The Secret Wife(84)
‘I’m translating a novel from Russian. It’s very gloomy, although with undoubted literary merit. The characters endlessly analyse their motivations till you want to shout “Get on with it, buddy!”’
Kitty smiled in recognition: ‘Yes, the same is true of Dmitri’s novels. His characters are incapacitated by guilt – except in his anti-fascist novel The Boot that Kicked, where they are energised by fury. I rather like the introspection. I wish more men were introspective.’ Of course, that’s what Tom was doing with his counsellor: trying to understand what made him tick. Kitty admired him for the effort. It couldn’t be easy.
On the way back to the cabin, she stopped at the hardware store in Indian Lake to ask the owner’s advice on winter-proofing her cabin. Now she had spent so much time and effort on repairs, she didn’t want to arrive next spring to find it had fallen apart again.
‘You’ve applied the weatherproof varnish,’ he said, frowning in concentration, ‘and it’s not leaking anywhere?’
‘Nope.’
‘You could fit some shutters or board over the windows,’ he suggested. ‘Do the eaves have enough overhang so that water from the roof runs off clear of the walls?’
Kitty nodded. ‘A good six inches.’
‘And what’s drainage like around the cabin? You want to avoid water pooling round the foundations.’
She frowned. ‘Actually, there is an area to the side where a puddle forms after heavy rain. What should I do about it?’
‘Easy. Dig a trench to let it run off.’
That made sense. Kitty thanked him and headed back to the cabin to start digging. With the edge of her spade, she marked out a channel that led from the hollow of the puddle down towards the lakeshore some fifteen feet away. The ground was mushy from the rain of a few days earlier and her spade cut cleanly through, only snagging on tree roots and mossy undergrowth.
She would miss Lake Akanabee. Maybe I’ll bring Tom here in the spring, she thought then added mentally, all being well. She’d like to show him this magical place. Perhaps they could hire a boat and explore the coves. Did that mean she had forgiven him? She never thought about Karren Bayliss now, so she supposed she had.
All of a sudden her spade hit something hard. She assumed it was a rock and tried to dig around it but a foot along the hard object was still there, about three feet below the surface. She cleared some of the earth above it and realised her spade was hitting a wooden crate that was about two feet wide. Had Dmitri buried it? Perhaps it was a treasure chest containing family heirlooms. Kitty was excited, wondering if she was about to solve the mystery of her great-grandfather’s later life.
She kept digging along the line of the box, which was longer than she had expected. It lay on a slope so she had to remove more soil at the upper part than the lower. When she had worked about six feet along there was a cracking sound as her spade pierced an area of rotten wood. She used the blade as a lever to prise open a corner of the box and bent to peer in. There was something yellowy-white, round. Suddenly a scream burst from her lungs as she realised there was a human skull staring up at her. She’d uncovered a coffin.
Kitty ran indoors, irrationally terrified, as if the skeleton might be pursuing her. Her voice was trembling as she dialled the number of the police station and told them of her grisly discovery.
‘Someone will be there within the hour,’ she was told. ‘Don’t touch anything in the meantime.’
Kitty couldn’t face waiting on her own for an hour with a dead body outside. She rang Bob’s cellphone, told him what she had found and asked if he could please come over to wait with her.
‘Be right there,’ he said. ‘Pour yourself a stiff drink.’
She took his advice and poured a glass of Chardonnay, then stayed indoors, her heart pounding, until she heard Bob’s outboard approaching the jetty ten minutes later.
‘It’s over there,’ she gestured from the porch, and as soon as he tied up the boat, he went to have a look.
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he called. ‘Course it could have been there for decades. Maybe it dates from before Dmitri’s time.’
‘I hope so. I hope we’re not about to find out my great-granddad was a murderer.’ Kitty tried to speak lightly, but she felt choked with worry. Had someone from Dmitri’s past caught up with him? Had there been a fight that went too far and he was forced to hide the evidence?
When the police arrived they tied plastic ribbon around the area and erected a tent over the coffin. She and Bob sat on the jetty drinking wine and watching as a forensics team arrived and pulled protective suits over their clothes.
You’re probably not going to be able to stay here while they investigate,’ Bob said. ‘You’re welcome to our guest room.’ He gestured to his house on the other side of the water.
‘Thanks, but I’ll probably stay at the vacation park. I expect they’ll give me a deal this late in the season.’ It would feel spooky to sleep in the cabin, even after the coffin had been taken away. That skull would haunt her dreams.
An officer came to take her statement and get her cell phone number. ‘You can move back in a few days,’ he told her. ‘It looks as though the body’s been there a while. Don’t worry – you’re not under arrest.’ He laughed.