Bone Valley

by Claire Matturro

  Once assured that I wasn’t going to strangle a bird, Lenora turned to her own brood, feeding, sweet-talking, and making a kind of a humming noise about it all.

  “What are they? I mean, what kind?” I asked.

  “Mockingbirds, a lot of them, wrens, cardinals, red-wing blackbirds, chickadees, jays.” She ran the names of the birds past me in a quiet voice until even their names sounded like humming.

  “Where do they all come from?”

  “From everywhere. Domestic cats get their momma, or they fall out of the nest, the trees get cut down, you name it. Bad boys shoot the momma bird; I hate a BB gun. There’s a hundred different ways the average person kills a bird, usually without even knowing it. You know how many thousands of birds die every day just smashing into cell-phone towers?”

  No, and I didn’t especially want to learn that fact. Thank you, but I had enough trouble getting to sleep as it was.

  “So you run, like, a bird-and-wild-animal rescue?” I asked, dodging the dead-bird lecture and shooting for the obvious.

  “And some farm animals. I got three goats, all of them lame. Some sicko had them cuffed around a foot, each of them, so tight that the skin rotted. Sheriff ’s detective rescued them after a call, but the infections were so bad they all went lame. I’ve been holding them for the court that’s going to prosecute the owner for abuse. I reckon those goats are mine, though. When the case is over, who’s going to want a small herd of limping goats?”

  Assuming this was a rhetorical question, I didn’t jump on it. Besides, if I came home with even one disabled goat, my neighbor Dolly the Hall Monitor of the Universe would have the zoning police on me in half a minute.

  Ducking possible goat adoptions, I reached into the next cage, where something that looked like a cartoon version of a blue jay was hopping up and down and shrilling at me—as if this were my fault! When I tried to catch it, it pecked at my hand and jumped back.

  “Don’t be shy. That one’s got an attitude,” Lenora said.

  I grabbed for the little miscreant and nabbed him. After I lifted him out of his cage so that I could do my Mother-Teresa-with-birds thing, it pecked me again so hard I nearly flung it down.

  But Lenora and Angus burst out laughing.

  “Here,” Angus said. “Let me take him.”

  I passed off the jay to Angus, and turned back to Lenora. “Aren’t jays the bad guys of the bird world?”

  “A little bit, but that’s mostly exaggerated. Besides, it’s the bad boys we love the most, isn’t it?” she said, and looked right into Angus’s eyes and smiled. As if on cue, I looked soulfully into Miguel’s eyes, and wondered why he was being so quiet.

  When Miguel more or less ignored me, I eased off to the next cage and the next bird. Furtively, I eyed Lenora and Angus, trying to make up my mind whether they were lovers, friends, or what.

  Finally we finished feeding the birds, and Lenora said, “I’d show you around, but I’m pretty tired. There’s a lot of small animals in cages and fences outside. I’ve got some gopher tortoises with busted shells in a fence out back. You know, you can fix ’em when they get hit—if the body’s okay, that is—by using duct tape on the cracked shells.”

  As I nodded, not sure how useful that tidbit would prove to be in my litigation practice, Angus took her arm. “Let’s go sit down,” he said. “We’ll give Lilly the grand tour another day.”

  At Lenora’s invitation, the four of us went into a primitive kitchen, where we took turns washing our hands. The tap water smelled of sulfur, but I splashed my face anyway. Miguel asked for water for me and Lenora pulled a bottle of Zephyr Hills, the local spring water, out of an ancient and rusting refrigerator. I all but snatched it from her.

  “Sit,” she said, but she kept standing, so we did too.

  “We can’t stay long,” Angus said. “We’ve got that phosphate meeting in Bradenton. Sure you don’t want to come? Help stop Antheus Mines?”

  “I hate those bastards so much. Especially that M. David Moody, what he was trying to do to this place. But I have a few more animals to tend. I can’t go.”

  At the mention of M. David’s name, I stopped gurgling water and listened closer, hoping for some enlightenment on the subject of his recent death.

  “What about Adam? Can’t he help?” Angus asked.

  Oh, okay, no enlightenment.

  “He’s got Samantha and they’re off touring until next weekend. But I’ll be all right. My creatures can be left long enough for me to go home and get some sleep. Nobody stays here all night anyway unless there’s an animal in active crisis. But as long as there’s daylight, I want to be here, so, forgive me, I need to pass on your meeting.”

  I wanted to jump in and ask a bunch of questions, but something in the look I saw pass between Angus and Lenora stopped me. Theirs was a private conversation.

  “I’ll skip the meeting and stay with you,” Angus said.

  “Don’t be silly. That phosphate meeting is your thing, these birds and creatures are mine.”

  “All right. But I’ll come back after the meeting.”

  “You don’t need to come back. I’m fine. You can’t treat me like an invalid. Besides, I’ve got Bob to keep me company.”

  “Bob?” Angus asked

  “Sure. Hang on, let me go get him.”

  Lenora left for a minute and when she came back in, she had a baby squirrel cupped against her chest. Something was wrong with its head, but her hand held it in place and I couldn’t get a good look.

  “Bob,” she said, by way of introduction. “Go on, y’all, sit down.”

  We all sat, and Lenora cooed at the baby squirrel and curled down into the kitchen chair nearest Angus’s. “Got his skull cracked. They were clearing out some woods on Antheus’s property last week, to put up some kind of office building or something, and one of the crew cut down a tree with a squirrel’s nest in it. Mom and the rest of the babies got run over by a Bush-hog, but one of the men saved this one, hurt as he was. He brought it to me.”

  No one spoke.

  “With a baby squirrel, they grow so fast. So incredibly fast. His brain will grow too big before the skull heals.”

  Angus leaned toward her from his chair, but none of us spoke.

  “He won’t make it,” she said, her voice almost a whisper, but she rubbed the soft skin under Bob’s chin and smiled at the little animal.

  I realized I was holding my breath.

  “But he eats, he’s not in any pain. I call him Bob because of the way his head bobs around if I don’t hold it.”

  “Is there any hope for him?” I asked, finally breaking the silence and forcing myself to inhale.

  “He’s okay for now. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

  I looked down at my hands, still holding the bottle of water, and I was embarrassed by my question, though I wasn’t sure why.

  When I looked up, I saw that Angus was crying. Not deep, loud sobbing, but a definite sniffling, with tears streaming down his face.

  “Oh, baby,” Lenora said, and stood up. In a quick, but gentle move, she handed Bob to me, and I cuddled the small animal, trying to hold its head like I’d seen Lenora do, and the little guy crawled up my shirt until he could rub his head against the skin on my neck. I looked down at it, just a tiny, little animal trying to live, with big, dark eyes, a little nose and mouth, brownish-gray fur, and a wound on his scalp.

  Bob the doomed squirrel chirped a little and then curled under my chin as if to sleep. I looked up and saw Lenora take Angus’s hand and pull him up and into her. “It’s all right,” she whispered.

  “Excuse us, please.” Lenora led Angus out of the kitchen and I didn’t trust myself to speak, so I rubbed Bob’s shoulders, and looked down.

  A few moments later, Angus came back into the kitchen, alone, red-eyed, and took Bob in his big hands. “Let me take him back to Lenora. Then we better get on to the meeting,” he said, gruffly.

  We left soon after that. There were about a hundred q
uestions I wanted to ask. But I had enough sense not to ask any of them. Not just then, anyway.

  Chapter 6

  Nobody bothered to tell me they were not taking me home.

  We rode in a strangled silence toward a main highway, and then Miguel turned the truck toward Bradenton, the county seat of Manatee, and not south, toward my house and Sarasota.

  “Whoa, wrong direction. Aren’t you going to take me home?” I said, waking up out of my sadness.

  “Can’t. Don’t have time to get you there and us back here. Meeting starts at five-thirty.”

  I glanced at my watch. “Where’s the meeting?”

  “Got a room at MCC reserved,” Angus said. “You ought to come to the meeting, anyway. If you’re going to represent me and Miguel, you need to know about this.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Public meeting of all the Manatee County people who oppose the Antheus mine permits. We’re trying to stop them. By turning public opinion against them,” Miguel said.

  Uh-huh, and you’ll get another SLAPP suit filed against you for your efforts, and you’re not going to be able to afford to pay me for defending the first one, the stupid orange-defamation case, I thought, but graciously didn’t say.

  Then I thought, well, okay, a radical meeting with Miguel and Angus was probably a better topper for a day of saving fake panthers and feeding baby birds than arguing with Philip over where to have our alleged wedding. “Shoot, let’s go, then,” I said.

  “Good. Let me get you some literature,” Angus said, and reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a ream of folded papers, forcibly stuffing other papers back into the compartment. “This is the list of the Antheus shareholders, you might recognize some of the names from Boogie Bog.”

  No, Boogie Bog and its real name, Bougainvillea Bayou, were about the only names on that topic I was apt to recognize, but I took the list.

  “Here’s a list of the names and addresses of people and government agencies you should write to and protest.” He shoved another sheet of paper at me. “And here’s a sample letter. All that information is correct. But put it in your own words. Handwritten letters are supposed to carry more weight,” he said.

  Yeah, a primer in public participation—a handwritten note? Like, without, say, a donation of thousands? How naive was this guy?

  But I was soon distracted from my cynical appraisal of Angus’s activities. “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said, looking at the short list of Antheus shareholders, all four of them. And M. David Moody’s name, big as Bob’s baby squirrel eyes, was first on the list. Someone had redlined through his name. “What did M. David have to do with Antheus?”

  “M. David pretty much was Antheus. He owned sixty percent of the stock. A lot of that land was his initially, acreage he bought in the seventies and eighties when it was relatively cheap. So he put his land into the company, and kept the controlling interest,” Miguel said, and pulled the truck into the Manatee Community College parking lot.

  I folded up the various sheets of paper and stuffed them into my purse.

  “M. David had valuable contacts with international phosphate companies. I always figured that Antheus, once they got their permits, would either sell out completely to one of those phosphate giants at a huge profit, or he’d at least bring one of those companies in as a partner,” Miguel said.

  As I tumbled out of the truck, I thought, so M. David had been the mover and shaker on Antheus. Okay, this had just gotten a whole lot more interesting.

  Trudging after Miguel and Angus as they made their way inside a conference room, I wished I’d had a chance to change clothes, wash up, and maybe grab a trail mix bar, but people were already milling about. Serious-looking people started shaking hands with Miguel and Angus.

  “There are snacks and drinks over there, if you want any,” Miguel said.

  Hungry, I walked over to the table, quickly deduced there was nothing I could eat, but snagged another Zephyr Hills water. By the time I had it opened, Miguel and Angus had already walked up to the front of the room and Angus was calling the meeting to order.

  Apparently, antiphosphate meetings were run by the same set of rules by which my brother Delvon’s church was run, that is, anybody can say anything at anytime, and the louder the better. In other words, a good deal of free-form crowd rant ensued about the destruction and environmental disaster that a phosphate mine by the east fork of the Manatee River would create. I got the point in thirty seconds—the mines would suck up millions of gallons of precious water and leave behind slime ponds of toxic waste—and ducked out to find a bathroom.

  When I came back in, a serious-looking man behind the microphone was droning in way too much detail about how phosphate runoff was killing our streams, bays, and Gulf, destroying marine life, and otherwise becoming the chemical agent of Armageddon. Then he cursed our luck for living on the outer edge of the so-called bone valley region, named after the ancient bones of bygone creatures that time and nature had turned into one of the world’s richest deposits of phosphate ore.

  Truth is, I’m just not much for scientific discourse unless it pertains to one of my own cases. Besides, I already had the big picture—phosphate mining, processing, and use were all bad; green trees and clean streams were all good.

  Edgy now, I bit back a yawn and scanned the crowd, looking for entertainment or information. Naturally I started with the most beautiful person there, that being Miguel, but he was not playing eye contact with me anymore, so I branched out my visual reconnaissance.

  Not halfway through my study of the various people crowded into the meeting room, damned if I didn’t see Mrs. M. David Moody, aka Sherilyn the beauty queen, standing in the back corner. An older man with a strong build was standing nearby, but his head was turned away from me. I couldn’t make out whether he was with Mrs. Moody or not. After a quick glance at his bulked-up body and his thin, gray hair, I dismissed him as a grandpa-weight-lifter-on-steroids, and turned back to Mrs. Moody.

  Something was wrong with her face. Even from across the room, I could see that her complexion looked wounded, like a bad sunburn that had peeled into different layers of skin and colors, but not healed. What in the world had happened to her? Mrs. Moody was known for her beauty and her splendid parties—parties I was never invited to attend but which I read all about in Marjorie North’s column in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Okay, I wasn’t necessarily a Sherilyn fan, but, still, to see her looking so unattractive seemed so—so what? Sad wasn’t the right word, not after meeting Bob the doomed baby squirrel and Lenora the saint with a serious disease. Still, I felt myself feeling a little sorry for the woman.

  But before I could think further on Mrs. Moody’s ruined complexion, Detective Josey Something Farmer came into the room, right through the door I was guarding, and she spotted me and stopped to shake hands.

  “Interesting, meeting you here,” she said.

  “I’m here as a citizen with a vital, but routine, interest in learning more about phosphate mining. Why are you here?”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  “Anything new on M. David?”

  “Yeah. It’ll all be in tomorrow’s newspaper. Sunday paper recap and follow-up story. Lots of pressure on the department on this one, high-profile victim and all, so the sheriff gave an in-depth interview.”

  “Tomorrow, huh? I’m not real good at waiting,” I said, and flashed what I hoped was an endearing girl-bonding grin.

  Josey grinned back. “Yeah, I hate to wait too.”

  “So tell me.” She hesitated, and I said, “Hey, you said it would be in the paper. Not like you’re selling government secrets.”

  “Yeah, right. Autopsy’s not complete yet, but the obvious physical evidence indicates he had been held down in the phosphogypsum pond until he drowned. Bruises on the back of his neck.”

  “Phosphogypsum pond? I thought he drowned in a gyp stack.”

  “Same thing. They take all the processing waste and store it in gyp
stacks, or ponds, behind earthen dams. The dams are around seventy feet high, and you can drive or walk around on top of them. If you are on the top of the dam, it looks like a big pond. So some folks call them gyp ponds because it looks like a pond from the top. Other folks call them gyp stacks because the stuff is stacked behind those dirt dams.”

  Okay, so there’s a whole vocabulary to this phosphate stuff. But at the moment I was more interested in the mechanics of M. David’s death. “So somebody forced M. David to the top of the dam, and drowned him in the…gyp stuff?”

  “About that.”

  As much as I disliked M. David—and that was a lot and for good reason—I couldn’t help but shudder at the image. Bad karma is ugly.

  “Any leads?” I asked.

  “The high sheriff’s official position is that we have a number of leads, all of which we are vigorously pursuing.”

  Okay, that was the public-relations speech. What was the truth, I wondered.

  “Prints, tire tracks, motives, what do you have?” I asked.

  “It’s all in the paper. Sheriff ’s not so good with ‘no comment’ when the media sticks their collective thumb in his eyes,” Josey said. “Somebody drove a Jeep to the top of the dam and left some tracks. Looks like it might be the DEP Jeep left on-site.”

  “DEP Jeep?”

  “The Florida Department of Environmental Protection. Their engineers watch the gyp stacks regularly, so they leave a Jeep at the plant so they can drive up on the stacks and check on things. Saves wear and tear and muck on their own cars.”

  “Think somebody from the DEP did it?”

  “No.” Josey gave me a look like I’d just accused Mother Teresa of being a serial killer.

  “But if the killer drove a DEP Jeep—”

  “Anybody who could hot-wire that Jeep could drive it.”

  “But anybody with a DEP key could drive it too.”

  Josey gave me that look again. All right, all right, I thought. Nobody from the DEP is a suspect, but that left a whole lot of other people to fill out the list.