Twenty Dry Summers

Chapter 1: What the Creek Gave Back

The creek had been dying all summer, and Howie Scoggins had watched it go the way a man watches an old dog slow down—with sadness, but without surprise. By June the water ran thin as spit over the limestone shelves. By July it pooled in stagnant pockets that smelled of iron and algae. By the second week of August, when the temperature hit a hundred and nine for the third straight day and the National Weather Service issued drought warnings nobody needed to hear, the creek bed was nothing but cracked mud and pale stone baking under a sky that had forgotten what clouds looked like.

Howie was sixty-three years old. He'd carried mail for the United States Postal Service for thirty-one years across forty-seven miles of rural Oklahoma route, six days a week, through ice storms and tornado warnings and heat that could buckle asphalt. He'd retired eighteen months ago with a bad left knee, a pension that covered the mortgage and groceries with a little left over for Bev's garden catalogs, and a sense of purpose that had evaporated almost as fast as the creek.

He found the bones on a Tuesday.

He'd been walking the property line, something he did most mornings now because the doctor said walking was good for the knee and because if he sat on the porch any longer Bev was going to suggest he take up watercolors or join the men's group at First Baptist, and he'd sooner eat gravel. The land was a hundred and sixty acres his father had left him—mixed grass prairie gone mostly to seed, a few head of cattle he leased grazing rights on, and the creek that cut a diagonal from the northwest corner down to where it joined Stiller's Run on the county road.

He saw the fabric first. A scrap of something that might have been denim, bleached almost white, caught between two rocks where the water had carved a small channel before giving up entirely. He might have walked past it. He almost did. But something about the way it was pressed flat, folded into the sediment like it had been there a long time, made him stop.

He crouched—the knee complained—and pulled at the edge. It didn't come free. He dug around it with his fingers, the dried mud crumbling like chalk, and that's when he saw the bone.

It was long and pale and unmistakable. Howie had grown up on this land. He'd seen cattle bones, deer bones, coyote bones. He knew what a human femur looked like because he'd seen one in a glass case at the county museum when he was twelve and it had given him nightmares for a week. This was a human femur.

He sat back on his heels and looked at the sky—blank, blue, merciless—and then at the bone again, as if giving it a chance to be something else. It wasn't.

He walked back to the house without hurrying. Bev was in the kitchen listening to the radio and shelling black-eyed peas into a colander. She looked up when he came through the screen door, read something in his face, and set the colander down.

"What is it?"

"Found something in the creek bed."

"What kind of something?"

He told her. She didn't say anything for a long moment. Then she wiped her hands on her apron and said, "You better call Emmett."

Sheriff Emmett Farrell arrived forty minutes later in a county cruiser that needed new shocks and a wash. He was sixty-one, thick through the middle, with a sun-damaged face and hands that looked like they'd been carved from the same sandstone as the creek bed. He was three weeks from retirement—a fact he mentioned to anyone who'd listen and some who wouldn't.

"Show me," he said.

They walked out together, Howie leading, neither man talking. The heat pressed down on them like a hand. Grasshoppers erupted from the dry grass with each step, clicking away on cellophane wings.

Emmett stood over the exposed bone for a full minute. He pushed his hat back and scratched his forehead where the band had left a red line.

"Well," he said.

"Yeah," Howie said.

"You touch anything else?"

"Just the fabric. Pulled at it a little. That's when I saw the bone."

Emmett nodded slowly. He looked up and down the dry creek bed, squinting against the glare. "How long you figure the water's been down this far?"

"Never seen it this low. Not in my lifetime. Not in my daddy's, far as I know."

"So whatever's down there's been down there a good while."

"That's my thinking."

Emmett pulled out his phone, stared at it like it had personally offended him, and made a call to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. Then he made another call to his deputy, a young woman named Lori Jessamine who was the only person in the department who knew how to operate the new evidence software the county had paid for and nobody understood.

They waited in the shade of a blackjack oak while the heat built and the cicadas screamed. Bev brought out a jug of ice water without being asked. Emmett drank two glasses and didn't say thank you, which meant he was thinking hard.

"Howie," he said finally, "you remember Lyle Creech?"

The name landed like a stone in still water. Howie felt the ripples move through him—not shock exactly, but something older and deeper, a recognition he'd been holding at arm's length since he first saw the bone.

"I remember him."

"Farmhand. Worked the Rutter place and a couple others during harvest. Came up from Texas, I think. Maybe Louisiana. Disappeared—what, twenty years ago?"

"Summer of oh-three," Howie said. "I remember because it was the same year the Comanche County Fair got canceled on account of the heat. Two bad summers in a row that year and the one before."

"That's right. Lyle just up and vanished. People figured he moved on. Transient workers do that."

"People figured a lot of things."

Emmett looked at him. "What's that mean?"

"Means people figured what was easiest to figure."

They were quiet again. A red-tailed hawk circled overhead, riding a thermal, patient as geology.

"If that's Lyle down there," Emmett said, "then he didn't move on."

"No," Howie said. "He didn't."

The OSBI team arrived late that afternoon—two technicians and a forensic anthropologist from the university in Norman who looked too young to be an expert in anything but who moved with quiet competence through the creek bed, flagging locations with small orange markers and photographing everything with a camera that clicked and whirred like an insect.

By evening they had uncovered most of a skeleton. The forensic anthropologist—her name was Dr. Yoon—confirmed it was human, male, and had been in the ground a significant amount of time. She estimated at least fifteen years, possibly more. The skull showed evidence of blunt force trauma to the left temporal region.

"Someone hit him," Emmett said.

"Someone hit him very hard," Dr. Yoon corrected. "With something dense and relatively flat. A shovel, maybe. Or a piece of pipe."

Howie stood at the edge of the taped-off area and watched them work. The sun was going down, turning the sky the color of a bruise, and the heat was finally breaking—not much, but enough that you could breathe without feeling like you were swallowing something solid.

He was thinking about Lyle Creech.

He hadn't thought about Lyle in years. Nobody had. That was the thing about it. A man had vanished from this community and within six months it was as if he'd never existed. No investigation to speak of. No search party. Just a general consensus, arrived at without discussion, that Lyle had drifted on the way drifters do, and wasn't it a shame, and pass the potatoes.

But Howie remembered him now. Remembered a lean, sunburned man in his late twenties with a gap between his front teeth and a laugh that came easily. Remembered seeing him at the feed store, at the gas station, at the Fourth of July cookout the Rotary Club put on every year at the fairgrounds. Lyle had been here. He'd been real. And someone had caved in his skull and put him in this creek.

Bev was waiting on the porch when he came back to the house. She had a glass of sweet tea in each hand and a look on her face that he recognized from thirty-eight years of marriage—the look that meant she had something to say and was deciding whether to say it.

He took the tea and sat down in his chair. The porch faced west and the last light was fading over the grass, which was brown and brittle and would stay that way until it rained, whenever that might be.

"They think it's Lyle Creech," he said.

"I heard Emmett say so."

"Someone killed him, Bev. Put him in our creek."

She sat down in her own chair and held the tea in both hands without drinking it.

"That was twenty years ago, Howie."

"I know when it was."

"I'm saying it was a long time ago. Whatever happened, happened. You finding those bones doesn't change what happened."

"No. But it changes what we know about it."

She looked at him, and in the failing light her face was the face of the girl he'd married—worried, fierce, protective of a world she'd built with her own hands and wasn't about to let anyone tear down.

"Just let Emmett handle it," she said.

"I intend to."

But even as he said it, something was moving in the back of his mind. A memory, half-formed, like a shape seen through fog. Something from his mail route. Something about packages—brown paper packages, always the same size, always going to the same address. And then they stopped. He couldn't remember when they stopped or why he'd noticed, but the memory was there, persistent as a toothache, and he knew it wasn't going to leave him alone.

He drank his tea and watched the dark come down over the land that had kept its secret for twenty years, and he thought about how you could live your whole life in a place and never know what was underneath you.