Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel (14 page)

I said, “Your mother said you had words with Aub Dunigan?”

“You have to understand I have daughters. I can’t have him wandering around, getting in my cars.” He seemed defensive, so I held up my hands as if surrendering. He nodded, satisfied.

“So when you had these run-ins—”

“It was a couple years back, and I was clear the first time he tried it, or so I thought. When it happened again, I took measures.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah. Look, say what you want about Aub Dunigan, he’s an old coot, but I doubt he’s got it in him, doing away with an able-bodied man like that. Ma thinks he’s a gentle soul, a child of God. Me, I couldn’t say. Except it don’t make sense, this. He’s too far gone to kill anyone.”

“Do you have any idea what may have happened up there?”

“No.”

“And the young man we found. He doesn’t sound familiar to you?”

“Nah, no idea. Him, now, George. You think”—he leaned toward me—“we got someone doing this for fun? How worried should I be? My girls will be spooked. Too much TV.”

“The kid died for a reason. We’re just not sure what it is yet.” Ron raised an eyebrow at that, and I knew myself it was thin. I continued. “I mean, don’t go wandering around up there, don’t send your kids up there or anything. But live your lives. You’re safe; we’ve got police up on the ridge.” I didn’t mention that it was only me.

“Shit, my kids don’t go anywhere without my knowing. Appreciate the visit.” My host stood as if to end our talk. I returned my beer to him unopened and stood.

“One more thing,” I said.

Ron Grady, Jr., kept his father’s firearms in a tall oak cabinet with red stained glass in the door. I examined them all, including the middle-aged muzzle-loader that Ron claimed hadn’t been out in several years. When asked about his mother’s handgun, he shrugged. “That’s why I kept all these others.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be checking on your family until we sort this out.”

“I appreciate it but there’s no need. I’m here all day and night. Unless I find work. If you hear of anything . . .” He was edging me toward the door.

Last I knew, Ron Grady had been employed at the garage that Kevin Dunigan owned. Normally I would never ask, but since he brought it up, I said, “How long you been out of work?”

“Since November. Merry fuckin Christmas.”

“Dot works, though?”

“A teacher, thank God. Third grade.”

He seemed rueful, but I wondered. Maybe the windfall of a gas lease had something to do with his sudden unemployment. Maybe the promise of one. Neither he nor his mother seemed to be living extravagantly, but you saw that sometimes, newly wealthy people who didn’t change. The thing was, the Grady plots were on the small side, and any drillable lease including them would have been bundled with a larger landowner, such as Aub or the Brays.

Outside, Ron was determined to see me off, so I admitted to him that I’d come on foot. On our way around back, I said, “It’d be helpful, having permission to cross your land.” He gave it, but it was slow in coming. He made a show of unplugging the orange extension cord that led to his electric fence, thanked me once again, and stood watching as I stepped back into the woods.

As I tromped toward the ravine, I glanced back at the two homesteads, following the slanting evening sun as it passed through bare trees. In the long dappled light that now struck their stone fence dead-on, something gleamed. Though by now I knew what it would be, I went back to confirm. Crouching on the forest side of the wall, I pulled out a turquoise-glass line insulator and hefted it in my hand. Had to be ten of them tucked into the stones at intervals.

BY THE TIME
I got back up on the ridge, I was bone-tired and let my feet carry me back to Aub’s farm. The sun was still high enough to warm the west-facing cab of the township truck, and I put my head back and slept two hours without feeling a bit sorry. Woke up shivering in the dark with my hands between my thighs.

Clouds had rolled in and the dark was the kind it’s hard to argue with, and the beam of my flashlight showed me very little of the farm as I walked a final round. I needed to eat and I wanted a word with Sheriff Dally. Thought about exchanging the township pickup for my own official vehicle, but it was in the wrong direction and I didn’t see the point for a radio that wouldn’t have the reach anyway.

In town, I bought two warmed-over pieces of Mama Rose’s pizza for dinner. We have square pizza in our area; it’s pretty good. I ate driving to the courthouse. There remained a news crew out front, and one in the rear lot, someone having figured out where the courthouse’s back door was. Entering, I kept my eyes low and passed through a flurry of questions without speaking. Pushed a microphone aside in a way that seemed gentle to me, but maybe not so much to the reporter holding it.

In the fluorescent-lit hall running the length of the courthouse basement, Kevin Dunigan sat on a wooden bench. His arms were crossed and he was staring at the opposite wall. I crouched next to him and also stared at the wall a moment before I asked him how was everything. He blew out a lungful of air and said, “I don’t like this being on the news. I didn’t okay that.”

Of course he knew it wasn’t up to him what went on TV, so I didn’t bother to say so. Deputy Ben Jackson came down the hall. He was hatless and had a white bandage over his left ear, and his collar was bloodstained. He nodded to me, unlocked the door to the cells, and gestured Kevin inside. As the door shut behind them I heard Kyle Leahey, the formerly raving inmate, now sobbing in the grip of methamphetamine withdrawal.

It wasn’t thirty seconds before the door swung back open again, and Kevin, red-faced, stalked down the hall. I stood and followed. In the sheriff’s department, Dally’s office was tucked behind a high fake-wood counter, hidden from civilian view; being in the basement, its one high window had bars over it and looked out on the sidewalk if you hopped high enough. While reception was rinsed in fluorescence, beyond it the offices were dark save where light from green-shaded desk lamps gathered. Kevin had vaulted the little swinging door and found Dally at his desk. I arrived just as Ben Jackson was trying to lure him back out again. It wasn’t working.

“Nicholas,” Kevin was saying, “haven’t we been cooperative?”

“Kevin, you see our situation down here. It’s not a hotel—”

“Either Aub moves or the crankhead does. I’m not convinced either of them doesn’t belong in a hospital.”

The sheriff opened his hands as if to ask what hospital.

“Well, you going to charge him? No? Has he even seen a judge? Then I want him out.”

“That’s not the best idea, Kevin—”

“I want him out.”

“Bring your lawyer by in the morning. We’ll talk.”

Seeing he wasn’t getting anywhere, Kevin drew himself up, said, “I will. Fuck yourselves,” and made his exit without acknowledging me.

Dally turned to his bandaged deputy and said, “Am I dreaming? I told you to go home, and yet here you are.”

“All right, boss,” said Jackson.

“Don’t wear that bloody shirt tomorrow. You have a clean shirt?”

Jackson turned the light out in his office, wished us luck, and was gone.

“He’s a good sport, but he’s down to one earlobe. He used to have two, just like the rest of us.” Dally had the beginnings of a beard and he looked exhausted. “Don’t,” he said, “please don’t talk yet. I’m going to hide under my desk and weep for a minute.”

“In that case, I’m going to the Heights.”

I had expected the sheriff to warn me away from there, but he surprised me. “Bless you, young man. Be careful.”

I SWUNG BY
my house to pick up some gear—gloves, a hat, binoculars, a thermos of coffee, and the waterproof cushion I bring hunting. Before I left, the sheriff had advised me that two state troopers and one of his guys were out patrolling the area surrounding Old Account Road, and at the foot of the Heights, I met the first of them. Where a clearing provided a little distance from the woods on both sides of the road, the trooper was running what appeared to be a sobriety checkpoint, but was in actuality a way to search vehicles for Danny Stiobhard without moving himself. The patrol car was so clean it shimmered in the dark, and drew the eye like a shark in shallow water. The trooper—French was his name—waved me down with a flashlight, not recognizing me as police in the township’s beater truck. I introduced myself and asked how long he’d been stationed there.

“Close to an hour.”

“Checked many cars?”

“Not too many, no.”

“Word will be out by now. People will be taking the long way around.”

French looked put off. “Shifty people you got up here.”

I said horrible hunting to him and continued on my way. Upper Sloat Creek Road ran along top the ridge south of Old Account. A series of trails, steep dirt junctions, and a power-line cut connected Upper to Lower Sloat Creek Roads the length of the ridge. All through the Heights, people had fashioned homes out of whatever they had to hand. Small modular houses dropped onto carved-out ledges was about as nice as it got; there were more trailers, and trailers sprouting extra rooms made of garden sheds and fifth wheels, and at the lowest end of the spectrum, dwellings that seemed at once to rot into the land and to be propped up by it, structures with open wounds leaking pink insulation, homes that seemed to draw no definite line between indoors and out.

My intention was to orient myself to the murder in the Heights, as I had been doing over on Dunigan’s ridge. I wanted to experience firsthand the stretch from, for example, Tracy Dufaigh’s place to the junkyard where George was killed. Not that I thought she had done it. And though part of me knew it was a fool’s errand to try, I wanted an eye on the Stiobhards, including Alan. Though he spent most of his time on the outermost skirts of the county, my guess was that he had a place to keep a truck and get laid somewhere more civilized than the cabin in the swamp. He bore scrutiny, just like the cookers and dealers who kept springing up as soon as we arrested the previous crop.

In hunting, patience is the cardinal virtue. You scout, you find the likely spot, and wait. It can take years to build up the sense of where a likely spot is. But once you’re there, with your ass freezing to the ground and your back against a tree, you sink into the rhythm of whitetail life. A line of does and yearlings feeding through an overgrown orchard as the sky turns green in the east, their huffs of white breath and sharp, careful steps in the woods. Walking the same way, days in a row. Then one morning, the buck is there. Maybe the next morning he’ll give you a shot. You have to be in the flow. You can’t force it. George’s death, the SERT team pounding through the woods—all that had jarred some of the natural rhythms of this area, and I hoped to find my likely spot before things settled again. As I said, my intention was only to scout.

I left the truck just off Upper Sloat Creek Road in the power-line cut, hoping one rusty pickup wouldn’t excite too much interest. Stepping out into the night air, I smelled the smoke from dozens of woodstoves below me. It was near freezing again.

Number 1585 was three houses to my west, and I picked my way through the brambles in the power-line clearing until I found the mouth of a trail. What I could see was rocky, narrow, and steeply sloped; farther in it was black as coal. I stood there for a while, hesitating, until a tree stump at the edge of the woods seemed like a better idea and I took a load off. I was beginning to feel I couldn’t do it all alone. I needed to sit and convince myself otherwise.

The tree stump afforded a view directly south across ridgetops almost to Scranton, a distance marked by the red lights of radio towers just outside Clarks Summit. All the strange, sad lives in between the ridge I was on and the nighttime horizon seemed to hover below me in a haze of exhaust and woodsmoke. The red lights winked in the south, and somewhere to the southwest, seen imperfectly through bare tree trunks, Chesapeake or Cabot or Encana or whoever was sinking a well in a blaze of yellow light. Orion stretched above me, and I took a moment for the stars overhead, which could be seen very clearly in this black pocket of the county, well pad or no. It may have been longer than a moment that I devoted to the stars.

A far-off ATV growled and barked as it changed gears. To the west, I heard two more ATVs before I saw their lights. When the three of them rounded the bend below, they brought with them the roar of four-stroke engines. They took the straightaway on Lower Sloat Creek at a furious pace as a state trooper’s patrol car swung in behind them, lights flashing. The statie was losing ground. The road, with its washboards and widow-making hunks of bedrock protruding through the surface, could not have been an easy ride for a Crown Vic. His siren wailed.

I crashed through the brush heading back to my truck, expecting to catch them somewhere on a road to the east. But the ATVs paused. I could hear their engines idling, and voices, but not words. Then they turned up the power-line cut and headed in my direction. My first instinct was to hide, let them pass, and pursue in the pickup. I changed my mind and fought my way to the center of the clearing, feeling thorns rip into my trousers and hands as I struggled for position. A rocky trail ran steep down the middle of the cut, flanked by stumps and boulders. I set up where two great masses of shale would bottleneck the four-wheelers, drew a .40 and my Maglite, but didn’t turn it on. Not seeing me, the ATVs kept cranking up the slope. My mouth got dry. I waited for what seemed like an age, but couldn’t have been thirty seconds. The statie’s spotlight swept them from behind, catching the Day-Glo decals on their helmets. With about twenty-five yards between us, I shone my light in the face of the first rider, who braked immediately, followed by the other two. I yelled for them to cut their engines. In response, all three revved, and then the hindmost two took their vehicles off the path, turning back down the hill and onto a trail running east. After a moment, the statie took off east as well, following their headlights through the bare woods.

That left the first rider, who hadn’t moved. I lifted my firearm, making sure he saw. Though his face was partly hidden by his helmet, I could swear he smiled and cocked back his ears as he gunned his engine. The ATV leapt forward and bore down on me. I stepped behind a boulder, flipped the Maglite in my hand, swung it, and caught him full on the faceguard as he passed. The helmet came partway off his head. He sailed off his ATV and landed like a fish in the dirt, turning over once on the point of his shoulder and winding up facedown. He’d pulled the four-wheeler back with him, and it crunched into the boulder next to me, pinning my thigh between rock and a piece of hot engine. A front tire, still spinning, dug into my shoulder before I was able to lever the thing off of me and shove it to the other side of the trail. When the vehicle had gone over backward, the safety switch had cut the engine off, and after it slid into a resting place in a thicket, the only sound left was a mysterious ticking from somewhere within the hunk of plastic and metal.