Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel (26 page)

Palmer, Brophy, and I lifted her onto a gurney, and the EMTs strapped her down.

“Not too tight,” said Brophy. “I’ll just do what I can do,” he told himself.

I declined John’s invitation to join him at the bar and got in my truck. There, in loud silence, I thought about what I’d seen that day. The woman from the bog might not have been anybody’s Jesus, not in our neighborhood, but we had rolled away the stone. She was risen, and ours to deal with.

Who she had been to Aub, in life, remained to be seen. A relative, maybe. A wife the world had overlooked, perhaps common-law? The headstone was enough of a gesture that she had meant something to the old man. Whether Aub intended to keep her grave to himself or not, it
was
secret; that suggested that the woman had been something secret too. The signs weren’t clear, but my thoughts of the old man were taking unsettling turns.

I WAS BONE-TIRED,
caked with mud, and scratched everywhere with thorns. My trousers had been soaked to the thighs with swamp water and hadn’t yet dried. Even so, I knocked at Evelina Grady’s, unfit to be seen and half dead on my feet.

The old lady answered. “You come by the front this time. Come in?”

“Thanks,” I said, and stepped inside. Though I had tried to stomp and scrape off every bit of mud from my boots, plenty had hung on; I bent over to unlace myself. My back muscles bunched and stretched painfully. My socks were still damp and stained red, but I wasn’t going to take those off, and consequently I left red-brown footprints across powder-blue carpeting. I looked back at my trail in dismay. Evelina saw it and said, “Don’t worry, Henry.” I followed her to the kitchen and sat while she made us instant coffee.

My bedraggled state would have made small talk absurd. The old lady knew I had something to ask or to tell, and waited for me to come out with it. The coffee she set before me tasted burnt sweet and chemical, and hot and wonderful.

“We went digging out by the swamp,” I said. “Found the grave of a woman.”

“On Aubrey’s land?”

“Where else?”

“And you don’t know who it is.” She nodded, and produced a pack of cigarettes from a pocket in her sweatsuit. She laid them on the table and stared as if expecting them to get up and do something. “Aubrey is the last of a strange brood. I mean, I’m told they were considered old-fashioned even in the olden days. They kept to themselves.

“But we don’t know what times was like back when he was young. We don’t know what being a neighbor was, or what love was like, or honor. Faith in God. Things we laugh about now. We forget.”

I kind of knew what she was getting at. I suspected that she had been drinking. There was a smell on her breath, maybe vodka. “We do forget,” I said.

“I don’t know who she is. Sorry. Not for sure.”

“You had mentioned a sweetheart last time we spoke. Someone who may have left Aub, jilted him?”

“I also told you what I thought of him. It’s not in his character, killing a person.”

I heard a hint of anger in her voice, and resisted telling her that she could never know that for certain. “I’m going out to have a smoke,” she said. “Come on out if you want.”

Gazing into the black woods behind her house, she lit a cigarette and smoked in silence. She wore wool socks and clogs. I was still in stocking feet, and the damp crept up my ankles; I wiggled my toes and thought, this is how Stonewall Jackson died.

“Forgive me, Evelina,” I said. “It’s none of my business. You’re quiet tonight. Something bothering you?”

The old lady peered at me over top of her glasses. “Tell me, Henry. Out where you live, did you sign?”

“I don’t own my place.”

She snorted impatiently. “But would you?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing against you if you did.”

“Not even if you were hard up?”

“I’d figure something else out, I guess.”

“But what if you were shiftless?” She leaned theatrically around me to look in the direction of her son’s house.

I didn’t answer.

“Sorry,” she said. “Clearly I don’t mean you.” She looked around her, at the wild lawn, the dew caught in starlight, and the apple trees twisting themselves into the ground. “Isn’t much, this. But I won’t sign no gas lease. It’s poison. Still, if you do or don’t, there’s something to poison you. It’s stubborn, maybe. Pointless.” She tossed her cigarette aside and muttered, as if admitting to herself, “Everybody’s going to sign.”

We let that drift awhile. There weren’t too many people in the area left who felt the way she did. It had to be difficult.

I asked, “What can you tell me about this woman, Aub’s?”

“I don’t know. We’re talking about old news, here. It’s said she came over from Ireland to marry someone from a farm family. Like a mail-order. Aub wasn’t the one she contracted with, but she wound up with him anyway. Maybe just long enough to pry herself free from her husband, then she took to her heels. Headed for the old country.”

“Got a name, anything? Who was she?”

She clucked and shook her head. “I hope it isn’t her you found. I don’t know her full name, but her married name was Stiobhard.”

NIGHT HAD FALLEN
; in my truck, the factory heat wheezed its swaddling breath as headlights from the opposite lane flooded my vision, leaving afterimages that I could not blink away. I needed to go home and I knew it.

At the courthouse, there was a light or two on somewhere deep inside, but nobody around upstairs. I had a key to the back door closest to the sheriff’s department. When I first stepped inside, the basement floor was silent, and with no other sound to muffle my footsteps, it felt like I was echoing down that long fluorescent hall forever into nothingness. The feeling was comforting as a daydream. As I passed the little window set in the door to the holding cells, I picked up movement, and peered in. The side corridor glowed green. I heard voices and the sound of a shower turning off; down the hall, Ben Jackson stood in the doorway of the jail bathroom. I rapped a knuckle on the glass window. Jackson double-timed it to the door and admitted me.

From the bathroom, McBride’s voice reached us like a distant chain saw: “Deputy, I know beggars can’t be choosers, but this towel wouldn’t dry my dick and balls.” The prisoner emerged into the hall, hunched, shivering, and naked but for several patriotic and death-themed tattoos. He brandished a thin white towel like a surrender flag before tossing it to the floor. “It’s cold as shit in here. I’m a health risk!”

Deputy Jackson raised his eyes to the sky. “Pick that up and be quiet.”

McBride noted my arrival. “Hey! Officer! This bitch said he wants to suck my cock. Get me out of here.”

“Get in your cell and get dressed.”

“I lodge a complaint on you.” McBride shook his head, toweled himself off theatrically, and moved into his cell, closing the door himself.

I turned to the deputy and said, “Some improvement over last night.”

“Yeah. Who knows what tomorrow may bring? I should tell you he’s been arraigned. Possession with intent to distribute, possession of chemicals with intent to manufacture, criminal conspiracy.”

I nodded. It was what I had expected.

“Funny, what meth he had wrapped up with him was not the same as what he’d have made in his lab,” Jackson said. “Looks like we’re seeing the arrival of a larger supplier. There’s a task force—DEA along with state Clandestine Labs Unit—that wants us to make a deal to get to whoever that supplier is. Someone’s been leaning on the DA. They don’t give a damn about this guy, particularly, considering what they think they could connect him to. Meantime, we braced McBride about the JD and George. Before his lawyer taught him not to talk, he swore up and down he had nothing to do with either of them.”

“Where’s Dufaigh?”

“She got bailed out after the arraignment. Her father showed.”

“What charges?”

“Possession with intent, but they’re not really after her. She’ll plead nolo to simple possession and go into treatment. It’s McBride they can use.” We were speaking low, but Jackson dropped his voice to a murmur. “He could walk. Of course, he doesn’t know that yet.”

“Let me talk to him.”

“Three minutes. You don’t touch him, you don’t open his cell, and you don’t mention any plea. And,” he added, pausing before his exit, “it never happened. I’ll be in the john down the hall.” Without another word, Jackson slipped out the door.

For a moment I stood in the green underglow, me at one end of the hall and McBride at the other. I could hear him stir on his bunk. It was hard bringing myself to face him up close; I worried his eyes would reveal something I needed to know but couldn’t bear to see.

McBride had dressed in red coveralls issued by the county, and was curled into the fetal position with his face to the wall. Something about his scalp, which showed plainly white through his buzz cut and was speckled with brown moles, inspired a loathing as pure as it was irrational. It was a head you wanted to slap, except you’d never stop wiping your hand after. The prisoner shivered and turned half in my direction.

“Sit up,” I said. “Look at me.”

“You’re nobody.” He turned back to the wall.

“I can get to Tracy.”

He didn’t respond.

“You must be wondering if we found your gun in that shithole. The .38? You know, Tracy did you no favors. She meant well.”

“What .38? Bullshit. Just go away.”

“But I’m not even here. You think I’m here building a case? I’m here so you can look me in the eye and tell me the truth, so that I know. I’m pretty sure you didn’t have anything to do with that boy we found. But either you killed Ellis, or you were there when he got it. You may not have even meant to. He catch up with you, catch you with someone? You cleaning up for someone? You may have thought you didn’t have a choice.”

At this, he turned over and sat up. We met eyes. “I’d never shoot a cop. I hope you get the guy and string him up by his balls. Between you and me, Ellis did brace me once, maybe a month back, fractured my orbital.” He touched his temple. “Ellis had the wrong idea about me and Trace—I ain’t no pimp, and she ain’t no whore, and it wasn’t business. Not like his little operation collecting pocket change from my friends. And if you think Tracy could kill anyone, you’re out of your mind.” Whatever was adversarial in him disappeared. Once-hidden facets now shone forth in his eyes—fear, desperation. “You don’t think it’s the law I was running from, do you?”

“Good luck,” I told him, then walked down the hall and exited the holding area. My head begin to pulse.

In the main corridor, Jackson asked how it went.

“He’s not the one,” I said. We bade each other good night and Jackson returned to his post in the cells.

I continued on and my footsteps echoed. Somewhere in a back office of the sheriff’s department a desk lamp burned, so I knocked on the glass door, then let myself in. Behind the partition, Krista’s work area contained several jars of candy and very many photographs, almost all of family and friends, and one of Krista herself in desert camo, in sunlight from another part of the world. I couldn’t tell from the uniform what division she had been in. I sprang the lock to the desk drawer where she kept her key ring, found the keys, and took them.

If anybody was in the courthouse with me, my shuffling footsteps up the stairs failed to draw their attention, and up in the attic room I was left alone with the dead birds and long-ago lives. In my previous exploration of the cabinets I’d found the suggestion of alphabetization, over which a fog of items, events, and documents had descended, completely out of step with the orderly passage of time. The Stiobhard section seemed to be divided between the S cabinets, in files of crumbling papers spanning old Xeroxes of documents from the nineteenth century to the 1960s, and the heap of unfiled boxes, where I found a more recent catalog, including a faded court order that had sent a young Alan Stiobhard to a juvenile hall outside of Scranton for petty theft. At issue: a few car parts pulled from a private junkyard. There were letters Mike sent in protest. Alan had been sixteen. I tucked anything that looked promising under my coat, locked the attic door, descended the stairs, returned Krista’s keys, and headed home.

MY HOUSE WAS
DARK
, the night cold and fresh. Once again, the fires of industry flickered above the hills on the southwest horizon. As I reached my front door, I noticed a smell, and my hand had closed on the knob before I saw what was there: two pike hanging from either end of a spliced length of fishing line, cleaned and dripping blood-tinted water.

Because it was wintertime, my porch table and chairs were put away and replaced with two racks of firewood. But I had kept two chairs for sunny days, wedged into a far corner where I could look south and east down the valley. From the darkness at that far end, a silhouette rose.

“Evening, Officer.”

“Alan, how you faring?”

“Faring pretty well. Got a minute?”

“Sure,” I said, trying to decide what to do with his family’s documents, still under my arm. “Come on in.”

“I’d rather stay out; just got one rolled.”

“Okay.”

A lighter’s flame popped in Stiobhard’s hand and tobacco smoke filled the air. “I see you found my aunt today.”

“Your aunt.”

“Great-great-aunt. Helen, of the Kinsale Stiobhards.”

“Is that who she is? Jesus.”

“I believe so, yeah.” Alan moved closer. He had an arm tied in a sling in order to rest his shoulder. “We appreciate you digging her up. But we’d like her back now.”

In my coat pocket, my hand tightened around the grip of my little .22.

“Easy, Officer. I’m just here to tell you you’ve got to hand her over to us.”

“What?”

“She’s ours. We’ve been waiting years to lay her to rest where she belongs. It ain’t a request.”

“So even you didn’t know where she was until now?”

“Sure, we had some idea. We only lacked opportunity.”

“Meaning what?”

“You could ask Aubrey. Suffice it to say, we feel he’s had her for too long, and she needs to come home now.”

I waited for him to continue. He didn’t, and exhaled two jets of smoke from his nostrils.