Twenty-Seven Bones (4 page)

Holly had rules. She didn’t drive stoned, she didn’t work stoned, and she didn’t get stoned around the kids, which meant that it wasn’t until nearly ten o’clock that night that she finally got a chance to sample her new purchase. She rolled the world’s thinnest joint in her room and took it outside to smoke.

It was a quiet night. There was no moon, but the stars were bright enough to read by. The temperature was perfect—if there’d been an outdoor thermostat, this was where she’d have set it—and the air smelled of the rain forest. It was a scent that was hard to describe and even harder to forget, all undertones, sweet and earthy, ripe and rotten, a rose garden planted over a shallow grave. Most of the cabins and Quonsets dotting the cleared hillside were dark, but Holly could see Peeping Fran, her nearest uphill neighbor, lying on a chaise longue on the screened-in veranda behind his cabin, writing by the blue-white light of a Coleman lantern. He looked up and waved; she held up the joint by way of invitation; Fran shook his head.

After the initial hit Holly felt herself begin to truly relax for the first time since her encounter with the dickhead at Blue Valley. After the second hit she was obliged to concede that Vincent had been telling the truth: this was indeed two-toke smoke. Which was about how long it took for word to get around among the mosquito population that supper was being served.

Holly wetted the tips of her thumb and forefinger with her tongue, clipped the joint, and turned to go back inside. As she opened the screen door she heard Dawn crying and hurried into the kids’ bedroom.

“What is it, baby?”

Sniffling; hiccups.

Holly switched on the battery-powered lamp between the twin beds—nothing short of a tornado would wake Dawn’s ten-year-old brother at this point—ducked under the mosquito netting, and crawled into the narrow bed beside Dawn. “C’mon, baby doll, tell Auntie Holly what the problem is.”

Dawn, tight-lipped, between hiccups: “Something…in my eye.”

Oops, thought Holly. My bad. “Dawnie, this afternoon, when I picked you up at school and you asked me if I’d been crying, and I said no, I’d just gotten something in my eye, that wasn’t only a lie, it was a BPM. A big fat BPM.”

Two years ago, when Holly took on the role of single mother, she’d felt so utterly unprepared that she’d decided there was no point even
trying
to bluff her way through it. So when she realized she’d blown a call, deciding arbitrarily to enforce bedtime by the clock instead of the sun, for instance, or insisting upon helping Marley perform some everyday task instead of letting him do it himself, regardless of how long it took or how uncomfortable it was to watch, she had no problem apologizing, declaring a BPM—Bad Parenting Move—and reversing her own ruling.

“Unh-unh.” Dawn shook her head doubtfully.

“Unh-
hunh,”
said Holly. “When something scares you or makes you sad, it’s always better to talk about it instead of keeping it bottled up—even when you’re a grown-up.”

“You go first, then.” Dawn rolled over to face Holly. Her eyes were startlingly bright and blue, and her skin was the color of medium toast, just a shade darker than her tawny hair in its tight cornrows. Plaiting West Indian style was another skill Holly had had to learn on the job. A shaneh yid, Holly’s late rabbi grandfather would have said of his little brown great-granddaughter—he’d have been speaking ironically, of course.

“Okay.” Holly took a deep breath, blew it out slowly, to demonstrate to her niece that this wasn’t easy for her, either. “I was working at Blue Valley, and one of my clients said something very nasty to me and really hurt my feelings.”

“Did you tell him sticks and stones?”

Holly laughed—if you didn’t find that kids had as much to teach you as you had to teach them, you just weren’t paying attention. “No, but I should have. I should have told myself, too. Instead I ran away. Your turn, now.”

“I was thinking about something bad that could happen.”

“What’s that, baby doll?”

“I was thinking what if
you,
well, you know.”

“Not really.”

“What if you…you know, like Mommy.”

“What if I died, you mean?”

Dawn covered her ears; her hands are still so tiny, thought Holly. “Don’t say that, Auntie.”
Doan say dot, Ahntie
—what her grandfather would have made of the West Indian accents the kids slipped in and out of so easily, Holly couldn’t begin to imagine.

Her first instinct was to explain that death was nothing to fear, that it was just part of life, but that would have been another BPM. It wasn’t death the child feared, it was abandonment. “Tell you what, baby doll. I give you my solemn promise, I’ll live to dance at your wedding.”

“That means if I don’t ever get married, you have to live forever,” said Dawn.

“Very funny,” said Holly. “Now go to sleep.”

The torchlight flickered, sending oily black smoke drifting across the cavern ceiling. Emily Epp staggered away from the lifeless body on the horizontal cross. Her knees buckled; her eyes were rolled up into her head, only the whites showing. Phil caught her, steadied her; he and Bennie helped her back to the chamber they called the white room.

All three wore ceremonial gilt-threaded
sarungs;
all three were bare to the waist. Emily fell heavily to her knees on the nearest rattan mat. As Phil and Bennie helped her lie down, the men’s eyes met across her body. Phil rolled his briefly toward the corner of the ceiling—what a drama queen, said the look. Bennie’s creased face was impassive as always. You could read anything you wanted into it. Phil read affectionate agreement.

“You going to be okay, Em?” he asked his wife.

“I just need some time to integrate,” she said weakly, but it did not escape Phil’s notice that as she lay back and crossed her hands over her belly, she did not fail to press her elbows and arms against her sides to push her bazooms together. Vanity, thy name is woman, thought Phil.

But Emily’s men had work to do. Leaving Emily to her integration, they returned to the cavern they called the cross chamber and unstrapped the body. Phil, the stronger of the two men, took the shoulders. Bennie, more agile, took the feet and led the way, walking backward. Phil used the beam from his helmet lamp to guide them down a sort of natural winding staircase carved into the limestone by an underground stream that no longer existed.

After thirty or forty feet, the path forked. To the left was the stinking chamber they called the Bat Cave, for obvious reasons. The bats were the size of large crows; the males had testicles like Ping-Pong balls. Phil guided Bennie to the right, through an archway to the Oubliette, which appeared to be a hollowed-out lava chute, an upcropping of the hundred-million-year-old volcanic bedrock upon which the limestone caprock had gradually accrued over the past two million years.

In a way, the Oubliette was the reason the Epps were conducting their rites belowground in the first place. When they first settled on St. Luke, several years earlier, they’d conducted the sacrifices at home and buried the bodies in the rain forest.

But when that little Jenkuns girl surfaced two years ago under a baobab tree—a Judas Bag tree, the natives called it—in the old slave burying ground, they realized they had to find a more secure place to dispose of the bodies. While searching the forest for a suitable location, they had discovered the cave complex mentioned by the early Spaniards.

The entrance had been plugged by a boulder, but removing it had been an easy task for Phil and Bennie, and it had taken them only two days of unchallenging caving to find the apparently bottomless dry well formation they named the Oubliette. From that day forward, they’d never had to worry about where to dump bodies again.

Together Phil and Bennie laid their burden on the ledge, perpendicular to the edge of the hole. Bennie chanted a Niassian prayer that translated roughly as:
Let he who travels the sea return within a cycle of the moon; let he who travels to the grave be seen no more on earth.
Then they dropped the body feetfirst down the hole. A few seconds later there was a splash—the men turned to each other in surprise, each momentarily blinding the other with his helmet lamp. Apparently the bottomless dry well wasn’t bottomless after all—or dry.

“Must have been this last hurricane,” said Phil, blinking. “Groundwater seepage or something.”

Bennie shrugged. Dry grave, watery grave, all the same to him, so long as the traveler never returned.

“How was that, Miss Brown? Are you feeling better?”

“Heavenly.” The toothless ancient glanced over her shoulder at Holly, who had just finished deep-massaging her withered glutes, and gave her a blue-black, gummy grin. “Gyirl, nobody ain’ touch me like dot in go’ on forty year, y’know?”

Holly’s Tuesday/Thursday morning gigs at the Governors Clifford B. Apgard Rest Home were simultaneously her most rewarding and her least remunerative. It would take her three hours of hard work to earn what she could make in a single hour elsewhere, but the head nurse had told Holly privately that the incidence of decubitus ulcers, commonly known as bedsores, had decreased 25 percent since Holly had begun working there.

Some of the improvement, of course, was the direct result of therapeutic massage bringing increased blood flow and muscle tone, but the most important benefits, Holly suspected, were indirect. When your body feels better, you move around more; when you move around more, you get fewer bedsores.

After the rest home, Holly drove by Busy Hands, located in a sprawling single-story cinder-block building situated directly across the Circle Road from the Sunset Bar, to pick up her messages and maybe a little work—after paying her rent, she’d be closer to broke than she had been all year.

The front room, which looked more like the waiting room of a seedy transmission repair shop, was empty. Mrs. Ishigawa was at her desk in the front office, behind the counter, cooking the books for lunch.

“I just dropped by to see if there are any extra shifts available this week.”

“Nope.” As always, Mrs. Ishigawa looked like the world’s oldest geisha, dressed in kimono, obi, split-toed ankle socks, and split-toed sandals, with a chopstick through her upswept, improbably black hair. As always, she was holding a lit cigarette between the ring and pinky fingers of her left hand. “But you got two terephone corrs, one woman, one man,” added the old woman, in her mincing, West Indian-flavored Japanese accent. “Man was Apgard—I terr him, shoot, mon, you run terephone rine up to Core, you cheap bassard, you don’t gotta bodda me ev’y five second.”

“And the woman?”

“I don’ ’membah name. You check burretin board.” Mrs. Ishigawa waved her cigarette in the direction of the corkboard next to the pay phone on the cinder-block wall behind her.

The woman turned out to be Emily Epp, half of a nice couple who’d been among Holly’s earliest non–Busy Hands clientele. Holly called her back first, set up an appointment, then returned her landlord’s call.

“Apgard here.”

“Mr. Apgard, it’s Holly Gold.”

“Miss Holly! Good to hear from you, thanks for calling me back. I find myself in desperate need of your services. What’s your schedule like this afternoon?”

“Conveniently enough, I just made an appointment with your tenants at the overseer’s house. I should be done around two.”

“How about two-thirty at the Great House, then? We’ll set up your table by the pool. Be a lot more comfortable, and you can take a dip afterward.”

Holly thought about it for a moment. She’d never been out to the Great House before—she rarely paid home visits to single male “happy ending” clients like Apgard. But the Great House was supposed to be quite a place—not to mention she’d get to keep everything she made instead of turning half of it over to Mrs. Ishigawa. “Two o’clock it is.”

“I’ll be looking forward to seeing you,” said Apgard warmly.

There was something in his tone of voice that Holly found faintly disturbing—it set off what she thought of as her uh-oh alarm. She would have called him back to reschedule at the Busy Hands, house cut or no house cut, but she couldn’t think of an excuse. The man
was
her landlord: piss him off, and she and the kids might end up living under a green plastic roof in Sugar Town.