S is for Silence (Kinsey Millhone 19)

“What’s the deal with you and your uncle Calvin?”

“Nothing. We get along fine. Just no warm, fuzzy feelings between the two of us. When I was growing up, he and my aunt made very little effort to maintain contact. It’s been so long since I’ve seen my cousins, I doubt I’d recognize them.”

“Mind if I talk to him?”

“About what?”

“Just some questions I have.”

“Be my guest.”

Calvin Wilcox watched without expression as I approached. I saw him flip aside his cigarette butt and then he leaned forward and turned off the radio. Up close, I could see he hadn’t shaved that morning, and the stubble along his jaw was a mixture of gray and faded red. With his ruddy complexion, his green cotton shirt made his eyes look luminous. As before, I felt I was looking at a version of Violet-same coloring, opposite sex, but electric nonetheless. “Looks like you pulled a rabbit out of a hat,” he said when I reached the open driver’s-side window. “How’d you come up with this?”

The question seemed ever so faintly hostile, but I smiled to show what a good sport I was. “I’d say ‘dumb luck’ but I don’t want to be accused of false modesty.”

“I’m serious.”

“Me, too.” I went through my standard explanation, trying a variation just to keep the story interesting. “Someone saw Violet’s car parked out here the night she disappeared. After that, it was never seen again so it dawned on me maybe it hadn’t gone anywhere. In retrospect, it seems dumb I didn’t twig to it before.”

“Who saw the car?”

I went through a lightning-quick debate with myself and decided naming Winston was a very bad idea. It was as Detective Nichols had said: the less information in circulation, the better. I waved the question aside. “I don’t remember offhand. It’s one of those things I heard in passing. What about you; how’d you hear about this?” I asked, indicating the excavation.

“I was listening to the radio on the way home from work when it came on the news. I called the sheriff’s office as soon as I got home.”

“Were you out here last night?”

“For a while. I wanted to see for myself, but the deputy wouldn’t let me get anywhere near. They knocked off at ten and said they’d be starting again this morning at six.”

“You have a guess about how long it would take to dig a hole that size? I’m talking way back when.”

“I don’t know the details. You’ll have to fill me in.”

“From the scuttlebutt yesterday, the guy made a long shallow ramp, eight feet wide and maybe fifteen feet at its deepest point. The back end of the car is buried at the bottom with the front on an incline about like this.” I held my arm out at roughly a thirty-degree angle.

He sat, blinking, while he ran the numbers through his head. “I’d have to do the math to give you any kind of accurate answer. In 1953, the guy would’ve used a bulldozer. If you’re telling me he backed the car in, then he must have dug the hole with a long sloping ramp on either end and scooped out dirt until the hole was deep enough at its deepest point to sink the car completely. I’d say two days, maybe a day and a half. It wouldn’t take long to fill it in again. Someone must have seen what he was up to, but he might have had a cover story.”

“The Fourth fell on a Saturday that year so most people were given Friday off, too. If the road crew was idle for the three-day weekend, then the excavation could have been done without anyone on hand.”

“I can see that,” he said. “With the road unfinished, there wouldn’t have been any traffic to speak of.”

“What about the excess dirt? Wouldn’t there have been quite a bit leftover when the hole was filled in?”

He fixed his green eyes on mine. “Oh, yes. The car would have displaced somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred cubic yards of dirt. Rough guess.”

“So what’d he do, haul it all away?”

“Not likely. The biggest dump truck in operation back then had a capacity of five cubic yards, so it would have taken way too long, especially if he ferried the load any appreciable distance. The easiest solution would have been to push it across the road and spread it out on that field.”

“But wouldn’t someone have noticed the sudden appearance of all the fresh dirt?”

“Not necessarily. If I remember correctly, the field you’re looking at belonged to a co-op at the time, and it was only being cultivated intermittently. With road construction under way, things were already torn up, so no one would have paid attention to a little more dirt.”