Whom Dog Hath Joined (3 page)

He stood up and made a call on his cell phone, then walked
back over to us. “I have to get some stuff from my car, and then I’m going
inside. Hang around until I get a chance to see what’s going on. I want to talk
to you. In the meantime keep the death dog away from the evidence, all right?”

He walked back toward Main Street, and I knelt down next to
Rochester. “You’re not a death dog, are you, boy?”

Rochester woofed and nodded his big shaggy head. Then he
licked my face.

One of the volunteers milling around the Meeting House was
my childhood piano teacher, Edith Passis. She had been a friend of my parents,
and I remembered her as a younger woman at parties at our house, her black hair
teased into a beehive, wearing glasses that feathered up at the edges and
thigh-high black leather boots. She had true Black Irish looks—coal-black hair,
pale white skin and bright blue eyes.

Now her hair had gone stark white, and a medication she took
tinted her skin a salmon-pink. Though I’d never say it to her face, I thought
she looked like a gerbil, as if she ate chopped lettuce at every meal and lived
in a pile of shredded newspaper. Her blue eyes were still clear, and she was as
sweet-natured and patient as she’d been when I was struggling to learn the
fingering for “The Caisson Song.”

“Hello, Steve,” she said, coming up to me. “What’s all the
fuss?” She bent down to stroke Rochester’s head.

“Rochester found a sneaker down there, where the clapboard
has eroded away from the foundation. Looks like it might be attached to a
body.”

She looked back up quickly. “A body? How terrible. Someone
local? Or a visitor?”

“Don’t know yet.”

She put her hand up to her mouth and her eyes crinkled in
sadness. You couldn’t get to Edith’s age, somewhere in her seventies, without
experiencing pain: the general (war, famine, natural disasters) to the personal
(death of her beloved husband, betrayal of her piano-trained hands to
arthritis.)

I noticed she was wearing the same round button and to
distract her, I asked, “Do you belong to the Meeting?” I’d always thought Edith
was Jewish, because I saw her sometimes at our synagogue in Trenton.

“I was born a Quaker,” she said. “When Lou was alive I went
to synagogue with him sometimes, but I always felt like a Friend in my heart.
After he passed I found a lot of comfort in coming here.” She shook her head.
“But there was a lot of discord over this construction project. Very
un-Quaker.”

“Why the discord?” Rochester kept straining to go back to
the sneaker he’d found and I had to keep a close rein on his leash.

A light breeze swept through the property, scattering some
of the dead leaves at the bases of the trees. “A lot of people don’t like
change,” she said. “When you get to my age… it seemed like such a big project,
so much money, so much disruption.”

“What kind of work is being done? Expansion?”

“More like reconfiguring. Our membership has been shrinking,
and we don’t need such a large meeting room anymore. We offer space to a lot of
non-profit groups, and Hannah Palmer felt we needed to remodel and create more
intimate spaces, both for our worship and for these other groups.”

“Other members disagreed with her?”

“Politely, of course,” Edith said. “But Hannah is a very
strong woman, and deeply spiritual, as well. I knew her family when she was
growing up. She was always such a serious child.” She shook her head. “We’re a
dying breed, we Friends. We’ve never been ones to proselytize, and so many of
our young people are seduced away from silence and contemplation by the noise
of the world. Hannah has revitalized our Meeting, even if I don’t always agree
with her policies.”

Edith waved at a tall, cadaverous-looking man with stringy
white hair down to his shoulders. “That’s Eben Hosford,” she said to me. “He’s
been the most vocal opponent to the Meeting House renovation. I’m surprised to
see him here.”

“Looks like an old hippie,” I said. He wore faded jeans torn
at the knees and a plaid long-sleeved shirt that was too big for his skeletal
frame. Around his neck was some kind of Native American dream catcher, all
feathers and leather strips.

Edith left me to walk over to him. Rick returned with a
utility belt wrapped around his waist and toting a flashlight, more of the bright
blue plastic gloves, and one of those life-saver tools you can use to cut a
seat belt or smash out a windshield.

He nodded as he walked past. I noticed that Lili had moved
away from the Meeting House, and was taking candid shots of the Harvest
Festival. I leaned against the trunk of a red maple, Rochester sprawled at my
feet, and watched the passing traffic -- a couple of high school band members
on break, a plump Indian woman in a red and gold sari, a smattering of suburban
parents and kids, and a tall black woman with a regal posture and massive gold
hoop earrings. An interesting mix of the Stewart’s Crossing I remembered and
the new world order.

I looked back at the dark blue high-top sneaker, visible in
the gap between clapboard and foundation. It was a Converse Chuck Taylor; I owned
several pairs like it when I was a kid. The white sole was smudged with dirt,
as was the canvas, but I could see the round logo with
Converse All-Stars
in red wrapped around a blue star.

It was adult size, probably belonging to a teenage boy or a
young man. It was covered with a sheen of dust, so looked like it had been
there behind the wall for a long time. How could that be? Had the Friends never
noticed the smell of a dead body? Was it in some long-ignored closet?

Who had worn it? A Stewart’s Crossing kid like me? But how
had his body ended up behind a wall in the Friends’ Meeting House? And when? I
felt the tingling of curiosity and I was excited, but worried too. I knew the
kind of trouble my curiosity had gotten me into in the past.

3 – False Wall

Lili returned, her camera back around her neck, and
Rochester hopped up. “I stopped by Gail’s table. Her mother is there, and she’s
doing fine. Rick show up yet?”

“He’s inside,” I said, as he emerged from the double doors.
The crowd was still clustered around the corner of the building where Rochester
had discovered the sneaker, so when Rick waved, Lili, the dog and I walked over
to him.

“Afternoon, Lili,” he said. “Can you hold onto Rochester for
a couple of minutes? I need Joe Hardy here to walk inside with me.”

I’d helped Rick out a couple of times with cases by then,
and I’d graduated in his estimation from Nancy Drew – who worked on her own—to
Joe Hardy, the younger of the two Hardy Boys. I had grudgingly accepted that
since he had the badge he got to be older brother, Frank.

“What do you need?” I asked.

“There’s a false wall at the back of a closet, right on the
corner of the building where the shoe is. I don’t want to knock through the
wall until I know what’s back there, so I want to climb up through an access
panel in the ceiling and see if I can look down. There’s a ladder I can use,
but I need somebody to hold it. I’d pull a uniform, but you know we’re a small
department, and we’re already stretched thin between crowd control here and
traffic duty out on Main Street.”

“Sure.” I handed Rochester’s leash to Lili, but as I started
to walk away he pulled to go along with me. “You stay here, boy,” I said. He
barked a couple of times then sat on his butt with a disappointed look on his
face. He wasn’t happy to be left out.

On our way in, Rick was buttonholed by Hannah Palmer. A few
strands of blonde hair had come loose, and she looked harried. “You aren’t
going to make us shut down the Harvest Festival, are you?” she asked. “Because
that would be a nightmare.”

“No ma’am,” Rick said. “If there was a crime committed here
it was a long time ago, and as long as we can keep people away from the
building we should be fine.”

“But they can still get into the kitchen, right? We make
money from the food.”

“Yes, they can.” He put his hand on her arm. “We’ll do our
best not to disrupt things.”

She thanked him and walked away. “You were awfully nice to
her,” I said, as Rick led the way into the Meeting House.

“The mayor’s a Quaker, if you’ve forgotten. Plus I feel
sorry for her. This Festival is a big deal, and it’s not her fault your dog dug
up an old corpse.”

I snorted but followed him inside. The main room was as I
remembered it, with a central aisle and rows of ancient wooden pews parallel to
each of the four walls. Severe, in a colonial America kind of way, plain and
spare. Since their worship involved silent waiting for God with no ritual,
there was no need for an altar, as you’d find in a synagogue or a church. Older
members could sit on raised benches along the far wall, allowing them to be
seen and heard.

I didn’t think I’d make a very good Quaker. I didn’t have
the patience for stillness, too much going on in my brain. Rochester and I were
alike that way, always curious about the world and eager to snoop around.

At the center of the space was a short table where someone –
the clerk, for example – could stand to address the Meeting. Rick led me
between the pews to a single door set into the back wall. Before he stepped
through, he handed me a pair of the blue gloves. “I’d tell you not to touch
anything, but I know you.”

I didn’t bother to complain. Rick was right; I was a nosy
guy, a lot like my dog.

I put the gloves on and followed him, feeling like we were a
couple of weird
Star Trek
aliens with bright blue hands. We stepped
gingerly into a warren of small offices and storage rooms. Red and black wires
looped down from the ceiling beside the bent frames of aluminum studs and holes
knocked through drywall. The smell of sawdust hung in the air.

A locked metal tool cabinet, dinged and banged from hard
use, stood to one side, beside a pile of buckets and hoses. Rick turned right
and stopped in front of the open door to a storage closet. “This is as close as
we can get to where the body is.” He held up his hand and we listened. We could
hear the buzz of the crowd outside, under the blare of the jazz band.

 “It’s tight in there. I managed to get the ladder set up
but it’s pretty rickety.”

He turned on his flashlight and stepped inside, and I
followed. He stuck the flashlight between his shoulder and his neck, gripped
the ladder, and started to climb.

I stood behind him, holding the ladder steady. He pushed up
on the access panel, but it didn’t move. “Is it screwed shut?” I asked.

“No, just stuck.” He pulled a screwdriver from his belt and
inserted it between the edge of the panel and the ceiling, and applied
pressure. “Come on, you mother,” he grunted.

Suddenly the panel gave way, and Rick nearly toppled
backwards. I had to head-butt his ass to keep him up there. I grabbed his flashlight
before it hit the floor.

He uttered a few curse words that would have gotten us a
long detention back at Pennsbury High, and then managed to get the panel
flipped up on its hinge. He stepped up higher on the ladder, which creaked
ominously, and poked his head over the edge. “Light,” he said, and I handed the
flashlight up to him.

He looked down. “Tight fit in here,” he said. “But I can see
a skull, and a jumble of bones and fragments of what look like dusty old clothes.
There’s an old ladder in there, too, I guess for climbing down the other side. Whoever
it is must have died in there, because I don’t see any other way in besides
this panel. Crime scene will tell me if any animals have gotten in somehow.”

He climbed back down the ladder, and I backed out of the
storage closet. His head had a sifting of dust on it that made his hair look
almost gray. He shook it out and wiped the back of his hand across his face.

The solemnity of what he’d found must have hit us both,
because neither of us said anything. I was reminded of the veterans outside,
how much death they must have seen in their service. Cold, damp primeval
European forests, vast arid deserts, cluttered warrens of blasted-out houses –
death was the same wherever you encountered it, whether a battlefield or a
place of worship.

Rick led the way down the hall to the brown metal tool
cabinet we had passed on our way in. It was, about six feet long and two feet
high, and the top was closed with a cheap keyed padlock. He pulled a
leatherette pack from  a pouch on his belt which opened to reveal a set of
metal lock picks.

“My dad had a set like that once,” I said. “I wonder what
ever happened to it.”

“Your dad was a burglar?”

“Nah, he just bought every random kind of tool he could find
at the flea market.”

Rick chose one of the picks and inserted it into the bottom
of the padlock. As he grunted and twisted I asked, “Any particular reason why
we’re breaking in there?”

“Because there’s probably a drywall saw inside.” The lock
clicked and popped open, and Rick lifted the lid. “Yup, here’s what I need.” He
grabbed a wicked-looking gizmo with a rubber handle and a long serrated blade
that ended in a sharp point.

“Watch and learn, brother Joe,” Rick said.

I followed him back to the storage closet, and we worked
together to drag all the boxes and accumulated junk into the hallway. When the
wall that separated the closet from the hidden space was clear, Rick knelt on
the floor and jabbed the drywall saw into it. He cut across a horizontal line,
then stopped to take a break.

“Why didn’t you cut your way in at first?” I asked. “Why go
to the trouble of climbing up above to look down?”

He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his
hand and sat back. “I wanted to see what was there before I cut in,” he said.
“Could have been a whole pile of bones in there, and cutting through without
looking could have damaged the scene.”

“I get it. Want me to give it a try?” I asked.