Twenty-Seven Bones (15 page)

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.

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 out 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.

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.

But the Golds usually ate as a family, back in the cabin. Mealtimes, therefore, involved considerable schlepping, of which Dawn did a major share, sometimes cheerfully and sometimes with a sigh, a toss of her tawny plaits, and a put-upon trudge. Marley was the family dishwasher—it occasionally gave Core newcomers a start to see him sitting on a high stool, with a dishrag in one foot and a plate in the other, but they always got over it.

Holly had to leave for work right after dinner. Her remunerative weekend nights at Busy Hands still provided the bulk of her income. Usually she let the kids stay in the cabin by themselves, and arranged for either Dawson or one of the other Corefolk to check in on them, supervise bedtime, be available for emergencies. But not with the Machete Man on the prowl. Tonight Dawson would stay in the cabin with the kids and sleep in Holly’s bed. This worked out well for all concerned. Though Dawson wouldn’t have admitted it under pain of torture, she wasn’t exactly thrilled about the idea of sleeping alone in the first hut this side of the forest.

Friday nights were the busiest night at the ’Hands. Six masseuses, and the waiting room crowded with down-island men. Depressed as the St. Luke economy was, there were islands in the Caribbean that were more depressed still, and many of their men found their way to St. Luke. Those that didn’t find work moved on. Those that did lined up at the post office every Friday to purchase money orders to send home to their families on Antigua or St. Vincent or St. Lucia. Afterward they made the rounds of the Frederikshavn bars, and after that, many of the ones who for religious, sentimental, or hygienic reasons didn’t seek out one of the down-island whores on Wharf Street, ended up at Busy Hands.

Holly of course didn’t know much about the men who sought their pleasures on Wharf Street, but the ones who came to the parlor were surprisingly polite, even shy, once they were on the table with their clothes off. They all called her Miss Holly, they were all appreciative of her legitimate massage work, and while most, though not all, wanted extras, they usually kept their hands to themselves, and not even the drunkest had ever spoken to her like that schmuck at Blue Valley.

And serial killer or no serial killer, Busy Hands was probably one of the safest places on the island—Mrs. Ishigawa had an armed bouncer on the premises every night, two on weekends. But when Holly left work that night, she found herself locking all of Daisy’s doors, which she’d never done before, and her Mysterian prayers for Daisy’s clutch to hold out were more heartfelt than usual.

Holly made it home without incident. After parking Daisy just inside the gate, which no one had bothered to lock—it wasn’t like the killer was going to come driving up the lane—she climbed the hillside and let herself into the darkened cabin. She checked on the kids first, standing in the doorway for a few moments listening to them breathing in their sleep. Dawnie sounded a little nasal; Holly hoped she wasn’t coming down with a cold.

She tiptoed into her own bedroom. Dawson was asleep under the covers, facing the wall. Holly undressed quietly, so as not to wake her strictly platonic friend, and changed into her bathrobe, which was hanging as usual on the bedside chair (also her desk chair, given the dimensions of the room).

On her way out, Holly grabbed the string shower bag containing toothpaste, toothbrush, a towel, a bath brush, bottles of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Soap, shampoo and conditioner, a box of Cobra brand mosquito coils, a lighter, and the old Sucrets tin in which she kept her roaches—she’d smoked the last of the chronic two nights earlier.

But she’d only gone a few steps when it suddenly occurred to her that perhaps waltzing blithely into the night wasn’t the brightest move in the world, with a serial killer on the loose. She hurried back to the cabin, tiptoed into the kids’ room, and rummaged through the shoebox containing Marley’s miscellaneous treasures—marbles, foreign coins, stones, seashells, empty shell casings, etc.—until she found his silver referee’s whistle, which she slipped into her bathrobe pocket.

The Crapaud was an echoing, tin-roofed, cinder-block building with a sloping cement floor for drainage, sinks and shower stalls on one side, and a row of toilet stalls behind swinging green wooden doors on the other.

Holly closed the door quickly to keep the mosquitos out. She shined her flashlight around—the Crapaud was empty. She settled into her favorite stall, smoked a good-sized roach, and browsed an old
Rolling Stone
by flashlight (each stall boasted a magazine rack) while sitting on one of the thrones. No flush plumbing—the toilet seats were mounted over holes above a deep black stinking pit into which lime was thrown at irregular intervals.

By this time, Holly was used to the pit, but she’d never really gotten used to the cold showers. She entered the stall, hung her bathrobe on the peg, balanced her flashlight on the window ledge, pointing down, turned the tap, and was dancing furiously under the resulting flow of cold water when she heard the creaky Crapaud door being opened.

“Help me.” A man’s voice, barely audible.

Holly turned the water off. “Who’s there?”

“Help me, please God, help me.”

She put on her bathrobe, wrapped the towel around her hair, grabbed her flashlight, and opened the stall door.

They heard the whistle from one end of the Core to the other. Ruford Shea, dressed only in high-rise bikini underpants, was the first to reach the Crapaud; by then Holly was sitting on the floor with Fran Bendt’s head in her lap. She had wrapped the belt of her bathrobe around Fran’s right forearm, which had been severed at the wrist. Ruford helped her twist a tourniquet using the handle of her bath brush; by the time they’d stopped the bleeding they were covered with blood, and the cement floor was slippery with it.

Fran had gone into shock; his skin felt cold even to Holly, who had just emerged from a cold shower. It didn’t seem possible that he could live after losing so much blood. She cradled his head, stroked his brow, murmured to him as he lost consciousness, and only noticed that the back of his skull had been cracked open when the blood began to soak through the lap of her bathrobe.

For a bunch of flakes, the Corefolk responded to the emergency with surprising efficiency. While Miami Mark jumped into his old flatbed sheep truck and backed it carefully up the hill to the end of the Crapaud path, two search parties were formed, one to check the Core to be sure the killer had left and the other to look for Fran’s hand, which they found in the ivy by the side of the Crapaud.

Three men carried Fran out to the truck; another kept his injured arm elevated. Holly followed, clutching her beltless bathrobe closed with both hands, and watched helplessly as they loaded Fran onto a thin foam egg-carton mattress in the wooden bed of the truck.

Molly Blessingdon, a practical nurse who worked at Missionary, put Fran’s hand in a plastic bag filled with ice. She rode with Fran, along with two men to keep him steady; Miami Mark drove. There was nothing Holly could do, other than return to the Crapaud and take another cold shower to wash the blood off. Dawson brought her a dry towel and a change of clothes, and she went back to the cabin to wait for the police.

Marley was still asleep—that boy could sleep through anything—but Dawn was awake. Holly told her Fran had had an accident and they were taking him to the hospital. Dawn asked if he was going to be okay. We all hope so, but it was a very bad accident, Holly told her. She didn’t know how long the lie would fly, but was determined to shield the little girl from the horror as long as she could.

Because really, when you thought about it, what business did any adult have, telling a little kid the bogeyman was real?