Love Me If You Must

4

The pungent odor of a thriving mildew colony met me as I led the contractor and his two assistants into the basement.

“Careful. These things were made for a size 5 shoe,” I said, turning sideways on the steps to keep my footing.

Bare bulbs, scattered about the seven-foot-high ceiling, cast a dim glow on stone walls. The cement floor, a novelty in a turn-of-the-century home, had mostly turned to dirt over the years. Only a narrow slash of concrete around the perimeter shone a bright white, the results of a recent attempt at waterproofing. The way the realtor explained it, workers jackhammered a twelve-inch-wide ditch around the edges, buried porous drain pipes, and tied the whole thing into a sump pump. Any water trying to seep into the basement from the water table below would be safely diverted.

I unfurled the floor plan I had sketched, and hunkered under a lightbulb with Lloyd. His two cronies wandered over to the area containing the furnace and hot water heater. I pointed at the drawing with one hand and gestured with the other as I described my intentions.

“We’ll make that section the mechanical room, with a door at one end. Next to it, we’ll put a smaller room for storage. The rest will be open. Just drywall, a barely dropped ceiling, and yards of carpet.”

I turned toward the staircase and frowned. In a corner behind the steps, a half circle of fieldstone rose almost five feet from the floor, forming a cistern. In the old days, it had been a reservoir for collecting rainwater. But I had no use for the thing in my new rec room.

I walked over to it and put one hand on the cool stone. “How do you plan to get rid of this baby?”

Lloyd scratched his pure white head of hair and hunched his six-foot-something frame over to the cistern. He kicked at it with his bulky work boot. The reinforced steel toe made a hollow thunk against the stone. A pebble-sized piece of grout bounced to the floor.

He shook his head and looked around the cellar. “You’re already asking for a miracle.” One enormous hand grabbed at the rock outcropping that formed the top edge of the structure. “What you’ve got here is a wall a foot thick. There probably isn’t much of a floor behind there, so you’re looking at having to pour a new one. I’m betting you’ll have to add a bunch of dirt to make it level.” He whistled through his teeth. “You’re looking at five, maybe six thousand dollars between the demo and finish. And all you’ve gained is about eighty square feet. I say just leave it there and cover it with drywall.”

I gave a half smile. “What would I do with a leftover nine-by-nine corner behind the stairs? The design only works if the cistern’s gone. I need the full space.”

“I’m just saying you’d be better off walling the thing up and putting folding doors over the rest of the back end. Make it more storage. People can always use storage.”

I could feel a stubbornness settle in the little dip at the front of my neck. My star contractor was quickly becoming a no-man. I only worked with yes-men. I’d hired him because he was already familiar with the house. He’d done the work on the second bathroom and had spearheaded the waterproofing project. Lloyd & Sons had also gotten stellar reviews from owners of other historic properties in the area.

He was the best. I couldn’t afford to lose him. I’d simply have to help him change his mind.

With a breath to boost my self-control, I plastered on a smile. “If we turned it into a closet, we’d be blocking a light source. But I’m sure we could use that window’s handy location to remove the stones once we knocked them all down.”

Lloyd gave me a look. He folded up his reading glasses and tucked them in the pocket of his flannel shirt. “There’s no way these stones’re going through that little window. You’ll have to haul them out by hand.”

I turned at the brush of air behind me. Tweedledum and Tweedledee stood with hands tucked in the pockets of their tight blue jeans. They stared slack-jawed at the cistern.

“I’m not carrying that thing out of here,” the youngest said, a look of disbelief sending his myriad of freckles into disarray. “Come on, Dad. You’re only paying minimum wage. I’ll end up on my back and miss finals. No way.”

“Can it,” Lloyd said with a slash of his hand. I could have sworn sparks flew out of his eyes as he looked at his carrot-topped son. Lloyd moved his gaze, softer now, back to me. “It’ll take a permit, but what you need to do is separate the cistern from the rest of the foundation, so you don’t damage any supporting walls when you knock the thing down. You might be able to dump some of the stones in the center and just level out the floor with concrete. A quick look should tell you.”

Lloyd dug into his utility belt and pulled out a flashlight. He turned it on and shone it into the cistern, then stuck his head in after it.

“Well, well. Would you look at that?” Lloyd gave another whistle.

“What?” I could hardly stand it. The look on Lloyd’s face told me he’d found something very interesting.

“Take a look,” he said.

I threw my arms across the ledge and scrambled up the stones, scraping my elbow raw and knocking my knee hard against the sharp corner of a rock. I pulled myself up for a full view of the inside.

The beam of the flashlight bounced around and it took me a minute to figure out what I was looking at.

I gasped.

A faint ringing sounded in my ears and the acute pain in my knee throbbed in time with my racing heart. My fingers, frozen in curious horror, clutched the edge.

Someone had already filled the bottom of the cistern with cement. And lying beneath it, with a silent scream etched in stone, was the outline of a body. Splayed fingers pressed frantically alongside the face, as if a living person had been trapped under ice and now tried in vain to smash through. A ridge of toes formed one foot, the rounded tip of a shoe, the other.

I couldn’t rip my gaze away. An uncontrollable shiver coursed through me. I ground my fingers into the ledge, but nothing could stop the scream from coming. The piercing noise bounced against rock and concrete as I gave voice to the stifled cries of the body so long forgotten.

The scream came to a stop. I felt the blood drain from my head. I loosened my death grip and slid slowly down the rock wall. My cheek scraped along, soaking in whatever coolness it could gather from the stones as I fought back the darkness.