Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel (7 page)

Jennie emerged from the kitchen holding a chipped mug with a band of yellow roses on it. I took one last look at my hosts Mike and Bobbie, hoping to see something in their faces. Bobbie wore thick glasses with large frames, and that didn’t help. The Stiobhards weren’t like most people I knew, but some things are universal; they didn’t behave like parents whose son had just killed a man. Maybe that’s what Danny had made them believe. Or maybe it hadn’t sunk in yet. “Anything you can tell me,” I said, and left.

As Deputy Jackson and I watched, the ambulance carrying George Ellis swayed back and forth as it descended Old Account Road. “Go home,” Jackson said. “Write your report. Dally told me to tell you.”

I got in my truck but I didn’t go home. Old Account Road climbs the south side of a ridge and, once it hits the top, teeters along the summit for several miles west. I knew the road well, so when I rounded the last curve before the long straight, I turned off all my lights—my flashers and my headlights too—and downshifted to avoid using brake lights. At a dairy farm near the western border of Wild Thyme Township the road makes a Y. I descended the south slope and passed through woods into a swamp, pulled off to the side, and cut my engine. Checked was the shotgun loaded and stepped out with it. My door clicked shut quietly but it was still too loud; every noise I made down there was going to be.

All around me, ragged pine trunks, softened by decay, strained to stay above the water’s surface. The swamp spread for acres, its edges choked with pussy willow and reed. The beavers always found a way to dam it so that every spring the road was submerged, and the township had to wade in and break the dam up. Local hunters knew that deer favored the swamp for its ample cover and access to water. But if you knew that, you also knew that though the Stiobhards didn’t own it, they considered it their personal grounds. I’d received a couple calls in past years from fellows who’d been cursed and chased away from there, wanting to know what could be done about it.

I knew of one way to get where I wanted to go: a stone causey leading through the rushes. Father had taken me once. I pushed down a strand of barbed wire strung between two red pines and hopped into the shadows. Strange how ground covered in pine needles always sounds hollow. I skirted the swamp’s bank on the northern side until the scant light caught the pale branches of a black alder cluster, trees that grew only man-height and no higher so close to the swamp, and produced bright red berries you shouldn’t eat. I ducked under the thicket of branches, snapping only a dozen or two. Finding my footing on the rubble that formed the causey, I began a slow crouching progress into the depths of the swamp, switching the shotgun from hand to hand.

A smear of snow lingered where the sun hadn’t hit the trail that day, some boot tracks in it; to my left and right clumps of bulrush had gotten a head start on spring, bright emerald even in the dark. I crossed channels of water, and they ran deeper and clearer and faster than you might imagine, feeding the rusty belly of the swamp. The water moved much faster than I. Up ahead there was an island where a stand of old-growth pine remained, too difficult for farmers to have reached; I was headed there.

There was no red glow of an open fire ahead, no hiss and pop, but the smell of woodsmoke told me I was close. Willows got so thick I had to crawl on my belly to get past them, shotgun out front. My heart was thudding, I tell you what. It seemed impossible I wouldn’t be heard. I made myself slow. All the stars in the sky might have passed over me while I dragged myself over those stones. My front was soaked, and my elbows too from digging in with them. The light on the island was small and uneven: a flame in a lantern. It made the night’s blackness appear deeper as I emerged from the brush and lay flat against a bank covered in pine needles. Not sixty yards distant stood a hunting cabin the size of one of those garden sheds that come in a kit; a metal chimney puffed smoke into the pine canopy. A window on each side of the cabin let out that flickering light I’d seen on my way in. How they’d got the thing to where it was, I don’t know. I listened for voices and heard only a hush of wind in the pines.

A round whacked into the tree next to me, some six feet above from my head, and I heard the shot slap out after the fact. Some instinct had already curled me up tight to the ground. I called out, “This is Officer Henry Farrell! You shoot again, I’ll shoot back.”

After a pause, a distant voice said, “Didn’t know it was you.”

If you’ve been through a shitty little deployment like I have, you learn not to appreciate being shot at, even if the round wasn’t meant to hit home. I stood and strode onto the island, not knowing whether I was shaking from anger or fear. Other than the lantern pulsing, it was black under those big trees; I stepped high to avoid the roots crossing my path, and strained my eyes for movement. I thought of how George had been shot, how it could come from anywhere. When I got to within ten feet of the cabin and the cabin’s occupant still hadn’t revealed himself, I stopped and turned slowly in a circle. To my right a fire ring was surrounded by logs for sitting, and everywhere else was pine trees, some of them toppled into the swamp, with their root systems turned on end like colossal circular saw blades half buried in the earth.

The voice murmured to my left. “You wouldn’t be trying to bring me in for something?”

“Looking for your brother.”

Part of a fallen tree moved. I twisted my Maglite on and just caught a glint off Alan Stiobhard’s glasses before he said, “Please cut that.”

When I did as he asked Alan approached me in silence. He stopped about ten feet off, clad in camo and a boonie hat, his deer rifle cradled sideways in his arms. Looked like maybe a .243. Alan was the eldest brother. He stood about six-six and was both taller and narrower than Danny. He had a beard longer than mine, and you rarely saw his eyes unprotected by thick square glasses with black frames. The other thing was, he almost never visited town. His retiring nature invited rumor and blame-laying: that he was a poacher and a house thief who sought ammunition, cash, and liquor, in that order; that he fathered a kid on a teenage dropout and sometime prostitute fifteen years his junior outside of Rosedale; that a few years back he’d slit the throat of a meth-dealing thug named Wesley Crummy and sunk his body in the swamp. Wesley was before my time. He had never been found and it wasn’t my intention to start looking that night.

“George Ellis has been shot,” I said, nodding at his .243. “What the fuck you think you’re doing?” Alan pulled the bolt open, and the spent shell pinwheeled into shadow. I pointed my shotgun to the side.

“Poor George,” Alan said, his voice soft and slight. “I’m sorry about that.”

“So you heard.”

“’Twasn’t Brother Danny who let George in on the big secret. I can tell you that.”

“Danny’s been here, then.” Behind me, footfalls dropped as gently as water from an icicle, moving through the dark toward the causey. As I turned, I heard Alan slide the bolt of his .243 home.

“You go after him, I’ll cut you in half. Now hold that difference-maker out at your side.” I did as told, and he took the shotgun and slung it into the darkness, where it thumped and skidded across the bed of pine needles. “Pull out your sidearm there. Drop it and I’ll keep it safe for you.” I did so. He approached.

When he slung his rifle up and bent to retrieve the .40 I drove an elbow hard as I could into his face. He toppled onto his back and just had time to chamber a round and point the handgun up at me when I landed on him, whanging my own head against his and tasting copper. The .40 never went off, and I had it pinned between my arm and side, my other forearm under his chin. I could feel him trying to reach his hands together to transfer the pistol behind me, so I put all my weight on his throat and he made a desperate sound, a high gurgle, and I felt the .40 drop.

The world went white and silent. It took me a moment to know I’d been hit upside the head with something and that I no longer had control of Alan. I reached into my pocket and found the .22 mousegun. When Alan reappeared in the glow surrounding the hunting cabin, the little pistol snapped in my hand, startling me. A stone the size of a rabbit dropped from Alan’s grasp. He swatted at his shoulder as if stung, then reeled a bit.

“Jesus Christ, Henry. You could have killed me.”

“What’d you . . . what’d you do?” I reached up to the side of my head, expecting to find blood. There wasn’t much. I kept the .22 pointed in his direction and we glared at each other, each heaving for breath.

“Might as well come in, have a drink,” Alan said. “Danny’s got enough of a start by now, and I’ve got to take care of this.” I picked up the .40 and holstered it; he didn’t stop me, so I didn’t stop him taking his rifle along.

We approached the cabin and I fought an urge to kneel and vomit. The cabin wasn’t fixed to the ground, and stood on wooden runners, presumably the easier to tow it. Something about that seemed wrong, and though the correct response to the wrongness would have been to vomit, I held it in. Hanging from the doorknob was a two-foot northern pike, gutted, its crooked jaw full of fangs. “Breakfast,” said Alan, hooking the fish with a finger through the gill. At that, I did puke. Alan stepped inside and let me do it alone.

In the cabin, the potbelly stove was warm and leaked smoke. Alan gestured to a folding camp chair near the stove, and I took it. He swept a sleeping bag aside and sat on the cot. There wasn’t room for hardly anything else: a couple pairs of waders, a change of clothes hanging from a nail on the back of the door, a rod and tackle, a couple old books missing jackets. Racked above the door, an over-under shotgun and a muzzle-loader. There was one empty rack where presumably the .243 went. Alan set the deer rifle beside him on the cot. “I’m not going in. You understand?”

I nodded. His voice sounded distant; he was probably in shock and I knew I could arrest him if the world weren’t diagonal and trying to slide back into place. He produced a bottle of top-shelf vodka—no doubt liberated from someone’s lake cabin—from beneath his cot, pulled on it, and shook it in my direction. “You need to visit the doctor’s office?” I declined. He splashed some of the liquor on the small wound in his shoulder, diluting the stream of blood into a wash that coated his chest. Then he felt for the .22 slug where it rested between bone and skin, and popped it out the same way it went in, tossing it in a dark corner when he was done. Pressing a rag soaked with alcohol to the wound, he gave me a look of quiet accusation. All he said was, “You going out for turkey this spring?”

“Is that what you’re asking me?”

“Farrell, I’m sorry about George. Like I said: Danny’s not the one. Chasing him all over the county would waste your time. You know that.”

“It looks bad.”

He smiled. “That’s right. Everything we do looks bad.” Alan flipped open the door of the stove, broke a few dry branches in half, and placed them inside. “Leave Danny. You won’t find him unless he wants to be found, and he ain’t the one anyway. I know, those two scrapped. When did you ever fight someone who didn’t matter to you? I don’t guess you ever did.”

I considered explaining to Alan that the only things worth fighting over were things you couldn’t have or couldn’t help. Everyone comes to know that at some point in his life. Some people know it all their lives. And I’ll bet that those who know, but don’t know that they know, make the killers of this world.

When the kindling caught, Alan swung the stove door shut and said, “Not to change the subject, but who did that fellow up on the ridge?”

“Pardon?”

Alan nodded. “That boy’s been up there since January at the least. Seen sign of him months back.”

“And said nothing?”

“And said nothing about none of my concern.”

“Who else knew?”

“That’s the question. The answer is, I couldn’t say. Reach up behind you and open that window, would you, Henry?”

To do so I had to turn my back. I told myself he’d have found a way to shoot me already. Smoke curled out of the window in a gauzy sheet, and the heavy night silence joined us, mixing with the sighs of the woodstove and the medicinal stink of vodka. Not far to the southwest, I heard a motor kick off, sounded like a dirt bike or a four-wheeler. It revved three times even, then three times again, and pulled away. Over the hill and gone.

“Okay,” said Alan. “Talk’s over.”

We limped along toward where the causey met the island; in an unspoken agreement, neither of us trained his weapon on the other. When we reached the waterside, I said, “Going to need my shotgun back.”

He swung his .243 to waist height and, without exactly pointing it at me, said, “I only mean to be helpful. I’m sure you see that. Please don’t press your luck.”

“Well. Thanks for all your help,” I said. He backed away, turned, and headed for the darkness at a trot; by the time I’d made my fingers close around the Maglite, he had disappeared. It took a few minutes rooting around in the pine needles to locate the shotgun. I turned to find his lantern snuffed out and the island gone silent.

I DROVE THE
dirt roads for hours, looking for light in the trees. Met a total of three cars, two of which I waylaid by flashing my brights. One contained a rueful man who expected me to DUI him. He promised me he lived just half a mile away, and I let him go with a warning. Another car contained a teenage couple. The third was Trooper Zukowski doing the same thing I was. We leaned out our windows and talked awhile, not mentioning George except when we parted and he said, “We’ll get that shitbag,” meaning Danny, I supposed. I kept my hands down so he wouldn’t see them shake. We each pressed on. It got late and I knew I wouldn’t pry anything out of the houses or the places I passed. By the time I got home it was after three and I was too tired to eat, just pulled off my boots and set my .40 on the table. Took it apart, cleaned it, and left it to air on the thinnest of my three towels. I held an ice pack to my head and got down my bottle of single-malt from atop the fridge, a present from Ed and Liz. I poured myself an inch and sat. Forgot to splash some water in, so all I tasted was burn.