Chapter 8 - The Season of the Thaw
Winter in Sangamon County is not white; it is grey-brown, the color of wet soy stubble under four inches of dirty slush that freezes at five in the afternoon and turns the two-lane roads into washboards of black ice.
By March, the ice along the Sangamon had broken up, moving downstream toward the Illinois River in long, jagged pans that ground against the bridge piers with a sound like iron teeth chewing gravel.
The house at 1427 Maplewood Drive didn't stay on the tax rolls.
In October, the county sheriff had sold the parcel on the courthouse steps to satisfy two mechanics’ liens that had been filed by the lumberyard in Chatham three years before. The buyer was an investor from Decatur who had three crews that did nothing but clear out repossession properties for the federal mortgage agencies.
On the third Saturday of the month, Daniel Harris drove the Crown Victoria down Maplewood.
He was in plainclothes—a brown canvas Carhartt coat over a denim shirt, with his gold retirement watch on his wrist. He had three weeks left before his thirty years were up; his papers were already on the chief’s desk, signed and notarized, and he had spent the morning cleaning out his locker in the basement of the municipal building.
The Dodge with the angle-iron ladder rack was gone from the driveway.
In the front yard, two men in yellow rubber boots were loading the contents of the house into a thirty-yard steel roll-off dumpster that had been dropped on the lawn, its iron wheels sinking four inches into the sod where the spring thaw had turned the clay into grease.
The front door was propped open with an empty five-gallon drywall mud bucket.
Daniel got out of the car. He didn't put his hat on; the wind was coming out of the south, wet and warm, carrying the smell of the bean fields and the fresh mud from the creek.
One of the crew members—a young man with a red beard and an unzipped insulated coverall—came down the split-level stairs carrying an old maple nightstand with one drawer missing.
"Can’t go in there, buddy," the boy said, heaving the nightstand over the side of the dumpster with a hollow, splintering crack. "County health board condemned the interior on account of the animal waste. We’re stripping it to the subfloor."
"I know," Daniel said. He reached into his Carhartt pocket, pulled out his leather badge case, and let it flip open. "Looking for a piece of wood."
The boy looked at the silver star. "What kind of wood?"
"Upstairs," Daniel said. "The window blocks in the back room."
"Already out," the boy said, pointing with a gloved thumb toward the front of the dumpster. "The framing timber went in first thing this morning. The boss wanted the spikes out so they didn't puncture the truck tires when we haul to the landfill."
Daniel walked to the edge of the steel bin.
Inside, half-buried under three rolls of stained brown shag carpet and four bags of wet fiberglass insulation, lay the sheet of three-quarter-inch CDX plywood.
The black expanding foam had dried into hard, crumbly grey crusts along the edges, like old hornets' nests. In the center of the wood, where the grain had been protected from the weather by the window casing, someone had written a four-digit number in blue carpenter’s chalk: 1956.
The year the house had been built.
The year the Allis-Chalmers plant had run three shifts a day, seven days a week, making tractors for the men who were breaking the bottom land along the river.
Beside the plywood lay the marine-plywood box.
The crew had used a sledgehammer on it; the corners had split along the screw lines, the unplaned fir boards splintered into long, jagged shards that showed the white, clean wood beneath the stain. The cedar shavings were gone, washed out by the rain that had fallen the night before through the open roof vents.
There was nothing in the box.
No tea saucer. No spoon. No scales.
Just the bare wood, grey at the margins where the urine had soaked through the glue, and three four-inch framing nails that had rusted until they were the color of dried liver.
Daniel stood by the iron wheel of the dumpster for five minutes.
A neighbor two doors down—an old man in an olive-drab army field jacket who was raking dead maple leaves out of his iris beds—stopped his work and looked across the fence.
"Harris?" the old man called out.
Daniel turned. "Morning, Arthur."
"They taking him away for good?"
"He’s in Menard," Daniel said. "Forty years. He has to do eighty-five percent before he sees the board."
The old man looked down at his rake. His hands were gnarled, the skin spotted with the large, dark brown liver spots of a man who had spent forty years on an open tractor seat.
"I heard the girl," Arthur said.
The wind took the words and moved them through the bare branches of the maples.
"When did you hear her, Arthur?"
"In July," the old man said. He didn't look up from the dirt. "Around four in the morning. I was out on the porch getting the paper before the heat came up. I thought... I thought it was the water pipes. You know how these split-levels are. The copper clanks when the well pump kicks on in the basement."
Daniel didn't answer.
He reached down, picked up a piece of the red clay from the edge of the tire track, and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger until it was round and smooth as a marble.
May you like
"It wasn't the pipes, Arthur," Daniel said.
He dropped the ball back into the grass, turned his back on the house, and walked back to the Crown Victoria, his boots heavy with the soft, wet earth of the county he had served for thirty years.
