Missing Persons

53

Doyle’s excavation was a work of thoughtful engineering.

The length of the subterranean construction wasn’t exactly mind-boggling; the distance between the south side of Doyle’s basement and the north side of the Miller home was only about fifteen feet. And this wasn’t a highway tunnel; the diameter of the mostly round bore ranged from a maximum of about thirty inches a few feet from where it began behind the Spielberg movie screen to as narrow as twenty-four inches or so near the Millers’ house. Parallel tracks of angle iron were embedded in the flat floor of the tunnel all the way from one end to the other. A long string of outdoor holiday lights-white only-were stretched along the entire distance to provide illumination.

The slope of the tunnel-it ran downhill at a steeper angle than I would have expected-was curious to me, but my initial impression was that the slope was deliberate. It appeared that the floor of the tunnel dropped about six or seven feet over its short length. A husky winch was bolted to the outside of Doyle’s foundation wall and a sturdy stretch of conduit connected it to the house’s electrical system. The stout cable from the winch was hooked to one end of an ingenious contraption that was constructed of four sets of skateboard wheels topped with two narrow, interconnected sections of thick plywood, loosely hinged in the middle. The wheels of the makeshift sled fit perfectly into the angle iron tracks that had been set in the tunnel floor.

A flimsy remote-control unit jerry-rigged from a garage-door opener would have allowed Doyle to operate the winch from any location in the tunnel. By climbing prone onto the sled, hanging on, and pressing the remote-control button, Doyle could either slowly extend or retract the cable on the winch, which would either lower the sled farther into the tunnel toward the Millers’ house or pull it back up the slope toward his own house.

Simple. Elegant.

Building the tunnel would have been tedious, no doubt. But if Doyle had managed only six inches of fresh digging a day, he could have completed the excavation in a little over a month. A foot a day and he’d have been done in a fortnight. The dirt that he’d removed from the tunnel was undoubtedly part of the weaving contours and berms of Doyle’s personal backyard water park.

And the snow thing?

Mystery solved.