Probable Claws

19

January 23, 2017

Monday

Square holes cut in the safety walls around the Cloudcroft Building allowed people to watch the progress. Renditions in color of the imaginative Z building covered the high wooden safety walls.

Harry and Marvella peered through two squares.

“This thing is huge,” Harry exclaimed.

“Is. Sean said they must dig out the entire foundation, go down to bedrock, sink in the enormous support beams to about eight feet, fill it in to finally realize the Z shape for the foundation. It’s complicated.” Marvella scanned the heavy machinery for sight of Sean. “Ah, come along, Harry. We need to go to the other side.”

The two hurried along watching for icy spots on the temporary sidewalk. Reaching the two-lane road into the cavernous excavation site, they waited. The heavy machinery was kept in the pit but foremen needed to drive their cars into the area.

Marvella checked her watch. “Ten. He’s good about time.”

Indeed he was.

Her cellphone rang. “Marvella, it’s Sean. Stay where you are. I’ll pick you up.”

Within minutes he drove up the incline in a bespattered Range Rover, the beast Rover not the pretty Velar. He hopped out, opened the door for Marvella first and then the back door for Harry.

“Ladies.” He smiled as he turned around the expensive SUV, drove them down, down, down. “Before you endure the cold, let me explain.” He pointed to the digging. “The basement, the underpinning of this structure, will of course bear five hundred thousand tons of weight, as much as the Twin Towers did. The I-beams will bear a great deal of weight. We’re building this the old way. The Twin Towers were pods affixed to a huge central steel core. When the planes hit, the spokes under the floor crumpled. The floor folded almost like a round filter in a coffee machine.”

“What an awful thing,” Marvella said.

“It’s perhaps the main reason so many people and firefighters were killed. Everything collapsed. Here we have designed supports that transverse the Z. So the ends of the Z sink deep into the diagonal. Other than that this is a conventional structure. A series of crossbeams, squares. It’s still the safest way to build a high building, a true skyscraper.”

“And you will light the top and the bottom?” Marvella had studied the design.

“We’ll use thick translucent glass cladding on top of the Z as well as the bottom. So, for instance, on St. Patrick’s Day the Z will glow in green, an inner and outer outline.”

“Sounds wonderful.” Harry loved the idea.

“One of the advantages of Richmond growing now as opposed to the early twentieth century is we are freed from building big boxes. Even if you cover them in bronze mirrors, they are still big boxes.”

“The Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institute for Contemporary Art opened all this up, don’t you think?” Marvella asked.

“An exciting design and a well-executed one.” He smiled. “It really is my hope that with all the new young people pouring in, and more companies, we will architecturally become one of the most visually interesting cities in America. Come on, ladies. Allow me to escort you through the giant trench.”

They stepped out. Sean led them over to one excavated spot with heavy wooden posts holding up the sides.

“To keep it from caving in?” Harry wondered.

“Right, and to give us a visual checkpoint. This end of the Z is almost finished; it’s much wider than it will eventually become. We thought we knew the earth underneath but there are always surprises.” He pointed to a gray section of this area. “Rock. Solid rock. Hard as the devil to get through even with all the equipment available to us today. We thought the rock was deeper but not in this spot. We need level bedrock for stability. Come on over here. Oh, wait a minute. I forgot. Let’s go back to the Rover.”

They trotted back with him. He reached into the spacious back seat, handing each lady a construction helmet.

“Forgive me.”

Harry put hers on.

Marvella remarked, “Fetching.” Then she clapped her hard hat over her silver hair.

Even with her sheepskin-lined gloves Harry’s hands tingled cold. She jammed her hands in the pockets of her heavy coat.

“How long do you think this part of the work will take?” Marvella asked.

“Mmm, it’s going well. Two more months, if we’re lucky.”

“I can’t thank you enough for inviting us down here, Sean. Harry has looked at the thumb drive of Russian art. She was an Art History major at Smith.”

“What do you think?” he asked as he led them over to where men were using spades for more careful work.

“I was surprised at the high quality and I was also surprised at their foray into modern art before all that was squashed.”

Sean nodded. “And millions of people squashed with it. The Soviet Union only lasted seventy years after all that looting, killing, destruction.”

“Ah, Sean,” Marvella said. “We all look through the shadow of the guillotine.”

Before he could reply, they stood at the edge of another trench. A young man put his foot on the spade, sunk down, lifted up a load of earth.

“What’s that?” Harry, sharp-eyed, pointed to something white exposed when the dirt was removed.

“Keith, hold off a moment. Look at whatever that is.” Sean pointed.

Keith dutifully did what the big boss said, brushed it with his glove. He pulled a pocketknife out of his zipped chest pocket, and began digging carefully, then in earnest. The three watched as he wiggled from the earth a skull, top jaw, no bottom.

Sean immediately hurried next to Keith, who held the skull, and was bewildered and a little spooked.

Harry and Marvella now came over.

“I wonder how long this has been down here.” Sean blinked.

“Well, not too long. This isn’t an indigenous person or a casualty of the war.” Harry pointed to the teeth still intact in the upper jaw. “Silver fillings.”

“Harry, how observant you are,” Marvella exclaimed.

Sean, already on his cellphone, called the city police. Then he clicked off.

“Keith, where’s Tony?” He mentioned the foreman for this entire operation.

Keith lifted his arm, pointing back toward the ramp. Tony, in a Rankin Construction work truck, a brand-new RAM 1500 painted white with the lettering, large, in script.

Sean waved. Tony saw the boss’s Range Rover, then the boss. He parked next to the SUV, got out, moved quickly over to Sean. One didn’t keep a Rankin waiting.

“Boss.”

“Look.” Sean picked up the skull, which Keith had set down on the earth as he had no desire to continue holding it.

“What the…?” Tony whistled.

“Harry, oh, Tony, this is Mrs. Haristeen and Mrs. Lawson. Harry pointed out there are silver fillings in the teeth.”

“So it’s been here at least since silver fillings replaced gold.” Tony knew something about gold fillings because his grandfather flashed gold teeth.

“Better stop work. For now. The police need to get here.”

“Shouldn’t we see if there’s the rest of whoever this is?” Tony sensibly asked.

“That’s police work.”

“You mean we shut this down until they clear everything?” Tony’s face blanched.

Sean nodded. “No choice. Once the police get here, assess the situation, I can make some decisions.”

“Sean,” Marvella quietly said. “Harry and I will leave you. It’s important this comes before anything.”

“Ah.” He turned to Tony. “Drive these two ladies up to the top, will you? No, actually drive them home.”

“No, please,” Marvella insisted. “You are going to need your foreman.”

Once up on the sidewalk again, the two women took a deep breath.

“Harry, your car is at my house. Let’s have a cup of tea.”

As they walked to Marvella’s stately home, built at the end of the nineteenth century, the two discussed who could be under the dirt. A vagrant whom time forgot. A murder victim, come back to claim his revenge. Their imaginations roamed all over the place.

Once at the house, restored by tea, they reviewed everything once more.

Marvella, holding her cup in both hands for the warmth, looked at Harry. “You know, we’re all sitting on someone’s bones.”

—

Speaking of bones, Susan Tucker, Harry’s best friend, had delivered fatback kindling to her grandmother at Old Rawly, the family estate still in Holloway hands. Susan’s grandfather was a Holloway.

Putting the fatback in a huge brass kettle, Susan brushed over her jeans.

Mrs. Holloway’s dog, Duke, chewed on a huge bone used as a doorstop.

“Susan, Duke is dedicated. How many generations of Holloway dogs have chewed that bone?” The eighty-plus very healthy woman smiled. “You know the story.”

“Sort of. When Marcia Garth married Jeffrey Holloway, she brought her corgi. Did I get that right?”

“Since you breed corgis with those bloodlines, yes.” She sat in a wing chair facing the fire.

“The Garths always had corgis. Since the Revolutionary War.”

“Piglet,” Mrs. Holloway said with emphasis. “All I know is Marcia’s corgi, Parson, took this old bone from Cloverfields. How long it was there I don’t know, but your father’s people felt it made an excellent doorstop and so do I.” She was slightly startled when Susan’s cellphone rang. “I hate those things.”

“Forgive me, Gran. It’s Harry.”

“Tell her hello.”

Harry, now on I-64 heading west, told Susan what had just transpired. When the call ended, Susan told her grandmother.

The older woman thought a moment. “Susan, I have known Harriet since she was an infant. She has always had a nose for trouble. Who else would be standing in a dig hole when a skull is unearthed?”

“You’re right.”

“I would prefer not to be right in this account.” She lifted her hand but did not point a finger at her granddaughter. “Mark my words, no good can come from disturbing a body. Let the dead rest. Honor their bones.” Mrs. Holloway noticed Susan looking down at the big bone. “Perhaps we should even honor nonhuman bones.”

“Well, Duke certainly is, in his own way.” Susan laughed.

“Honey, do what you can to blunt Harry’s formidable curiosity. I promise you no good can come of it.”

Susan nodded in agreement but knew it to be an impossible task.