Twenty-Seven Bones (14 page)

“Mistah Lewis?”

Apgard opened his eyes, threw up his arm to shield them from the white glare of the sun. He started to sit up, but fell back with a groan. Apparently he’d passed out the night before, because when he looked around he found himself lying on the chaise, on the patio. Johnny Rankin was standing over him holding a tray with, God bless him, a Bloody Mary Ann (white rum and tomato juice) and an open bottle of aspirin.

“T’ought ya might be needin’ de hair of de hound, sah,” Johnny told him, then added that Dr. Vogler was waiting for him in the drawing room.

Lewis shook a handful of aspirin out onto his palm, popped them, washed them down. His body felt the rum first and shivered with gratitude. “What time is it?”

Johnny set the tray down on the patio table, consulted his watch. “Half past noon.”

The last thing Lewis remembered was getting felt up by Emily Epp. He glanced under the towel and was relieved to find he still had his shorts on. An alcoholic blackout is a frightening thing—the night before looms behind you like a great black pit. “When you got here this morning, was I…Was anyone else here?”

Johnny shook his head. “It do look like ya had some comp’ny, sah.” His characteristically solemn expression was, as always, unreadable. “I took de liberty of tidyin’ up. Ya wan’ me get rid of de doctah?”

“No—give him some coffee or something, tell him I’ll be there in a few minutes. And Johnny?”

“Sah?”

“Don’t say anything to…Oh.” For just an instant there, just a moment of inattention, it had slipped his mind that Hokey was dead. Weird sensation, like starting to introduce yourself and forgetting your own name.

Johnny realized what had happened. He told Lewis not to fret himself, that the wound was still mighty fresh.

Later, in Lewis’s study, Vogler too tried to reassure Lewis about his momentary lapse. “The mind tries to protect itself—it’s a temporary state of dissociation. I’m more concerned with your alcoholic intake.”

“It won’t happen again. It was just—the sense of guilt overwhelmed me.”

“What you have to understand, Lewis, is that what you’re feeling is survivor’s guilt. It’s part of the grieving process—but not the healthy part. So when you start feeling that way, you need to remind yourself that you didn’t kill your wife, you didn’t contribute to her death in any way, shape, or form, and there was nothing you could have done to prevent it.

“Now unfortunately, since you kept me waiting for half an hour, our time is up for today. I’ll write you a prescription for Valium, in case you start feeling overwhelmed again, but you’ll have to promise to lay off the booze—the two don’t mix. And you do understand I’ll have to charge you for the full hour.”

“You mean the full fifty minutes.” But Lewis was glad to be rid of the man so soon. He wondered, now that Hokey was dead, whether he still had to stay with the therapy. He’d only agreed to it because Hokey had insisted—it had seemed to reassure her.

But if anybody needed reassuring now, it was Lewis. He was the one who owed the Epps an alibi at least as good as the one they’d given him. And since they were taking the hydrofoil ferry to San Juan that afternoon, spending the weekend, and taking the ferry back Sunday afternoon, it was within that window of opportunity that the Machete Man would have to strike again. Only this time, of course, he would be wearing Lewis’s skin.

But did he have the balls for it? Lewis wondered. And what could the Epps do to him if he did renege? They couldn’t implicate him without implicating themselves.

Then he remembered Bennie. A little man with a sharp machete, who could move as silently as a gecko and strike as quickly as a mongoose. Lewis looked down, found himself clenching and unclenching his right hand as if to assure himself it was still there. Did he have the balls to be the Machete Man? Cheese-an’-bread, mon, he certainly hoped so.

The Carib cliffs were limestone, sheared off cleanly eons ago. The sea had carved out hollows at their base. Standing on the wide rocky ledge where the bodies had been found, Pender heard the breakers booming and watched the surf boiling and foaming through the holes in the honeycombed rock at his feet, then draining away again, leaving behind bubbles of dirty, cream-colored froth and slimy tendrils of seaweed.

The recessed hole in the side of the cliff from which the two bodies had fallen was not visible either from the ledge or from the top of the cliff, so like the investigators before him, Pender had a hard time figuring out how two bodies, murdered at least six months apart, could have come to rest, one atop the other, on this ledge. And like those investigators, Pender settled for the scenario Julian had suggested: that the two bodies had been buried together in the same hole or neighboring holes somewhere along the coast, and the storm tides had exhumed them from their sandy grave, then deposited them here.

Bad break for the bad guy, good break for the good guys, thought Pender, so deep in contemplation that he was momentarily oblivious both to his dramatic surroundings and the attractive woman who had led him there.

What he was contemplating was degree of concealment, an important factor in assessing a serial killer’s state of mind. In this case, it was a negative progression. First known victim, buried deep in the forest. Second and third known victims buried shallowly enough to be washed up by the first hurricane. Fourth known victim left for the police to find.

Despite the savagery of his characteristic method of execution, the Machete Man had started out as a careful, organized killer, thought Pender. But all that was beginning to shift. Contacting the police, leaving bodies around to taunt them with, signaled that the Machete Man was moving into a new phase of his career. But whether the killer was ratcheting up or winding down was something only time would—

“Watch your step, there.” Dawson, now dressed in a tie-dyed T-shirt and hiking shorts, had grabbed his arm again, this time to tug him away from the water, as an incoming wave crashed against the rocks below and sent the foam boiling up around his feet.

“Whoops—that’s the second time you’ve saved me today,” said Pender, whose salt-stiffened clothes were already dry from the midday heat.

“Next time I’ll have to charge you,” she joked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You seem so familiar—are you sure we’ve never met?”

“I’m sure I’d remember,” said Dawson, turning away, leaning over the edge of the rock to gauge the incoming tide. “Guess I just have that kind of face. Listen, if we don’t start back soon, we’ll have to swim for it.”

As they made their way back to Smuggler’s Cove, Pender found himself thinking seriously about asking Dawson for a date. He certainly liked what he’d seen of her so far, which was of course everything except the soles of her feet, and he’d always been an adherent of the nothing ventured, nothing gained school of courtship.

With this beauty, though, he felt oddly shy. He knew himself well enough to recognize that that was not a good sign. The last thing he needed at this stage of his life was to fall in love, get his heart broken again.

Back at the manchineel grove, Dawson helped Pender wipe the corrosive sap off the seat of the Vespa. “Manchineel apples are supposed to be the original forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden. A few years ago, some college kids down on spring break pitched tents on the beach and made a campfire from manchineel wood. Only one of them survived.”

When they were done, Dawson hauled a heavy backpack filled with round bumpy objects the size of human heads (calabash, of course) out of the sea grape bushes. Pender helped her put it on, then she accompanied him as far as the cracked white pavement of the Circle Road.

“Thanks again for your help,” said Pender. “If I tell you something I shouldn’t tell you, will you promise me you’ll keep it to yourself?”

“Sure.”

“Remember how you said there were no dangerous animals on St. Luke?”

“Yes?”

“Take it from your old uncle Ed, the FBI man: there’s at least one. And in my experience it’s the most dangerous animal of all.”

“I’m not quite following you. What are trying to tell me?”

“I’m trying to tell you not to go hiking alone again in the forest, or accept rides from strangers, that kind of thing, at least until this is all over.”

“Until
what’s
all over?”

“Can’t tell you,” said Pender. “Wish to God I could.”

After dropping the kids off at school Friday morning, spurred on by her earlier conversation with Pender, Holly used the Frederikshavn Public Library’s computer to research prosthetic arms again. She found several sites, read about new advances in myoelectric sensors that pick up and amplify GSR electrical activity in the muscles, about transhumeral cases and harnesses, about hand-built sockets and sensitive source boosters for individuals with little or no muscle signals.

But the prices hadn’t come down much since she’d last investigated the topic. Still between sixty and a hundred grand a pair, however she sliced it—might as well have been a hundred million.

Holly did two massages at Blue Valley in the early afternoon, then picked the kids up and drove them out out to Sunset beach. They swam (Marley undulated along, porpoiselike, propelling himself with a powerful butterfly kick), they surfed, they snacked on crackers and grapes. After snack, Dawn and her Barbie moved a few yards closer to the water, one to build and demolish sand castles and the other to live in them and be rescued.

Marley, who had long since given up protesting Holly’s no-swimming-right-after-eating rule, asked her why she was so down in the mouth.

She started to say it was nothing, then remembered her BPM with Dawn earlier in the week, and decided to tell him the truth. “I was surfing the Web for prosthetic arms again—prices haven’t come down any.”

“Ain’ had ’em, doan miss ’em,” said Marley as he positioned himself behind Holly, rocked back on the base of his spine and began massaging her back with his feet. Like her, he was naturally gifted at massage. She’d taught him a few things—the things you can’t teach, he already knew. “Good, hunh?”

“Great,” said Holly.

“You think I could do this better with metal hands?”

“Probably not,” Holly had to agree, as Marley pressed his heels on either side of her spine and felt around for the trigger points, the acupressure vortices.

“Then doan vex yaself.”

And as the massage continued, Holly couldn’t help remembering how harshly she had once judged her sister’s parenting choices.

For such a cream puff of a woman, Laurel had been awfully hard on Marley. No sympathy, no fuss—it was as if being born without arms was a perfectly natural thing. And she’d insisted on Marley doing everything he could for himself, using his feet for hands. Or almost everything—one of the carpenters at the Core had built the boy an articulated dressing and ass-wiping stick with an alligator clip on one end connected to a rubber handle he could hold in his mouth on the other.

And Laurel had been proved right, of course. Not only was Marley remarkably unself-conscious about his handicap, but over the years the boy had learned to use his toes as fingers and developed a contortionist’s flexibility in his legs.

Good job, Laur’, thought Holly, leaning back and wiggling around until both the pressure and the placement of Marley’s feet on her back made the long, powerful quadratus lumbarum muscles alongside her spine start to relax. The sun was warm on Holly’s face, the sound of the sea was tranquilizing, and the tears rolling down her cheeks, if not quite tears of joy, were by no means tears of sadness, either.

On their way home from the beach, Holly and the kids spied Dawson sitting on a bench under a tin-roofed shelter by the side of the Circle Road. She was waiting for the little blue ride-share bus known as the Too-Too (too small, too slow, too expensive, and far too seldom seen) that circled the island at unpredictable intervals.

“Hey, hepsie gyirl, ya well lollis, come ride wit’ we.” Marley called out the window, in a perfect imitation of a cruisin’ St. Luke buoy. A hepsie girl was well built; well lollis meant provocative.

If I were ten years younger, and you were ten years older, thought Dawson, dragging her backpack full of calabash over to the bus rather than pick it up one more time. Come to think of it, if you were just ten years older, I’d take my chances. (Laurel, Marley’s mother, used to worry about how Marley would do with the opposite sex when he grew up. Dawson used to tell her that as far as she was concerned, a man with no hands might be a refreshing change—most men she knew seemed to have far too many.)

They ended up giving the other two occupants of the bus shelter a ride out to the strip mall. As long as they were there, Holly gave the kids money for ice cream while she stopped into the drugstore for some necessaries. On her way back to the Baskin-Robbins, which was sort of an island joke among visiting statesiders, because it had only a dozen flavors, a newspaper headline in a vending machine caught her eye. She dropped a quarter in the slot and read the lead article as she strolled down the sidewalk.

Dawson was waiting outside the store. Holly handed her the paper. “Did you see this?”

“That’s Apgard’s wife.”

“I know her. She volunteers—volunteered—at the rest home. Nice lady. I can’t believe it.”

“I can,” said Dawson. Then, in pig latin, as the kids joined them: “Ater-lay.”

“Ater-lay ut-way?” asked Marley, taking a lick off his cone, which was in Dawn’s right hand; her own was in her left.

“Ater-lay, ever-you-mind-nay,” replied Holly, distractedly. Part of her was thinking about poor Hokey; another part couldn’t help thinking that if Marley had prosthetic hands, he could have held his own ice-cream cone.

“Johnny?”

“Sah?”

“If anybody else shows up to pay a condolence call, shoot them, would you?”

“To kill or wound?”

“Your choice.”

By Friday evening. Lewis was exhausted to the point of collapse. After Vogler left, he’d spent the afternoon dealing with lawyers, making funeral arrangements (Chief Coffee had assured him they’d be done with the body by Sunday), and receiving callers. The governor showed up, as had almost all of the island’s power elite.

There had also been an endless procession of Hokanssons and Christianssons, Hokey’s maternal line. For an only child, Hokey had a seemingly infinite supply of relatives, especially in light of the fact she was an orphan. Both her parents had died during the Blue Valley Massacre in 1985, when armed men interrupted the Three Kings Night Ball, always a highlight of the social season. The leaders of St. Luke society had been lined up against a marble wall, stripped of their cash and valuables, then gunned down. Eight dead, fourteen wounded, and the remainder of both the social and tourist seasons in shambles.

The Ladies Who Golf contingent, stringy, casserole-bearing women with blond hair and sun-ravaged complexions, were the last callers. They had decided not to cancel the women’s match play tournament that year, they told Lewis, but to reschedule it and name the trophy after Hokey, if that was all right with him.

Sadly, the grief-stricken husband had given his consent. Grief-stricken husband was a part Lewis had been playing all day, with such conviction that by evening, with the help of a steady rum ration administered by Johnny, the role had become the reality, at least on some level. Hokey was gone—never mind why, or who was to blame—and there was certainly no one who had more reason to feel sorry for himself than Lewis.

After the flood of condolence calls dried up, Sally reheated a sampler platter from the hot dishes that had been dropped off, and Johnny set up a TV tray in the study. Lewis picked unenthusiastically at the various offerings while he watched the business report. When Johnny returned to clear the tray, Lewis told him to have Sally take what she wanted and send the rest on to the Governors Clifford B. Apgard Rest Home. Ditto the flower arrangements.

Again, Johnny and Sally offered to spen’ night; again Lewis turned them down. The clock was ticking: he had to kill someone that weekend, and he still had no idea whom he was going to choose. He vaguely remembered Emily having given him some pointers the previous night, after her all-hang-together speech, but most of it had been washed away by the rum.

Emily did have confidence in him—he remembered that much, though he wasn’t quite sure what was behind this confidence. She just kept saying it was
lalua kahuna
or something, the hand of destiny, and that he would learn more in the fullness of time. Not exactly the sort of practical advice that would have come in useful long about now.

The Great House was empty again. Alone in his study with a fresh bottle of Reserve for company and a pipeful of rain forest chronic for inspiration, Lewis worked out his problem.

The biggest obstacle, he realized, was that the method of execution was fixed and unalterable, as was the murder weapon—Bennie’s machete, which had been used in all the previous Machete Man killings. (There had been some discussion between the three of them as to whether to leave Bennie himself behind to help Lewis, but it had been decided that would defeat the whole purpose of the exercise—Bennie also needed an alibi.)

That left the who, when, and where aspects of the problem still to be decided. But the more Lewis thought about it, the clearer it became that all three questions were interrelated. Either the subject would determine the location and timing, or the location and timing would determine the subject. The latter arrangement, he decided, would be fairer, to a
lalu’a tonua
way of thinking.

Location, then: someplace populated enough to provide a subject, yet isolated enough to abduct or even dispatch the subject without being seen himself.

Maybe one of the bus shelters on the Circle Road. But the Too-Too stopped running around ten or eleven at night—earlier if the bus driver got too-too drunk.

How about Sugar Town? Too crowded, too difficult for a white man to negotiate without being noticed.

The lime grove? Sometimes during the day, down-island women hiked or hitchhiked to the public grove at the edge of the forest that his grandfather, like Julius Caesar, had willed to the citizens in perpetuo. But the only visitors at night were the Wharf Street whores, who occasionally brought tricks there for an al fresco fuck—which meant of course, that they were never there alone.

There was another location, however, at the opposite edge of the forest, where there would be plenty of foot traffic at night, Lewis suddenly realized. He was thinking of the Core, and more specifically, of the communal shit’n’shower known as the Crapaud. Healthfully situated in the woods, away from the dwellings, accessible only via a narrow path through the forest—a path every person in the Core probably traveled every night.

Fish in a barrel—a parade of fish in a barrel, so to speak. All Lewis would have to do would be to position himself in the underbrush, wait for somebody to come by alone, whack ’em on the head, drag ’em into the bushes, hack off a hand—right hand, he reminded himself—and melt back into the forest.

Melt back into the forest—Lewis liked the sound of that. Hot damn! he thought, pouring himself a celebratory shot and slamming the half-empty bottle down hard on the table next to his armchair. Maybe this Machete Man thing wasn’t going to be so difficult after all.