Draw the Dark (25 page)

David does. He goes absolutely still. Huge tears roll down his cheeks, but not a single sound bleeds through his lips.

“This is how it will be,” says the second man. “If you ever say one word of what you’ve seen here to anyone, then I will kill your mother, and I will make you watch. I will kill your sister, and I will make you watch. And then I will gouge out your eyes and cut off your ears and slice out your tongue, and then I will kill you too. Do you understand me? Not . . . one....
word
.”

( . . . don’t take my mouth . . .)

And that, I think, is precisely when David went mute. Still weeping, the boy nods.

Daecher growls, “I think it’s a mistake.”

“No.” The other man straightens. “The mistake will be if we don’t seize the opportunity.”

I know then, at that instant and a blaze of intuition, what that opportunity is. Even if I had not seen what happened next, I could have guessed because David had seen it himself: the Gemini twins, one immortal and the other not.

The second man bends over Eisenmann, who is coming around; I see that in the feeble movements of his arms and legs.

“Be quick,” says Daecher.

“Of course,” says the second man. He stands, strides to the tool closet I’d seen earlier, steps inside and then, after a few moments, reappears.

And he has a corn knife.

The blade is a good foot and a half long, like a machete, but with a squared end. The wood handle is dark from skin oils after years of being used to chop stalks.

David freezes when he sees the second man come toward him with the knife. But the second man smiles, almost beatifically. He actually reaches out and tousles David’s hair.

“Don’t you worry,” he says, with a chuckle. “This isn’t for you.”

Turning his back on the boy, the second man squats over Eisenmann and goes to work.

I can’t do anything but watch. I watch it all happen, and then I feel the earth moving beneath my feet, as if a chasm’s opening. I remember what Dr. Rainier has said about private hells, and I think, surely, that if this is David’s private hell, the torment he is fated to relive for the rest of his life, I share it.

Then the earth yawns open, the ground splits, and I fall; the blackness rises up and closes around, and I am falling.

Mercifully, I pass out.

”I cracked open my eyes, squinting against the glare of fiashlights. My right shoulder throbbed, and my right hand was cramped. My face felt sticky, and I put my left hand up. The fingers came away glistening with blood, and my cheeks felt wet, my eyes gritty like I’d been crying. “Wh-what . . . what ha-happened?”

“You fainted,” said Dr. Rainier, sounding immensely relieved. “You were drawing like there was no tomorrow, and then you started screaming, and you got a nosebleed, and then, well, it looked almost as if you’d had a seizure....”

“Can you sit up?” A gruff voice, deeper, male. A hand reached from behind a glare of flashlight and cradled the back of my head. “You took quite a tumble there. You need to go slow.”

I hung onto Uncle Hank’s arm as he and Dr. Rainier helped me sit up. Uncle Hank handed me a kerchief to wipe my face. I smeared away blood; my head felt as if someone had taken a hammer to it. “When did
you
get here?”

“About ten minutes ago. Hel . . . Dr. Rainier called soon as you went into some kind of trance, and I got here fast as I could.” He turned to Dr. Rainier. “What were you thinking? Taking a chance like that with my boy, what were you
thinking
?”

“No,” I said, “I was the one who came up with the idea.”

“That doesn’t excuse it. You’re just a
boy
. . . .”

“I’m not a boy. I know what I’m doing.” I looked at Dr. Rainier. “I was there. I saw it. I know what happened.”

Dr. Rainier had gathered up the hasty drawings I’d made. Her face registered first disbelief, then astonishment and, finally, horror. She looked up quickly. “These two men,” she said. “Christian, I’ve seen them before.”

“What?” Uncle Hank took the drawing from her. “One of them’s a walleye.”

“A strabismus,” Dr. Rainier corrected. “But I’ve seen them both.”

“I’ve only seen one of them before.” I pointed to the one with the strabismus; I’d rendered in a few quick strokes, the man grasping a small struggling boy. “His name’s Daecher, and there’s some kind of serial number after his name. I think . . . I think they’re both German PWs from the camp. Mr. Witek’s father must’ve drawn a lot of them.”

Dr. Rainier was nodding. “That’s where. In that sketchbook by Mr. Witek’s bed . . . this one.” She tapped the paper. “He’s there too.”

I said, “He’s more than just here on paper.”

“What?” Uncle Hank and Dr. Rainier said at the same moment. “What do you mean?” asked Dr. Rainier.

I turned to Uncle Hank. “Is Mr. Mosby still here? The guy with the ground penetrating radar?”

“Yes. He said they wouldn’t finish with the old Ziegler place for a couple of days yet. Why?”

I pointed to the north side of the barn—and then I showed them one of my drawings: two men, shovels in hand, shoulders hunched, bent to their task. “We need him.”

“But it’s down there,” he said. “Right under the concrete and that brick. Bet my company on it.”

That was close to midnight. No one felt much like sleeping. So after rousting the relevant people and applying jackhammers and crowbars and then spades, we’d opened that grave by seven, first light. By that time, someone had gotten through to Dr. Nichols, who’d pulled up at six thirty, hair mussed and eyes red-rimmed. She was jazzed.

Not one skeleton but two: both men, laid out alongside each other, possibly because it had been easier to make the grave wider than deep. After over sixty years, the tissues holding the bones together had disintegrated, and the skeletons were disarticulated, in pieces but still clumped into two distinct shapes.

One wore a tattered set of work trousers, and I could see where the crowbar had smashed into Mordecai Witek’s skull. Dr. Nichols felt along the legs and hips and then fished around with her fingers beneath the body—and withdrew a frayed, gnawed-looking leather wallet. Dr. Nichols carefully unfolded the wallet and tweezed out a ten-dollar bill, two fives—and a photograph: four people, discolored with age and faded. One was barely recognizable as Mordecai Witek.

Even though they were photographic ghosts, I was reasonably sure who the other three were. I’d even seen them before, without knowing it: the family portrait in Mr. Witek’s room. Looking at Marta, I thought I knew something else too.

“The lab might be able to do something with that,” Dr. Nichols said, carefully slipping the photo into an evidence bag. “But this.” She held up a thick rectangle, about the size of a Social Security card. “This is good.”

The card had once been pink. On one side was a black seal, what looked like some kind of bridge span against a backdrop of mountains and the letters,
IABSOIW
. On the reverse, the card read:

“My Lord,” said Uncle Hank. “He never left.”

“Looks that way. Of course, we’ll do DNA and get a comparison sample from his son’s body,” said Dr. Nichols. “I’m sure his executor will have no objections. But I’d say this card is pretty persuasive, wouldn’t you?”

The other skeleton would be a problem. The man’s nose was broken, but that was the only bony injury visible on Dr. Nichols’s cursory exam. She didn’t find a wallet, though she thought that he might have been some kind of farmhand. “Look at the clothes, how rough they are. Very coarse weave and I think there’s some kind of logo here on this remnant of a sleeve. Bleached, I’m afraid; I can’t read it, but you can see where this part of the cloth is quite a bit paler than the rest. The lab people might be able to clean it up. But we might never know who he is.”

I knew better. I’d seen and drawn what the two Germans, Woolfe and Daecher, had missed because there’s a big gush of blood when you cut a man’s throat with a corn knife, especially when he’s still alive, and blood can hide a lot.

I said, “If you can find the left pinkie finger . . . that would help.”

After ten minutes of careful sifting of trowels of dirt through wire mesh, Dr. Rainier said, “Hey, I thought I saw something metal....”

Dr. Nichols’s gloved fingers carefully picked out a length of bone she called a metacarpal—and then, a man’s gold pinkie ring. On the ring was a set of initials in fancy, curlicue script.

“
C-R-E
,” I said. “Charles Randall Eisenmann.”

“But that’s impossible.” Uncle Hank looked from me to the ring and then to Dr. Rainier before saying again, “It’s not possible. Eisenmann’s alive.”

“Then how do you explain the ring? Look at pictures from the time period. He always wore this ring, always. He’s still got the gold watch chain and fobs; they’re in the pictures too. But I’ll bet that if you compare a picture from 1944 to one in 1946, the ring’s gone.” I pointed to the ring in Dr. Nichols’s gloved fingers. “That’s because the real Charles Eisenmann was still wearing it when he died, and the guy who took his place forgot about it. He changed out of his clothes and made sure he had the pocket watch. But he missed the ring.”

Uncle Hank still wasn’t convinced. “How do you fake something like that?”

I knew the truth because I’d seen it happen. “Because there were the scars. All we know is he got them on the night of the murder, right? He got attacked? But what if the guy who took his place did them to himself? What if someone
helped
?”

“It’s possible,” Dr. Nichols put in, “especially if the damage is extensive and people are primed to accept it because there would be other cues—the clothes and the watch chain and the fobs. Close enough is all that’s required.”

Uncle Hank screwed up his face. “I still don’t buy it.”

I turned to Dr. Rainier. “You recognized those guys in my pictures, right?” When she nodded, I said, “Can you get Mr. Witek’s sketchbook?”

“I don’t see why not. It’s locked up with his personal effects, but—” She turned to Uncle Hank. “A request from you would probably do it. A warrant, if you need it. You certainly have enough presumptive evidence right here for one.”

“Sure,” Uncle Hank agreed. “But what would I be looking for?”

“The Gemini twin.” I riffled through my stack of drawings and tugged out the one with the second man, corn knife in hand, bent over Eisenmann. “That guy.”

“Any jury would say you saw the drawing and it hung around in your subconscious,” Uncle Hank objected. “Heck, that’s what
I’m
saying.”

“Ah . . . not bloody likely,” interrupted Dr. Nichols. Her capable fingers crawled through the debris on that mesh screen, and then she was thumbing dirt away from an oval disk made of thin metal.

Dr. Rainier’s eyebrows knit. “What is that, a machine tag?”

Dr. Nichols’s eyes actually twinkled. “Oh, it’s a tag all right, just not for a machine.” She extended her hand.

In the center was an aluminum oval as big as her palm. A single, deeply incised line bisected the tag along its long axis. There were also three round perforations in the aluminum, two above and one below, and a remnant of what looked like a shoelace was threaded between the two holes along the top of the oval. Above and below the line were a series of numbers and letters that read:
9356 Pz. Gen. Rgt. 26
. A large
O
had been stamped along the lower left-hand edge.

“I have no idea what those abbreviations mean,” said Dr. Nichols, “but I’ll bet that this is some kind of dog tag. That number corresponds to identification, a serial number.”

“The Wolfsangels were a Panzer division,” I said. “So the
P
and the
Z
could be an abbreviation for Panzer, right? So maybe this is for Soldier 9356.”

“With an O blood type,” Dr. Rainier chimed in. “That does make the most sense in terms of the
O
, right?”

“Maybe. We bag this, send it on, and see what comes up, but I’ve got a very good feeling about this. Artifacts are the most helpful element in terms of dates and identities. But let’s talk DNA for a second. If this man is the real Charles Eisenmann, then we can match his DNA to the relatives buried in your town cemetery, specifically to his parents. Fifty percent of his DNA will match his mother, and fifty percent will match his father. Those numbers can’t and don’t lie. You get a sample from the man who claims he’s Charles Eisenmann, and the DNA will expose him.” Dr. Nichols practically preened. “Sheriff, I’d say that you have more than enough evidence for an exhumation.”

As I stood there, Dr. Rainier and Uncle Hank came to flank me on either side. They looked tired too, but I knew that Uncle Hank still had a long day ahead. He said, “Dr. Rainier will drive you home. You look done in.”

“I am,” I said, “only . . .”

“What?”

I craned my head to peer back into the barn’s dank shadows. “I don’t know, it’s just . . . I don’t know.” They followed me as I trudged around to the barn’s northwest face. The scaffolding was still in place. I’d be lying if I said I was sad to never lay eyes on that again. The ghostly remnant of that last swastika was still visible, and I thought about that for a second. I had never thought about this before, but now I wondered: why had I been compelled to spray-paint
this
side of the barn?
Nothing
was coincidental here, not the dreams I’d had or meeting Mr. Witek or gazing out from the haymow . . . nothing. So
this
side was important. But why?