice of being thrown off the case for wrongdoing that made him think – what the hell. Maybe he unconsciously thought: If I’m going to be separated from MK, it might as well be because I am doing time for breaking and entering. Whatever it was, it shocked him when the glass smashed but that didn’t stop him from reaching through and undoing the lock.
Inside, the house smelled exactly as it looked – unlived in. Dust and mouse droppings covered the kitchen counters. The cupboards had glasses and plates in them but no foodstuffs, not even a salt or pepper shaker. Down the hall was a bedroom. The bed had a bedspread and pillows but underneath there were no sheets or blankets. The bathroom had toilet paper on the roll, but no soap in the dish.
In the hallway was a door, presumably to the basement. It had a flat metal bar across it and was locked with a heavy padlock. It looked very secure and out of place in this ghost house. As his British ex-father-in-law would say: “In for a penny, in for a pound”. He went outside and fished a tyre iron out of his car.
The barricaded door looked tough, and was. After banging at the lock several times with no success, he finally succeeded in jamming the tyre iron behind the steel bar. Even hanging from the iron wouldn’t budge the bar. Eventually he found himself standing on a chair with one foot while jumping with all of his weight on the protruding iron. That did it. The entire steel bar cracked away from the wooden doorjamb, sending Harry flying off the chair and banging his head on the wall before banging it again when he hit the floor.
Harry rolled over onto his side and allowed himself time to moan and wonder what he was doing. He sat up, rubbed his head and said out loud, “I’m going to see what was down there. That’s what he was doing.”
The wooden stairs had no banisters and Harry had to be careful walking down into the dim light. Faint golden sunlight from the late-day struggled to get through the tiny, dusty, high basement windows. Other than a wheelbarrow and a metal locker containing a pickaxe, two shovels, and a bag of concrete, the cellar was completely empty. Hoping that it wouldn’t show from the outside, Harry flipped the light switch. The first thing he noticed were the straight-line cracks in the concrete floor. A couple of them were at right angles but there were two perfect rectangles marking the outline of what Harry couldn’t imagine was anything other than – graves.
Later, when things got real bad, Harry berated himself for his next decision. Why didn’t he just leave right then? Why did he go to the locker and grab the pickaxe and start digging?
The cement over the outline was just a skim over loose dirt. Harry used the pickaxe and then the shovel to remove half the rectangle. He didn’t have to dig more than two feet before he found a shoe. With his heart pounding in his throat, he pulled on the shoe and found the skeleton of an ankle inside. Just because he expected it, didn’t mean that it wasn’t a shock. Harry dropped the shoe and finally came to his senses.
“I gotta get out of here,” he said.
That’s when he heard the cock of the gun. He turned in time to see Helen stepping down the stairs with a shotgun in her hands. She fired both chambers just as Harry dove behind the wheelbarrow. Burning pain erupted in his foot and calf.
The mayor’s wife cracked the gun and ejected the spent shells. She reached into her jacket pocket for two more cartridges and loaded as she descended.
“Helen,” Harry said, scooching up to the wall and bringing the wheelbarrow with him for cover. “I wouldn’t shoot if I were you. The state police are on their way.”
“You called them from down here?” Helen asked.
“I did.”
“Then you’re lying, Mr Cull. There is no cell reception in this basement.” Helen levelled up the shotgun but then stopped and asked: “How did you know to dig?” Before Harry could answer, Helen noticed the cracked outlines in the cement floor. “Fucking earthquakes,” she hissed. “Another reason to be against the god-damn fracking.”
Harry couldn’t see any way out of this. His lower leg was bleeding and hurt like hell. He thought maybe he could pick up the wheelbarrow and rush the woman. It looked heavy but maybe that famous adrenaline, the same thing that allowed mothers to lift cars that had pinned their babies, might kick in. Harry was just about to try when he heard the mayor shout his wife’s name from upstairs.
“Down here,” Helen shouted.
Charlie came down the stairs with his arms out to his sides balancing himself like a tightrope walker. “Helen, what are you doing?”
“I’m shooting your tenant, dipshit. What does it look like?”
“Stop! We have to think about this.”
“There’s nothing to think about,” Helen said, never taking her aim from Harry crouching behind the wheelbarrow. “This snoop found the house and what’s in it. What else can we do?”
“What if he’s already told somebody?” Charlie asked.
“Then we’re fucked,” Helen replied without hesitation. “But I don’t think he did.”
“His car’s out back.”
“Yeah, and we’ll drive it away and torch it.”
“What about the body?”
Helen stepped forward and hooked her toe under the handle of one of the shovels Harry had used. She kicked it up and Charlie reflexively caught it.
“I have to bury him?” he said, incredulity in his voice.
“That’s what this place is for, darling.”
“I never buried anybody,” Charlie said.
“Then it will be a learning experience.”
“What if we took him out to the woods?”
“You want to carry a dead body up that flight of stairs and into a car?” Helen said.
“No, we’ll walk him out.”
“You think he’s just going to walk out of this house so we can kill him?”
“I’ll go,” Harry said. “I’d rather die in the woods than in this place.”
“See,” the mayor said to his wife.
“No, too risky. I’m shooting him now.”
That was all Harry needed to hear. He had bunched himself almost inside the wheelbarrow and manoeuvred his hands onto both sides. Using all his strength he picked it up and crashed it towards Helen. The shotgun went off, sparks flew from the metal base. Harry felt an intense pain in his shoulder but didn’t slow down. He smashed into Helen with the wheels and props on the bottom of the barrow and pushed her back like a football-tackling dummy. He kept pushing until he slammed her into the wall, where she collapsed under the weight of the cart.
Harry saw the shotgun lying on the ground behind him and turned but, as he reached for the weapon, he saw the shadow of a shovel swinging towards his head. After that everything went black.