Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel

by Tom Bouman

  “So she’s what, she’s mummified?”

  “Pickled, more like. It’s chemical.” Brophy climbed out of the grave and pulled Palmer aside. As they conversed, Brophy gestured at his own neck, as if demonstrating something. Palmer nodded along. I turned to the tree line, trying to scan for my figure on the sly. My gaze came to rest on Nolan as he drank from John’s flask of whiskey and let his eyelids sag in relief. He noticed me looking, and raised his eyebrows in what was the closest expression to a smile I’d ever seen him make.

  “Does no good in the bottle,” he said, and held the flask out to me. I declined.

  After further conversation, Brophy went to his kit and produced a body bag. “Here comes the tricky part,” he said.

  We cut down and stripped two saplings, then buried their narrow trunks below the coffin and heaved up, two men to a side. The box lifted free of the mud with a sucking sound, and red-brown water poured from its seams, soaking us from the thighs down. “Shit. Jesus,” said John. Nolan paled but otherwise remained impassive. All I could smell was earth and swamp and something sulfurous; there was no odor of rotting flesh, not even up close. As we slid the coffin onto dry land, its sodden wood fell apart in my grip.

  We gathered around the body. She looked vulnerable, smaller out in the big new world. I had an irrational protective impulse as we stood in silence, offering the woman a moment of respect before the indignity of a body bag, then transport to some lab, there to be cut and pulled open and scrutinized. It felt wrong, taking her out of there. But that’s what we did.

  As the others carried the body out, I broke off the trail. Palmer saw me go, and said nothing. I picked my way north through the saplings around the periphery of the clearing. The shade in the woods soothed my eyes, even broken as it was with blades of white light. A silent step, a listening pause, a step. I climbed the slope and willed my eyes to focus, to peer beyond the trunks and the thicket. With the swamp spread out below me, I reached the place I’d seen almost without realizing. The silver tree stump I’d used to mark the spot was unmistakable, though, and had been gouged to a fare-thee-well by a woodpecker. There was a faint scent of tobacco on the air. I scoured the ground at my feet and found the butt of a hand-rolled cigarette nestled into a patch of club moss. My chest tightened in frustration. There would be egress from the ridge in any direction but one, from there, and my friend remained more than a few steps ahead. Whoever he was, he had moved on.

  WE SET THE woman in the shade beneath Nolan’s deck, where rolls of deer fencing and a stack of hay bales were stored. For a moment we stood awkwardly in the dirt drive, and then John said what was on all of our minds.

  “You got any beers in that house?”

  Nolan nodded. “Be right back.”

  “Can’t we come in? Cold out here.”

  “Like that? No, you can’t.”

  “What, who’s going to care? What do you care? We’ll take off our shoes.”

  Nolan snorted. “Jesus Christ, John, I don’t want goddamn mud all in my house. Leave it alone.”

  When the door slapped shut behind Nolan, John turned to Palmer and Wy with a wink. “He’s a divorcée. A sensitive plant. You should see it in there, it’s like it never happened, all the décor she picked out, everything is still there. As if she’s going to come home any minute. Poor fuckin son of a bitch.”

  Brophy’s eyes widened. “How long ago was this?”

  “Aw, no, that ain’t her,” John said, referring to the corpse lying under the deck. “His wife just married some blowjob up in Sidney.”

  While we waited, I tried raising Sheriff Dally on my cell, but had only one bar, and that winked in and out. Nobody else’s reception was any better, and though the air was cooling quickly into the low forties, Wy kept looking over at the body bag. The body inside needed to get where she was going. For that to happen, we needed to know where that was, and how she’d be transported.

  I mounted the steps and stood at the back door, which opened into the kitchen. Our host wasn’t in sight, so I knocked lightly and let myself in, shucking my boots. The kitchen curtains let some light through, but the other rooms were dark.

  I had the landline phone in hand, and had just finished dialing the sheriff’s department, when Nolan passed in the hall without seeming to see me.

  I heard a door open, and footfalls descending an interior staircase. I placed the phone gently on its cradle and padded in the direction from which he’d come. Nolan’s living room contained a wicker bookcase with a few books on the top shelf, including a worn copy of The Tracker by Tom Brown as told to William Jon Watkins, and a field guide to animal tracks and sign. A row of National Geographics filled the bottom shelf. The case was otherwise empty save for one framed photograph that had fallen over; it was a shot of a handsome, burly teen in a rented tux, at the prom with his date, who was plain and overweight, but sweet-looking. I set it down. On the western wall, a flight of brass ducks passed over a little Jøtul woodstove in a bricked corner. A pair of oil paintings pictured a buck at attention, and a doe and a fawn, respectively, in each case the surrounding woods a little too grand for our area.

  Among a mosaic of photographs hanging in the dark hall I picked out Nolan crouching with a buck so freshly killed his eyes had yet to glass; Nolan and the woman I presumed was his ex-wife; Nolan with his arm around the boy from the prom photo, who was in football shoulder pads, his face alight; and a dark square of wallpaper where a photograph had once hung.

  The staircase groaned, and I crept back to the kitchen and pressed redial. Krista had just answered when Nolan walked into the kitchen. The smile fixed on his face did nothing to hide his displeasure at my presence. I mouthed, Sorry, pointed to my stocking feet, and shrugged. Nolan opened his refrigerator and pulled out a box of light beer cans. As he closed the icebox door, he seized one of the newspaper articles about his son as if seeing it for the first time in years, letting a magnet clatter to the floor. He stuffed the article into a pocket and waited by the back door.

  Krista finally put me through to the sheriff, and I filled him in. Dally said he hoped she would come back as a natural death, and that he would send an ambulance to ferry our corpse to the county morgue.

  “Listen,” he told me. “Brophy may feel out of his depth and want to send her with Palmer to a state lab down in Scranton. Don’t let the state take her yet. It’s important that the body stay here in town until at least tomorrow morning.”

  “What happens then?” I said. I felt Nolan’s eyes on me.

  “She’s got a date.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  The sheriff explained what he had in mind.

  When he was done, I said, “I don’t agree with that approach at all. You need to be gentle with him, or he’ll—”

  “Just keep the body up here,” Dally told me. “We’ll discuss it later.”

  I hung up. Nolan stood by the door, waiting.

  Before leaving the kitchen, I felt I should say something friendly. “How’s your son been? He have a good season this year?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Any scouts?”

  “You want to . . .” Nolan gestured at the door, and tried to cover his impatience with a smile.

  Outside, we sat on car bumpers and hoods and drank and shivered, and waited for the ambulance to show. I raised a beer to my companions’ service to the township. John followed with a toast to George Ellis: “Rough, tough, and hard to bluff.”

  “Amen,” said Nolan.

  I deflected a couple questions from John about our investigations. Nolan’s gaze wandered from our conversation and lingered on the body bag under his deck. He looked at his watch and sighed.

  “You miss your shift?” Kozlowski asked.

  By the time the ambulance arrived, Brophy and Palmer were negotiating over the body, and Brophy was losing.

  “No,” said Palmer. “You want our assistance in the field, fine. We never agreed to take anything on beyond that. It’s a county matter.”


  “Bill, I’m in no position to take on a new subject. I just got a car accident vic nobody wants to claim. I get one more body, I’ve got to send one to the funeral home. Or to you.” He turned to me. “Henry. She’s in good shape now, but every second she spends in an uncontrolled environment, every second she’s above thirty-six degrees, everything the chemical composition of that bog prevented, all that bacteria, will rush in and turn her into sludge. Now, I can keep her cold, but that’s about all. The detailed examinations, the tests, the time, the man-hours, I can’t do that for a subject like this. But someone should. Getting her to Scranton, now, is the best way.”

  Two overweight EMTs stood silently by, half listening to our discussion. I recognized one of them as Damon from the other day. He waved at me, a surreptitious hand at waist level.

  Dusk was falling. In the face of Palmer’s stony refusal, Brophy raised his hands. “Do what you want. I’m just asking for what’s best. Never seen anything quite like that one before, so, you know.” He looked me long in the face, then pulled me aside. “You ever hear of the Tollund Man?”

  “No, sir.”

  “He was from Denmark. Lot of peat bogs over there. Not exactly like this one, but similar. And this Tollund Man was dug up in one, in a bog. He was so well preserved that people thought he might have been a modern murder victim. He had a rope around his neck. As it happens, he was from the Iron Age.” His eyes shone.

  It must have been plain on my face I didn’t know when the Iron Age was.

  “What that means,” Brophy continued, “he could have been alive the same time as Christ. That old. People speculate—speculate, now—that he was a human sacrifice. Think about that: a human sacrifice. For all we know, he could have been a messiah, a Christ nobody ever set down in words. Can you imagine? Preserved for two thousand years.” He looked with longing at the body bag under the deck. “And now we find her. I don’t believe there’s ever been one found on this continent. She might have been preserved for decades. Could have lasted hundreds of years more after we’re gone.”

  “So put her back,” Kozlowski suggested from across the driveway. Nolan snorted. I glared at them both.

  Turning to Brophy, I said, “I bet you can handle it fine.”

  “No, I can’t, and that’s the thing,” he said. “They can. Leave it up to me, and . . .” He shrugged. “We won’t learn half of what there is to know.”

  Palmer, Brophy, and I lifted her onto a gurney, and the EMTs strapped her down.

  “Not too tight,” said Brophy. “I’ll just do what I can do,” he told himself.

  I declined John’s invitation to join him at the bar and got in my truck. There, in loud silence, I thought about what I’d seen that day. The woman from the bog might not have been anybody’s Jesus, not in our neighborhood, but we had rolled away the stone. She was risen, and ours to deal with.

  Who she had been to Aub, in life, remained to be seen. A relative, maybe. A wife the world had overlooked, perhaps common-law? The headstone was enough of a gesture that she had meant something to the old man. Whether Aub intended to keep her grave to himself or not, it was secret; that suggested that the woman had been something secret too. The signs weren’t clear, but my thoughts of the old man were taking unsettling turns.

  I WAS BONE-TIRED, caked with mud, and scratched everywhere with thorns. My trousers had been soaked to the thighs with swamp water and hadn’t yet dried. Even so, I knocked at Evelina Grady’s, unfit to be seen and half dead on my feet.

  The old lady answered. “You come by the front this time. Come in?”

  “Thanks,” I said, and stepped inside. Though I had tried to stomp and scrape off every bit of mud from my boots, plenty had hung on; I bent over to unlace myself. My back muscles bunched and stretched painfully. My socks were still damp and stained red, but I wasn’t going to take those off, and consequently I left red-brown footprints across powder-blue carpeting. I looked back at my trail in dismay. Evelina saw it and said, “Don’t worry, Henry.” I followed her to the kitchen and sat while she made us instant coffee.

  My bedraggled state would have made small talk absurd. The old lady knew I had something to ask or to tell, and waited for me to come out with it. The coffee she set before me tasted burnt sweet and chemical, and hot and wonderful.

  “We went digging out by the swamp,” I said. “Found the grave of a woman.”

  “On Aubrey’s land?”

  “Where else?”

  “And you don’t know who it is.” She nodded, and produced a pack of cigarettes from a pocket in her sweatsuit. She laid them on the table and stared as if expecting them to get up and do something. “Aubrey is the last of a strange brood. I mean, I’m told they were considered old-fashioned even in the olden days. They kept to themselves.

  “But we don’t know what times was like back when he was young. We don’t know what being a neighbor was, or what love was like, or honor. Faith in God. Things we laugh about now. We forget.”

  I kind of knew what she was getting at. I suspected that she had been drinking. There was a smell on her breath, maybe vodka. “We do forget,” I said.

  “I don’t know who she is. Sorry. Not for sure.”

  “You had mentioned a sweetheart last time we spoke. Someone who may have left Aub, jilted him?”

  “I also told you what I thought of him. It’s not in his character, killing a person.”

  I heard a hint of anger in her voice, and resisted telling her that she could never know that for certain. “I’m going out to have a smoke,” she said. “Come on out if you want.”

  Gazing into the black woods behind her house, she lit a cigarette and smoked in silence. She wore wool socks and clogs. I was still in stocking feet, and the damp crept up my ankles; I wiggled my toes and thought, this is how Stonewall Jackson died.

  “Forgive me, Evelina,” I said. “It’s none of my business. You’re quiet tonight. Something bothering you?”

  The old lady peered at me over top of her glasses. “Tell me, Henry. Out where you live, did you sign?”

  “I don’t own my place.”

  She snorted impatiently. “But would you?”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing against you if you did.”

  “Not even if you were hard up?”

  “I’d figure something else out, I guess.”

  “But what if you were shiftless?” She leaned theatrically around me to look in the direction of her son’s house.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Clearly I don’t mean you.” She looked around her, at the wild lawn, the dew caught in starlight, and the apple trees twisting themselves into the ground. “Isn’t much, this. But I won’t sign no gas lease. It’s poison. Still, if you do or don’t, there’s something to poison you. It’s stubborn, maybe. Pointless.” She tossed her cigarette aside and muttered, as if admitting to herself, “Everybody’s going to sign.”

  We let that drift awhile. There weren’t too many people in the area left who felt the way she did. It had to be difficult.

  I asked, “What can you tell me about this woman, Aub’s?”

  “I don’t know. We’re talking about old news, here. It’s said she came over from Ireland to marry someone from a farm family. Like a mail-order. Aub wasn’t the one she contracted with, but she wound up with him anyway. Maybe just long enough to pry herself free from her husband, then she took to her heels. Headed for the old country.”

  “Got a name, anything? Who was she?”

  She clucked and shook her head. “I hope it isn’t her you found. I don’t know her full name, but her married name was Stiobhard.”

  NIGHT HAD FALLEN; in my truck, the factory heat wheezed its swaddling breath as headlights from the opposite lane flooded my vision, leaving afterimages that I could not blink away. I needed to go home and I knew it.

  At the courthouse, there was a light or two on somewhere deep inside, but nobody around upstairs. I had a key to the back door closest to the sh
eriff’s department. When I first stepped inside, the basement floor was silent, and with no other sound to muffle my footsteps, it felt like I was echoing down that long fluorescent hall forever into nothingness. The feeling was comforting as a daydream. As I passed the little window set in the door to the holding cells, I picked up movement, and peered in. The side corridor glowed green. I heard voices and the sound of a shower turning off; down the hall, Ben Jackson stood in the doorway of the jail bathroom. I rapped a knuckle on the glass window. Jackson double-timed it to the door and admitted me.

  From the bathroom, McBride’s voice reached us like a distant chain saw: “Deputy, I know beggars can’t be choosers, but this towel wouldn’t dry my dick and balls.” The prisoner emerged into the hall, hunched, shivering, and naked but for several patriotic and death-themed tattoos. He brandished a thin white towel like a surrender flag before tossing it to the floor. “It’s cold as shit in here. I’m a health risk!”

  Deputy Jackson raised his eyes to the sky. “Pick that up and be quiet.”

  McBride noted my arrival. “Hey! Officer! This bitch said he wants to suck my cock. Get me out of here.”

  “Get in your cell and get dressed.”

  “I lodge a complaint on you.” McBride shook his head, toweled himself off theatrically, and moved into his cell, closing the door himself.

  I turned to the deputy and said, “Some improvement over last night.”

  “Yeah. Who knows what tomorrow may bring? I should tell you he’s been arraigned. Possession with intent to distribute, possession of chemicals with intent to manufacture, criminal conspiracy.”

  I nodded. It was what I had expected.

  “Funny, what meth he had wrapped up with him was not the same as what he’d have made in his lab,” Jackson said. “Looks like we’re seeing the arrival of a larger supplier. There’s a task force—DEA along with state Clandestine Labs Unit—that wants us to make a deal to get to whoever that supplier is. Someone’s been leaning on the DA. They don’t give a damn about this guy, particularly, considering what they think they could connect him to. Meantime, we braced McBride about the JD and George. Before his lawyer taught him not to talk, he swore up and down he had nothing to do with either of them.”