Chapter Nine ♥
*
Daphne looked down at the dirt and took a deep breath. It was already a hike getting up here. The cemetery itself hadn’t been hard to get into. What she hadn’t expected was the two hundred foot climb, at the back of a three-quarter mile stretch. If they weren’t in the very back corner she couldn’t imagine how. The trees protected them from sight in the darkness of the night, but if it were any lighter out, it wouldn’t be enough.
She flexed her hands in the heavy leather work gloves. The digging had already taken a lot out of her, and it was hard to know how much longer they were going to have to keep going before they were done. She looked at the sky and tried to gauge how many hours they had until morning.
“This is—I’m very serious when I say this—but this is the worst idea I have ever heard from you or either of your two hooligan friends, and you once suggested sex on top of city hall.”
Major dug the point of a spade into the dirt and leaned on the handle. He looked up at her and smiled. “Is that still on the table, then?”
Daphne looked at him, her expression flat. “I’m not going to answer that.”
“I’m going to take that as a maybe,” he said. He tossed another shovelful across his body.
“Not maybe. I’m only doing this because you asked me to.” Her body hurt. It had been a long week. She could only imagine how much it must have ached to be doing all this digging on Major’s leg. ‘A flesh wound,’ the doctor had said. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t dangerous to be digging around in the dirt.
“Duly noted. Now, could you start digging again? I feel like we’ve been doing this for a week, and we’ve still got to get this hole closed up again before morning if we want to get out of this without getting arrested.”
They were already waist deep, by that point. Six feet was standard. Over her head by a good bit. Her shovel bit into the earth and threw it out over her shoulder. She grit her teeth when she spoke, trying to keep the smooth rhythm of movement unbroken. Smooth was fast, she kept repeating to herself.
“How are we going to know we’ve got it?”
Major’s shoulders turned as he tossed another shovelful of soil. He wiped his forehead with an arm just as slick with sweat as his forehead. “We won’t know for sure until we get it. All we know is that the old guy had a bunch of letters, and he was buried with them.”
“That’s not very helpful.”
“It’s not. I’m not exactly overjoyed about it either.”
Her shovel bit into the dirt, but it stopped short. The shock hit her in the elbows and hurt. She straightened, the tiredness temporarily wrung out of her body.
“Hey, wait. Shhh. I think I have something.” She jabbed again. The sound was unmistakable. Major crouched down and pulled dirt away with his fingers. The box was the first thing they saw. And underneath it, something that turned her stomach to think about.
“That’s something, alright,” Major said solmenly.
“Do clothes usually rot like this? He looks like he’s been down there for a hundred years.”
“Yeah, this is normal.” Major’s voice was disturbingly confident.
“How do you know that?”
He looked up at her with an unreadable expression on his face. In the dark it all looked the same. “I don’t, Daphne. I just know I’m not planning on looking into it.”
“I’m not touching that box,” she said.
“I’ll take it, you big baby. Give me a boost out of here.”
“You can’t boost me?” She wanted to be out of this grave as soon as possible. Sooner.
“I think you’d rather boost me than lift me,” Major countered. She thought about it only an instant before shrugging. He wasn’t wrong.
“So how do you want to do this?”
“Just lace your fingers together, and let me step up. Like mounting a horse.”
“You’ve always been a romantic, haven’t you, Major?” She joked, but she did what she was told. He was heavy, and her body was tired, but she managed to keep herself steady by pressing into the soil walls. He stepped up and lifted himself out of the earth with a grunt.
“I can’t help who I am. Now you.” His hand reached down. She took it.
“Pull, pull, pull!” Her arms felt like they were going to give out and she was barely six inches off the ground. She dug a toe into the wall and used that to steady herself.
“I am pulling. Up, and… Good.” They both fell to the grass panting. The wind howled through the trees, and for the first time in hours she realized how cold it was. The sweat felt like it was going to freeze on her skin. Major pulled himself up to sit with his legs dangling. “Give me a second to catch my breath and we’ll get this hole filled up. Looks like we’ve got an hour or so before dawn.”
“Let’s get this done, then,” she said, pushing herself to her feet and grabbing a shovel from the grass.
“Yeah. Let’s get it done.”
“Do you know what’s inside the box?” They drove down the street. It was already past time for proper professionals to start waking up, and they hadn’t even made it to bed yet. She wanted to cozy up into Major’s arms and pass out.
“I know what Leo said, but I don’t think hearsay is admissible as evidence.”
“I’m not a judge, Major.” She screwed her face up and stared at him as he drove. “Do you... not know what a bail bondsman does?”
“Is it important that I know?” He looked like a zombie, his eyes fixed on something past the horizon that neither of them could see.
“Just open the box. I want to get to sleep, but I’m not going to be able to get a wink if I’m covered in dirt and wondering what I just spent six hours digging up.”
He pulled into the driveway, and if she didn’t know better she’d have guessed that he could fall asleep right then and there. But he reached back and pulled it out of the back seat “Coming right up.” He pulled on the lid. It didn’t budge. “Oh. Uh, it’s locked.”
“Give it here.” She held her hands out. Whatever disgust that she felt about its provenance, she was too tired to think about it now. She reached toward her hip with her right and as her left slid it into her lap.
“What are you going to do? Shoot the lock off?”
“Do I—do we need to have a conversation about the nature of my job? No, I’m not going to shoot it off.” She let out a breath and pulled the pouch from her pocket. Honestly. She wasn’t even carrying. Why did everyone seem to assume that she was armed at all times?
She slipped a bent bar of spring steel into the tumbler and worked a rake through quickly.
“Where did you learn to pick a lock?”
The look on Major’s face was priceless. She couldn’t have surprised him more if she’d used her vagina to open it. Like she’d grown a third arm or something.
“I learned it where anyone learns it,” she answered, giving the punch line a long time to marinade. “The kitchen table.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry about it. Just one more second, and… there we go.”
It only took a handful of attempts before the wrench turned. She left the keyhole in the ‘open’ position and slid it back across the seat. Major looked at it.
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
“Once my vision stops swimming, then I’ll open it.” She let out a long sigh.
“I’m going to go to bed, then.”
“You do that.” She knew he wouldn’t. He was as curious as she was, no matter how tired he might have been. It was eating at him. Eating at both of them. “It’s just a bunch of letters.”
“I told you that much, at least. You’re the one who was so curious about it, why don’t you give them a read?”
“Who sends physical letters these days?” She let out a sigh and started scanning through the papers. They were hand-written, and the person who was writing them was far from a great penman. She wasn’t sure whether that made it cute or humiliating. Perhaps both.
“Are we really judging the personal habits of a guy whose grave we just robbed?”
“Point taken.” She let out a breath and set the first sheet down. “This letter is to a woman. They’re all addressed to the same woman, actually: Ruth. Signed… ‘T.’ That’s helpful.”
“Extremely helpful, yeah.” Major gently tapped a thick finger in the middle of the page. “Usually the interesting parts of a letter come between the salutation and the signature, though, so don’t get disheartened too soon.”
“It’s a bunch of sappy stuff. Very sweet, but nothing that explains why—”
She stopped so suddenly that Major looked at her like he’d been slapped.
“What?”
“I think I figured out why we just dug up this guy’s grave,” she said.
“Is that right?” He leaned over. She pointed at the passage.
“Listen to this. I don’t know who I’m supposed to report this behavior to. The Commissioner is one of the people who I’m trying to report on, for Christ’s sake! That doesn’t sound like a good time.”
“I don’t know all the details, but according to Leo, there is some stuff going on in the Police precinct, and those letters detail at least some of it.” Major let out a breath. This was the final confirmation that the information that they’d gotten had been at least halfway right. That the work they’d done for the past six hours hadn’t been a fantastic waste of time.
“How delightfully vague,” Daphne mused. Her eyes kept scanning, even when it took six passes to get the sentences down.
“I mean, the only way that the entire situation could get more mysterious would be if he gave us a treasure map to find him first, so yeah. I’d say vague is the order of business.”
“Can we go inside now? I just want to sleep for a month.” As the words came out of Daphne’s mouth she realized just how true they were. She had gone through reserves that she didn’t even know she had, and now she was running on emergency power. That couldn’t last a whole lot longer.
Major pushed the car door open and let out a breath. “That sounds perfect to me right now.”