The Bone Yard

by Jefferson Bass

  Angie opened the back door of the truck again and leaned in. When she emerged, she had a hamburger patty in her hand, which we’d procured at McDonald’s on our way. “Hey, Jasper,” she cooed, waving the burger near him. The dog’s head snapped around and his nostrils flared. “Want a treat?” She made another quick pass with the burger near his nose, too quick for him to make a grab. “Want it? Huh, Jasper, you want it?” She waved the burger back and forth as she said it. The dog’s eyes were locked on the burger like a fighter plane’s targeting radar, and his head swiveled in perfect sync with the movement of the patty. “You ready, Jasper?” She cocked her arm back. “Go get it, Jasper!” With that, she flung the burger across the clearing and into the brush. The dog tore after it. “See,” she said, pointing to the screen. She’d zoomed it in as close as it would go. The small dog icon, which had been superimposed on the triangle, suddenly flashed to a new position, halfway across the screen. As Jasper snuffled his way through the bushes, the icon moved every five seconds. Then, after a brief pause that was punctuated by loud smacking noises in the underbrush, the icon made its way back to the triangle, arriving shortly after Jasper did.

  “Okay,” Pettis conceded, “looks like it works, close up, anyhow. How far away can that thing see him?”

  “Seven miles, says the company that makes it,” said Angie. “That’s if the terrain’s flat and there’s nothing in the way between the collar and the receiver.” She scanned the flat terrain around the cabin. “We might need to find a piece of higher ground to get better line-of-sight reception. Anyplace nearby that’s higher up?”

  “Hell, yeah,” he said. “How about a hunnerd fifty feet higher up? There’s a old fire tower right over yonder.” He pointed. “I’d check the stairs and the floorboards pretty careful before I trusted it, but it looks to be in pretty fair shape, at least from the ground.”

  Angie cocked her head, much as the dog had done a few minutes before. “So you’re willing for us to track Jasper for a few days, see where he goes, see if he brings another bone back from one of those places?”

  “Sure, why not,” he said. “On one condition.”

  “What condition?”

  “If he shows you where the rest of them bones are, you’ve got to give him another hamburger. Sound reasonable?”

  “You drive a hard bargain, Mr. Pettis.” Angie laughed, and they shook hands. “We’ll get somebody out here to check the tower later today. Oh, we’ll need to change the battery in the collar every couple days. Is that okay?”

  Pettis scratched his stubble again. “That might require some additional compensation,” he said. Angie looked worried. “Better make it a cheeseburger.”

  “You and Jasper drive a hard bargain, Mr. Pettis. But you’ve got me over a barrel. A cheeseburger it is.”

  He grinned. “Pleasure doing business with you, Miss Angie.”

  Breakfast anytime, promised the marquee of the Waffle Iron, a glass-fronted cinder-block diner on the main street of Sinking Springs, the tiny county seat of Bremerton County. The sign appeared to date from the 1950s or early ’60s; the diner’s name was outlined in script by glowing tubes of neon, and so was the profile of a cartoonish chef, who wore a puffy white hat and served up a golden neon waffle. Underneath the sign’s offer of breakfast were two alternatives: Lunch Specials and Fried Cat. It was only when I did a double take that I noticed the word Fish tucked on a separate line underneath. The fried cat must have been pretty tasty, because the parking lot was packed fender to fender with pickups and SUVs.

  After our errand at Pettis’s, Angie and I had returned to explore the ruins of the school further while Vickery mined the courthouse records for information about the reform school, or old-timers who might still remember it. We rendezvoused with him shortly after dark in the Waffle Iron’s parking lot.

  Every head in the diner swiveled in our direction when we entered, sizing us up frankly and reminding us clearly that we were outsiders. Angie and I ignored the stares; Vickery took the opposite tack, nodding and waving amiably at various patrons, as though they’d greeted him in a friendly way. We ran this visual gauntlet to a back corner of the diner, where a booth had just opened up. As we slid onto the plastic benches, Angie and Vickery with their backs to the wall, the clatter of silverware and chatter of conversation gradually resumed.

  The waitress who came to take our order was young, slightly plump, and pretty. I saw her taking the measure of the three of us—glancing at our ring fingers, considering whether Angie was married to either Vickery or me. She must have decided Vickery was fair game, because when she asked for his order, she flashed him a dimpled smile that was orders of magnitude brighter than the token one she’d given me. She held the pen a few inches above the order pad and tilted her head slightly to one side, raptly waiting his decision. “And what would you like, sir?”

  Vickery slowly removed the cigar from the corner of his mouth. “I’m open to suggestions,” he said. “What would you say is the tastiest thing on the menu?”

  The waitress reddened slightly, but her smile broadened. “I’d say it depends on what you’re in the mood for.”

  I saw Angie’s eyes roll in disgust. She turned to Vickery and laid a hand on his arm. “Do tell us, darling, what you’re in the mood for.”

  Vickery glared at her. “I’m not sure, sweetheart,” he said, “but weren’t you planning on having a little humble pie for dessert?” Angie laughed, and the waitress—undone by the exchange—dialed down her demeanor from flirtatious to businesslike. Angie ordered the chicken-salad plate, Vickery got fried eggs and bacon, and I decided to try the fried cat.

  As the waitress scurried away to put in our order, Vickery nibbled his cigar briefly, then took it out and frowned at it. The tip was crumbling, and flecks of soggy tobacco clung to his lips and tongue. He laid the cigar across the ashtray, pulled a few napkins from the black-and-chrome dispenser, and swabbed his mouth. “So tell me, Doc,” he said, “what put the ‘forensic’ in anthropology for you? How come you’re hanging out with cops instead of fossil hunters or museum donors?”

  “One thing led to another,” I said. “Early in my career—while I was still working on my PhD dissertation—I spent summers in South Dakota, excavating old Indian graves for the Smithsonian. It was pretty quiet out there; big ranches, not many people. Not much excitement for the police, either. DUIs, mostly; occasionally a burglary or barroom fight or some cattle rustling. So we got a fair number of visits from the sheriff’s deputies and the state police. They’d come by almost every day—just to make sure we were okay, they said, but mostly they were bored, and we were the most reliable entertainment around. So whenever they’d come by, we’d show them what we were excavating that day, or bring out something interesting we’d found a day or two before—scalping marks, bashed-in skulls, whatever.”

  “So instead of the bookmobile,” Angie cracked, “y’all were the bonemobile.”

  “I guess we were.” I laughed. “One of the skeletons became kinda famous, and we had cops coming to see him from half the state. It was an adult male in his forties—no spring chicken, by Plains Indian standards. He had an arrowhead embedded deep in his right femur, about halfway between his hip and his knee. Right about where his thigh would’ve been gripping the ribs of a horse, riding bareback.”

  “Cool,” said Vickery. “You think he bled to death? Or died of infection?”

  “Neither.” I grinned. “That was what was so interesting about it. The bone had healed and smoothed around the arrowhead—remodeled, we call it—which meant that he’d lived for years after being shot with the arrow. It was so deep they couldn’t get it out, so they just cut off the arrow, and he carried the point around in his leg for years. Probably hurt like hell for a long time, maybe for the rest of his life. Then, five or ten or twenty years later, he got clubbed to death—back of his skull was completely crushed—maybe because he couldn’t run fast enough when some Sioux came after him with a battle-ax.”

&n
bsp; “Wow,” said Angie. “That’s a great show-and-tell exhibit. Beats the pants off our plaster casts of Ted Bundy’s teeth. I’d sure come out and take a look, if I were a South Dakota deputy. It’s like the History Channel meets CSI.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Listening to the bones, hearing the story they can tell, even if the story’s two centuries old. Anyhow, one day, a South Dakota state trooper who’d seen the arrowhead skeleton came back out to the site. This was back before cell phones were everywhere, mind you, and there was no way to get ahold of us except to come out there in person. We were way off the grid.” Vickery nodded. “So this state trooper comes out. Corporal Gustafson, I think his name was. No, wait; that’s almost it, but not quite. Gunterson. Yeah, Gunterson.” I gave my head a shake. “Funny how I can dredge up that guy’s name after thirty years, but can’t remember where I left my pocketknife this morning. Anyhow, Gunterson asks if I’d be willing to take a look at a skeleton that a cattle rancher’d just found.”

  “What kind of skeleton? Old or new? Indian or white or what?”

  “That’s exactly what the trooper wanted to know. I said I’d be glad to take a look.”

  “And?”

  “Exposed bones in a dry wash. Not Indian.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Indians have shovel-shaped incisors—their front teeth are scooped out on the back side. So do Asians. Caucasian incisors are pretty much flat across the back.”

  Angie rubbed her teeth, then asked, “Old bones, or new?”

  “Old enough to be bare and sun-bleached. New enough to have an amalgam filling, though that could have been anytime in the twentieth century. She—it was a woman in her twenties—had only two cavities, so she was probably born sometime after the 1950s.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “That’s when America’s cities and towns started adding fluoride to their drinking water.”

  “A dastardly commie plot,” teased Vickery.

  “Indeed,” I said. “Those Communists wanted our kids to have strong teeth. So this woman was all set for the commie takeover, dentally speaking. Although it’s possible that she grew up earlier, before fluoridation, in an area where the groundwater’s naturally high in minerals.”

  “Interesting,” he mused. “You can tell all that just from the teeth?”

  “You can tell a lot more than that just from the teeth,” I said. “You can also tell that she had good dental care as a kid, because the one filling she had was in a second molar—a ‘twelve-year molar.’ But then something happened, her life changed for the worse. She had a big unfilled cavity in one of her third molars—her wisdom teeth—which means that she wasn’t going to the dentist anymore. Maybe she’d run away from home; maybe she was on her own and not making enough money to afford dental care. I’ve seen this a lot over the years, and often far worse, in murdered prostitutes—they leave home, lose touch with their families, fall on hard times, can’t afford a dentist. So their teeth start to go. Which makes them less attractive, and makes it even harder for them to earn money. Vicious downward spiral.”

  Angie picked at the chicken salad with her fork. “So this dead woman in South Dakota—she was a hooker?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “Unfortunately, she was never identified. Maybe a hooker, maybe a hitchhiker; maybe both. The body was dumped in a draw near Interstate 90, not far from an exit. I’m guessing a trucker picked her up, had sex with her, then killed her and dumped her body hundreds of miles from where she’d gotten into the truck.”

  “And how do you know she was killed?”

  “Because her hyoid bone—the U-shaped bone in the throat—had been crushed. Means she was strangled.”

  Vickery nodded. “I’ll buy it,” he said. “It all fits together. Too bad. Young women without money are very vulnerable. Not many options, and plenty of people ready to prey on them.” He inspected his cigar again, frowned at it, and laid it on his plate, alongside his knife and fork and one uneaten bite of mashed potatoes. “So that was the case that got you going on modern forensics?”

  “I guess it was,” I said. “After that, word got around South Dakota that I was willing to look at modern bones and bodies. At the end of the summer, when I went back to the University of Kansas, a KBI agent called me up. Turned out that he was the brother of a South Dakota sheriff I’d helped. Pretty soon I was looking at bones from all over Kansas. And by the time I moved to Tennessee, the TBI and the Tennessee state medical examiner knew about me, and asked me to consult on cases.” I sopped up the last of my coleslaw sauce with the last bit of hush puppy. “So. Like I said, one thing led to another. South Dakota led me to north Florida. And raw oysters. And fried cat.”

  I left the Waffle Iron full and happy. The diner’s food was good, and I’d enjoyed reminiscing about my summer excavations in South Dakota. We’d parked the Suburban in the back corner of the parking lot, which had largely emptied out by now. As we neared the vehicle, I noticed a folded paper underneath the left windshield wiper—a sale circular or political flyer, I figured. “Uh-oh,” I joked over my shoulder to Angie and Vickery. “Looks like we’ve gotten a parking ticket. These Sinking Springs folks sure keep an eye out for foreigners.” I plucked the paper from beneath the wiper blade and unfolded it. It was not a circular or flyer; it was a hand-lettered note on plain white paper. It read, “Find the Bone Yard.”

  I stared at the note; it was the second time I’d read the words bone yard today, but this note, I felt certain, had been written half a century after the diary entry. I shifted my fingers to a corner of the paper and showed the message to Angie and Vickery. Angie whistled softly. “I guess I shouldn’t have handled this,” I said. “Sorry. I might have just contaminated some evidence.”

  Vickery shrugged, then took out a clean handkerchief and carefully wrapped the note in it, then handed it to Angie. “Hell, everything’s evidence of something, Doc,” he said. “This whole world’s one big crime scene. The trick’s figuring out what to send to the lab. And where to stop stringing the tape.”

  As Angie and I followed Vickery’s taillights back to Tallahassee, I phoned my son, who was at Myrtle Beach with his wife and two boys. “Hi, Dad,” said Jeff when he answered. “How are you? What’s up?”

  “I’m fine. Still in Florida. I just wanted to talk to Walker and Tyler.”

  “So, what am I, chopped liver?”

  “No, of course not.” I laughed. “I just wanted to talk to the boys. Just wanted to tell them . . .” Tell them what? Tell them how lucky they were? Tell them not to become orphans, not to be abused, not to get sent to reform school, not to get murdered and dumped somewhere in the woods?

  Yes. Those things, and more.

  Jeff put the speakerphone on and handed the phone to the boys.

  “Grandpa Bill,” said Walker. “I caught a fish today.”

  “I went body surfing,” Tyler shouted.

  “Wonderful, boys,” I said. But what I meant was “what wonderful boys.”

  Chapter 13

  My shovel scraped across a chunk of timber a few inches beneath the ground, near one of the chimneys. The timber was black and crumbling; as I leaned down to inspect it more closely, I saw that it was rotted but also charred. It was embedded in earth that was undisturbed—that is, as I dug deeper, I saw that there were no other artifacts beneath it—so I guessed that the wood had been a floor joist rather than a ceiling joist or rafter.

  Angie and I had returned to the ruins of the reform school; Vickery had spun off to start interviewing people about the school’s grim life and fiery end.

  I wondered if Angie and I might find charred bones amid the ruins—Stevenson’s initial research hadn’t ruled out the possibility that one or more bodies hadn’t been recovered after the fire—but it was a big job: the ruins were a whole bunch of haystacks, and whatever skeletal needles lay hidden in them might well have crumbled to rust or to dust by now.

  I’d spent the morning skimming vegetation and th
e top layer of burned material from the center of the dormitory area. My clothes were soggy and grimy and my back was grumbling, so I was relieved when Vickery’s Jeep pulled up and emitted a brief chirp of the siren. He rolled down the window and waved Angie and me over.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “Let’s take a ride,” he said.

  “In air-conditioned comfort? Sure thing. Where we going?”

  “To see some reform school alumni.”

  I looked down at my sweat-soaked clothes and took a quick sniff under one arm. The news from there wasn’t good. “I’m pretty rank. Maybe I should stay here.”

  “Nah, jump in, Doc. I don’t think any of these folks will object.”

  The air was cranked all the way up, and the blast of cold on my wet skin gave me goose bumps. Glancing at the console between the front seats, I noticed a hand-drawn map. It appeared to be a drawing of the school site; the buildings had been crudely outlined, and a dotted line led northward from the site to a sketch of what appeared to be a tree, with an X beside it. Vickery studied the map briefly, then put the Jeep into gear and continued around the drive. Just beyond the remnants of the buildings, he slowed to a crawl, then cut the wheel to the left and jounced us off the road. As the vehicle swayed and lurched along, I realized we were following what was left of a dirt road, although high weeds and small bushes swished and screeched against the underside of the vehicle, and occasionally we had to swerve around trees that had grown up in the roadbed. Scattered amid the oaks and pines were magnolias, their dark, glossy leaves dotted with cupped white blossoms. Rolling down the window, I drank in their sweet, heady perfume.

  After perhaps a quarter mile, the track meandered up a slight rise and around an immense live oak. The trunk was a good eight feet thick, and the lower branches—some of them nearly two feet in diameter—curved down to rest on the ground before turning skyward. The effect was of a small grove of trees, rather than one single tree. The branches themselves were thickly carpeted with ferns, as if the forest floor were actually a living thing consisting of many layers and levels . . . which it was, I realized. “Amazing,” I said, “the way the ferns are colonizing the trees.”