The Bone Tree

by Greg Iles

  After decades of patient investigation, Henry had spent the last month of his life rushing from revelation to revelation. The death of Pooky Wilson’s mother, the appearance of a mysterious witness to the Norris bombing, and finally the confessions of Glenn Morehouse had given Henry potential keys to some of the most heinous unsolved murders in American history. Last night’s events had brought partial closure to some of those cases, but many mysteries remained.

  As footsteps passed back and forth beyond her door, she dropped a bag of green tea into her mug and settled in behind her desk. Then she took out the sheet labeled ELAM KNOX and began to read Henry’s notes. The writing on this sheet was much clearer, which told her Henry must have written this shortly after seeing Kaiser, before the sniper’s bullet grazed his head.

  I always knew that Abbott’s redacted 302 contained something important, but I never could have imagined what it was. According to John Kaiser, Jason Abbott told a lot of lies about Forrest Knox in his effort to incriminate him, but Kaiser believes that some of what he said was true. Abbott told his FBI interviewers that in 1966, Frank and Snake Knox murdered their father, Elam, at the Bone Tree. Abbott said Elam had died a particularly brutal death, even by the standards of the Double Eagles. As for the motive, all he knew was that Elam had been killed for betraying his family. But Elam Knox’s death was held up as an example of how far the Knoxes would go to avenge treason. According to Abbott, the old man’s bones were left among all the others at the Bone Tree, as a perpetual warning to would-be traitors.

  Kaiser believes that Elam Knox was murdered by his sons, but he’s not convinced that he died at the Bone Tree. Like Dwight Stone, Kaiser doubts that the Bone Tree exists. He thinks it more likely that the term refers to a man-made cross or torture post in the Lusahatcha Swamp, or even a “torture house” that many FBI agents were told about in the 1960s. Kaiser told me that anecdotal evidence suggests Elam Knox was not only a violently abusive man, but also a sexual predator. He was the kind of itinerant preacher who seduced women in every town where he ever set up his revival tent. Many of his paramours were underage, and if rumor could be believed, not all were female. Both his sons were often in trouble for violent offenses, some sexual in nature. Kaiser theorized that Elam might have crossed some sexual or moral line that Frank would not tolerate and was punished for it. But I’m not so quick to believe this. I always heard that Elam was a bad-tempered drunk, and it might be that he simply passed on information that ended up hurting the family or the Double Eagles.

  Kaiser also believes that a cache of “trophies” of Double Eagle violence exists somewhere, such as the military tattoos cut from Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis. After hearing my summary of Morehouse’s revelations, he thinks that cache might be at Valhalla, in Lusahatcha County. Of course, I told Kaiser nothing about Morehouse verifying the existence of the Bone Tree, or his assertion that some sensational historical artifact might be hidden there. On balance, I believe the Bone Tree exists. At the very least, the bones of Jimmy and Pooky and Joe Louis Lewis probably lie there. As for Frank Knox’s “insurance” against Carlos Marcello, I won’t know that until I find the tree myself. I asked Morehouse about Elam on the phone Monday afternoon, but he refused to say anything. I could tell he was holding something back, and I suppose now I know why. The truth would have opened Snake Knox to a murder charge, and not for just any murder, but patricide.

  Caitlin licked her lips and set the stationery to one side. Then she picked up Henry’s Bone Tree journal and opened it with almost reverent care. Reading these Moleskines was like being given the key to a hidden library, one in which the secret histories of Natchez and Concordia Parish had been recorded by a monk working in fanatical solitude. And out of all the tales Henry had meticulously documented, none had lodged in her mind like that of the huge, hollow, centuries-old cypress hidden in a swamp near Athens Point, Mississippi.

  According to Henry’s research, the mysterious “Tree of Bones” dated to pre-Columbian times, when the mound-building Natchez Indians were said to have traveled south to conduct rituals beneath a great cypress in a swamp that lay to the east of the Father of Waters, between two natural clearings that would later become the towns of Woodville and Athens Point. In that swamp, said the Indians, dying deer and panthers had chosen certain hollow trees in which to spend their final hours, over time creating and sanctifying “bone trees.” One particularly large specimen had been woven into several area legends, from that of pirate Jean Lafitte in the early 1800s to Al Capone’s bootlegging operation in the 1920s, which had flourished up and down the Mississippi River.

  While Henry was skeptical about these likely apocryphal stories, he’d clearly believed reports that Confederate raiders operating in the area in 1862–1863 had used the Lusahatcha Swamp as a haven to escape pursuing Union troops. Those raiders had reportedly hanged at least three local Yankee collaborators from what one officer had called “the Bone Tree” in his diary. Lieutenant Richard Wadsworth, CSA, had noted that slave hunters punished runaways beneath the same tree (which slaves called “the Chain Tree”) by whipping, maiming, or worse. Henry had also established a Ku Klux Klan connection to the Bone Tree. According to Special Agent Dwight Stone, one Klan informant had spoken of African-Americans being hunted for sport in the Lusahatcha Swamp, those hunts ending in castration or murder beneath the tree itself. In 1964, Stone and a team of FBI agents had searched the swamp for three days with boats and dogs but had found nothing. At that time Agent Stone had concluded that the term “Bone Tree” referred to a man-made cross that the Klan had constructed for torture purposes, and not to an actual tree.

  Caitlin realized that the archetypal image of a sacrificial tree would be irresistible to rumormongers, but she couldn’t escape the feeling that some of the stories must be based in fact. Henry noted that the bald cypress belonged to the redwood family, and one specimen in Florida had been documented as thirty-five hundred years old. Caitlin shivered when she read that line, for if it was accurate, then all the bloody legends of the Bone Tree could be true. She wondered whether her fascination with the tree might be rooted in her morbid curiosity about the most atavistic human impulses. Tales of castration and crucifixion conjured the horrors of the Belgian Congo and Rwanda. As unpleasant as those thoughts were, some rogue region of her brain had always hungered to peer into the psychic abyss that yawned beneath these depraved acts.

  According to Henry’s notes, some residents of Lusahatcha County had claimed to know the location of the Bone Tree, but in fact they had “known” only that the tree lay somewhere in the Lusahatcha Swamp. That was like saying you knew where a particular New York brownstone was by pointing to the island of Manhattan. Henry Sexton had made one personal effort to find the Bone Tree, using as his guide an Athens Point native who claimed to have been shown the notorious cypress by his grandfather. But after an exhausting day of trolling through acres of swamp that straddled federal timberland and a private hunting preserve—all of it choked with thick stands of ancient, moss-bearded cypress, and infested with venomous snakes and alligators—Henry had returned home no wiser than he’d left.

  Clearly, if Dwight Stone and a platoon of FBI agents in boats had failed to find the Bone Tree in three days, Caitlin’s only hope of success lay in Toby Rambin. If the Lusahatcha County poacher turned out to be another con man hoping to cash in on the hopes of a gullible outsider, she would be screwed. Within a day or two, the army of outside reporters would make up her head start on the Double Eagles case, and she would own the story no longer. Finishing her lukewarm tea, she picked up her Treo and dialed Toby Rambin’s number once more. She tried to stay calm, but even the prospect of making contact with a man who had seen the Bone Tree made her pulse speed. The phone rang twelve times without an answer, and at last she hung up.

  Opening Henry’s journal again, she flipped to a sketch he had made of a giant cypress with an opening like an inverted V in its trunk. He’d filled in the opening with black ink, and that blackne
ss bled into the water he’d drawn around the tree, where cypress knees jutted upward like the limbs of half-buried bodies. Caitlin touched the drawing with her fingertip, feeling the rough page that Henry had pored over while he was alive.

  The legend of the Bone Tree reminded her of the mythical “Raintree” from the movie Raintree County, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. Part of that overripe Civil War film, which itself had been haunted by tragedy, had been shot about thirty miles from Natchez, at the burned ruins of Windsor. Only a few weeks after Caitlin and Penn had fallen in love, they’d spent a magical day walking among the ghostly Corinthian columns that, along with the famous Staircase to Nowhere, were all that remained of the once-majestic mansion. To Caitlin, the Windsor ruins conveyed the tragic grandeur of the Old South far more viscerally than the perfectly preserved mansions of Natchez, which gave the illusion of beauty to a society built on the bloodied backs of slaves.

  The producers of Raintree County had obviously felt the same. On Windsor’s steps, Taylor and Clift had struggled through some of the worst lines in movie history, trying in vain to repeat the success of Gone with the Wind. You could almost sense the enveloping darkness that had swirled around the failed production. Ross Lockridge, the author of Raintree County, had committed suicide at age thirty-four—one day before his book reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Like Montgomery Clift, who’d recently had his face scarred in a car crash, the author never got to enjoy the success he’d struggled to attain. And Elizabeth Taylor was already being troubled by the demons that would haunt her for the rest of her life. But despite these chaotic elements, Caitlin had always recalled the story that had given the film its title.

  In Lockridge’s novel, the mystical Raintree was given several origin stories. Folklore claimed it was an exotic plant brought from the Orient by an idealistic community of pioneers, and that only a single tree had survived, hidden deep in an Indiana swamp. All who found the tree supposedly discovered love under a rain of yellow flowers. A second legend told of a ragged preacher who had planted apple seeds throughout his travels. In his bag, that preacher—later called Johnny Appleseed—had also carried one rare and precious seed: that of the Golden Raintree. “Luck, happiness, the realization of dreams,” said the legend, “the secret of life itself—all belong to him who finds the Raintree.” Was it merely chance, Caitlin wondered, that the Yankee legend of a mystical tree was empirically optimistic, while the southern version was a dark tapestry of blood, betrayal, and murder?

  Flattening her left hand over Henry’s sketch, she picked up her Treo and dialed the poacher’s number yet again. The phone rang five times . . . seven. She was moving her thumb to the END button when a surprisingly deep voice barked from the Treo’s little speaker.

  “Hello!” she said, jerking the phone to her ear.

  The cigarette-parched voice of an older black man said, “Hey, now. Who dis be?”

  “I’m a friend of Henry Sexton,” Caitlin said. “I’ve been trying to reach you since last night.”

  Silence.

  “Are you there, Mr. Rambin?”

  “I been workin’. What you want, lady?”

  “I want to find the tree that Henry Sexton was looking for. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  More silence. Then the voice said, “Might do. Might not. I read in the Natchez paper a little while ago that Mister Henry be dead. Burned up, it said. I don’t wanna get burned up.”

  “I don’t either. And I wrote that newspaper story, by the way.”

  “Huh. How you know about Henry and me?”

  “I was working with him. And I can certainly make the trip worth your while.”

  This time the silence stretched too long.

  “You can name your price,” she said quickly, afraid she would lose him like a fish nibbling on a line.

  “Henry was gon’ pay me two thousand dollah.”

  Caitlin doubted this, but she said, “I can match that.”

  After a couple of seconds, Rambin said, “Price gone up now, though. Hazard pay.”

  She closed her eyes but did not sigh. “I see. What’s the new price?”

  “Double. Fo’ thousand. Take it or leave it.”

  After what seemed a suitable interval—which she hoped would mask the fact that she would pay forty thousand dollars to find the Bone Tree—she said, “Four thousand it is. But I want to go this afternoon.”

  “No way, lady. I got work this afternoon. Can’t get loose. Plus, I got to make sure the coast is clear. We’ll go tomorrow morning. After that, I’m clearing out. Too dangerous round here. Gettin’ like the old days again.”

  The idea of waiting a full day galled her, but Caitlin sensed that upping her offer wouldn’t persuade Rambin to change his mind. “You know what tree I’m talking about, right? Are you positive you know where it is?”

  A harsh squawk of a laugh came through the phone. “Lady, they ain’t nothin’ I don’t know ’bout this old swamp. I was birthed on the edge of it, and lived jes’ about every day in it. You jes’ bring your money, hear?”

  “Where?” she asked quickly.

  “Ain’t but one decent road leads down to the swamp from the state road. There’s others, but you’d never find ’em.”

  “I’ll be there. Is eight A.M. all right?”

  “Six thirty,” Rambin said. “And bring cash. I don’t take no damn bank check.”

  “I will.”

  “What’s your name?” Rambin asked.

  “Caitlin Masters.”

  The old poacher took his time with this. “I see it right here in the paper,” he said finally. “All right, then. You wear a red bandanna around your neck. You see a rusted old school bus, you’ll know you goin’ the right way. Park where the road ends. If I feel like you’re on the level, I’ll let you see me. And no po-lice. You hear?”

  “I’ll be there,” Caitlin promised. “Without police.”

  Rambin clicked off without another word.

  Caitlin sat up, her eyes on Henry’s journal. She was excited, but the reality of tomorrow’s rendezvous presented certain problems. For one, she would have to craft a cover story that would guarantee both secrecy and freedom of movement, one that would satisfy both Penn and Kaiser. At least she had a decent amount of time to come up with something credible.

  She suddenly remembered Henry’s warning that she not try to find the Bone Tree alone. Yesterday the reporter had actually made her promise not to do so. Would it be wise to keep that promise? Who could she trust to keep their mouth shut about her mission? Jamie? She needed her editor running the paper in her absence. Keisha Harvin, perhaps? The hungry young reporter would kill to go on an assignment like this one, but Keisha was simply the wrong color. A black girl prowling the back roads of Lusahatcha County in the company of a white woman would attract unwanted attention.

  While Caitlin considered other alternatives, an image of Jordan Glass rose into her mind. Jordan would be the perfect companion: the photographer was a veteran of countless war zones and wouldn’t be intimidated by anything they might encounter. The problem was, Glass was married to Kaiser. And even though Jordan had told Caitlin that she kept some things from her husband, Caitlin was unwilling to trust her best lead to a woman she’d only just met—even if Glass was a personal hero to her.

  Caitlin jumped when the landline on her desk rang. The second she picked it up, Jamie Lewis said, “Kaiser’s headed back to your office, and he doesn’t look happy.”

  “Thanks.”

  She opened her drawer and swept the journals and envelope into it, then switched off her light and unlocked her door. As she curled up on the little sofa against the wall, a knocking sounded on her door.

  Caitlin didn’t move.

  The FBI agent waited a few seconds, then turned the knob and leaned into the room. She could almost sense Kaiser’s eyes adjusting to the darkness.

  “Caitlin?” he said softly.

  She didn’t stir.


  “Caitlin.”

  She gave him nothing. Kaiser stood there in silence, making judgments she could only guess at. While she waited, the mind-boggling reality of what she’d arranged with Toby Rambin sent a chill up her spine. If she did everything right—and if Rambin turned out to know what he claimed he did—then by tomorrow at noon she might be cracking open the biggest story of her career. In a single day she could vindicate Henry Sexton, bring closure—and possibly justice—to the families of several civil rights martyrs, and rack up another Pulitzer Prize. You couldn’t do a better day’s work than that.

  After some fraction of time she could not guess at, John Kaiser went out and pulled the door shut behind him. Caitlin remained on the sofa, breathing deeply, trying to slow her pounding heart. Now that she’d finally connected with the poacher, whatever had kept her going all these hours without sleep finally let go, and exhaustion washed over her. In the darkness of her mind, she saw the wild-eyed face of Elam Knox staring in fury from the black V in the trunk of the Bone Tree.

  “I’m coming for you, you bastard,” she whispered fiercely. “And there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it.”

  CHAPTER 26

  DREW’S LAKE HOUSE was locked when I arrived, so I opened it with the key he’d given me. Inside, I found nothing but evidence of a hasty departure. There were dirty dishes in the sink, and the chairs and sofa looked as though someone had gotten up and left the room only minutes ago. One bed had been slept in, and in the bathroom lay a pair of pants on the floor that matched my father’s size. Back in the den, I found something far more disturbing: a plastic bottle of nitroglycerine tablets. Dad usually keeps a couple of tablets in a pocket, but it was hard for me to imagine him voluntarily leaving that bottle behind. The only scenario that made sense—other than his being killed or kidnapped—was him running for his life, leaving so fast that he left critical medication behind.