Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel Read online

  “All right,” I said. “George, wait here while Kevin and I head up. Keep your walkie-talkie on.” I had bought satellite walkie-talkies for me and George a while back; they’re good for a mile or two of range out in the township where neither our two-way transmitter nor the county’s is reliable, especially since they moved everyone to narrow bands after 9/11. It’d only take two more transmitters planted on summits between the township and Fitzmorris to make radio contact between us reliable, but of course that hasn’t been done. If we need to reach town, we use phones, which is inconvenient when approaching a suspicious vehicle in the dead of night, or fighting a drunk on a domestic call. Anyway, I was pleased about the walkie-talkies. They had been handy back in deer season.

  Kevin climbed in the passenger seat of my truck and we set off. It was a bright morning and there was more snow left up in the hills than in the valleys where I’d been; my transition eyeglasses went from yellow to brown. The driveway led past an old barn foundation and up to a corncrib; I always liked those corncribs for their back-slanted walls, walls to keep the rats out. There was a line of trees to one side, with barbed wire strung through it, and more wine jugs lying in the remains of a stone wall. And it was from the corncrib that Aub emerged, shotgun in hand, to peer down at us. We were still about fifty yards away. I stopped, put on the parking brake, and stepped clear of the truck, which I did not want shot, as it might not get repaired until next quarter. Kevin stayed in the vehicle. Aub stood stock-still, hadn’t raised the shotgun. I took a noisy step forward.

  “Aub, it’s Henry Farrell. Officer Farrell. Can you drop that? We’re here to say hello.”

  “It’s Cousin Kevin, Aub,” Kevin called out of his window.

  “Come on up, then.” The old man wore a plaid flannel shirt and alligator-clip suspenders over stooped shoulders. His pants hung loose around his middle and were tucked into black galoshes. His pink scalp showed through strands of yellowed hair. On either side of an Irish nose, his eyes were dark and sunk deep. When we got close, I asked him again to set the shotgun down; he opened the breach, with trembling fingers plucked out a shell, and left the gun open in the crook of his arm. The weapon had to have been at least seventy-five years old. I was surprised he’d convinced it to fire at Danny Stiobhard.

  “My friend,” I said, “you’ve got some explaining to do.”

  The old man’s voice shook and he had trouble with his consonants; it took concentration to understand the words that tumbled out half formed and angry. What I made out was this:

  “He been coming on my land and cutting trees. They stole my wheels. Seen him coming on up again and I let him have one. But I didn’t have nothing to do with that boy.” He closed his eyes and turned his head to the side.

  “What boy is that, now?”

  “One you’re coming on up to collect.”

  I turned to Kevin, who was all bewilderment.

  I stated the obvious. “We’re here about Danny Stiobhard.”

  “Fellow got killed up in my woods. You got to come on up and collect him.”

  Kevin put his face in his hands and said, “Oh, my god. Oh, god.”

  “Aub, are you sure?”

  “Found him yesterday. Mountain let go and I found him.”

  We all three waited in silence a long time before I decided what to do. I’m a patrolman, more or less, no detective. But I wasn’t trained to say, this is someone else’s mess, someone else will clean this up. I was trained to take care of it.

  “Can you show me?”

  Aub nodded, turned, and walked toward the tree line. His farmhouse was sided with green tar shingles, and as we passed it I noticed that the ground between it and the ancient outhouse was muddy and well trod. The old man led the way past the west face of his house and into a field covered in snow. A couple sets of prints made a straight line to and from the wooded ridge at the field’s edge, and both prints looked like his, or were about his size, I’m no expert. A few sets of snowmobile tracks led from the road at the bottom of his field to the trailhead, merged into one, and led into the forest. Aub pushed aside a few bare branches to expose a logging road dug into the hillside.

  Up we went, with Kevin slipping once and landing hard on his knee until he learned to walk splayfooted. The woods were pretty and full of junk. The pièce de résistance was a rusted-out International pickup at the edge of a clearing, its glass all gone and mustard-colored stuffing popping out of its seat.

  In our area we have second-growth forest, meaning the wilderness is reclaiming what used to be farmland; that’s where the split-rail fences come from, and why rusted strands of barbed wire disappear into tree trunks that have grown around them. On Aub’s land, there were still blue shale walls, two feet wide and three tall in most places, some a mile or more long, climbing ridges and descending into valleys, deep into the woods. One wondered at the farmers who broke their backs making them just a few generations ago, what they were thinking—if they were impatient quarrying the stone and then setting them in place, if they were sure their children would always farm the land and be grateful for those walls.

  As the walls remain in wooded places, so do trails—not only the main-drag logging roads like the one we were on, but narrow ways through the brush. People call them deer trails now but I have to wonder if livestock made them first and the deer just find them convenient; I read somewhere that cattle and sheep do tend to walk exact paths, wearing them into the ground over centuries. We passed through a break in the wall and cut onto one such trail, departing from the snowmobile track and following Aub’s prints up the ridge. It turned into a longer walk than I expected, but eventually we came to a high-up place where the undergrowth was thinner and the trees were bigger and straighter and let in more sun.

  Half tucked underneath a car-sized shale boulder was where we found it. A pale-and-dark patch on the ground, it was unmistakable to the prepared eye, out of place even in those woods already full of ruined and discarded things. I told Kevin to stay where he was; he squatted with his head in his hands while the old man and I pressed on. Within ten feet of the body we flushed several turkey vultures from an ash tree. They didn’t bother to fly too far away.

  It was plain that this was no boy but a young man, shirtless, face down and away from me, right arm tucked under him. The skin on his back was mottled lavender and looked thin as newspaper, as if his shoulder blades and spine would tear through if he were nudged. He had slid partway out from a hollow, the kind animals dig beneath boulders for their dens, and the snow holding him in there must have melted and let him out. He had on jeans and his feet were still buried. At first it looked like his left arm was hidden under the boulder, but as I got close I saw that there was no arm to hide. It, the shoulder, and much of the upper left side of his torso were gone, as if the arm had been ripped away. We were silent and still so long that the chickadees started singing again.

  I’ve seen bodies—dry corpses crawling with flies in dusty streets, an old woman withered in her armchair, dead for weeks. To say they all seemed to belong where they were might not speak too well of me, or of the places I’ve been. This one didn’t belong where he lay.

  I took careful steps, looking for signs of what might have brought this kid to that place. The only tracks I saw were on the trail we’d taken to get there. Looking back at Aub Dunigan, I came to myself, put my hand on my weapon, and told him to lay the shotgun down. He snapped the breach closed and set it stock-down against a tree trunk. Once he’d done so, he didn’t know what to do with his shaking hands. “This is none of me,” he said.

  I got George on the walkie-talkie. He was pretty faint at that distance but I told him to find a spot where he could radio the county, or call.

  “What the hell for?” George said.

  “Found a body up here.”

  “What?”

  I gave him the code and said, “Raise the sheriff. We’ll be down the hill soon as we can.”

  Kevin had joined us and stood staring at the c
orpse. Aub turned away and walked toward a nearby boulder. I told him stay where he was. He looked back at me and gestured to where he was headed, as if to explain. I said, “Jesus, Kevin, get him to stay put.”

  “Aub,” Kevin said.

  The old man seized a fallen branch and pulled; with it came a piece of cloth and another branch of the same size. He’d made a stretcher by tying a blanket between two tree limbs, must have brought the blanket up on a previous trip. Demonstrating it to me by pulling the blanket taut, he said, “Take him on down.”

  For some reason this made me sad. “No, put that down. Just set it down. We’ll get him later.” I put Aub’s shotgun over my shoulder and we walked down to the house without speaking. It took a while.

  This was too much for me and George alone. Seeing the body and putting my own tracks everywhere around it gave me an unreasonable feeling of involvement, even complicity. When we made the last turn on the trail down, and there was just a screen of trees between us and Aub’s house, which was now flanked by two county sheriff’s cars, George’s radio car, and an ambulance, it felt like we three were coming out to surrender. As if thinking the same thing, Aub broke our long silence: “He wasn’t my doing.”

  Out we came, me and Kevin and a stooped old man wringing his hands. Out of the woods and into light so white you saw colors in it.

  SHERIFF NICHOLAS Dally stood waiting by his car. He’s got fifteen years as sheriff of Holebrook County versus my couple serving Wild Thyme Township, and this has always made him seem not only wiser than me, but taller. When he speaks it carries the weight of pronouncement. Good qualities in a policeman. He’s a clean shaver but that morning he had a small cut on his chin, a tiny seam of red on a white field turning black. They say he plays the trombone but I can’t imagine it.

  He touched the tip of his campaign hat, and without a word placed a gentle hand on Aub’s elbow, steering him toward a waiting county deputy, who led the old man into the farmhouse. Dally turned to Kevin Dunigan and said, “Would you keep Deputy Ellis company while Henry fills me in?”

  Kevin ignored the request. “What’s going to happen to Aub?”

  “I need to speak to Officer Farrell. I’d appreciate it if you’d stick around, though. We’ll need you.”

  Kevin moved off toward my deputy’s car, rubbing the back of his neck.

  Dally turned to me. “What’s it look like up there?”

  “Young man, nobody I know, no shirt, stuffed under a boulder and missing an arm. No tracks other than Aub’s. We didn’t touch him but we’ll need to get up there soon if we’re going to beat the vultures.”

  “Holy Christ. Coyotes make off with his arm, maybe? But how’d he get up there with no shirt.”

  “No animal sign either. Strange.”

  Dally shot a look at the house.

  “Aub says he had nothing to do with it. I believe him. But the reason I’m here in the first place is he took a shot at Danny Stiobhard this morning.”

  Dally raised his eyebrows, but all he said was, “Best someone stays with him.”

  We stepped onto the porch, which was missing only a couple boards. After wiping his feet on a welcome mat made of old tires, Dally headed in. Kevin followed him, leaving my deputy George on the porch smoking a cigarette. I could feel a line of nervous sweat down my ribs. There wasn’t much to do but listen to the snow melt, and to think about the vultures up the hill, and worry. I was needed to lead the coroner and sheriff back to the body. My deputy was free.

  “George,” I said, “got a job for you.” He sniffed. “Why don’t you bring Danny Stiobhard in for us?”

  “Come on.”

  “I’d try the clinic first. If the doc says you can’t have him, tell her I said it’s important.”

  “What if he ain’t there anymore?”

  “You know, find him.”

  George trudged off to beat the bushes, grumbling.

  Not ten minutes later a maroon extended-cab pickup joined the small fleet of vehicles in the dooryard. Wy Brophy stepped out of the driver’s side. The county coroner and medical examiner was long-limbed and tall, with frameless hexagonal spectacles and a camera dangling from his neck. He hitched a camouflage backpack over one shoulder and raised a hand in greeting. Brophy’s arrival coaxed the two EMTs from their ambulance—a tall overweight boy and a short plump blond girl, county EMTs with ALS training and good equipment. The boy had a large pack on and between the two of them they carried an orange spineboard. Their names were Julie and Damon. Sheriff Dally stepped out of the house, and soon I was leading the four of them back up the ridge, leaving the Dunigans with Deputy Ben Jackson.

  The coroner walked like an old-timey explorer, addressing the ridge in long, confident strides. He never did slip, and still had breath to ask me questions, sheriff listening all the while.

  “How long had the body been out here, did Aub say?”

  “He didn’t.”

  “And you saw it?”

  “Saw it a little. Didn’t touch anything.”

  “Good. How bad was he?”

  “You know. Dead as a mackerel. And he’s missing an arm.”

  “Jesus. No sign of the arm, I gather. Any footprints, anything?”

  “Just saw Aub’s, and now mine and Kevin’s, to and from the farmhouse. Could have missed some, but I didn’t want to muddy the waters. Let’s slow down a minute.” The EMTs had taken a number of falls; connected as they were by the spineboard, if one of them slipped, the other couldn’t help but follow suit. They had wet patches on their knees and Damon was sucking wind.

  While we waited for them to catch up, we heard a woodpecker knocking for his lunch. Brophy raised his camera and searched the surrounding trees, stopping on a big gray beech. With a click and whirr he took his shot, then turned to me. “Downy woodpecker.”

  By the time we got back to the scene, a turkey vulture had removed one of the corpse’s eyes and eaten it. A red string trailed out of the socket. Taking his first glance, the fat EMT said, “Oh, dog,” half to himself, while the monstrous birds flapped up into a tree to wait us out. I could feel them watching.

  The sun kissed the forest floor, turning snow into a fine white fog, waist-high. We all stood back while Brophy tied police tape in a rough circle about fifteen feet in diameter, winding it around a series of tree trunks to encircle the body. Then he pulled latex gloves on, removed his lens cap again, and took a bunch of pictures, saying nothing, pausing often in contemplation. Once he called for me and pointed to a series of footprints, asking, “Yours?” I said I thought so. I couldn’t help but glance back at the sheriff, and he was looking right back at me. Brophy stuck a blue pencil in the snow next to where my prints doubled back on themselves and moved on.

  Eventually the coroner got around to the corpse itself, taking angle after angle of the body as it lay. “We’ve got to turn this guy over,” he said. “Nicholas, you want to come in here, please?”

  The sheriff thought a second and said, “Henry, you go. Let’s not make any new footprints.”

  Brophy looked around him. “Don’t worry about the footprints, that horse is out of the barn.”

  One of the EMTs handed me a body bag and I ducked under the tape. The corpse was thawing and I caught a whiff of roadkill as I squatted next to Brophy, who passed me a pair of rubber gloves. Up close, you could see every one of the kid’s vertebrae and ribs.

  “Okay,” said Brophy, “we don’t want to disturb any wounds. I’ll take him by the neck and abdomen, and you take his left leg, and we’ll ease him over onto the bag.” I spread the black bag out and zipped it open next to the body. “Okay? Carefully.”

  His leg felt like wet deadfall. He was still frozen to the ground on the underside where the sun hadn’t reached, and he came up with a peeling noise and a flood of rot smell. I tried not to look into the mess where his arm and chest used to be, or his empty eye socket. We laid him on the bag and I took a few steps back into my own tracks.

  Brophy photographed the body
and the empty space where it had lain, at some length. Then he squatted, blue pencil in hand. With the eraser end, he pulled open the kid’s mouth and peered in. Then he turned to the torso. First he moved the pencil over the remaining half of the kid’s chest in an arc, then bent down to look into the frozen meat and bone. After moving his hands down the remaining arm, he stopped at the fingers and pried them up for a better look. It was then I saw that the fingertips were gone. He took a glance at the legs and feet.

  “This kid’s been shot.”

  This was news to me. Brophy looked about him, making angles from various positions in relation to where we stood. Then he put his face up right next to the boulder’s visible surface, moving across and down the horizontal layers of shale as if he were reading fine print. Circling out from where we had been squatting, Brophy scrutinized all the neighboring tree trunks in much the same way, pausing at an old antler scrape but ending by shaking his head.

  He pulled off his gloves and let them drop. “Wish we had the rest of him,” he said. Producing a small tape recorder, he began to speak into it. “Evident powder burns on anterior chest and abdomen consistent with an intermediate-range gunshot wound. No visible spatter on any likely surfaces around the deceased. Left arm, shoulder, heart, and portion of left lung not present at scene. Marks on body and cuts to the ribs and clavicle suggest trauma by ax or similar sharp tool. Fingertips on right hand severed. Extensive dental damage, likely with a heavy, sharp tool. Left eye scavenged by a”—at this he looked up into the tree—“turkey vulture.” Brophy put the recorder in his pocket, lifted his camera, and took a snapshot of the black birds where they lurked in a nearby beech. “Let’s zip him up.”