Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel

by Tom Bouman

  Dally asked me if I’d mind looking in on the various sites at the ridge. Though I was eager to get back to the Heights and track down Jennie Lyn, that would wait until closer to night. It was a blue-sky day and my hiking boots had dried. I headed back over 189 to the Bray horse farm. Mrs. Bray—Shelly—seemed pleased when I asked to use her dirt lot as a base; cell reception was better there and I had hoped it would allow me to speak with Tracy Dufaigh again. Unfortunately, Dufaigh wasn’t there.

  “Yeah,” said Shelly, leading a mare into a corral, “she left early yesterday, understandably. Haven’t heard anything from her since. Is this about your deputy?”

  “No, no. No,” I said. “Just wanting to check on her. All right. Headed up to the ridge.”

  “Have a good one. Oh, hey, Barry Nolan stopped by this morning. Said he wanted to call on me, let me know he was around. Given everything.” She slipped a bridle off the mare’s head. “He also asked what you’d said to me.”

  “How well do you know him? You friendly with his wife, by any chance?”

  “No, she was on her way out by the time we bought this place. Summers I teach riding at Camp Branchwater, so we have that in common. He’s decent enough.”

  “Is he well liked at the camp? I only ask because—”

  “He’s not the likeliest guy to be working with kids?” She laughed. “Yeah, I know. He doesn’t anymore. He taught survival once.”

  That, I hadn’t known. “Huh.”

  “Yeah, he loved that, it was his calling. There was some trouble with the management, and they turned the course over to a regular counselor,” Shelly said. “These counselors are all well-off kids working for the summer. You can imagine. College kids. He brought it up to me a couple times, said he got railroaded. I don’t know, it might have been his way of asking me to advocate for him with Pete Dale. It came off a little bitter, but that’s the way he is, kind of.”

  The late morning sun was high enough to warm the steep southern side of the ridge. I picked my way through the woods to the site of our grisly discovery, in a straight line over the ridge. The snow had disappeared from almost everywhere except the hollows shaded by boulders and fallen trees. I walked once around the police-tape perimeter, seeing nothing unusual, and headed back down the south side again. My heart leapt along with a startled doe as it vaulted away from me.

  The wind hushed by, hinting at spring, and places I’d never seen, and being young. I would have enjoyed it had I not been aware that we’d found John Doe in the woods close behind. A befouled place.

  I wended my way back down to the stone wall that skirted the edge of the forest and followed it east, looking for any natural point of ingress from the south, something that might lead from 189 to the ridge without too much difficulty. In the midst of some spindly birches and ironwoods, there was a tall stand of hemlock trees, trunks close together, forming a kind of half blind. Deer like those places, and so do hunters; I stepped between trunks and kicked aside some damp deer scat and a beer can and sat where I was partially hidden by a log and had a good view to the south. I listened to the wind murmuring again, this time sounding like my mother’s voice, and conjuring vividly my threadbare clothes snapping on a line. I could feel the rough wood of clothespins in my hands.

  I heard hoofbeats. Thirty meters to my south, a horse picked its way along the trail. Shelly Bray was the rider, and she scanned back and forth as if looking for someone or something in the trees. I took off my glasses so they wouldn’t reflect, and laid low and waited as she passed. She had to duck under a branch, and in so doing turned in my direction. I could have sworn she saw me but she acted as though she didn’t, and was soon out of sight and earshot.

  Solitude and sun-dappled air is a kind of magic, a drug, like music. Before long, the township’s finest was curled up with my fondest early memories of hunting for caves never found, and the smell of fresh-caught fish on an open fire. I’d taken my belt off, .40 and all, and it lay coiled in the crook of my arm. I’d grown used to having the other pistol strapped to my ribs. The hemlocks swayed and sang me to sleep.

  A branch snapped. An unnatural silence. Before I was fully awake, the .40 was out of its holster and in my hand. Not twenty feet to my right, footsteps retreated east, breaking the silence suddenly and definitively. I slipped out of the hemlocks and ran in the direction of the sound, throwing the belt over my shoulder and gripping it there. Careful footfalls became someone moving through undergrowth, with me following. How close, I wasn’t sure. There are times a chipmunk can sound like a man in the woods. I’d stop to listen, and pick up the trail again, sometimes waiting until my quarry decided to move. Couldn’t see anything through the trees, which clicked in and out of focus, and I suspected the person I was chasing was in camouflage. Once I splashed across a stream, but there were no bootprints I could see, and we were headed uphill where the ground was dry. My head began to pulse.

  He turned north, into the ridge. His movements became sporadic and cautious. I followed as best I could, trying to keep track of the distance and glancing up now and again at the sun to check direction. He was leading me northeast. In a mile, maybe more, we’d hit the swamp that bordered Aub’s land, and I’d have him pressed up against it. Once, just once, I caught a flash of earthy color disappearing behind a distant stone fence. Otherwise he was just sound.

  I came to a clearing surrounded by stands of young saplings growing densely together, a kind of bowl leading to the edge of a bedrock outcropping and a boulder field that tumbled into the western edge of the swamp. It was reputed to be a coyote den in Father’s day. A little deer path cut down the middle of the clearing, and connected to a logging trail somewhere above me.

  Nothing moved. My head began to spin. I asked myself if I had lost him, and felt a watchfulness in the silence. Pressing through trees no thicker than my arm, growing close together as bristles on a hairbrush, I headed for the rock, slowly, trying to stay in what cover there was. Through the trees, the swamp was gray-white where the ice remained, and sunlight sparkled in blue-brown water where it had thawed.

  In the outcropping there was a kind of side door into the rock, a man-sized gap where, over thousands of years, the shale had been pried apart by time and ice. I crossed ten quick feet of open space and was inside. The sound of my own breathing reflected back from the rock walls. The crevice soon opened up to let more light in from the top, and I came to a place where I could either go right into another narrow passage, or down. I chose down.

  The shale opened out into a kind of chamber exposed to the sky, with a fire ring, a rusted lawn chair, and a wire strung between two rock faces. Bits of dried flesh and fur clung to the wire. I poked through the black wood and ash in the pit. It still smelled faintly of smoke. Prodding the leaves and debris on the ground there, I uncovered a beaver trap, snapped shut, and a larger one that had likely been used for coyotes. Squatting there, I listened. The wind rattled dried willow in the swamp below. Nothing more. I listened. Nothing. Then, behind me in the rocks, the click of a gun safety.

  For the second time that day I had the .40 in hand without thinking. My options were few, and I gave myself no time to figure out how I’d been flanked, or by whom. I could clamber up and try to tumble sideways out of the rocks, and catch a round in the head as soon as I popped it up. I could wait for my new friend to move in, hoping to get him first, knowing there’d be no way to get the drop if I followed procedure—identifying myself as police and asking him nicely to put his weapon down. It took a moment to find a third way. In a small alcove that had looked like a dead end, there was a short passage leading toward the swamp. A slab of shale had broken off from a larger boulder above and formed a kind of roof over two pieces of rock. I slipped across the open space I was in and, bent double, backed inside. Inside the tunnel was a scattering of dried shit; little pellets from a porcupine, coyote scat laced with fur and bone. Peering over my shoulder, I moved cautiously toward the triangle of light at the eastern end.

  The t
unnel led to a flat semicircle at the swamp’s edge, ringed by chest-high boulders. There was no way out—other than the way I’d come—but over the rocks or into the swamp. On the ground, a brown tangle of grasses and sphagnum, and to the right was a briar patch with wicked-looking thorns. From my new position, I risked a glance up the boulder field and was halfway satisfied with the view. With my back to the water, and high shoulders of rock on either side of me, I was still about pinned, but at least I would sense his approach from almost any angle. I took cover and listened, taking split-second glances back at odd intervals.

  After minutes of stillness, I heard something I didn’t expect: the steady trot of a horse, far up the hill. The hoofbeats paused in what I reasoned was the clearing above the rocks, and its rider, I surmised, was Shelly Bray. I didn’t move, or do any other thing that might get us both shot. Silently I willed her to move on. She didn’t, or at least I heard nothing. After a moment I couldn’t stand not knowing, and risked another look; there was no horse, no rider, nothing.

  I took cover and called out. “Stiobhard?”

  Nothing.

  “Stiobhard, you there? Talk to me.”

  No answer. I looked out over the swamp, which was busy thawing in the sunlight and didn’t care what we two men were doing with our guns. I needed to move. Crawling to peer out over the eastern side of the space, I put my knee down on a thorn that was a half an inch long. As I mouthed some cusses and pulled it out, I noticed yellowed and crinkled scraps everywhere below the briar patch, like tissue paper: rose petals that had fallen probably six months before. That’s when I started to see the place. Brambles that tough should have taken over everything in sight by now, and there was a reason they hadn’t; nearby was a rusted hand scythe, its blade half buried in the earth. Someone had been gardening. I holstered the .40. Staying low, I brushed aside the grass, still not sure what I was looking for. First, a chipped white vase with blue flowers glazed on it, tangled in the weeds but still standing, some brown stems protruding from its mouth. And just above it, a flat square of shale. I yanked vegetation away. There was no name, only a rough cross hand-chiseled into its surface. A gravestone.

  I listened. If my friend was still there, and if he was capable of ending my life, he might. He might. If he was going to, it almost didn’t matter what I did, except I didn’t want to be sunk in a swamp. So I’d have to get out somehow. Starting on the western side, I took what low running start I could, threw myself over the eastern rock face, and flailed into the saplings beyond. Flush with the ground, I watched and waited. The sun climbed higher in the midday sky before I could convince myself I was safe. I stood. Far as I could tell, I was alone. As I shook my head and began to wonder if I hadn’t always been, I heard the sound of footsteps to my left, and turned in time to see a split-second glimpse of a shadowy figure slip into the woods far above me. My vision phased in the sun, and I spent a moment bent over with my hands on my knees. Every bit of my heart wanted to continue the chase, but my head called it a draw.

  AT HOLEBROOK COURTHOUSE, Krista let me back into the sheriff’s department. I found Dally at his desk with a lunch laid out before him. I told him what I’d found, and mentioned the figure I’d heard in the woods, but left out that he might have been a phantom from my struggling brain. He wasn’t too pleased with my news.

  “Christ,” he said. “At least the grave’s marked. Maybe there’s a record of it in deaths and burials. Could be a dog, for all we know.”

  “Yeah, maybe. It didn’t feel that way.”

  Dally looked pissed off, and then something dawned on him, something he tried to disguise. “You want to handle this one, Henry?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  “Have Krista take you up to records, to deaths and burials. Maybe there’s something up there that spares us digging it up. Maybe Aub will be so kind to tell us what that stone is doing there. Maybe we’ll catch a break just this once.”

  “Wait, digging it up? Sheriff, this grave looked mighty old.”

  “That’s why I’m sending you after a good explanation. If we can’t get one, then what we have is an unrecorded grave not a mile distant from a murder victim, on land belonging to one of our only two persons of interest. In which case, we have good reason to request Detective Palmer’s services again. Maybe another trooper or two.”

  KRISTA AND I climbed the grand staircase to the courthouse’s third floor, to an attic where paper records from the 1860s to the 1970s were stored. These had yet to be digitized, and probably never would be. The room had a high ceiling but few windows, and the few it had were small and circular, like a ship’s portholes. Black filing cabinets lined the walls and made up several rows about five feet high. There was a pile of cardboard boxes in the corner, presumably to be filed one day. A dead bird lay in the shaft of light below a near window, mummified by the stale air.

  “I wouldn’t tell the clerk you were up here alone,” Krista advised. “I’m saving you some trouble not putting in official requests. He’ll keep you waiting weeks.”

  “I appreciate that. Any idea how this is organized?”

  “Alphabetical, I guess. Horrible hunting.” She retreated downstairs.

  I found a cabinet marked D and pulled open a drawer.

  It took a couple hours. But between several different cabinets and a box or two, I put together a serviceable record of the Holebrook Dunigans, including births, deaths, and marriages. Like most of us, they are buried in St. Paul’s Cemetery on Route 153. Everybody was accounted for in Aub’s immediate family. If there was a beginning, there was an end—except for Aubrey, of course. And he had never been married, or there was no official record of it. I put everything in rough chronological order in a manila file and headed out.

  Kevin Dunigan’s auto shop was on the way, and I stopped there first. Kevin put on a jacket and led me out of his waiting room and around back, to a trash-strewn lot bordered by a creek. He seemed uncomfortable as ever, and this was probably the most private spot he had at his place of business.

  I told him about the grave site and asked him if he knew of any relatives buried on Aub’s land, anyone at all. He looked alarmed at the question but told me no.

  “Generations back they were wild people,” he said. “Half wild anyway, and all to themselves. Not . . . not American, really. God knows what that place is.”

  “We may need to dig it up.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Henry, can’t you leave it alone? We’re talking about something very old. Maybe we missed a relative somewhere. It was olden days, records weren’t so good. Is it so wrong to just let it be?”

  “I need to talk to Aub.”

  Kevin looked away. “You can’t.” I waited for him to elaborate. “Our lawyer has advised us against it. And we’ve got to take back our permission to search Aub’s land.”

  I stifled a flash of irritation that got my head throbbing. “I have to say I disagree with that advice, Kevin. It’d make sense if Aub had done something wrong, but he hasn’t, and we both know that. It only looks bad.”

  “Well—”

  “Our warrant lasts a week. We don’t need your permission. And even if we did, it’s not your permission we’d need; it’s Aub’s. And in any case, I’m trying to save you some trouble, so just let me talk to him.”

  Kevin raised his voice. “I say how it is now. You’ve seen the shape he’s in.”

  “Yeah, I have. You have power of attorney? Has he signed anything? Has a judge? Has he had his evaluations yet?”

  He snorted. “Aub signing something. He’s a mule. He won’t sign anything we put in front of him.” Kevin shook his head impatiently.

  “So. What’ve you put in front of him lately?”

  Kevin looked away and breathed heavily through his nose. “You want to talk to him, fine. But you’re not taking him from our home. Dally released him to our care. I’ll call Carly and tell her you’re coming.”

  “No need.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  I fo
llowed Kevin to the front lot. He gestured for me to remain outside. It took him longer than I expected, and when he returned, it was without his jacket. There were bright spots of color on his cheeks, and he smelled sharply of sweat. “It’s what, four now? How about coming over at six? You’ll be done by dinnertime.”

  “Kevin.” I met his eyes. “How about now?”

  “He’s sleeping.”

  “I’m trying to help you out. To help Aub. If I have to, I’ll park in your goddamn front yard and blow my horn.”

  Dunigan raised his head and squared his shoulders. “He’s not there.”

  Four or five cars passed on the nearby road before I could speak. “What?”

  “He . . . ran off. We have him bunked in the basement—it’s a nice basement, carpeted—and, you know, locked in for his own protection. We took precautions, but he must’ve found a tool or something. He’s gone. He walked away.”

  “Jesus Christ.” I fought through the fog in my mind. “You have guns in the home?”

  “Of course, but—”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Of course, but they’re locked up in my gun safe. What happened to ‘he didn’t do anything wrong’?”

  “You stay here in case someone sees him and calls. Tell Carly to stay home and wait.”

  Evening was already coming down. I placed a call to the sheriff’s department and the answering machine picked up. I didn’t want to be overheard on the radio, so I drove ahead.

  At Kevin and Carly’s house, Carly stood in her doorway in what I took as a defensive attitude. She didn’t invite me in. I was curious to see how their house was kept, but didn’t press it. At my request, she went off to check that the household’s firearms were all accounted for; I still didn’t believe Aub to be consciously, naturally violent, but I was still learning how much we didn’t know.