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f it that even as I passed a faded sign announcing BREMERTON COUNTY, I glimpsed another, a hundred yards ahead, reading MICCOSUKEE COUNTY. Midway between the two signs, a two-lane county highway intersected 90, and Angie slowed the Suburban.
“Turn left,” Vickery instructed.
Angie made the turn. A mile down the empty road, she glanced at Vickery. “You’re sure that was it?”
“Pretty sure. Unless our Bremerton County agent is having some fun with us. I asked him how to get to the old reform school from Highway 90 in Apalachee County. He had no idea — he’s only been assigned here about six months — but he checked with the sheriff’s dispatcher, and she said to turn right there where we just turned.”
“Wait.” Angie took her foot off the gas. “We were supposed to turn right there?”
“No. Left there. Right there. Exactly there.”
I laughed. “Are you two secretly married?”
“Good God, no,” exclaimed Angie.
“Hey,” Vickery squawked, “you don’t have to sound so horrified. Some women have actually liked the idea of being married to me. You know. Briefly.”
Angie chortled. “Stu’s left a string of broken hearts and wealthy divorce lawyers in his wake.”
“Only three,” he said. “So far. But I’m starting to look for future ex-wife number four.”
A few miles farther, we came up behind a sheriff’s cruiser, its blue lights flashing, tucked on the shoulder behind a black Ford pickup. “That’s Stevenson in the F-150,” said Vickery. “I’ll tell him we’re here.” He sent a quick text from his cell phone, and the truck began easing forward. The cruiser whipped around it, then turned right. The truck followed, and Angie fell in behind them. The pavement was cracked and buckled, knee-high with weeds in places. Fifty yards off the highway, a rusted chain was stretched across the road between rusted steel posts. We stopped, and a big-bellied deputy got out and inspected the chain and the padlock. He leaned back into his car and took out the radio microphone; after a brief exchange, he got off the radio and popped the trunk of the cruiser. Leaning in, he rummaged around, emerging with a bolt cutter whose handles were as long as my arm. He spread them wide and nibbled at the lock with the jaws; the chain clanked to the weedy pavement.
A half mile farther in the pavement ended in a loop, and we eased to a stop in front of four tall, widely spaced columns of Virginia creeper. At the tops of the four tangles of vines, I glimpsed a few crumbling courses of chimney bricks and — perched on one of these — a glossy crow, who cawed indignantly and flapped to a nearby pine tree as the five humans emerged from the vehicles.
Vickery introduced Angie and me to Stevenson, the young FDLE agent; Stevenson, in turn, introduced the Bremerton County deputy, Officer Raiford, who studied me as if I were an unusual zoological specimen. “Tennessee,” said Raiford, after he’d completed his examination. “Well, how in the world’d you end up out here in Bremerton County? Musta pissed somebody off pretty bad.” He laughed at his joke, then turned his head and shot a stream of brown tobacco juice a few feet to his right. “Y’all’s football program’s been having some troubles the last few years.”
“Tell me about it,” I said, fervently hoping he wouldn’t.
Luckily, Stevenson intervened. “I printed out some aerials and a topo map of the site. If you want, we can spread ’em out on the hood of the car.”
“Trunk’d be cooler,” pointed out Vickery. Stevenson nodded and laid a folder of printouts on the back of the cruiser. The topmost image was a satellite photo off Google, zoomed in close enough to show the entry road and the turnaround loop where we were parked. The four vine-clad chimneys were reduced to pairs of small specks in the photo, but they cast long, parallel shadows across the dirt and scrubby grass.
Next were two aerials taken in the 1960s, according to Stevenson. One aerial showed a small but tidy complex of a half-dozen buildings in a large, mostly open lawn. I recognized the four chimneys, which were divided between two main buildings: a dormitory, which held beds for a hundred boys, and a multipurpose building, which Stevenson said housed the classrooms, dining hall, kitchen, and administrative offices. The four remaining buildings, he said, were an infirmary, a chapel, and two equipment sheds.
Underneath this first aerial was a second aerial showing three buildings crammed into a small clearing in the woods. “What’re those?” asked Vickery.
“Ah, those,” said Stevenson. “Very interesting. Those were the colored buildings, for the Negro boys. This was a segregated institution. The Florida legislature required the facilities to be a quarter mile apart.”
“Wow,” Angie said sarcastically, “so much progress in the century since the Civil War. Sad thing is, there are still folks around here who miss those days.”
Stevenson pulled out additional pictures of the segregated facilities — the phrase black-and-white photo took on an added shade of meaning — and spread them on the trunk. The two main buildings and the chapel for the white boys were simple but appeared well constructed, neat, and carefully maintained. Their many-paned windows were large and occupied much of the walls; the interiors would have been flooded with light, and I imagined the windows offering the boys pleasant views of oaks, pines, and magnolias. The buildings for the black boys, by contrast, looked flimsy, unkempt, and virtually without windows — rickety barns, essentially, for human animals.
“Jesus”—Angie marveled—“widely separate and hugely unequal. Even the cages had a double standard.”
“Yeah, the colored buildings were an afterthought,” Stevenson commented, unnecessarily. “The main part was originally built as a CCC camp — Civilian Conservation Corps — in the 1930s. During World War II, it housed conscientious objectors — mostly Quakers who didn’t believe in war. They dug ditches and paved roads and fought forest fires; some of them worked in the state mental hospital over in Chattahoochee. Some served as guinea pigs for medical experiments—that’s a weird parallel with the Nazis, huh? After the war, when the conscientious objectors left, that’s when it became the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory.”
“So it was a reform school from the mid-1940s,” I said, “until when?”
“Burned to the ground in August of 1967,” he said. Looking at his youthful face, I suspected that the fire had occurred at least a decade before either he or the sheriff’s deputy was born. “Terrible fire. Undetermined cause. Nine boys died, and one of the guards.”
“Good heavens,” said Angie. “Nine boys died? That’s nearly ten percent. Must’ve been a really fast-spreading fire.”
“Apparently,” Stevenson answered. “Not surprising — look at those old buildings. Firetraps. Late August, the days hot as hell, the wooden siding and cedar shakes like tinder waiting for a match. When I buy firewood, I pay extra for fatwood lighter that looks a lot like those shakes. Lightning strikes, a guard drops a cigarette butt in the pine straw, whatever, and whoomph. Anyhow, after the fire, the rest of the boys were transferred to other correctional facilities.”
“Was everybody accounted for,” I asked, “or were some missing and presumed dead?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “We’ve got some people doing research on the history of the place. Looking for records, first-person accounts. If we’re lucky, we might find a sixty-year-old who was doing time there and lived to tell the tale.”
As we walked the site, I noticed rectangular depressions in the ground — low spots where I could see traces of foundations, barely discernible amid the bushes and vines that had been swallowing them for the past four decades.
I wasn’t convinced that searching the ruins would tell us much — I’d not noticed signs of recent disturbance here, at least not yet — but the site was complex, and I didn’t want to rush to pull the plug.
I was poking around the ruins of the dormitory when I heard the call of nature, so I headed for the nearest line of trees. As I neared the tree line, I stepped on an old flagstone, a two-foot-square island of flat sandstone in a sea of weeds.
The stone wobbled slightly beneath me as my weight shifted. I took my next step, then stopped and turned back to the flagstone. I put an exploratory foot on it and bore down gently. It did not move. I put my full weight on it and leaned forward, and when I did, it rocked again, barely perceptibly.
I trampled the weeds along one side of the stone and knelt. Using the triangular tip of my trowel, I dug two small handholds beneath the edge, then wiggled my fingers into the dirt and lifted. The stone was heavier than I’d expected — it was a couple of inches thick, and must have weighed a hundred pounds or more — so I was unable to budge it from my kneeling position. Getting to my feet, I bent down, then reminded myself, Lift with your legs, not your back. Crouching, I did my best imitation of an Olympic weight lifter, grunting with the strain. The stone came up slowly at first, but the higher it tipped, the less effort it required. By the time I had it on edge, I could balance it with one hand.
I could also see, within the hole that had been covered by the flagstone, a large metal can — a paint can, perhaps? — its top thinned and perforated by years of rust, transformed into metallic lacework. I called Angie over and showed her my find. She photographed the can, its hiding place, the flagstone covering, and the surroundings. Then she carefully eased the can out of the ground and set it atop the stone. As she did, water sluiced through the perforations in the lid. She tried peering inside, but it was too dark and murky to make out anything. She eyed my trowel. “You think you could get that lid off without maiming yourself?”
“I’ll try.” I slid the tip through the biggest of the perforations in the lid, wiggling it gently to widen the opening. Once it was several inches in, I pried gently upward. The trowel tore the crumbling metal easily, and it took only a minute to sever the lid completely.
“The forensic can opener,” Angie cracked. “First time I’ve seen one of those in action.”
