The Bone Tree

by Greg Iles

  “What am I watching for?” she asked in a quavering voice.

  “White men,” Harold said. “Maybe in a boat, maybe on foot. Maybe even on horseback. You never know what them crackers get up to.”

  Caitlin shivered at this prospect. “What do I do if I see somebody?”

  “Keep your gun lower. Yeah, like that. Out of sight. Let me do the talking. You a smart lady. You see it goin’ bad, you start pulling that trigger and don’t stop.”

  “Okay.”

  “Can you hit what you aim at?”

  Caitlin remembered Tom teaching her how to shoot. “I can hit bottles on a fencepost.”

  “Then you can hit a man. Just be on the lookout.”

  Harold started the motor and continued up the channel. They followed the game fence for a couple of minutes, then Harold guided the bow onto a shallow slope of mud until they scraped to a stop.

  Caitlin’s heart thumped in anticipation.

  With the cold gun butt clenched in her hand, she scanned the surrounding trees while Harold tugged on a pair of knee-high rubber boots and climbed out. Wading into the dark water, he went to the game fence, took a pair of pliers from his jacket, and pulled open a four-foot-by-four-foot gap.

  “What about the other hole?” she asked.

  “Somebody might be watching that. Could be a game camera there, no telling. We gonna go through here to be safe. The Chain Tree ain’t far.”

  He tugged the pirogue back into deeper water, then climbed in, started the motor, and steered them through the opening as sweet as you please.

  “What would the white men do if they knew you put a hole in their fence?”

  Harold laughed softly. “Hang me on one of them hooks they got in their skinning shack. They’d skin me like a buck, then mount my head on the wall.”

  Caitlin shuddered at the dark undertone in his laughter. Numbing fear competed with the electric anticipation she felt as they neared the object of her quest.

  “How far are we from the tree now?”

  “Couple minutes, no more.”

  Sweat had broken out beneath her jacket. Every cypress tree they passed seemed larger than the one before, and the air grew dark and close beneath the overhanging limbs.

  “You want to hear a scary story?” Harold asked.

  “Hell, no.”

  Harold chuckled softly. “You know what a mandrake is?”

  Caitlin thought she remembered some John Donne from college that referred to a mandrake. Go and catch a falling star. Get with child a mandrake root, tell me where all past years are, or who cleft the devil’s foot.

  “It’s some kind of plant, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. My granny used to fool with some witchin’—charms and stuff like that. Voodoo from New Orleans. She said a mandrake will scream when you pull it out of the ground, and the scream will kill anybody who hears it.”

  Caitlin rolled her eyes at this quaint superstition, and a little wave of relief rolled through her.

  “Granny said you have to harvest the mandrake a special way.” Harold peered into the dimness ahead. “You tie a dog’s tail to it, then run away. When the dog runs after you, he pulls up the plant. Then you can go back safe and get it.”

  “What made you think of that story?”

  “Granny made Granddaddy bring her out here one time. She said the real mandrake only grew where the seed of a hanged man spilled on the ground.” He paused a beat. “You know what I’m talking about?”

  Caitlin thought about it for a few seconds, then grunted in the affirmative.

  “Granny knew some boys had been hung out here, see? More than one with his clothes off. And some people say they cut them boys’ manhood off. The ones hung from the Chain Tree anyway. So Granny figured there would be mandrakes growin’ under it.”

  Caitlin gripped the pistol tighter. “That’s enough. You’re creeping me out.”

  “Hey, I’m scared, too. I wouldn’t even be here without you payin’ me that money.”

  Instinctively, she pulled open her jacket and checked her phone. Still no reception.

  “There it is,” Harold said, a note of awe in his voice. “Just like I told you. Man alive, look at that.”

  Caitlin jerked up her head. Before her stood the near-mythical object of so many fruitless searches. Just as the legend said, the Bone Tree towered more than a hundred feet over the water, its lower branches joining the crowns of other trees to form a tangled canopy. The fibrous bark of the massive cypress looked like the leathery skin of some great creature, not dead but only sleeping. At its bottom, the trunk divided into leglike partitions that plunged into the muddy tussock that supported the tree. What lay inside that vast trunk? she wondered. Were Elam Knox’s bones really wired to the inside wall of its organic cave?

  As the pirogue glided toward the tussock, Harold was forced to slow the motor and thread his way between giant knees that protruded from the water like the backs of prehistoric animals basking in the water.

  “Where’s the opening?” she whispered.

  “Other side,” Harold answered softly. “There’s the chains.”

  Caitlin followed his pointing finger. From a twisted limb fifteen feet above the ground hung two thick, rusting chains of iron. Wild euphoria surged through her at this confirmation of her hopes. At last she was close to the consummation of her dream—and Henry Sexton’s, too.

  As she said a silent prayer for Henry, the chain-saw whine of an outboard motor smothered her joy and made her duck down in the boat. The motor was much closer than before, maybe fifty yards away. She could see nothing through the ranks of cypress trunks, but when she turned and looked to the stern of the pirogue, she saw pure terror in Harold’s eyes.

  “What should we do?” she hissed.

  “We need to get out of here.” He reached for the trolling motor.

  “No!” she whispered. “Not before I see what’s inside that tree. We’ve come too far.”

  “Then get out and do it! Quick! ’Cause two minutes from now, I’ll be gone from this motherfucker.”

  JOHN KAISER SAT ALONE on a bunk in the cellblock of the Concordia Parish jail, staring down at the corpse of Sonny Thornfield. He felt like a fool. He’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book—a diversionary attack. Both the shotgunning of the FBI satellite truck and the firebombing of Penn’s family’s safe house had been timed to draw him and his men away from the courthouse, making the murder of Sonny Thornfield possible. This meant that someone with connections in both the criminal and law enforcement spheres was pulling the strings.

  Forrest Knox.

  He should have known that a former Lurp like Forrest would employ military tactics. Kaiser’s second mistake had been placing confidence in Sheriff Dennis’s men and the facilities under their command. Dennis himself had been absent during the attack—and he still hadn’t shown up—but of course Kaiser had effectively banned him from the premises after the torture fiasco in the utility closet.

  Kaiser had examined Thornfield’s body inch by inch, and his best guess was that a Double Eagle had strangled or suffocated Sonny with something soft—a shirt or towel—while the others gently held him down. Thornfield’s arms showed faint bruising, but he’d been far too weak to fight hard—or for long. Murder was going to be hard to prove. The grim truth was, his heart might have given out even before his oxygen.

  No one could understand how the killers had gotten into Thornfield’s cell, but Kaiser was pretty sure of what had happened. In the event of a power failure, the emergency generators kicked on, which powered the electronic gate system controlled by the duty guard. But after the second bomb had taken out the generator, the cell doors would have had to be operated manually. There hadn’t been enough time for someone to crank open those doors, allow the Eagles to get to Thornfield, then close the doors again while Agent Wilson had been absent from the sheriff’s office. But Kaiser had examined the door mechanism, and there was a dual DC-controller for the unit, which meant th
at you could hook a car battery to it and operate the doors in an emergency. He suspected that someone with advance knowledge of the bombs and their targets had done just that. Spanky Ford had claimed this was practically impossible—and Kaiser planned to hook Ford up to a lie detector as soon as possible—but the damage was already done.

  He was about to go down to the garage-level holding pen where Snake and the remaining Double Eagles had been moved when he heard boots approaching the cellblock door. A few seconds later, the broad silhouette of Walker Dennis filled the space, and then the sheriff stumped down between the cells and stopped outside Sonny’s. He didn’t even nod to Kaiser, but only stared down at the body with what looked like cold fury.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Kaiser asked between gritted teeth.

  “None of your goddamn business,” Dennis muttered.

  Kaiser shook his head in amazement. “You’re going to have to do better than that, Sheriff. Four bombs go off at your courthouse, your department falls apart, a star witness is murdered in your jail, and you don’t show up until a half hour after the fact?”

  “I don’t answer to you, Kaiser.”

  “No. But that begs the question: just who do you answer to?”

  Dennis looked up at last, his eyes burning with rage. “Fuck you.”

  Kaiser fought to control his temper. When he spoke, it was in a low voice that almost any man would recognize as dangerous. “Sheriff, either you come clean and tell me everything that’s going on, or I’m going to federalize your department. In all frankness, I may have to do that regardless of your actions.”

  Dennis studied Kaiser for several seconds. Then he turned and walked out of the cellblock.

  CHAPTER 69

  CAITLIN SCRAMBLED OUT of the pirogue with her pistol in her right hand and clambered onto the grassy earth beneath the Bone Tree. Her left hand held a cheap flashlight Harold had passed to her.

  “Which way?” she asked. “Where’s the opening?”

  “Go to your right. Around to the other side. And quiet down. Jesus. We ain’t the only ones out here.”

  “Sorry,” she panted. Fear and excitement were making her hyperventilate.

  She kept her eyes on the wet ground as she moved around the great legs of the trunk, watching for cottonmouth moccasins, which were plentiful out here. She felt like she was moving in slow motion, but she knew this was only adrenaline distorting her sense of time.

  The trunk of the Bone Tree was so vast that the johnboat disappeared as she worked her way around it. Again she thought of the Tree of Life in the Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World. But this tree had been made by God, or nature. And it was no tree of life, but of death.

  As she worked her way to her right, a black opening like a cave mouth showed between two of the cypress’s elephantine legs. Her breath stopped in her throat. The inverted V was more a crack than a door, but certainly wide enough for men and animals to pass through.

  “Harold!” she cried, forgetting all caution. “Come around here. Hurry!”

  “Shut up!” hissed her guide. “Them bones ain’t going nowhere, if they even in there.”

  He appeared about five feet behind Caitlin, his old .22 rifle clutched in his hands.

  “I know, I know, I’m sorry. This is just freaking me out. This is a major deal, Harold. You have no idea what’s going to happen behind this. Do you think it’s safe to go inside?”

  “Prob’ly safer in there than out here.”

  She started to venture in, but Harold held up his hand.

  “What is it?” she whispered.

  “I heard that motor again.”

  “Shit. It’s just hunters, right?”

  “You think that’s good news?”

  “I don’t care anymore. Just stand guard while I check out what’s inside. Five minutes is all I need.”

  Harold turned and scanned the darkness under the canopy of trees. With his dark skin and the primitive atmosphere around the Chain Tree, Caitlin couldn’t help but picture a runaway slave from 150 years ago, afraid of being lynched.

  “If you want to stay five minutes,” he said, “give me your gun.”

  Caitlin hugged the pistol to her belly. “My gun? Why? You’ve got a rifle.”

  He snorted. “This lil’ .22 ain’t worth spit against the deer guns them hunters carry. They’ll blow a pound a meat out of me. I need some firepower.”

  Caitlin thought about it. “What if there are animals inside the tree?”

  Harold took the stock of his rifle and banged it against the trunk of the Bone Tree. The wood made a dull thump against the fibrous bark. He watched the black opening for several seconds, then said, “Anything but a snake would have scooted right out of there. And you wouldn’t hit a snake with that pistol anyway. You got boots on. Just give ’em a wide berth.”

  “I’m not giving you my gun,” Caitlin said. “I’m sorry. I’ll hurry, I promise. Now, promise you won’t leave me.”

  “You gonna pay me the extra five hundred?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll pay you an extra thousand if those bones are in there. Hell, you’ll be going on talk shows for the next six months.”

  This notion didn’t seem to impress her guide. He flicked his hand like she should get on with it, then turned and gazed out over the water with his rifle clenched in his hands.

  Closing her left hand tight around the flashlight, Caitlin inched toward the lightless opening with the pistol held in front of her. She felt like an archaeologist carrying a flaming torch into an undiscovered tomb. The fissure in the tree was tall, and narrower than she’d first thought. A man Penn’s size would have difficulty squeezing through, but she was thin and could pass with relative ease. Pausing on the threshold of the strange doorway, she shone the flashlight’s weak yellow beam into the darkness at the heart of the tree.

  She saw bones, far more than she’d expected. Some were white as chalk, while others looked brown and coated with moss. There seemed to be no order to their arrangement. She would have to move closer to understand exactly what she was looking at.

  Shining the beam just inside the crack, she saw no snakes on the dry-looking floor of the cave. She sucked in a deep, preparatory breath, then turned sideways and stepped through the fissure.

  A small animal scrambled out of her path, and she jerked backward, shining the light around in a panic. A possum stared at her from ten feet across the floor, its red eyes glazed with terror. She aimed her pistol at the gray-furred animal and started to squeeze the trigger, then stopped. A gunshot might send Harold into panicked flight across the swamp. Instead, she moved several feet to the side of the fissure, crouched, picked up a long bone, and hurled it at the possum. The animal started, froze, then scuttled around the inner wall of the cave and vanished through the crack of light that led to freedom.

  Caitlin heard Harold laughing softly.

  Now that she was alone in the hollow heart of the cypress, a profound transformation overcame her. She sensed the great age of the tree, an ancient, hoary temple of fiber more resilient than any bone. She understood why wounded animals might seek out this silent chamber to die. It was literally a mausoleum, and it felt like one, only without the artificiality of the stone sweatboxes in human cemeteries. In one curve of the round room, it appeared that animals or humans had mounded up earth and moss against the wall.

  Remembering the need for haste, she dropped to her knees, set her pistol beside her, and began to examine the bones. Caitlin knew little about anthropology, but she seemed to be looking at a mixture of deer and human bones. Then her flashlight played across the hollow eyes of a human skull lying sideways beneath a pile of arching rib bones, and her breath stopped. Five feet away, she saw another. Something coiled beside the second skull caused her to scrabble backward, then jerk up her pistol and squint into the darkness. It wasn’t a snake, she realized, but a thick rope. Picking up the flashlight again, she saw that the rope was rotted half through. With sickening certainty she realized that
someone had probably been bound with that while being tortured.

  She gasped as she started breathing again. Forcing herself to relax her diaphragm, she shone the light upward to give herself a break from the horror. What she found was horror magnified, and confirmation of the story Jason Abbott had told the FBI back in 1972. Wired to rusted nails driven into the walls of the tree were enough human bones to make a skeleton. The collection had lost much of its original composition, but the bones had clearly been posed to represent an inverted crucifixion. It brought to mind the cross of St. Peter, but Caitlin knew that Elam Knox’s death was no martyrdom.

  She dropped the beam and let it play over the bones on the floor again.

  “I can’t leave these here,” she said softly. “God.”

  Hot tears slid down her cheeks. She had come here looking to make her reputation, but she’d found something so profoundly sad that it humbled her beyond all thought for herself. As soon as she came within range of a cell tower, she would call John Kaiser. This obscene place was the business of the FBI, not a swarm of ravenous reporters craving the latest titillating story. She pocketed her flashlight and pulled out her Casio camera to start photographing the bones.

  “Harold?” she called over her shoulder while shooting pictures methodically. “Could you come in here, please?”

  Getting no answer, she looked back at the vertical crack of daylight behind her. “Harold!”

  No reply.

  She felt a moment of panic at the thought that he’d abandoned her, but then his dark silhouette blotted out the lower two-thirds of light shining through the crack.

  “You find what you was lookin’ for?” he asked.

  “Yes. I’m going to pass you a skull and a few bones. It’s terrible crime-scene procedure, but I’m worried that whoever’s in that boat might come back and get rid of the evidence before the FBI can get here. Preserving some of this is far more important than any damage we might do. Okay?”