Awaken (20 page)

John reached out and took my hand. “They’ll never lay a finger on you,” he said.

I knew what he meant. We’d be gone before the police ever got inside the room.

It wasn’t the police, however. It was Alex, who loped inside, a backpack slung over one shoulder. He’d changed clothes since the last time I’d seen him. His dark hair was still damp on the ends, and he smelled newly showered.

“There you are,” he said casually, not noticing the tense looks John and I wore. “I’ve been calling you for ages. I don’t know why I bothered; you never answer your phone anyway.”

I’d remembered to slip my phone into the pocket of my dress. I’d forgotten, however, to turn it on.

“We, uh, just woke up a little while ago,” I said, sheepishly dropping John’s hand to hit the power button on my phone. “Where are Frank and Kayla?”

“They went to Kayla’s place to change, then to your friend Mr. Smith’s,” he said, with a meaningful glance at my mom. It was clear he didn’t think we should be talking about any of this in front of her. “They wanted to give Patrick his, er, car back. Then they said they’d meet us” — he lowered his voice, mumbling the next few words so only I could hear them — “at the cemetery.” His tone returned to normal. “Hi, Aunt Deb. Are you okay? You look like you’ve got a headache or something.”

Mom lifted her head. “I’ve been better,” she said. “Would you like some waffles?”

“That’s okay, I just took my dad to breakfast at Denny’s to get him out of the house.” Another meaningful glance at me. “Away from Grandma.”

Mom looked surprised. “Your dad? Oh, Alex, that’s great. How is he doing?”

“Still charged with murder, thanks, Aunt Deb. But I appreciate your bailing him out. Dad? Hey, Dad?”

To my surprise, Uncle Chris poked his head through one of the open sets of French doors. In one hand he was holding an enormous black plastic trash can. In the other, he was dragging a five-foot-long palm frond that had been knocked down by the storm.

“Oh, hey, Deb,” he said with a grin when he saw my mother. “Alex said he wanted to come over and I thought it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to get started on your cleanup. Cassandra was a mean one, huh? Lot of poinciana blossoms in your pool, which is weird, since I didn’t think there was one of those trees around here ….”

His voice trailed off as his gaze landed on me. Then his eyes lit up … until he noticed John. Then he frowned a little. “Piercey! And … you.”

John stepped up to him, his right hand extended. “John,” he said. “Remember? It’s nice to see you again, Mr. Cabrero.”

Uncle Chris didn’t look as if he thought it was so nice to see John again, but he stuffed the palm frond into the garbage can, then shook John’s hand.

“How you doing?” he asked. Then he took a deep breath and said, “Well, I’m going to get back to work. Lots to do if we’re going to get this place cleaned up.” He wrinkled his nose slightly. “Hey, uh, no offense, Deb, but it smells like burned toast in here.”

“Oh, no,” Mom said with a semihysterical laugh. “That was just Pierce’s boyfriend. He lit the carpet on fire with his brain.”

Uncle Chris looked at her as if she’d lost her mind — which I think she had, sort of — and nodded.

“Okay,” Uncle Chris said. “Just checking.” Then he quickly wheeled the trash can away, into the backyard.

Alex, who’d slid onto one of the kitchen counter stools, froze. Only his eyes moved as he cut his gaze towards my mother. “Wait … you
know
?”

“Of course we know,” Mom said. “Why haven’t you told your father yet, Alex? This involves him. After all, Grandma is his mother, too.”

Alex glanced from me to my mother like we were both crazy. “I know. Why do you think I haven’t let him out of my sight since I got here? I’m keeping him as far away from her as I possibly can. But I can’t tell him about any of this. He wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

Mom’s glance came into focus. She frowned with disapproval. I didn’t exactly blame her — Uncle Chris was a lot cooler than many people gave him credit for — but considering her own reaction when she’d heard the news, I didn’t think she had much room to talk.

“Your father isn’t a child, Alexander,” she said. “He doesn’t need your protection.”

“You’re right that he isn’t a child,” Alex said, unzipping his backpack and reaching into it. “But you’re wrong that he doesn’t need protection. My dad needs a lot of protecting, because it doesn’t seem to me as if anyone’s ever bothered to protect him before in his life.”

Alex pulled a file from the backpack — a very similar file to the one he’d taken from Mr. Rector’s office in the spec house on Reef Key — and slapped it onto the kitchen counter. A photo slid out … a photo of my mom with my uncle Chris — both of them looking years younger, twenty years younger at least — and someone who could only be Seth Rector’s father.

When my mother saw the photograph, the color drained from her face. She reached out quickly to snatch it away, but Alex was too fast for her.

“No,” he said, his hand landing over it. “Let Pierce see. She has the right to know.”

“Know what?” I asked, moving towards the counter.

“Pierce,” Mom said. She looked as if she were going to be sick. “I can explain ….”

“I’m interested to hear that explanation,” Alex said. “I’m sure Pierce and John will be, too.” He passed the photo to me.

In the picture, my mom, Uncle Chris, and Mr. Rector were in swimsuits, standing on a sandy beach in front of some mangroves, the bushy kind of tropical tree my mom had always said roseate spoonbills liked to nest in. The three of them were laughing and holding something up for the camera as they mugged for the lens. The things they were holding were yellowish and long, and appeared to have been pulled from the sand. I could see the holes — not very large or very shallow — on the beach behind them, along with a lot of seaweed and driftwood.

There were more things like the ones they were holding sticking up out of the sand all around them. There were also more than a few empty beer bottles, and even an overturned bottle of Captain Rob’s Rum.

“That’s Reef Key, isn’t it?” Alex asked. “Before Mr. Rector and Farah’s dad developed it? Is Farah’s dad the person taking the picture?”

“Yes,” Mom said in a faint voice.

That’s when I took a closer look at what she and Uncle Chris and Mr. Rector were holding up as they laughed into the camera, and finally realized what they were: bones.

Not fish bones, or animal bones.

Human bones.

M
om,” I said, confused, squinting down at the photo. “I don’t understand. Why are you holding up fake bones and laughing? Was it Halloween? Were you guys pretending to be pirates?”

John took the photo away from me.

“Those are not fake,” he said. He put the photo back in the file Alex had laid across the counter and closed the cover.

I glanced from John to my mother. John’s expression was grim. My mother’s was mortified.

I was starting to feel mortified, too, now that I understood.

“We were so young,” Mom murmured.

“You looked like you were my age when that was taken,” I said.

I didn’t mean to sound judgmental. It’s just that no matter how old I was, I don’t think I would ever have picked up real human remains and waved them around, laughing, in front of a camera.

I couldn’t meet John’s gaze. His skeleton could easily have been one of those on that beach, if his body hadn’t ended up in the Underworld instead. The idea of anyone picking up his remains while drunk on a beach and waving them around was causing my blood to boil. A faint pink hue began to tinge the edges of my vision … but not enough to block out the fact that my mother had buried her face in her hands yet again.

“You’re right,” she said. “I was a senior in high school. I should have known better. The four of us — Seth’s father, Nate; and Farah’s father, Bill; and your uncle Chris — we used to go out to that island all the time. I loved it so much … not only because of the birds, which were so beautiful, but because I could get away from your grandmother. She was … well, she was so pushy. She didn’t understand why I loved nature so much. She was always trying to get me to walk with her in the cemetery for some reason.”

I knew exactly why Grandma had always been trying to get my mother to walk with her in the cemetery. She’d been trying to hook her up with John, so she could kill him. Even then, my grandmother had been possessed by a Fury. Mom clearly hadn’t had a very happy childhood.

Still, that didn’t excuse her behavior.

“Gee,” I heard myself saying. “I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t enjoy a nice stroll around the graveyard, considering your affinity for human skeletons.”

John shot me a disapproving look that clearly said,
Now is not the time to be sarcastic to your mother.

“I deserve that,” Mom said miserably. “I know. But the truth is, as much as I protest when your father complains about my mother, I couldn’t stand being around her, either. Nate had a boat. So did a lot of our friends. We’d have little parties out at Reef Key. We truly had some wonderful times.”

“Sure,” Alex said. “Of course you did.” He pulled a sheet of paper from the file in front of him. It was a photocopy of a very ancient-looking legal document. “The Rectors own Reef Key. Here’s the deed.”

Alex passed the photocopy to me. It had a lot of
aforesaid
s and
upon their oath
s in spidery handwriting, but ultimately declared that on the fifth of June
AD
1845, William Joseph Rector personally appeared before the judge and was awarded a certain piece of unoccupied land belonging to the government of the United States of America situated in the township of Isla Huesos. That piece of property would heretofore be known forever after as Reef Key.

Before that, it had been known as Caja de Muertos.

“Caja de Muertos?” I looked up. Though my mom’s side of the family was Spanish, the only words in their native language I knew were dirty words I’d been taught by the housekeeper we’d had when I was kid. I was pretty sure
muertos
meant dead, though.

“Coffin Island,” Alex translated for me as he plucked the deed from my fingers. “Embrace your heritage.” To my mom, he said, “Those Spanish explorers who discovered Isla Huesos in the fifteen hundreds. They called it Isle of Bones because the beach was covered in skeletons. What’d they do with all the skeletons? They didn’t just leave them there, did they?”

Mom didn’t say anything else. She simply looked down at her hands.

The pink tinge deepened until the words were swimming before my eyes. It was difficult to make out anything — or anyone — in the room. Where John was standing, I saw only a vague dark shadow.

I felt an overwhelming urge to reach out to grasp his hand, but at that moment a strong gust of wind blew through my mother’s wide-open French doors. Even though the rain outside was gone, the wind that had fueled the storm raged on.

You were like a kite flying high in the wind, with no one holding its strings
. Mr. Liu’s words popped, unbidden, into my head.
Only the wind that fueled you was your anger.

No wonder I’d felt such a strong urge to reach for John. Mr. Liu was right. I really did need to get control of my own strings, or I’d blow away.

I reached for the handle of the whip Mr. Liu had given to me. I’d slung the belt around my waist on my way back downstairs after brushing my teeth. I wasn’t sure why.

Now I knew. The minute my fingers closed around the handle, the pink began to fade.

“Wait,” I said. “Those explorers buried the remains they found, didn’t they? On Coffin Island? Is that why it’s called that? Is that why you found all those bones there? A storm or something uncovered them?”

Mom brought her hands from her face. Unlike me, she hadn’t noticed the wind. “Bones aren’t all we found there,” she said.

“What else, Dr. Cabrero?” John asked gently, as he returned from closing the French doors.

“Gold?” I asked. My mind was spinning, trying to think why she could look so pale.

Alex shook his head. “Square grouper.”

Confused, I looked from my mother to my cousin. “Is that some species native to this area, like the roseate spoonbill?”

Alex burst out laughing. “No, you idiot. It’s when a drug runner dumps his load in the ocean in order to avoid being charged. When you find a floating bale of marijuana, it’s called a square grouper.”

My eyes widened. “Wait. Drugs? So this
is
about drugs?”

“Don’t call her an idiot,” John said, frowning at Alex.

“Sorry.” Alex even looked as if he felt a little sorry. To my mom, he said, “So that’s how this all started? A bale washed up while you guys were partying on Reef Key?”

She nodded again, her eyes shining with tears. “Nate got the idea to dry it out and break it up and sell it to tourists. Back then, there was no such thing as Homeland Security, and no one was paying very much attention to what went on on an island so much closer to Cuba than to Miami, where all the hard drugs were. And certainly no one would ever suspect a bunch of straight-A high school kids. It all seemed so innocent and even a little bit fun ….”

“Until someone got caught,” Alex said.

Tears had begun to trickle down Mom’s face. I handed her a napkin. She thanked me and wiped her eyes, glancing furtively towards the dining room, where Dad was still yelling into his cell phone at Gary, the guy who had the ferries.

“Exactly,” Mom said. “Then someone had to take the fall. Nate convinced Chris to take the blame, insisting that as a minor, he’d go to juvie and then serve only a year or two. Nate promised Chris that if he took the rap, when he got out, he’d have a job and a small fortune waiting for him.”

“But that wasn’t true,” Alex said.

“Of course it wasn’t true,” Mom said, her voice clogged with emotion. “None of it was true. There isn’t a Rector alive or dead who hasn’t broken every single promise he or she ever gave. It turned out Nate wasn’t even dealing marijuana anymore. Unbeknownst to us, he’d cut a deal with some guys from Miami and moved on to much harder stuff. That’s why Chris got charged as an adult instead of a juvenile. The police knew and wanted Chris to reveal who he was working with.”

Alex’s gaze was on his father, who was across the yard, busily picking up palm fronds and other flotsam from the storm and stuffing them into the garbage can. “But my dad wouldn’t say.”

“Of course not,” Mom said. “You know how he is, loyal to the core. I was horrified when I found out about all of it — the hard drugs, Chris being encouraged to take the blame for what Nate started, the fact that Nate never intended to keep his promise to preserve Reef Key as a spoonbill nesting ground. I was so ashamed of not having had the guts to turn in Nate myself. I wanted to, but he threatened me, saying if I went to the police with what I knew, he’d see to it that Chris had an ‘accident’ in jail.” She began to cry again, raising the napkin to her eyes. “He said he had friends who could arrange it. I was so frightened, I broke off our relationship and left for college and never came back to Isla Huesos, except for my father’s funeral.”

“Oh, Mom,” I said, and went to her side to put an arm around her shoulders, glancing over at John. It was at my grandfather’s funeral that he and I had met. Granted, I’d been only seven, and we’d bonded over a dead bird he’d brought back to life — Hope’s twin. But it had still been a meaningful moment in our relationship. “I’m so sorry all of that happened to you.”

“Don’t be,” Mom said, patting my hand. “It was my fault. I never should have gotten involved with Nate in the first place. I was the older one and set a terrible example for Chris. He was only following my lead. I thought by coming back now that he’s out of jail, I could help him, but things have turned out worse than ever.”

“Well,” I said. “You didn’t know there was a hellmouth under Isla Huesos, or that Grandma was a Fury.”

John narrowed his eyes at me. “It’s not a hellmouth.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “It’s our home. An entrance to the Underworld, then.”

The sound Mom let out was halfway between a sob and a laugh. “No. That’s not something I ever suspected, although perhaps I should have. But I wasn’t particularly surprised to hear Nate Rector parlayed all his illegal drug earnings into the real estate market and has converted Reef Key into a high-scale luxury resort. That seems exactly like the kind of thing the Rector Wreckers would do.”

“I agree.” I dropped my arm from around my mother’s shoulders and moved to tap the file in front of Alex. He’d kept close hold on it when the wind burst in. “What I want to know is what it says in here about those bones they found on the beach.”

Alex grinned devilishly as he reopened the file. “You mean, are Seth’s and Farah’s dads building their fancy new subdivision on top of an
ancient Indian burial ground
?”

“I believe the politically correct term would be
ancient
Native American
burial ground
,” I said. Alex began to crack up, which caused me to crack up, but neither my mother nor John smiled.

“It isn’t funny,” Mom said. “I know what I was doing in the photo was wrong, but I had an excuse: I was young, in love, and maybe a little bit drunk.”

I widened my eyes. Mom said, quickly, “I didn’t say it was a good excuse. And Pierce, if you ever do anything remotely similar, I will ground you for the rest of your life.”

Trying not to smile, I met John’s gaze and found that he, too, was grinning. Mom still didn’t seem to get it: I was
already
grounded for the rest of my life … in the most delicious way possible, in the Underworld, with John.

“The Calusa Indians were fierce warriors and expert sailors,” Mom, not having noticed my smile, was saying. “And they managed to eke out an existence on these islands hundreds of years before comforts like purified drinking water, mosquito repellant, or air-conditioning were invented. They stayed true to their own religion and own way of life, refusing to capitulate to invading foreigners, even as their families were being slaughtered for doing so. It’s hard not to admire them for that.”

“No one here is saying they don’t admire them,” Alex said, pulling another sheet of paper from his file. “We’re saying the exact opposite of that … that we think somewhere along the line, someone dropped the ball. Because while there is this photo of you and my dad playing pirates on the beach — and of course that reference to Coffin Island in the deed — nowhere in any of the paperwork for the Rector and Endicott Reef Key Luxury Homes and Real Estate Development is there one mention of human bones being removed and properly reinterred elsewhere.”

Mom looked troubled. “Well,” she said, rubbing at a spot of maple syrup that had spilled onto the counter. “I suppose it’s possible that Nate had them removed sometime after he and I broke up —”

“Really, Mom?” I said to her. “If he did it right, don’t you think there’d be a marker or a plaque wherever he had them laid to rest?”

She stared at the counter. “It’s been twenty years. There’ve been a lot of storms. It’s possible they simply washed out to sea.”

“It’s also possible they’re sitting in some Dumpster somewhere on the construction site. He’s probably already thrown them under a bulldozer and crushed them into powder, but in case he hasn’t, we need to go back and look.” I glanced at John. “This could be what’s causing the imbalance. One of the first things Mr. Smith ever said to me was that no life, if it was led by a decent person, should go unremembered. He was talking about you, and Coffin Night, but I think maybe we’ve just found out about a whole lot more bodies that were never properly buried.”