William Lashner - Bitter Truth

Caroline didn’t go beyond the arched entranceway, halting there as if kept out by the type of invisible fence used to restrain dogs. From the entranceway she flicked the flashlight’s circle of light around the area. The statue of Aphrodite, struggling against hairy arms of vine, was to our right; the bench, its orange blossoms closed in the darkness, was to our left. The oval plot at the center that had been populated with violet lilies and pale yellow jewelweed when Grimes had visited was now overgrown with thick grasses that were strangling the few perennials that had survived.

I placed the lantern on the ground and kneeled before it. “Put the light here,” I said.

The circle of light jerked around the little garden and landed on the kerosene lantern. There was a tiny button on the side which, when I pulled, extended itself into a pump. I jacked the pump back and forth, priming the lantern. Then, when the pressure made the pumping difficult, I lit a match and turned a knob to the highest level and heard the sweet hiss of the pressurized fuel escaping. As I slipped the match under the glass windshield the inside of the lantern exploded into fire, which, after a few seconds, centered with a fury on the mantle. The white-hot flame blanched the scene for a moment before our eyes adjusted to the harsh light and long shadows.

I took the lantern and hung it from one of the arms of Aphrodite. Then I took the shovel, stepped through the weeds in the garden’s central, oval plot, and, right in the middle of the oval, jabbed the shovel deep into the earth. As I levered the shovel’s blade upward the roots of the weeds and flowers snapped and groaned until the shovel’s load of dirt and weed pulled free, revealing bare black earth beneath. I tossed what I had dug to the side and jabbed the shovel into the groaning earth once more.

It was not as crazy an idea as it sounds, digging up that garden. When Grimes, Jacqueline Shaw’s fiancé, had told me in the Irish Pub of his audience with Grandmother Shaw in that very same place, I had been left with the distinct impression that there was something hidden in the ground there. “Treasures are buried in this earth,” Grammy Shaw had said, “keepsakes, mementos of a better time. Everything of value we place here.” It had sounded figurative at best, but it had left me with an uneasy feeling, accentuated by her explanation of how, when the vapors of her gas plant burned, it was as if the spirits buried in that earth were igniting. On my first visit to that garden I had almost felt it beneath my feet, a presence of some sort, something dark and alive. And then Nat, the gardener, who seemed to know more than anyone else of the Reddman family’s secrets, Nat, trailing frogs like a twisted Pied Piper, Nat had come upon me in that overrun oval and told me that Grandmother Shaw was right to order that this place should remain untended and allowed to turn wild. “Sometimes what’s buried should remain buried,” he had said. “No good can come from digging up the dead.”

There were no shortage of suspects for Jacqueline Shaw’s murder. Peter Cressi had killed her, sure, and somehow I would make sure he paid the price, but, financially speaking, pinning the death only on Peter did nothing for me. There had to be someone who paid him to do it, who arranged for the roof and stairwell doors to be open as he slipped down and performed his UPS impersonation, someone with assets on which I could collect once I filed and won my civil suit. Was it the Church of the New Life, that bogus cult of rehashed New Age excretion that was scheduled to reap a cool five mil from Jacqueline’s death and tried to threaten me off the case? Or was it Eddie Shaw, pressured by the mob to pay up his debt, his arm shattered, his life threatened? He had been at the Cambium that afternoon, having flown in just for that purpose from North Carolina, looking for Jacqueline, so he had said, in perfect position to wedge the roof door open, to tape back the automatic lock on the stair shaft door, setting up Cressi’s murderous visit. How he must have howled when he found out there was no insurance money coming to him. Or maybe it was Bobby Shaw, the diffident sexually confused stutterer, whose life was devoted to increasing the value of his fortune, or Harrington, who also had access to Jacqueline’s building and was refusing marriage to a Reddman for some unknown reason.

There were enough suspects in the present to keep me busy, sure, but I wasn’t digging up Grandma Shaw’s garden just to find for Caroline the truths buried in her family’s history. Something strange was at work here, something old, something hidden deep within the story of the Reddmans. Everything seemed to center around that crazed relic, Grammy Shaw, with her twisted face and one good eye, controlling the destiny of her entire dysfunctional family. Grammy had brought Nat and Selma and Harrington into the clutches of the Reddman family; Grammy had diverted great sums of money into a secret trust for some unknown purpose; Grammy had decreed that the garden was to grow wild and be left untouched. I couldn’t shake the feeling that whatever secret Grammy had been trying to hide she had buried in this garden. I could have respected her wishes, sure, the rich old hag with half a face, but protecting her secrets wasn’t going to get me any closer to my hard-earned share of her fortune. “No good can come from digging up the dead,” had said Nat, the gardener. But it wasn’t my dead.

I was three feet down when I heard the clang of my shovel against something hard and metallic. Behind me was a heap of dirt and ripped-out plants. The air was filled with the smell of old earth being turned. I had been digging out the heart of the little oval garden for almost an hour now, digging an area about eight feet long and four feet wide, trying to keep the floor of the pit level, like an archaeologist searching for pottery shards through strata of time. It was hard going, all except for one patch. I had stripped down to my tee shirt in the warm night. My hands slipped along the shiny surface of the new shovel’s handle and had started to blister, forcing me to grip the wooden shaft awkwardly, so as to keep the tender portions from continuing to rub. My muscles ached and my back was only a few strains from spasm. In my few breaks, Caroline had dug a bit, but without much enthusiasm or progress, so it was mainly up to me. Without a pickax, I was forced to chop at the dirt with the shovel to loosen the packed earth before I could scoop it up, all except for the one patch I mentioned before. It was a small area roughly in the middle of the garden where the dirt was softer. I thought about just digging there, but I didn’t want to miss anything, so I kept at the whole of the pit. Still, it was no surprise that, when I heard the clang of metal against metal, it came from the loosely packed center.

When I first heard the clang I wasn’t sure what it was, my blade had already sparked against a few rocks, but then I clanged again and Caroline let out a small gasp, and then another, one for each time I wracked my shovel against the metal. It didn’t take me long to figure out the rough rectangular dimensions of the object and to dig around it until my shovel could slip beneath and then to leverage it up out of the earth.

It was a box, a metal strongbox, dark, with rusted edges. There was a handle on the top, which I pulled, but it broke away quickly, weakened by rust and decay. I grabbed the box from beneath the sides and lifted. It was heavy and it smelled richly of old iron. When I gave it a tender shake I could feel its insides shift. The primary weight was the box itself, I could tell, for what had shifted inside had been relatively light. There was a lock integrated into the body of the metal and then another lock, an old rusted padlock, holding together two bars welded onto the top and the bottom. With the box in my arms, I stepped out of the pit and brought it to Caroline.