Authors: Jefferson Bass
Suddenly Stu smacked his forehead with his left hand, causing all of us to jump. “Son of a
bitch
,” he exclaimed. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.”
“Think of what?” asked Angie.
“We’ve got two dead boys, right?”
“We know this one’s a boy,” I said. “Hard to be sure about the first one.”
“There used to be a boys’ school—a reform school—somewhere in this neck of the woods. A long time ago. Maybe not in Apalachee County, though. Over in Miccosukee County? Or maybe Bremerton.” He looked at the deputy. “Any idea how far we are from the county lines?”
“Probably not more’n a couple miles from either one,” said Sutton. “We’re kind of in a corner here.” He pointed to the northwest. “Moccasin Creek’s the boundary with Miccosukee. Bremerton’s close, too; due west, maybe. But I never heard of a reform school anywhere around here.”
“Hell, it probably closed ten years before you were born,” Vickery told him. “Burned down sometime in the sixties or seventies, I forget when. Terrible fire. A bunch of the boys died. They never rebuilt the school. Just sent the survivors to other places.” He looked at the skull again. “Doc, any chance these two kids died in the fire?”
I studied it again. “Maybe. Smoke inhalation, possibly, but there’s no way to tell that without soft tissue, and the soft tissue’s long gone. But these skulls both had fractures.”
Vickery frowned. “But don’t skulls fracture in a fire?”
“Yes and no,” I said. “Not like this. When a body burns, the skull breaks into small pieces, about the size of a quarter.”
“How about if a wall or a roof collapsed,” he persisted, “and hit the kids on the head?”
“It’s possible,” I acknowledged. “But if the bodies weren’t burned beyond recognition, seems like they’d have been sent home to be buried.”
“If they
had
homes,” Angie observed.
“Good point,” I conceded. “Probably be worth finding out more about the fire—pictures, news accounts, official reports. Be interesting to take a look at the site, too.”
“I’d be up for that,” seconded Angie. “Any idea who owns the property now?”
“No,” Vickery said, “but it shouldn’t be hard to find out. If it’s still owned by the state or the county, we might not even need a search warrant.”
Pettis cleared his throat. “Not to cause trouble, but does that mean you-all needed a warrant to search my property?”
Vickery laughed. “We’d be in trouble at this point if we did, huh? But nah, we’re like vampires—if you invite us in, you’re stuck with us. If you don’t invite us in, we have to stay out.”
“Well,” interjected the deputy, “unless there’s an active crime scene. For instance, if a human skull turns up, we can do at least an initial search even if you don’t want to cooperate.”
Pettis frowned. “But I called you. If I didn’t want to cooperate, why would I call you?” I smiled; the man had a point.
“And we sure do appreciate your cooperation,” Angie threw in quickly.
Pettis’s frown turned into a smile. “Well hell, I’m glad to help. Seems like the right thing to do. Couple kids dead; be good to figure out who they were and how they died. Besides, truth is, me and Jasper kinda like the excitement. It’s pretty quiet out here most of the time. Ain’t it, Jasper? Huh, Jasper? Jasper, what do you say?” The dog, hearing his name three times in quick succession—the pitch rising each time—capered and spun, and gave a yodeling version of a bark.
“Speaking of Jasper,” I said, “did you happen to see what direction he came from when he brought either skull home?”
“Nope. Wish I had. Like I told Miss Angie here, way it happened was, I was sleeping in the bed. It was right about daybreak.”
“Excuse me,” I interrupted, “was that the first time, or this time?”
“It was both times. Jasper, he’s kind of a night owl. Likes to roam around while I’m asleep. So there I am, sleeping like a baby, and Jasper jumps up in the bed with me. He mostly just does that if there’s a thunderstorm, ’cause he’s scared of thunder. But sometimes he does it if he’s real pleased with himself. So anyhow, there I am, dreaming about something or other, and I feel Jasper curl up beside me, and he’s slurping and gnawing on something that keeps bumping me in the leg. First time it happened, I ’bout jumped out of my skin when I saw what it was. Second time, I just said, ‘dammit, dog’—’scuse my language, ma’am—‘you have got to quit doing this.’ ”
W
here should we begin? What were we searching for, and how hard should we search? Did the two skulls come from the grounds of the school? If so, were they victims of the fire that destroyed the place in the 1960s? Or was there another, darker story?
Those and a hundred other questions spun through my mind as the black Suburban hummed northwest toward Bremerton County, taking Angie, Vickery, and me toward what had once been the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory.
U.S. 90 almost, but not quite, managed to dodge Bremerton County altogether. As it was, the highway cut through such a small corner of it that even as I passed a faded sign announcing B
REMERTON
C
OUNTY
, I glimpsed another, a hundred yards ahead, reading M
ICCOSUKEE
C
OUNTY
. 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.