The autopsy of People’s Park began on a sultry June morning, roughly six months since the onset of demolition.
Two weeks prior, the city council had voted, by a margin of five to four, to cordon off a corner of Bowditch and Haste for picketing. Councilmember for District 4 Jodi Davies sponsored the resolution. In a rare display of solidarity with Davies, Councilmember Leticia Stroh provided the swing vote, though she declined to endorse Davies’s second resolution, condemning the University of California for imperialism.
A ragtag band of neo-hippies and Boomers took up positions inside the sawhorses, waving signs and chanting hoarsely as UC maintenance crews finished clearing the Free Speech Pit.
Siefkin Brothers, Builders, supplied a new perimeter fence. They also provided a small-scale front-end loader and a dump truck. A private security company was engaged to guard the equipment and ensure the personal safety of workers.
All in all, it was a modest showing compared with the legions of vehicles and personnel that had rolled up in December.
An unsettling sense of déjà vu prevailed nonetheless, and everyone stood at attention, bracing for fresh chaos. UCPD chief Vogel established a round-the-clock foot patrol. Our office got another memo putting the Sheriff’s department into a state of readiness. Berkeley PD followed suit.
Defenders of the Park duumvirate Trevor Whitman and Sarah Whelan implored their supporters to exercise restraint, for the moment at least. Tweet after tweet went out: Do not interfere. Protest only within the designated zone. They understood it was difficult for people to sit on their hands. But if you truly cared about preserving the park, as opposed to grandstanding, this was the best way forward. They were confident that the evidence would vindicate them.
The bit about grandstanding was a shot at Chloe Bellara and the People’s Park Alliance. Bellara—gone dark since her Molotov cocktail post—didn’t respond. She’d failed to show for her academic standing hearing, and shortly thereafter, she deleted all her social media accounts.
The archaeologists arrived.
Professor Iliana Marquez Rosales was an angular woman who favored combat pants, military-style shirts with epaulets, and a sun-faded bandanna. By edict or osmosis, the dress code had spread to the rest of her team. They spent several days plotting out excavation sites with stakes and twine before commencing to dig.
That evening when I showed up for work, Brad Moffett beckoned me urgently to the coffee station.
He said, flatly, “They found more bones.”
I said, “What.”
Rex Jurow leaned over his cubicle wall. “At the park.”
“Are we…” I looked back and forth between them. “Should we go out there?”
“B shift already got em,” Jurow said.
A weighty silence.
“Please don’t tell me it’s another kid,” I said.
Moffett’s expression was inscrutable.
I dropped my bag and hurried down to the morgue.
Dani Botero was mopping up, about to depart for the day. She handed me a box of gloves, and I followed her into the freezer.
She took down a brown paper bag.
Bones don’t typically smell much, and if they do it’s more mineral than organic. The odor that puffed out at me when I opened the bag was of a wholly different variety.
Garlic.
I looked at Dani. “The fuck is this?”
“Dr. Bronson thinks they’re chicken bones,” she said.
The adrenaline began to drain out of me.
“They found them in the pit. They didn’t want to take chances, so they called us.”
As I climbed back up to the squad room, I tried to imagine how many picnics People’s Park had hosted in recent months.
Jurow and Moffett leaned on each other, crying with laughter.
“Fuck you,” I said.
“I mean,” Jurow said. “Your face.”
He mugged incredulity.
“Seriously, fuck the both of you. Dani, too.”
“Oh now, respect your betters,” Moffett said.
—
THE JOKE WAS on all of us.
In the ensuing days, the excavation stalled repeatedly, as every attempt to dig turned up bones.
First dozens.
Then hundreds.
Thousands.
The entire park, two point eight acres, had been studded with bones.
Pushed deep into the turf. Wrapped in burlap and buried. Broken into maddening fragments and scattered like seed. There were bones in the pit. Bones strewn around the former basketball courts. Bones in the urinals, in the toilet tanks, hidden in the bushes.
Now we knew why Chloe Bellara had been too busy for social media or school.
She must’ve known some hungry anarchists.
Mostly chicken, but also cow bones, cat bones, coyote bones, the bones of other birds, and a metric shit-ton of bones of indeterminate origin.
Every new discovery prompted a call to the Coroner’s Bureau.
Every call required us to respond.
Every time we responded we had to take photographs. We had to bag the bones and bring them back to the bureau. We had to intake, open a report, and schedule an autopsy.
The pathologists had to study them and make a determination, which was getting harder and harder to do with the barest minimum of scientific rigor, because as soon as they’d finished with that bag, the techs brought in another bag, with more bones. Bags piled up in the freezer. It got so that everybody in the office knew Professor Marquez Rosales’s phone number by heart, along with those of her graduate students. The sight of them on caller ID caused stomachs to bottom out.
And still they kept coming, and coming: a paralyzing tsunami of bones.
Brad Moffett wasn’t laughing anymore. None of us were. At any given moment we were down two coroners, creating a state of permanent short-staffing. Legitimate calls went unanswered. We’d show up to a homicide three hours late and the detectives would chew us out. Paperwork went out the window. The county couldn’t authorize enough overtime. The sergeants clamored to issue a blanket judgment of non-human origin. They took their request to the lieutenant, who took it to Captain Bakke, who took it to the sheriff, who consulted with the district attorney, who thought it over and said no.
Because what if, somewhere in there, there was a human bone?
Why not? It had happened once. It could happen again.
Lawyers for the university moved to have the park condemned.
These recent discoveries are nothing more than an act of mischief…
With the logjam mounting, a new policy directive came down. We would still respond to bone calls from People’s Park but send only a single coroner.
Inevitably, the route became known as the KFC Run.
Independence Day fell on a Sunday. Rex Jurow and I drove to the scene of a bad accident at the 580/238 interchange. Kat Davenport stayed behind, waiting for someone to call in with more bones. It was midnight, but you could never tell.
Jurow and I removed three bodies, none of which belonged to the drunk driver who’d caused the wreck. He kept arguing with the EMTs, insisting he was fine, trying to sit up as they strapped him to the stretcher. Didn’t they understand? He couldn’t go to the hospital. He had somewhere to be. This pussy was waiting on him.
I ended up stuck at the bureau an extra hour, unpaid. Before leaving I knocked on Moffett’s door. For a guy who liked to keep the mood light, he didn’t take kindly to my crack about filing a grievance with our union rep.
—
THERE HAD BEEN a period when I would get home from work and notice Maryanne’s bedroom lights on, her nervous shadow flitting in the predawn.
The windows were dark now as I walked up the driveway.
Outside the guest cottage I slipped off my boots.
Amy was asleep on the futon with her earplugs in and her eyeshade on. The monitor hissed white noise. I crept to the kitchenette to start coffee. While it brewed I thumbed through my inbox, stopping at the name Elaine Shumway.
Dear Deputy Edison—
I hope this finds you well. I apologize that it’s taken me a little while to write to you.
I went down to the basement to check if my husband kept records of his old cases. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find anything. I did a big housecleaning after he passed. You can imagine that it was hard having reminders of him around. I discarded a lot of paper. I don’t remember noticing anything related to Phil’s work, but if there was, I may have accidentally put it out with the trash. If so, I apologize.
However, I do have something that may be of minor interest to you. We have a vacation home on the Cape. I didn’t think to check there because we only ever use it during the summer. I haven’t had the occasion to go out in some time. Being there also reminds me of Phil. My daughter and her family are borrowing it for a few weeks, and yesterday I came out to spend the Fourth with them. There’s an old postcard stuck up next to the kitchen window. Phil sent it to me when he went on that trip to California. He thought the picture resembled our view from that spot in the kitchen. It doesn’t, much.
I’m sure it’s a shoddy substitute, but since it’s the best I can do I thought I’d pass it along regardless. I asked Hope to take some pictures and email them to you.
Warmest regards,
Elaine Shumway
I found Hope Morgan’s email in my spam folder.
Hi there, from my mom. Thanks. —H
I tapped open the first photo, of the postcard’s back side. Yellowed tabs of Scotch tape stuck out, top and bottom. No doubt the glue had long dried out, and it had come free with the merest pressure.
Smudgy postmark, some day in February 1988; six lines, written in Phil Shumway’s strong cursive. Nice weather, but he missed her. He was tired and he looked forward to getting home.
The second photo showed the postcard’s front. The colors had faded somewhat, but not enough to rob the image of its drama: a rugged coastline, waves flinging spray against a flawless sky.
Cheesy red lettering almost ruined it.
GREETINGS
from beautiful
Half Moon Bay
