Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

In the Hole by Peter Sellers

2001’s EQMM Readers Award winner, Peter Sellers, is back with his first short story since the award-winning “Avenging Miriam” (12/01). This one was inspired, he tells us, by his experience building decks. Mr. Sellers lives in Toronto, Canada, where he makes his living in the advertising business as a creative director. He is also the editor of several mystery short story anthologies.

Thomas had just finished a job laying asphalt with two guys called Pig Eye and Larry. They had resurfaced the parking lot of a tiny strip mall that hardly anyone used. Thomas thought that the owner would have been better off tearing the place down. He kept that to himself, however. Money was money, and he was in a bit of a hole at the moment, so any job was a good job.

Neither Thomas nor Larry actually knew anything at all about how to do the work required. They figured that was not a problem since Pig Eye claimed to have laid more asphalt than whores. They let him be the boss and did what he said.

Thomas could not figure out how Pig Eye had come to that name. Pigs, as far as Thomas knew, had tiny hard eyes. Pig Eye’s were wide and slightly bulging, as if he were in a constant state of surprise. When no better reason came to him, Thomas figured whoever had named Pig Eye was being sarcastic.

The job took three hot, hard days, and when they were finished Thomas looked at the patchy, uneven surface and reckoned that if Pig Eye had done as much laying as he claimed, most of those women must have been left highly unsatisfied.

The man who owned the plaza thought so, too, because after yelling at them for some time about what lousy excuses for pavers they were, he said he would pay half what he owed.

“Well, we never claimed to be any damn pavers,” Thomas pointed out. “You asked us to do the job and we did. We never said we were competent.”

That cut no ice with the owner and they walked away with precious little to show for aching muscles, dozens of smarting burns, and shoulders peeling from the sun. They conferred briefly about whether or not they should get a lawyer and sue for the rest of their wages. Pig Eye claimed that he could handle the case himself, come to that. After all, he had been inside more courtrooms than courtesans. That settled it right there. They kissed the money goodbye and went to a tavern.

They found an old-fashioned place with only Molson Ex on tap, served in ten-ounce glasses at a price ripped-off asphalt spreaders could afford. They took turns calling for rounds, holding up fingers to show the waiter how many to drop.

The more they drank, the more Pig Eye talked about his life. He had done that pretty much nonstop for the three days they had worked. He kept yacking away no matter how hot it got. At the same time, Larry never opened his mouth. He didn’t even seem to do that to drink. It was as if the beer were absorbed through his upper lip.

Thomas had met Pig Eye and Larry in a beer hall such as this one. Pig Eye had been proclaiming, in a loud voice, the merits of Canadian football. As he extolled names like Cookie Gilchrist, Royal Copeland, and Sam Etcheverry, a horde of NFL fans booed and threw French fries, salt shakers, and the odd ashtray at him. Thomas admired his courage if not his wisdom. Larry was right there, too, saying nothing, but keeping a watchful eye on the proceedings. He tried to protect Pig Eye by knocking away the most harmful projectiles.

When at last Pig Eye had given up and sat down with a cry of “Philistines!” Thomas went over to talk with him about it. He, too, was an admirer of the Canadian game, having played it in high school and for two years at college before leaving to seek the greener pastures that had eluded him ever since.

Pig Eye must have been sixty, his face pruned up by life and hard work in the sunshine. Larry was maybe half that, strong, tireless, and seemingly willing to do whatever Pig Eye told him. The three of them ended up doing a few small jobs, with the asphalting being the biggest. Thomas was hard-pressed to think of a time when Larry was ever far from Pig Eye. Certainly he was never out of earshot.

After about an hour, the smell of hot asphalt was starting to fade. Thomas got up to go to the men’s room as much to get away from Pig Eye’s blather for a few moments as out of necessity. When he came back, there was something radically different about the bar. It was quiet. Pig Eye had stopped talking, and not just long enough to draw breath, either. Nobody in the bar was saying anything. When Thomas looked where everyone else was looking, he understood why.

The woman standing in the doorway was the kind you dreamt about at two in the afternoon, when the heat of the steaming asphalt felt as if it would boil the flesh right off you. When the rake you were using to smooth down the blacktop felt as if it was made of pig iron, you started to imagine where you’d rather be. Usually anywhere would do. For Thomas it was always with a woman like this one: curvy, slender, dark hair to her shoulders with a wisp of it falling across one dark eye.

She moved from the doorway into the bar. Thomas recalled a line from a cheap detective novel he’d read once: “She walked the way money would if it had legs.” He had always liked the line, purple though it was. Now he knew what it meant. Halfway to the bar, she turned and looked at Thomas. Her gaze was direct and confident. It didn’t faze her a bit, Thomas realized, being in here and being ogled by men who had not been socialized to pretend they weren’t staring.

“I’m looking for someone who wants to do a job,” she said. Her voice had a hint of that smoke-and-whiskey sound that suddenly made a jazz song start playing in Thomas’s head.

“We’re all working men, here,” he said.

She looked around and then back at him with an amused smile. “Working on what?” she asked. “Your fifth beer?”

Thomas shrugged. “It’s a union thing.”

“Then perhaps I’m in the wrong place. I need someone non-union.”

She and Thomas looked at one another steadily. Finally Thomas said, “I don’t mind being a scab.”

Sitting at the bar, Thomas had another beer. She perched on the stool next to him and looked perfectly at home. Up close, it didn’t take long to realize that her style and self-assurance were learned. She could walk into a place like this, no sweat, because she’d done it before. More than once, Thomas reckoned.

“So tell me about the job.”

She sipped some kind of colored drink that she’d had to coach the bartender on how to make. “First, tell me, if you don’t mind scabbing, are you prepared to do something illegal?”

Thomas smiled and shook his head. “I knew it had to be something like that,” he said. “You’ve got yourself the wrong boy, darling. If you want to lead some poor sap around by his pecker and get him so dewy-eyed that he thinks you love him, and then get him to whack your old man so you can make off with the money, that’s your business. But I’m not so naive, baby, not by a long chalk.” He slipped off the barstool. It was too bad. She was good-looking, all right. He started walking back to where Pig Eye and Larry sat, still watching, Pig Eye still silent.

“I admire your ethics,” the woman said. “But you misunderstand me.”

He turned back to her. “Do I?”

“Yes. It’s nothing nearly so melodramatic. I need to have a large deck and hot-tub enclosure built. And I want someone who’s prepared to do it without bothering about a building permit.” She smiled pleasantly. “I’m prepared to pay well. But if that will compromise your morality, I understand.”

Thomas was very clear in his own mind on what he would and would not do. He had always thought building permits for jobs like that were stupid. “How much?” he asked.

“How do I know you’ll do good work?”

Thomas pointed over to Pig Eye and Larry, sitting side by side, slack-jawed. “They’re my references. In fact, if the job’s big enough, you may want both of them, too.”

“Are they relatives of yours?”

“No, just associates.”

She shook her head. “I only have the budget for one.”

“It’s me, then. What’s the address?”

She gave him the details about where to be when, and when he asked for an advance, she hesitated only briefly before handing him one hundred dollars. “My name’s Mary,” she said. “I’ll see you on Tuesday.”

Thomas went back to his friends. “I got a little job,” he said. “Take me a week, tops.”

Pig Eye was finally ready to talk again. “Woman like that? Take you more than a week. I knew a woman looked like that once. Getting over her took me a lifetime.”

“Yeah, well.” Thomas did not wish to get Pig Eye started on recounting his romantic entanglements. He dropped fifty dollars on the table. “Get yourselves laid, boys. On me.” As he headed for the door he figured that was not how the money would be spent, but at least his heart was in the right place. He went back to his room, hoping nobody was in the shared bathroom so he could shower and shave.

Mary lived in exactly the kind of house that Thomas had imagined. It was a large stone place with a curved drive and it took almost two minutes to walk from the road to the front door. Mature trees shrouded the house from the street. Thomas had bought himself a watch with part of the other fifty to make sure he was on time. He liked to be punctual, and prided himself on his ability to keep time in his head. He got the sense, however, that the margin for error on this job was thin, and the money was too good to risk.

Thomas expected some butler from central casting to answer the door and was surprised when Mary did.

“Jeeves have the day off?” he asked.

“I don’t believe in servants,” she said.

“Just scabs,” he replied with a smile.

“Only if they’re not insolent.” She stepped out of the house and shut the door. “This way.” She took him out back and showed him the job site.

The backyard, like the front, was wide, deep, and secluded, with more of the same big trees. At least one tree’s worth of dressed lumber was neatly piled behind the house along with several Sonotubes, concrete premix, and several pounds of nails. Leaning against the stack of lumber was a clamshell auger.

“What’s that for?” Thomas asked.

“I thought you knew about doing this kind of thing. It’s for digging the post holes.”

“What I meant was, where’s the power auger?”

“There isn’t one. This is better for you. The work is very Zen.” When he gave her an arch look, she shrugged lightly and added, “So I’m told. It’s the way my husband wants it, anyway.”

Thomas set down the tools he had brought with him. There was a hammer that he liked the heft of, a Lufkin tape measure, and a plumb rule that had been his grandfather’s and of which he was particularly proud. Then he picked up the auger and gauged it. “Your husband at work?”

“He’s out of town,” she said.

Thomas nodded, wondering how long before the come-on started. He was no fool, and it wasn’t as if a job that started in the backyard hadn’t ended up between the sheets before. Oh well, he reasoned, it would come when it came. “Where are the plans?”

She unfolded a sheet of homemade drawings. They seemed to be to scale and he figured they would work, although he usually just winged it and hoped for the best. “All right. I better get down to it.”

“If you need anything, I’ll be inside,” Mary said, but Thomas had already turned his attention to the job.

It took more than an hour to measure and stake the layout. It was going to be a big deck, thirty feet wide across part of the back of the house and twenty-four feet deep. One corner was to be trimmed at an angle with three steps leading down to what would be a flagstone patio. Thomas wondered if they would want him to install that, too. He hated working with flagstone, but he would do it if asked. Or perhaps he would subcontract the job to Pig Eye, who had probably done more flagstone than farmers’ wives. The hot-tub area was at the far right as you stood with your back to the house, the structure to be elevated from the rest of the deck, with built-in benches on three sides. This, Thomas decided as he paused to look at the framework of string, was going to take more than a week. He picked up the auger.

The first holes were tough. The soil was largely clay, heavy and wet and clinging to the blade of the auger. Thomas lifted the device as high as he could, standing on tiptoe, and drove it into the ground, jarring his shoulders. He pulled the lever, closing the machine’s jaws, then muscled the load of dirt out of the hole, dropped it, and went through the routine again. He had to go down three feet to be sure the concrete would be below the frost line and the cold weather would not cause the deck to heave. If a job was worth doing, Thomas thought, and he cursed his way through the third hole.

After ninety minutes, his shoulders ached and his shirt was off. As he finished the fifth hole, Thomas looked up. Mary was standing by the pile of lumber holding a bottle of beer and an empty glass. “I thought you could use this,” she said.

“Thanks.” She was wearing a halter top and a short denim skirt with plain brown sandals. Her limbs looked toned and smooth. Thomas tried to avoid looking at her, sensing that only trouble could come of it.

“Do you want the glass?” she asked. Thomas could feel the sweat rolling down his chest and arms, and he knew he looked good, the work causing his sinews to stick out. He could feel her looking at him in a way that was more than casual.

“It comes in a glass,” he said, and drank half of it without coming up for air. The second half went almost as quickly, and then, with another “Thanks,” he turned back to the job. A couple of minutes later, when he risked a quick glance around, she was gone.

Halfway through the fourteenth hole, Thomas’s new pawnshop watch told him it was almost time to quit. The going had gotten easier now. The soil seemed looser and not as wet. Thomas figured he could finish the rest the next morning and then start mixing concrete. He lifted the auger and drove it down, pulled the handle, lifted, and released. Again, lift, drive, lift, release. And a third time. He lifted and drove the auger down. It stopped with a jolt that nearly shook it out of his hands.

Damn. Just what he needed at the end of the day. Thomas had been pleased by how few rocks there’d been so far: just some incidental stones that were easily dealt with. But as he poked around the bottom of the hole with the blade of the auger this rock felt like a mother. That seemed odd, because it had not sounded that big. There was more of a dull thud when he hit it, and not the usual sharp clang. Thomas fired the auger down a couple more times, from different angles, in case he was wrong. But no; the rock felt big and immovable. He would have to dig around it and pry it up.

Thomas lifted the auger out and tossed it aside. He knelt beside the hole and reached down to the bottom with a trowel, scraping away some loose dirt. Then, with his hand, he felt around the edge to try and get a fix on how big the rock was. There was something odd about it, as if something soft were covering it — something soft and loose. Thomas looked down into the hole and at first wasn’t sure if he had just been working in the sun too long. He reached in gingerly and pushed more dirt aside. There was no mistake. It wasn’t a rock at all.

Thomas sat back on a pile of dirt and thought for a minute or two. The sweat dried on his body, and he wiped himself with his shirt before he put it back on. Thomas didn’t know much about corpses. He’d gone out for a time with a woman who worked at a funeral home and who had shown him a couple up close, but that was a different thing. The body in the hole was fairly new, that much was certain. The hand and forearm were obviously a man’s. Who was it? Who put him there? There was only one reasonable conclusion to which Thomas could come. Mary, Mary, how does your garden grow? He knelt at the side of the hole, shoveled a foot of dirt back in, and straightened up the site. He had never been one for leaving tools and equipment scattered around. That was unprofessional. He did the work slowly, taking time to square the stacks of lumber, thinking all the while about what his discovery might mean, and what he was going to do about it.

Finally, Thomas walked around to the front door and rang the bell. Mary answered, wearing more than she had worn earlier. “I’m gone for the day,” Thomas said.

“It looks like you’ve made good progress,” she said. If she had been looking out the window, Thomas wondered just how much she had seen.

“It’s coming along okay. I’ll be mixing concrete tomorrow.”

“Very good,” she said with an innocuous smile.

“Yeah, and after I get that poured I’ll have to take a day off. Concrete takes about twenty-four hours to cure. Not as good to work on otherwise.”

She seemed to accept this with equanimity. “You’ll be back here Friday, though?” she said.

“As long as it doesn’t rain.”

“Of course.” She was so low-key about the whole thing that Thomas decided to try what he thought was his bombshell.

“Oh yeah. I found a little glitch in the plans.” There was no reaction, so he probed further. “They’re a little off, and I gotta make an adjustment.” He noticed a slight tightening of her eyebrows. “A few of the holes have to be made in different spots than the plans say. Otherwise the support won’t be right.” She pursed her lips and Thomas thought he had hit on something.

After a pause she said, “But if you make these changes the support will be better?”

He nodded. “Absolutely.”

“Fine,” she said, with no hint of concern. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

Thomas went downtown and looked around a couple of places for Pig Eye and Larry, but didn’t see them. In the end, it was just as well. He had some thinking to do and Pig Eye’s constant yapping sometimes made thinking difficult.

For much of the trip Thomas had actually considered calling the cops. Then he began to think that there had to be something better to do than turning Mary in. He was still mulling over the decision when the bartender announced last call.

When he got there the next morning, Mary gave no hint that there was anything amiss. Thomas worked slowly, his mind half on the job and half on the body. There was still no sign of a living husband.

Thomas finished digging the remaining holes, changing the position of each one by six inches or so. After all, he’d told Mary that some adjustments needed to be made and he liked to think he was a man of his word. Sometime in the middle of the morning, Mary brought him a cup of coffee but they didn’t exchange more than a few words.

By noon, all the holes were dug, and Thomas started on the concrete. He ran a hose from a tap that rose from the ground in the middle of one of the garden beds. Then he dumped a bag of premix into a wheelbarrow, added water, and stirred with a spade. As soon as one bag was mixed and shoveled into a footing he started on the next. It was hard work, but good for the shoulders, he told himself.

At one o’clock, Mary brought him sandwiches and a bottle of beer. “Thanks,” Thomas said. He had taken his shirt off again. Dirt was embedded in the cracks of his hands, and concrete dust around his nails. He could have washed up with water from the hose, but he figured this was part of what Mary wanted to see: dirty, sweaty man eating lunch. It was something for her to chew on while the old man was away — or three feet under. Thomas still was not sure what to think.

Mary sat with him while he ate. “You’re coming along well,” she said. “Although it doesn’t look like you had to move the holes around much.”

“It wasn’t as bad as I thought.” Then Thomas decided to try a risky gambit. He figured when he asked her this, two things could happen: She would tell him a lie, or she would tell him to get off her property. Thomas was not averse to gambling. “So how long will your husband be gone?” he asked.

She surprised him. When she started standing up, he figured that was the end of the job. But all she said was, “I’m not sure. He tends to get buried in his work.” Then she went inside again.

The sandwiches stoked Thomas up for the afternoon. In all the holes but one, he filled the Sonotubes three feet deep with concrete. The one with the body at the bottom he just filled with loose earth and put a skin of concrete on top, about two inches thick and easy to lift out. Then he set carport saddles in each of the footings, using a length of two-by-two to make sure they were level. That done, he cleaned up the site again and went to tell Mary he was going.

“And you won’t be back tomorrow, you said.”

“Right. Till it cures. I’ll start building on Friday.”

“Would you like some supper?” she asked.

That took Thomas by surprise, but he made a decision then and there. If that was her husband’s body positioned to support part of the deck — and Thomas had no reason to think it wasn’t — then he had no reason to fear that their meal would be interrupted.

He smiled at her. “Sure,” he said. “I could use a bite.”

The conversation over dinner covered all the bases Thomas had expected. His plan had been to reveal as much truth as seemed prudent and to make up the rest. It was strained at first. Thomas was not used to sitting on a carved wooden chair in a fancy dining room, dealing with more than one fork, drinking wine from cut glass.

“It’s been some time since I saw a tablecloth that wasn’t plastic,” Thomas said. He’d meant it to sound joking, but from Mary’s reaction it must have come out wrong.

“Relax,” she said. “There’s nothing to worry about now.”

Gradually, he did begin to feel easier. He found himself telling more than he had intended about his life and the many things that, like napkin rings and champagne flutes, he had left behind.

Some of her questions bordered on rude, but Thomas had learned long ago not to take things personally. “You’re not a derelict, though?”

He laughed. “I suppose I could have been. But I don’t drink enough for that, I’m not crazy, I bathe regularly, and I shave most mornings. I have a fixed address, even if it’s only a rooming house.”

“How would you like to change that?” she asked. It took a moment for her meaning to sink in.

The next morning, Thomas went out back to check his work. The concrete was curing nicely and all the footings were still level, even the fake one. He had been concerned about how that might fare, but it looked as good as the rest.

Thomas was surprised by how the night had gone, though less by Mary’s invitation that they spend it together than by the things he had told her. In the darkness, more small truths long held private had slipped free.

At the same time, he had not been able to get much information from Mary about her life. He had learned that her husband’s name was Dennis Cuthbertson, who had inherited a lot of money and made still more with some on-line ventures. Right now, Mary claimed Dennis was away exploring the possibilities of a gold mine in Malaysia. Thomas figured that was as good a story as any.

The amount of Dennis in the house was what struck Thomas most as he sat in the dining room — or, for that matter, any other room. Dennis’s presence could be felt everywhere. There were pictures of him in every room, on the mantel above every fireplace, on every bookcase, on every dressing table and nightstand. In all the framed images, there was something artificially sleek about Dennis, and Thomas wondered if he’d had face work done.

In one large room with floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides, the photos of Dennis sat on a baby grand — or, anyway, what Thomas took to be a baby grand. He was not sure he had ever seen one. The house was full of things like that: things that poor people did not own and rich people probably did not use — at least not for anything more than a fancy picture stand.

There was more besides. Walls were adorned with diplomas recognizing Dennis’s accomplishments, letters of thanks from charities acknowledging his invaluable contributions, and articles about him that had been clipped or copied from newspapers and magazines. It was as if someone had created a shrine to Dennis. It was Mary’s way of assuaging her guilt, perhaps. Thomas found the effect oppressive.

He did not take long to convince himself that his suspicions were correct: Mary had done away with Dennis, and now she was having a few laughs, slumming. Thomas imagined rich women did this a lot with men and boys who came to work the garden or clean the pool. This was not a problem for Thomas. He figured he would still get paid for building the deck, and perhaps get a little something more out of it besides. He just had to wait for the right moment to bring it up. “Oh, yeah, baby, I found something out back that, uh, I kinda gotta ask you about.” It wasn’t time for that yet, however.

In the middle of the night, Mary put the proposal to him. “Why don’t you stay here? At least until the job’s done.”

“I didn’t bring anything with me. No clothes.”

“I think I can find something that’ll fit.”

“No toothbrush, either.”

“I’ve got a spare.”

Thomas smiled to himself in the dark, thinking, That was easy.

Work went slowly over the next few days. Thomas decided to build the hot-tub end of the structure first, wanting to maintain access to the body as long as possible. He couldn’t have told anyone exactly why, but he had learned to trust his instincts over the years and there was something nagging at whatever part of the brain got nagged by thoughts like that. There was more to Thomas’s leisurely pace than that, of course. He was smart enough to understand that once the job was done, he would be sent away, and he wanted the situation to last as long as possible.

As the work went on, Thomas realized that he would often forget entirely that the body was there. He would be in the middle of doing something else and his glance would find the short footing. Then the image of the body at the bottom of the hole would come back to him, and he would wonder how long it had been gone. The ability of the human mind to shunt aside unpleasantness is a marvel, he thought.

Five days into the job, Thomas needed more supplies. Mary, or more probably Dennis before he died, had miscalculated the amount of nails required, and Thomas wanted stringers for the stairs instead of building them from scratch. He knew that store-bought stringers could be of doubtful quality, but they would make his job easier.

It was in the parking lot of the lumberyard that Thomas ran into Pig Eye and Larry. The two of them were helping a small-time contractor load his truck. Thomas knew they were there before he saw them, Pig Eye’s familiar high-pitched voice coming from behind the truck.

“Working hard, boys?” Thomas asked as he came up on them.

“Hardly workin’,” Pig Eye replied, looking surprised as ever to see Thomas.

It turned out that Pig Eye and Larry had spent the last few days hanging around at a couple of working-men’s bars and prowling lumberyards, looking for bosses who wanted cheap labor for cash. They had picked up an hour here and two hours there, but nothing to write home about. Today they were a couple of strong backs for a while at twenty bucks a man. “This is the last of it,” Pig Eye said. “No more work today and no prospects for tomorrow.”

Thomas had always believed that good things got passed along and that you were wise to share your good fortune — as long as it cost you little and there was a chance of a bigger payback. As he looked at his two acquaintances, a notion struck him.

“Say, Pig, I got a proposal for you. You could make a couple bucks.”

Pig Eye looked wary, as if he expected to be asked to donate a kidney. “What needs doin’?”

“How are you at building decks?”

Pig Eye laughed. “I’ve nailed more decks than doxies.” Later, back at Mary’s house, Thomas had to look up the meaning of doxy in the Oxford dictionary, but at the time he just grinned and nodded. He’d been around Pig Eye long enough to get the drift.

Thomas laid out his scheme. “Since I been doing good on this deck thing, I thought I’d share the wealth. You cover for me a couple days, I’ll pay you cash. You get fed, too.”

“Me and Larry both?”

Thomas shook his head. “I don’t think she’d go for that. Just one of you, but the pay’s good enough for two.”

Pig Eye looked at Larry and then back at Thomas. “I’ll be the man for the job, then. When it comes to hammers, Larry there has no kind of proper feeling. He misses more often than not. Except if it’s his thumb.”

Larry frowned and looked hurt, but Thomas wasn’t sure if that was because of Pig Eye’s criticism or because he was being squeezed out of work so easily.

“Fine,” Thomas said. He gave Pig Eye the address and told him not to show up before ten. “That’s enough of a day. And I’ll square it with the lady of the house.”

Heading home, which is how Thomas had come to think of the big house with its curtain of cedars, pines, and tamaracks, he felt pleased with himself through and through. He was counting on Pig Eye to do the same kind of job on the deck as he had done on the parking lot. Moreover, Pig Eye did poor work slowly. This would delay the inevitable and actually add more time, because whatever work Pig Eye botched, Thomas would have to make right. Yes, Thomas thought, sometimes life could be just fine.

The next morning, Thomas was pleasantly surprised when Mary announced that she was going out for the day. This was good. It meant there would be no questions about Pig Eye on the job. Even if Mary threw a fit and she forced the situation back to the way it had been, it would still add a day — and you could do a lot in twenty-four hours if you planned it right.

Pig Eye showed up more or less on schedule. Once he had the job in hand, Thomas decided to relax. He made himself some coffee and sat reading the newspaper. When his attention began to waver, he tried watching television, but he could find nothing that captured his interest. He prowled through the house, looking at all the things that Mary and Dennis had accumulated in their life together and that were now hers. The volume and diversity of the stuff fascinated him. It also struck Thomas how quiet the house was. He had not noticed this before. The phone never rang, it seemed, and no one visited. Thomas aside, Mary was always there alone. These things had not fazed Thomas before, he was so full of thoughts of Mary. But now that he was alone, the circumstance settled on him and made him uneasy. There was something bothering him, but he could not put his finger on what it was.

Thomas felt irritable and restless and out of place in the big rich house. He missed working and regretted giving the job to Pig Eye. In the distance, he could hear the sound of Pig Eye driving nails. If he were closer, Thomas was certain he would be able to hear the old man’s constant muttering, for he talked whether there was anyone there to listen or not. Thomas decided to go for a walk.

“I’m going out for a bit,” Thomas said to Pig Eye. “You need anything?”

“A deck of smokes would speed the job along,” Pig Eye replied.

Thomas knew the brand.

Thomas was gone for about an hour and a half. The house was in the kind of neighborhood where people did not duck out to the corner store for a quart of milk when they ran low. You got the chauffeur to drive the maid and they had to travel a mile or more. Some of the houses were so far apart, Thomas figured people drove just to visit the folks next-door.

Thomas walked slowly and, by the route he took, he figured it was more like two miles to the nearest store. With every step the unease tugged at the back of his mind. He picked up the cigarettes, got himself a lemonade to drink on the spot, and bought some chocolate bars to share later with Pig Eye. By the time Thomas started back, the sun was high and the heat was building.

Somewhere between the store and the house, the right course of action came to him. He realized that he could not stay at Mary’s house anymore. There was too much Dennis there and not enough Mary. It was as if she were dead while Dennis’s life raced exuberantly on.

That thought, coupled with the reality of the body at the bottom of the hole, kept flashing before him. It was clear evidence that he couldn’t trust Mary and it put him in mind of the fact that, once the deck was built and she was tired of him, there was nothing to stop her from killing him, too. After all, if she could get away with murdering someone as appreciated and oft-photographed as Dennis, then killing someone like Thomas, consequence-free, would be easy. He had no connections in the world, except maybe to Pig Eye and Larry, and that link tenuous at best.

As Thomas approached the house, he saw Mary’s car parked in front of the closed garage. There was another vehicle beside it, an expensive European car. It was the first car other than hers that Thomas had seen there. He had hoped to be back before she was, so that Pig Eye’s presence would not come as a surprise, but it was too late to do anything about that now. He hoped that her having unexpected company would not complicate matters.

When he met her coming along the pathway from the backyard, he could tell by her face that she was not happy. “Don’t go back there,” she said, her voice just above a whisper.

Thomas took this to mean that she was annoyed about Pig Eye.

“Get out of here,” Mary said. “Now.”

That was a bit much. If she was the kind of woman who would react like this over one old man pounding nails, then to hell with her. He would go, all right. But he was not about to do it without taking the few tools he had brought with him. He did not own many to begin with, and he was damned if he was going to leave them to people who already had more than they could figure out a use for. There was money coming, too.

“I’m going back there to see Pig Eye,” Thomas said, “and get my stuff.”

“No, you’re not,” she said. Her eyes were a little wild and looked to be pooling with tears. Then she struck at him, swinging her fist sideways awkwardly, the knuckles towards him. This startled Thomas, but he had been struck at before by stronger and more gifted fighters, and he parried the blow easily. He could not fathom why she was being so unreasonable. Something told him there was more to Mary’s reaction than just bringing Pig Eye onto the job.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked. “I wanted a day off and Pig Eye wanted work.” He felt annoyed that he had to explain. “He’s okay.”

“No, he’s not,” she said. She began to hit him again, saying, “Go away, go away.”

Thomas ran out of patience. “I know about your husband,” he said. He kept his voice flat and cool, detached so she’d know she couldn’t sway him with her body.

She stood back and stared. “I’ve seen him,” Thomas said. “Out back there.”

She turned in the direction of the yard. He heard her say softly, “Dennis.” It took a second, but suddenly Thomas realized he had heard no hammering since coming back, and he knew Pig Eye could not be finished. The attitude of her body and the back of her head as she looked towards the yard made it seem as if she was expecting a real person to come along, not a ghost. Thomas pushed past her and ran to the yard.

There was no one there. Pig Eye had done some surprisingly good work while Thomas was gone, but it looked as if he had stopped abruptly. A couple of two-by-fours were lying askew by the pile. A package of three-inch nails had tipped over and spilled on the grass. The chop saw had a length of wood lying through it, uncut. And Thomas’s hammer was on its side on the last board to be set in place. Next to the hammer, a nail that had been tapped in partway stood waiting for the finishing blows.

Thomas puzzled over where Pig Eye could have gone. Maybe he was inside using the washroom, but Thomas doubted it, knowing from experience that Pig Eye was more likely to relieve himself behind a tree. Then he heard a man’s voice coming along the drive. At first he assumed it must be Pig Eye, who always talked so much. But once his ear tuned to it, Thomas realized that it was a voice he had never heard. Instinct told him to make himself scarce and get a fix on what was happening. He walked quickly to the garage and slipped behind it. That’s where he found Pig Eye.

Leaning slumped against the garage, Pig Eye looked surprised as always, only this time maybe he really had been. His bulging eyes had glazed over, but hadn’t entirely lost their familiar look. His shirt, blue and threadbare, was now also bloodstained. Thomas did not have time to study the situation closely, but he thought that maybe Pig Eye had been stabbed. However it had been done, someone had killed him. Thomas shook his head, wondering what signals he had missed that had let the situation come to this, and he slipped inside the garage.

Through the door, left open a crack, Thomas could hear the voices moving closer. He heard a man saying, “I’m disappointed in you, Mary. He was older and more scraggly than the ones you usually pick. You never did have much taste.”

Mary’s voice sounded hollow in reply. “I’m sorry. I did my best.”

“Yes, well, I’m used to your best being insufficient.”

“I’m sorry, Dennis.” She sounded miles removed from the confident woman in the bar. Thomas knew life to be that way sometimes, though. He remembered men who had been tough and dependable out in the world, but at home, with the wrong woman, they had turned meek and chewed upon.

As he listened to Dennis belittle her, Thomas felt he ought to do something. However, not knowing if the man was armed made hasty action inadvisable. Thomas waited and thought as the two people outside walked to where Pig Eye lay.

“Let’s get him dealt with,” Dennis said harshly, and Thomas heard the sounds of Pig Eye’s body being shifted and dragged. Suddenly he wondered how many other vagrant bodies were hidden under the lush lawn, lured by work and Mary. It could have been him. He was sure it was meant to be him, if Pig Eye’s good fortune hadn’t turned sour.

Thomas was thinking this over, wondering if Dennis went away for the purpose of having Mary draw a man in, or if the killing was a bonus tacked on to the end of a successful business trip, when he heard a commotion erupt outside. Thomas opened the door wider to capture it.

There was a hard bloody sound that made Thomas queasy, and Mary screamed in a way that even her distant neighbors might be able to hear. Then there was only the sound of Mary sobbing. Thomas left the garage and peered cautiously around the corner, stepping out into the yard when he saw how it was.

Larry was not anywhere near as clumsy with a hammer as Pig Eye had claimed. From the looks of Dennis’s head, Larry’s blows had found the mark each time. Thomas thought that Larry must have liked the heft of the hammer as much as Thomas did himself.

Larry was standing with the hammer in his fist, breathing hard and looking sadly at Pig Eye. Mary was on her knees about ten feet away, sobbing, but the sound was muffled and Thomas saw that she had one hand balled into a fist and half-buried in her mouth.

“Hey,” a voice said.

At first Thomas couldn’t figure out who spoke. It was not until the word was repeated that Thomas understood it was Larry.

“Yeah,” Thomas said.

“Pig Eye told me to meet him here.” Larry spoke slowly and quietly, as if he had to think hard to come up with the words, and then was embarrassed to have made a noise at all. “Said to wait till the job got going good. Said nobody’d mind.” He turned from his friend to the woman. “She owe you money?”

“Yeah.”

Larry dropped the hammer and walked over to where Dennis lay. He fished around and found a wallet, drawing from it a raft of bills. He handed them to Thomas. “Here.” He picked up the hammer again. “Go,” he said.

Thomas hesitated, looking at Mary, whose eyes were still fixed on the ground.

“Go,” Larry said. He looked back and forth from the partly built deck to the kneeling woman. “I got work to finish.”

Thomas looked at the money in his hand. He turned to Mary, who watched him with what might have been hope, fresh tears slipping down her face, sure that he would save her. He understood then that that was what she had done for him. Trying to warn him off and then, when he missed the point, not telling Dennis that the guy he really wanted was hiding in the garage. Now she wanted him to return the favor.

Larry’s eyes had an unfocused glaze to them, the hammer red in his fist. “Go on now,” he said quietly.

Mary didn’t say anything in words, just with her eyes. Thomas looked at the money again, folded it, stuffed it in his pocket. Then he walked to the side of the house and down the driveway towards the street.