Chapter 7

Valerie Boren-Odell, 1990

The National Park Service (NPS) is looking for its next generation of law enforcement rangers—those trusted to protect the country's most precious resources.

—National Park Service job posting.

"With Ranger Ferrell going on medical leave soon, I'd like to get up to speed on the investigation of the human remains." I grip the clipboard in my lap so tightly I'm surprised my fingers don't punch holes through fifty sheets of paper, plus one hidden Polaroid from my second visit to the burial site. There was no need for more film, because the skeletal remains had been bagged and removed, the site swept clean.

My attempts to find out who sanctioned that have been fruitless. Frank Ferrell avoids anyplace he and I might cross paths during shift change. Chief Ranger Arrington has returned from the Memorial Day weekend in a surly mood. The rumor is that his "personal business" trip involved trying to minimize the fallout from a romance with a co-worker at his previous duty station.

I hope that's not true, but I know better than to engage in gossip about it.

Now I've been sent on a daylong trip to Oklahoma State University, wearing my hot, sticky Class A Service uniform, to hand out NPS literature at a college job fair. Joining me is Arrington's supervisor, our park superintendent, who co-manages Horsethief Trail and a national recreation area in the center of the state. He's here to speak at an afternoon gathering of politically significant people, once our three-hour job fair stint is complete. Normally, this would offer me a perfect opportunity to fish for information about the unorthodox handling of the grave site. Nothing that significant is ever kept from a park superintendent. If it were, heads would roll.

"That's in law enforcement's purview, as I'm sure you know." His nonanswer is an answer. Our superintendent isn't on the commissioned law enforcement side of the NPS system. Being a noncommissioned employee, he intends to lay the responsibility at law enforcement's feet, if trouble arises. "Ferrell is local, as I understand it. He came over from the Forest Service and has a longtime relationship with the sheriff's office and other interested parties. I'm assured that he'll wrap this thing up before going on leave." He sips his coffee.

"I realize we're not dealing with a scene that's recent, but that seems…overly ambitious. I'd like to be ready to step in as needed. I've been on incident teams for more death investigations than I care to remember. My second year at Yosemite, we had seventeen, including the climbers struck by lightning at Big Sandy Ledge on Half Dome." I cringe inwardly, even though invoking prior incident involvements is standard procedure when establishing credentials at a new unit. These things are like gory badges of service, but I hate politicking.

Aside from that, bringing up Yosemite strays dangerously close to the larger truth—I was in the thick of it for less than two years before Joel and I slipped up, got pregnant, and became parents. I moved to more benign duties, which allowed for predictable work hours and staggered shifts. That was the only way Joel and I could afford childcare, the government rent for our meager park housing, baby formula, and diapers. My career backstep was supposed to be temporary, until Charlie was school-age.

"You were in on that Half Dome thing with the lightning strike?" For the first time, the superintendent seems genuinely impressed.

"The rescue and recovery. " I skirt the fact that I was topside, not one of the rescue climbers. Normally I would've been pushing for my chance to go down the rope, but I had a secret. I knew I was pregnant. "I was field medical at the scene, then the liaison with the families of the deceased climbers. It's rough stuff, dealing with that much grief all at once."

The superintendent levels a jaundiced look at me over the top of his glasses. With his graying burr haircut, he seems a relic from another age.

Be glad you're drawing a paycheck and wearing the uniform, little lady.He wants to say that, and ten years ago, he would have. With the passage of more workplace antidiscrimination laws, he knows he can't. He's probably had to sit through endless seminars on this very subject. Doubtless, he hated every minute of it.

"Well—" He drawls the word, pointedly turning his focus back to the tabletop. "We're not quite Yosemite around here, are we? Some hundred-year-old bones, unmarked in a cave, don't exactly compare. Wait around, Boren, maybe we'll have a real dead body for you, next go."

"It's Boren-Odell. I use both," I say, but don't dispel him of the illusion, if he's under it, that I might be some relation to Senator Boren.

"Noted," he replies flatly. "Hang in there, Boren-Odell. We get some dead bodies—suicide or two, hiker goes over the edge on one of the overlook trails, heatstrokes, drownings, ATV rollovers, base jumper takes a gainer off the electric company's high-line poles. An escaped convict killed two campers in the Ouachita a few years back." Straightening a stack of brochures, he looks down his nose at the information sheets, picks up one of the free ink pens. "Wait around. We'll get you a chance to use all those…skills and all that…critical incident training." Smiling, he nods at the pen, well satisfied that he's put me in my place. "Not like there's any grieving family to liaison with on a bunch of bones that've been lying there at least a century."

I struggle for a response. Twice now he's pushed the century-old timeline. The cave bones have been conveniently filed in the category of cleared for relocation.

"Hundred years ago, the area was still Choctaw Nation, Indian Territory," he goes on, watching the door for the next influx of students. "Up in the Winding Stairs…why, all those mountains, was an outlaw haven. Jesse James, the Rufus Buck Gang, Belle Starr, Booly July, whole bunch of others hid out in the old Indian Nations. The tribal courts didn't have jurisdiction over outsiders. The only thing the Choctaw Lighthorse could do was boot them from the territory, or try to get them handed over to federal custody. Federal marshals could go into Indian Territory after somebody, but there weren't nearly enough of them—not ones with the guts for it. Ever read True Grit? It's set in the Winding Stairs. The real-life Tom Chaneys and Lucky Ned Peppers were many…and the Rooster Cogburns were few." For the first time since I joined him in the booth, his eyes lightup.

Something stirs inside me, too, sending ripples of unexpectedly deep and tender nostalgia. "That was one of my father's favorite movies." I hadn't made the connection that my new job was taking me to the land of Mattie Ross, her faithful pony, and the hunt for her father's murderer, Tom Chaney. In Yosemite, I nicknamed my first park patrol horse Little Blackie in homage to a Saturday matinee my dad and I attended for my eighth birthday, right before he shipped out to Vietnam.

My tide pool of memory swirls until the superintendent says, "Not the film, the book. The original. By Charles Portis. You read it? They filmed the John Wayne movie in Colorado, of all places, not where it should've been. You'll get questions about it from park visitors. Portis's story is fiction, but at this point, it's part of the history. A tourist attraction."

"I'll read it. Thanks."

"We all know how it is." His eyes go dull again. "Happy tourists mean dollars—local business dollars, park concessionaire dollars, funding dollars from Congress. The brass wants smooth sailing. No controversy. No messy media headlines. No hullabaloo about deaths in the park."

"Yes, and I do realize those skeletal remains aren't anything recent, but…"

I can't even finish the sentence before he rises, preparing to greet students who haven't yet entered the room. "Anyway, back in the day, you had dirt-poor squatters and land speculators by the hundreds, looking to rent or pilfer tribal land. And immigrants passing through on the Old Military Road, too green to know they were in dangerous country. Plenty of shenanigans went on there—none that the government wants to revisit at this point—but plenty of things that could've happened to three little girls there, a hundred years past."

"I see." Three little girls and a hundred years. "I'm wondering how we know the remains are over a hundred years old. Has an archaeologist from district been—"

"That'd be in the purview of law enforcement."

"Do we know they're nonindigenous? Because the archaeologist might be able to…"

That earns me a long, fixed stare. "I'd say Chief Ranger Arrington and Ranger Ferrell have a handle on the issue."

"Has anyone investigated—"

His sharp intake of breath stops me cold. "On occasion when a dog is on a bone, he's better off letting it go before he…or she…chokes on it. This is one of those times, Ms. Boren…Odell."

Students push into the room, so I retrieve my Smokey Bear hat from the table, stick it on my head, and muster a smile. The afternoon passes in a blur of telling starry-eyed kids, especially the girls, what incredible career opportunities await them in America's national parks. I feel like a cardboard cutout—fake and one-dimensional—but my presence sends the desired message. Park Service jobs are for girls, too.

Afterward, walking across campus to The Heap, I attempt to put my mind in a better place, but it's useless. Despite the crush of students hurrying by with backpacks, loneliness reaches in and grabs me in the gut. It's so quick and so strong I'm completely unprepared.

What am I doing in Oklahoma, so far from family, working with people who don't know me and don't want to?The thing I thought I could reclaim—that sense of adventure and wildness, and purpose, and endless possibility—is gone. My time of mad young love and blissfully living in camp tents and crappy single-wide trailers is over. It ended when Joel died.

He took all of that with him, and he took the best part of me. He didn't intend to; it just happened. It happened because he was dedicated to his job, because he loved search and rescue, because we had a little boy of our own, and the injured hiker's ten-year-old son had run for miles to get help after his dad fell into a narrow canyon with no foot access. The helicopters were unviable due to the weather. The only way in with a haul bag of emergency medical supplies was over the edge, down the rock—but the rock was icy, and at seven thousand feet, the conditions were getting worse by the minute. The victim was in shock. We needed to medically stabilize him and prevent hypothermia until we could extract him in the morning. The incident commander wanted that rescue. Joel went down. He never made it back.

He didn't mean for our perfect life to end that way, but it did.

Sinking onto a bench, I stare at the wide sky over the university's stately brick buildings, and I beat myself up with questions. Why am I here? Life with Kenneth would be easier in so many ways. But can I let Charlie be raised by a man who sees him as a square peg—too talkative, too inquisitive, too boisterous, mildly annoying? It's not fair to anybody. Charlie doesn't need a replacement dad. He needs a fresh start. We both do. If the powers that be are determined to make me a token at Horsethief Trail, the requisite female on the crew and nothing more than a paper ranger, I'll fight that battle as it comes. Charlie and I will have our adventure—exactly the sort we boasted of in the Polaroid hiking, fishing, and cabin photos we tucked into letters over the weekend and sent home as a peace offering to my mother and grandmother. Charlie can spread his wings and fly here, just like Joel would've wanted.

The chimes of the bell tower stir me from my reverie. Looking up, I realize I've missed my turn toward the parking lot and stopped in front of the university library. Squinting at the building, I chew my lip, contemplating my next move. A long drive home awaits me. I should get going. I should heed the park superintendent's advice. I could get to the station in time to clear up some leftover relocation paperwork, and yet…

Dog on a bone,I think, and laugh under my breath as I proceed toward the graceful old building with its arched windows and towering white steeple. I have no student ID, but I've learned that a National Park Service uniform will get you in almost anywhere.

The Edmon Low Library is no exception. Within fifteen minutes, I have my own courtesy card plus an eager graduate research assistant, Heidi, who is more than willing to guide me. She'd be happy to set me up in a study carrel, where I can spread out the material on whatever subject I'm here to research.

"What are you here for?" she asks in the delightfully blunt way of a college kid. "I could maybe snag you a subject librarian if I know what you're after."

"Choctaw Nation area, statehood era, Winding Stair Mountains. Trying to brush up on local lore, separate history from tall tales, that kind of thing. But I only—"

"You need Mr. Wouda." My eager-beaver assistant is off at a goodly pace before I can add that I have an hour at most. I don't know whether to follow or wait where I am, so I jog after her. We make our way through staff-only doors and along hallways lined with dusty file cabinets and unused card catalogs, up two floors, then back down, asking after Mr. Wouda. Finally, we locate him in a tiny staff workroom.

As Heidi explains my reason for being here, Mr. Wouda cranes up at me. He's a diminutive man in a beige cardigan, plaid polyester pants circa 1975, loafers, and a tweed fedora. With thick bottle-bottom glasses magnifying eyes of a bright amber hew, and a bulbous nose, he looks like a cross between Mr. Magoo and Tom Landry. A library ghost come to life.

I find myself opening with an apology, which isn't like me—my grandmother taught me that women shouldn't habitually apologize for taking up space in the world—but Mr. Wouda has an intimidating way about him. "What in particular about the Winding Stair?" he demands curtly. "Your local libraries or museums could offer a concise overview. Little snippets to tell the tourists."

"I'm sure…but I was looking for deeper context on a particular story." I fumble. "Something I…heard around town."

"I'm listening."

"I don't know exactly how to classify it. A ghost story, legend…folktale?"

"About?" A craggy hand wheels in the air between us, as in, Move along. Busy, busy, busy.

"Human remains buried up in the mountains. Unmarked."

His chin disappears into his neck and he peers over the top of his glasses. "That was a perilous area, as I'm sure you know. Creeks and mountainsides, horses and wagons, accidents and diseases, predators, both animal and human. Graves could be anywhere and undoubtedly are. We walk over history, unaware, every day in all places. We sleep atop it. When we rest our heads at night, we've no way of knowing who may have been laid to rest beneath us."

A chill scuttles over my shoulders. "Was it typical to bury someone without personal effects, though? No clothing or grave goods? No funerary objects of any kind?" Heidi raises a quizzical eyebrow, and so I add, "That's the way I heard the story."

Mr. Wouda considers the question, lips moving as if I've fed him gristle. "Not typical, but if travelers were waylaid, a smart thief might remove items that could identify the body. Clothing, shoes, a pocket watch, a wallet, a blanket, a cookpot, those things were also valuable resources in the time." He checks my reaction. The barest hint of a smile alters his no-nonsense demeanor. "Many a wandering spirit likely travels those mountains looking for his boots."

Again, the chill. Again, I hide it. "Children, though?"

Mr. Wouda's mood sobers instantly. "Go on."

"Were there towns…or someplace families would have lived?"

"In the valleys." The answer is careful, measured. "Timber towns sprung up from the 1910s through the thirties, until the land was so cut over and burned the only bidder willing to take it at auction was the US government, for $1.42 an acre, over forty-eight thousand acres. Once again, as I'm sure you know."

"Yes." That tidbit is printed on our brochures and wayside exhibits. "But on the high ridges out of the way? Child burials?" Heidi gasps, and I realize I've strayed way too close to the truth. "Or is that just a creepy story to keep Boy Scouts in their tents at night?"

Mr. Wouda adjusts his glasses, eyes me as if he realizes I'm not really here asking about a campfire tale. "Perhaps you should know about the women."

"The women?"

"Yes." Drawing out the word, he interlaces his hands, steepling the index fingers. "And what was once obtusely referred to as the Indian Concern. Of course, no one would use such a crass term today, but your ghost story might lead there…to Kate Barnard and the clubwomen, and to Gertrude Bonnin, who came a bit later. Bonnin was herself Yankton Dakota Sioux and a well-known writer when she came to Oklahoma as a research agent for the Indian Welfare Committee of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. Have you heard of this? Or read Angie Debo's work on the subject, perhaps?"

"I haven't." I feel as though we've jumped the tracks somewhere, but I'm along for the ride, wherever it leads.

Mr. Wouda's golden-brown eyes gain intensity until they glitter with it. "My aunt, Alva Grube, was a prominent member of the Oklahoma Federation of Women's Clubs. She raised me alongside her stepson, Beau, after my mother died and my father left me. Auntie was a bit of a scandal, really. She championed the clubwomen's horse-wagon library, and sometimes drove it through the hills and dales to the tiny towns that had lacked for books. It was quite a bold undertaking for a female in the days when decent women didn't stray from home alone. She knew Miss Kate and Gertrude Bonnin and was a fan of women who stepped outside their place. Scandalous women. I was at her hip so much of my boyhood that I adored those women and was quite a fan myself." Mr. Wouda peers through the bottle bottoms at my badge and name tag, smiles in an approving way that tells me I've been accepted into the club of women willing to step outside the lines. "How long are you here today, Ranger Boren-Odell?"

I check my watch, wincing. "Maybe fifteen or twenty more minutes at most, unfortunately." Mr. Wouda looks instantly dashed. My level of regret is equivalent, but unavoidable. "I have a three-hour drive home and my son to pick up."

"Ah, life," he sighs. "I cannot gather the needed materials for you as quickly as that. They are somewhat obscure at this point. Forgotten in the dust of history." He whisks toward the door, his sweater lifting like a superhero's cape. I think I've been dismissed, until he adds, "Leave your contact information with this young one here. I'll send a packet to you—the writings of Gertrude Bonnin, Angie Debo, a few others. But not immediately. I'm off on a walking tour of Europe next week."

Without another word, Mr. Wouda blows out the door, leaving Heidi and me standing like two people in the wake of a tornado, shocked to find ourselves still in one piece.

"I told you," she says finally. "You needed Mr. Wouda."

Grinning, I pull out my pocket pad and jot down the cabin mailing address and phone number, then hand it to Heidi. "I guess I did."

Leaving the library, I feel fifty pounds lighter. I'm no longer an outcast, but a member of the secret society of slightly scandalous women. I walk in the places where they walked. I like the notion ofit.

The idea settles my head, and even a long, sweaty trip in The Heap can't dull the shine. I pass the miles home, rocking out to oldies on the radio and singing as out of tune as I please. Outside, the landscape morphs from cedar and prairie grass pastures, to hills, to slopes and tall pines.

Finally, the Winding Stairs rise in the distance. For the first time since moving here, I have the faintest sense of belonging as the mountains close in around me.

I'm barely within range when dispatch comes over the radio, and I jump halfway out of my skin before catching that power company workers have discovered a Ford LTD sedan abandoned in a tiny parking area at one of our trailheads. "Anybody round there?" Mama Lu drawls out. "On that ten-thirty-seven, it's been three days now that car hasn't moved. There's keys on the seat, door's unlocked, no flat tires, but no sign of the driver. Over."

I've got the mic in my hand before my brain even catches up. The trailhead is in a remote corner of the park's 26,500 acres, but I'm fairly nearby.

"Seven hundred…five-four-nine, I'm in the area. I'm on it," I say.

"Five…four…who?" Lu, the dispatcher, asks. She has already made an impression on me, based on the daily radio chatter. She mothers everybody, but not in a soft and fluffy kind of way. She doesn't take guff off anyone. The guys call her Mama Lu, but only behind her back. "Oh, five-four-nine," she says, making sense of my newly issued call number. "You sure? Hon, that Keyhole Loop parkin' lot is wa-a-ay back in the twigs. I don't think those electric comp'ny boys are still down there…" She leaves the sentence open-ended, intimating that it might not be safe for me, a female all alone.

This is the polar opposite of talking to Mr. Wouda. Not that some measure of concern isn't warranted. Abandoned cars in out-of-the-way places generally indicate something bad—lost or injured hiker, drug deal gone awry, wildlife poacher, emotionally disturbed person who has taken to the woods, fugitives from the law, or a suicidal individual seeking the right location. The Keyhole Loop hiking trail eventually leads down to Holson Creek, which flows through hundreds of acres of waterfowl preserve, then into the Fourche Maline River, and finally Wister Lake. The territory has flooded to the extreme during recent rains. We could be looking at a drowning.

"I'm ten-seventy-six. Over." A mild adrenaline rush hits me as I wheel The Heap around. I've missed this feeling.

"You sure, five-four-nine? You'll likely lose radio down at Keyhole Loop. Let me check who else might could meet up with you there."

"No need. I'll update once I've taken a look. Five-four-nine, out." The abandoned car has been sitting there for three days. It's hardly a hot scene, I remind myself as I veer off the blacktop, then grind along a gravel road, The Heap squealing loudly enough to flush a pair of foraging deer. Anyone at the trailhead will be amply warned of my approach.

Anyone alive, that is.

The parking area is quiet when I reach it. No sign of the electric crew, other than tire tracks and a discarded Mountain Dew can. The silver Ford LTD sits in one corner of the lot, trunk and passenger door wide open. A flock of crows roosting in a tree nearby hints at an uninhabited scene, but crows also love dead things.

I exit with my hand resting on the butt of my service weapon, then take a few steps toward the car as the birds scatter. Mirror tint obscures my view through the car window. Drug dealers favor mirror tint, but the vehicle isn't tricked out in any other way. It's only a few years old. Well kept.

Who opened the door? If the electric crew found it this way, door and trunk open, surely they would've told Lu. She would've passed on that information.

Who's been here since the power-line workers left?

Scanning the woods again, I move in a wide arc toward the vehicle, every nerve in my body on high voltage.

"NPS Law Enforcement!"

I watch, listen. No answer but the crunch of my boots on gravel.

I've nearly got a bead on the car's interior when three telltale marks near the door handle and an empty Pringles can in the dirt tell me all I need to know.

"A bear," I whisper to exactly no one. "Okay."

Black bears know how to open unlocked doors, operate trunk latches, lift unsecured windows on cabins, open coolers and containers of most types. They are quick learners and masters at all maneuvers that might lead to food.

It's almost funny, a bear break-in sending me into full alarm mode, except for the fact that it doesn't explain the Ford LTD. The interior is clean, free of signs of blood or struggle. A crocheted lace angel dangles from the rearview mirror. A little girl's barrette rests on the floorboard, rainbow colored with a unicorn in the middle. This is a family car, the type someone's dad might drive to work at the bank or the insurance office.

Moving to the woods, I look for footprints at the trailhead but find no signs of recent use. At the lot perimeter, a slide indicates that someone half walked, half slipped down a mossy, duff-covered slope. Following the trackway a short distance, I carry out a hasty search, calling, "Hello? Anybody out here? Park Service." No answer comes, other than my own voice echoing off a boulder-strewn slope where the trackway ends. A circle back toward the hiking trail yields nothing more than the paw prints of a sow bear with cubs.

The shadows lengthen as I return to the parking lot to search the car and inventory the contents. I'm squatting to check the Pringles can, just in case it contained something other than potato chips, when I look up, past the door handle, past the bear claw digs in the vinyl door pull, past a perfectly positioned dried-mud paw print on the steering column, to the sun visor.

A photograph has been tucked under one corner. I recognize a face in it.