The Bone Yard bf-6

by Jefferson Bass

  “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.”

  “Those are resurrection ferns,” Angie replied, and I thought, live oaks, dead boys, resurrection ferns.

  As we rounded the far side of the tree, Vickery slowed the Jeep, and Angie gasped, “Oh my God.”

  Just ahead, in a patch of ground between two huge branches of the live oak, stood three rows of knee-high crosses — four crosses in two of the rows, three in the other; eleven crosses in all.

  Vickery eased the Jeep to a stop alongside the nearest row of crosses. “Welcome to the Bone Yard,” he announced.

  Part II

  Chapter 14

  We walked in silence toward the eleven crosses, mysterious and haunting in the grotto formed by the live-oak canopy. The crosses appeared to be made of galvanized metal pipe, two or three inches in diameter. On the tops of the horizontal pieces, the metal was a dull, mottled gray; underneath, it was black with mildew. Someone had gone to considerable effort to construct the crosses — their uprights and horizontal pieces had been neatly miter-cut and welded together — but neither the crosses nor the ground bore any sort of plaque or inscription, any indication of whose bones might lie within these graves, or how long they’d lain there.

  “This is amazing,” Angie whispered. “How’d you find out this was here?”

  “I tracked down the former superintendent, Marvin Hatfield.”

  She looked as surprised as I felt. “Hatfield? The guy quoted in that old newspaper story about the beatings?”

  “Yep. Good old spare-the-rod, spoil-the-child Hatfield.”

  “I’m surprised he’s still alive.”

  “So is he, probably. He’s ninety years old, in a wheelchair and on oxygen, but his mind’s still fairly sharp. He lives in a nursing home in Dothan, Alabama, about an hour from here. Did you know he became commissioner of the Department of Corrections a couple years after the fire?”

  “Why, no,” she said, “but it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? ‘Hey, Hatfield, I see that your school burned down and killed a bunch of kids. Great work! I’d like you to take over our prisons and do an equally fine job with them?’ You suppose that’s how the phone call went?”

  Vickery shrugged. “Could be. We’re looking into whether somebody pulled a string with the governor to get him the promotion. Don’t know if we’ll be able to find one, though, this many years after the fact. Anyhow, I told Hatfield about the skulls, asked if he thought they might have come from the grounds of the school. He closed his eyes and thought about that for a while — that, or checked out for a little nap; hard to be sure. Then he said they might have come from the ruins, since they never found a couple of the bodies after the fire. When I told him what the Doc said, that there didn’t seem to be any signs that they’d been burned, he said, ‘Well, then, they might have come from the cemetery.’ Being the world-class interrogator that I am, I said, ‘What cemetery?’ According to Hatfield, boys occasionally died at the school — nine in the fire, of course, but also from illnesses and other accidents, too. Most boys who died at the school were sent home to their families to be buried, but if they didn’t have relatives who claimed them, they’d be buried on the grounds.”

  It made sense, now that he said it, though it hadn’t occurred to me as a possibility before. Perhaps it should have; after all, unclaimed bodies accounted for a third of the corpses that ended up at the Body Farm. For some reason, though — naïveté or idealism or some combination of the two — I’d assumed that dead children were different from dead derelicts; I’d assumed there’d always be someone who wanted to claim them, bury them, mourn them. And my experience had borne out that assumption: the thousand skeletons in our collection included virtually no children, so maybe it wasn’t surprising that I was unprepared for the sight of a graveyard for reform school orphans.

  A butterfly, luminous yellow, fluttered above a cross. “Did Hatfield refer to the cemetery as the Bone Yard?”

  “Not exactly. He never used the term, so finally I did. I asked if the cemetery was what the boys used to call the Bone Yard.”

  “You are a world-class interrogator,” Angie observed drily. “What’d he say?”

  “He looked startled — said he hadn’t heard those words in forty years — but then he said yes, he had heard it referred to by that name. When I asked if he could tell me where it was, he drew me that little map. Pretty good memory for a ninety-year-old.”

  I walked down one row of crosses and back up another. “Was his memory good enough that he could tell you who’s buried here? And what killed them?”

  He pulled out a notepad and consulted it. “Three were boys who died in the fire in 1967. Six of the nine fire victims were sent home for burial by their families, but three of them were orphans who’d been in foster care before they got sent to reform school. The guard who died in the fire was also buried here. Two boys who died of the flu in the winter of 1958, which was a couple years before he took over. One boy who drowned on a class canoe trip. Another who fell off a tractor that was mowing the grass; he got run over by the bush hog.” I gave an involuntary shudder. “He didn’t remember any of the other circumstances — said most boys buried in the cemetery died before he took over, and he couldn’t recall what the records said about the rest of them.”

  Angie frowned. “And did he tell you where to find these helpful records?”

  “They were kept on-site, at the school. So they burned up in the fire. That was before the wonders of centralized record keeping.”

  “Very handy,” she observed. “What about the guard? What was his name? Why’d they bury him there?”

  “Also no family, according to Hatfield. Said the boys were his only family. He died trying to save their lives. Hatfield couldn’t remember the man’s name.”

  “What about the trauma?” I asked. “Did you tell him both the skulls we found had been fractured?”

  “He said he didn’t know anything about that. He took a hit or two of oxygen, then circled back to the one that fell off the tractor; asked if that might be one of them.”

  “It’s possible,”
I conceded. “If the housing of the mowing attachment hit the head just right, it could have knocked the mastoid process loose. But what about the first skull, the one with the hairline fracture in the temporal bone?”

  Vickery shrugged. “He said he was sorry he couldn’t be more helpful, but most of the deaths happened before he took over.”

  I wasn’t ready to let go. “What about the beatings? Did you ask about those?”

  “I did. I showed him a copy of the newspaper story. He got mad, turned red in the face; I actually thought he might stroke out on me. Said that story was a pack of lies — inaccurate, irresponsible, and cowardly — and he’d sure like to see how some goddamned bleeding-heart reporter would keep order among a bunch of juvenile delinquents without swinging a paddle every now and then. Then he started wheezing and said he was really tired and he didn’t know anything else that might help us, and could he please take his nap now?”

  Angie blew out an exasperated breath. “That’s it? ‘I don’t care if some boys were murdered — it’s nap time’? Christ almighty.”

  “Look, I’ll go back and talk to him again once I have more questions, but he was clearly done. I didn’t see anything to be gained by interrogating him to death.” I couldn’t help but laugh. “On the way out, I did ask him who else might know about the cemetery or the deaths. He shook his head. ‘Young man, I have no idea,’ he said. ‘That was a lifetime ago. Those boys were already lost by the time they got to us. Why on earth would anybody know or care after all this time?’ I hate to say it, but I’m afraid he might be right.”

  “I care,” said Angie.

  Vickery nodded slightly in agreement, or at least acknowledgment. He looked at me. “So, Doc, can we figure out who’s buried here? Does each of these crosses mark a grave? And do these crosses mark all the graves? Or might there be more?”

  “All good questions.”

  “I suppose,” Angie said grudgingly, “we could dust off the old reliable root finder.”

  I smiled at the name, though I had no clue what it meant. “Root finder?”

  “That’s what the crime-scene folks fondly call their ground-penetrating radar,” Vickery explained. “What is it you told me GPR really stands for, Angie? Great Pictures of Roots?”

  “Ah,” I said, the light dawning. I’d seen ground-penetrating radar in action before, and I had to admit, I’d been whelmed: far from overwhelmed, but not totally underwhelmed, either. In theory, GPR made perfect forensic sense: radio-frequency pulses, directed into the ground, would be bounced back with different intensities by materials of different density. Dense materials — undisturbed soil, for instance, or metal pipelines, or rocks, or roots — would send back stronger signals than looser materials, such as a human body, or the disturbed dirt of a recently dug grave. In my admittedly limited experience, interpreting the on-screen images required a fifty-fifty mixture of high-tech aptitude and psychic power. One of my graduate students had done a research project in which she used an advanced prototype GPR system to image bodies buried under slabs of concrete — a realistic simulation of a murder in which, let’s say, a man kills his wife, buries her in the backyard, and then pours a new patio to conceal her grave. My student’s project had shown me two things: first, that someone skilled at reading the cloudlike images on the GPR’s display might have a pretty good shot at determining whether or not a particular patio was hiding a body (or at least a body-sized area of disturbed soil); and second, that I was not that skilled someone, since to me, most of the subterranean images looked like the rainstorms on the Weather Channel’s radar.

  “Well, if you don’t want to use the root finder, we could try divining,” I suggested.

  Vickery looked puzzled. “Divining? What, like praying?”

  “No. Divining, like dowsing. Like water-witching.”

  He snorted. “The business with the forked stick?”

  “As my assistant Miranda would say, the forked stick is so last century,” I said. “The state of the art these days is coat hanger, man. You take apart one of those coat hangers from the dry cleaners. You know, the kind that has the round cardboard tube for your pants to drape over?” He stared at me, so I hurried on with my explanation. “You cut the cardboard tube in half, then cut two pieces of the wire and bend them into L’s. Stick one end of each L in each piece of the cardboard tube, and use the tubes for handles, to let the wires swivel freely.” I struck a stance like a Wild West gunslinger, my hands mimicking a pair of revolvers. “Then you walk the search area with the exposed wires level, parallel to the ground.” I headed slowly toward one of the crosses. “When you come to a body, or a grave, the wires cross.” I pivoted my fingers toward one another. “Or sometimes swivel sideways.” I wiggled my fingers back and forth.

  Vickery removed his cigar and studied me closely, apparently trying to decide whether I was pulling his leg or had gone truly mad.

  “Ah, the forensic coat hanger,” said Angie. She mimicked my gunslinger stance. “Stranger, you’d best be gone by sundown,” she drawled à la John Wayne, “or I’ll fill ya fulla starch.”

  Vickery hooted, and even I was forced to smile, despite feeling some embarrassment. “Hey, scoff all you want, but my colleague Art Bohanan swears by it.” Vickery rolled his eyes. “Art says he mapped a bunch of graves in an old family cemetery this way.”

  “No slam on Art,” Angie said, “but I’ve read some journal articles about divining for graves. A few years ago, there was an archaeologist in Iowa who did a big literature search and a bunch of interviews and some simple experiments. From his research, at least, he concluded that it’s totally ineffective. He says the wires move when you slow down, or bend over, or your posture shifts because you’ve stepped down into a low spot. Basically, it’s like a Ouija board — it works because you make it work, subconsciously.”

  I shrugged. “Well, I know a research scientist who’s also a believer. His theory is that as a body decays, it turns into a big biochemical battery, giving off electrical currents that the wires pick up.” I pointed my divining-rod revolvers at Angie. “Say, little lady, ya wanna go back to grad school and get yourself a PhD? Divining would make a dandy little dissertation.”

  She held up both hands. “I surrender. I wish Art were here right now. I’d be happy to put him to the test. We could check his accuracy by bringing in the forensic backhoe.”

  “See, now you’re talking some useful technology,” said Vickery, and I smiled. Unlike forensic coat hanger, the term forensic backhoe was actually used in all seriousness, or at least in some seriousness, by police and anthropologists. A forensic backhoe was identical to a basement-digging backhoe or a ditch-digging backhoe; the fancied-up terminology simply acknowledged that a backhoe could be used, by a skilled operator and an experienced scientist, to excavate with surprising precision. I’d used forensic backhoes many times in my career, just as I’d used forensic shovels, forensic trowels, forensic paintbrushes, and even forensic saucepans on forensic kitchen stoves. Stoves I’d ended up replacing, not once but twice, when the bones I was cleaning boiled over, forever contaminating the unreachable nooks and crannies of the forensic burners. “But, fascinating though this discussion of technology is,” he added, “I do feel duty bound to bring us back to the questions at hand. How do we identify who’s buried here? And how do we figure out which of their skulls that damn dog brought home?”

  “I’m not sure those two questions are actually related,” I said slowly, the realization coming clear only as I said it. I pointed to the lush ferns surrounding the eleven rusting crosses. “Unless there’s something I’m not seeing, nothing — and nobody — has been dug out of this cemetery in years. Not by that dog or by anybody else.”

  Vickery’s face fell, and the wind went right out of his sails. He’d been so proud of his find, and it was a remarkable one. But as we took a critical, appraising look at the markers — I couldn’t help thinking of the old hymn “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”—it became more and more cle
ar that this was not the source of Jasper’s finds.

  Before taking Angie and me to the cemetery, Vickery had called to alert his boss, the FDLE special agent in charge of a batch of counties in the Florida panhandle. Now he phoned headquarters again with an update, and though I didn’t hear the details of the call — Vickery headed down the overgrown road on foot as he began to talk — I could hear notes of disappointment in his voice.

  Angie, meanwhile, was already documenting the graveyard. She started by taking photographs of the cemetery as a whole, then of each row of crosses, and then of the individual markers. Then she enlisted my assistance, which consisted mainly of holding the end of a fifty-foot tape measure as she sketched the site and noted the locations of the crosses. After she’d finished the sketch, she reeled in the tape, which slithered and twitched its way through the ferns like a yellow ribbon snake.

  “Just for kicks,” she said, snapping the crank into the case of the reel, “why don’t we probe one of these, see if these crosses really do seem to be marking graves, or if they’re just decorative accents.”

  “We have probes in the Suburban? Why didn’t you say so sooner?”

  “What, and miss that great seminar on the forensic coat hanger?”

  She retrieved two probes and a fistful of survey flags from the back of the vehicle and handed one of the probes to me. It was a stainless-steel rod, four feet long and about the thickness of my index finger, with a one-foot handle across the top that formed a tall, skinny T. “Pick a grave, any grave,” she said. I pointed to the cross closest to us, which was at one corner of the cluster of markers. “Which side of the cross do you suppose the grave would be on?” I shrugged; without a plaque or marker — and with such dense ferns underfoot — it was impossible to tell.

  “How about we probe both directions? That way, no matter which way the grave is dug, we’ll find it. If it’s there to find.”