PART 3: Eleven Feet of Black Water
The rear of the car dropped like an elevator with its cable cut. The front end jerked upward, its headlights pointing at the sky. Dirt and broken timber poured into the hole with a roar, and beneath them was a sound that made my blood go cold, the slap of water.
Two of the blocks on the driver’s side tipped inward as the ground beneath them collapsed. One slammed against the driver’s door with a crunch of metal. The other wedged against the passenger side. The Range Rover settled at a steep angle, its rear half swallowed by the old cistern, which was rapidly filling with black groundwater stirred up from the bottom.
Trent’s face appeared at the driver’s window. His palms were flat against the glass. He was screaming something I couldn’t hear. He shoved at the door with his shoulder, but it wouldn’t open more than an inch against two thousand pounds of concrete.
Someone behind me was already on the phone with 911. Linda Hargrove was shrieking. One of the Bennett twins dropped his bike in the street.
Danny sprinted for the skid steer at the curb. I heard its engine cough to life.
I ran to the wall. Water was coming into the cabin from the back. I could see it rising around the rear seats, brown and oily, inching toward the front. Trent had twisted around in the driver’s seat, trying to climb over the console toward the passenger side.
The passenger door was pinned too. The engine had died, and with it the windows and the big panoramic sunroof. He hammered at the glass with his fist. It didn’t even crack.
I don’t remember deciding anything. I remember running into my garage and grabbing Walter’s splitting maul from its hooks above the workbench. It was the one he’d used every autumn for thirty years. I remember thinking that I was sixty-three years old and had no business lifting it. I lifted it anyway.
I climbed onto the tilted block on the passenger side. "Cover your face!" I shouted. Trent threw his arm over his eyes. I swung the maul at the corner of the passenger window, and the glass burst into a thousand pebbles.
Trent scrambled up through the shattered passenger window as the car shuddered beneath him. I leaned over the concrete block with both hands locked around his wrist, my glasses gone and my boots slipping on the wet edge. Behind us, Danny drove the skid steer forward and hooked its bucket against the nearest block, dragging it back across the torn lawn. The Range Rover tipped rear-first, deeper into the muddy black hole.
Danny jumped down and grabbed Trent’s belt, and together we hauled him over the block and onto the grass. Trent rolled onto his back, coughing and soaked to the waist. A few seconds later, the Range Rover groaned and slid another three feet down. Soon only the hood and the windshield were above the ground.
Fire trucks arrived four minutes later. They pushed the crowd back and strung yellow tape around my yard. A paramedic wrapped a gash on Trent’s forearm. He sat on the curb in a foil blanket, staring at me as if he’d never seen me before. "Why’d you do that?" he finally asked. I sat down beside him, still shaking. "Because Walter would have haunted me if I hadn’t."
The fire captain came over with his helmet under his arm. "Old brick cistern," he said. "About eleven feet deep, with a rotten wood cap. It’s a miracle it held this long." He looked at the blocks, then at Danny’s skid steer, then at me. "Whoever put four tons of concrete on top of a hundred-year-old cap…" He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.
A crane pulled the Range Rover out the next afternoon. It came up dripping and dented, and Gus from the tow company said it was almost certainly totaled. My front yard became a crater ringed with orange fencing. Walter’s birdbath was somewhere at the bottom of it.
Three days later, a certified letter arrived from a law firm downtown. Trent’s attorney claimed ninety-two thousand dollars for the vehicle, plus damages for injury and emotional distress. The letter said I had "knowingly constructed a structure upon a known subsurface hazard." Then came a phrase I read four times: "on property belonging to our client."
I laughed when I read it. Then I called Danny, and he didn’t laugh. "Aunt Maggie," he said, "get a survey. Today."
The surveyor, Hal Whitcomb, was an older man with a white mustache and a GPS rod. He spent the whole next morning walking my yard and Trent’s, setting little orange flags and muttering at his tablet. I watched him from my porch, sure he’d prove me right and that I’d frame the report next to Walter’s photo.
Around noon, Hal stopped at the edge of the orange fencing. He looked at his screen. He looked at the crater. Then he walked slowly up my steps and took off his cap.
"Mrs. Dunn," he said, "your property line doesn’t run where you think it does. That corner, the cistern, the birdbath, all of it, belongs to the house next door."
