Black Valley

by Jim Brown

  His system responded quickly. The alcohol seared his nerves, rushing to his extremities.

  The blackboard would be gone tomorrow. He had seen to that by calling and leaving a message for janitorial services. With his newfound celebrity status, Dean knew he could pretty much get anything he wanted. He had never abused that power – until tonight.

  Vandals, he had reported. The same vandals who had earlier shattered his classroom window with a brick.

  Only, he no longer believed that to be true.

  This was no random act. This was too specific. Too exact. Cutting him to the heart like a surgeon’s scalpel. The phrase. How had they known? Only a handful of people knew of that particular little taunt. A handful, and they were all accounted for or – dead.

  Dean took the bottle by the neck and dragged it to the dining room table. He poured himself another drink, but with less soda.

  Judy.

  It had been, what – twenty, twenty-one years now? Had it really been that long? Sometimes it seemed twice that; other times, he half expected her to come padding out of the bedroom wearing those big, mock-puppy slippers and a long, crimson cotton robe with a fluffy white collar.

  “It makes you look like a ten-year-old,” he would kid her.

  “I am a ten-year-old,” she would answer. “At least, I wish I were.”

  Wish I were.

  Forget the Nobel – marrying Judy Pinbrow had been the highlight of his life. He had loved her for as long as he could recall. First puppy love, then teen lust, finally developing into the mature affection that lasted through the years and beyond the grave.

  But the Judy that Dean had married was not the same Judy he had pined for. She was changed, different. “Damaged goods,” she claimed.

  How’s it hanging, Jimmy Dean?

  They had never spoken of the rape or of that night – but in some ways it was responsible for all that came after. Despite his love for her, Judy’s head had always been in the clouds, her eyes on faraway places, adventure, and challenge.

  Until the rape.

  She was never the same. Instead of adventure, she craved security. Instead of challenge, she sought routine. Dean Truman was tailor-made for the role of husband-protector-provider.

  Though simple, theirs had been a happy life until the baby. No – that wasn’t true. He had been happy, but not Judy; her eyes never seemed as focused as before . . .

  Before Whitey Dobbs.

  But it wasn’t Dobbs. That was the hell of it. Dean Truman had been with Dobbs at the exact moment the sinful act had supposedly taken place, and despite his disdain for the arrogant bully, he knew Dobbs was innocent of the crime that John and the others had so creatively punished him for.

  If not Dobbs, who?

  Something had happened; that was undeniable when, in the following weeks, Judy Pinbrow was clearly pregnant.

  Dean had done the gentlemanly thing. He offered to marry her; she accepted. The hasty union meant sacrifice. He could no longer entertain ideas of going to an Ivy League school, even with the academic scholarships. Money that had been saved for his education now went for doctor’s visits, rent, groceries. He would never forget the look of disappointment on his father’s face when he first told him.

  But eventually his parents had come around, when they saw Dean’s determination to still make something of himself, despite the self-inflicted academic exile, and when they saw his unequivocal love for his young bride.

  Dean looked around the aging clapboard house. God, he hated this house.

  “So why did you buy the damn place?” Nathan had asked. “It’s bad enough that you were renting it, but to buy it? Jeez. Move. Get out of that two-story ghost house.”

  But he couldn’t.

  Baby bones.

  It was shabby then, worse now, despite thousands of dollars of restoration attempts.

  “I could build you a new home – hell, a great home, for half of what you’re spending just to keep that old place barely livable,” Mason Evans had harangued.

  Dean dreamed of a new house. He had even toyed with the idea of buying a second home but keeping this one – leaving it empty. But he couldn’t.

  Baby bones.

  There was always the chance that someone, kids on a dare, bums looking for a dry place, would stumble inside. Would discover . . .

  Dean finished his second drink. A tepid, fuzzy-eyed feeling overcame him. It was not a pleasant sensation. It meant a lack of control, and that was unacceptable – unacceptable. He looked at the bookcase that hid the small basement door.

  “Ridiculous,” he said, calling for the scientist in him to return. His reaction was completely out of proportion with events. The vandalism indicated someone with a shared a knowledge of his past.

  How’s it hanging, Jimmy Dean?

  That did not, however, mean the vandal knew the full story, and it was an even greater assumption to believe he knew about the basement.

  Buried him alive for a crime he didn’t commit. Never found the body.

  The sealed basement door mocked him.

  Baby bones.

  Shortly after they were married, Dean had used a portion of his college fund to rent this house near the Westcroft College campus. It was old and musty, but affordable. Temporary. Judy was well into her pregnancy, and Dean treated her as a knight would a lady fair.

  The pregnancy was difficult, and Judy spent much of the time confined to bed. Then one night . . . It was cold, he remembered that, unbearably cold; the roads were closed, the pass to the north was sealed. The snowplows stayed busy trying to keep the main road and the Willamette Bridge clear. Without the bridge or the pass, Black Valley, Oregon would be literally severed from the rest of the world.

  Dean was working two jobs as well as going to school. One of those was in the pharmacy. People needed their medicine, and since most couldn’t get to the store, the store had to get to them. Using the company four-wheel drive, Dean ventured deep into the foothills, twice becoming stuck and having to shovel his way out.

  It was close to midnight before he got home. The first thing he noticed was the cold. It was almost as cold inside as out. No, that wasn’t right. Later he had been able to run water; the pipes hadn’t frozen, it had just seemed that cold. Cold but different. He called her name. No answer. He looked for a note, thinking something had happened to the furnace, forcing her to take solace with a friend.

  “Dean?”

  A fragile voice whispered as if his name were made of glass.

  “Dean?”

  Judy. He found her in the bedroom.

  Baby bones.

  On their bed. The blood – oh God, the blood. The bed was covered, the sheets saturated. Judy was exposed, naked, and the source of all the gore. Gore. She had given birth. While he was off taking care of others, his wife had had the baby, alone, in this cold, cold house.

  Her face was a shade of white he had never seen before and hoped to never see again – white and bloodless.

  He still had the four-wheel drive and used it to rush her to the hospital. All the way there, until she passed out from exhaustion or lack of blood or both, he kept asking, “Where’s the baby? What happened to the baby?”

  She had answered only once, her words colder than the worst winter wind. “The devil gave me the child, and the Lord took him away.”

  After reassuring himself that Judy was in the hands of those most likely to help her, Dean had returned to the house in search of the child.

  Nothing.

  Blood, afterbirth, but no baby. No baby.

  A thin blood trail led from the bedroom to the basement door. The overhead light didn’t work. Dean found a flashlight, then went down the short flight of stairs. It was a basement in only the loosest sense of the word, little more than a crouch-high crawl space with a hard dirt floor. A dirt floor in Oregon
was like a swimming pool in Alaska.

  Dean remained on the stairs, letting the cycloptic beam of the flashlight drag across the dank, dark earth. The night was so silent, he imagined he could hear earthworms squirming in the ground. His breath came in short, desperate gasps. The shadows seemed to have weight and mass, physically recoiling from the cone of yellow-white light but ever present, pushing forward.

  If the child was, it was under the black, soppy ground. It wasn’t alive.

  A vision of Judy flashed in his mind. Judy in the bed, lying in a pool of her own blood. Could she really have dragged herself down here?

  Stillborn.

  That must be it. The child had been stillborn, and Judy, fueled by grief, had buried the remains, here in the basement. Stillborn. At least, he hoped it was, prayed it was, had to believe it was. The alternative was unbearable.

  Dean wretched, gagging in the dark.

  He pulled himself up the stairs. He found the two-by-fours and nails in the garage. Then, finding the studs buried in the wall, he hammered the boards in place, forever sealing the basement and the secrets it bore. He shoved a heavy bookcase in front of the door, then stepped back to survey his work.

  Baby bones?

  Somewhere, in his mind, a child cried.

  Stillborn. Had to have been.

  “Where’s the baby?”

  “The devil gave me the child, and the Lord took him away.”

  There were questions, lots of question. But the loss of blood had left Judy weak, debilitated. She never left the hospital. One week later she was dead. Myocardial infarction, triggered by severe trauma and stress. It was rare in a girl that young, but it happened or so the doctor said. In deference to Judy’s family, the baby was listed as stillborn.

  Then Dean Truman was alone. Alone in a house he hated but could never leave. He couldn’t. There was a secret in the basement.

  Baby bones.

  11

  Mason Evans drove like a madman, pushing the imposing motor of the Delta 88 to its limit. In the back of his mind, buried behind a torrent of emotions, a thought vied for attention. It cried out for him to slow down, warning of the dangers of driving too fast, reminding him of the time he would lose if he was pulled over by the Oregon State Police.

  To hell with it! He pressed the pedal to the floorboard.

  The sun was pulling itself up on the eastern horizon, turning the cloud-filled sky a deep orange-purple, the color of rotting fruit.

  His telephone conversation with Tina’s roommate raged in his mind like a wildfire.

  “Let me speak with Tina,” he had demanded to the groggy girl, jerking her from slumber.

  “Mr. Evans?” the roommate’s voice revealed confusion. “What time is it?”

  What time is it? How could she be so blase’ when the world was coming to an end?

  “Two, three A.M. I don’t know. I just need to speak with Tina. Now.”

  Pause. He could hear her breathing, detect the faint sound of movement, the squeak of the bed, the rustling of sheets. “She’s, uh, she’s not here right now.”

  “What? She left Portland almost six hours ago? Where the hell is she?”

  “I – I’m not sure.” She was lying. But she was Mason’s only hope. He fought the urge to scream, to howl like a burning timber. Instead he searched his mind for her name – Debbie . . . Demi . . .Dennis . . .

  “Deirdre, listen to me. I know you girls stick together, and I can appreciate that. But listen to me. This is important, Deirdre – a matter of life or death. I swear on my mother’s grave.”

  “I – I don’t know, Mr. E.”

  “If you’re worried about her getting into trouble, don’t. This isn’t about breaking rules. I’m trying to save my daughter’s life.”

  A moan of indecision came across the phone line. “She won’t be back until Tuesday.”

  “Tuesday? Where is she?” He realized he was being too belligerent and silently scolded himself.

  “She’s out with that new guy, her new boyfriend.”

  Mason’s hands began to shake. White points of light danced in the corners of his vision. Don’t lose it, old man. Don’t you lose it, he screamed in his head.

  “Where?” His voice was hoarse with sudden terror.

  “I don’t know for sure.”

  “Deirdre. Please!” He had never begged for anything in his entire life, but it didn’t matter. When it came to his daughter, he could beg with the best of them. All he wanted was for his daughter to be safe.

  “She said something about a house, in Lane County. It was his, I think, or maybe his parents’, but it’s empty.”

  “Where. What part of Lane County?”

  The line was quiet. “I’m not sure.”

  “Try, Deirdre. For God’s sake, please try.”

  “Mr. Evans, are you all right? Are you sure Tina’s not going to get into trouble?”

  “What city?” he screamed.

  The girl on the other end of the phone began to cry.

  “I’m sorry, honey, I’m so sorry.” He tried to catch his breath. “Please, Deirdre, please . . . “

  “They’re not in Portland or Eugene. They went to Berry, Blanchly – it was something like that.”

  “Black Valley? They went to Black Valley?”

  “That’s it.”

  He left the house.

  “Mr. E. – Mr. E. are you there? Is everything all right? Mr. E., you aren’t having a heart attack, are you? Mr. E. . .”

  Her words sounded in an empty room. Mason Evans was driving to Black Valley.

  He stood by the corner, leering down the hall. The green-and-white tiled floor gleamed as if wet. The fetid odor of industrial strength disinfectant, ammonia, and fresh wax irritated his nasal lining. From his vantage point, in an alcove with a pair of vending machines, he could see the nurses’ station on the right and the four intensive care units on the left. Each room was fronted by a large, plate glass window and identified with numbers, eleven inches tall, one through four.

  Clyde Watkins was in room number one.

  There were two nurses, a thin girl with a nervous nature who fluttered from room to room like a pollinating bee, and an older, heavier woman who sat in command behind a waist-high counter.

  Squinting, he could make out the prone form of a man in room one – centered in a nest of technology. Tubes, wires, machines, bags, and poles crowded round him like gaunt, wary spectators. Multiple devices produced a faint but irritating cacophony of tones and beeps.

  He waited. He watched. He fidgeted.

  Click.

  Flip.

  Click.

  Flip.

  When the thin girl entered the farthest room and the charge nurse went into the office behind the counter, he moved – quickly, as was his nature; quietly, as was his gift. He reached the room in less than a heartbeat.

  Piper Blackmoore had never broken the law. Not so much as a traffic ticket. So it came as a great surprise when she found herself breaking into the county morgue. She had tried to resist an urge that she couldn’t quite explain. But something was happening; something was dancing on her nerves, causing the hair on the back of her neck to rise, causing her flesh to repeatedly pebble, causing tiny bolts of God’s own lightning to shoot up the length of her arm and bounce around inside her chest, her head, her heart.

  Something odd was happening. That was how she felt. No wonder people in town thought she was four pancakes shy of a stack.

  It had started yesterday. No, before that. But only in bits and spurts. It had actually been going on for a while, but now – now it was happening more often, lasting longer. Waking her from her sleep. And she would be damned if she knew what “it” was. But the electrical current that had taken up residence just beneath her skin told her the answer was here – in the morgue.r />
  News of poor Meredith Gamble had been the talk of the town this morning. Word was, it was an accident, but someone had started a rumor that it was more than that.

  Mrs. Humelory over at the Perk Up coffee kiosk thought there was a madman at large. “One of them slashers, like Jack the Ripper,” she declared as the machine hissed and fussed and oozed out Piper’s morning cappuccino. “A serial killer. Like you see on the TV, only this one is here.”

  “Mrs. Humelory, I strongly doubt anyone in Black Valley is a serial killer,” Piper had argued, waiting for her coffee and wanting desperately for the conversation to end. The rain hadn’t let up, and despite the little awning over the drive-up window, cold droplets of water and a harsh, icy wind found their way into Piper’s truck.

  Mrs. Humelory didn’t seem to notice or mind. “Of course, it’s not anybody in town. It’s one of them strangers. A drifter. Mostly likely from Portland or Eugene. Yes, definitely Eugene, they’re all half-crazy there anyway.”

  Like Piper.

  No, she wasn’t half-crazy. She was completely crazy – breaking into the county morgue like some ghoul.

  Her criminal career almost ended before it started. She had slipped past the hospital staff without trouble. She thought she was home free, when she turned the corner and almost ran to the sheriff’s deputy sitting at the little utilitarian desk outside the morgue entrance.

  Pulse thundering, she jumped back behind the wall.

  A guard. They were guarding the morgue. Why? She waited, breathing silently, half expecting the Deputy to jump up and grab her, slam her face against the wall, and read her her rights. But nothing happened. After a couple of minutes she ventured a look.

  The deputy was leafing through a copy of Hunting and Fishing. She recognized him. Cheevers. Not the sharpest crayon in the box. That was good. As her mind raced over possible scenarios, the deputy solved the problem for her, abandoning his post for a visit to the men’s room.