“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.
“Jesus Christ, I don’t believe it. Oh God, Jesus!” Sampson said.
“Animal bones. Looks like the skull and upper thigh bone of a medium-sized dog,” I said to Sampson.
“Lots of bones!” he added.
We continued to dig even faster. Our breathing was harsh and labored. We had been digging in the summer heat for nearly an hour. It was in the nineties, sticky-hot, and claustrophobic. We were in a hole up to our waists.
“Shit! Here we go again. You recognize this from any of your med-school anatomy classes?” Sampson asked.
We were looking down at fragments from a human skeleton. “It’s the scapula and mandible. It could be a young boy or girl,” I told him.
“So this is the handiwork of young Gary? This Gary’s first kill? Another kid?”
“I don’t know for sure. Let’s not forget about Grandpa Walter. Let’s keep looking. If it is Gary, maybe he left a sign. These would be his earliest souvenirs. They would have been precious to him.”
We kept on digging and, minutes later, we found another cache. Only the sound of our labored breathing broke the silence.
There were more bones, possibly from a large animal, possibly a deer, but probably human.
And there was something else, a definite sign from young Gary. It had been wrapped in tinfoil, which I now carefully removed.
It was a Lionel locomotive, undoubtedly the one he had stolen from his stepbrother.
The toy train that launched a hundred deaths.