Unbury Carol(59)

Opal stepped past him, already looking about the home. “It’s cold in here, Cole. Am I right?”

“Sure is, Sheriff.”

Opal took a cursory glance into the parlor and then the dining room, too. Cole followed him as he stepped through the house, his boots clunking against the wood floors, stopping to examine things that interested him.

“I suppose we better go downstairs,” Opal said.

“Sheriff?”

“Yes, Cole?”

“What do we do if she’s down there?”

“What do we do? We give her a once-over and hope Dwight Evers can explain who Alexander Wolfe is.”

“Give her a once-over.”

“That’s right.”

“For bruises or whatnot.”

Opal was looking at the chandelier hanging in the foyer but now he turned to his deputy. “That’s right, Cole. We’re looking for foul play. Not their taste in drapes.”

Cole nodded and followed Opal deeper into the house.

The sheriff checked the office. He looked at some papers on the desk and thought, yes, he had seen something like fear in Manders’s eyes. Fear in the eyes of a man who handled dead bodies all day. A man who oversaw the makeup applied to dead eyelids, dressing up the fleshy faces of bloated ladies who no longer breathed. Manders buried children. Jane Flurry was just five when she caught the cough that sent her down into the earth. And Doris Mickey’s kid must have been something to look at after he fell from the roof of their house like he did. If there was a man in Harrows who ought to be immune to the shudders of finality, it was Robert Manders.

“Sheriff!”

Cole was calling from the kitchen. Opal went to him.

“This here’s the door to the cellar.”

Opal came into the kitchen and stuck his head in the frame. He took the candlestick from the wall and asked Cole if he had a match. The deputy lit it.

“Well,” Opal said. “Let’s hope for the best.”

“What’s the best?”

“Nothing,” Opal said. “Nothing is best.”

Cole followed him down the creaking stairs.

Once they reached the cellar floor, Opal didn’t speak anymore, didn’t call out to Evers, and Cole understood he shouldn’t, either. The sheriff stopped and brought the candle to the wall, checking some luggage he found there. The cases were empty and Cole guessed he was looking to see if Dwight Evers had planned on going somewhere fast.

Opal turned and trained the light on the doorway of a storm room. The more affluent citizens of Harrows had these types of rooms in their basements. Shelter. Some citizens had numerous subterranean rooms. Opal had found some bad things in the cellars of Harrows.

His shoes scuffled the concrete floor as he stepped to the entrance and stopped. He held the candle far out before him.

“Nothing,” he whispered.

Cole leaned over his shoulder and saw the same nothing. A cold empty room with a stone slab of a table. More morgue than anything else. Opal stepped farther into the room and brought the candle low, illuminating the ground on the other side of the slab. Whatever he was searching for, Cole was certain he hadn’t found it.

And yet there were some breaks in the dust on the slab. Two spots for shoulder blades, perhaps, a clean circle made by the back of a head.

Then Opal motioned for Cole to follow him out of the room, and the two walked the rest of the damp basement. At the far end were some crates filled with traditional home items: books, papers, tools.

Opal turned to Cole. “Where is she then?”

He was talking now, not whispering, and his voice echoed off the stone.

“Getting made up, Sheriff?”

Opal nodded. Wondered if he should have come last night. “Sounds about right.”

The sheriff waited another moment, studying the dimensions the light gave him, and then crossed back to the stairs.

In the kitchen again, Opal told Cole they ought to check the bedrooms. Cole followed him up the stairs, the dark wood creaking. The sheriff tried the first door and decided it looked like the master bedroom. He walked the dimensions of the room once, stopped to look out through the drapes, then paused at a series of gunshots in the plaster wall.

“Well well.”

“No blood,” Cole said, squatting beside the sheriff. It wasn’t uncommon to find bullet holes in even the finest homes in Harrows.

The lawmen checked all four rooms upstairs.

“She’s not here,” Cole said.

“No. She’s not.”

They returned to the first floor. They locked the front door from the inside and went out the back. Cole asked him, “You think anything untoward is going on, Sheriff?”

“I want to say there isn’t, Cole, but I just don’t know.”

Manders came to mind again. Manders who had shaken the rubber hand of every person to die in Harrows for two decades running. The local authority, death-desensitized. It ought to take a monster to rattle Robert Manders.

But Dwight Evers?

“Let’s get back,” Opal said. “Kern’s probably thin as a toothpick from starving.”

The deputy didn’t talk on the ride back into town. He knew better than to bother the sheriff when Opal was thinking like this. It wasn’t even the right time to bring up something nice.

It was time to let Sheriff Opal work.