The Cabinet of Curiosities (Pendergast #3)(81)

The soil beneath the floor of Leng’s old laboratory was waterlogged and foul-smelling. Nora cleared a one-meter square of the floor bricks, then began digging a diagonal test trench with her trowel. Anything under the floor would not be deep. There wasn’t much farther to go. She was almost in the water table.

She struck something. A deft bit of brushwork revealed a rusted, rotten nineteenth-century umbrella, only its whalebone skeleton intact. She carefully cleared around it, photographed it in situ, then removed it and laid its rotting pieces on a sheet of acid-free specimen paper.

“You’ve found something?” Pendergast asked, eyes still closed. A long white hand removed a chocolate from a box and placed it in his mouth.

“The remains of an umbrella.” She worked more quickly. The dirt was looser, muddier.

Fourteen inches down, in the left-hand corner of the grid, her trowel struck heavily against something. She began clearing away the sodden dirt around it. Then her brush hand jerked aside reflexively. It was a circlet of hair about a smooth dome of brown bone.

A distant rumble of thunder pierced the silence. The storm was still upon them.

She heard a faint intake of breath from O’Shaughnessy.

“Yes?” Pendergast’s voice came instantly.

“We’ve got a skull here.”

“Keep digging, if you please.” Pendergast didn’t sound surprised.

Working carefully with the brush, heart pounding uncomfortably in her chest, Nora cleared away more dirt. The frontal bone came slowly into view, then two eye sockets, slimy, sticky matter still clinging inside. A foul smell rose and she gagged involuntarily. This was no clean Anasazi skeleton that had been buried a thousand years in dry sand.

Plucking her T-shirt up over her nose and mouth, she continued. A bit of nasal bone became exposed, the opening cradling a twisted piece of cartilage. Then, as the maxilla was exposed, came a flash of metal.

“Please describe.” Again Pendergast’s weak voice broke the silence of the room.

“Give me another minute.”

Nora brushed, working down the craniofacial bones. When the face was exposed, she sat back on her heels.

“All right. We have a skull of an older adult male, with some hair and soft matter remaining, probably due to the anaerobic environment of the site. Just below the maxilla there are two silver teeth, partly fallen from the upper jaw, attached to some old bridgework. Below that, just inside the jaws, I see a pair of gold spectacles, one lens of which has black opaque glass.”

“Ah. You have found Tinbury McFadden.” There was a pause and Pendergast added, “We must keep going. Still to be found are James Henry Perceval and Dumont Burleigh, members of the Lyceum and colleagues of our Dr. Leng. Two people unlucky enough to have also received J. C. Shottum’s confidences. The little circle is complete.”

“That reminds me,” Nora said. “I remembered something, while I was digging last night. The first time I asked Puck to show me the Shottum material, he said in passing that Shottum was quite popular these days. I didn’t pay much attention to it then. But after what happened, I began to wonder who had—” She stopped.

“Who had made that particular journey ahead of us,” Pendergast finished the thought for her.

Suddenly there was the rattle of the doorknob.

All eyes turned.

The knob rattled, turned, turned again.

There was a series of concussive raps on the door, which reverberated through the small apartment. A pause followed; then a second volley of frantic pounding.

O’Shaughnessy looked up, hand dropping to his automatic. “Who’s that?”

A shrill female voice sounded outside the door. “What go on here? What that smell? What you do in there? Open up!”

“It’s Mrs. Lee,” Nora said as she rose to her feet. “The landlady.”

Pendergast lay still. His pale cat’s eyes flitted open for a moment, then closed again. He looked as if he was settling in for a nap.

“Open up! What go on in there?”

Nora climbed out of the trench, moved to the door. “What’s the problem?” she said, keeping her voice steady. O’Shaughnessy joined her.

“Problem with smell! Open up!”

“There’s no smell in here,” said Nora. “It must be coming from somewhere else.”

“It come from here, up through floor! I smell all night, it much worse now when I come out of apartment. Open up!”

“I’m just cooking, that’s all. I’ve been taking a cooking class, but I guess I’m not very good yet, and—”

“That no cooking smell! Smell like shit! This nice apartment building! I call police!” Another furious volley of pounding.

Nora looked at Pendergast, who lay still, wraith-like, eyes closed. She turned to O’Shaughnessy.

“She wants the police,” he said with a shrug.

“But you’re not in uniform.”

“I’ve got my shield.”

“What are you going to say?”

The pounding continued.

“The truth, of course.” O’Shaughnessy slid toward the door, undid the locks, and let the door fall open.

The squat, heavyset landlady stood in the door. Her eyes darted past O’Shaughnessy, saw the gigantic hole in the living room floor, the piles of dirt and bricks beyond, the exposed upper half of a skeleton. A look of profound horror blossomed across her face.