Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel (12 page)

Bray nodded.

“Mind if I have a look?”

“What for? Oh, Jesus, you’ve got to be kidding.”

He led me to a side door in their house, and down a set of stairs to a carpeted basement. There he pulled open a desk drawer and began to rummage through it.

“Get a deer this year?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“But you did go out.”

He turned to me with some impatience. “Yes.” He leaned over the desk drawer.

A flat-screen television sat, monumental, in an entertainment center loaded with speakers and electronics. Posters of models in swimsuits hung in frames here and there—from the eighties, judging by the hairstyles. I found it an odd way for a man of Joshua’s age and circumstances to decorate his walls, and particularly odd that he had bothered to frame them. The whole basement felt awfully neat.

What Bray was looking for turned out to be a key; he led me to an alcove, where a five-foot gun safe stood against a wall. He opened it to reveal a row of rifles, shotguns, and muskets. Among the deer rifles and over-unders I saw an AR-15, the country cousin to what I carried in the 10th. Five handguns were mounted on the inside of the safe’s door, including a .45 revolver, a six-shot .38, and three automatics. Bray shifted from foot to foot as I cataloged everything in my mind.

“Can I handle them? Pick them up?”

“If you must.”

I hefted a couple of the automatic handguns for show, then the .38, which I examined for signs of recent use and, with my back turned, sniffed. Gesturing at the rifles, I said, “It’s a lot.”

“Yeah.”

“Anybody else have access to the safe? Know where the key is?”

“No.”

I picked up a Thompson muzzle-loader that looked expensive and unused and had a scope—I held it to my shoulder as if in appreciation, and the lens was dusty. Next to it was what I was most interested in: a .50-caliber Hawken with brass fixtures in the stock; I guessed it was about thirty years old. “Oh,” I said. “Beauty. You go out this year?”

“Not for flintlock.”

“Do you usually?” I picked the musket up, cocked it, and set the frizzen, scraping a nail along the pan. Clean, far as I could tell. I pulled the trigger and the hammer snapped down.

“I’m beginning to think I need a lawyer.”

“Hey, come on. You got a kit for this? Patches? Balls? Powder?”

“No.”

“How can you go out if you don’t have a kit?”

“I just told you, I didn’t. Last season I went out with Barry Nolan, our neighbor over the way. This past one we didn’t get around to it.”

“Ah.”

“He’s got everything. We get a deer, he processes it, gives me the backstraps and a loin, and keeps the rest.”

“Get one last season?”

“He did, not me.”

I set the flintlock back down, saying, “I appreciate it.”

Before closing the safe, Joshua Bray stroked his chin and contemplated the handguns. He selected a 9mm, put it in a vest pocket, where it sagged halfway down his thigh. Then he locked the safe and led me back outside.

“All right,” he said. “Nice meeting you. Let us know of anything. I’m off to walk the property line.”

“Mr. Bray, please don’t go up there now. There’s an ongoing—”

“See you, Officer.” He turned his back and headed into the woods.

Shelly Bray must have been watching for me; as I approached the old pickup she stepped out of the stables and cut me off at the pass. She produced a little card with the stables’ logo on, good for one free horseback lesson. On the back she’d written what I took to be her personal number.

“It’s selfish of me, I know,” she said. “With all that’s going on, I’d feel so much better if you’d check in on us from time to time. And who knows, once this is all over with, you may want to take me up some lunch hour.” She nodded toward the card in my hand. “Horses are good for you, you know.”

“Yes,” I said, “thank you, Shelly. I may.” As I stepped into the truck, I said in farewell, “It’s a nice place.”

“We’re trying to keep it that way.” She returned to the stables, and I drove away in a thunderous cloud of smoke and noise.

Sometimes I suspect I am not good company. In fact, I know I’m not. My natural response to an invitation is quiet disbelief and I often decline in order to spare the other party my presence. But sometimes you have to say yes or you wind up like Aub Dunigan. I said yes to Ed and Liz when I moved back East, because they wouldn’t take no, and thank God I did. It helps me to have something other to do than talking. I couldn’t, for example, sit across a table from someone and drink coffee at a coffee place and talk about life. Even though I disliked and feared horses, I’d rather ride a horse than talk.

I turned onto 189. Barry Nolan was a friend of George’s I’d often seen at the horseshoe pits in summer, but I never had much to do with him myself. Even among the dedicated boozers at the bar he was considered something of an alcoholic, slow, ill-tempered, and not a man to cross. For gainful employment he worked rotating shifts at a precision machine shop in Kirkwood and served as caretaker of Camp Branchwater. Nolan lived on a slim parcel of land that abutted Aub’s ridge to the north and the Brays to the west. An avid hunter and tracker, he was one of the breed who work just as much as they must in order to fund their real lives outdoors. Sheriff Dally had asked me to wait before sitting him down, but that seemed wrong to me. My instinct was to get as many people as I could unawares.

I pulled onto a driveway leading past a row of fir trees and drew up beside Nolan’s olive split-level. His truck was there, and so was he; as I climbed the stairs leading up to his back deck, he pushed open the storm door and gestured me inside. He was a big guy, and tall. A short beard covered the wattle of his neck. Without asking, he poured me a coffee and set it down on the kitchen table, where it slopped out and pooled around the mug. By the door there was a mountain of empties—liquor and beer—rising out of a recycle bin, and several more on the floor ringing the receptacle. The refrigerator was layered with photographs and newspaper clippings. Most were about Wild Thyme High School sports and Lehigh University football. My eyes settled on a portrait of Nolan’s son, about age ten: the kid’s hair was buzzed and braces spanned his upper teeth. In subsequent pictures he had grown into a bruising defensive tackle. Now a college junior playing D-1 ball, he—and the town—had some expectations of an NFL career.

The house was cold, and Nolan wore a brown work vest with threads escaping from the armholes. His hair was damp. Leaning on a counter, he rubbed his swollen, bloodshot eyes.

“Fuck me,” he said.

“Yeah. So you know?”

“I know. Tell me this motherfucker’s going to get his.”

“He will.”

“Yeah,” Nolan agreed, “he will. One way or the other.”

“Can I ask how you found out?”

He yawned and shook his head. “I’m all off schedule, late shift, I can hardly think. Koz called this morning. What he knows, I know.”

“So you, you aren’t aware of . . . the boy we found yesterday? Up on the ridge?”

He blinked, almost expressionless. “What?”

“We found a young man dead on Aub Dunigan’s land.”

“That can’t be.”

“I know. But . . .”

He shook his head again, bewildered. “I know everything that goes on up there. No way.” He saw I was serious. “What happened to him?”

“We’re figuring that out. Looks like he may have been shot. Best keep that to yourself.”

“Course I will.”

“Can I ask you about Aub? You see much of him?”

“Not too much, considering we’re neighbors. He a suspect?”

“What about at the camp—I gather he visited there sometimes?”

“Not in recent years. He fuckin loved baseball; I’d let him know when the boys were scheduled to play. Sometimes he’d get a free lunch from the mess. But he’s getting old, you know. Non compos.”

“So he was welcome there?”

“More or less. Harmless, far as I know.”

“Barry, you’re not going to like this. I need to see your gun locker.”

His expression darkened. “They’ve been saying on the radio this day would come.” I caught the briefest glint of humor in his eyes, but it disappeared. He led me to a side room and opened a closet door. Tucked behind a row of camouflage and flash-orange outfits he had a .30-06, a .240, and a .22, a newish in-line muzzle-loader, and a Browning twelve-gauge, all in good repair, plus a compound bow and a quiver of evil-looking arrows. High on a shelf, a black case was nestled among boxes of ammunition and spray bottles full of scent. Nolan retrieved the case and showed me the chrome .44 automatic inside. “Never had much use for this, but I guess it’s good to have one around.”

“Where’s your flintlock?”

“What?”

“Sorry, you didn’t go out this year?”

“No, flintlock, I gave that up. Can I tell you, it’s just a bitch? Last year I had a doe dead to rights, a beautiful young one. Crossed right in front of me on the trail up there. So I pull the trigger and the pan flashes, and nothing. Hang fire. I stand there, the doe stands there, and she jumps just as the musket goes off. Got her somewhere on the haunch, and she limped off into the swamp to die. Couldn’t get to where she was. The worst thing was, soon as I shot, out comes her little one I hadn’t seen. With the double-lock triggers it went off early just as much as late, or never. I sold the damn flintlock.”

“But you bought tags this year.”

Nolan regarded me with suspicion. “Jesus, you got my phone tapped too? You look through my trash? Yeah. My son loves the season, god help him. It’s when he’s home from college, you know. He wasn’t interested this year.”

“Huh.”

“Look, and I got bills. Obviously. Between a kid in school and the . . . the divorce. Something had to pay for Christmas, and keeping the lights on, and, you know. Everything. Getting by.”

I hadn’t known about his breakup, or what his wife’s name was, hadn’t ever even seen her. It had seemed like there was a marriage still in the house. I was embarrassed, and only nodded.

“So,” said Nolan. “That all?” We went back to the kitchen.

“Who bought the flintlock?”

“Some New Yorker. I forget his name.”

“If you think of it, let me know. So, Josh Bray, you two hunt together? He an all right neighbor?”

“Yeah, okay. Far as hunting, useless. I help out here and there. The wife gives me ideas—wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers. You ever get a look at her?”

I didn’t answer that. In the silence I became aware of the television that had been on in the background: a talk show with a loud audience had been replaced by the studied concern of a local news anchor. When I heard “Wild Thyme,” I rushed to the living room. The local news had just switched to a shot of Dally in the basement hall of the courthouse, his head inclined toward several microphones. The sheriff mentioned “a local officer” but not my name. The unidentified corpse was “maimed, and in a state of advanced decomposition.” He admitted the difficulty in a case as cold as this, but expressed confidence all the same. Since he had not named Aub, I was taken aback to see the wide shots of his farm that followed. There appeared to be nobody stationed to secure the scene. A reporter stood before a yellow police line that jerked in the breeze, giving the image of Aub’s place—beautiful, if dilapidated—overtones of horror.

About George, Dally was more guarded. When asked the inevitable question, which you couldn’t hear in the broadcast, you could see his expression move from deadpan to stormy while the reporter was talking. His answer was short. He named Patrolman George Ellis as the victim and me as his superior, and concluded with a warning that the investigation was ongoing, and to respect the family’s privacy. They showed a blurry picture of George in uniform, and that was that. Grim news from over the border in Wild Thyme.

“Guess it’s out there now,” said Nolan from the kitchen. “I can’t watch.”

You could see how, with the information that had been doled out, the two deaths would be connected in a much grislier tableau than they might otherwise have been. Was George the officer mentioned who discovered the first body? Did he encounter the murderer out there in the woods, or in the bloody basement of some tumbledown barn? And so on. You could see.

I bade Barry a quick goodbye and drove to a hilltop where my cell worked. The phone in the sheriff’s department rang thirteen times before Krista answered, sounding harried. She put me on hold, where I stayed for ten minutes, waiting for the sheriff or Ben Jackson or anyone. In the end it was Dally himself who picked up.

“Henry, what is it?”

“There’s nobody stationed at the Dunigan place. The press is out there. I had to chase hikers away from the site on the ridge. Where are the goddamn staties anymore?”

Dally sighed. “A couple got called back, a couple are up in the Heights. We had some trouble up there. Ben was conducting some interviews and came back to the car to find two slashed tires and his lights busted. Changed one tire before rocks started flying from the woods on both sides of the road.”

“Jesus. He okay?”

“He took one on the ear but he’ll live. We’ve got to put a foot down on these people.”

“I could pay a call or two this evening, try to mend some fences.”

“Mend fences.” There was a pause on the line. “Well, we’ll be out there making what arrests we can.”

“Can you send Lyons or Hanluain over?”

“They’re busy, sorry.”

“What about Fitzmorris PD?”

“Over budget on overtime already this quarter. We’re just as screwed as always, Henry.”

I sped down 189. Though it was against my nature, I turned the truck onto Fieldsparrow Road and eased it through the gauntlet of TV cameras and reporters at the foot of Aub’s driveway, snapping the yellow police ribbon like I’d just won a race in slow motion.

You ever have your vision close in around you, that’s what it felt like with all those eyes on me. The left side of my head began to throb once more. I parked inside the perimeter, on the blind side of the barn. Taking a deep breath, I walked the twenty paces to the clutch of newspeople. As I attempted to retie the police ribbon, a blond reporter in a fake-fur-lined hood put a microphone in my face.