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TWO HOURS later and fifty miles to the east, I took the I-40 exit for River Road, the winding, two-lane blacktop that snaked along a tumbling mountain river and into Jonesport, the county seat of Cooke County.
The sheriff’s office was tucked into a granite courthouse that looked more like a small fortress than a seat of county government. As I parked, I noticed a couple of stoop-shouldered whittlers occupying a bench on the courthouse lawn. Shavings were heaped almost knee-high between the feet of each man. I had seen these same whittlers on that same bench in the exact same postures some nine months earlier when I’d been up in Cooke County. I wondered if they had even left their post, or were they permanent fixtures, like the Civil War cannon and the statue of Obadiah Jones, the town’s founder and namesake? I tucked the box of Leena’s bones under one arm. As I passed the bench, I lifted my other hand in greeting. Neither man spoke or waved, but there was a flicker of eye contact and the barest hint of a nod from each aged head, and both pairs of eyes swiveled to the box under my arm.
“That’s a mighty good pile of shavings you-all got there,” I said. “Just be careful you don’t drop a lit match. I’d hate to have to come identify your burned bones.”
“Is them bones you got in that box?” one of the men asked.
“From that Kitchings girl?” asked the other.
“She weren’t a Kitchings,” corrected the first one. “She were a Bonds.”
“Bonds. I knowed that,” said his friend. “I just disremembered.”
“Are them bones? That Bonds girl’s bones?” persisted the first one.
“You’d need to ask the sheriff about that,” I said.
“Sheriff’s inside,” said Whittler Number Two.
“Is he doing a pretty good job cleaning up the county?” I asked.
“View from here is pretty much the same all the time,” said the first whittler. “Don’t too many folks commit their crimes right here in front of the courthouse.”
The second one laughed, exposing toothless gums. “They was a lot of crime going on inside the courthouse,” he said.
The first one wheezed out a chuckle at that.
“Course we didn’t know about some of it at the time. New sheriff might be doing stuff we don’t know about neither.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Jim O’Conner isn’t that kind of guy. Anyway, I’d best get in. Y’all don’t cut yourselves.” They nodded, bent low over their whittling again.
Jim O’Conner’s head was barely visible behind the immense pile of papers, files, and folders on his desk. I knocked on the door. He raised up, peering over the stack.
“Thank goodness,” he said. “This paperwork’s driving me nuts, and I was desperate for a break. Come on in.”
“Not quite how I imagined I’d find you,” I said. “Figured you’d be out chasing thieves and bootleggers and poachers and such things.”
“Well, the job is mostly administrative,” he said. “Got training logs to fill out, grant requests to write, grant reports to write, court cases to get ready for, hiring requisitions.”
“You’re hiring? Business booming?”
“Well,” he said, “we didn’t have many people to start with. I had to let some of them go, ’cause they were sort of in Orbin Kitchings’s vein,” he said. “Law enforcement for personal profit.”
I grimaced at the mention of the name. Orbin Kitchings had been the county’s chief deputy, and he’d used his badge and his authority to commit crimes with impunity. I’d never forget the interaction I witnessed between Orbin and a small-time marijuana farmer-the deputy had extorted money from the man and had cruelly shot the poor fellow’s dog.
“I’m not surprised you’re having trouble with that,” I said.
“It’s a small county, with a frontier mentality. The line between the good guys and the bad guys gets kind of fuzzy sometimes, especially when money’s involved.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean to be rude,” O’Conner said. “Here, let me clear a spot for you to sit down.” He stood up and came around the desk to remove another stack of papers and files from the one chair in the office. That’s when he saw the box. He looked from the box up to my face, just as I’d done when Steve Morgan brought it into my office at UT. I read the question in his eyes. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Yeah,” I said. “TBI found this when they were searching a storage unit Garland Hamilton had rented.”
The sheriff sucked in a deep breath and blew it out, then started grabbing armfuls of folders and setting them in the corner.
After he’d cleared off one end of the desk, I set the box down and stepped back to give him space, physically and emotionally. He reached out, folded up the lid, and eyed the bones with a mixture of sorrow and tenderness that thirty years seemed to have done little to diminish. One by one, he picked up the bones and turned them over in his hands. A femur. A hip bone. A handful of ribs. His eyes got a faraway look in them.
“Funny thing,” he said. “She’s been gone so long. These bones aren’t her, but they were her. Part of her, anyhow. I couldn’t pick these out of a lineup. I mean, I can’t tell one skeleton from another. But because you say this is her, I know it’s true, and that brings the whole thing back. Does that sound strange?”
“Not at all,” I said. “I’ve seen hundreds of people react this way. We humans seem to have a deep need for closure when somebody we love dies. That’s why when a child goes missing, the parent can never finish their grieving unless or until the body’s found. We want our stories to have endings, even if the endings break our hearts.”
He didn’t say anything, but he nodded, his eyes glistening. Then he noticed the paper bag nestled in one end of the box. He hesitated, but only briefly, then unrolled the top and peered inside. He looked up at me and said, “Do you mind?”
I picked up the bag and gently tipped its contents into his cupped hands: the tiny bones of a half-formed baby, which Leena had been carrying when she was killed. The biggest of the bones, the femur, was smaller than a chicken drumstick. “Damn it, Doc,” he said. “I don’t know who to hate more, her aunt for killing her or her uncle for getting her pregnant.”
“I’m not sure there’s a lesser of those two evils,” I said. “And it probably doesn’t change the equation that the uncle’s dead and the aunt’s in prison.”
“Not a bit.”
“You said a while back that if we ever recovered these bones, you’d like to bury them with the skull. You still feel that way?”
He nodded.
“What about the fetal bones
-do you want to bury those with Leena’s bones?”
“Of course,” he said. “This was Leena’s baby.” He paused.
“Even if it was fathered by a hypocritical, abusive son of a bitch.”
“Yeah,” I said.
He drew another deep breath and then shook himself. He looked at the clock on the wall over his door. “I’m thinking maybe that now would be a good time to call it a day,” he said. “It’s after five, and I don’t think my heart’s in this paperwork anymore for today. You got to hurry right back to Knoxville?”
“I’m not in a big rush,” I said.
“Come on up to the farmhouse with me.”
“I was hoping you’d ask.”
“You want to ride with me, or would you rather follow me up?”
“I’ll follow you,” I said. “That way you don’t have to drive me back to town.”
We walked out together, past the bench, past the whittlers. This time O’Conner had the box of bones under his arm.
“Evening, Sheriff,” said Whittler Number One. Either O’Conner ranked higher in their esteem than I did or they were sufficiently curious to speak first.
“Evening, fellas,” he said.
“Are them there that girl’s bones?”
O’Conner didn’t say anything at first. I could see a couple of different emotions working in his face, then it smoothed out, and he said, “Yes, sir. They are. We’re going to give her a decent burial finally.”
“That’s good,” said the old man. “That was a shame what them Kitchingses done to her. She deserves a decent burial.”
“You all have a good evening,” said O’Conner. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Night, Sheriff,” the two men chorused together.
O’Conner placed the box in the backseat of a black-and-white Jeep Cherokee that had a seven-pointed star on the side.
I got into my truck, and together we backtracked along River Road a couple of miles back toward I-40, then turned up a gravel road through dense forest, along a small stream that fed into the river on the other side of the blacktop. My first trip up this gravel road, I’d been blindfolded and bound with duct tape-shanghaied by a giant mountain man named Waylon-and brought up this road to see Jim O’Conner. I hadn’t known what lay along either side of the gravel at the time. My second trip up, I’d been able to see, and I had seen the gravel end at a wall of vegetation-or seem to end. In fact, it plunged beneath a cascade of kudzu vines. We had snaked through a tunnel of kudzu and then emerged into a small hanging valley, where O’Conner was conducting a secret experiment in agriculture. Not marijuana, as I had suspected at one point, but ginseng: he’d found a way to replicate wild black ginseng, the sort prized by poachers, the sort that commanded top dollar in Chinese markets. This trip, I noticed that the road had recently been regraveled. It looked slightly wider, and a film of dust on the weeds alongside hinted at heavy traffic. When we got to the kudzu tunnel, I saw that the vines hiding the tunnel’s mouth had been cut back, transfering what had once been a secret entrance to O’Conner’s little valley into a shaded arbor. The vines had been thinned, which took some frequent attention, I knew, given kudzu’s prodigious ability to grow by several feet a day. Sunlight filtered through. It still wasn’t cool under here, but it was a brief respite from the baking sun of the late-summer afternoon. When we emerged out the other side, into a large clearing with a frame farmhouse at one end, I was surprised at the transformation. Half a dozen vehicles, pickup trucks, and late-model cars were tucked into a small parking lot of gravel. The kudzu vines that had wrapped the back of the house-forming another tunnel connecting with the giant ginseng patch-had also been trimmed back, and the house had been freshly painted. I saw a small satellite dish and junction boxes, where underground telephone wires and television cable emerged from the ground.
