Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel

by Tom Bouman

  I picked up a sandwich and returned to my station. The forms were still there. There would always be a gap between what appeared on the reports and what had actually taken place. For the past few days and nights, the time sheets I submitted to Milgraham and the chronology of my work would be especially tough to reconcile, given how much unanticipated overtime it would involve. I had been lobbying for a salary, rather than wage, anyway; I don’t mind staying out a little late. If done right, the reports would help my cause. Form upon form. I couldn’t bring myself to begin.

  I had been meaning to put in a call to the machine shop in Kirkwood where Barry Nolan worked, and finally had a spare moment to do so. After a minute of blown-out hold music, the manager got on the line, a prickly fella named Goffa. I introduced myself and explained that I was calling on behalf of Nolan. “He’s had a friend die, and he’s been helpful to us here in the township,” I said. “I just wanted you to know that if he’s missed some work, that’s the reason.”

  “Yeah, well. That’s what the phone is for. In the end . . .”

  “I understand,” I said, wanting to get off the phone. “I can account for second shift yesterday, and first shift the day before.”

  Goffa made an impatient noise. “That’s, you know. Okay. What about third shift before that, and second shift the day before that? If everybody blows off their rotation—”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Yeah. He missed four in a row. Part-timers, like Nolan, work on a rotation—”

  “Thanks for your time,” I said, and hung up.

  I got up, put on my extra .40 and coat, had my hand on the doorknob, and then I stopped, took off my coat, and sat.

  Camp Branchwater was shut up in the winter. Remote as it was, patrolled by Nolan, and offering no heat or electric, the young drinkers, vandals, drug users, and cheaters of the area let it be. I’d never gotten a call about it in my few years on the job. I needed a closer look.

  There was a number for Branchwater’s office in my phone book; I dialed it and got the answering machine. I left a message for someone to call me back, gave my office number and my cell, and said it was urgent. Then I called the sheriff’s department; Krista hadn’t heard any news of the sheriff or Aub. It took her just a moment to find Pete Dale’s number in Westchester for me. I thanked her and hung up.

  After a few rings, Pete’s kindly wife Donna answered. Though she was surprised to hear from me, she summoned some pleasantries and questions about the township. She didn’t seem to know anything of our difficulties. I made some conversation with her before asking to speak with Pete.

  “Henry?” Pete’s voice on the line was slow, burred by smoke, friendly. “I’m halfway out the door. How can I help you?”

  “Did Sheriff Dally speak with you?”

  “He did. How’s poor Aub? And of course, shocked to hear about your deputy.”

  “Thanks. Pete, I’m calling because I’d like to see your records, records of campers and counselors from the past fifteen years.”

  After a pause, Dale said, “This doesn’t sound like anything to do with us.”

  “I know,” I said. “Our victim isn’t local either. We saved you for last, hoping . . . Sheriff Dally, he wanted to keep you out of it.”

  “I appreciate it. And you have my permission, one hundred percent. Absolutely. I’ll call Barry Nolan and tell him, and you can work it out from there.”

  I paused too long. “Is there anybody else who can let me in?”

  “What’s wrong with Barry?”

  “Nothing. He was friends with George, and we’d like to limit his—between us, can I ask you about him?”

  “He’s a good caretaker,” Dale said. “On the off season he’ll fix a window, make sure the whole place doesn’t fall down, whatnot.”

  “Between us,” I said. “Between us, I heard there was some trouble with him a few years back.”

  Dale didn’t answer right away. “Yeah. That was no big deal.”

  “Pete,” I said. “Anything I should know about?”

  “Nothing, a couple kids went home with black eyes and bruises. I don’t know if you know, but boys do fight. How it got to where it did . . . there was a concerned parent, and it came back that the scrap happened on one of Barry’s survival trips, and he didn’t stop it. In fact, it wasn’t the only one he didn’t stop. Not saying he actively encouraged the boys to fight, but . . . people grow up with different ideas. I fired him and rehired him quietly, in a limited capacity, kept him away from the campers. It was mostly for his son. A sweet kid. You don’t want to see your father shitcanned. Anyway, Nolan is reliable. He’s not involved with this, is he?”

  “Like I say, we’re trying to give him a break. Between us, Pete.”

  “Oh, sure.” Dale thought a moment. “You know Shelly Bray, she runs a horse farm in Wild Thyme?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ve turned over the riding courses to her. She’s got a set of keys. Good luck. And Henry, remember: Branchwater is one hundred and seven years old. We’ve never once had need of the police.”

  “We’re trying to keep you out of it,” I said.

  FROM THE SHORE of Camp Branchwater’s private lake, a great blue heron croaked and rose into the air, flapping its huge wings once, twice, and was gone. Winter had outstayed its welcome and spring would not be denied. As I stood waiting in the driveway, Shelly Bray pulled up in her late-model station wagon, the engine quiet as air. Waving cheerfully, she stepped out of the car in jeans tucked into high brown boots. Her hair was smoothed back into a ponytail, and she wore a puffy vest embroidered with the logo of her horse farm. Our hands touched as she passed me the camp key ring.

  “Well, thanks,” I said, and waited for her to leave.

  “You don’t want company?” Her smile faltered. “You don’t have to talk about . . . anything you can’t talk about.”

  I should have sent her away. Instead I found the office key and we went in.

  The camp’s main building was a large two-story house, sided with cedar shingles, that been there for at least a hundred years. The electric was shut off for the season, and dark plaid wallpaper sucked up most of the interior light; we pushed open curtains and found a waiting room with factory-made furniture designed to look antique. Under a layer of dust, outdoor magazines were fanned on end tables. I peered into a glass case and found Max Brand paperbacks sandwiched between James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain, along with assorted shipwrecks, kidnappings, and explorations.

  Shelly watched me take the measure of the place for a moment, and asked, “Did you ever go here? When you were a boy?”

  “Me? No.”

  “My husband did. That’s partly why we ended up buying our place.”

  I moved from one group photograph of boys in black-and-white to the next, around the room. “You settling in, out here in the hills?” I asked.

  “It’s like a dream,” she said simply. “I grew up in West Virginia. Before and after school, and every summer, I worked on a horse farm. I never did my homework. I thought, who gives a shit? If I have to work all my life, I might as well be around horses. Tracy is the same way; that’s why I hired her. Never thought I’d have my own.” She sounded apologetic. “We were dirt-poor hillbillies. Probably why it feels strange, living in that place.”

  “That’s not what I imagined at all. Meeting you,” I told her.

  “What did you imagine?” she asked.

  I turned away, embarrassed, but her smile was kind and if she weren’t married, I’d have said there was something else in it.

  We passed through a door to the offices. There, we found a hallway lined with filing cabinets organized by year; within each year, each camper had his own file, including a photo, emergency contact information, what cabin he was bunked in, and accounts of problems: health, disciplinary, and otherwise. There were about a hundred boys to a summer, divided between July and August stays. Their ages ranged from nine to thirteen. Many of them attended year after year
. As I sifted through the past decade, Shelly went further back, opening drawers. I opened my mouth to stop her, and nothing came out.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked me.

  “I thought I wasn’t going to talk to you about that.”

  “Here,” she said. “Look at this little bozo.” In a file from twenty-six years back, she found a school portrait of a boy with spiked hair and a mouth full of braces. She drew up close to me. “My husband. See?”

  “Huh.”

  She dropped it back into the file, which she flipped through before returning it to its year.

  Eight years back I found a file for Finbar Nolan, Jr. There was little in his folder other than a photograph, and on the form where contact information was supposed to be written it read simply, Nolan. It was the same kid I’d seen in photographs on Nolan’s refrigerator at older and younger ages. In this photo he had longer hair in the back, and was sitting for a portrait against a phony backdrop of trees and sky. At age thirteen, you could see that he was already growing into a football player. I tucked the file under my arm and kept looking. In that year, most of the kids were white and Anglo in appearance. There were several African-American boys, and Filipino brothers named Roger and Oscar Villanueva. I pulled the brothers’ files, compared a Polaroid of John Doe, and put them back.

  Shelly stopped herself from asking a question.

  I shrugged. “We have no idea who the victim is. Was. But it’s just too remote of a spot to be a random drop.”

  “You think he was a camper here?”

  “Maybe.”

  I passed through all the remaining rooms on the ground floor, peering at photos, looking for the year that Barry Nolan, Jr., attended. They were roughly chronological, hung over windows and between Audubon prints and vintage maps, leading into back offices, a bathroom, a small kitchen. Eventually I was back in the front room, moving up the staircase. Shelly sat flipping through a magazine.

  She asked, “Can I ask why you didn’t call Barry? To let you in, I mean?”

  “He was close to my deputy. We’re keeping him out of it.”

  She was silent for a few moments. “It’s not—it can’t be what I’m thinking. Can it?”

  “We shouldn’t be talking about this.”

  Halfway up the stairs, I found something. A color photograph of about fifty boys and counselors gathered beneath a maple tree. You could tell how dirty they were after a summer outdoors, and how alive. Without touching the frame or the glass, which already showed a recent set of fingerprints, I scanned the faces. Standing with his arm flung over Barry Nolan, Jr.’s shoulders was a smiling kid, his long black hair held down by a red bandanna, his skin deep brown from the sun. For a moment, I tried to bridge the years between the living boy and the dead man, and then descended, holding the framed photograph by its hanging wire.

  Aware of Shelly observing me, I kept my face and gait calm as I made my way back to the filing cabinets. I combed the records once again with greater urgency but no more success.

  “Looks like I may be a while,” I called out to the lobby. “I’ll drop the keys off when I’m done.” I pulled the lowest drawer all the way out and reached my arm into the filing cabinet, up to my shoulder. My fingertips brushed a manila folder that lay flat against the floor.

  Shelly appeared in the hallway without my hearing her. She said my name and I looked up. There was an expression on her face like some guys would get leaving for patrols in the Mog. I’ve seen it too on an elderly man whose heart had stopped, on a young woman whose husband had put a knife through her ribs in a vicious domestic. The tension of a body anticipating death, competing with disbelief—a kind of involuntary calm. Struggling to produce the words, she whispered, “He’s here. Nolan.”

  A second passed. She wasn’t a fool. She knew, and I knew, and she needed me to go to work. “It’s going to be okay,” I said.

  I pulled her down the hall and planted her out of sight by a back door, placing her shaking hand on the dead-bolt knob. “If I tell you to run, stay low until you hit the woods. Keep going until you find someone. A phone. Don’t stop.” Moving to the front of the house with a .40 out, I heard nothing. I paused at the entrance to the lobby, checking the windows for movement. Nothing. I crept back to Shelly, who jerked her hand back as the lock’s knob began to turn, slowly, silently, on its own.

  She backed away, slipped past me, and ran to the front door, a noise in her throat on the verge of a scream. I raised my weapon. The dead bolt slid free of its housing. I waited for the door to open.

  Outside, a rifle shot cut the air. Glass exploded in a thud. The report was a .270 or higher. I ran to the front door. Shelly stood frozen by her station wagon and its shattered passenger-side window. The next shot passed through her vest with a burst of goose down. She barely moved, just patted her side in confusion. I leapt into the yard and toward Shelly, sending several .40 rounds at a shadow that had already disappeared between the cabins seventy-five yards back. I pulled Shelly down, shielding her with my body. As we crawled around the rear of the car, a third rifle shot popped the near tire and the car sagged. Two more shots followed at a lazy pace after we had cover. Explosions of mud and rock. From behind the bumper of the station wagon, I saw a figure hooded and cloaked in ghillie cloth, now over a hundred yards distant, backing toward a tree line with rifle trained on our position. I sent two more shots in his direction to discourage him from getting any closer. Shelly was unhurt. We moved, bent double, to the driver’s-side door. I opened it and scrabbled for the keys where they hung in the ignition. Yelling for her to stay low and climb in the back seat, I started the engine just as several rounds tore into the hood.

  As I backed the station wagon down the drive and out of range, two more bullets splashed home a couple feet in front of the bumper. We moved around the bend and into safety, but not before I crumpled the open driver’s-side door against a tree; the window glass shattered in on me, making me believe for a moment we were taking fire from the north as well as the southwest. Where the driveway met the road, I threw the car into neutral and stepped out. Shelly remained hunched in the back seat with her head wrapped in her arms. I called her name once, twice, and she looked up.

  “Can you drive?” I said.

  She pulled herself together. “I don’t know, the tire’s gone—”

  “Drive slow. I need you to get safe, get to a phone. Call the sheriff’s department.”

  “Okay. Okay. Fuck.” She climbed out of the back and slid into the driver’s seat. I tried slamming the ruined door a couple times, metal and plastic crunching together with no result. “Stop. Stop!” she said. “I’ll hold it closed.”

  “Be careful,” I said.

  Shelly pulled into the road. She looked up the drive, and then at me, shook her head, and drove away as fast as her flat tire would allow.

  I stepped into the woods. When I reached the place where the figure had disappeared into the trees, my eye caught a brass glint: five .30-06 shells lay scattered on the mat of wet leaves, along with a five-cartridge magazine, empty.

  With each new whitetail season, I wonder why I put so much effort into killing a being that has more in common with me than the average person walking down the street. I haven’t settled on the answer. One year in Big Piney there was an elk that’d been hit by a car and lived, and roamed the public land nearby for months. Its flesh had healed but its shoulder had not; the bone wouldn’t support weight. Though it had a beautiful four-foot rack, a hobbled buck can’t mate, can’t fight, can’t run, can’t do anything in life. I scouted it in the fall, and the first day of the season I went out and shot it, and said thank you Lord. I like to think the elk was thankful too. With most human beings it’s not so simple. We have to limp along no matter the wound.

  Camp Branchwater was splayed along a north-facing ridge; the south-facing side curled around a swamp like a sleeping dog. I headed for high ground, skirting the clearing’s edge, keeping plenty of cover between me and the shooter’
s possible positions.

  As I made my way, I passed a Studebaker abandoned beside a stone foundation, and later on, a trio of blue plastic oil drums that would likely survive long after I was gone, until the woods were all cut down around them. These were objects I happened upon without noticing until I was close by. How I expected to pick out the dull glint of a gun barrel reaching through the brush a hundred yards away, I could not guess.

  I moved and stopped to look, but more to listen. Take more than a step a second and you’re not really after anything. Make your footfalls sound like something else. Be something else.

  Instinct and the land swung me around to the northern edge of Aub’s plot. I took a long loop west, and fetched up in a patch of blackberry brambles that bordered an intersection of logging roads, and settled in there.

  The shooter’s hearing would be wasted after firing at least ten rounds, by my count; that was in my favor. And if he expected me to wait for police to come screaming up 189 before I went after him, so much the better. He’d be looking for an approach from the northeast, and I was going to give him something else. A long minute passed before running steps broke the stillness. They were heavy but careful. No snapping branches underfoot, no barreling through the brush. In the clearing above, Nolan moved into view, wearing shaggy state-of-the art camo, carrying a deer rifle. He turned on his heel a moment and listened. I considered a long shot uphill, and thought better of it. Then he was gone, back in the trees.

  I waited a beat, two, three, and took a slanting line to follow him. In about a hundred halting paces, I caught sight and sound of him as he crossed in front of me, slipping up the ridge away from Aub Dunigan’s farm. I adjusted my line and prepared to meet him. He was heading for the site where we’d found the body.