Pete came out Saturday morning with his old battered flatbed, the post-hole auger riding in back like artillery, and a big thermos the size of a fire hydrant.
They started at the road end, where the old fence leaned worst, and worked the way Ethan liked to work: steady, in order, nothing rushed that didn't need rushing. The pickets came off with a pry bar and a screech of old nails β good cedar, still, under the silver; Ethan stacked them by instinct for salvage before he remembered the whole point was replacement, and laughed at himself, and stacked them anyway. The rails came down. Then the posts.
The posts were the story, as posts usually are. Each one had been set deep β deeper than frost, deeper than sense β in gravel that rattled as it came up, and the holes, when they stood empty, were narrow and dark and smelled of cold earth and cedar oil, thirty-one years on. "Walter Hale believed in depth," Pete said, grunting on the pry bar. "This is set like a man expecting a siege."
"He was the township engineer," Ethan said. "Designed the storm drains."
"Explains it. Engineers build fences like the water's coming for them personally."
Four posts out by ten o'clock. Coffee β strong enough to file a nail on. Two more were out by eleven, and the old line lay open along the boundary like a pulled stitch β Ethan's yard and Marge's suddenly one continuous piece of grass, the ferns standing unguarded along the strip he'd never mowed, and he found he kept glancing at it, the way you glance at a door you didn't know was a door.
Marge's porch was empty. Her car was in the drive. The kitchen curtain moved once, early, and then did not move again, which he chose to find reassuring and mostly did not.
They set the new line from the iron pin at the road, the way the plat said: a string line, taut and bright, running four feet east of the old fence, deeper into what his map called his. Pete measured twice the way honest men do, humming. "You know she'll have something to say about this string."
"She'll have a survey that says otherwise," Ethan said. "She hasn't produced it yet."
"Mm," Pete said. "Well. Digging's digging. Fire her up."
The auger bit at the first mark and went down sweetly through topsoil and the loam beneath, the engine settling into its working growl, dirt spiraling up in a clean dark ribbon β and then, at not quite two feet, it hit something that was not root and not rock, and the whole rig kicked sideways in Pete's hands with a sound like a spoon in a garbage disposal.
Pete killed the engine. In the ringing quiet they looked at each other.
"Rock?" Pete said, without hope.
"Rock doesn't make that noise."
They cleared the hole by hand, Ethan flat on his belly with a trowel and then just his fingers, the way you work around anything you don't want to break. The dirt came up damp and iron-smelling. What emerged, inch by inch, was a corner: two edges meeting at a true right angle, flat, finished, and unmistakably poured. Concrete β good concrete, dense and pale, with an aggregate he could see β and along its top edge, where the trowel scraped, ran a band of something darker that rang faintly when he tapped it with the trowel's handle.
Metal. A metallic edge, set flush into the concrete, running away under the undisturbed ground in the direction of the old fence line.
"That's not a footing," Pete said quietly. "Footings don't have corners like that, and they don't have β whatever that is β inlaid. That's a slab. That's a lid, is what that looks like. Ethan. That's a lid on something."
Ethan sat back on his heels. His hands were dirty to the wrist. Up the string line, in both directions, the un-dug marks marched away under the grass, evenly spaced, minding their own business, over a boundary strip where a woman had stilled the ferns with two fingers and told him, in the voice of a person stating a law of nature, that the fence was not to be touched.
"Leave it," he said. "Don't hit it again. We'll cover it back over and leave it exactly like we found it."
"Ethan β"
"Cover it," Ethan said. "Gently. Like we were never here."
They shoveled the dark earth back into the hole and tamped it down and rebuilt the little mound of the mark, and Pete did not hum anymore. The auger stood idle. The cedar posts lay in their stack. And across the newly undivided grass, at the back of the Hale house, Ethan heard β very faintly, and with the unmistakable care of someone who had been listening for the sound of an engine stopping β Marge Hale's porch door draw softly, precisely closed.
Chapter 6: The Slab