Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel (25 page)

“Where’ve you been?” said John.

“There’s something down there,” Palmer said.

Wy Brophy bent over his open case, sorting through equipment. Nolan squatted beside the open grave, using a shovel for support, his nose dripping sweat and his face ashen. “We hit wood,” he said. “It’s soft. You can’t see it now, the water keeps coming in.” The earthen wall facing the swamp had been seeping since we’d dug about two feet down. The deeper we got, the more that side of the hole crumbled like a levee on the verge of collapse. I moved to the edge of the pit and peered into the pooling water in its depths, water that reflected the robin’s-egg sky. The others joined me. I pulled Palmer back for a moment and told him we were not alone. He nodded without meeting my eyes and without belief.

Brophy instructed John and Nolan—gently, gently—to find the edges of the casket and clear its surface of water. As the two large men slid down into the pit, I pulled on Palmer’s coat again, quietly. “Something’s up there too,” I said, and nodded toward the tree line above. “I chased a man to this same spot yesterday, and I’m telling you, I saw someone up there. Let’s work up either side of the clearing—”

“Easy,” said Palmer, “I’m not doing that.”

“We could have the shooter
right now
,” I said. I turned to find John and Nolan watching us from below.

Palmer put an arm around my shoulder and turned me away from them. “Listen,” he said, “we’ve got something right here. I think you can see that. I’m doing what I was called in to do. Whatever’s up there, frankly, I’m not going to crash through the woods after it. Not on your word alone.”

“Why not?”

He sighed. “Sheriff mentioned. Your doctor friend? She told him. You need rest.” Palmer patted me on the back and joined the others.

Feeling betrayed, I resisted looking to the tree line, then took a breath and stepped to the pit’s edge. John and Nolan were at pains to work together in the small space, and after a misplaced foot and an ominous crunch, the coroner cleared them out of the hole and slid down himself, scooping away earth with his gloved hands. He exposed a narrow coffin, its wood barely distinguishable from the soil surrounding it. There were no handles visible. Brophy raised a hand and asked for a hammer. Using the claw, he knelt and eased iron nails out of soggy wood; the coffin lid folded in half like cardboard.

Another age gazed up at us.

The face was dark as mahogany, its eyelids sunken into sockets that had emptied long ago, its mouth forced into a wince as the facial tissue tightened into leather. And still, its features were delicate, discernible. It. Her. And strange to relate, her face, turned slightly to the east, seemed to reach out to us from somewhere.

“Jesus,” said Brophy, scrambling to his feet. “Jesus.”

A film of cloth swam around the body, stained the color of iron-rich earth, its floral print still visible. Around her collarbone, lace had shriveled and turned the same red-brown. A black weal of what looked like damaged skin encircled her throat.

Brophy asked for his camera, and Palmer handed it down to him. After taking some photos, Brophy held up an end of rope, about an inch in diameter. “This is in with her,” he said. “It’s around her back and under her arms; it was laid out here, on her anterior abdomen. Maybe she was lowered with it?” Or killed with it, I thought. He took another picture. As he cleared around the body, we saw a sodden dress clinging to hipbones, hand curled around skeletal hand. All the while, the swamp crept in.

“Wy,” John said, looking at the rising water level, “she’s going under, there.”

“What do you think’s been preserving her all this time? She’ll last a while longer.” The coroner took samples of water and soil. “This bog, this . . . this area here. Amazing. Never seen anything like this, guys.”

“So she’s what, she’s mummified?”

“Pickled, more like. It’s chemical.” Brophy climbed out of the grave and pulled Palmer aside. As they conversed, Brophy gestured at his own neck, as if demonstrating something. Palmer nodded along. I turned to the tree line, trying to scan for my figure on the sly. My gaze came to rest on Nolan as he drank from John’s flask of whiskey and let his eyelids sag in relief. He noticed me looking, and raised his eyebrows in what was the closest expression to a smile I’d ever seen him make.

“Does no good in the bottle,” he said, and held the flask out to me. I declined.

After further conversation, Brophy went to his kit and produced a body bag. “Here comes the tricky part,” he said.

We cut down and stripped two saplings, then buried their narrow trunks below the coffin and heaved up, two men to a side. The box lifted free of the mud with a sucking sound, and red-brown water poured from its seams, soaking us from the thighs down. “Shit. Jesus,” said John. Nolan paled but otherwise remained impassive. All I could smell was earth and swamp and something sulfurous; there was no odor of rotting flesh, not even up close. As we slid the coffin onto dry land, its sodden wood fell apart in my grip.

We gathered around the body. She looked vulnerable, smaller out in the big new world. I had an irrational protective impulse as we stood in silence, offering the woman a moment of respect before the indignity of a body bag, then transport to some lab, there to be cut and pulled open and scrutinized. It felt wrong, taking her out of there. But that’s what we did.

As the others carried the body out, I broke off the trail. Palmer saw me go, and said nothing. I picked my way north through the saplings around the periphery of the clearing. The shade in the woods soothed my eyes, even broken as it was with blades of white light. A silent step, a listening pause, a step. I climbed the slope and willed my eyes to focus, to peer beyond the trunks and the thicket. With the swamp spread out below me, I reached the place I’d seen almost without realizing. The silver tree stump I’d used to mark the spot was unmistakable, though, and had been gouged to a fare-thee-well by a woodpecker. There was a faint scent of tobacco on the air. I scoured the ground at my feet and found the butt of a hand-rolled cigarette nestled into a patch of club moss. My chest tightened in frustration. There would be egress from the ridge in any direction but one, from there, and my friend remained more than a few steps ahead. Whoever he was, he had moved on.

WE SET THE
woman in the shade beneath Nolan’s deck, where rolls of deer fencing and a stack of hay bales were stored. For a moment we stood awkwardly in the dirt drive, and then John said what was on all of our minds.

“You got any beers in that house?”

Nolan nodded. “Be right back.”

“Can’t we come in? Cold out here.”

“Like that? No, you can’t.”

“What, who’s going to care? What do you care? We’ll take off our shoes.”

Nolan snorted. “Jesus Christ, John, I don’t want goddamn mud all in my house. Leave it alone.”

When the door slapped shut behind Nolan, John turned to Palmer and Wy with a wink. “He’s a divorcée. A sensitive plant. You should see it in there, it’s like it never happened, all the décor she picked out, everything is still there. As if she’s going to come home any minute. Poor fuckin son of a bitch.”

Brophy’s eyes widened. “How long ago was this?”

“Aw, no, that ain’t her,” John said, referring to the corpse lying under the deck. “His wife just married some blowjob up in Sidney.”

While we waited, I tried raising Sheriff Dally on my cell, but had only one bar, and that winked in and out. Nobody else’s reception was any better, and though the air was cooling quickly into the low forties, Wy kept looking over at the body bag. The body inside needed to get where she was going. For that to happen, we needed to know where that was, and how she’d be transported.

I mounted the steps and stood at the back door, which opened into the kitchen. Our host wasn’t in sight, so I knocked lightly and let myself in, shucking my boots. The kitchen curtains let some light through, but the other rooms were dark.

I had the landline phone in hand, and had just finished dialing the sheriff’s department, when Nolan passed in the hall without seeming to see me.

I heard a door open, and footfalls descending an interior staircase. I placed the phone gently on its cradle and padded in the direction from which he’d come. Nolan’s living room contained a wicker bookcase with a few books on the top shelf, including a worn copy of
The Tracker
by Tom Brown as told to William Jon Watkins, and a field guide to animal tracks and sign. A row of
National Geographic
s filled the bottom shelf. The case was otherwise empty save for one framed photograph that had fallen over; it was a shot of a handsome, burly teen in a rented tux, at the prom with his date, who was plain and overweight, but sweet-looking. I set it down. On the western wall, a flight of brass ducks passed over a little Jøtul woodstove in a bricked corner. A pair of oil paintings pictured a buck at attention, and a doe and a fawn, respectively, in each case the surrounding woods a little too grand for our area.

Among a mosaic of photographs hanging in the dark hall I picked out Nolan crouching with a buck so freshly killed his eyes had yet to glass; Nolan and the woman I presumed was his ex-wife; Nolan with his arm around the boy from the prom photo, who was in football shoulder pads, his face alight; and a dark square of wallpaper where a photograph had once hung.

The staircase groaned, and I crept back to the kitchen and pressed redial. Krista had just answered when Nolan walked into the kitchen. The smile fixed on his face did nothing to hide his displeasure at my presence. I mouthed,
Sorry
, pointed to my stocking feet, and shrugged. Nolan opened his refrigerator and pulled out a box of light beer cans. As he closed the icebox door, he seized one of the newspaper articles about his son as if seeing it for the first time in years, letting a magnet clatter to the floor. He stuffed the article into a pocket and waited by the back door.

Krista finally put me through to the sheriff, and I filled him in. Dally said he hoped she would come back as a natural death, and that he would send an ambulance to ferry our corpse to the county morgue.

“Listen,” he told me. “Brophy may feel out of his depth and want to send her with Palmer to a state lab down in Scranton. Don’t let the state take her yet. It’s important that the body stay here in town until at least tomorrow morning.”

“What happens then?” I said. I felt Nolan’s eyes on me.

“She’s got a date.”

“What’s that mean?”

The sheriff explained what he had in mind.

When he was done, I said, “I don’t agree with that approach at all. You need to be gentle with him, or he’ll—”

“Just keep the body up here,” Dally told me. “We’ll discuss it later.”

I hung up. Nolan stood by the door, waiting.

Before leaving the kitchen, I felt I should say something friendly. “How’s your son been? He have a good season this year?”

“Yeah.”

“Any scouts?”

“You want to . . .” Nolan gestured at the door, and tried to cover his impatience with a smile.

Outside, we sat on car bumpers and hoods and drank and shivered, and waited for the ambulance to show. I raised a beer to my companions’ service to the township. John followed with a toast to George Ellis: “Rough, tough, and hard to bluff.”

“Amen,” said Nolan.

I deflected a couple questions from John about our investigations. Nolan’s gaze wandered from our conversation and lingered on the body bag under his deck. He looked at his watch and sighed.

“You miss your shift?” Kozlowski asked.

By the time the ambulance arrived, Brophy and Palmer were negotiating over the body, and Brophy was losing.

“No,” said Palmer. “You want our assistance in the field, fine. We never agreed to take anything on beyond that. It’s a county matter.”

“Bill, I’m in no position to take on a new subject. I just got a car accident vic nobody wants to claim. I get one more body, I’ve got to send one to the funeral home. Or to you.” He turned to me. “Henry. She’s in good shape now, but every second she spends in an uncontrolled environment, every second she’s above thirty-six degrees, everything the chemical composition of that bog prevented, all that bacteria, will rush in and turn her into sludge. Now, I can keep her cold, but that’s about all. The detailed examinations, the tests, the time, the man-hours, I can’t do that for a subject like this. But someone should. Getting her to Scranton, now, is the best way.”

Two overweight EMTs stood silently by, half listening to our discussion. I recognized one of them as Damon from the other day. He waved at me, a surreptitious hand at waist level.

Dusk was falling. In the face of Palmer’s stony refusal, Brophy raised his hands. “Do what you want. I’m just asking for what’s best. Never seen anything quite like that one before, so, you know.” He looked me long in the face, then pulled me aside. “You ever hear of the Tollund Man?”

“No, sir.”

“He was from Denmark. Lot of peat bogs over there. Not exactly like this one, but similar. And this Tollund Man was dug up in one, in a bog. He was so well preserved that people thought he might have been a modern murder victim. He had a rope around his neck. As it happens, he was from the Iron Age.” His eyes shone.

It must have been plain on my face I didn’t know when the Iron Age was.

“What that means,” Brophy continued, “he could have been alive the same time as Christ.
That old.
People speculate—speculate, now—that he was a human sacrifice. Think about that: a human sacrifice. For all we know, he could have been a messiah, a Christ nobody ever set down in words. Can you imagine? Preserved for two thousand years.” He looked with longing at the body bag under the deck. “And now we find her. I don’t believe there’s ever been one found on this continent. She might have been preserved for decades. Could have lasted hundreds of years more after we’re gone.”

“So put her back,” Kozlowski suggested from across the driveway. Nolan snorted. I glared at them both.

Turning to Brophy, I said, “I bet you can handle it fine.”

“No, I can’t, and that’s the thing,” he said. “They can. Leave it up to me, and . . .” He shrugged. “We won’t learn half of what there is to know.”