10
Mandy hadn’t necessarily dreamed of this moment.
Most likely her father had, and so, by association, it had flickered through the back of her mind, the ghost of a whisper of a promise.
Still, when Raquel Collins contacted her shortly after dinner, she didn’t go wide-eyed in surprise or punch the air with excitement.
Mostly, she felt skeptical followed by…disappointed?
All these years later, could it really be this simple?
Not to mention, it felt slightly suspicious that the Collinses had made a significant discovery in a matter of days involving a mystery that had puzzled the rest of the world for thirty years.
The sheer number of law enforcement officers, search volunteers, and bloodhounds that had covered those grounds during the past few decades. And yet, all of a sudden…
Mmm-hmm…
Mandy debated calling her officers, but decided she wanted to be absolutely certain before summoning the cavalry. Not to mention Raquel Collins had been annoyingly coy over the phone.
We think we found…Well, best come see for yourself.
So now Mandy returned to the Collins property barely twenty-four hours after her initial welcome, zipping up her heavy jacket and unloading two battery-operated rapid deploy lights, courtesy of the fire department.
She’d just shut the hatch on her police SUV when Raquel appeared from behind the house.
“The dog found it,” she stated without preamble. Raquel was wearing a coppery-colored puffer jacket and rabbit fur headband in deference to the biting late-November chill. Leave it to the woman to somehow look glamorous even at a potential crime scene.
“The dog?” Mandy asked.
On cue, a pale, square-headed canine appeared.
Mandy nearly dropped one of the aluminum-shrouded lights. “You have a dog?”
“I prefer the term ‘canine opportunist.’ He appeared on our front porch this morning. Theo is already in love.” Raquel regarded her intently. “We took him to the vet. Relatively good health, but no ID chip. She advised us to ask you if you recognized him. Tell me, Chief, do you recognize him?”
Mandy definitely got the question behind the question. She honestly felt too flabbergasted to speak. A light-coated Lab-ish-looking stray. What were the odds?
This evening was getting stranger and stranger.
“Let’s start with your discovery,” she said at last.
Single-shoulder shrug. “Follow me.”
The dog led the way. Nothing ironic about that, Mandy thought as she marched past the house to the collapsed barn, then beyond.
She could just make out a faint glow coming from the ground about fifteen feet ahead. Next to it appeared to be a pile of discarded dirt-caked wooden planks.
“Where’s Theo?” she asked.
“Hi, Chief!” The shouted reply came from below, as in from the dimly illuminated pit.
“What the fuck?”
“I haven’t touched anything, I swear. I’m not a total idiot,” he called back.
Raquel and the dog were already peering down in disapproval. “It’s true,” Raquel said. “He’s only an idiot half the time.”
“I heard that!”
“Get out!” Mandy was beyond flabbergasted and now genuinely pissed off.
“You bring the light?”
“Get out!”
Tugging at the rope snaking past her feet.
Mandy mumbled a few more disparaging terms, then set down the battery-operated lights and fired them to life.
The RDLs were surprisingly powerful for their modest size, perfect for illuminating crime/disaster/emergency scenes of all kinds.
She placed one to the right side of the pit, the second on the left.
The opening appeared slightly sunken in the earth, the granite edges still spotted with clumps of meadow.
A little adjustment here, angling there, and she caught Theo in full glare just as he emerged from the hole, gloved hands tight around the rope he must’ve used to rappel down.
“Wow, that’s perfect!” he exclaimed, reflexively lifting one arm to block the high-powered beam, then immediately teetering off balance. Raquel grabbed his arm and tugged him onto terra firma, muttering some ill-tempered phrases of her own.
The dog settled onto his haunches and took in the show.
“All right, start from the beginning.”
Both Theo and Raquel pointed at the dirt-caked mutt.
“Such a good boy,” Theo gushed.
“Not keeping him!” Raquel corrected.
According to the Collinses, Mr. Man—if the dog already had a name, Raquel was definitely losing that war—had magically appeared out of the blue just this morning. Seemed to know his way around the house and property.
“Don’t you think he looks like…” Theo fished.
Mandy refused to either confirm or deny. Mostly because to consider this dog might have something to do with that Dog hurt her head.
They’d taken him to the vet.
Bought up half a pet store, Raquel inserted.
Brought the dog back home and gave him a bath.
Obviously, Raquel added dryly.
Then the dog disappeared. Theo infused the statement with just enough alarm, while his wife sighed heavily. So of course they searched for him.
Raquel had spied the dog digging in the field that stretched out behind the shed. By the time Theo had jogged over, the dog—good boy!—had exposed what appeared to be some kind of wooden cover.
Mandy passed her flashlight over the pile of jumbled planks. “Those boards?” She drifted closer, eyeing the remnants. Definitely on the decaying side and peppered with crude irregularly shaped nails that jutted out ominously. “The wood looks like pine.”
“Too heavy. I’m thinking hemlock.”
“Hemlock?” She eyed Theo in surprise, while Raquel’s expression mirrored her own.
“Back in the day, farmers used it for structures that needed to withstand the elements; it’s a particularly dense and durable wood.”
“And you know this…?”
“I did some reading on the subject. I did just buy a two-hundred-plus-year-old New England farm, you know.” Theo regarded her and Raquel as if they were the ones being obtuse.
“Check out the fieldstone pit. I’m thinking it’s an old well, given the approximate depth.
Fifteen feet isn’t much compared to today’s drilled wells, but given this was most likely hand-dug a couple of centuries ago, that’s pretty impressive.
The top was completely covered by several inches of sod and vegetation.
Anyone could’ve walked right over it and never known. ”
“Except for the dog, apparently. You’re saying he came straight here, didn’t tear up the garden, play in the mud for a warm-up act?”
“He seemed to come straight here.”
“Shit.” Mandy knew about hand-dug wells.
The forests around these parts were dotted with remnants of settlers past. Most of the abandoned pits featured crude walls of stacked boulders.
In comparison, this well’s construction appeared nearly refined, the walls comprising smaller, evenly shaped stones fitted tightly together.
The top rim was capped with flatter granite slabs, a detail she’d never encountered. But most disturbing…
The other abandoned wells had become lush, verdant gardens, nature taking back what was once hers. While this one—the walls appeared nearly black, slick with some kind of fungus or mold. There was a whiff of something in the air as well. Rot. Decay. Despair.
She had no idea what had possessed Theo to rappel down into such suffocating gloom. She didn’t even want to peer into it. She already knew she wouldn’t like what she would see.
The night felt hushed, suspended. The dog whined low in his throat, as if willing them to continue. They must see this. Someone, after all these years, must finally know. And then?
Deep breath. Mandy grabbed the portable light closest to her and angled the lamp to shine deep into the murky depths. Theo had left a flashlight glowing at the bottom of the pit, which mostly created a slice of mottled shapes and shadows. With the RDLs added to the show, however…
It took her a minute to process.
“What the hell is that?”
“The perfectly round object sitting directly in the center?”
“Yeah.”
“Some kind of crockery, maybe earthenware.”
“Crockery?”
“Exactly. But that’s of secondary importance. Take a closer look at the ground around it.”
He adjusted the light, and she just bit back a gasp. What she’d initially viewed as an uneven dirt floor suddenly resolved into focus.
Not random debris or tumbled-down fieldstones, but bones. A jumbled collection of gray-and-green-stained jutting ribs, smoothly rounded knobs, and, most telling, the empty eye sockets of a mud-caked human skull peering directly back up at them.
“Jesus. What…Who…How many?”
“I counted a single skull. And I didn’t touch anything. I swear.”
“But there could be more buried beneath,” she muttered, more to herself than to him.
“Maybe, but I don’t think that’s one of the Dixons. At least, not a member of the twentieth-century clan. I doubt that poor soul died in our lifetime. More like our grandparents’ grandparents’ generation.”
“You’re suddenly an expert on skeletons now?” Mandy’s tone was sharp, though they both knew her ire wasn’t directed at him.
“Not bones. But the well cover.” Theo shrugged.
“Forget for a moment that it was totally overgrown, to the point that even thirty years ago, when this place was crawling with law enforcement and search dogs, no one discovered it. But the nails used to hammer together the boards—hand-forged with irregular shanks and square heads? I haven’t seen anything like that outside of visits to Sturbridge Village when I was a kid. ”
Mandy blinked at the reference to the old colonial town and “living museum” in Sturbridge, Mass.
“You think this well was sealed up at the turn of the nineteenth century?”
“Why not? We know the homestead dates back to the mid-1700s. If this was the original well, no reason why it couldn’t have been boarded up two hundred years ago.” Theo shrugged. “Certainly, I didn’t see any sign of prior disturbance before I pried up the first plank.”
Mandy shook her head, trying to grasp the enormity of the situation.
A previously lost historic well. Bearing human remains.
That had managed not to be discovered three decades ago when half the state had scoured these grounds looking for signs of six other disappeared members of the Dixon clan.
And yet a random stray had pinpointed it in a matter of hours.
She was waiting for the theme song from The X Files to cue up at any moment.
“But wait, there’s more,” Raquel spoke up.
She stood next to the dismantled cover, one hand tapping against her leg in agitation.
Now she directed her flashlight at a hemlock plank that appeared to rest upside down.
She homed in on what would’ve been the underside of the timber, revealing distinct gouge marks, as if someone had hacked at the dense wood with a sharp object, again and again.
As if they were trying to chop their way through the nailed-down boards, desperate for escape.
“I did not do that,” Theo exclaimed as all three of them exchanged unsettled glances.
Mandy didn’t doubt him. The marks were obviously as discolored and aged as the wood itself. Meaning…That poor, poor soul.
“WWMFD,” she sighed at last. What would my father do?
Then, having spent the afternoon reading through his case notes, she knew.