The Bone Yard (Body Farm 6)

“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,”