Twenty-Seven Bones (17 page)

“Good morning, Agent Pender,” Apgard, sleep-tousled, in rumpled shirt and shorts, met Pender at the door and ushered him into the drawing room.

“Good morning, Mr. Apgard. Sorry to have to bother you.” Julian had insisted Pender take a cruiser to use for the duration, instead of the Vespa. Pender had had the switchboard operator patch him through to Apgard on his way over from the Core, to let him know he was coming.

“Not at all. What was it you needed to see me about?”

Pender answered with a question of his own. “When did you last see your tenant, Francis Bendt?”

“Let me think—Thursday? No, Wednesday—I remember because that was the second of the month, the day after his rent was due. We had a drink at the Sunset, he gave me a sob story, I told him pay up or move out, he paid up. Why?”

“He was murdered last night.”

“My God, no!”

“We think it’s probably the same man who killed your wife. And another of your tenants, a Mr. Arena, has been reported missing.”

Lewis was genuinely thunderstruck this time—it hadn’t occurred to him before that the Epps might be behind Arena’s disappearance as well. “Cheese-an’-bread, that explains that.”

“What explains what?”

“Arena missed his rent, too, this month. First time ever for him. I’m…I can’t…Excuse me.” He crossed the room, opened the glass-fronted liquor cabinet, poured himself a shot of Reserve. “How about you, Agent Pender?”

“I’ll pass.”

Lewis tossed back his first shot of the morning, then sent a friend down the hatch after it. “Were there any clues this time? Do you have any suspects?”

“A few promising leads,” said Pender. That was FBI-speak for zilch. “The reason I’m here, though, is that I’m concerned about the safety of the rest of your tenants at Estate Tamarind—and of course that’s the first place we’re looking at in terms of suspects. And since it looks as though I’m going to be down here longer than I’d anticipated and I’ll need a place to stay anyway…”

“Say no more. Why don’t you take the A-frame at the end of the lane, on the left. Electricity, sleeping loft, gorgeous view.”

Pender asked what it was going for. Apgard said he wouldn’t
think
of charging him. Just catching whoever was doing this would be payment enough. And the furniture in the storage shed behind the kitchen had all belonged to deadbeats and skip-rents, he added—Pender was to help himself. Pender thanked him, asked him where he could pick up the key to the A-frame.

“No key required,” Apgard replied. “Didn’t seem to be much point putting a lock on a door of a house with plastic screens for walls.”

That last comment continued to resonate with Pender as he left the Great House, bound for the strip mall to stock his new digs. Screen walls, no locks. He decided maybe he’d accept Julian’s offer of a gun to go along with the squad car. Something with double action for a quick double tap. And big. A forty-five at least. Three-fifty-seven Magnum would be even better, Pender decided. Guy’s swinging a machete at you, you don’t just want those first two rounds knocking him
down,
you want them knocking him
backward.
Especially if you have plans for that right hand of yours—plans that don’t include separate burial.

You don’t avoid authority successfully for over thirty years by hanging around crime scenes. The previous night Dawson had donned her backpack and lit out for the forest before the police arrived, and had stayed there until the coast had cleared back at the Core.

Or until she thought it had cleared, anyway. The Core seemed to have returned to normal—there were no cops on the hillside—but when she walked down to the kitchen to get her homemade yogurt out of the communal refrigerator, there was a green-and-white police cruiser parked alongside the usual collection of junkers, under the flamboyant tree at the end of the lane.

Her heart started pounding. Fight or flight. Flight or flight, more like it. She spooned a couple of dollops of yogurt into a cereal bowl from the drying rack, sprinkled some wheat germ on, and hurried back up the hill. But not fast enough. She heard a man shouting her name, turned, and saw Pender strolling toward her down the dappled lane. “Dawson!”

My God, she thought—who dresses that man? Yellow-and-green Hawaiian shirt, blue-and-white-plaid Bermudas, orange-and-white flip-flops. His legs were nearly as white as his Panama hat. “Hey, Ed.”

He caught up to her. “Did you hear, we’re neighbors. I just moved into that A-frame at the end of the lane.”

“Welcome to the Core,” said Dawson.

“Thank you. Which one’s your house?”

“That Quonset at the top of the clearing.” She pointed.

“Looks nice and cozy.”

“Cozy—that’s the word.” The floor of the round hut was less than twenty feet across.

“Listen, I was wondering if I could ask you something.”

“I suppose.”

“It’s just, I don’t really know very many people here. And I still owe you for saving my keister the other day. So I was hoping maybe you’d let me take you out to dinner tonight.”

“It’s really not necessary,” said Dawson.

“I know—but it’s a damn good excuse for asking you out,” said Pender. “You’re not going to make me have to think up another one, are you? Because I will if I have to.”

That threw Dawson for a loop. The truth, she thought—what a concept.

Pender wanted to try local cuisine. Dawson suggested the Raintree Room, just outside of Frederikshavn, about a quarter of a mile up the dundo road. Dundo meant darkened, she explained, for the way the forest canopy closed out the sky.

The dundo road—Hettie Jenkuns. “Is there a cemetery up that way?” he asked Dawson. They were in his police cruiser; he’d turned off the two-way radio.

“The old slave burying ground.”

“I’d like to take a look.”

“Just keep driving. Watch for a turnoff on the right, after we pass the public grove.”

THE GOVERNOR CLIFFORD B. APGARD, SR. PUBLIC GROVE
, according to the roadside plaque erected by the St. Luke Historical Preservation Society. A few acres of gnarled lime trees—little Key limes.

No plaque marked the turnoff for the slave burying ground—just a rutted dirt track, and even that narrowed until the cruiser could no longer pass. Which meant the Machete Man had to have known this place existed beforehand, thought Pender—he hadn’t just stumbled on it. Which meant in turn that he was either a local or knew something about local history.

Of which Dawson was a fount. Pender followed her down a footpath that opened out onto a level clearing with an enormous baobab tree in the middle. “They say in the old days they used to hold Obeah rituals up here,” she told him. “You know, torches and drums and dancing, maybe sacrifice a chicken under the Judas Bag tree.”

“The what?”

“Judas Bag. That’s another name for the baobab, on account of those.” She pointed to one of the foot-long oval bags dangling from the branches of the tree. “Each one’s supposed to have exactly thirty seeds—you know, like the thirty pieces of silver Judas got for ratting on Jesus.

“It’s one of the longest-lived trees in the forest, and also one of the most useful. The trunks are hollow, so you can get water from them, you can make paper, cloth, and thread out of the bark, and they say you can eat the fruit—I’ve never tried.”

The weeds had already obscured Hettie’s temporary grave, as they had the older, more permanent graves, only a few of which were still marked with faded headstones or half-toppled wooden crosses. Cute place to hide a body, thought Pender. The old needle-in-a-haystack trick. Bones in a boneyard, two bits.

And according to what Dawson had told him the other day, the rocks and ledges at the base of the Carib cliffs were supposed to be sort of a boneyard as well. So was it possible the bodies had been placed there, rather than simply washed up by happenstance?

Damned if I know, thought Pender—he was starting to feel the flop sweat again.

Before he left the Great House Saturday evening, Johnny laid out Lewis’s black suit for Hokey’s funeral Sunday, folding the trousers over the dowel of the dumb valet and slipping the coat over its rounded mahogany shoulders. Lewis was in the shower, washing away a late-afternoon hangover. He’d kept on drinking after Pender left, and eased his nerves further with a pipeful of chronic. Maybe more than one—his subsequent nap had lasted through suppertime.

After another slug of overproof to wash down a handful of aspirin, then a hot shower, using one of Hokey’s shower caps to protect the bandage on his head, Lewis was feeling more himself. Before leaving the bathroom, he opened the window to air it out—in this climate, new life-forms had been known to spring up overnight.

When Lewis returned to the bedroom, the suit on the dumb valet gave him a turn. It looked a little like the Baron Samedi effigy they used in voodoo ceremonies. And he hadn’t worn black since the Guv’s funeral. He remembered reading somewhere that the Chinese or the Africans or somebody wore white for mourning. Wouldn’t that cause a stir at First Lutheran tomorrow, thought Lewis.

He had to get through the night first, though. Hopefully without leaning quite as hard on the Reserve, he promised himself as he changed into a pair of Bermudas and a crimson-and-blue rugby shirt. But the worst was behind him, and he’d come up with a plan in the shower. Might as well take advantage of the Epps’s absence to go through the overseer’s house, find out what he could about his new…what was the word? collaborators? conspirators? partners?

Because as soon as the deal had gone down, Lewis had begun to have second thoughts, if not about the deal itself, then about the Epps. Second, third, and fourth thoughts. Three nights ago, it hadn’t seemed to matter. He’d been looking for something he’d almost despaired of finding—a way to get rid of Hokey—and then it turned up right next door. A gift horse like that, you don’t look in the mouth.

But now that he was mixed up with the Epps, he was beginning to realize that he knew almost nothing about them. Except that they’d murdered at least…he had to tick them off on his fingers…the St. Luke girl, the two bodies found on the cliff, Hokey, possibly Arena…five people.

Lewis slipped on a pair of well-worn loafers and walked to the overseer’s house. His intention was to search the entire place, but he never even made it to the front door, because when he reached the landing where the stone staircase turned left, the archway leading to the old Danish kitchen caught his attention. He played the flashlight beam around the cellarlike room. Low ceiling, stone walls, dirt floor. Three big steamer trunks, padlocked. Bunch of suitcases, unlocked. Empty.

But across the room there were signs of disturbance. The rectangular stone hollow in the wall that had once housed the oven was still boarded over with the tin Maubey Soda sign he’d nailed to the masonry years ago to discourage rats from nesting. But there were no cobwebs, the dirt under the sign was sprinkled with masonry dust, and the old nails had been removed and replaced so many times he had no trouble pulling them out with his fingertips.

He put the flashlight down, lifted the sign away, leaned it against the wall beside the hole, picked up the flashlight, played it around the hole. Four feet high, wide, and deep, set three feet above floor level, it appeared empty at first, but it was obvious from the lack of dust that the grate in the bottom had been removed recently.

Again, Lewis set the flashlight down. He lifted the grate out with both hands, put it on the floor, then leaned into the oven, holding the flashlight next to his cheek and aiming the beam straight down into the old fire pit under the oven hole, once a good three feet deep, with ancient ashes and charred log ends scattered at the bottom, but filled in now with dirt to within six inches of the top.

The flashlight had begun to flicker and dim. Lewis switched it off and put it down to save what was left of the batteries. Gingerly, with his fingertips, he began sifting and probing the loose-packed soil, which had to have been hauled in from the garden. Obviously his tenants had gone to a good deal of trouble to bury something under the oven. But what? Treasure? Their life savings? Some Indonesian artifact too valuable to be displayed upstairs with the rest of their—

His fingers struck something metallic. Eh, eh, well me gad, and what have we here? Further excavation, and a quick shake of the dying flashlight, revealed a white-and-gold canister roughly the size of a coffee can buried on its side a few inches beneath the surface. John McCann Steel Cut Irish Oatmeal, he read, just before the flashlight beam flickered out entirely.

Working in the dark, Lewis prised the can free, shook off the clinging dirt. The contents rattled dully—they were neither heavy nor metallic. He pried off the lid with his fingernails. A puff of stale air escaped, faintly dusty, organic-smelling but not unpleasant.

Lewis felt around in the front pockets of his Bermudas, came up with his windproof butane joint lighter. The flame was forceful, but narrow and blue, not meant for illumination. Lewis tilted the can, held the lighter up to the rim, and mindful of the blue flame hissing and dancing only inches from his face, he cocked his head and peered in.

As Lewis’s eyes adjusted to the light, what had appeared at first to be a can of ivory-colored sticks and stones proved to be a can of disarticulated bones, some like sticks, long and thin or short and thin, but flared out delicately at the ends, others roundish, like irregularly shaped stones, and still others short, with conical tips.

They were, of course, the bones of a human hand. If he’d counted, he’d have found twenty-seven of them—eight carpals, five metacarpals, and fourteen phalanges—and if he’d measured them against the bones of his own hand, he might have concluded that they were the bones of a child named Hettie Jenkuns.

But Lewis Apgard neither counted nor measured the bones. Instead, once he’d recovered from his gruesome shock, he replaced the lid on the can, replaced the can in the dirt, replaced the grate at the bottom of the oven and the Maubey Soda sign over the hole in the wall, and hurried back to the Great House as fast as he could without actually breaking into a run.