"Jesus, you look as if you've seen a ghost," Gardiner Young said. A raft of feelings welled up in his chest — compassion, a tinge of shame at having snapped at Greg, but most of all a kind of dread.

"I can't talk," Greg hissed breathlessly. "I found her. You've got to come with me."

chapter continues

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An instant later, Greg was stumbling down the back steps of the old house with Young close behind him. Wordlessly, Greg led him to the kennel. Siner and Vera, his assistant, had been washing one of his dogs and the floor inside the kennel was still wet. In the middle of the large center room, a trail of soapy water led to a small puddle that had formed above a drain. In short clipped sentences, Greg explained to Young how he had come to the horrific discovery.

The kennel, and at extreme left is the top of the septic tank

"It wasn't going down," Greg said as he looked down at the puddle. "It wasn't draining, so I figured I would check the septic tank."

A country boy who had been raised on a farm in Vermont, Greg Siner was no stranger to septic tanks and all of their quirks, and when the drain inside the kennel backed up, the first thought he had was that something had gone wrong with the system, that it was just another in the long list of things that had gone wrong since they bought the place and while Young sometimes found it hard to believe, Greg Siner was not completely ignorant of — or insensitive to — their precarious financial situation. He realized that a malfunctioning septic system could mean another big-league expense at a time when the couple was having a hard time making ends meet. "Christ, I hope nothing's wrong," he had said, as he and Vera had made their way around back.

By the time he got within 15 feet of the underground tank he could already smell the problem. The tank, which had been unused for the better part of a decade before Young and Siner bought the place, had gotten a substantial workout in the previous several months, thanks to Greg's Irish water spaniels. The foul stench that drifted in the light September breeze seemed certain proof that the system had, at last, failed.

"I thought about not opening it," Greg said as the three of them, Siner, Vera and Gardner Young, stood at the edge of the now-open tank. Gardner Young peered down, shading his eyes as he tried to see the bottom of a four-foot-deep shaft that led down into the septic tank.

There, at the bottom, surrounded by a sea of decaying effluent, he could just barely make out a whitish globe. Greg would later describe the sight as "something out a Georgia O'Keefe painting," a lonely hunk of skull floating across a deathly still background, except in this case, it wasn't resting on the pristine whiteness of the desert sand.

"At first, I thought it was a dog skull," Greg said. "I mean, Cam left her dogs behind, and they told us that they were able to find homes for the younger ones, but the older ones...well, I figured that one of them died and they just dumped it in here."

Young reached into his pocket and covered his nose and mouth with a handkerchief. That wasn't a dog skull. It was a human skull; the head cocked slightly backwards, the jaw dangling open as if locked forever in a final scream.

Vera was silent. Greg was shaking slightly, trying to force himself to look anywhere on the sprawling property but down into that hole. But no matter how hard he tried; his eyes kept racing back to the bottom of the pit.

"What are we going to do?" he murmured. "We've got to tell somebody."

"I'm going to call Jack," Gardner Young said.

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