Katherine Page - The Body In The Basement

“What is he doing? He must have found an animal bone.”

Pix jumped in, landing on the soft earth. She went over to the dog and grabbed his col ar. "Stop it this instant!" As she pul ed the dog away, she noticed that what he had unearthed was not a bone, but a piece of fabric.

“Samantha, look what Artie's found. I think it's part of an old quilt."

“I'l get something to dig with."

“It's probably in tatters. Remember the beautiful Dresden Plate quilt I saw in the back of Sonny Prescott's pickup? He was using it to pile logs on, to keep the truck clean!"

“Here's a stick. It was al I could find.”

Pix took it from her and scraped away the dirt. So far, the quilt seemed to be in good shape.

“It looks like a nice one. I love the red-and-white quilts,"

Sam said excitedly.

“Me, too." Pix crouched down and tugged at the cloth.

"It's Drunkard's Path. I've always meant to do one, but sewing al those curves seems much harder than straight lines."

“Artie, sit!" The dog had come to her side, about to resume his labors. The other two were looking over the edge of the excavation, puzzled expressions on their faces.

At least this was how Pix interpreted them, and she prided herself on knowing her dogs' moods.

“Look at Dusty and Henry. They're al confused. People aren't supposed to dig like this." Dirt was flying out behind her as she dug deeper. "You pul while I dig.”

Samantha gave a yank and a large chunk of earth flew up, revealing more of the quilt. And as it unfolded, something else was exposed.

That something else was a human hand.

Two

At first, Pix thought it was one of those plastic joke hands that had been al the rage in Maine the previous summer—sticking out of someone's trunk or trash can. The first time she'd seen one, she'd laughed. After a while, it got boring—and ghoulish.

This hand wasn't plastic.

Pix and Samantha looked at each other, aghast.

Samantha was the first to speak.

“It's a dead body, isn't it?" she whispered. Her face looked pale and sickly.

Pix gently lifted the hand with the stick. It was flaccid and curiously heavy. The cuff of a blue denim work shirt was revealed. Pix assumed there was an arm attached, leading to al the other parts wrapped in the quilt in the shal ow grave. She nodded and stood up. Her legs were shaking.

“I'l stay here and you go to the Hamiltons' for help.

They're the closest. Take the dogs."

“No, Mom. Keep the dogs with you."

“Al right," Pix agreed. The dogs could slow Samantha down if they decided to chase a squirrel or even a leaf blowing across the path. She felt immeasurably comforted to have them stay.

The two women climbed out of the hole in the ground at the lower end, opposite the spot where the body had been buried. As they walked across the level dirt, Pix gave a thought to the footprints they were obliterating, but there was nothing they could do about it now. From the moment the dog had jumped in, the murder scene had been messed up.

Murder scene. Murder. There couldn't be any doubt.

This was not the way loved ones were laid to rest.

Samantha paused briefly to give her mother a hard hug. "Is this real y happening?”

Pix held her close. "I'm afraid so, but I can't believe it, either. You'd better go," she said, holding her tighter.

Samantha broke away and ran off toward the road.

She was a fine athlete, and as her mother watched her graceful long-legged stride, the horrible discovery they had just made was forgotten for an instant—but only an instant.

The first thing Pix did was to tie the dogs to one of the trees. She didn't want Artie or the others to continue the exhumation. She sat down on a granite boulder, a massive one disgorged by the inexorable progress of the glacier, and tried to think.

But the horror of their discovery was making rational thought impossible. At least she'd been able to send Samantha for help. What was fil ing her mind now was the picture of that hand lying on the ground, disembodied. It was growing larger and larger in her imagination. She hadn't even noticed whether it was the right or left, and what did that matter anyway? What mattered was that it was a person, someone who had been alive perhaps only a day or two ago. She took a tissue from her shirt pocket, blew her nose, and swal owed hard. She sat up straighter. So far, she'd done what she was supposed to; now she had to force herself to think of something besides that hand.

For instance, whose it might be? She hadn't heard anyone was missing on the island, and her mother would certainly have mentioned it the night before. If it wasn't someone local, the police were going to have a difficult time identifying the remains. The end of the Point was a lonely, sheltered spot. A boat from anywhere along the Maine coast—or the Eastern Seaboard, for that matter—

could easily land and dispose of a body without anyone knowing.

But ... Her thoughts were sliding back into their old, familiar logical patterns. The kil er had to be someone who knew about the construction, someone who knew the foundation hadn't been poured yet. It was too unlikely that an individual looking to get rid of a dead body would just happen upon an excavation site. No, the whole thing did not point toward someone wel acquainted with what was happening on Sanpere. Roughly 95 percent of the population.

The initial shock and disbelief were beginning to wear off and Pix was drawn to the edge of the basement, above the body. She looked down. The hand was dead white against the dark soil, just as she'd left it. She hadn’t imagined the whole thing and natural y nothing had moved.

She jumped into the hole again, being careful to land on the same spot and retrace her steps. Somehow, Pix couldn't continue to sit on a rock with a corpse lying a few feet away and not investigate further.

She didn't disturb anything; she simply stared at what had already been revealed and noticed several things she had missed before. There was a noticeable but smal X

sewn in blue thread near the border of the quilt where people sometimes put a name and date. Roman numerals? The beginning of a date? X was ten. She remembered that much from her year of Latin.

The hand looked like a man's—or that of a hirsute woman who worked with her hands. The nails were short, uneven, and one was blackened—the way a nail gets if you close it in a door or hit it with a hammer. It was the left hand, but there was no ring on the ring finger, although that didn't mean whoever it was wasn't married. Few of the men around here wore wedding bands, except to please their wives when they dressed up. The kind of work they did was not kind to jewelry.

The final thing she noticed sent her quickly up aboveground. The quilt was indeed a red-and-white one, but there were two reds, one a slightly rusty one—dried blood. It had been a violent death.

Back on the rock with the dogs stretched out next to her, she realized she could be here a long time. It would take Samantha at least a half hour to get to the Hamiltons'

house at the beginning of the Point. Nan would be in church and probably not home yet. It was Sunday, so Freeman Hamilton wouldn't be out pul ing his lobster pots, and Pix hoped he was puttering around the house and not off someplace. He wouldn't go too far, though, and risk being late for his Sunday dinner.

Freeman wasn't a churchgoer. Said he liked to talk to God directly. She remembered what he'd told her once when she was a girl and he and Nan were a young married couple. He'd come by with some lobsters for her grandfather, pointed to the view of their cove, with islands that seemed to stretch beyond the horizon across the wide expanse of deep blue water, and said, "You know, if you want to speak to God, it's a local cal from here”