His fingers skimmed across something much too smooth to be a stone. He leaned over, heart thudding, but could see nothing. He wished he had brought a flashlight, but that probably would have made Bobbi even more suspicious. He dug wider, letting the dirt run and rattle down the inclined slope.
He saw he had uncovered a car headlight.
Gardener looked at it, filled with an eerie, skeletal amusement. THIS is what it's like to find something in the earth, he thought. To find some strange artifact. Only I didn't have to stumble over it, did I? I knew where to look.
He dug faster, climbing the slope and throwing dirt back between his legs like a mutt digging for a bone, ignoring his pounding head, ignoring his hands, which first scraped, then chafed, then began to bleed.
He was able to clear a level place on the Cutlass's hood just above the right-side headlights where he could stand, and then the work went faster. Bobbi and her buddies had done a casual burial job at best. Gardener pulled loose gravel down by the armload, then kicked it off the car. Pebbles shrieked and squealed on the metalwork. His mouth was dry. He was working his way up to the windshield, and he honestly didn't know which would be better - to see something, or nothing.
His fingers brushed slick smoothness again. Without allowing himself to stop and think - the silent creepiness of the place might have gotten to him then; he might have just turned and run - he dug a clear place on the windshield and peered in, cupping his hands to the glass to cut the glare from the moon.
Nothing.
Anne Anderson's rented Cutlass was empty.
They could have put her in the trunk. The fact is, you still don't know anything for sure.
He thought he did, however. Logic told him that Anne's body wasn't in the trunk. Why would they bother? Anyone who found a brand-new car buried out here in a deserted gravel pit was going to find it suspicious enough to investigate the trunk ... or to call the police, who would do it.
No one in Haven would give a rip one way or another. They have concerns more pressing than cars buried in gravel pits right now. And if someone from town did happen to find it, calling the police is the last thing they'd do. That would mean outsiders, and we don't want any outsiders in Haven this summer, do we? Perish the thought!
So she wasn't in the trunk. Simple logic. QED.
Maybe the people who did this didn't have your sterling powers of logic, Gard.
That was a crock of shit, too. If he could see a thing from three angles, the Haven Quiz-Kids could see it from twenty-three. They didn't miss a trick.
Gardener backed to the edge of the hood on his knees and jumped down. Now he was aware of his scraped, burning hands. He would have to take a couple of aspirin when he got back and try to conceal the damage from Bobbi in the morning - work-gloves were going to be the order of the day. All day.
Anne wasn't in the car. Where was Anne? In the shed, of course; in the shed. Gardener suddenly understood why he had come out here - not just to confirm a thought he had plucked from Bobbi's head (if that was what he had done; his subconscious mind might simply have fixed on this as the handiest place to get rid of a big car quick), but because he had needed to make sure it was the shed. Needed to. Because he had a decision to make, and he knew now that not even seeing Bobbi change into something which was not human was enough to force him into that decision - so much of him still wanted to dig the ship out, dig it out and put it to use - so much, so very much.
Before he could make the decision, he had to see what was in Bobbi's shed.
5
Halfway back he stopped in the cold, slippery moonlight, struck by a question -why had they bothered to hide the car? Because the rental people would report it missing and more police would turn up in Haven? No. The Hertz or Avis people might not even know it was missing for days, and it would be longer still before the cops traced Anne's family connection here. At least a week, more like two. And