Steven Havill: Twice Buried

“Is that the way you went down there last week?”

“What do you mean?”

“All hunched over like that.”

He nodded.

“Don’t like spiders much?”

He made a face. The nearest web was almost three feet over his head.

“Go on down.” I followed him into the cellar. “Anything changed?”

He scanned the shelves and the jars and then shook his head. “No. You can see where the jar was that I took.”

“Uh-huh. Did you happen to notice the floor when you were down here?”

“No.” This time he did glance down.

“That’s one reason I came back out here. There were four sets of footprints in this nice, fine dust.” I knelt down and rubbed some of the dirt between my fingers. “Mine, Clark’s, and the two ambulance attendants.” Bob Torrez looked sideways at me. “And none of your size thirteens. You see how visible they are in places? You didn’t come down here earlier tonight.” I smiled. “And now I know why. Las aranas aren’t your favorite beasties, are they?”

He grinned sheepishly.

“But now tell me why your bootprints aren’t here from a week ago.”

When he was finished examining the dirt floor, he sat back on his haunches. “I don’t know, sir. Maybe she swept the place since then.”

“You don’t believe that and neither do I. Someone who doesn’t bother to dust off food storage jars isn’t going to bother with a dirt floor.”

“Maybe she’s got one of those volunteers from the Department of Human Services who does cleaning.”

“Sure. Including sweeping a dirt fruit cellar floor? I don’t think so.”

“What are you thinking, sir?”

“I don’t know. At first I got to wondering about the cobwebs. I didn’t have to sweep them aside. I figured that you did that a few days ago. But after I saw your performance just now-”

“They were practically in my face last week.”

“Yeah, but your face is about two feet higher than Anna Hocking’s.”

“Maybe she flailed her arms as she was falling.”

“Flail, Robert? She was eighty-six years old. I can’t picture it.”

“You’re saying that someone swept the tracks smooth? Even took a sweep at the cobwebs?”

“Maybe.”

“The doors weren’t locked and latched when you first came?”

“Yes,” I said, then thought better of it. “The ones that I checked were.”

Torrez looked toward the staircase. His right hand rested unconsciously on the butt of his service automatic.

“If someone was here and wanted Mrs. Hocking’s death to look like an accident, the doors would all have to be locked. From the inside. But there would have to be a way of getting out.”

We both went back upstairs. Old houses hide some secrets pretty well. But it’s just about impossible to make modern tampering blend in. Whoever had painted the inside of Anna Hocking’s windows years before had been sloppy. The three living room windows were painted shut-and locked.

The kitchen window was solid. So was the bedroom window.

“She wasn’t one for fresh air, was she?” Torrez said.

“A lot of elderly folks aren’t,” I said. We went to the bathroom. Only a ferret could have squeezed through the two inches that the rusty casement hardware allowed.

“I don’t think so,” the deputy said. We opened the door to the second bedroom. Mrs. Hocking had saved every cardboard box for the last decade. There was a path of sorts and I made my way to the window that looked out onto the back porch.

It hadn’t been painted shut. The brass swivel lock in the top center of the lower window’s frame was open.

“You think they went out this way?”

“Maybe. Don’t touch anything until you’ve dusted for prints. Then we’ll see how easily it moves.”

“If someone came here, she must have let them in.”

“Unless they jimmied the door as easily as I did earlier.”

“And then went out this way? I’m not sure I buy the cellar idea, sir,” Torrez said. “I mean, there’s a dozen ways that footprints can get obliterated. And the ones that we could see weren’t all that clear.”

I shrugged and ran a hand across the bristle brush of my gray hair. “Why don’t you get the print kit. Then we’ll see.”

My intuition told me I was right even if nothing else did. While Torrez went outside, I returned to the utility room. A broom was standing in the corner, almost behind the hot water heater. Farther back in the corner was an old dust mop that looked like one of those long-haired oriental dogs without legs.

I spread a black trash bag on the floor and then, using a paper towel, gently picked up the broom by the end of the handle. I held it two feet over the black plastic and dropped it straight down. Nothing. I made a face and put the broom away.

Just as carefully, I leaned around the heater, picked up the dust mop and repeated the performance. This time, when it hit the plastic, a fine spray of adobe brown dirt formed a halo around the mop.

“Gotcha, you son of a bitch,” I muttered.

By ten the next morning, we had a fair-sized convocation at Anna Hocking’s. It was too bad that she had to be dead to receive all that attention.

I hadn’t minded the long hours. I could recharge my batteries with a couple minutes of sleep a night. If I got that much I considered myself lucky. But Linda Rael, the young reporter, was among the walking dead. The dark circles under her eyes made her look like she’d been popped twice by an angry boyfriend.

By dawn, Linda was content just to sit in the car, bravely trying not to let her eyelids crash shut. I still refused to let her into the house. The last time we’d talked, her temper was beginning to fray. That made Sheriff Martin Holman nervous. To him, nothing was worse than angry press.

“I think we’re about finished, don’t you?” he asked. He’d cornered me on the back porch, about as close to the inside as I’d let him go. He never seemed to know what to touch and what to leave the hell alone.

“Eddie Mitchell is still dusting for prints in the kitchen. When he’s finished there, we can concentrate on finishing up outside.”

Holman gazed out through the porch screen at the yellow crime scene ribbon that circled the little house-and that included the driveway and the yard. Deputy Tony Abeyta, two months on the force and scheduled to begin academy training the next week, strolled around that circle, eyes watchful. So far, Linda Rael was the only newshound present, but as the word got out others would show up.

Sheriff Holman was unimpressed with my theories. As more of a tip of the hat to his office than his person, I’d taken him down into the cellar briefly and explained what I thought had happened. Holman was no cop-he’d sold used cars before his election first to the county commission and then later as sheriff-but he was smarter than I usually gave him credit for being.

He did have a perfect talent for knowing what to say to the media.

“I can’t tell Linda that we think we’ve got a murder because of some cobwebs and a little dust on a mop.”

“I can understand that,” I said.

“I mean, brooms and dustmops are supposed to have dirt on them.”

“Uh-huh. The lab’s going to tell us that the dirt on that mop came from the cellar floor.”

Holman looked pained. “Come on, Bill. This whole hillside is the same dirt. You sweep the living room floor and you get that dirt.”

I shook my head and fumbled for a cigarette. The pocket was empty. “Nope. That would be blow sand…or light blow dirt. This is old adobe dust, the kind of stuff that sifts gently over the years. Fine as silt.”

“So she swept her cellar.”

I shook my head again. “She hasn’t even been able to go down in the cellar for months.”