She came back about two minutes later, a pair of garden shovels in hand. The kind with a strong neck that you can put your foot into.

“Should we be digging?” she said. “Like—is it safe?”

“Well, if it’s an old septic tank that got filled in with sludge or soft dirt, there’s no issue,” I said.

I made the shape of a box with my hands. “I don’t know what you were told, but a lot of the really old septic tanks are made of brick. Someone hits ’em doing construction and it opens up a hole. The bricks fall in. If that’s what happened and they put dirt or sludge down there, that would seep up any smell pretty quick. But the reality is—most of these tanks are so old that everything in ’em already seeped down into the ground or the soakaway decades ago. The real problem is they’re dangerous because they’re empty holes under the ground.”

I took one of the tools and started digging then, right where she’d pointed. I went for five minutes, moving in a grid pattern and digging holes about three feet down each time. The ground wasn’t like the hard dirt that filled my backyard, but instead loose material. Soft and easily lifted.

“This would go faster with two people,” I said.

She grabbed the other shovel and we both dug, working in silence. After twenty minutes, the dust was so thick in the air that I could hardly see.

It also became clear that there was no concrete subfloor in one area, for a rectangle of about eight feet by ten feet.

Tink.

Maria stopped moving. She stared down at the noise. Which came from her shovel, buried about three feet into the ground.

“Back up,” I said. I took a pair of gloves from my back pocket and got down on my knees, using my hands to push away the dirt that was near the head of her shovel. Then I pulled the tool from the ground and reached in.

My hands grabbed at something hard and oblong, with a bulbous end. I didn’t pull the object out—just followed it—making rough measurements that told me it was about two feet long.

“What is it?” she said.

My hands sifted more dirt, and I felt a curvature. Kept moving south with my hands buried two feet deep until I came to what I was looking for.

And I pulled a human skull from the dirt.

“Oh shit,” she said.

I sat back with my butt against the backs of my shoes. The smell. The flies. The ex-manager who didn’t mind moving out. There was never any septic tank issue down here.

Things lined up in my head. My next move.

“You’re gonna call the coroner’s office,” I said. “I’m gonna give you a direct line to the head dog. So you can talk straight to her.”

“I assume I was down here alone?” the manager speculated. “Needed some dirt for a . . . planter or something.”