The Skeleton Crew by Deborah Halber Read Free Book Online

around the outermost tip of Cape Cod. On the deserted beach they would have heard crashing waves and chittering seabirds.
    Jeep tracks, bike paths, and nature trails crisscross Provincetown’s thirty miles of beach. By day, families with children play in the surf, and by night, gay men cruise Herring Cove for hookups in the tall grass, secret spaces like this one among the dunes. Shadows lengthening, the girl—and the dozens of others who likely tromped down that stretch of beach that day—didn’t immediately spot the woman hidden in a pine grove that formed a small private room with scrub brush walls and a pine-needle floor. The sea breeze might have masked the odor of the blanket’s sole occupant. But up close it would have sat heavy in the air, thick and sweet. The beagle picked up the scent.
    The dog bounded past clumps of stunted oak and beach plums into the outdoor alcove where a woven green beach blanket big enough for two hadsat undisturbed, the coroner estimated later, for a week, perhaps as long as three weeks. After days in the heat and sun, putrefaction must have been in full swing, sulfurous intestinal gas and disintegrating red blood cells generating a greenish skin discoloration on the woman’s lower abdomen, chest, and upper thighs. In a week, most of the body would have turned aquamarine.
    Girl and dog ran back to the shack, where the adults, with no landline and twenty years too early for cell phones, set off on foot for the National Seashore park ranger station. Chief ranger James D. Hankins was the first official to make his way to the crime scene.
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    By 1974, Jim Hankins had spent sixteen years with the U.S. National Park Service, the last two as head ranger for the northern section of the Cape Cod National Seashore. I tracked down Hankins in his home state of Tennessee, where he had retired. Growing up there in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, he’d always wanted a career outdoors. He’d worked in stunning spots: Cape Hatteras, the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. At the Cape Cod National Seashore, Hankins supervised round-the-clock patrols of the miles of woodlands and beaches that made up twenty-two thousand acres of the sublime vistas found only at land’s end. Park rangers in those days acted as police officers, firefighters, and maintenance crews rolled into one, he said. The worst troublemakers Hankins encountered were pretty harmless, like the exhibitionist who paraded nude on the upper deck of his shack just as dune buggies loaded down with unsuspecting tourists rolled by.
    Hankins seemed more peeved about the transformation of the shacks into residences. In his view the shack owners were squatters on public land who over the years accrued more privileges that, in his opinion, they didn’t earn and never should have had. He also didn’t care for the sleeping bag set —young people crashing for the night on sandy beaches or in roadsiderest areas. But he conceded that if someone slipped into the dunes toting a sleeping bag and without a vehicle, he or she might evade the night patrol and get away with sleeping under the stars.
    A few weeks before the body was found, the Cape had celebrated the Fourth of July with parades and fireworks. Tens of thousands of visitors had streamed in for the holiday weekend, stretching the limits of the police force and park rangers, but things had quieted down again—Hankins had thought—when the beagle walker’s parents alerted a ranger at Race Point, who called Hankins at home. He jumped into his jeep and drove deep into the dunes, following dune buggy trails.
    He saw what the girl had found, and his earlier casual remark about slipping past the ranger station took on a sinister truth. Two people apparently had entered the dunes; one had gotten out undetected, even though every vehicle entering national parkland had to stop and buy a permit.
    Hankins made his way back to the