Inherit the Bones

Chapter Five

Cedar Valley is a bit of a misnomer. We’ve got cedars and there is a valley, but the two don’t meet until the valley funnels its way into the base of Mount James, five miles outside of town. There, the cedars have invaded what was once native prairie land. In town, the flora is mostly pines, aspens, and birch trees. Mount James is just shy of 14,000 feet. There are fifty-three 14’ers in the state and less than two hundred feet kept us off that list. In any case, Mount James towers over the valley and the town. The peak casts a long shadow that touches everything in town eventually, much like Stanley James Wanamaker, who it is named for, did when he ran the mining of silver in these mountains in the 1800s.

It was late afternoon. The Jeep was hot and we got the windows down quickly. I was born in Cedar Valley, and twenty-nine summers in Colorado told me it would stay warm until about seven, when the mountain breezes would dance into the valley and cool things off in a hurry.

Sweat trickled down the back of my neck and I cursed the county. They hadn’t replaced our vehicles in ten years. I fiddled with the air-conditioning knob but the whispers that seeped through the dusty vents were just as warm as the air outside, so I balanced the steering wheel with my knee and pulled my dark hair up into a ponytail.

The morgue was a ten-minute drive from the police department. I talked fast and drove slow. “Sam, what do you know about the Woodsman murders?”

He fiddled with the notebook in his lap. When his hands moved, the heavy silver ring on his right hand caught the sunlight and winked back at me. “Well, let’s see. It was what, thirty years ago?”

I nodded.

“And, um, okay, it was thirty years ago and two kids went missing, two boys, right? Cousins?”

I nodded again. Cedar Valley has always been a small mountain town. Up until the mid-nineties, railroad tracks literally divided the town in two. Tommy McKenzie lived in a sprawling country home with his wealthy parents. His father’s brother hadn’t been so lucky in business; Andrew and his parents lived in a house on the other side of the tracks. It was run-down, poorly insulated, with frequent flooding.

“Right. So, the kids went missing and nobody ever knew what happened to them. It was the hottest summer on record,” Sam continued, gaining confidence. “Folks searched day and night for weeks, dredging up ponds and checking every mining shaft and cabin in a hundred-mile radius.”

“The papers called them the McKenzie Boys. They disappeared on July 3, 1985, sometime between leaving school and dinnertime. They got off the bus together at Parker and Tremont and that was the last time anyone remembers seeing them. Some said maybe they were runaways, but I think most people, deep down, believed they’d been taken. I was born a year later, by the way, right there, at Memorial General,” I said, pointing at the hospital as we drove past. “The case was big news, even the national press picked it up. It was a bad summer all around. In August, a woman’s body was found downriver, snagged in some reeds. She’d been strangled. And the mayor at the time, Silas Nyquist, he died of a sudden heart attack a few weeks after that.”

Sam twisted the silver ring on his finger. He said, “And they never made a connection, huh, between the woman in the river and the missing boys?”

I shook my head. “They tried. The woman was assaulted, strangled. The boys were simply gone. And by simply-of course, I don’t mean simply. I just mean it was hard to draw a line from missing children and the murder of a young woman. You studied psych, didn’t you, at the academy? The two cases present different M.O.’s, different styles. Kidnapping is a lot of work. The killer went to great trouble to hide the boys’ bodies. Rose-the woman in the river-she was dumped there after he was done with her. If it was the same guy, why not bury her where he buried the boys?”

Sam pondered this for a moment. “Maybe the perp started small, with the kids, then moved on to murder? Not a total stretch, given what we know became of the McKenzie boys.”

I smiled at his use of “perp.” He was fitting right in.

He continued. “And to think, that whole time, the bodies were just a few miles away.”

I nodded. “The skull was the only bone we saw at first, but later, after the other skeleton was found, Brody and I both admitted we had thought right away the skull might belong to one of the boys. The bones were old, but not that old. And that skull, well, the skull was small, too small to be an adult.”

Sam nodded, deep in thought. His hands were quiet now, stilled by curiosity. I slowed the Jeep to let a young woman with dreadlocks the color of pennies wrestle a stroller up and over the curb. As I continued down Main Street, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw she had stopped to adjust a wheel on the stroller, her copper coils touching the ground as her head bent this way and that.

Sam asked, “When were the other bones found?”

“We skied back the next morning, Brody and I and the chief and a couple of crime scene technicians. They brought hounds and right away, the dogs sniffed out the other grave. The children were buried deep, but not deep enough. Chavez has always suspected animals, maybe a coyote, dug up that first skull, and after that, well, it was only a matter of time.”

Four years ago. It could have been yesterday.

“It was my first big case as a cop. Still is my biggest case, for that matter.”

Sam gave me a look that I couldn’t interpret. I thought it was sympathy but when he spoke I decided he pitied me and I thought that tragedies are like rocks thrown in a lake, creating ripples that never hit shore; they just go on.

Sam said, “Some of the guys, they say you dream about them? The kids?”

In a moment of weakness, nearly two years ago, I told Chief Angel Chavez about my dreams. Rather, my nightmares. He insisted I see a therapist, and I did, and the dreams stopped after a couple of intense months of weekly meetings and detailed journal writing.

I wondered what the good Dr. Pabst would say if he knew the dreams had started again.

I said, “Yes, I dream about them. They were just kids. They didn’t deserve what happened to them. And for thirty years, they’ve been waiting for justice.”

Sam Birdshead looked out the passenger window at the old Victorian homes that dotted the street, each one adorned like a wedding cake with square layers and extravagant curls and fancy little eaves and nooks. The front porches were overrun with flower boxes bursting with violent splashes of color; in the yards, the grass was neat and tended, the weeds few if any. We were on the north end of town, the rich end.

The side of town Tommy called home thirty years ago.

Sam said, “We have an old tribal saying that goes something like ‘all dreams spin out from the same web.’”

I waited for him to continue, but when he spoke next he asked, “Do you think he’s still out there?”

“Who? The Woodsman?”

Sam nodded.

“I don’t know. After we found the bodies, we had every expert you could think of come in. There are a few things everyone agrees on. The Woodsman was strong and tall; Tommy was a big kid and whoever took him down had to be bigger. The Woodsman was probably not younger than sixteen, and not older than fifty. The terrain in the woods is rough. There’s no vehicle access. He had to be fit enough to drag or carry the bodies. If he’s still alive, he’s anywhere from mid-forties to eighty. Hell, he could be dead.”

The sun ducked behind a single cloud in the sky and for a moment, the sudden shadow caught me at just the right angle and blinded me. I pulled off my sunglasses and blinked, and continued. The roads were clear; we had hit the sweet spot just after school lets out and just before the end-of-day traffic.

Sam said, “Why is he called the Woodsman? The bodies weren’t, uh, chopped up, were they?”

I shook my head. “Hand me that water bottle, will you? Behind my seat? Thanks. Some jackass in the press labeled him the Woodsman and the name stuck. I guess she thought she was being cute, because of the legend, and the boys being found in the woods.”

“What’s the legend?”

“You don’t know the Woodsman and the Bear? The woodsman was a hunter, a lumberjack; a man of the woods. He lived in a remote cabin with a beautiful young wife who didn’t mind that her husband was bearded and stinky and probably had squirrel breath. All she wanted was a baby. Well, screw as they might, it just didn’t happen. It broke the man’s heart to see his wife so sad. Then one day, in town, he saw a sweet, young girl harshly berated by her mother. The woodsman went home and talked it over with his wife and the next day, he went to town and snatched the girl. The wife grew to love the child but the little girl was evil. A few months later, the woodsman returned home to find the child had killed his beautiful young wife in a fit of jealousy. Overcome with rage and grief, the woodsman took the child deep into the forest and strung her up as bait for a bear. The bear appreciated the free meal so much that he struck up a friendship with the woodsman.”

Aghast, Sam stared at me. “That’s a horrible legend.”

I shrugged. “Most fairy tales are. Try reading some of the original European stories. Anyway, the tale goes that if you are very naughty, the woodsman will come and steal you from your home and take you to the woods and feed you to the bear. There are a few old cabins up there, just off the trails, and enough gloom in those forests to give weight to the legend. At least, if you’re a kid.”

Sam said, “Creepy. I thought our tribal legends were disturbing. So, the real Woodsman-the killer-there were never any leads?”

“We think he was someone local, one of the mine workers, or a day laborer in the orchards. Physically strong, knew the land, and had opportunities to watch the kids and catch them alone, in broad daylight. They just disappeared, Sam. No one saw anything.”

He was quiet a moment and then said the very thing that I found myself thinking, day after day. “Thirty years isn’t that long ago, Gemma. The Woodsman could not only still be alive, he could be living here in town. Maybe he never left.”

I pulled the Jeep into the parking lot of the medical examiner’s office, a smaller building annexed to the newer hospital, Saint Thomas’s, and turned off the ignition. The old engine grumbled for a moment and then fell silent and I looked at Sam. He was a quick study and would go far as a cop.

“Now you know why I dream about them. Let’s go see about a dead clown.”