lost boy lost girl (26 page)

“Do you know how you can always tell if you’ve found a place where someone stashed a corpse?”

I looked at him.

“Push in a shovel. A stick does just as well. All you need is an opening. The smell builds up underground, waiting to jump out at you.”

“Swell,” I said. “I still say he couldn’t have buried anything back here. We’d be able to see his tracks.”

Pohlhaus began ambling along toward the back of the yard and the big fence. He was moving slowly and keeping his eyes on the ground. I shuffled here and there, positive I would find nothing. After a little while, I realized that Pohlhaus was moving in a straight line for about six feet, then turning on his heel and reversing himself along the path he had just taken. In effect, he was creating a grid, which then could be linked to other grids until every inch of the weedy ground had been inspected.

“You can leave, if you want to. In another couple of minutes, we’re going to be drowning in cops here.”

I said if he wasn’t going to give up, neither was I.

The forensic team showed up, and after introducing me, Pohlhaus went inside to show them the basement and the bloodstains. The patrolmen rolled up and were organized to put up crime-scene tape and keep civilians away.

“At this point, you’d better stand down, Mr. Underhill,” he told me.

Two uniformed men I remembered seeing in Sherman Park divided the front half of the yard between them. They were wasting their time, I knew. I wanted to see Pohlhaus admit he’d been wrong.

A criminalist named Gary Sung, who had been introduced to me as a trainee from Singapore, popped out of the back door, waved Pohlhaus toward him, and engaged in a brief conversation that required his pointing several times toward the wall. I had no idea what they were talking about, so I ignored it. I was leaning against the side of the house, just at the edge of the overgrown yard.

The two officers I had seen in the park, Rote and Selwidge, looked at something and called for Pohlhaus. He walked up to them and stared down at whatever they had discovered. He waved me toward them. When I got there, I saw what the height of the grasses had until then kept from view. Someone, having decided to clear a long strip of ground about three feet wide and running the length of the property from fence to fence, had overturned the earth in that strip a thousand times, breaking up the surface, softening the ground, and leaving a nice fat stripe of brown earth, through which only a few weeds had begun to protrude. It had been cultivated, that little strip of land.

“I wonder,” I said. “If that’s it, how did he . . . ?”

“If I’m right about what Gary Sung told me, any minute now we’re going to see him pop up out of the ground right over . . .
there
.”

He had just spotted exactly what he had been hoping to see.

“Out of the ground?” I asked. Then I understood: I knew what he had known for the previous twenty minutes or so.

There came a groaning noise, and the sound of earth and pebbles clattering into a hole. Exactly at the few square feet of ground where the sergeant was pointing, a panel of weeds and grass swung up into the air and fell away, revealing the sweaty, smiling face of Gary Sung.

“It’s
dahk
in there!” Sung crowed.

I moved toward his head, which by stages rose out of the ground as he climbed up the steps built into the earth.

“Do you believe this madman?” Sung sprang out of the hole, waving an entrenching tool. “He dug a tunnel and hid it behind a daw you can’t see!”

Mark had not noticed the door in the basement wall; Sergeant Pohlhaus and I had failed to see it; only Gary Sung had seen it, and he was transported with pleasure. “So now we know,” he said. “Gotta be careful.”

“Very careful,” Pohlhaus agreed. He looked at me. “Our Dangerous Materials Squad handles this kind of thing. I’ll get them out here. We’ll probably want to pull down that miserable wall, give us some room to maneuver.”

He went up to the strip of ground that looked like temporarily neglected farmland. “Gary, give me that tool, please.”

Gary Sung went across eight feet of ground and passed it to him, handle first.

“Come over here,” Pohlhaus said to me.

I moved up beside him. He hunkered down next to the wide brown stripe on the ground, slid the entrenching tool into the soft earth, and scooped away some dirt, then a little more. “Ah,” he said. I bent over and caught the stench drifting out of the little opening Pohlhaus had made; death and rot and ammonia, a smell of primal process. In a second, it seemed to coat my skin.

I’ve been writing for more than an hour, and I can’t go on. Anyhow, some kind of earthmoving machine is coming up the alley, making a noise like a motorcycle gang.

Tim put down his pen and thought about what he was going to do next. Dressed in his Principal Battley costume of gray suit, white shirt, and necktie, Philip had announced that he had no interest in “standing around” in his backyard and “gawking at” the police while they leveled the cement wall and excavated for bodies. While Tim had occupied himself with his journal, Philip had wandered around the house, snapping the television on and off, picking up magazines and putting them down again. Around three
P.M
., Philip clumped up the steps; he reappeared downstairs ten minutes later minus the necktie.

“I hope you’re not going to stand out there and watch,” he said. Without his necktie, he looked oddly naked, like a man seen for the first time without his glasses.

“They’re just going to knock down a wall,” Tim said.

“I mean after that.” He was obviously in anguish, and just as obviously had no idea of how to cope with it. “Anybody can knock down a wall. I could knock down a wall. Even you could knock down a wall. It’s the part that comes after. You might want to spectate, but not me. I’m serious.”

“Spectate?” Tim said.

“Frivolity is par for the course with you, isn’t it?” He charged into his den.

“I never heard the word before,” Tim said to himself. “Spectate. Philip chooses not to spectate.”

The living room seemed to retain some of the tension of Philip’s little speech and annoyed departure. Tim felt like moving around, going somewhere, yet he did not want to leave Philip alone, if only because it would be counted against him later. Then he remembered that Mark’s computer—the very computer from which he had e-mailed his Uncle Tim—was still upstairs, waiting to be used. With the help of good old Gotomypc.com and Mark’s laptop, he could spectate his e-mail, see if anyone interesting had written to him, and clean out the spam before it became overwhelming. It would be a way to fill the time: spam as distraction.

“Philip,” he said to the obdurate door, “I’m going upstairs to look at my e-mail on Mark’s computer. Do you mind?”

Philip said he could do whatever he liked.

Upstairs, Tim sat in Mark’s desk chair and clicked open the lid of the laptop. He felt slightly guilty, as if he were trespassing on his nephew’s privacy. Instantly, the computer screen sprang to life. Icons in neat rows arranged themselves across a charcoal-green field. Tim clicked an icon and waded through the inevitable commands and delays before he managed to get connected.

On a dial-up modem, his program moved with excruciating sluggishness, and the server was having a grouchy, error-ridden day. After three tries, Tim finally succeeded in linking up with his computer at home. Using Mark’s mouse, he moved his cursor to the Outlook Express icon on his screen and clicked once. It was like watching the Mississippi River drift around a wide bend: everything swam along in a brown, sleepy current. The boldface of the new e-mails came to life on his screen. Five and six appeared, then a rapid, ascending column that even at one remove hit the screen with the rapidity of microwave popcorn exploding in a bag. The number at the bottom of Tim’s screen rose from 24 to 30 to 45 to 67. There it stayed, all the popcorn having popped.

He read wearily down the From list, bypassing
Depraved
and
PC Doctor
and
vVirtual Deals
and the first names of women he did not know because they did not exist, and was then all but levitated out of the chair by the familiar but entirely unexpected name
munderhill. munderhill
had e-mailed his old adviser and confidante tunderhill a message bearing the subject line
4 u 2 c
. There was no date.

Tim selected this heading with a click and cursed the draggy modem, the draggy server, and the sluggish program.

At length, the message appeared in the wide lower-left-hand box.

From: munderhill

To: [email protected]

Sent:

Subject: 4 u 2 c

deer :) my unk

old writer

try this link

lostboylostgirl.com

it is

4 u 1nce 2 c

so u know

u have & hold our luv

m & lc

Did he hesitate, did he think about it? He rammed the cursor over the blue underlined text and double-clicked, double-clicked, double-clicked.

Another brown, blurry Mississippi episode overtook both monitors, his on Grand Street and Mark’s in Millhaven, and while it lasted, Tim Underhill, otherwise known as
tunderhill,
leaned forward far enough to breathe on the screen were he breathing. Onto his screen, then Mark’s, appeared the ordinary Explorer window bearing the link’s URL.

Across the top of the larger interior window scrolled the words
BROUGHT TO YOU BY lostboylostgirl.com.
Beneath that was:
1-Time Only Showing!
The Windows Media Player’s rectangle opened beneath the caution, if that was what it was and, without the conventional delay for buffering, filled immediatelty with light and color. So Tim was to see a film clip. The line on the bottom of the rectangle told him that the clip ran for one minute and twenty-two seconds, one of which had already slipped into oblivion. A golden beach ornamented with arching palm trees, a long blue ocean, occupied the little window. A movie, a webcam? A webcam, Tim thought, broadcasting to an audience of one from a world where there were no webcameras. Faintly, he heard the sound of gentle surf and wind rustling the palm fronds. His heart tightened.

The bright sky darkened above the water. First a blond head, then a dark, entered the screen from the bottom left-hand corner. “Lucy,”
lc,
and Mark, moving hand in hand into the frame, leav-ing the prints of their bare feet on the sand beneath them as they went. There was the faintest suggestion of haste. A rattle of palm came from the speakers. From the left, heavy dark clouds swam in above the sea; a branching reddish light irradiated the open sky. Hasten hasten the globe revolves. Wind rustled and stirred their scant garments, little better than rags, though beautiful rags. Moving quickly but without running, they briefly occupied the dead center of the Windows Media rectangle, then moved rightward toward the margin. Boiling darkness occupied the distant reaches of the sky, and a harsh illuminated red forked above, distant but traveling forward. The timer showed one minute and two seconds to go.

They paused, the lovers, mid-beach and looked toward the turmoil over the darkening water, which rolled toward them. Oh stay; oh hurry.

b safe my deers
:)

Their beautiful poised slim legs lifted into a sprint; their rags flew.

Tim could not see the faces turned from him, but he knew them. They were unforgettable. Through the Starbucks window, indelible, that staggering goddess-visage: he did not have to see it again to remember it.

Now the whole sky grew dark, ripped through with dark, dark red. Thirty-two seconds remained. It seemed an eternity. These luxurious thirty-two, now thirty-one seconds, would last him the rest of his life. But the timer sped up, cruelly, and the lost boy and lost girl sprinted toward the margin of the little frame. Tim Underhill sent himself
toward
them, as if he could, poor bereft old man, to absorb every particle, mote, and cell of their departing seconds, which numbered fourteen, thirteen, ten, six. Mark’s head turned, and his upper body twisted not even a quarter turn, sufficient for his smile to shine forth and his eyes to meet
tunderhill
’swith the force of a soft, underground explosion—four seconds, rain sluiced over their heads, two, they flew into the not-to-be-seen, none, they were gone utterly.

It was to gasp, it was to tremble.

The Media Player rectangle with its buttons and keys vanished into the gray beneath Mark’s charcoal-green. Tim clicked the little x on the top right-hand corner of both screens. The linked website should have zipped away and revealed his e-mail window. Instead, it collapsed into itself to leave no more than an impression of broken glass shattering inward. His screen flashed the flat deadly blue of hard-disk crashes and visits from or to the local computer wizard; it hung there for perhaps another second, then faded away to nothing, to disengaged gray, as if a fuse had blown.

For a while, Tim kept hitting the return key and double-clicking on everything in sight. Then he noticed that the green strip of Gotomypc.com still ran across the top and bottom of Mark’s screen. Trying to control his panic, he managed to back out of the program and get Mark’s computer off-line.

Through the bedroom’s closed window came the sounds of metal scraping on stone and the whining of gears. He groaned, clutched his head, bent over the keyboard, groaned again. His need for drama satisfied, Tim unfurled from the chair and went to the window. Just beyond the flattened wooden fence, a yellow earth-moving machine nearly the width of the alley was pushing its enormous blade into what remained of Joseph Kalendar’s rear wall. The concrete blocks at the edge of the blade shattered into chunks of powder, and the rows above them swooned outward, bulging before they separated, and crashed down into the blade and the alley. Through the dust, a portion of the wide brown strip of exposed earth became visible.

Tim fished his cell phone from his jacket pocket and dialed a number at 55 Grand Street. Since all there were close friends of his, and everybody spent hours in one another’s lofts, it almost didn’t matter who answered. As it happened, he had dialed Vinh’s number, and Maggie Lah answered. He told her to go upstairs and look at his computer, then call him back on his desk telephone. When Maggie called back, it was to say that his computer appeared to be deceased. Expired. Not a single vital sign. He asked Maggie to call Myron, the wizard next door, and tell him he was having an emergency caused by Gotomypc.com, which Myron had installed on his computer.