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 the 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.”
“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.”