Walking the Bones

by Randall Silvis

  NINETY-THREE

  He’s close, DeMarco told himself. If he intends to be buried beside his mother, he’s got to be fairly close.

  Standing in the shade of the RV, DeMarco looked up and then down the lane. Three other homes, one sixty yards or so farther down the lane, two back toward the highway. Three sets of neighbors.

  He didn’t want the bespectacled man watching him go from house to house and calling to alert the neighbors. He might already be phoning Emery. So DeMarco climbed into the RV and drove slowly in the direction of the main road, checking out the two houses along the way. The one nearest the highway had a bright-red swing set in the side yard, and what appeared to be newer shingles on the roof. Its front door was closed. The other house and yard were neat, with two small flowerbeds off the front porch, but seemed a bit more drab to DeMarco’s eyes, as if the siding could use a good cleaning. The porch was empty but for a single bentwood rocker, with a basket of ferns hanging over the porch rail, a hummingbird feeder on a slender pole stuck in one of the flower beds. The front door was not visible behind the screen door, and so, he reasoned, must be standing open.

  “That’s your best bet,” he told himself.

  He parked the RV just short of the highway, half on the lane and half on the shoulder, at an angle that did not give a view to the former Summerville home. Then waited, hoping the bespectacled man would return to his greasy work. Five minutes into the waiting, his cell phone buzzed with a call from Trooper Morgan.

  “Emery Elliott Summerville, Specialist E4,” Morgan said. “According to his DD 214, home address at time of entry and at separation are the same: RR 2, Box 12, Blue Goose, Kentucky. MOS, mortuary affairs specialist. Good Conduct Medal. Looks like he did four years active duty, a little over two years in Reserves, and then was granted a medical discharge, 15 October 2004.”

  “Mortuary affairs,” DeMarco said. “That means corpse recovery, right?”

  “To the best of my knowledge,” Morgan said. “Anything else I can do for you, Sergeant?”

  “This is great,” DeMarco told him. “Exactly what I needed. How’s everything going in the frozen north these days?”

  “Eighty-six and sunny. How about you?”

  “A hundred-twenty in the shade. How’s Captain Bowen holding it together? He have a nervous breakdown yet?”

  “Just a couple of little ones,” Morgan answered. “We got a new guy out of the academy to fill in while you and Trooper Matson are gone. A cross between Speedy Gonzalez and Nurse Ratched.”

  “You boys teaching him how to be humble?”

  “You bet,” Morgan answered. “But we’re not as good at it as you are.”

  A pang of nostalgia washed over DeMarco then, and he realized how much he missed his dysfunctional family. They all had their idiosyncrasies and quirks, but they all had their virtues too. Together they kept the quirks in check and multiplied the power of the virtues.

  “Give everybody my best,” he said.

  “Ten-four, Sergeant. And the same to you. We’re looking forward to having you and Jayme home again.”

  NINETY-FOUR

  Corpse recovery, DeMarco told himself. That accounts for the illness. Those guys got the worst of it. Filthy desert air, radiation poisoning, breathing in bacteria and chemicals with every breath. Gulf War disease in triplicate.

  However, DeMarco thought. If he enlisted in ’98, five or six of the victims were already dead by then.

  DeMarco noted the dates and their implications in a small spiral notebook Jayme kept in the console. Then sat there staring at what he had written. And thought, It still doesn’t rule him out. Assumed name. Disappeared before the bodies were found. Neighbors covering for him.

  He tucked the notebook back into the console, popped open the door, and walked briskly across the lane, skirting the edge of the nearest house to cross into the rear yard and past the swing set to the side door of the other house.

  Music was playing in a room not far away, country gospel. He recognized the harmonies: the Gatlin Brothers. He knocked twice before the curtain over the door’s glass panel was pulled back, and a small, round face peered out at him.

  He smiled and mouthed hello.

  The door came open, held in place by a safety chain. With it came a stream of air-conditioned coolness. He saw, at chest level, one rheumy eye, a fleshy cheek, half of a cotton ball of white hair. “Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m Ryan DeMarco, with the Pennsylvania State Police.”

  “Oh my,” the woman said.

  “No, no,” he told her, and flipped open his wallet to show the badge and photo ID. “There’s nothing wrong, nothing to be worried about, I promise. I’m just going around the neighborhood, trying to gather some information. Do you have a minute or two to talk with me?”

  She continued to peek out at him long enough for three more blinks of the visible eye, then finally unfastened the chain and opened the door wider. The full sight of her brought a smile to his face. She stood less than five feet tall in a pair of loose gray chinos, a T-shirt screen-printed with a huge yellow sunflower, and a pair of blue, nonslip hospital socks. Black-framed reading glasses hung around her neck on a beaded chain.

  “What kind of information are you looking for?” she asked.

  “How well did you know Leah Grace Summerville?”

  The question brought another blink. “Why, I knew her very well. We were neighbors for most of twenty years.”

  “So you knew her son Emery too?”

  She smiled. “He used to come down here when he was little. Always singing a tune of some kind. I have a cherry tree out back, and he loved nothing better than to climb up into that tree and sit there eating cherries and singing his little heart out. I called him my little canary.”

  DeMarco nodded. “So you knew him later too, I guess. After he came back from Iraq.”

  “Oh, that war!” she said. “It was like he was a different person. Hardly ever wanted to sing anymore. And he had such a lovely voice too. Reminded me of Jimmie Rodgers. You probably don’t remember him.”

  “My mother listened to him sometimes. Didn’t he have a song about a honeycomb, or something like that?”

  “‘Oh honeycomb,’” she sang, shuffling her little feet, and continued singing all the way through the chorus.

  “That’s the one,” DeMarco said.

  And then her face grew serious. “I don’t believe for a minute what some people say about him. You heard about that business over west, I take it.”

  “Sad, sad business,” he said.

  “A boy as sweet as Emery could never have done something like that. Never.”

  DeMarco nodded again, remained silent for a few seconds. “So anyway,” he said. “I was told Leah Grace’s family originally came from the mountains somewhere around here.”

  “Wildcat Ridge,” the old woman said. “That’s what Leah called it. Her family was loggers there until the government shut them down.”

  “Would you have any idea how I might get to Wildcat Ridge?”

  She blinked again. “What are you looking for up there?”

  “I’m just researching the family,” he told her.

  “A policeman doing that?” she said. Then, sternly, “If that boy’s as smart as I think he is, he’s long gone from here by now.”

  DeMarco asked, “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “When he came back home to bury his mother, that’s when. And he was just as kind and sweet to me then as he ever was. I wish you people would just leave that family alone.”

  With that she shoved the door closed. DeMarco felt the push of cool air hit his face, and then it was gone.

  NINETY-FIVE

  Walking back to the RV, DeMarco had to grin, remembering how Wally Stumpner had not so much as blinked at the name of Virgil. Virgil Helm. Emery Summerville. Every time DeMarco ha
d said, “Virgil,” did Stumpner have to make a shift, think Emery before he answered? It would be like translating from one language to another.

  And beyond Wally Stumpner, closer to Aberdeen, had any of those people known Virgil’s real name? Probably not.

  But how about Royce, his employer? Wouldn’t he have to know?

  Not if he paid Virgil Emery under the table. Avoid paying taxes. All that paperwork.

  But if Emery Virgil is still alive, DeMarco pondered, he’ll be receiving checks from the military, right? The man is sick, probably even sicker now than when he left Aberdeen. Bronchitis. Migraines. Intestinal problems. Memory loss. Sexual dysfunction. Joint and muscle pain. And thanks to the depleted uranium he would have been exposed to, even cellular and DNA damage.

  DeMarco had known three such vets back in Pennsylvania. All but one eventually gave up on medical treatment and simply waited for the inevitable. One of those two no longer had to wait.

  Emery, DeMarco suspected, had probably given up on treatment too. Was that why he became Virgil Helm? To distance himself from not only the war but also the country that had turned its back on him?

  DeMarco climbed into the RV, turned on the engine and air conditioner, and called Trooper Morgan again. “Would you mind running a check on Emery Elliott Summerville for any outstanding warrants and arrests?”

  “I thought you might want that,” Morgan said. “He’s totally clean.”

  “Dang. Are you at your computer?”

  “Yeah. What do you need?”

  “Pull up his file again. Medical. Date of last treatment.”

  “Hold on a minute.”

  DeMarco waited. The air was blowing out of the vent fast and chilled now, so he pulled the door shut, settled back in his seat. Except for the cost of gasoline and the difficulty finding a parking space, he was beginning to enjoy his land yacht. Half of which, he reminded himself, belonged to a seriously ticked-off Jayme.

  He wondered how she was doing. How was she spending her day? Almost seven hours had passed since he’d sent his text. Maybe he should resend it. But what if she was in the cooling-off stage now—would another text fire her up again? This relationship thing was trickier than ever these days thanks to cell phones and email. Last time he dated, a phone call every three or four days was all anybody expected. Fewer if calling long distance. Now, apparently, expectations ranged from—

  “2014,” Morgan said. “April 9.”

  DeMarco snapped back to the present. “That was only three months before he disappeared.”

  “So he’s a fugitive?” Morgan asked.

  DeMarco chose not to answer. Instead, he thanked Morgan again, hung up, and reached for the notebook.

  “All right,” he said aloud, needing to hear his thoughts fall into place. “Let’s say he stopped going to the VA, started going to some local doc. Or stopped seeing anybody. Chances are he kept his disability checks coming, but how did he receive them? Maybe somebody forwarded them to him. Or maybe he switched to a P.O. box somewhere.

  “Or maybe direct deposit,” he said. “But which bank?”

  He knew that not a shred of paper or anything of evidential value had been found in Virgil’s apartment in Aberdeen. It was as clean as a whistle, he had been told, and looked as if nobody had ever lived there.

  “But how does this relate to the name change?” he wondered.

  “Okay,” he said. “If we start by assuming that he’s responsible for those girls, then the change of identity is a no-brainer. He needed to stay anonymous or risk getting caught. If we start by assuming his innocence…

  “It’s harder to explain.

  “Harder,” he told the rearview mirror and the eyes looking back at him, “but not impossible.” The deceased vet he’d known in Pennsylvania had done three tours in Iraq. The more his health deteriorated, the more he hated the government for sending him over there. He stopped treatment. Said he would have stopped his disability checks too if not for his wife and kids. Toward the end, all he wanted was to load up a couple of magazines and take out every government employee at the VA hospital. But he was in a wheelchair then, and his wife refused to drive him to the hospital. So he took himself out instead.

  DeMarco blew a heavy breath against the window. He drew a circle in the fog. Drew a diagonal line through the circle. He gazed through the circle at the mountains to the east. “Wildcat Ridge,” he told himself.

  “Roger Wilco,” he said a half minute later. And buckled his seat belt.

  NINETY-SIX

  DeMarco told his GPS app, “Directions to Daniel Boone National Forest.” The pleasant female voice with sometimes humorous pronunciation indicated that the nearest entry point was in London, fifteen miles north. But the little voice inside his head, which wasn’t really a voice but an often bothersome nudge, tug, or scowl, said something along the lines of Unh-uh. Too far. To get to London, DeMarco would have to drive alongside fifteen miles of forest and, he suspected, past Emery’s probable egress from the forest when he wanted to visit his mother’s grave.

  Every good investigator relies heavily on gut feelings, and DeMarco was learning to trust his more and more, vague though those feelings often were. For most of his career he had been reluctant to credit these hunches, and heeded only the particularly strong ones while, and frequently to his detriment, ignoring the rest in favor of logic. But during a conversation with Thomas Huston he had learned of research indicating that the heart is a sensitive sensory organ producing its own electromagnetic field five thousand times stronger than the brain’s, and has a nervous system capable of learning, remembering, and communicating with and influencing the brain. Since then, because he had trusted Huston and admired his intelligence, DeMarco had been trying to listen more carefully to his heart’s brain, even when it spoke from the gut. And now it was telling him Unh-uh. Too far.

  So instead of driving fifteen miles to London he drove three miles to Keavy and parked in two spaces across from a hardware store. Before going inside he took an inventory of the camping equipment Jayme had packed but that they hadn’t yet used. A ground tarp and sleeping bag. An orange backpack on a metal frame. Two metal water bottles, a Bowie knife with a ten-inch blade in a black leather sheath, a kit including a collapsible metal cup, metal plate, and spork, safety matches in a waterproof plastic tube, a little camp stove consisting of a can of Sterno beneath a ten-ounce pot resting on a frame, a pint jar filled with coffee beans, plus the remaining eleven PowerBars and an unopened bag of beef jerky.

  “More than enough,” he told himself. He expected to spend one night at most in the forest. The highest point, well south of where he would be hiking, had an altitude of only four thousand feet. If he could find no sign of Emery by midmorning tomorrow, he would come back to the RV and call in the infantry and air support. The only reason nobody had found Emery by now was because they had been searching for Virgil Helm, a nonentity. Apparently several people had been keeping Emery’s true identity secret. What other secrets were they keeping?

  DeMarco wondered if anybody had ever cared enough about him to keep such a secret. His mother had. So many secrets they had hidden from his father! And Jayme would. At least he thought she would. At least he hoped.

  He considered calling her again. Held the phone in his hand. Lifted it closer to his mouth. All he had to do was tap his finger.

  But no. She didn’t like to be pushed. She hated being pushed. Push her, and she pushed back harder.

  Let her be, his heart’s brain said. Or so he imagined.

  NINETY-SEVEN

  In the hardware store he asked the manager, an agreeable middle-aged man with a pot belly and bare, shiny skull, if he had heard of a place in the forest called Wildcat Ridge. “Far as I know,” the man said from behind a counter near the back of the store, “there’s no place around here officially named Wildcat Ridge. People tend to give places their own names
, though.”

  Beside him a can of paint was being vigorously shaken by a noisy machine that made the plank floor vibrate beneath DeMarco’s feet.

  “What’s up there you want to see?” the man asked in a low shout.

  “I heard it’s a good place to hike,” DeMarco said.

  “Most people stick to the Sheltowee Trace. Lots to see along there.”

  “I’m looking to avoid most people,” DeMarco said with a smile. “Privacy, you know?”

  “Well then,” the man said. He reached down and shut off the paint shaker. The vibration and rapid-fire thump lingered in DeMarco’s ears for another thirty seconds. “Seems to me the only times I heard anybody speak of Wildcat Ridge, and that’s been a while back, it was one of the old-timers. Fellas used to do some logging there. And as near as I can remember, it was somewhere north of the lake. But with a good view of it.”

  “Which lake would that be?” DeMarco asked.

  “Laurel River Lake,” the man said. “We’re just off the northern tip of it right now. Head due west from here and keep yourself north of the lake. Any high point you see from there could very well be Wildcat Ridge.”

  “I appreciate it,” DeMarco said. “Is there any place nearby I could park an RV overnight? It’s a twenty-eight-footer.”

  “Campground not three miles from here off 312. You can pick up a couple of trailheads there too. Get you situated before you go off trail. You got a compass?”

  DeMarco smiled. “If I get lost, just walk downhill, right?”

  “In theory,” the man said. “Me, I’d take a compass.”

  “Got one on my phone,” DeMarco told him. “What’s the weather report for tonight? Any rain expected?”

  “Warm and clear tonight,” the man said. “How long you plan to be up there?”

  “Not long enough to get wet,” DeMarco answered. “Thanks for your help.”