A Brilliant Death (27 page)

At the back of the row, tucked in behind a grove of elms and maples, was the location of the home purchased by Frank and Amanda Baron in the spring of 1950 for thirty-one hundred dollars. It was from this home that Amanda Baron mysteriously disappeared in October of 1953. Less than nine months later, on July 16, 1954, while Frank was allegedly having dinner in Steubenville with a woman he met, married, and divorced all inside of four months, the house mysteriously went up in flames. There was little evidence as to the cause of the blaze, though everyone with a minimum of cognitive power suspected Big Frank had it torched. He collected the insurance money—nearly eight thousand dollars—and bought the house across the street from the bakery.

On a sunny day in the early spring of 1971, Travis showed up at my back door and waved me out to the back porch. “Put on some old shoes; I need you to help me do something,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing major. Come on.”

I did as he requested, though I was wary of Travis’s interpretation of “nothing major.” Although sunny, it was early April and the temperature was just a few degrees above freezing, the ground still soggy from the thaw. We walked toward the north end of town and turned up Shaft Row. “What’s this all about?” I asked, though I instinctively knew.

“I just want you to see something,” he said.

“You’re just not going to let it go, are you?”

I followed him up the gravel road to where his first home had been. The trees had grown up in a bowl around the old property, which was now covered with a thick bed of desiccated weeds and thistles and thorny locust trees. The village had filled the old root cellar years earlier, using it as a dump for debris from street cleanings. A clear path, new, had been beaten down to where the house had stood, and parts of the concrete foundation were exposed. It wasn’t, I knew, his first visit to the old homestead.

“So, what have you been up to?” I asked.

He turned sideways to slip through a thicket of thistle. He knelt and pulled at the corner of a piece of canvas, revealing a shovel and a garden hoe. “I want you to help me find that cistern.”

“I knew it. For the love of God, Travis! Why?”

“Because . . . I just want to find it, that’s all.”

“No, you don’t. You want to find it so you can see what’s in it. I could just kick myself in the ass for ever bringing that up. You can’t possibly believe your mother’s body is in there. She was seen jumping in the river, remember?”

“I know, I know. But something’s just not right.”

“I agree. It’s your brain that isn’t right.”

Travis had met with his grandparents in Wheeling at Christmastime. He spent three days with them, and he couldn’t have been happier. For weeks, all he talked about was graduating and moving to North Carolina. But the cistern had obviously been on his mind since the moment I mentioned it in the diner near Beckley.

“The cistern in your side yard is thirteen paces from your house—I stepped it off,” Travis said. “I figure this one wouldn’t have been in the front yard, and the backyard is uphill. The other side of the house is too close to the trees, so it has to be out here somewhere,” he said, pointing toward a gentle, weed-covered slope that ran down to where Thorneapple Creek circled behind the old company headquarters.

“It could be covered with a lot of dirt,” I offered.

“There were parts of the foundation still exposed. We ought to be able to find it.”

I stopped at ten paces and began working the ground with the hoe. Travis continued another five paces and scraped the ground with his spade. The thistles were snagging my clothes and jabbing me with every step; the mud worked up over the edge of my new Chuck Taylor All-Stars, which was going to make my mom furious. “That’s why I buy you boots,” she would say. We worked in an oval, moving inward one step with each lap. We had made three laps when Travis struck cement; it was the cap on the cistern. It was covered by a four-inch layer of coal chips, gravel, and dirt. “It looks like it was covered up intentionally,” he said.

“Oh, please,” I said, rolling my eyes. “The hillside has simply moved down and covered it. Everything isn’t a conspiracy, you know.”

“That’s what they want you to think,” he said, taking the hoe and scraping the dirt from all around the concrete cap. It was circular and eight inches high. I smiled and pointed to the rim on the far side. In rough print was: “Alex Harmon” and “Jimmy Kidwe.”

“Big Frank must have switched Jimmy’s ass before he could finish his name,” I said.

Travis said nothing. He took his hoe and began moving the earth from around the disk. After a few minutes the entire cement cap was exposed. Travis took the spade and wedged it between the stone base and the cement cap, using the shovel as a lever. It budged, but the wooden spade handle was cracking under the pressure. “It must weigh a ton,” he said.

“Once we get this off, then what?”

He looked at me. “We’ve got to go down and see what’s in there.”

Chills raced up my spine. He didn’t mean “we.” I knew what he was thinking. “You want me to go down there?” I said. “Down there—God only knows how far—and see if your mom’s body is buried in the bottom of this cistern? That’s your plan?”

Travis nodded. “Look, Mitch, I know you don’t want to do it, but if my mom is buried down there, I don’t want to be the one who finds her.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Good. Besides, you owe me.”

“I owe
you
! How do you figure?”

“You stayed in the bathroom that night while Big Frank kicked my ass.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Nothing is fair; nothing is free,” he said, staring at the cap. “How deep do you figure it is?”

“Too damn deep for a ladder.”

“I’ll figure it out,” he grinned. “Come by about ten.”

Travis was sitting on the front porch steps waiting for me. He motioned me around the side of the house where he had a six-foot length of heavy pipe, a pair of two-by-eight planks, a car battery, and the winch and a length of a cable that were remnants of Big Frank’s unsuccessful attempt to open a tow truck business. A flashlight was stuck in his hip pocket. I looked at the pile of materials and asked, “Can I assume that you’ve developed a plan?”

“You can.”

“Can I also assume that I won’t like it?”

“Oh, most assuredly. In fact, you’re going to hate it.”

We placed the pipe, winch, and battery on the planks and carried them like a stretcher. From the alley behind Travis’s house we cut across the back of the lumberyard to Thorneapple Creek and walked along its soggy bank a quarter mile up the hill to the rear of Shaft Row and the foundation of the old Baron home. By the time we were able to drop the load, my arms and shoulders ached from slogging along the creek bank. Causing me more angst, however, was the fact that I believed I had figured out Travis’s plan for placing me inside the cistern. And he was right. I didn’t like it. Not even a little bit.

Travis used the steel pipe to wedge the three-foot cement disk off the cistern opening. Once the cement cap was clear of the rock base, we were able to rotate it to its edge and balance it in the weeds. We then placed the two-by-eight planks over the opening with a two-inch gap between them. The winch was placed on the middle of the planks with the cable running between them. At the end of the cable was a loop, a foot in diameter, held together with cable crimps. Travis hooked the winch to the battery with wiring that he had carried over his shoulder, then tested the winch, both up and down.

Unfortunately for me, it worked like a charm.

“We’re ready,” he said, handing me the flashlight. “The batteries are fresh; I just put ’em in.”

I took the flashlight and shined it down the hole. The beam was faint. “I thought you said these batteries were fresh.”

“Fresh to that flashlight. They’ve been in the kitchen drawer for a while.”

I guessed that it was sixteen feet to the bottom of the cistern. I shined the light to the cistern floor. The beam was faint, but bright enough to see the cistern floor. There was no body, just the dark and dank earth. “I suppose you want me to dig around down there.”

“Yeah.” He took a deep breath and peered into the cistern. “Look, if I were you, I wouldn’t want to do this, either. But I have to know if there’s anything down there. There’s probably not, but I have to know for sure or it will always bug me. Once I know, I’ll be okay. We can put Project Amanda to rest and I swear that I’ll peacefully go on with the rest of my life. But I can’t have this gnawing at my gut forever, and I can’t go down there and poke around where my mother might be buried. I just don’t have the guts to do it. So I really need your help on this one. Do this for me, and I promise I won’t ask for any more favors.”

I looked him in the eyes and said, “Liar.”

He laughed. “But this will be the last
big
favor I ask.”

“Qualify ‘big,’” I said, putting my right foot in the cable loop. He lowered the cable until I could stand free of the edge of the hole. He tucked the shovel under my arm, then he slowly lowered me into the abyss. The winch whined as my head disappeared beneath the rim of the opening, I was overtaken by fear unrelated to the possibility of unearthing the skeletal remains of Amanda Baron. “Travis, that battery isn’t going to die when I’m at the bottom of the hole, is it?” I asked, my words echoing off the walls of the cistern.

“I’m hoping it doesn’t die when you’re halfway down.”

“Goddammit, Travis, that’s not funny.”

“It’s funny if you’re not the one being lowered into the hole.”

“Travis, if I . . .”

“It’s fine. Quit fussin’, grandma. And if something happens, I’ll run home and take the battery out of the Fifty-Seven.”

“Yeah, great. As I recall the last time you tried to take something out of Big Frank’s garage it wasn’t exactly a sterling success.”

“Try to remember who’s controlling the winch, would you, smart ass?”

The drop was slow, just a few feet a minute. Once I got comfortable with the trip down, I held the shovel below my feet so I could feel for the bottom. When the shovel hit, I reached down with my left foot for the earthy floor.

It was darker than anyplace I had ever been. I could see nothing. I was certain that as soon as I moved some dirt a boney hand was going to reach up and pull me into the grave, or I would turn on the light and shine it into the decaying face of a miraculously back-from-the-dead Amanda Baron. She would arise from her grave to avenge her death and mistakenly confuse me for Big Frank, and of course the battery would go dead and leave me stranded in a hole with the walking corpse as hunks of flesh fell from her body. I realized these were all unreasonable fears, but I was the king of unreasonable fears. And, at that moment, I was trapped in a black, sixteen-foot pit with my vivid imagination.

The cistern had a diameter of about four feet, which didn’t leave much room to maneuver. I turned on the flashlight and wedged it between two stones on the wall. I pressed my back against one wall, pinning the dangling cable behind me, and shoved the spade into the ground across from me. The dirt was soft and the spade easily sunk to its top edge. I pulled back on the handle until it hit the stone wall, then flicked the dirt to one side. I decided to scrape dirt away on one half of the cistern floor, then the other half. After taking a few scoops, I began using the spade like a hoe, raking the soft dirt away from the other side of the cistern.

“How’s it going?” Travis asked, his voice echoing through the hole.

“Helen Keller digs a ditch,” I said.

The dirt was building up around my feet, and I had hit nothing but the soft dirt bottom. I had skimmed a foot of dirt from the cistern floor when the shovel scraped against something hard. I froze for a moment, then gently used the shovel to remove more dirt from the area.

“What was that?” Travis asked.

“I don’t know.”

I pulled the flashlight out of the wall and slowly dropped the beam toward the floor, following the light down with my eyes. When the hazy yellow beam reached the floor, I took a breath and lowered my eyes, certain that a skull would be staring back at me. Across the floor was a grayish material, lumpy and solid. I kneeled and brushed the dirt from the concrete base of the cistern. I had hit nothing but the end of the line. Confident that a body could not be hidden beneath the dirt and the concrete bottom, I moved to the other side of the cistern and sank the spade into the undisturbed dirt. It took but a few tries to confirm that nothing but dirt and concrete lay at the bottom of the cistern. I was overcome by my own bravery and relief.

I put my foot in the loop and told Travis, “Bring ’er up.” I was at the surface and resting ten minutes later.

“Anything?” Travis asked.

“Nothing,” I responded.

“What was that scraping noise I heard?”

“Nothing. Just my shovel scraping the bottom of the cistern.”

“Rocks?”

“Concrete.”

“Concrete?”

“Yeah, the concrete floor.”

Travis didn’t have to say it, for I already realized my folly, but he did anyway. “Why would there be a concrete floor in a hundred-year-old cistern?” He pointed to the outcropping of limestone that extended over Thorneapple Creek. “Wouldn’t you just dig down to the limestone and use that as your foundation?”