Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 100, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 603 & 604, October 1992

By the time the backhoe was positioned and started digging, the rain had started falling at a steady shower. The open pit quickly became swollen with mud and water, and as night fell Victor called up the Norwich volunteer fire department and had outside lights set up. The backhoe snorted and roared as it dug, and Victor stayed as close as he dared to the lip of the hole. Flashing lights from the trucks and the fire department vehicles crisscrossed and bounced off the house. He nodded as a figure approached. It was Percy Layman, the volunteer fire chief. Percy wore his yellow firegear and hipboots. His bald head was open to the falling rain.

“Reporters are starting to bunch up at the driveway.”

“Let ’em,” Victor said. “Just make sure they stay off the property, all right?”

“Sure.” Percy stood next to him, looked down at the pit. “Where’s Gordo?”

Victor motioned with his head. “Inside with Mrs. Hanson and the two girls. I don’t want them touching or disturbing anything in the house.”

“Yeah.” Percy took out a grey handkerchief, blew his nose. “Any idea when you’ll talk to those reporters?”

The backhoe went in for another load, and mud and brown water swirled around. Victor shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me.”

“So tell me again what happened,” Victor had asked.

Freddy was leaning forward in his chair, elbows resting on the desk. “Like I said before, Chief. I was around twelve. I woke up and heard a noise, something that made me sit up. I looked out the window and saw Mom was dragging Dad into the septic hole, by his feet. The summer before Dad had dug this hole in the front lawn to put in a septic tank but he didn’t have enough money for the tank, so it stayed there. I watched it and couldn’t believe it. Thought I was dreaming. And then Mom went into the garage and came out with the tractor, and leveled the hole off.”

“What did you do next?”

“I ran downstairs and grabbed her and asked her what the hell was going on. She was tired and dirty and breathing hard, and she said that Dad had been beating her up, even worse than before, and she couldn’t take it anymore and she clobbered the back of his head with a baseball bat. And it was going to be our secret, ’cause if she was arrested, she’d get taken away and we’d all be put in foster homes.”

Victor was scribbling furiously. “Was it true? Did your father beat up on your mother?”

He shrugged, the buckles and belts jingling. “Yeah, but nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Just the ordinary stuff, then,” Victor said wryly.

“Yeah.”

“So why are you telling us this now, Freddy, five years later?”

He hunkered down in the chair. “I got my reasons.”

“You do?”

“Yeah.”

Victor said, “How about letting me in on them?”

Freddy said, “Shoot, Chief, I’m almost eighteen. Be out on my own soon. It doesn’t make any difference to me if she’s arrested or not.”

The rain was falling steadily, and the backhoe was still digging, slowly and without a rush, making the pit wider and deeper. Victor thought back again to the other day. Freddy Hanson’s story sounded too strange to be true, but there seemed to be something there. After the boy had left, he had gone into the storage area and dug up, folded up and covered with dust, the original missing persons report filed on Henry Hanson. He had read and re-read it for an hour. The story seemed simple enough. Henry Hanson had walked away one night and had never come back. It wasn’t unusual for him to walk, as he liked to hitchhike, but in a couple of days’ time, Mrs. Hanson had reported him missing.

There were also a few notations made by the former chief, Al Leclerk — dead now these three years — about Henry Hanson, which seemed to confirm Freddy’s story. The man had worked as an itinerant farmer and lumberman, working in the forested mountains around Norwich, and he had been arrested several times for assault, assault and battery, and once for suspected rape.

An hour later he had almost put the file away, wondering again at Freddy’s story, before he realized that something was missing. Follow-up reports. There were none. According to the report, in all the five years since Henry Hanson’s disappearance, not once had Deborah Hanson inquired about the investigation into her husband’s case.

Not once.

Maybe she already knew where he was.

With that, he got on the phone with Gordon Moore, and then with the district court judge.

The backhoe grumbled again, and in the steady rain, Victor thought he saw something in the open hole. He waved an arm and the backhoe stopped, and he got a flashlight from Percy Layman and dropped down into the pit.

The mud stopped up around his shins and his orange raincoat dragged in it. He certainly hoped the backhoe operator wouldn’t burp and drop a load of the goddam mud on his head. He aimed the flashlight at a corner of the hole.

There was the toe of a man’s boot.