“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—na?veté 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?”