Wings of Fire - Charles Todd [107]
He was very close to standing up and identifying himself. But she shut the door again, and in a minute or two more, the lamp was snuffed out.
His legs were stiff from squatting, but he waited for a little longer, then turned his attention back to the garden.
If the body had been hidden here, how much would be found now? The long bones, perhaps, the jaw. Kneeling, feeling the night’s damp soaking into his trousers, he lifted a few of the stones very carefully from their bed and touched the soil beneath. His fingers worked down into it, among the plant roots and the friable earth, spreading and probing. There were no tree roots here, on the hillside. If there had been a body in this ground, some trace would remain to a trained eye. He mustn’t disturb it too much.
It was useless to dig. In the dark. Leaving behind signs of his presence. Wait until later, and let the experts—
His fingers struck something rough and hard. In spite of himself, a coldness swept over him even though common sense told him he couldn’t have found bone at this shallow depth. And not the boy’s bones.
Someone had been here before him, lifting the rocks in the center just as he’d done, loosening the soil. He should have realized that as soon as he touched the earth—it would have made sense if he’d had his wits about him.
Working carefully, winkling it and using his other hand to clear a little space here, a little there, he very soon had the long slender length of wood out of its hiding place.
A carving. No, something else, the sides were too smooth.
He let his fingers gently feel the thing in his hand. It was not old wood—he knew the texture of that. They’d used and reused whatever lumber came to hand in the trenches, scavenged for boardwalks to keep their feet dry above the filth, for shelter from the rain, for a place out of the hot sun or the cold wind. On the Somme the generals had forbidden even such simple, rough comforts, while the Germans had lived in tunnels they’d efficiently dug deep in the earth. No, this wood was hard and firm and new to the ground it had been buried in. Three sides were smooth as sanding could make them. The fourth had something cut into it. Deeply incised, and at midlength. Like a blind man he worked at the shapes, slowly letting his sense of touch and not his eyes tell him what was there. There was a flow to the shapes, but they were separate. Letters, then.
R, yes, most certainly an R. Then a space before the next. A. Next to that an E, he thought. No, he was wrong. H. And the very last, C.
He thought back to the photographs he’d been given by Rachel Marlowe, and the names on the reverse. Richard Allen Harris Cheney.
Nicholas had left his calling card. And not very long ago ...
21
Rutledge put everything back exactly as he’d found it, brushing the pansy leaves clean of any bits of earth, using his hands to smooth and press the disturbed earth. Then he got to his feet and thought about what he’d done, whether he’d left any task undone. Then he remembered the entrenching tool, and groped for that.
With the same care he’d exercised coming here he made his way out of the valley and back to the inn, returning the tool to its place in the car before going upstairs again to his room. Looking down at his shoes, he grimaced. The caked mud reminded him of the trenches. Taking them off, he set them outside his door for the boot boy.
Washing his hands well, then blotting the worst of the dew out of his trouser knees, he went back to his earlier task. The poems.
It was in some ways quite unnerving to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Like working out the obituaries of people he knew. But Olivia seldom failed him once he learned the technique of what she had tried to do. All the members of her family were here, cleverly disguised by the allegorical themes she’d chosen for each. Sometimes, like “Eve,” they were given biblical names, at others wrapped in Cornish legends, or cloaked in bits of well-known history—whatever fit