by Tom Bouman
“The sow that got killed up my way, you saw her, you took the cubs. What happened to her?”
“She got destroyed. Cremated.”
“You sure?”
“Shaun handled it, but yeah. No reason to save the carcass.”
“Nobody would’ve dug the bullets out and saved them?”
“She’s gone, pal.”
The night in question, Ryan and I had the .270 rifle and the .38 lent to me by the Stiobhards, which I had returned to Mike, who claimed afterward to have lost it. Alan had carried what looked like a cheap 9mm handgun. We took fire from what was almost certainly an AR-15-type rifle. That left whatever Terry Ceallaigh was carrying until he’d run out of ammunition—likely a handgun.
And maybe one more weapon.
No doubt PSP detectives and techs would’ve combed through the woods by then. They’d had about thirty-six hours to gather evidence. Still, it couldn’t hurt to check.
In the hills surrounding the abandoned farmhouse, I could feel the knife wound tugging at my stitches as I lowered myself to the forest floor, casting my eyes for the glint of bronze. When I was white and sweaty to where I knew I’d have to leave soon, and had still found nothing, I met Lee by the bullet-pocked house, and he drove me back to the cottage on Walker Lake.
MISS JULIE bandaged me, wrapping my ribs snug. She cooked for us, though I wasn’t hungry. She asked me was I okay. But the closeness between us had been folded up and put away somewhere. Hard knowing what to do about it, so I went back into the field.
Terry Ceallaigh never did agree to speak to me, and I tried over the years. Out of a sheaf of charges, he pled to voluntary manslaughter of Dentry. Though he claimed then and subsequently to be under duress, the first-degree felony kidnapping of Ryan is what got him the longest sentence. I’d always wondered why that had been necessary. It could have been that Ryan was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and seen the wrong face. By all accounts those boys were already wondering how much I knew, and what to do with me. As likely, Ryan was bait. Let Alan escape with the boy, I come running, they kill Alan and me at once, and the boy, I’d imagine. Blame each one on the other. With Alan and me dead, they could pin whatever they wanted on us.
I didn’t watch the state police search Hancock’s home, a modest split-level built into a hillside, alongside a metal barn bigger than the house, but I’m told it contained parts of Carl Dentry’s blue Harley cruiser. Nor did I go and see any of the gas stations, not right away. As Hancock had transferred some legitimate assets to Ton L, my father-in-law Willard was now stuck co-owning a couple businesses with a criminal enterprise disguised as an LLC. Ton L’s assets had been frozen as a result of the investigation—Willard couldn’t buy or sell his shares of the business, and expected to be questioned by the AG’s financial investigator at some point soon. I trusted he had nothing to hide. It helped give Willard some distance that the man robbing gas stations all throughout the area was almost conclusively identified as Nate Hancock himself, likely attempting to undercut the value of Willard’s remaining shares, to wear him down and drive him out.
Nor did I concern myself further with the Ceallaighs, who were facing a very different life than what they’d counted on. Thinking of those kids broke my heart. I couldn’t be everywhere.
But there was always a good spot on the ridge to set up and watch the goings-on at the Bray horse farm, where a gang of PSP techs, detectives, and possibly some feds on the opioid task force had been circulating through the house and outbuildings for days. They brought out what looked like a safe, and then a gun safe. They took apart an SUV and a late-model pickup, then put them back together. There was always a trooper stationed a little bit up the driveway. When the search edged into the pasture and the forest beyond, I moved back to where I could listen and not be seen.
Eventually the investigators left the horse farm, leaving only the trooper. Then one day, the trooper was gone. I switched over to nights. Autumn dwindled away. Always in the back of my mind, and often in the fore, were Julie and the baby. Julie had stopped objecting to my absence, and handled my presence with a cheerfulness that was troubling and false.
Kyle Mylnarz worked his late shifts at one HO Mart or another. I asked Willard to keep him on, and he gave me his schedule in advance. Nights off, Mylnarz drank at one Hallstead bar or another. Once he led me to a strip club east of Binghamton. He was not a surprising man. But one night, instead of heading home around five a.m. after a shift, he drove west. I gave him a couple turns and then caught up with him, keeping his taillights in sight until I felt safe letting him go for a minute. I took a series of dirt roads at sixty, through Wild Thyme hills, back to 189, where I found Mylnarz’s car again. As he neared the Brays’ place, he slowed, then pulled onto the shoulder. I passed by without looking, rounded a bend, and parked on a dark intersecting dirt road facing 189.
When it had been long enough, I headed back the way I came, cut my headlights, and crept partway up the Brays’ winding, wooded driveway. Maybe I was feeling a bit cautious after the shoot-out at the farmstead, but when I got out of my truck and eased the door shut, it was with both .40s on me. One in my hand, one on my side, digging into the bandage covering my wound.
Kyle’s vehicle was parked beside a black Chevy sedan. Bar code stickers in its windows showed it was a rental. I took a picture of one with my camera phone. The sedan was cool as I crouched beside it. Flashlight beams flitted on the far side of the barn that had served as stables, tack room, and garage. I crept to where I could see two men digging in the little graveyard where Shelly’s horse Wurlitzer had been buried. There’d been a frost to cover everything, and a waning moon to make it glow silver.
The world was waking up. Among the faint rustlings and distant engines coming to life, I heard muffled voices, shovel blades scrabbling at frozen earth, and then they stopped. Low laughter. I waited, pressed to the side of the barn, a .40 in each hand.
Kyle came around first, followed by a tall man in a baseball hat. Each carried a shoulder bag.
I put a .40 to the second man’s ear and yelled, “Police, hands behind your head, on the ground!”
Kyle ran and slid to a stop behind the parked cars.
“Kyle,” the man said.
“Shut up, on the ground.”
The man did as I told him, and in doing so dropped a pistol. His hat came off, revealing a bald dome. In the dim early morning I saw that it was Andy Swales. The pistol on the ground was a SIG Sauer P365. I kicked it away.
“Kyle,” Swales said again, as I patted him down and removed a jackknife from his pocket. “Kill him.”
“Shut up,” I said. “Kyle, you kill me, he kills you. The only reason you’re alive now is me.”
“Kill him.”
“Kyle, walk out slowly with your hands up, and toss whatever you’re armed with on the ground.” With my knee on Swales’s back and one hand pointing the .40 into the dark, I cuffed one of Swales’s wrists.
“Kill him!”
Swales made a strangled growl as I fitted the other cuff next to his white gold watch. I pushed his face into the earth and lay down beside him, with his bulk between me and Kyle.
“I don’t want anybody else to die,” I called out. “There’s been talk about you killing me,” I said.
“I don’t want that.”
“That’s good. Now show me.”
“Our lives are over,” said Andy Swales. “Our lives are over if you let him go.”
“Your life is not over,” I said. “You can talk your way out of it. Tell them what you know.”
There was silence. Then, “What do I do so you don’t shoot me?”
Once Kyle was in bracelets and both men lying flat where I could see them, I hauled Swales’s duffel bag over behind the car where Kyle had left his. In the bags, more cash than I’d ever seen, book-sized packages of a powdered substance that turned out to be fentanyl, two handguns, and in Swales’s bag, a key drive.
Andy Swales called over, “What
are you doing over there, Officer?”
I put the drive on my own key chain. All that money. Just a few bundles would be enough for Mag to start over with a new house for the kids, or to fight Dennis in court if it came to that. But if I palmed a single bill, it’d be trouble to the end of my days. I’d have enough trouble explaining the five grand Swales had left in my station. I took out my phone, photographed the open bags, and then placed a call to Allie DeCosta.
She answered on the third ring, sounding awake.
“You got somebody following Andy Swales?” I said.
Silence, then, “Holy shit, he’s with you?”
“Up to the Bray place. Him and Kyle Mylnarz.”
“Kyle who?”
“You’ll get to know him.”
As the sun rose, deep browns and grays were all that was left of autumn. I sat waiting; thinking, time to go home.
EARLY ONE November morning about four, I met Father at Aunt Medbh’s house, where Ma had cooked a couple thin venison steaks. We ate them standing. This was one of Father’s superstitions, and it seemed to work: when going on the hunt, eat of the animal you hope to find, and make yourself one of them. We drove to state game land on the southern edge of the Heights and met Mike Stiobhard by the entrance. The morning mist was burning off, but still clung to the low places. Father set up high, under a hemlock tree, with a view down a natural crossing point into a valley. I gave him my .30-06, and he made a quick appraisal of the rifle, brought the scope to his eye, said nothing.
“Stay out of trouble,” I said.
Mike and I walked farther in, one step every few seconds, puffing out white breath, alert even though we were too late to fool any deer. It was the first time I’d seen Mike, or any Stiobhard, since the abandoned farmstead.
“I can’t let him disappear this time,” I told Mike. “I need to know what he knows.”
“Good luck,” he said. We walked on.
“He can’t come back here, then, Mike. Not ever.”
“He won’t.”
We walked far enough that I no longer knew where we were and, stepping over a barbed-wire fence half sunk into the ground, we had moved beyond the game land. Mike followed a deer trail up a slope. At the top, the land flattened out beneath a high rock promontory overgrown with brambles. Through black bare trees, a view south.
“Alan had all kind of places around,” Mike said. “This was his favorite. I want you to know so you’ll respect it. And if you set up on the rock there and get a buck one morning, maybe you’ll think of him, and how this is where he’d rather be than any other place.”
He ambled off, and so did I. I took a look around. A place like many others, but level and open, with a patch of grass to attract deer. Everything was in its place, except at the foot of the bluff there was a fieldstone firepit, recently used but swept clean. Nearby, brambles were growing around and through a small pile of deadfall. The place may once have been Alan’s, but the wild things of the forest would return to claim it. I clambered up to the top of the rock and looked out over a vast horizon. Hills leapt one over the next, a world that never ended.
WINTER SETTLED over us. They cleared Father to return to North Carolina, but he and Ma and Mag’s family did not go. So Miss Julie and I were stuck in a home that wasn’t, in a stale honeymoon, in a marriage on hold, waiting. Of all the things to be sorted out after my headlong policing of shit I didn’t understand—my father-in-law’s legitimate business interests threaded into a tangle of criminal enterprises and fronts, the lives of innocents ruined, the hollow faces of the Stiobhards with Alan nowhere to be found, the whereabouts of Joshua Bray and his kids—I only truly dreaded one thing. It wasn’t a fight. If Julie and I could have fixed it with a fight, we would have. We discussed my affair with Shelly Bray, and time had made my lies less acute and more forgivable. She never threatened to leave and I didn’t think she would. It was something quieter missing from her expression, her tone, and the very words she said. It was because I didn’t know what it was that I feared it.
Every time I went out of the cottage without her, to go play a Country Slippers show at the High-Thyme Tavern, to go to work, or a township meeting, I felt that missing thing standing in my way. It was painful to push past it or through it. And yet, every time, I did because I had to. It wasn’t the baby, waiting. I didn’t know what it was.
Christmas was coming. We had both of our families near and planned to go back and forth between them. Still, Julie wanted a tree of our own, so one clear morning we crunched through the snow to the woods above the cottage and with an orange handsaw cut down a raggedy white pine for the cottage. The branches and needles of the tree were like noodles. We made ornaments out of paper—stars, snowflakes, Santa with a cotton-ball beard.
“Pretty good,” said Julie, not satisfied.
We drove out to a vast swamp, frozen, with yellow grasses rising through snow and ice. There was one spot of color: a good hundred yards in, a red spray of wild winterberry against solid blue sky.
“That,” she said.
I picked my way out to the plant and took what we needed, and made my way back to the road, breaking through the ice only once. On the shoulder, I stood there with my one leg wet to the knee, holding this dried-out branch that had already dropped some of its berries.
She said, “Who are you?”
This was the missing thing I had feared. Standing there, I searched for the answer in my past. How much more could I share and not be whittled to nothing? And where to start: the dirt road where I was raised, the mountaintop where I first met Polly Coyne, the men I’d killed and seen killed, the work, the job, the fiddle. In my future: Miss Julie, sun sparkling on water, you and your sister, but something else: a wild shadow at the edge of the woods, moving too slowly for flight. I didn’t know if it was me, or the thing I was to protect you from.
“I’m a father now.” As I said it, I knew it to be true.
“Good answer. Is it ever going to change?”
“No.”
We floated home, and my answer has not changed from that day to this. You were born in May, purple, eyes open, with a full head of hair.
THE NIGHT BEFORE Father and Ma left, I heard Father tell you a story while you slept in your crib. It was about four Iroquois brothers and a giant white bear. The bear had slashed at tree trunks with its huge claws, threatened the villages, eaten all the game, and kept the people inside their homes. All through the night, the brothers followed the bear’s trail over hill after hill, higher and higher with the lights of villages below, never stopping for rest or food until at last they killed the beast. It’s the bear’s blood that turns the leaves red in fall. As the brothers sat together, tired, cooking the bear, they looked around them and realized that the lights they saw everywhere were stars. They had chased the bear into the sky.
We had another new arrival that month. One early evening Shaun Loughlin came bumping up the driveway, opened up the rear door of his Game Commission SUV, and stood there looking into it, hands on his hips. I came out there with you wrapped in a blanket and pressed against me. There was Crabapple, almost big as life again, reclining in the truck with the backseats down. Julie came out, looked at the bear, then at me, then at Shaun, took you, and walked back inside.
We put Crabapple in Aunt Medbh’s house in a little back room I used for thinking. Mary Weaver had stuffed him very lifelike, one arm partly crossed over his chest, his mouth open, teeth bared. Julie called me sick, but I liked him there. Over the years, remember, you and your sister dressed him up for Halloween, Christmas, and Easter, and for a time he was the first thing you girls showed new friends visiting our house. Stuffed, Crabapple was not quite the same as I remembered when we were both alive. But when we were alone, I looked into his face and sometimes caught a flash of the way his mouth had been: raw and pink and ready.
Don’t miss the first two Henry Farrell novels
DRYBONESINTHEVALLEY.COM
Winner of the
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es Times Book Prize
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Winner of the Edgar Award
for Best First Novel
“A tough, edgy thriller.”
—Wiley Cash
“[A] relentless thriller
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—Michael Sims,
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PRAISE FOR
THE HENRY FARRELL NOVELS
Dry Bones in the Valley
“Dry Bones in the Valley is a standout debut with an authenticity of place and character rare in any form of literature.”
—Ivan Doig
“Tom Bouman has hit pay dirt with Dry Bones in the Valley, his carefully paced and skillfully plotted novel centered around Henry Farrell, truly one of the most likable and dedicated law officers in the history of crime fiction. I loved every word of it.”
—Donald Ray Pollock
“Bouman’s story is deceptively simple, layered with history, bearing within itself the promise of lightness, of redemption.”
—James Sallis
“[A] tightly crafted piece of rural noir that seems pulled from the earth itself, a profound look at the dark corners of rural America.”
—Steve Weddle
“Dry Bones in the Valley is a gorgeous, lived-in novel, and Bouman’s turns of phrase are chest-clutching in their beauty.”
—Hannah Pittard
“Some stories are so sad, you want them to have the comfort of a gentle storytelling voice. Tom Bouman extends this kindness in … his beautifully written first novel.”
—New York Times Book Review
Fateful Mornings
“Tom Bouman’s tools … cut straight and true, in this riveting mystery about a good man caught in the ruined Eden of rural America.”
—Julia Keller, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sorrow Road
“Bouman’s tender portrait of a widower remaking his life infuses his crime fiction with a level of intimacy that is both rare and winning. I was happy to ride shotgun with Henry Farrell again.”