In the side yard of the lot where our trailer had sat, my aunt had planted hydrangeas much the same color, though not quite so lush as these had been. The neighbor’s hydrangeas were a washed-out pink, and Aunt Gin took delight in her superior blooms. The secret, said she, was burying nails in the soil, which somehow encouraged the shift from pink to the rich blue shade.
Afterward I felt I’d been incredibly dense, taking as long as I had to add that particular two plus two. I stared down at the cracked and slightly sunken oblong of soil and felt a flash, the sudden getting of facts that hadn’t seemed connected before. This was where Winston had last seen the car. Amid dirt mounds, heavy equipment, and orange plastic cones, he’d said. A temporary road barrier had been erected, denying access to through traffic. No sign of Violet, no sound from the dog, but from that night forward, the Bel Air was never seen again.
Perhaps because it was buried here. Maybe all these years, the rich blue hydrangeas had been feeding on the rust.
20
I drove to the service station near Tullis and used the pay phone to call Schaefer. I told him what had occurred to me and asked how we might confirm or refute my hunch about the oblong depression in the earth. Schaefer was dubious but said he had a friend who owned a metal detector. He agreed to call the guy. If the guy could help, they’d meet us at the property as soon as possible. Failing that, he’d drive out on his own and assess the situation. I hadn’t told Tannie what I was up to, but now that I’d set the wheels in motion, I worried I was making a colossal ass of myself. On the other hand, oh well. There are worse things in life and I’ve been guilty of most.
By the time I pulled up at the house again, she’d finished her business with Bill Boynton and he was gone. “Where’d you disappear to? I thought we were having lunch.”
“Yeah, well, something’s come up. I want you to take a look.”
“Can’t we eat first and then look?”
“This won’t take long.”
She followed me to the side yard and I pointed to the irregular rectangle that had attracted my attention. At ground level, the depression wasn’t as defined as it appeared from above, especially with half-dead hydrangea bushes piled to one side. At close range, it looked more like a mole had been tunneling across the yard. The soil was uneven, but it took a bit of squinting to see that it was sunken in relation to the surrounding lawn. This was about the same as staring at the night sky, trying to identify Taurus the Bull by visualizing lines between stars. I never saw anything remotely resembling livestock, a failing I attributed to my paltry imagination. Yet here I was pointing like a bird dog, saying, “Know what that is?”
“Dirt?”
“Better than dirt. I think it’s Violet Sullivan’s grave.”
Tannie stared down at her feet. “You’re shitting me.”
“Don’t think so, but we’ll find out.”
We sat on the porch steps waiting for Tim Schaefer. Tannie had lost her appetite and neither of us was in the mood to talk. “But I got dibs on the braunschweiger once we get around to the sandwiches,” she said.
At 1:10 Schaefer drove up in his 1982 Toyota and pulled into Tannie’s drive with his metal-detecting pal. The two got out, car doors slamming in unison, and crossed to the porch. Schaefer carried a shovel and a long steel implement, like a walking stick with a point on one end. He introduced his friend, whose name was Ken Rice, adding a two-line bio so we’d know whom we were dealing with. Like Schaefer, he was a man in his early eighties, retired after thirty-eight years with the Santa Maria Police Department, working first as a motorcycle officer, then foot patrol, Narcotics, and later as the department’s first K-9 officer. For the past twenty years, his passion had been the location and recovery of buried relics, caches of coins, and other forms of treasure. We shook hands all around and then Rice turned on his de tector, which looked like the two halves of a toolbox, connected by a metal rod. “Let’s see what we got.”
The four of us trooped across the property to the side yard, me tagging behind Rice like a little kid. “How does that work?”
“System has a directional transmitter and directional receiver built into these interlocking cases. Powered up, it emits an electromagnetic field that penetrates the soil. This is the same equipment used by public-utility employees looking for pipes underground. When the search pattern encounters metal, the signal is interrupted and that generates an audio response.”
“How far down?”
“The Fisher’s capable of revealing a target as far down as twenty feet. Depending on soil mineralization and ground conditions, it’s possible to detect an object even deeper.”
When we reached the spot, the three of us watched as Rice swept the detector across the ground. He’d put on a headset, and I gathered the device made a continuous sound that grew louder when he made a find. On his first pass, I saw the needle on the gauge leap hard to the right and stay there as though glued. He pressed a hand to his ear, frowning to himself as he continued sweeping across the area. Having finished, he said, “You’ve got something the size of a boxcar down there.”
I laughed. “We do?”
“Schaefer tells me you’re looking for a car, but this might be something else.”
“Such as what?”
“A dumpster, underground storage tank, a chunk of sheet metal roof.”
“So now what?” I asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
He and Schaefer conferred and then Schaefer returned to his car, where he opened the trunk. He came back bearing a ball of twine and a plastic bag full of the golf tees he used in recaning chairs. While Rice made a series of passes with his box, Schaefer followed in his wake and stuck golf tees in the ground, roughly conforming to the signal Rice was picking up. Tannie and I each took a turn listening, passing the headset from one to the other. If Rice moved the device too far left or right, the tone diminished. Schaefer ran a line of twine from tee to tee. When they finished mapping, the string was laid out in a rectangle eighteen feet long by approximately eight feet wide. I could feel the skin pucker on my arms at the notion of an underground object of that size. It must be equivalent to sailing on the ocean and realizing a whale was on the verge of surfacing under your boat. The very proximity seemed ominous. Unseen and unidentified, it radiated an energy that had me edging away.
Schaefer picked up the metal bar he was using as a probe. He chose a spot and pushed down, leaning his weight into the rod. It sank eight inches, but not easily. The soil in this part of the state has a high clay content, larded with numerous rocks and sizeable sandstone boulders. This makes digging tedious under the best of circumstances. Strike a boulder with a shovel blade and the impact will reverberate all the way up your arms.
Rice added his weight to the job. The probe sank another foot and a half and stopped. He said, “What do you think?”
“Let’s see if it’s rock or we’re hitting something else.”
Schaefer took his shovel and set to work, cutting into the hard-packed topsoil. I’d thought the ground would yield, but it proved to be slow going. Twenty minutes of steady effort produced a trench eighteen inches wide and about three feet long. Frail roots were exposed and hung from the perpendicular sides of the cut like a living fringe. The dirt pile beside the hole mounted.
At a depth of twenty-six inches, he made contact with an object, or a portion of an object. The four of us paused to stare.
“I’ve got a trowel if you want to dig by hand,” Tannie said.
“Might be smart,” Rice replied.
When she returned, she said, “May I?”
Schaefer said, “Have at it. It’s your land.”