The Root Cellar

Josephine Bellamy had not come to Moonvale to solve a murder.

She had come to assess the square footage, take photographs of the water damage, and get back to the city with a fair appraisal number before the end of October. She had a sublet to vacate, a storage unit to empty, and the particular hollow efficiency of a woman who has recently been laid off from a job she'd spent six years treating like a relationship. She did not need complications. She needed clean floors, good light, and a real estate agent who knew what she was doing.

The floors were not clean. The light was adequate. The real estate agent, a pleasant woman named Diane who wore a fleece vest in October like it was a uniform requirement, had met her at the inn's front door with a key, a sympathetic smile, and the information that Moonvale did not have an appraisal firm per se, but that her cousin could look at it.

The Moonvale Inn was three stories of Vermont farmhouse style, white clapboard going gray, a wraparound porch that had seen better decades, and a kitchen large enough to seat twelve that still smelled faintly of the brown butter and cardamom her Aunt Margot had apparently cooked with exclusively. Jo had met Margot twice: once as a child at a cousin's wedding, once at her father's funeral nine years ago, when Margot had pressed Jo's hands between her own and said something that Jo had not been in a state to absorb. The inheritance, arriving via a letter from a Vermont attorney three weeks after Margot's death, had been as surprising as learning you had an aunt who remembered you.

She spent the first morning taking photographs and the first afternoon starting a list.

Roof: inspect, estimate Porch boards: three rotted, possibly more Kitchen range: gas, functional, possibly original West bedroom: water stain on ceiling, likely roof issue Root cellar: hasn't checked yet

She had put off the root cellar because the inn's root cellar was accessed via a door in the kitchen floor, and something about a door in the floor in a crumbling inn she'd inherited from a woman she barely knew activated a very sensible reluctance. She baked instead. There was flour in the kitchen — good flour, the heavy paper bag kind, recently opened — and butter in the refrigerator, which was running. She made shortbread, which she always made when she needed to think without acknowledging that she was thinking. Her hands worked the dough while her mind worked around the question of whether to renovate and sell or just sell, and by the time the shortbread was in the oven she had arrived at the conclusion she'd been avoiding all day: she couldn't sell it without checking the cellar.

She opened the kitchen floor door.

The smell that came up was earth and cold stone and old wood — normal root cellar, nothing alarming. A wooden ladder. She could see the bottom of it from the top: packed dirt floor, shelving on one wall, mason jars. Her flashlight was on her phone and it was good enough.

She went down.

The root cellar was large — extending well under the full footprint of the inn — and neater than she'd expected. Shelves of preserves and dried herbs, labeled in the same precise script that filled the inventory notebooks she'd found in the kitchen. Margot had been organized in the way of people who live alone and build systems because systems are reliable. Jo moved her flashlight along the shelves, noting condition, already composing the line in her appraisal notes: root cellar, good condition, approximately 400 sq ft.

Then the flashlight beam caught something at the far end of the cellar that was not shelving and was not preserved summer vegetables.

She stood very still.

The man on the cellar floor was not a ghost, not a mannequin, not any of the benign explanations her mind cycled through in the three seconds before she accepted what she was seeing. He was a man, perhaps fifty-five, in a canvas work jacket, on his back on the packed dirt floor with his arms at his sides in the particular stillness that was the opposite of sleep. She had only seen a dead person once before — her father, in the hospital, prepared and peaceful — and the stillness was the same.

She went back up the ladder faster than she'd come down.

She stood in the kitchen and breathed for thirty seconds. The shortbread timer went off. She turned off the timer, took the pan out of the oven, set it on the rack. Then she called 911.

The dispatcher was professional and calm. She gave the address. She gave a description. She answered the questions. She did not say I just inherited this inn and I don't know anyone in this town and I would very much like to not be involved in whatever this is, because that was not a helpful thing to say to a 911 dispatcher.

The sheriff arrived in eleven minutes, which she clocked because she had nothing else to do while she waited except pace the kitchen and note that the range was definitely original, possibly 1960s, and would need replacing.

He was younger than she expected for a sheriff. Mid-thirties, with the particular composure of someone who had decided years ago not to waste energy on being rattled. He looked at her with the calm assessment of a man who was noting things without writing them down, and he said his name was Hatcher, and she said her name was Josephine Bellamy, and he said he was sorry for her loss — meaning Margot — in a way that sounded like he had known Margot and was genuinely sorry.

She took him downstairs.

He looked at the body for a long time without touching anything.

"Do you know him?" she asked.

"Tom Fielding," he said. "He's been the town's groundskeeper and handyman for thirty years. Lives on Birch Road." He was quiet for another moment. "He did work on this property. He had a key."

"How did he die?"

Hatcher straightened up. He had the expression of a man composing a careful answer.

"I'll have to get the county ME out here," he said. "But it looks like he fell — the ladder's positioned, the landing is consistent with a fall from height. Probably came down to check on the cellar for Ms. Margot, lost his footing." He met her eyes. "It's a natural death, Ms. Bellamy. An accident."

She looked at Tom Fielding on the cellar floor, arms at his sides, face turned slightly toward the near wall.

She had baked shortbread competitively for three years and she had a professional pastry chef's eye for precision. She knew what hands looked like when they'd tried to break a fall.

Tom Fielding's hands were at his sides. Perfectly arranged.

She did not say this to Sheriff Hatcher.

She went back upstairs and stood in Margot's kitchen and thought about hands.