Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel (4 page)

“You have a deputy.”

“He’s out chasing Danny Stiobhard.”

“Is he? What for?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He had business on the ridge. I’d like to know what it was.”

“That’s a good question. Here’s another: Why did Dunigan feel he had to defend his place with deadly force?”

“I don’t know. Look, Nicholas, you can’t believe Aub did this.”

“Henry. You don’t know who did what, or how it happened or why. Next time, check with me before stepping outside your remit.”

I nodded but said nothing. I was not answerable to the sheriff, though he sometimes treated me so.

Dally, gazing out at the hills, scratched under his campaign hat and said, “Fuck me. Wait here until we get back, then. I’ll get us some staties. Try not to let anyone up.”

They drove off, no lights, no sirens. Kevin followed in his own car.

Holebrook County law enforcement is a skeleton crew. Dally had two deputies, two patrolmen, and an administrative assistant—not much. Fitzmorris had a nominal chief of police and two deputies. I was one of five township officers scattered throughout the county; the remaining fifteen townships had decided they didn’t need them, and used the state. And I just had George Ellis. Even if they pulled a patrolman or two from Fitzmorris, or even some state troopers from the barracks in Dunmore, we couldn’t cover the whole ridge plus Aub’s homestead. But for the time being someone had to do what they could, so I headed down to fetch my truck and bring it to where I could watch both the house and the tree line.

As I walked down the long driveway, I peered in the windows of the little blue hatchback with no wheels. Still looked new. The west-facing main doorway to the barn was directly in front of me; it was a legal gray area to check inside, but curiosity won out. The doors were tall and heavy, and slid open and shut on a rusted track. I tugged one open wide enough to reveal a vaulted interior in decent repair, though there were enough chinks in the siding to give a kind of stained-glass effect with the sunlight. Bat and bird shit coated the floor, tarp-covered tractor implements, and disused furniture. I took a quick turn on that floor and headed back outside.

As with any barn of this age, there had been some serious decay; brambles covered the floor sills along the southern side. The bottom-most timbers crumbled in my hands. On the eastern face, wind and rain had weathered the pine siding to a silver sheen. It was one of my favorite colors.

I found another sliding door about five foot high. I pulled it open and caught a familiar bouquet of guano, old wood, and mold. I ducked inside. The basement’s floor was packed dirt, none of it disturbed that I could tell. Much of it was hidden by rusted tractor implements, old hay bales, five-gallon buckets, and every other thing. Just above my head, rough-hewn joists, many still bearing the shapes of the tree trunks they had once been, supported the first floor. They in turn were supported by coarse, fat posts at the walls and along the structure’s midpoint. And running the length of that midpoint was the largest sleeper beam I’d ever seen. It was a full forty feet long, about twenty inches square, and perfectly straight, disappearing into darkness at the far end of the cellar. The oak tree it came from had to have been old growth.

As I picked through the basement, trying not to leave any trace, my Maglite chanced upon something flash-orange up against the south wall. It didn’t look of a piece with the other junk. Pushing aside a coil of wire fencing, I found four traffic cones fixed diagonally tip-down in a wooden frame. I realized what it was, and felt a slight creep when I saw the splatters. That method of slaughtering chickens is much more common in this area and among Aub’s type of people, do-it-yourself people I suppose is what I mean. Trying to get to a chopping block with an ax in one hand and an upset chicken in the other just isn’t sensible; you only see it in movies. This way you take a sharp knife to the jugular and the chicken stays put. That’s how Liz and Ed do it, too.

I shut the barn door and drove the truck up to the farmhouse yard, fishtailing once in the slush. I parked. The sun had to cut through the whitest mist you ever saw. When I closed my eyes I saw the corpse and felt its weight in my hands.

I stepped out and approached the corncrib where we first ran into Aub that morning. This type of outbuilding is rare now, but would have been an ordinary sight as recently as thirty years ago, when I was just a little kid and the world hadn’t sped up. I turned the white porcelain doorknob by the stem—so I wouldn’t smear any fingerprints, or leave any—and opened the door. A scent of sawdust, mixed with gas and oil. Near the door a chain saw sat ready for use, yellow dust caked around its oil cap and air filter. Sharpened chains hung on nails, and beneath them, three splitting mauls and a single-bit ax leaned in a row. I squatted to peer at their blades: there was no blood that I could tell, and they were all dull and rusty. Empty plastic jugs of oil were strewn about on the floor, and there was a pile of junk at the back.

I stepped outside. Beneath the wooden stairs there was a little gap in the stone foundation. I knelt and shone my light back there, and caught a glint of color. The entire south-facing foundation was lined with domes of turquoise glass about the small size of bell jars, the ones they used for insulating power lines in the old days. They were nestled into the stones, must have been about thirty of them. In my flashlight and with a few thin beams of light shining through gaps in the stone, the glass shone like cats’ eyes.

Out behind a huge old lilac bush, Aub had about a face cord of firewood that must have been split that fall, and several rows of seasoned stuff, one of which had taken a break and sat down in the snow. As I was walking around out there, I heard an approaching car—a rarity on this dirt road—and my instinct was to duck behind a woodpile. My truck was partially hidden from the road by the stand of maples. A gray-silver compact sedan passed slowly, as if the driver were taking a long look at the farm. I couldn’t tell the make. Could have been Kevin’s. It slid east from behind the big barn, picked up the pace, and then disappeared into the woods.

In the farmhouse’s kitchen doorway, I stood looking in, not daring to enter. The outbuildings were one thing, a domicile quite another. I wanted to see inside, to make sense of this predicament, to act. I stayed outside where I belonged.

I heard cars pull into the yard, doors open and shut. Sheriff’s Deputy Jackson rounded the corner along with two state troopers. Jackson handed me a Styrofoam cup of gas station coffee. There were several police vehicles lined up in the driveway, including three all-white Crown Vics belonging to the state police, and two county cars. The two troopers had been borrowed from Dunmore. They were a bit younger than I, and much more squared away; each had a little bath mat of hair atop his head, nothing but pink scalps on the sides, reddening in the cold along with their ears. I’d had to call in troopers for help on domestics involving weapons. You sometimes have to step in there on your own and pray the staties won’t take an hour to join you. I’ve had fights lasting three minutes that seemed like two hours. Anyway, I didn’t know these guys—they looked new. Robertson and Zukowski were their names. Turned out they both lived in Clarks Summit, well to the south. We stood drinking coffee and watching as across the yard Sheriff Dally stood talking and pointing about the property with a third state trooper. This one was older, paunchy, his uniform a little more decorated, his campaign hat tucked under his arm.

“Who’s that one? He with you?” I asked Zukowski.

“Detective Palmer, Forensic Services,” the trooper answered. “We loan him out to rural departments. He’s out of Scranton.”

“He’s here to make sure us local woodchucks don’t dick it up,” said Deputy Jackson.

I’ve mentioned our manpower struggles, which go double in the poorer rural municipalities. Our people don’t want taxes, naturally, and tend to believe they can fend for themselves. The township supervisor who hired me was a Brylcreemed old-timer who knew roads and maintenance—and everyone in the township over fifty—and left me to my own devices. Last year a newcomer named Steve Milgraham unseated him. Pudgy, personable, and inclined to wear salmon-colored pants, Milgraham inherited a flourishing construction business and knows everyone in the township under fifty. Broadly speaking, I don’t care about politics. I figured that, with the sheriff’s support, I would continue to enjoy the blessing of the local, largely Republican, base. But with Milgraham’s arrival I began to hear rumblings from the distant right: Why does a small rural community need not one but two law enforcement officers? Are the DUI checkpoints legal? Can’t Officer Farrell cut my cousin a break? Why should we pay taxes for a service we don’t want, when there’s a state police barracks nearby? And so on. Once, after a township meeting, I overheard Milgraham say that having a policeman in Wild Thyme Township was like putting a silk hat on a pig. Who is the silk hat, and who is the pig, I want to know? Privately I began to refer to him as the Sovereign Individual, or just the Sovereign.

We watched from a distance as the sheriff and Palmer from Forensic Services conversed in the yard.

Trooper Zukowski turned to me and said, “So, you found the body, huh?”

“First on the scene.”

“Did he fall out of your beard?”

Soon enough, Dally approached us, handing me a small can of pink spray paint and asking me to show the way once more, blazing trees as I went so that any police could find his own way henceforth. I was to leave one statie up at the site of discovery and another stationed somewhere on the logging road that led through the woods to Aub’s farm. I didn’t see the use in mentioning that that wasn’t the only trail leading to Dunigan’s land. We didn’t have the men anyway. Jackson and I were to return to help exercise the search warrant as needed.

Leaving the staties at their posts up in the woods, Jackson and I tromped back down the trail. I asked him how Aub was holding up.

“Aw, man, it broke my heart. You ever have to help an old man like that take a shower? He’s skin and bones, Henry. Our cells ain’t so bad, but leaving him there, he started singing. Half moaning, half singing. I don’t know if he can hear himself much.”

“You think he’s going to be charged?”

“We’ll see what turns up, I guess.”

We met Sheriff Dally and Detective Palmer of PSP Forensic Services in the dooryard. Detective Palmer shook my hand and introduced himself as Bill. “And you’ve been keeping an eye on things here?” He asked me. “Everything undisturbed?”

“It’s a big spread, as you can see. I took a look in all the buildings to make sure we weren’t missing something that wouldn’t keep.” At this, the sheriff gripped the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Oh, a car,” I said. “A silver car passed slowly but never stopped.”

“Well,” said Palmer, “with a place like this, we can only do our best. Deputy Jackson, come along with the sheriff and me. Officer Farrell, you want to resume your post down at the foot of the driveway?”

I returned to my truck feeling a little let down. The ridge was where they should have started; I was sure of it. Aub didn’t kill and chop up that young man any more than I did. I ran the blue hatchback’s license plate through JNET: it was registered to Aub, with no violations. Nothing but fuzz on the police radio, so I turned to the hot country station and listened to the commercials and syrupy songs.

Around two, Deputy Jackson drove down, took a lunch order, and brought me back a roast beef sandwich with red onions and mustard. Every so often I’d get out, get some air, and see if I could see anything with my binocs. When they hit the corncrib, I watched as they brought out all the mauls and axes, labeled, with their heads taped in plastic. Then Dally emerged holding a piece of cloth in his latex-gloved hand. He spread it out and held it up to the light: a cornflower-blue dress shirt, stained everywhere brown. That’s when I began to worry for Aub.

Deputy Jackson bagged the shirt and they disappeared inside Aub’s house for what seemed like a couple hours. My mind was in different directions. The sun just kissed the western hills when I heard all the vehicles start up and head my way. Deputy Jackson was last out, and he paused by my truck long enough to tell me about a meeting tomorrow morning at the sheriff’s office, to go over the coroner’s report and what they’d found at Dunigan’s farm.

Time passed slowly. Around five I heard cars coming up the road and wondered was it George with something to tell me, but instead it was two more staties to spell Zukowski and Robertson. I convinced one of them to take my post at the foot of the driveway and that two troopers on the ridge was one too many; they’d never be able to cover it all, so best just keep one of them where we found the body, and one by the house. By the time I left the farm, the sky had begun to darken.

B
ACK AT
the station, I turned up the radio and flipped back and forth between the nothing on channel one and the nothing on channel two, listening for George. All I could see was the body lying there. I tried thinking of other things but the body always returned, an afterimage floating blue on black.

In a morgue the size of a walk-in freezer, Wy Brophy was opening up our John Doe. The sheriff would be briefing the DA’s office and the judge, and dealing with Aub. My deputy was wandering the Heights, and it had been too long since I’d heard from him.

I picked up the phone, intending to dial Liz Brennan at home, as the clinic would have closed. Calling her made me nervous, and after a few calming breaths, I shook my head and told myself, idiot, she’s just your best friend’s wife. I dialed. When she answered I could hear her boy and girl in the background—they’re five and three—and some kitchen noises.

“Listen,” I said, “don’t . . . this is between us, but I sent George to pick Danny Stiobhard up today, and I—”

“Yeah, he stopped by. Danny had already left.”

“Yeah.”

“I left him lying flat for two minutes and he found the back door, I guess. Jo never saw him leave till his truck started up. Should have known.”