Twenty-Seven Bones Read online

  “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.”

  4

  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.

  5

  “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 Cliff
ord 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.

  6

  For law enforcement the decision to issue advisories was a tough one, for civilians a no-brainer. Ater-lay that afternoon Dawson told Holly about Pender’s warning; just before sunset Holly convened a residents’ meeting in the vacant A-frame across the tamarind-shaded lane from Andy Arena’s house.

  This second ’frame was the most expensive rental at the Core, which was why it was also generally vacant. It featured a sleeping loft, electricity, and a back porch that overlooked a rolling meadow with a great spreading rain tree plunked down in the middle for a centerpiece, so elegant, graceful, and symmetrical it could well have been Mother Nature’s corporate logo, especially from spring through fall, when it was covered with pink tufts that lit it up like a Tiffany lamp at sunrise and sunset.

  The assemblage of adult Corefolk (the kids, supervised by Dawson, were playing a vigorous game of Red Rover Come Over down in the meadow), was an object lesson in diversity, a rainbow coalition, if your idea of a rainbow is varying shades of white, peach, beige, brown, and black. Holly stood with her back to the fine-mesh plastic screening that enclosed the rear A of the A-frame.

  “I’ll make this short. Most of you know that Andy Arena has disappeared. Yesterday an FBI agent named Pender came around asking questions about him. Then when Dawson ran into Pender at Smuggler’s Cove this afternoon, he gave her a vague warning about how something dangerous was happening on St. Luke, and not to hike alone in the forest.

  “She wasn’t sure what he was talking about until we saw in the paper that Mrs. Apgard, our landlord’s wife, was murdered yesterday. Now neither of us knows exactly what’s going on here, but we thought the least we could do was let everybody else know what we knew.”

  There were a few questions; Holly had even fewer answers. Everyone left the meeting in a somber mood, none more somber than Fran Bendt.

  The reporter already knew about Hokey Apgard’s death, including the manner of it, which seemed on its face to be the work of the Machete Man. But it did seem like quite a coincidence, Hokey Apgard becoming one of the Machete Man’s victims the day after her husband learned of his existence. And now that the FBI was sniffing around the Core and Smuggler’s Cove, the story was getting juicier and juicier.

  So tomorrow, Fran decided, he would do a little more sniffing around himself, see what he could find out about the G-man. Maybe even get an interview. Then he’d take one last stab at persuading Faartoft to buy the story before he offered it to St. Thomas’s Virgin Island Daily News, St. Croix’s Avis, or one of the Puerto Rican papers. A scoop like that would buy enough coke to last him…well, until it was gone, and by then the Machete Man would be his story—the wires and the networks would be coming to him.

  Still the question remained: now that the Machete Man seemed to be striking close to home—Arena had been a resident of the Core, and Estate Apgard was less than a mile to the east—was it Fran’s duty to share his information with his neighbors, and if so, how much? He’d almost spoken up in the meeting. The only thing that had stopped him was the possibility of being scooped himself. There were no St. Luke natives at the Core—everybody had relatives on other islands, or back in the States. Whom they’d be sure to tell. Sayonara, scoop.

  And now that his neighbors had reason to be on their guard anyway, what good would it do any of them to know the particulars? It wasn’t like the guy was going to be running around waving his machete. By the time you saw the machete, Fran suspected, it was probably too late to save yourself anyway.

  7

  Lewis left the Great House on foot, wearing a black watch cap over his bandaged scalp, black jeans, a black nylon jacket zipped up the front over a black T-shirt, two golf gloves, and a pair of Topsiders he would be disposing of along with the other clothes when he was done.

  His first stop was the overseer’s house. He let himself in—Lewis had keys to all his rentals, or at least to all the ones with locks. As promised, the machete was hidden in the same hollow of the masonry wall in which Lewis used to hide his porn when there was only one bedroom, back when he and Hokey had lived there as newlyweds. He’d been expecting something fancy, maybe from Indonesia, but it was only the steel-bladed, wooden-handled, utilitarian affair carried by every garote in the Caribbean. (A garote, the disparaging St. Luke term for a down-islander, was an island-hopping bird with a voracious appetite.)

  He also found the short-handled sap with which Bennie had brained him Wednesday night, and a miner’s helmet with a dual laser/LED lamp attached. He donned the helmet over his watch cap, slipped the truncheon into his pocket and the unsheathed machete through his belt, and set o
ut across the sheep pasture in the direction of Estate Tamarind, on the far side of the southeasternmost finger of the rain forest ridge.

  The moon had dropped behind the ridge when Lewis reached the high wooden fence at the end of the pasture. He slipped sideways through the narrow stile. The path began to rise almost immediately; Lewis switched on the white LED beam as sharp-smelling turpentine trees closed out the sky.

  The forest path had been cleared in the 1700s as a thoroughfare for the wagons hauling Apgard cane up the hill to the windmill at the summit of the ridge. As a boy, Lewis used to play at driving imaginary slave-, mule-, and ox-drawn wagons with his great-great-grandfather’s old bullwhip. As a man he’d used the path on his Peeping Tom expeditions to the Core.

  The fingernail moon was just setting behind the sea when Lewis reached the stone ruins at the summit. The blades and works of the windmill itself were long gone, but the stone tower still stood. Say what you would about those old slave-driving Danes—they knew how to build.

  Lewis switched off the LED and used the red laser and the starlight to guide him down the other side of the ridge, then switched off the laser as the lights of the Core winked into view through the trees.

  8

  Holly’s cabin was about the size of a double-wide trailer, with a plank floor, plywood walls left open around the top for ventilation (fine-mesh plastic screening kept the bugs out—and in), and a corrugated tin roof. The bedrooms were on either end. The middle room served as kitchen, dining, and living rooms—some long-departed, ingenious Peace Corps carpenter had fitted it out with counters that folded up and a table that folded down.

  There was neither running water nor electricity in the cabin. Holly did most of her cooking in the big, open-sided communal kitchen down by the lane, which had both electricity and water, plus a big iron restaurant stove, an enormous refrigerator (all contents labeled with the owner’s name, and woe betide the poacher), two industrial-sized sinks, and two long trestle tables.