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  “Speaking of the Toe, i.e., Quigley,” Big Otto said in a tone designed to include only Stu Farmer and Gary Leach, “I understand old man Stark tromped up to the Quigley work site this afternoon and gave those scabs a piece of his mind.”

  They’re not exactly scabs, Stu considered observing, but instead opted for the less inflammatory: “I thought we were talking football here.”

  “Game’s over, Stu. Time to stop stewing.”

  “Yuck, yuck.”

  “You’re the one’s always yammering about his hairdo … ’Scuse me—‘hairstyle.’ Maybe we can spend the next few hours talking about your ponytail?”

  It was Gary who interrupted this familiar exchange. “I heard the same thing about Stark,” he grumbled while he polished off his beer. “Who woulda figured? But it’s gonna take more than one creaky old man to set those bozos straight.”

  “Maybe,” Gunston answered, “but don’t forget he was in construction for a long time. He knows what it’s like to lose a gig to out-of-town contractors.”

  “Out-of-town?” Gary demanded. “How about out-of-the-damn-country? That crew is all from Italy or Germany or someplace like that.”

  “That, too … but the general contractor’s American. From up north somewhere. A Mainiac, or something … I tried to score the electrical on that addition after they get it up … All I got was a snooty, ‘I’ll keep you in mind’ …”

  “Bum,” Stu and Gary groused in unison.

  “You got that right, gents … But what I’m sayin’ is, Stark’s as steamed as we all are about this setup, and he can be a tough old dog. You guys are too young to remember him in the old days.”

  “Hah, that’s a laugh,” Stu countered. “All he cares about is that little church—and the fact that they’re runnin’ back-hoes on Sundays and that he can’t hear himself sing the songs …”

  “Hymns,” Big Otto said.

  “Whatever.”

  “Another round?” Eddie asked as he removed the three empty Miller Lite bottles.

  “Yeah, sure … This one’s on me.” Gary tossed a ten-dollar bill on the bar, and waited for Eddie to move off toward the other customers. “So, what are you sayin’, Otto? That Stark’s aimin’ to throw a monkey wrench—?”

  “I’m just telling you that there’s a lot of folks around here that wouldn’t be too heartbroken if those clowns at the Quigley place disappeared—and some locals took over their jobs.”

  “Whoa … whoa … whoa,” said Stu. “What do you mean by ‘disappeared’?”

  Gunston gazed at him; his bushy mustache quivered with droplets of beer. “What I’m sayin’ is this: If you and me and Gary here was to decide to do something that ‘persuaded’ the contractor up there that he should be hiring local folks … well, I don’t suspect we’d be gettin’ too many complaints from the goody-goods at the church. Don’t forget that our good ‘constable’ goes there, too—sometimes.”

  Stu studied the bottle in his hands. “What are you thinkin’ of doing?”

  Big Otto looked down the bar before answering. “Like I said, Stew, I’m not talkin’ about me, so forget the you stuff. I’m talking about us. This has got to be an ‘all for one, one for all’ deal. I’m not stickin’ my neck out unless I know you guys are with me on this.”

  Gary nodded his head, and after a quiet moment said, “Okay, I’m in.”

  “In on what?” Eddie asked as he sauntered over. “You guys starting a pool for next week’s game?”

  “Ahh … Not exactly. We were just talking about the geeks working on the old Quigley place,” Stu said.

  Gunston rolled his eyes.

  Eddie folded his arms over his chest, taking a stance much like one he might take if someone made a pass at Tina—but there was no twinkle of humor in his eye. He gave Stu a tight-lipped smile and said, “Greeks.”

  “Huh?”

  “They’re Greeks, not geeks.”

  “Greeks, geeks, what’s the difference?”

  “You want to tell him, Otto, or should I?”

  Big Otto shook his head. “Stu, Eddie’s last name is Apollo.”

  “Yeah …? So? Who doesn’t know that?”

  “His family comes from Greece.”

  Stu stared at Eddie, then looked back at Otto. He was no more enlightened than he’d been before. “So?”

  “So, Eddie is telling us the guys working the Quigley job are from Greece … like Eddie.”

  A light bulb finally flashed on in Stu’s brain. “Well, hell, Eddie, you don’t talk weird like they do. How was I supposed to know you came from someplace other than the good old U.S.A.? Anyway, I thought those guys were from something like … like Italy or something … Well, hell, now that I think on it, Apollo sounds like an I-talian name … Ends with an ‘o’ and all …”

  A gravelly groan sounded deep in Eddie’s throat. “Keep an eye on your friend here, Otto.” He made a point of hitting the “o” at the end of Otto; then he moved down to the other end of the bar.

  “You know what, Stu?” Gunston said. “You’re about as brain-dead as that bottle of beer in your hand.”

  “Come on, big guy, how was I supposed to know Eddie was Greek?”

  “Greek, schmeek, that’s besides the point. If we’re going to make some ‘adjustments’ in personnel on that Quigley job, we’ve got to keep it to ourselves. You can’t just go blabbin’ about what we’re up to here. Get it?”

  “Absolutely,” Gary piped in. “You gotta learn to keep your mouth shut, Stu.”

  “Okay, okay … What’s the plan?”

  Big Otto took a long, slow swig from his beer. It served to get the undivided attention of the other two men. After setting the bottle back on the bar, he glanced right, then left, to be certain he wouldn’t be overheard. “Alright … Now … these guys are working on Sundays, right?”

  Stu nodded. “Where are you going with this?”

  “Why do you think that is, Stew?”

  “They don’t go to church,” was Stu’s triumphant answer.

  “Are you a churchgoer, Stu?”

  “… No.”

  “Do you work on Sundays?”

  “Ahhh …”

  Being a mason, the answer to Otto’s question was a simple one for Gary. “Look, Stu, these guys are behind the eight ball; they have to finish digging those foundations before the ground freezes. Actually, they need to get their cinderblock or stone set in there before the real cold weather sets in. Mixing mortar in twenty degrees isn’t happening.”

  “Right,” Otto said. “Now, all we have to do is stop that backhoe from digging for … say a week, maybe two … three at the outside … and that job’s on hold till spring. Nobody’s doin’ nothin’.”

  Stu seemed to give this some very serious thought. Finally he said, “And that gives us all winter to figure out what our next move is.”

  “Now you’re cookin’.”

  “So, the way I figure it, there’s two ways we can go with this,” Gary said. “We can either incapacitate the backhoe … or we can incapacitate the backhoe operator … right, Otto?”

  “I think we’d better pick up this conversation back at my place.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The Taneysville post office was housed in what had originally been built as a combination dwelling and commercial property. Except for the blue and red government lettering above the door, the ramped access for persons with disabilities, and the steel letterbox outside, it still retained its homelike feel: weathered brown shingles, windows with white trim, shutters also painted white, a steeply pitched roof from whose eaves snow and icicles draped themselves each winter.

  The interior was nearly as eclectically cozy as the exterior. A wall divided what had been the original parlor of the house. Cut into the wall was a lockable door (rarely even closed) behind which the two postal workers labored, a single window for picking up mail, and a bank of personal postboxes with antiquated combination locks and brass numbers—the largest being 193.

 
If there was community news to share or spread, Taneysville’s post office was the place to do it. And on this Monday morning, as was natural, it was overflowing with gossip. The babble of voices almost overcame the sound of construction blaring down upon the town from the Quigley place. Almost, but not quite.

  “… they say that John Stark went up there and confronted the contractor. Got real het up—”

  “That’s old John all right … Well, he wouldn’t be the first one to complain, and he darn sure won’t be the last—”

  “And—?” A third voice joined the discussion.

  A fourth speaker weighed in. “You hearin’ anything different outside than you did yesterday—or the day before that? Whatever Stark did or said, they’re still busy diggin’. They should be in China in a few days!”

  “What really gets my goat,” a fifth person ventured in a tense and edgy tone, “is that none of the site work is goin’ to us here in town. It’s all out-of-state—”

  “If you don’t count the lunchtime sandwiches served up at Hoffmeyer’s—”

  “Well, what good does a bunch of takeout do the rest of us?” was the aggrieved rejoinder. “Those sales just fill Milt Hoffmeyer’s big pockets—”

  “Hey, c’mon, now. Milt’s not the problem. He’s just earnin’ a livin’, same as—”

  “I’m not sayin’ Hoffmeyer’s wrong to take their money … and I’m not sayin’ he isn’t. Alls I’m sayin’ is that we’re gettin’ diddly from this. Plain diddly.” The speaker’s mood was turning uglier by the second. He thrust a slip of yellow paper toward Clarice, the postmistress, as he spoke. “This was in my box, Clarice … Item too big, the notice says.”

  She didn’t bother to look at the yellow paper or at the man staring through her window. The postmistress sorted the mail and placed it in each box; she knew every resident of Taneysville and nearly every facet of their lives: whose kids were writing home, whose weren’t; who kept being suckered into magazine subscription lotteries, and who gave away their hard-earned dollars to every charitable request that came down the pike; she even knew whose bills were paid on time—and who required supplemental warnings. “Your wife picked it up already, Frank. It wasn’t a single item, but that’s the only official card we’ve got. Nope, it was a whole bunch of catalogs. Gift-type stuff and clothes. I couldn’t squeeze ’em all into the box.”

  She took the yellow card, and looked beyond him to the next person in line while Frank started stalking away, head lowered in sudden rage, his slim black beard working around unspoken oaths. “Where does she think the cash for that junk comes from?” he demanded of the floor. “Aren’t I doing the best I can …? Don’t she know money don’t grow on trees …?” He slammed a greasy baseball cap on his slicked-backed hair and stormed out the door while the others, who were already crowded into the room, moved quickly out of his way.

  “Well!” one portly woman announced in the silence that followed his departure. “I always said that girl shouldn’t have married a Bazinne. Frank’s been a bad apple all his life, and age hasn’t mellowed him a lick.”

  “And his father before him,” another woman responded.

  “Amen to that.”

  Additional comments on the Bazinne family began filling the room.

  “Never were good neighbors …” one elderly man intoned. “You remember that old hound I kept—”

  “The one that never shut up?”

  “That’s the one. A good old dog. Kept away strangers—”

  “Really? What kind of strangers do you get out your way, Hugh?” one speaker teased.

  The owner of the dog pointedly ignored the jibe and resumed his tale. “You remember? All of a sudden, she up and died—”

  “Now that you mention it, I do recall that. You said you thought that dog had been given poison—”

  “Still do. And I think the culprit was Frank—”

  “Well, his wife never does look well … pinched and gray around the eyes—”

  “When she even shows her face—”

  “When, indeed—”

  “Well, all I can say is that she was a pretty girl before she took up with Frank. I always thought she could have made something of herself. She and my daughter were—”

  “And how is your daughter doing, Annie?”

  But this conversation was also interrupted by the arrival of May Hoffmeyer, who smiled at the assemblage as she always did: rain or shine or snow or summer drought.

  “I heard John Stark went up to the Quigley place yesterday,” the person nearest her said. “They say he was mighty peeved. Aimed to make them stop all the digging, is how I heard it.”

  May shook her head; her smile turned rueful. “Milt told me the same thing. He can be a stubborn man, John can. Once he takes to a notion, you can’t stop him. Never could.”

  “Does Milt have any idea what happened up there?”

  “Not a one … But my guess is that they’re going to keep digging on Quigley’s hill come hell or high water. I guess we’re just going to have to learn to cope with—” May’s words died in her throat. Every head spun toward the windows; no one spoke; instead, they were all busy listening.

  “What’s that …?” a voice finally ventured.

  “They’ve stopped digging. That backhoe at Quigley’s, it’s stopped. Goodness, you can hear a pin drop!”

  “Kinda like the old days, ain’t it?”

  CHAPTER 6

  “What is it?” Nikos shouted in his native Greek the moment the roar of his backhoe subsided.

  “Bones. It looks like bones,” Taki replied, also in Greek but in a far more subdued tone. He was on his knees digging with his hands in the freshly turned dirt.

  “Hey, hey, I told you guys to speak English when you’re on this site,” the foreman and general contractor, Sean Reilly, barked as he approached the backhoe. “You know how many looky-loos we’ve been getting up here … that old guy yesterday, those other clowns last week. So, let’s remember to use English, okay? We’re going to end up with some serious accidents if we don’t know what the heck we’re saying to each other …”

  Nikos and Taki stared at their boss but didn’t answer.

  “Okay, what’s the holdup, Nikos? Who told you to shut this baby down?”

  “Taki thinks he saw something.” Nikos pointed toward the backhoe’s bucket, where Taki was carefully removing small stones from the earth beneath it.

  “You’d better be looking for gold down there, Taki, that’s all I can say,” Sean grumbled. “We’ve got rain coming in tomorrow and I can’t afford any more delays around here.” He jumped into the shallow pit and shook his head. What was intended to be the basement for the addition was less than four feet deep. The combination of inclement weather and the rocky New England landscape had forced the excavation to take three times as long as Sean had anticipated—a fact that had strained to the limit his relationship with the property’s new owner.

  “Come on, Taki,” he said, resting a forearm on the backhoe and peering around the bucket, “what the hell are you doing down there? Let’s let Nikos get back to work.”

  “There’s bones down here, Sean.”

  “So what are you? A dog, all of a sudden? Who cares?”

  Taki lifted a bone, about ten inches in length, and handed it to Sean.

  “So?” Sean said, looking the bone over. “Probably a deer or something.” He waved the bone toward Nikos. “Fire that backhoe up. Let’s get back to work.” He placed the bone under his arm, clapped his hands three times, then clawed his way out of the pit, holding the bone in his left hand.

  “I don’t think it’s a deer, Sean,” Taki called back to him.

  “Then a horse, a cow. Who cares? It’s ancient. I mean look at it. Probably been down there for a hundred years … This was a farm, for pete’s sake. There’s probably lots more animal skeletons lying around—”

  Suddenly Taki let out a small, startled yelp, stood quickly, and genuflected.

  Nikos jumped
from the backhoe and trotted toward him. “What is it, my friend?” Again, he spoke in Greek.

  “In English … in English … Come on, you two. You know the rules.”

  Nikos placed his hand on Taki’s back and glanced at the cleared area. “You better take a look at this, Sean. This is no horse or deer.”

  Sean slid back down into the hole and joined the other men. When he saw what they’d found he dropped the bone he’d been holding like a hot iron. He then walked around them and bent down to get a closer look. What he saw was the top half of a human skull sticking out from the loosened dirt. The backhoe seemed to have crushed a portion of it. “Damn,” he said as he stood. He turned to face Nikos and Taki. They both took a step backward.

  “Probably an Indian … Native American … whatever,” Sean said as he dusted his hands off on his jeans. “No telling how long he’s been down here.” He sat down into the bucket of the backhoe. “Whoa boy … I’ve got to think for a minute. This could mess up everything …” He rubbed a dirty hand across his forehead and the three men were silent for several long minutes. “Okay,” Sean finally said, “here’s the plan: Taki, I want you to go keep an eye on the other guys. I don’t want any of the crew to know about this besides the three of us. I don’t care what you tell them, just don’t let them come down here for twenty minutes or so, okay?”

  Taki nodded and climbed out of the dig. Sean turned his attention to Nikos.

  “Alright, Nikos, we’ve got to get rid of this stuff. And we’ve got to get it out of here without anyone seeing us. I want you to finish digging it up with the backhoe. Then smash the bones with the bucket as best you can—enough so that no one can figure out what the hell it is. Especially the skull—that’s the first thing these guys will recognize. One of ’em might even want to take it home for Hallowe’en … I’ll bring my truck around; you can drop the load into the bed; and I’ll dump it in the lake or somewhere tonight.”