Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel (27 page)

“I’ll do what I can for you,” I said. “But you do something for me. Whatever you’ve got, you tell me now. The old man is suffering. I’ve got a John Doe and a dead deputy turning this township to rot. Your brother’s on the run. And here’s you walking around free as you please, talking about ancient history and goddamn aunts.”

Alan shrugged. “Been putting things right in your pathway. I can’t do everything for you.” He shook his head. “Like I said, Helen is ours now. We’re taking her back, in one piece.” As he brushed past me and moved toward the steps, he paused to say, “You will not cut into that woman. Leave her as she was.”

He moved into the darkness of the northern field. As he stepped into the woods, he called over his shoulder, “Roast them with butter, salt, and onions. Brain food for you, Officer.”

My condition must have been improving; as I held the pike up for inspection, they looked like something I could eat. Smelled halfway decent too. I brought them inside, wrapped them in paper, and put them in my icebox.

I had a bath, and it was very human.

After washing the pike in the sink, I prepared them much as Alan had suggested—he didn’t need to tell me how to cook a fish—and got them sizzling in the aged oven that came with the farmhouse. You don’t want to eat pike all the time, as they are near top of their food chain and full of mercury, but they can’t help it if they’re delicious either, especially when caught on the young side and cooked right then. With some wild rice and green beans frozen from the garden, it was as good a meal as I’d had in days. The heat from the oven thawed me a bit.

I washed my dishes, then poured a small glass of scotch and sat at the kitchen table looking at the Stiobhard files in a stack. Below the mix of deeds and criminal records was a rich vein of photocopied documents from early in the century. Time had blurred the typewritten words, but it wasn’t too long before I found what I had been seeking: a marriage license between Michael Stiobhard, who was grandfather to the Mike I knew, and Eibhilín Aodaoin ó Baoill of County Cork, Ireland. The year was 1928. It took some scrabbling among the papers at the table, and stacking and restacking, before I concluded there was no great-great-aunt among the Holebrook County Stiobhards. Helen had to be Eibhilín, our lady of the bog. I poured my whiskey back in its bottle and went to bed.

C
AN I
tell you one more thing about my wife Polly and our place in Wyoming? She loved gardening: vegetables, but especially flowers. Our neighborhood was scrubby and dry, and it took effort to grow anything beautiful. The irrigation ditch that cut across our land meant a lot to Poll; it was a kind of anchoring presence for what she cultivated, a surety against drought and failure that not every homestead had. She planted a stretch of perennials along the far bank so we could sit on the porch and smoke a joint and survey our bright swaths of color in a gray-green ocean of sage. Yeah, we grew a bit of weed for ourselves, in secret defiance both of the law and the cartel working their way north at the time. As a lawman, I gave myself that special privilege. Anyway, the flowers: I remember the first season her salvia and Jacob’s ladder bloomed together in a purple embarrassment of riches. They were not gentle nor cloudy as the lilacs we get back East, but they did the trick.

One bright morning I come home after a shift of the usual shit, waiting at DUI stops and tailing pickups, and there was Polly, out kneeling by the flower bed at the irrigation ditch. Her back was to me. It was uncommon to see her out during the day by that stage. Something about her body didn’t work right in the sunlight anymore, and she got light-headed and short enough of breath that it could be a near thing for her to get back to the house. Something in the air. I was tired and almost didn’t go out to her, but I did. As I got closer I noticed she was wearing something on her head. She turned slightly and I saw it was a gas mask. She’d driven out to the A to Z for it so she could weed the flower bed and be in the sun. I hurried to her side. Kneeling, she looked up at me from amid the pink and blue phlox and delphiniums, and through the mask’s clear plastic, there was a smile. I remember thinking, how is it all these flowers can live here but my wife is dying?

It wasn’t long after that. There were weeks of desperation as we sought treatment we couldn’t afford, and nobody was optimistic; in addition to the newly discovered cancer that extended from lungs to brain, Poll’s liver and kidneys had partially crystallized and her skin was opening up in nickel-sized sores that didn’t go away on their own. I’ll always remember the last time I saw her alive, what I would consider alive, is when she struggled out to her garden in a gas mask.

In the hospital there came a point when she was lucid and I couldn’t be sure she would be again. It took some time sitting by her bedside to bring myself to say what I had to. We’d both know why I was saying it.

“Poll,” I said, and couldn’t go on.

She smiled.

I tried again and got a little farther. “You’re the best part of this world. The only beautiful part, to me.” I tilted my face back but my eyes flooded over. “Everything else is nothing compared to you.”

“Shucks,” she said.

I laughed at that. “I’ll find you again. I can’t live without you.”

“But I want you to,” said Poll. “Yes, you can.”

NEXT MORNING I
stood on the front stoop of Kevin and Carly Dunigan’s place. Carly answered my knock.

“Morning,” I said. “Carly, I need to speak with Aub again.”

“Afraid you can’t. The sheriff beat you to it. They just left about five minutes ago.”

“Already? Where?”

“I have no idea. Sheriff didn’t say.”

“What’s Kevin’s cell?” She didn’t answer, and I asked, “Does Kevin even know about this? Does Wendell?”

“Kevin’s at work. Which is where I need to be. And I assume Aub needs to be wherever he is—”

I left her standing there, slammed the door to my vehicle, and called Dally on my cell. He didn’t answer, and I sped away.

I pulled around to the asphalt parking lot behind the courthouse to find the sheriff’s radio car. I had arrived at exactly the right or wrong time: As I trotted to the main entrance, a siren wailed in the distance, and Liz Brennan tore up the driveway in her station wagon. She jerked to a halt a bit past the entrance, got out, didn’t close her door, and hurried past me into the basement level. The siren grew louder as I followed her in, and was swallowed by the closing door and the courthouse’s heavy interior.

We headed down a set of stairs to a metal door, behind which was the coroner’s office and a morgue the size of a meat locker. We opened it in time to hear Wy Brophy say, “I’m not a doctor, Nicholas.”

The sheriff knelt on the floor beside Aub Dunigan, whose eyes were gently shut even as his mouth grasped—whether for words or air I couldn’t tell. His right knee was raised, and his forearm flopped onto his abdomen repeatedly and with no strength. His left side was motionless. Liz swept the sheriff away, and performed what examinations she could.

“I thought we were going to talk about this,” I said to Dally.

“Yeah, well,” said Dally with a sigh. “As you see.” He stood tall, but if you looked close enough, you could see the burden of guilt beginning to bend him.

Without turning from her patient, Liz asked for an account.

“Ah,” Dally said. “Yeah. We took him down here to view a body, a body that was pulled out of his land.”

“But . . . he was the one who found him in the first place, right?”

“No, a woman. Somebody new.” His eyes turned to an examination table, where a corpse lay covered by a sheet. “It upset him. He pitched forward onto the examination table and ended up on the floor. I was able to, to stop his fall a bit. And here we are.”

“His heart’s steady, considering, but his breathing worries me. I’m reasonably sure we’re looking at a stroke. We need to take him to town.” By this, Liz meant over the border to a hospital in Binghamton or Elmira. “I’ll ride with him. Where’s the ambulance coming from, the county? We’ll need advanced life support.”

The EMTs arrived and strapped the old man onto a gurney. His mouth was the only part of him free to move, wide open and gnawing at the air. They disappeared out the door, and the sheriff, silent and lost, followed them. Liz promised to call me with news that I could relay to Aub’s family, and left me in the morgue with Brophy.

The coroner stared at the shrouded body on the examination table, wearing earmuffs against the cold. Coming to himself, he said, “Can I help you, Henry?”

“I’m sorry about all that,” I said.

Brophy shook his head. “What a thing.”

“After everything,” I said. “From your point of view, the sheriff, he was pretty much on the money? He didn’t leave anything out?”

“No, no. Well. Aub didn’t so much ‘pitch forward.’” Wy glanced in the direction of the woman’s body once more. “You know, he saw her and he, he went to her. It looked like he was trying to hold her. Embrace her. You’re going to say I’m crazy, but it was romantic. More than romantic.”

“So he knew her.”

“Who is this woman?” Wy asked, halfway rhetorically.

“We don’t know.”

“Well, he was talking to her, but I couldn’t understand him. And then, you know. The sheriff pulled him away, helped him up. And—” He smacked one palm against the other. We stood there in silence.

I approached Helen, or Eibhilín, or whoever she was, and drew back the hospital sheet that covered her face. She looked as human as the first time I saw her. An aspect of her lived on. It was as if she were midsentence in something that took a while to say; I waited for the message so long that Wy disappeared into his office, and came back, and I was still looking. I covered her, and the impression lingered in the room.

“While I’m here, can I have another look at the John Doe?”

Brophy led me to a bank of four morgue drawers, opened one, and slid the JD out far enough to expose his face. I don’t know what I was looking for, maybe just to burn him into my mind again, or to see him in some new way. His lips shriveled back to show too much of the ruined mouth. Below the stubble on his Adam’s apple, and above his black chest hair, was a constellation of chocolate-colored moles. He had no nose or ear hair, and eyebrows that were too perfect—they would have met above his nose, had they not been plucked. Once he’d been cleaned up, you could tell his haircut had taken some time and money. In more ways than one, he didn’t look like someone from around here. Poor people aren’t thin anymore, like when I was a kid; now they’re fat on the cheap food feeding the ghost of the American dream. This kid was thin, almost extravagantly so. In the slightly more civilized setting of the morgue, I had a sense of sophistication, even wealth.

BACK AT THE
station I was reminded that what might be called normal life goes on, with or without my participation. There were voice mails from a state police dispatcher informing me of a heroin-related car accident in the township the night before, and two domestics, one violent, all handled by state troopers. Fine by me. I also had a cryptic message from my DEA liaison, as well as from Alexander Grace, owner of the stolen skid steer. His voice shook a little on the tape: “I got him, Henry. I got him here. You have to come over right away.” It didn’t sound good. I raced down 37 to find Grace hopping mad; a former employee had shown up claiming to know where the machine was, but wouldn’t give it up until he had the money in hand. This led Grace to produce a pistol. The man consented to be held captive for a little while, then grew tired of waiting for me to show up, got in his truck, and left without being shot. Grace gave me the employee’s name, and I promised to pay him a visit.

I picked up a sandwich and returned to my station. The forms were still there. There would always be a gap between what appeared on the reports and what had actually taken place. For the past few days and nights, the time sheets I submitted to Milgraham and the chronology of my work would be especially tough to reconcile, given how much unanticipated overtime it would involve. I had been lobbying for a salary, rather than wage, anyway; I don’t mind staying out a little late. If done right, the reports would help my cause. Form upon form. I couldn’t bring myself to begin.

I had been meaning to put in a call to the machine shop in Kirkwood where Barry Nolan worked, and finally had a spare moment to do so. After a minute of blown-out hold music, the manager got on the line, a prickly fella named Goffa. I introduced myself and explained that I was calling on behalf of Nolan. “He’s had a friend die, and he’s been helpful to us here in the township,” I said. “I just wanted you to know that if he’s missed some work, that’s the reason.”

“Yeah, well. That’s what the phone is for. In the end . . .”

“I understand,” I said, wanting to get off the phone. “I can account for second shift yesterday, and first shift the day before.”

Goffa made an impatient noise. “That’s, you know. Okay. What about third shift before that, and second shift the day before that? If everybody blows off their rotation—”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Yeah. He missed four in a row. Part-timers, like Nolan, work on a rotation—”

“Thanks for your time,” I said, and hung up.

I got up, put on my extra .40 and coat, had my hand on the doorknob, and then I stopped, took off my coat, and sat.

Camp Branchwater was shut up in the winter. Remote as it was, patrolled by Nolan, and offering no heat or electric, the young drinkers, vandals, drug users, and cheaters of the area let it be. I’d never gotten a call about it in my few years on the job. I needed a closer look.

There was a number for Branchwater’s office in my phone book; I dialed it and got the answering machine. I left a message for someone to call me back, gave my office number and my cell, and said it was urgent. Then I called the sheriff’s department; Krista hadn’t heard any news of the sheriff or Aub. It took her just a moment to find Pete Dale’s number in Westchester for me. I thanked her and hung up.

After a few rings, Pete’s kindly wife Donna answered. Though she was surprised to hear from me, she summoned some pleasantries and questions about the township. She didn’t seem to know anything of our difficulties. I made some conversation with her before asking to speak with Pete.