Jon Talton - Cactus Heart

“Look at this.” I ran my hand against the rough wall. “How old the brickwork seems. Doesn’t even seem part of the warehouse building.”

“It’s probably not,” Gretchen said. The dark corridor didn’t echo. It swallowed up sound, making words stand out starkly for a moment before they disappeared.

She went on, “When they cleared the buildings for Patriots Square back in the 1970s, they found this little underground city of tunnels and chambers.”

“I remember,” I said. “There were old saloons and brothels and opium dens.”

“They dated from the 1880s, when there was no air conditioning and it was cooler underground. And as the town grew, the new buildings were just built on top of the old basements, then they were gradually sealed off and forgotten.”

I let out a breath, just to remind myself I could. The passage was amazingly close. People were smaller a hundred years ago.

We followed it down one direction, maybe fifteen feet, where it made a hard turn into a larger room, another step down. Here, the brick was mingled with what looked like adobe and the floor was dirt. Ancient wooden citrus crates were stacked precariously in one corner; I could make out the words “Arizona Pride” on one label and an illustration of a Gibson Girl-like redhead holding out a bounteous tray of oranges and grapefruits. Spider webs were everywhere, so we didn’t venture far. There didn’t appear to be any other way out.

Gretchen followed me as we tracked back the way we came, then turned again and followed the passage to where the skeletons were found. Now it was just a hole in the wall: bones, fabric, bricks, dirt-everything had been photographed, diagrammed and hauled away for more tests. The crime lab could do things today we didn’t even dream of when I went through the academy in the mid-1970s.

“This is where they were found?” Gretchen asked.

It jarred me a little, this reminder that those bones were a “they.” They once had eyes that saw and cried. They had parents, and a grandfather, who grieved for them. I nodded and played the flashlight around in the little compartment inside the wall. The space inside was maybe a foot deep and three feet wide and high, no larger. It really looked like a careless bit of workmanship: the far wall inside appeared to be dirt. Whoever built the basement didn’t extend the brick all the way into the hard soil.

“Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell,” Gretchen said softly. “They were four years old when they were kidnapped. Taken from their grandfather’s house. Never found alive again. And all this time, they were right here.”

The light bounced heavily off the brick. Winston Churchill did brick masonry to relax, but I didn’t know beans about it. The bricks in this wall looked a little newer than the ones down the passage. Maybe. The mortar was crumbling. It would make sense: Jack Talbott walled them in and re-laid the bricks hastily.

“Do you think they were alive when he put them in there?” Gretchen asked.

“It’s hard to know.” I hesitated telling more to a civilian. Talbott had been found with the twins’ pajamas. So maybe they were murdered immediately and the ransom demand was a ploy. That was almost a comforting scenario, considering the scraps of rope and leather that had been found. Those might mean the little boys had been tied up and walled in while still alive, without even a blanket against the cold desert night underground. I kept it to myself.

I tried to stand upright and almost knocked myself in the head. “The other thing I can’t get out of my head is this pocket watch we found. Why would it be there?”

“Well, wristwatches didn’t come into widespread use until after World War I,” Gretchen said. “So there were probably lots of pocket watches still in use in 1941.”

“Right, my grandfather loved his. His father gave it to him. And railroad men used them, too. But…” I stared out at the blackness of the passage. You would never find your way out without a flashlight. “But why would two four-year-olds have a pocket watch? Could they even tell time?”

“I see what you mean.”

“And if this Jack Talbott, the kidnapper, was after a hundred grand of Yarnell money, why wouldn’t he have taken the watch, too? It looked gold.”

She moved toward me and took my hand. “David, I need to get out of here. It’s creeping me out.”

We went back out the way we came, Gretchen holding my hand tightly. I helped her back up the ladder and then started up myself. The rungs were slippery and cold. I felt an involuntary chill wrapping around my back, a sense of climbing out of a black place where murder had lived undisturbed for nearly sixty years, a sense of not wanting to look back down the ladder behind me. I stepped onto the hard concrete of the main room and had forgotten about the shooting pain in my ankle.

“Sorry,” she said when we were out on the street again. She wiped each cheek. Her eyes were red. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry.” I patted her shoulder. “It’s pretty intense. I shouldn’t have taken a civilian down there.”

No,” she said, a marked steeliness in her pleasant voice. “I wanted to see.”

I got back home late, feeling a little guilty about my appreciation of the way Gretchen Goodheart filled out her blue jeans, and a little edgy for reasons I couldn’t exactly define. I was working on a dull headache that I ascribed to too many hours spent reading old records about an open-and-shut case that was actually growing more complex with every scrap of paper that I accumulated.

Central Avenue was a river of impatient lights headed out of downtown, but Cypress, my street, was dead. I crept along past the neat, darkened houses, the palm trees tall and soldierly in the narrow parking lawns between the sidewalks and the street. This was my old neighborhood. When I was a kid, I knew everybody on the block. There were the eccentric heirs to the railroad fortune on the corner; they moved away to the fancier Palmcroft district when I was ten. There was the old hound-dog in the backyard two houses down who barked if anything was wrong in the night. I knew a story for every house, and every notch in a hedge or passage between fences held a memory. The city was smaller then.

Now there were new neighbors to know. Most of the old owners had left or died in the years I had been away from Phoenix. Many of the houses had been restored beyond any former splendor, pools added, and all in all Willo was much more affluent than it had been. Yet the neighborhood had gained a self-conscious quality, too: It was a historic district, an urban homesteading success story. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. I felt a constant sense of familiarity and strangeness, and tonight the block just felt empty and sad.

Lindsey’s old white Honda Prelude was parked in front of my house and Lindsey was sitting inside. She had a key to the house but didn’t use it. I parked and met her on the sidewalk, where she held her hand gently against my chest as if she were taking some internal reading, then she ran an index finger down my nose, across my lips, into my mouth. She wore baggy jeans and a gray sweater, and her pale skin glowed from the street light. Without a word she led me up the walk and we went inside.

Later, we sat on opposite ends of the sofa, our bare feet resting on each other’s laps, easily naked together, sipping the Macallan from shot glasses. We were in the living room, the grandest room in an otherwise small house, with a twelve-foot ceiling and bookcases rising behind a wrought-iron staircase. Sometimes I could feel Grandfather and Grandmother in the room, not as ghosts but as missed beloveds. It was a room that put me in a mind to realize the fleeting preciousness of our connections.