Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel

by Tom Bouman

  It was once just a place in the woods, open to the sky, marked by fallen trees and a scattering of shale boulders draped in lichen and moss. My eye was drawn to what did not belong. Nolan stood facing east. By then he must have known I was approaching, but only turned to look at me when I told him to drop his rifle and put his hands on his head.

  “I’m glad it’s you,” he said. “You know. It’s all for nothing. It’s all a mistake.”

  “Drop your weapon.”

  “You ever do something, but it just don’t seem real?”

  “Nolan.”

  “I’m sorry about this.”

  His rifle was muzzle-down. He lifted it in my direction, making a lazy sweep. He wasn’t angry or hateful, but helpless. I shot him four times in the chest. He fell and was gone before I reached his side.

  I’LL TELL you what happened, to the extent that it’s documented and we can believe what is set down, coming as it does from Finbar Nolan himself. He left two handwritten letters in white business envelopes pinned to his refrigerator with magnets. The first read as follows:

  To All Concerned,

  By now you know it was me who killed the boy you found up at Aub’s. I don’t remember the exact day but it was between Christmas and New Years that I found him at the camp. I meant to burn and bury him forever but could not. His name was Albert Retroz. His death was a mistake.

  I am sorrier than I can say about George Ellis. He was a good man everybody liked him, even me. If it is a comfort to his family he felt no pain. I was trying to leave the boy’s car in the junkyard up in the Heights. Too late now. You can find it at the camp.

  I hope to be forgiven in the next world.

  —Nolan

  The following letter was hardly more revealing.

  Barry,

  Remember some good things I did.

  Be strong.

  Sell the house and land, as it will fetch a good price now.

  Take care of your mother.

  —Love, Dad

  Now picture a hulking, handsome young man. He has just driven two hours from college in Bethlehem. As he sits in a back office of the sheriff’s department across from Dally, and reads the second letter for the first time, he understands that his father is dead. Gone too is his first love, an on-again, off-again boyfriend in college, a wild, wealthy boy named Albert Retroz who would not let go of what they had, and would not accept it as secret. Barry Nolan, Jr., now understands why Albert fell off the face of the earth, why the calls he made have not been returned, and that the horror he has quietly wrestled with for months—never quite believing the worst—is real. Al is dead, and everybody knows everything, or enough. He sets the letter down and wipes his eyes with a broad hand.

  We found Retroz’s car, a gray German compact, in a barn at the camp, like Nolan said. We also think we found the place where he died, out front of a cabin whose cedar siding divulged to Palmer’s careful eye a few splinters of bone. We never did locate his arm, or the .38, or the flintlock. Retroz’s death was ruled wrongful and there was nobody to punish for it.

  A BEND OF the Susquehanna River passes through eastern Holebrook County, dividing the town of Fitzmorris in half. On one side, the original town had been built up against the river, and then spilled its box stores, auto dealers, and fast food chains south. Two bridges spanned the Susquehanna: a recently constructed concrete four-lane, and a venerable cast-iron that the town had blocked off to automobile traffic, painted green, and left open to pedestrians.

  The previous year, a flood had nearly washed the pedestrian bridge away. Some businesses near the riverbanks were still boarded up, and as I looked at the brown water roiling below us, I had to say, good thinking. Move up the hill. This year and the next and the one after that, it’ll be the same damn thing.

  A contingent of Pennsylvania state troopers in their dress grays stood approximately at attention, apart from the seventy-odd mourners milling on the bridge’s walkway, keeping a local camera crew at a distance while a Unitarian minister presided over the scattering. The ceremony concluded with a Walt Whitman poem that I liked, that made sense to me, about all the dead getting buried and absorbed into the earth, and returning in different forms. Here’s the last bit: “O years and graves! O air and soil! O my dead, an aroma sweet! Exhale them perennial, sweet death, years, centuries hence.” At the minister’s prompt, George’s brother Tim shook out the contents of an urn. There was no breeze, and the ashes fell heavily into the river, calling to mind a backhoe emptying its bucket.

  Later, I stood on the back deck of a tavern named the Barley Mow, gazing over the Susquehanna as the sun spread pink across the water, avoiding a party that had been made strange and somber by the fact that George and Nolan had run in the same circles. There were notable absences. Certain people couldn’t talk to each other and nobody knew what to say to me, and I had been counting the minutes until I could steal away. Tim Ellis found me. I had come to think of him as a suburban version of his brother George, without the heft or bloodshot eyes.

  Tim gripped the same wooden railing I was leaning on and gazed at the southern riverbank. He stood there a good while. “My brother. What did he die for? Did he die for no good reason?”

  At the time I thought that yes, he certainly did. “That’s the question,” I said, “but what’s the answer?”

  “I sure don’t know.”

  “I liked George. A lot of people did. He lived well, at least.”

  The Barley Mow was crowded and I slipped by people I should have spoken to, nodding and smiling them away. As I neared the door, Julie the blond EMT—almost unrecognizable in charcoal pants, a turquoise blouse, and a dusting of makeup—put a hand on my sleeve, looked in my eyes, and said something I couldn’t hear over the dull roar. Though she appeared to expect an answer, I gestured toward the door and left her standing there. In the end, it was Sheriff Dally who caught me as I was stepping into my vehicle.

  “Got something for you,” he said. “About as much closure as we’re likely to get on Aub and your mystery lady.” He handed me a sealed manila envelope, which I tossed on the passenger seat.

  “How is he?”

  “Ah, not great. Can’t talk, can’t walk. He’s in a home north of Scranton. He won’t be back in the township.” Dally shrugged, then cocked his head at the report where it lay. “You should read it. It says how this was a long time coming.”

  “Okay. I’m back to work Monday. Call if you need anything.”

  “You know,” he said, “Krista Collins has been hoping to get out in the field. I have no openings in my department. I figured you’re already budgeted for it . . .”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “She’s a soldier, a veteran. She knows what she’s doing. Plus she can bring you pieces of my network, contacts in the DEA, FBI, ATF. I’ll speak with Milgraham if you need me to.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  As I drove through the gauntlet of too many cars parked on Front Street, I took note of a twenty-year-old sedan parked with its nose out, whose driver was still sitting at the wheel. Hat pulled low, watching the cars and people move in and out of the slipstream of George Ellis’s wake, Finbar Nolan, Jr., was undeniably right where he was, and at the same time so far away that he didn’t even see me pass.

  AFTER NOLAN’S SHOOTING, Township Supervisor Steve Milgraham stepped in and suggested some mandatory leave, mental health treatment, and—surprise—a Fitness-for-Duty Evaluation for me. Dally supported the first two only. He appealed to Milgraham’s sense of economy, and claimed that the coming investigation of an officer-involved shooting, which was obligatory, would be tantamount to an FFDE, which it was not. I could see the fight brewing between the supervisor and the sheriff over me, and while I was in no position to assert my independence, I often thought about how to make up that ground I seemed to be losing.

  The first couple days I had to move around some, to avoid camera crews and reporters who had sniffed out my home address. When I’d
hear anyone on my driveway, I’d slip out the back door, cross the meadow to the ravine, and either clamber down to a landing where a deep pool collected the clearest burbling water, or head up to a slab of shale beneath a stand of hemlocks, and listen to the wind move west over the hills. After a while it was plain nobody was trying very hard to find me, and I felt safe enough to drink beer on my porch and watch March turn into April.

  Deputy Jackson showed up a couple times to fill me in on what I had been missing. It may have had as much to do with APA recommendations on shootings as it was out of friendship—I wasn’t supposed to be alone—but I appreciated it. The first visit, he told me U.S. Marshals had spirited Pat McBride away to some special facility in the dead of night; the deputy speculated that the dealer was now a guest of the state somewhere around Harrisburg, making himself useful to a major drug case. Another visit, Jackson told me that Wy Brophy had gotten his way, and the lady of the swamp had moved out of our morgue and into a Scranton lab. In a way I was glad. I couldn’t help feeling curious about her, and Aub, and how it was she had died. I was going to have a headache about it with the Stiobhards, but I was used to that.

  One afternoon I heard a car pull onto my driveway, and I started for the woods, as had become my habit. Something made me stop and get a look at my visitor—I might have been hoping it was Liz or Ed. What I saw was a high-end Japanese sport utility, black, with sprays of mud on its doors. A woman emerged, shading her eyes. She was small and thin, with short silver hair. I had seen her on the news. I had waited too long to disappear; having noticed me, she strode forward with her hand outstretched.

  “Do you know who I am?” she asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. “Please come in.”

  Charlotte Retroz had fine features. In fact I’d say she was beautiful, and about fifty. She had refused my offer of a drink, would not even accept tap water, and perched on the edge of my easy chair clutching a quilted cloth purse with chickens on it. “I’ve been over it so many times,” she said. “I’m here because I need to know more.”

  “I’ll help however I can.”

  “This Nolan,” she said. “In your report, he said very little to you before . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “And you had to. Absolutely.”

  “Yes.” I had been struggling with that question on my own, but tried not to show it. In my mind, I knew it had been the only possible course. You can know lots of things in your mind.

  “There’s a word that appears in his letter and in your report: mistake.”

  I nodded.

  “Not accident. It’s not the same thing,” she said.

  “You’re asking if—”

  “If this Nolan intentionally killed my son . . .” Her voice failed her.

  “Can I ask what you know about their history?”

  She drew herself up. “You don’t need to be delicate, not in this day and age. Al came out last year. It wasn’t a shock to me, but it was disappointing to his father.”

  “Oh.”

  “Successful men like Al’s father, part of why they succeed is that they are less burdened by empathy. Certainly he loves Al, and he never, never attacked him, not in my presence. But I could tell it was difficult. There was a heavy silence. It was some time before we knew Al was missing.

  “As far as the Nolans go, Al and the boy were friends. We encouraged it. Al’s social world would have been all one thing, otherwise. They had Branchwater together when they were boys, and the summer they were sixteen, there was a camping trip with . . . the father. With Nolan. Something went wrong and it was cut short. Al wouldn’t talk about it, and we figured the friendship was over. After all, their worlds were just going to get more and more different. Now I see how it was.”

  “Have you met with Barry?”

  “He won’t . . . he can’t. I’ve tried to reach him.” She looked out the window and back at me. “Sheriff Dally told me Barry said he didn’t know why Al would be in the area around Christmas. That they had no plans to meet. I find that hard to believe. Don’t you?”

  “It’s . . . Yeah.”

  “Officer, you haven’t answered my first question.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s because I don’t know.”

  “If there’s any impression of the man, anything you’ve held back for whatever reason, we won’t hold it against you.”

  “Mrs. Retroz—”

  “It matters.” She drew her palms across her cheeks. “It matters if Al, who was sweet, and kind, and full of fun, died accidentally, or . . .”

  I thought of what I should say, and said it. “From what I know, Nolan had his ideas, and they weren’t going to change. But he loved his son. He was capable of that. I believe your son’s death was an accident.”

  “I hope that boy is good,” Charlotte Retroz said, holding back tears, her jaw clenched. “I hope he is good enough for mine.”

  THE MORNING BEFORE George’s service, I had driven my pickup out to the edge of the woods. A large ash tree had toppled, overburdened by an ice storm during the winter. It turned out not to be straight or broad enough to mill beyond the first ten feet. With my chain saw I sectioned what I thought might work for Ed, and bucked the rest, along with whatever other fallen wood nearby that was big enough to split for the stove but had been covered by snow all winter. The sun had risen high in the sky and I had been splitting for some time when I became aware of someone watching me. Danny Stiobhard stood there in clean work clothes.

  “I followed your noise out here. Got a minute?” he said.

  “You help me load this, sure.”

  We each carried armloads of firewood out to my pickup, then I drove him back across the field to my house.

  Inside, I brewed some coffee and we sat, smelling of sweat and sawdust and motor oil, at the kitchen table.

  “So anyway, I come in peace,” he said, and raised his mug in my direction.

  “I gathered.”

  “And you know by now that I haven’t killed anybody.”

  “Very good, I’m glad.”

  “Yeah, so,” he said. “Sorry about that night. Things could have been different. I’m going to have to work that one off. I know that.” I said nothing and let him squirm. “But you think it never happens? How many guys just like me, rotting in a cell for something they didn’t do?”

  “I don’t know of any, personally. But I can understand your worry.”

  “Fuckin Barry Nolan.”

  “Indeed.”

  “All over his son being, you know. With that other.”

  “We don’t really know what happened.”

  “I know he was a drunk, and stupid,” Danny said. “Wouldn’t have picked him for this, though. He had his pants on backward about something.”

  “So how long did you know?”

  “About the stiff? I didn’t.”

  “Your brother did.”

  “Nothing in the township he don’t know. Who do you think it was found George?”

  “So did he know it was Nolan that killed him?”

  “That I couldn’t say.”

  Of course not. “Can I ask why were you trying to get up on the ridge?”

  There was a flare-up behind Danny’s eyes, but he kept it civil. “As I recall, I told you that. Kevin Dunigan hired me to clear the trails.”

  “He says he didn’t.”

  “Then he’s a fuckin liar and a short-assed rascal.”

  “You notice Aub’s wheels were missing?” I said.

  “I’m leaving.” He stood. “All I came for was about my aunt.”

  “Sit down. Please.” He obliged, though he was angry enough that the coffee trembled in his hand when he lifted it again. “So tell me.”

  “My great-aunt. Helen Stiobhard. We always did want her back for a proper burial. Guess that’s out of the question now,” he grumbled.

  “It’s out of my hands.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. So what’s the deal?” I asked. He made a dismissive gesture t
hat I couldn’t read. I pressed him. “What’s the matter with the way she was buried the first time? Hey, you can tell me anything. I’m on leave.”

  Danny sized me up and then spoke. “The way I heard it, she took up with Aub, and we never heard from her again. I say ‘we.’ This was when my granddaddy was just a boy.”

  “Listen, I looked in the records.”

  “Did you? Fine.”

  “You don’t have any Aunt Helen and I think you know it.”

  He slammed his mug down. “I’ll tell you what I do know: we have a claim on that land.”

  “Aub’s land?”

  “Aub’s land, yeah. So you need to get the dead old girl back up from Scranton so we can get a DNA sample.”

  “Kevin has power of attorney now, there’s very little you can do. Aunt or no.”

  “No? What about a great-grandmother? Yeah, Daddy, he don’t want to talk about it, he don’t want anyone to know. Not even if it gets him the land. But that Irishwoman was his true grandmother and direct relation. She left our great-granddaddy and lived in common law with Aub for years before she got killed. That don’t make a claim?” Danny stood up to leave.

  “Hey,” I said, my wheels still turning. “Aub was your great-grandfather?”

  He scoffed, and spoke slowly, as if to a dimwit. “No. I’m a damn Stiobhard. She bore my granddaddy and then ran off, left him when he was a baby.”

  “Kevin know about this?”

  Danny snorted. “What Kevin don’t know. And I’ll tell you something else: he hired me for one thing, but got quite another. Yeah. And you ask him where those fuckin car wheels went.”

  AFTER THE FUNERAL I went over to Ed and Liz Brennan’s for supper. It stayed light enough and warm enough that we got in a game of croquet with their kids, on their large and bumpy front lawn, before we sat down to our braised venison and roasted parsnips and carrots. I had been having trouble keeping recent events out of my mind, particularly the jolt of the .40 in my hand. In my memory, the force of the shots and the red that splashed out of Nolan’s chest had become the same thing, and in my mind I was not only hearing and seeing, but feeling him die by my hand. There was very little separating me from that memory. I had talked about it with the shrink they’d set me up with in Scranton, a pleasant fellow who needed me to say something about the way I felt. I was careful to keep it to the shooting and to my feelings about George’s death, and even when he asked me about my military service, which wasn’t any too traumatic, I thought it wasn’t safe, it wasn’t smart to start talking about things it would take me too long to finish. I did enough sharing to get back to work once the investigation was over with.