Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel (17 page)

Huff led us to an RV strewn with Styrofoam coffee cups and crumpled napkins. The sheriff and I are both tall, and sitting there in the undersized chairs in the undersized room felt a little like playing house. The rig manager then left to round up a small group of technicians and roughnecks who’d known Contreras best. Dally and I waited. He asked was I all right. I nodded. Then I gave a weak smile for his benefit and said, “This shit gives me the creeps.”

“I can tell. We’re here about John Doe, let’s stick to that.”

I stood and looked around in the trailer, but all I could see in my mind was the rig reaching to the heavens. “Hey, how’s Jackson?”

“I’m hoping it’s not a concussion, but it probably is. Direct hit to the base of the skull. The ear is the least of his worries.” Dally continued, almost to himself, “What am I going to do? Down a man, in the middle of all this shit.”

I shrugged and, when Dally wasn’t looking, checked my own eyes for dilation.

In the hour that followed we saw five low-level technicians and roughnecks, some white Okies, some Mexican-American, none of them too put out by the questions we asked. Not one knew where Contreras might be. To a man, they seemed to be distancing themselves. As a finale to each interview, we showed a photograph of our John Doe’s face. It was the cleanest photo we had, taken on the examining table, but the kid was still blue and wasted away, missing an eye, with nothing alive about him. You could see the workers stiffen as they looked.

The last man Huff brought in was another maintenance mechanic, a little Okie guy with a blond mustache and skin the color of tomato soup. Vernon Yeager. He wore bright red coveralls. Sitting, Yeager smiled with evident discomfort and little warmth, revealing a snaggletooth. It took a couple attempts to explain that I was Wild Thyme municipal police, and the sheriff was the sheriff, and that neither one of us worked for the other. Yeager’s eyes darted back and forth between us, as if waiting for some trap to be sprung. He maintained eager body language and a defensive grin through the usual series of questions: How well do you know Contreras, did you see him much outside of work, when was the last you saw him, do you know where he is. I sat back and listened as Yeager answered in polite Okie cadences, putting his
h
’s before his
w
’s and not telling us anything. Dally laid a head shot of the corpse on the little plastic table between us and Yeager, and slid it across. The roughneck’s smile became vague, then uncomfortable, and then disappeared as he looked down at the photograph, then quickly back up at us.

“You saying he’s dead?”

“Take a close look, please,” the sheriff said. “Sorry about it, don’t want to upset you.”

Yeager took another look. “I . . . it ain’t Gerry. Can’t be.”

I cleared my throat and smiled kindly. “You’re saying that because you want it to be true, or . . . ?”

“No, no. I mean, the face is . . . messed up. I can’t tell.” Yeager looked trapped. He turned and appealed to me. “Look, what in hell’s going on?”

“We just want to know is this Contreras,” Dally said. “In your opinion. It’s nothing to do with you, right?”

“Right.” Yeager peered out the window to the sky, as if looking for aid, and back to the photo. “I don’t think so. Hope it ain’t.”

“Okay. You let us know if you hear from him.” We each gave him a business card, same as we gave the others, and he put his hard hat back on and left.

Dally and I stayed put in the RV, discussing the men we’d seen. The first four had given us nothing, but the strength of Vernon Yeager’s reaction had tripped wires for both of us. As we left the RV, the rig manager Huff had been waiting for us. He caught our eyes and nodded once, almost not at all.

Leading us back to our vehicles, he thanked us for coming and said, “So please let us know what you turn up. I’d hate to think it’s Gerry. I’ll be honest, he wasn’t my favorite, but he was one of my guys.”

We thanked him, said we might be back, and left.

Since Dally was going to be in the township that morning, he had scheduled a stop at Camp Branchwater as well. Pete Dale, the owner, had arranged for Barry Nolan to show us around, and we were already late.

The camp was spread over the crest of a ridge and down a grassy slope to a small private lake surrounded by forest. In my youth, I’d always heard that since the lake was so lightly fished, the bass and steelheads with which it was stocked grew to legendary sizes, with only pike and muskellunges and the odd eagle keeping them honest. That afternoon as I stood on the crescent drive in front of the camp’s main office, gazing at the stretch of lake visible through the trees below, I had a flash of recall: me and my sister, dirty kids in the summertime, staring from the hemlocks at the far side of the lake as campers in gray uniform T-shirts practiced fly-fishing casts. Though the camp forbade it, we two little Robin Hoods had planned to bait-fish an easy breakfast before the sun was over the trees, but we hadn’t been early enough. It was my first time seeing fly-fishing, and I remembered thinking someone ought to tell those boys they were making things too easy on the fish.

Now the camp was empty: no boys shouting, none of the loudspeaker announcements you hear wafting over the hills in summertime. Nolan stood in the driveway beside a four-seat gator with an open trunk in the back. The sheriff and I parked one behind the other and got out.

“Sorry, Nolan,” said the sheriff. “Tied up elsewhere, you can imagine.”

“It’s all right.” He started to get in the vehicle’s driver’s seat, then stopped. “Just missed another shift, that’s all,” he said.

“We’ll write you a note,” I said, and gave him a look that the sheriff couldn’t see.

“Forget it, don’t worry. So, what do you want to see?”

We took muddy paths through cedar-shake cabins and barns sided in hemlock, the ATV skidding on the turns, the sheriff riding shotgun and me in the back. Behind me in the bed, loose hand tools and a charred grate for cooking over a campfire bounced, clinking. Every now and then we crossed the remnants of a snowmobile trail.

“How often do you patrol here?” The sheriff shouted over the diesel engine.

“I take a turn around every couple days. Nothing ever happens.”

“The snowmobile tracks, they yours?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

We took a wooded trail that wound around the lake, and ended up back in front of the main building, where we’d started.

“Listen,” said Dally, “I hope that’s all we’ll need.” I could tell he was eager to get back and discuss Contreras and what we’d learned on the well pad.

“Anything else, let me know.”

We left Nolan sitting in his ATV and raced to town.

BACK AT THE
courthouse we didn’t have much time to debrief. Kevin Dunigan was waiting in the hall with Paul Wendell, a silver-haired lawyer specializing in real estate and divorce. In the past year Wendell had done brisk business as a go-between for the gas companies. The pair didn’t get two words out before Dally asked them to wait a moment. We left them in the hall and stepped into the department. Krista handed the sheriff a while-you-were-out telephone message from one of the county’s judges. He looked at the message in his hand, then in the direction of the hall, and muttered a curse. He disappeared into his office. Before long, Dally quietly asked Krista to bring Dunigan and his lawyer in. They each nodded to me as they passed, and there was a look of triumph on Kevin’s face.

I kicked around the department for a while, leaning on Krista’s counter and chatting with her, Lyons, and Ben Jackson, who had returned to the office against the doctor’s instructions. It took maybe ten minutes before Kevin, Wendell, and the sheriff emerged. Dally told them, “We’ll bring him on out to your car, just go ahead and sit tight in the back lot. He’ll be out.” When the other two left he said, “Hope to Christ the reporters are gone.”

“Springing the old man?” Deputy Jackson asked.

Dally seemed put out. “They got me on the six-hour rule. He’s released to Kevin and Carly’s supervision, and he’s to submit himself to a physical and mental health evaluation sometime in the near future. Down in Scranton, most likely.”

“Sheriff,” I said, “the guy didn’t kill anyone. And he’s sure not going on the run.”

“Yeah, I know what you think, Henry. Well, let’s keep an eye on him out there, all right?”

In five minutes, I watched as Aub plodded stoop-shouldered down the hall, still wearing the same set of work clothes his distant cousins had bought him two days earlier, flanked by Dally and Lyons. Dally placed a gentle hand on Aub’s arm, and was brushed off.

IN DALLY
’
S OFFICE
the sheriff, Jackson, and I sat down to talk about the well pad. We raised the possibility of sending for Contreras’s wife to identify the corpse—it’d have to be in person, as the facial features were so degraded that just seeing a photo risked a false positive—or to give us something of her husband’s to match DNA with. We decided against it then, not being far enough along yet to inflict the kind of pain those requests would cause. The sheriff said he’d ask Elmira PD to beat the bushes for Contreras again.

And we’d both smelled something on Vernon Yeager, but Dally felt we couldn’t put screws to him without knowing for sure Contreras was our JD. Deputy Jackson disagreed.

“There’s nothing stopping you,” he said. “For all we know and for all he knows, that is Contreras. Act as if it is. You may get nothing. You may get something Elmira can use.”

The sheriff nodded. “Let him stew for a while, maybe, then ask him to come in. He was a nervous little son of a bitch.”

“Some people naturally are,” I said. “But I agree, he’s got a quality about him. He in the system somewhere, I wonder?” Sometimes you can spot a man who has done time. There were obvious hardcases, and converts holding to strict beliefs to keep from being swept back into their old lives, and garrulous types whose eagerness to please masks a kind of corrosion deep down. Yeager struck me as belonging to the final category.

Krista called one of Dally’s FBI contacts, who did a review of Oklahoma and Texas for us, turning up nothing there. He did find a grand larceny conviction in Arkansas, for which Vernon Yeager had done a year in the Texarkana Correction Center. He’d stolen electronics from the dock of a big-box store, in broad daylight, right under a security camera. I could see the effect this news had on the sheriff. To me, it seemed like the crime of a stupid man who maybe had a habit to feed. Not nothing, but not murder, either.

Dally asked me if I’d mind looking in on the various sites at the ridge. Though I was eager to get back to the Heights and track down Jennie Lyn, that would wait until closer to night. It was a blue-sky day and my hiking boots had dried. I headed back over 189 to the Bray horse farm. Mrs. Bray—Shelly—seemed pleased when I asked to use her dirt lot as a base; cell reception was better there and I had hoped it would allow me to speak with Tracy Dufaigh again. Unfortunately, Dufaigh wasn’t there.

“Yeah,” said Shelly, leading a mare into a corral, “she left early yesterday, understandably. Haven’t heard anything from her since. Is this about your deputy?”

“No, no. No,” I said. “Just wanting to check on her. All right. Headed up to the ridge.”

“Have a good one. Oh, hey, Barry Nolan stopped by this morning. Said he wanted to call on me, let me know he was around. Given everything.” She slipped a bridle off the mare’s head. “He also asked what you’d said to me.”

“How well do you know him? You friendly with his wife, by any chance?”

“No, she was on her way out by the time we bought this place. Summers I teach riding at Camp Branchwater, so we have that in common. He’s decent enough.”

“Is he well liked at the camp? I only ask because—”

“He’s not the likeliest guy to be working with kids?” She laughed. “Yeah, I know. He doesn’t anymore. He taught survival once.”

That, I hadn’t known. “Huh.”

“Yeah, he loved that, it was his calling. There was some trouble with the management, and they turned the course over to a regular counselor,” Shelly said. “These counselors are all well-off kids working for the summer. You can imagine. College kids. He brought it up to me a couple times, said he got railroaded. I don’t know, it might have been his way of asking me to advocate for him with Pete Dale. It came off a little bitter, but that’s the way he is, kind of.”

The late morning sun was high enough to warm the steep southern side of the ridge. I picked my way through the woods to the site of our grisly discovery, in a straight line over the ridge. The snow had disappeared from almost everywhere except the hollows shaded by boulders and fallen trees. I walked once around the police-tape perimeter, seeing nothing unusual, and headed back down the south side again. My heart leapt along with a startled doe as it vaulted away from me.

The wind hushed by, hinting at spring, and places I’d never seen, and being young. I would have enjoyed it had I not been aware that we’d found John Doe in the woods close behind. A befouled place.

I wended my way back down to the stone wall that skirted the edge of the forest and followed it east, looking for any natural point of ingress from the south, something that might lead from 189 to the ridge without too much difficulty. In the midst of some spindly birches and ironwoods, there was a tall stand of hemlock trees, trunks close together, forming a kind of half blind. Deer like those places, and so do hunters; I stepped between trunks and kicked aside some damp deer scat and a beer can and sat where I was partially hidden by a log and had a good view to the south. I listened to the wind murmuring again, this time sounding like my mother’s voice, and conjuring vividly my threadbare clothes snapping on a line. I could feel the rough wood of clothespins in my hands.

I heard hoofbeats. Thirty meters to my south, a horse picked its way along the trail. Shelly Bray was the rider, and she scanned back and forth as if looking for someone or something in the trees. I took off my glasses so they wouldn’t reflect, and laid low and waited as she passed. She had to duck under a branch, and in so doing turned in my direction. I could have sworn she saw me but she acted as though she didn’t, and was soon out of sight and earshot.