Daddy's Gone a Hunting

61

Sal Damiano, the foreman of the cleanup crew, made an early decision on Wednesday morning that fixing the sinkhole in the pavement would wait until the job of hauling off the rubble of the complex was completed.

Once again, broken slabs that had once formed walls, chunks of machines that had fashioned fine-grained mahogany and maple into furniture, battered cans of oil that had been used to keep the museum antiques from drying out, were systematically lifted by forklifts and dropped into Dumpsters.

When Jose Fernandez had arrived home the evening before, he had opened his computer and looked up the Connelly complex on the Internet. Sitting in the kitchen of the four-room apartment in the housing development near the Brooklyn Bridge, he had told his mother about what he was researching.

“Mom, take a look at the pictures of that museum, the way it was until the explosion. That furniture must have been worth a fortune. They called that room the Fontainebleau bedroom. The real Fontainebleau was where Marie Antoinette slept before the French Revolution.”

Jose’s mother, Carmen, turned from the stove and looked over his shoulder. “Too fancy. Too much trouble keeping it clean. Who’s Marie Anter-”

“Antoinette. She was a French queen.”

“Good for her. One hundred thousand dollars in student loans and you’re clearing trash that used to be expensive furniture.”

Jose sighed. It was a familiar refrain. He knew it would have been smarter to get a business degree, but there was something in his DNA that had made him want to know everything he could about ancient history. I’m still glad I studied it, he thought. I just wish I didn’t have all these loans. But I’ll get a teaching job someday. He was already going to City College on weekends to get a master’s degree to teach Spanish. He knew he’d make it. And his student loans were a fact of life. He’d pay them the same way he’d pay off a mortgage or a car.

The only problem was that he didn’t have a house or a car.

But for some reason, all day Wednesday, as he shoveled and hauled debris at the Connelly complex site, the sinkhole kept capturing his imagination. In ancient times, new cities were built on top of the ruins of the old ones that had been devastated by warfare or floods or fire.

During the summers of his junior and senior years in college, he had walked and hitched his way through the Middle East and Greece. When he was twelve, he had read a book about Damascus and he remembered how excited he’d been when he finally arrived there. At that moment, he had whispered to himself the first words of that book: “Damas, Damascus, oldest city in the world, city upon a city…”

Then, the next summer when he was in Athens, he had learned that, even with all the archeological excavations that had already been done, as they had started to widen the streets to prepare for the Olympics, they had uncovered another layer of settlements from ancient times.

I must be losing it, Jose thought, as he hauled and carried and pushed and pulled in his area of the cleanup. I’m comparing a sinkhole in a parking lot in Long Island City with places like Damascus and Athens.

But at five o’clock, as the tired crew gratefully wrapped up for the day, he could no longer resist the impulse to take a closer look at the sinkhole. It was almost dark but there was a flashlight in the truck. He got it and started to walk to the rear of the parking lot.

From behind him, Sal called, “Are you planning to walk home, Jose?”

Jose smiled. Sal was a nice guy. “Just want to take a quick look over there.” He pointed to the sinkhole.

“Well, be sure to make it quick if you’re riding back with me.”

“I will.” Breaking into an easy jog, Jose covered the distance in seconds. As Jack Worth had done hours earlier, he stepped over the orange tape and, careful not to get his weight too close to the edge, switched on the flashlight and pointed it down.

It was not the medallion on the necklace that he noticed first. Even through the grime he could still make out the engraving on it.

Tracey.

It was the sight of strands of long hair still attached to the skull of the skeleton that made him too numb to move or even call out. The incongruous memory of a high school biology class flashed through Jose’s brain. He remembered the teacher saying, “Even after death, hair and nails continue to grow.”