Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel (10 page)

“Just hold tight. Cousin Kevin’ll be along to get you out.”

The mention of Kevin prompted another impatient wave. Deputy Jackson gripped me by the arm and steered me out of the holding cells. At the back steps to the courthouse, he bid me goodbye. “Look, I don’t feel good about it either,” he said.

I escaped the courthouse without incident and drove the few blocks to the clinic. I parked next to Liz’s station wagon and hopped up the steps. In the waiting room, the country station was on and an old lady sat enthroned in a wheelchair with an inflatable splint around her ankle, which was raised, the foot naked and outraged as a newborn baby. A man in a parka sat beside her. I guessed he was her son. The receptionist Jo waved me through; as the door closed behind me I could hear the old lady voicing objections.

In her private office, Liz had most of an orange peeled and in sections on a napkin. “You look like shit,” she said, and handed me two sections of the fruit. I ate them and, after looking in vain for a garbage can, spat the seeds into my hand and put them in my pocket. “You ever find George?”

“Yeah.”

“At the bar, was I right?”

“Uh, nope. No. You still got that buckshot somewhere, I could use it.”

“Oh. Yeah.” She disappeared and came back holding a baggie containing a small handful of shot. “I didn’t know—”

“Nice, Doc, thanks much.” I turned to go. “Listen, you may see some things on the news today.” Liz’s cheerful demeanor faltered at this, and I didn’t see the sense in keeping from her what she’d find out anyway. “Well, okay. We found a body in the woods off Fieldsparrow Road. Nobody knows who he is.”

“Holy shit, man.”

“We also . . . George was killed last night. I can’t say more right now.”

Her eyes misted behind her glasses, and she said, “Oh, honey,” and pulled me into a hug. I hate to admit how quickly thoughts of George were pushed from my mind.

She’s my best friend’s wife. I have a wife, even if she’s gone. There are feelings you can’t help, but you can’t chase after them either. No, never.

In my truck, I fished out a piece of the shot Liz had plucked from Danny’s hide and rolled it between my finger and thumb. It was crumpled, dark, and dull—lead, common from before Fish and Wildlife made a big push for the steel shot that doesn’t poison the ecosystem so much. I pulled away.

Irving Sporting Goods, owned by the Irving family, is one of the few mom-and-pops that still does a brisk business in town. They’re in a renovated, windowless barn a couple miles away from downtown, in South Fitzmorris. Though I find the ownership a bit prickly, I do shop there out of civic feeling. I parked out front and stood rapping on the door; the store wasn’t quite open, but one of the Irving boys stood in plain view inside, smoking a cigarette behind a glass counter. When he saw who it was, he put out the butt and let me in, returning to his post. The radio news was turned up.

The store carried new and used firearms. I reviewed the weapons lined up behind the counter and saw no muskets. Irving eyed me as if waiting for an explanation. When he didn’t get one, he said, “Help you, Officer?”

“Wonder if you can. I’m curious if you’ve sold any flintlocks lately?”

Irving stared at me and made no response, so I asked again.

“Don’t carry them anymore,” he said. “Not unless we get one used.”

“No?”

He shrugged.

I pointed to the ammunition on display. “How about musket balls? I see you still carry them.”

He gave another shrug.

“Tell me something,” I said, “how about .38s?”

“Let’s see,” said Irving, running his eyes over the handguns in the glass case below. “Come back with a court order.”

“Listen,” I said, “later today you’re going to find out why I asked. If you change your mind and want to share, give me a call. That’s if it doesn’t offend your principles too much.” I gave him a card. “Right now I need a list of all the muzzle-loader and flintlock tags bought here this season.”

“Talk to the Game Commission.”

“We are talking to the Game Commission. Me and the goddamn sheriff’s department. Right now I need your list because I don’t have time to sort through their fuckin list. Do it now, Irving.”

“Easy,” he said. “Easy.”

He stepped out from behind the counter and edged past me. In the back of the store there was a desk surrounded by plastic child gates. He stepped in, slumped into a swivel chair, and contemplated his ancient state-issued computer equipment. I leaned in to try to look over his shoulder, and was startled by a girl, about three, seated behind the partition. She was combing the hair of a doll that had one eyelid shut. I waved, and she looked blankly back. After some muttering and tapping on the keyboard, a printer on the floor made a bleat and churned out three pages of data. I took them, nodded thanks, and left.

G
EORGE ELLIS
’
S
brother in Florida, name of Tim, turned out to be the least of my worries. My grief training came through for both of us. I let a handful of bare facts and boilerplate do the work. Tim was incredulous at first, then enraged at the killer, and then angry at us for not finding him yet. By the end of our conversation he had quietly accepted his brother’s death, even to the point of wondering how much of the burial would be paid for by the township (not any). He asked would I see to his cremation, and he’d find the time in the next few weeks to arrange a small service. It wasn’t a big family and I hung up with the impression George wasn’t tight with them.

I closed George’s personnel file—which contained one sheet—and filed it. In one of his drawers I found a bottle of bourbon with two inches left. I set that on George’s desktop. John Kozlowski came in with a look in his eyes that told me the news was out. He shook my hand, took the whiskey bottle, and made to leave.

“John,” I said. “We’ll get it done.”

“I should hope.”

“I don’t want you to worry.”

He kept his back to me. “You think we don’t know who you’re after?”

“No, I think you think you do. That’s why I’m talking to you now.”

“Well, Officer. I’ll do what I can to help.” He took a drink. “At this point, the race is on.” He pulled the door shut behind him when he left. I cursed quietly.

Before me sat an electric typewriter and a small pile of blank incident reports. Tough to separate the events of the previous day into distinct moments with beginnings and ends, but I did the best I could, leaving out my encounter in the swamp altogether. One, Aubrey Dunigan’s alleged assault on Daniel Stiobhard with a shotgun; two, the discovery of John Doe on Aubrey Dunigan’s land; three, George Ellis. I struggled over the last one most, and not just because the letters kept rearranging themselves and going unfocused. In the process of writing it, I composed a sentence on a separate sheet of paper—
As I surveiled the property of Michael and Roberta Stiobhard, Daniel Stiobhard disarmed and held me at gunpoint
—and left space for it on my incident report, but didn’t add it in just then. You’ve got to write these things up basically as soon as they happen. It’s not only the litigious era we live in. As ever, the Sovereign would be looking for a way to call me on the carpet, and whatever it was going to be, he could get me for the paperwork as easily as the thing itself.

I filed the reports deep in a desk drawer and examined the printouts from Irving Sporting Goods. There were about eighty names on there, mostly regular tag holders including the muzzle-loader season, and not the flintlock. Fourteen people bought tags for the flintlock season at the local store; two from over the border in Apalachin, New York; several from as far south as Scranton; three or four from nearby townships had bought them. Mike Stiobhard had bought one for himself and one in his wife’s name, though it was reasonable to assume he’d be the one out in the cold. Danny Stiobhard had one, too. Of the eighty or so names, three more caught my eye: Grady, Nolan, and Bray. All of them lived in the township. Grady had only bought the standard tag, which made him less interesting. Bray and Nolan both had flintlock licenses, and in fact, Nolan had bought two—one in his son’s name. All three men were neighbors, and all three had land abutting Aub’s.

I opened the weapons locker. A uniformed policeman is asked to carry many things on his person, I say on his person, but it’s his belt, really; try a day of carrying around the .40, two extra magazines, the Maglite, pepper spray, jackknife, telescoping baton, two sets of cuffs, and so on. I never carried all that. It reminded me too much of lugging around a ten-pound rifle and sweating through my gear in Somalia. The thing about Somalia was the dust, everywhere. If you took your rifle out, you had to clean it when you came back. Every time. It wasn’t an empty exercise, and I got in the habit with all of my weapons back home. If I took something out in the field, I cleaned it. In my quiet township with minimal supervision, I often left everything in the locker and carried only a set of handcuffs and the Maglite. The mousegun had been my wife Polly’s to ward off bears while camping. It was far too small to bother a grizzly, but it had made her feel better, and I always took it along on the off chance I would need something in a pinch. Never had until last night. Now I contemplated all that standard-issue equipment and it almost looked like not enough.

I spent a little while filling magazines and tucking everything back in its place on the belt. I checked and cleaned a second .40 and strapped it under my left arm in a cowhide shoulder holster. Armed to the teeth, I sat at my desk in my sleepy station and listened to the garage on the other side of the wall and thought.

I had always sought rural postings because something in me needs the wide-open space and the boredom. Some people need to be surrounded by other people. Some love talking; I don’t. That was one thing I liked about George, he never required conversation. And the station, the station itself was just the kind of place I could keep neat and functional; it had never asked much of me beyond that. Now things were getting worse by the hour and it felt like I was dragging my heels in the dirt, getting pulled after a train.

When the knock on the front door came, I knew it meant trouble. Usually people know to walk right in as if they own the joint. I Indian-crept to the window adjacent to the door and stuck a finger in the venetian blind. The TV reporter standing there looked shorter and older than he did on the five-thirty news. He was from a local station over the border in Binghamton; Holebrook County didn’t have enough news to warrant a daily paper, let alone a TV station. Behind him stood a cameraman fiddling with a digital camera, a long fuzzy mic tucked under one arm.

I opened the door, cleared my throat, and before the reporter could start talking, I held up a finger as if I’d be right back. Then I closed the door on him. After pulling on my coat I stepped through the inside door to the garage and found Kozlowski.

“John,” I asked, “where can I find a girl named Tracy Dufaigh, do you know?”

He nodded as if he knew why I might be asking. “Don’t know exactly where she lives, somewhere in the Heights. Last I knew she works up at the horse farm that used to be the Regans’s.”

That gave me a little shiver. The Bray place was on my list already.

“She and George were on the outs, just so you know,” John continued. “Even if someone’s told her, she may appreciate hearing it from you all the same.”

I glanced out of a portal in one of the garage doors and was dismayed to find the news team between me and my truck. “Listen, you got something for me to drive?”

Kozlowski loaned me a three-quarter-ton diesel pickup from the eighties that the township had bought from the National Guard and painted red; you could still see camouflage paint on the insides of its doors. There was no tape deck but someone had bungee-corded a little boom box to the dash; cassettes were scattered about the cab, some good ones, an Alan Jackson. As the truck roared to life, John opened the garage door for me and I drove away without a second look from the news reporter, who last I saw was still at the station door patiently waiting for me to emerge.

After a deafening ten minutes on 189 I turned up a dirt drive at a sign that read B
RAY
S
TABLES
and showed a silhouette of a prancing horse. Didn’t know the Brays, but I had known the Regans a bit. Did odd jobs for Philly Regan one summer in high school, clearing trees and splitting wood. I’ll always remember the advice he gave me the first time he handed me a chain saw: “Try not to cut your dick off.” He keeled over with a heart attack two years ago and his grown kids finally sold the place a year later, just before natural gas started handing out lease money.

As I pulled into the yard, I saw that the Brays had kept the farmhouse much the same, white with hanging flowerpots on the porch, now empty. Up the hill they had kept a one-story structure that used to be part of the dairy operation, and converted it into stables. The rest of the post-and-beam barns had been replaced by two colossal windowless buildings made of corrugated steel.

I stepped out of the truck still feeling the vibration of its huge engine through my body, my ears ringing in the sudden quiet of the farmyard. Figuring nobody could have missed my arrival, I just kind of stood in the mud, looking around, until a screen door creaked open and slapped shut, and a woman approached me from the house. I summoned a smile and waved. She couldn’t have been over five-two, with dark hair clipped back and blue jeans tucked into high boots. She smiled in a way that gathered her whole face around her eyes; I guessed she was in her forties. I found her attractive, and that made me awkward and shy.

“Wondering when we’d meet,” she said, extending a hand. “Shelly. Bray,” she added, gesturing about her.

I nodded and shook her hand and fumbled through my own name and title. “Sorry to come by unannounced,” I said. “We’ve had some trouble up here on the ridge and I thought I ought to visit.”

Her smile grew wary. “Please come in.”

We passed a small sign on the lawn that showed the word F
RACK
crossed out. The house we entered was furnished with antiques. The walls were white, and plastic kids’ toys had collected in the corners and on the staircase. Shelly led me to the kitchen, where she offered me a glass of water and we sat at the table.