Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel (2 page)

Danny snorted and lowered his arm. “Liz, stop. Wait until he goes.”

“Sit. Still.” She plucked another ball out. He hissed through gritted teeth and exhaled when the shot was free. His face looked mighty pale.

“Stiobhard, you might as well tell me who the other party is.”

As Liz dug in with the clamp again, Stiobhard yelped and started to hyperventilate. Liz made him lower his head between his knees and slow his breathing. When he regained control, he said, “I’ll tell you who to talk to. You know Aub Dunigan out on Fieldsparrow Road?”

I nodded. Aub lived on a disused dairy farm that most passersby would assume was abandoned. There were younger Dunigans in the area, yet Aub was alone in the world as far as I knew. A recluse.

“Like I said, it was an accident, no doubt. He’ll tell you himself if he remembers back as far as half an hour ago.”

“You provoke him?” My guess was Danny had his eye on a nice cherry tree; they have grown big in Aub’s woods.

“Why would I? Over what? He’s old. His cousin Kevin hired me to clear his trails. Evidently nobody told him. You have what you need, would you just? Just go check on the old man. Tell him no hard feelings.”

Liz pushed her glasses into place with her wrist. She had bright blue eyes. “Let’s talk out in the hall.” After she’d closed the door to her makeshift operating room she said, “Henry, I’ve given you all the time I can right now.”

“Got it.”

“Let me patch him up, then you can do whatever you’re going to do.”

“All right. Save the shot, okay?”

She nodded. “Hey, we on tonight? Uncle Dave Macon got the ax this morning,” she said. “I made coq au vin.”

Uncle Dave Macon is—was—a troublesome rooster. Liz is my best friend Ed’s wife. We get together Tuesday nights to have dinner and run through old fiddle tunes. I play the fiddle. All you really need to make dance music is a fiddle and a banjo. Liz comes from a traditional family and plays very good clawhammer banjo and passable three-finger. Ed started out as a rock-and-roll guitar player, but he’s been learning. Despite his frequent suggestions that we arrange some heavy metal song in a bluegrass style, and drinking to excess when we play, he rounds Liz and me out pretty well. It’s nice to have someone to play with.

Liz saved my life when I first returned to Wild Thyme a few years back, which I’ll tell about later.

I told her we were on, left the clinic, then called the office on my cell and asked George to go out and park at the foot of Aub Dunigan’s driveway and not let anyone up. I decided to call on Kevin Dunigan, Aub’s second cousin and nearest relative that I knew of. If the old man needed to be put in a home, best that process started with family.

It was early enough that I could catch Kevin before work. I put on the lights, but not the siren, and stepped on it, easing through one red light and racing into the outskirts. Kevin lived with his wife in a brick ranch house just east of town, and owned an oil-change shop in Fitzmorris. The house is at some remove from the road in the middle of a field, but you can pick it out at a distance by the flagpole in his yard; he flies Old Glory and, just beneath it, a big blue flag with the oil-change corporate logo on. As a result of that flag he’s had to turn away some would-be customers who concluded that his house was the shop.

When I got to his driveway I turned off the flashers and pulled in. One of the garage doors was open and at least one car was still there. Kevin, gray and compact and near fifty, stepped out of the door that communicated between house and garage, and onto the driveway. There was a look of mild concern on his face and a mug in his hand.

“Why, Henry.”

“Kevin, how you been?”

“Fine. What, ah, what brings you around?”

“You hear from Danny Stiobhard this morning?”

Kevin’s eyes widened. “Why would I?”

“Your cousin Aub winged him with a shotgun. He says.”

“Come again?”

Kevin’s wife Carly joined us outside, wearing a yellow baseball hat and baggy jeans tucked into galoshes. I didn’t know her very well; she worked in the little bookstore in town, and had steered it in a Christian direction.

Kevin relayed what I’d just told him. She said, “
Now
look.”

“Don’t worry about Danny,” I said. “He’ll live. Just so I have everything straight: You hired him to clear the trails?”

“I certainly did not,” Kevin said. “What on earth.”

“He said you did.”

“What about Aub? Can we see him? What do we do?”

“Well, I have yet to get his side of things. It would be good if you came with me to check on him. I may have to bring him in.”

Carly boggled at that. “You ‘may’? You haven’t got him now?”

Kevin took a couple steps back, saying, “Oh, no. No, you don’t.”

I held up my hands. “Hey. Please.”

Kevin pointed a finger at me. “Do your own job.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

He handed his coffee mug to Carly and rubbed his face with both hands. “Sorry, Henry. Since I was a kid, he’s . . . it’s been difficult, him in the family. Just don’t let him shoot me and I’ll get my coat.” He went inside.

Carly raised an eyebrow at me.

“He won’t get shot,” I said.

Kevin followed me in his car, a silver sedan. We drove up and down the hills on 37, the sun getting higher in the morning and the roadside ditches rushing with meltwater. Every now and then a beer can flashed blue. Holebrook County is on the western edge of the Endless Mountains region. The term is a poetic one; what people mean is that it’s hilly. We’re part of the Appalachian Range, which formed almost five hundred million years ago, along with a vast inland sea to the west. Creatures in the sea died and sank, and the mountains eroded, and over a hundred million years this mix of sediment and organic matter was buried and turned into shale, the Marcellus Shale. Because of the once-living things in it, the Marcellus contains a lot of natural gas, all wrapped up in layers of rock like a present to America.

After maybe seven miles we turned onto a narrower route, passing dirt roads where they coughed out onto the pavement. Many were marked with blue and white ribbons put there by the gas operators, showing the way to sites they were probably going to drill. And not only at roads: if you knew where to look in the tree line, you saw the ribbons marking trailheads. I dislike seeing them but I’m out of luck, because they’re everywhere.

Fieldsparrow Road led up and to the north. I waited to see that I hadn’t left Kevin in the dust and then made the turn, slowing the truck to about half speed. The township paid for new shocks last year and they won’t be doing it again soon. We bumped along for a mile or two, past derelict trailers and at the edge of a clearing, a blue swing set grown over with black grapevine. After a long stretch of woods the road emerged into wide gray fields. On the left stood a couple lopsided sheds, and up a long, steep driveway a farmhouse was half hidden by a grove of maples. I parked behind Deputy Ellis’s radio car, where he sat tapping ash over the top of his window, hidden from the house by a barn.

We each got out of our vehicles and stood in the road and George said, “Nobody stirring up there. Far as I can tell.” He tossed a butt into the ditch, where the water carried it away. “How’s Danny?”

“He’ll live.”

Kevin Dunigan pulled up. George tried to wave him along with some impatience, not realizing who he was. Extending a hand out his window, Kevin introduced himself. George told him to park out of sight of the house, then turned to squint one eye at me as if to ask what the hell.

The barn we were hiding behind was built into a slope, so that half the foundation disappeared underground. A heap of blue shale fieldstones surrounded the barn, along with a set of rusted rotary blades, several empty jugs of wine, and much more broken glass, all covered with briars and deadly nightshade. The structure itself was standing, I’ll say that for it; the siding had weathered silver and was full of holes toward the bottom. I peered around the corner to the base of the dirt driveway and was surprised to find a new hatchback. It was blue, on blocks, and its wheels were gone.

“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.