Cat & Mouse

“WHAT THE hell is this all about?” Sampson asked as we trudged from the ramshackle barn to a gray fieldstone fireplace that stood in an open clearing. “You think this is how we catch the Bug-Eyed Monster? Beating up on this old man?”

Both of us carried old metal shovels, and I had a rusted pickax also.

“I told you-data. I’m a scientist by training. Trust me for about half an hour. The old man is tougher than he looks.”

The stone fireplace had been built for family cookouts a long time ago, but apparently had not been used in recent years. Sumac and other vines were creeping over the fireplace, as if to make it disappear.

Just beyond the fireplace was a rotting, wooden-plank picnic table with splintered benches on either side. Pines, oaks, and sugar maples were everywhere.

“ Gary had a recurring dream. That’s what brought me here. This is where the dream takes place. Near the fireplace and the picnic table at Grandpa Walter’s farm. It’s quite horrible. The dream comes up several times in the notes Alex made on Soneji when he was inside Lorton Prison.”

“Where Gary should have been cooked, until he was crispy on the outside, slightly pink toward the center,” Sampson said.

I laughed at his dark humor. It was the first light moment I’d had in a long time and it felt good to share it with someone.

I picked out a spot midway between the old fireplace and a towering oak tree that canted toward the farmhouse. I drove the pickax into the ground, drove it hard and deep. Gary Soneji. His aura, his profound evil. His paternal granddaddy. More data.

“In his bizarre dreams,” I told Sampson, “ Gary committed a gruesome murder when he was a young boy. He may have buried the victim out here. He wasn’t sure himself. He felt he couldn’t separate dreams from reality sometimes. Let’s spend a little time searching for Soneji’s ancient burial ground. Maybe we’re about to enter Gary ’s earliest nightmare.”

“Maybe I don’t want to enter Gary Soneji’s earliest nightmare,” Sampson said laughing again. The tension between us was definitely breaking some. This was better.

I lifted the pickax high and swung down with great force. I repeated the action again and again, until I found a smooth, comfortable, working rhythm.

Sampson looked surprised as he watched me handle the pick. “You’re done this kind of fieldwork before, boy,” he said, and began to dig at my side.

“Yes, I lived on a farm in El Toro, California. My father, his father, and my grandfather’s were all small-town doctors. But they continued to live on our family horse farm. I was supposed to go back there to set up practice, but then I never finished my medical training.”

The two of us were hard at work now. Good, honest work: looking for old bodies, searching for ghosts from Gary Soneji’s past. Trying to goad Grandfather Murphy.

We took off our shirts, and soon both of us were covered with sweat and dust.

“This was like a gentleman’s farm? Back in California? The one you lived on as a boy?”

I snorted out a laugh as I pictured the gentleman’s farm. “It was a very small farm. We had to struggle to keep it going. My family didn’t believe a doctor should get rich taking care of other people. ‘You shouldn’t take a profit from other people’s misery,’ my father said. He still believes that.”

“Huh. So your whole family’s weird?”

“That’s reasonably accurate portrait.”

Chapter 87

AS I continued to dig in Walter Murphy’s yard, I thought back to our farm in Southern California. I could still vividly see the large red barn and two small corrals.

When I lived there we owned six horses. Two were breeding stallions, Fadl and Rithsar. Every morning I took rake, pitchfork, and wheelbarrow, and I cleared the stalls; and then made my trip to the manure pile. I put down lime and straw, washed out and refilled the water buckets, made minor repairs. Every single morning of my youth. So yes, I knew how to handle a shovel and pickax.

It took Sampson and me half an hour before we had a shallow ditch stretching toward the ancient oak tree in the Murphy yard. The sprawling tree had been mentioned several times in Gary ’s recounting of his dreams.

I had almost expected Walter Murphy to call the local police on us, but it didn’t happen. I half expected Soneji to suddenly appear. That didn’t happen either.

“Too bad old Gary didn’t just leave us a map.” Sampson grunted and groaned under the hot, beating sun.

“He was very specific about his dream. I think he wanted Alex to come out here. Alex, or somebody else.”

“Somebody else did. The two of us. Hot shit, there’s something down here. Something under my feet,” Sampson said.

I moved around toward his spot in the trench. The two of us continued to dig, picking up the pace. We worked side by side, sweating profusely. Data, I reminded myself. It’s all just data on the way to an answer. The beginning of a solution.

And then I recognized the fragments we had uncovered in the shallow grave, in Gary ’s hiding place near the fireplace.