Chapter 4 - The Sound of the Plywood
The Springfield Fire Department’s Engine 4 arrived before the second patrol car.
They didn't use the air horns on Maplewood; they came in with the low, rhythmic growl of their Detroit Diesel, the red lights painting the clapboards of the houses opposite in long, bloody sweeps that brought three neighbors out onto their grass in their undershirts.
Captain Terry Sullivan came up the split-level stairs with a thirty-inch Halligan bar in his right hand. He was fifty-eight, with thirty years of soot in the pores of his nose and the wide, flat feet of an old high school guard.
He didn't look at Thomas Miller, who was now kneeling on the linoleum with his wrists zip-tied behind his back and his forehead resting against the ducks in the marsh.
Sullivan looked at Daniel.
"Upstairs?"
"Back bedroom," Daniel said. He hadn't holstered. His left hand was hooked into Miller’s collar, holding the man’s throat three inches off the Congoleum so he couldn't roll onto his hip. "Take the lock off the trim, Terry. Don't tear the frame if you can help it; the state’s attorney is going to want the wood for the grand jury."
Sullivan went up the risers, his turnout boots making the old fir stairs groan like a flatboat in a lock.
María had moved Emily into the bathroom at the end of the hall.
The bathroom had a single window that looked out over the flat tar-and-gravel roof of the garage. It was small, painted that pale institutional mint green that was popular in the late sixties, with a porcelain sink that had two separate brass taps for hot and cold.
María was sitting on the rim of the cast-iron tub, her arm around Emily’s ribs.
The child was not crying.
She sat on the lid of the toilet, her strawberry pajamas pulled up over her shins, watching her own toes. Her small feet were dirty at the margins—the black, oily grease of an unwashed garage floor—and her toenails had been bitten down until the quicks were red and swollen.
"Emily," María said softly. "The men with the red truck are here. They’re going to open the door now."
Emily didn't lift her head.
"It doesn't like the light," she whispered.
"What doesn't, baby?"
"The thing."
"The snake?"
The child’s hand tightened around the throat of the hare until the cotton batting inside the seam let out a faint, dry pop.
"It’s not a snake like the zoo," Emily said. Her voice had no breath in it; it was just the friction of her vocal cords against each other. "It’s the black one. With the teeth."
Outside in the hall, Sullivan’s Halligan bar went into the pine jamb.
There was no clean splintering. The wood was old, dry white pine that had been nailed into hemlock studs with seven-penny common nails in nineteen-fifty-six. The metal tool let out a dry, high-pitched screeech as the adze end bit between the casing and the stop.
Sullivan didn't jerk it. He leaned his two hundred and forty pounds into the shaft with a slow, hydraulic pressure.
The three two-inch screws pulled through the lath with three distinct, dull cracks that sounded like walnuts being stepped on in the grass.
The door swung inward three inches.
The air that came out of the room was not hot. It had been sixty-eight degrees in the hallway, but the draft from the bedroom was seventy-eight, thick with the oily, sweet smell of a unvented space heater, mixed with the unmistakable, sharp ammonia reek of dog urine and something else—something older, like wet grain that had sat in the bottom of a steel silo through two July rains.
Sullivan stopped with his hand on the brass knob.
He looked back down the hall at Daniel, who had come up the stairs behind him, leaving Miller with Officer Higgins from the second unit.
"Harris," Sullivan said. His voice was lower than usual. "You got a light on your belt?"
Daniel unhooked the Streamlight from his duty ring and clicked the tailcap.
The three-hundred-lumen beam went through the three-inch gap.
The room had no furniture.
There was no maple dresser with round brass pulls; there was no twin bed with a white headboard; there was no desk with third-grade spelling workbooks stacked by the lamp.
The single window that faced the backyard had been covered from the inside with a sheet of three-quarter-inch CDX exterior plywood, secured to the window casing with eight-inch framing spikes driven through three-by-three timber blocks. The edges of the plywood had been sealed with black expanding foam that had cured into bloated, orange-yellow caterpillars along the trim.
In the center of the bare oak floorboards lay a single four-by-eight sheet of galvanized steel roofing tin.
On top of the tin sat a rectangular box made of unpainted three-quarter-inch marine plywood, four feet long, two feet wide, and eighteen inches deep.
The lid of the box was not hinged.
It was weighted down with three sixty-pound bags of Quikrete gravel-mix that had absorbed the humidity from the air and turned into solid, grey stone inside their paper sacks.
From inside the box came a sound.
It wasn't a hiss.
It was the slow, wet, heavy sound of forty pounds of muscle sliding across unplaned fir plywood—a dry, scaly shhh-shhh-shhh that had a three-beat cadence, followed by the dull, hollow thud of a blunt, bone snout striking the underside of the lid six inches from the air holes.
May you like
Sullivan took one step back, his Halligan bar coming up across his chest like an iron cross.
"What in the name of Christ," the fire captain whispered into the dark, "is that?"
