Twenty-Seven Bones (7 page)

If St. Luke was to some extent an island out of time, its infrastructure having been badly damaged by Hurricane Eloise in 1975, by Hugo in 1989, and then again by Luis and Marilyn in 1995, and its tourism industry dealt a near-mortal blow by the Blue Valley massacre in 1984, then the former Peace Corps training camp known as the Core was an island within an island.

It wasn’t technically a sixties commune—everybody paid their own rent—but the ethos and the facilities harkened back to that era. Rustic cabins, Quonset huts, and A-frames, no phones, electricity only in the most expensive dwellings, communal shit ’n’ shower. Good people, hippies, neohippies, neo-Luddites, down-islanders from even more impoverished islands. Holly’s idealistic-to-the-point-of-otherworldly sister Laurel and her two mixed-race love children had fit right in.

It wasn’t the worst fit in the world for Holly, either, much as she missed her life in Big Sur. But although the reduction in her earnings had been extreme, the reduction in living expenses had not been. Not only did she have to support a family of three now, but almost all the necessities that appeared magically on the shelves of even the dinkiest groceries in California had to be shipped or flown into St. Luke, oil prices were through the roof, and since the majority of the property on the island was owned by a tiny minority of the population, rents were kept at an artificially high level.

After dropping by Apgard Realty to make her rent payment (of which a larger percentage than usual had come directly from the pocket of the extremely grateful Lewis Apgard himself), Holly took stock of her financial resources and discovered that she had been reduced to a few hundred in the bank and twenty in the pocket. Fortunately, in addition to being rent day, the first of the month was also tempura night at the Core.

Tempura nights were the brainchild of C. B. Dawson, an eccentric (insofar as the word applied at the Core) woman who grew her own vegetables behind her cabin and was given to disappearing into the rain forest for days on end. There she made a slim living from the fruits of the trees, never the trees themselves. Bracelets and necklaces strung from wild tamarindillo seeds, necklaces from the seeds of the elephant’s ear tree, incense holders and paperweights fashioned from sandbox tree fruits, bowls and gourds from calabash and cannonball trees, that sort of thing.

Dawson was the first friend Holly had made on St. Luke, and the closest. At fifty, she was remarkably self-effacing for such a striking-looking woman. Her hair was still naturally dark and her figure impressive enough that last year a man who’d met her on the beach and claimed to own a modeling agency, had given her his card, and told her she could make a six-figure income modeling swimsuits for the mature, full-figured woman—a growing niche, apparently.

But she’d thrown the card away. She told Holly it was out of the question, but wouldn’t say why. Sometimes Holly had the impression Dawson was hiding from someone or something. Why else would a woman who was so broke she could barely afford the rent on the cheapest structure at the Core—a Quonset hut at the very top of the clearing—turn down that kind of money?

But tonight was tempura night, the one night a month that nobody, not even the poorest, green-cardless-est down-islander, went hungry at the Core. Dawson gathered firewood from the forest, set up a wok the size of a microwave antenna in the center of the hillside, established a perimeter of kerosene torches to keep the mosquitos at bay, and spent the next few hours dancing her wok dance in the flickering light of the tiki torches. She peeled, sliced, diced, battered, dropped morsels into the boiling oil and fished them out with a flourish when they floated golden brown to the surface. Young Marley helped by working the bellows with his feet, and the rest of the Corefolk kicked in whatever foodstuffs they had on hand or could afford to buy.

Roger the Dodger, for instance, a gentle-hearted former Vietnam War draft evader, now a sandal maker with a hillbilly beard long enough to hide a family of birds, contributed the cooking oil. Dave and Mary Sample, who had three kids with a fourth on the way, and kept chickens behind their cabin, provided eggs for the batter. Holly provided flour. Molly Blessingdon, a nurse at Missionary Hospital, kicked in a whole chicken, as did Billy Porter, who played guitar for the house band at the King Christian. Everybody else brought veggies, and the Core kids picked mangos, sugar apples, and soursops for dessert.

All contributions were welcome, but the person voted most valuable scrounger at the October tempura party was Ruford Shea, a diminutive down-islander from St. Vincent who’d contributed all the fresh-caught shrimp the capacious pockets of his work pants could hold.

Ruford was also the one who reported seeing Andy Arena’s old yellow Beetle parked across the street from the harbormaster’s shed. It was there when he went to sea in the morning, crewing on a shrimper, Ruford reported, and still there when he returned late this afternoon.

After the last crumb in the Core had been battered, fried, and eaten, Holly and Dawson talked it over. Dawson and Arena had had a brief, passionate affair a few years back—all Dawson’s affairs were brief and passionate.

“It’s not like him,” said Dawson.

“Maybe he’s having a midlife crisis,” Holly suggested.

“Horseshit,” said Dawson. “That’s something men invent when they want to get—Hey, watch it, there!”

A sports car or a teeny-bopper girlfriend, she’d been about to say, but a soccer ball had just whizzed past her head, missing her by inches, and when she caught sight of Holly’s nephew racing after it as if he hadn’t a care in the world, she didn’t feel much like bitching. Which was not an unusual response: Marley had that effect on a lot of people. “Never mind, skip it.”

“You think we should file a missing person’s report?” asked Holly.

“You do it.”

“Why don’t you do it? You know him better than I do, you can give them a lot more—”

Dawson cut her off. “I just don’t like to get messed up with the police. Avoid authority, the Buddhists say.”

“Since when are you a Buddhist?”

Dawson lay back on the blanket, looking up at the stars, which were pretty spectacular at this latitude, this far from city lights. “Us Mysterians say that, too,” she replied.

“What’s a Mysterian?” asked Marley, dribbling his soccer ball over to Holly, stopping it on a dime, plopping himself down into her lap, leaning back.

“It’s a religion Dawson and I made up,” Holly explained, putting her arms around him and pulling him tightly against her. “After that Iris Dement song—you know, the one I’m always playing about let the mystery be? Mysterians aren’t atheists, or even agnostics. They know there’s some big mystery out there, but for the most part—”

“Never mind. I thought it was like some kind of
Star Trek
thing—Klingons, Mysterions. Can I stay up an hour late tonight? Mr. Bendt says there’s gonna be a meteor shower, and he’s gonna set up the telescope.”

“As long as he keeps it pointed at the sky,” said Holly—they didn’t call their neighbor Peeping Fran for nothing.

Hokey went to bed early—tomorrow was her morning to volunteer at the rest home named for Lewis’s father and grandfather. Lewis watched Lou Dobbs on the TV in his study. Hokey was a member of the St. Luke Historical Preservation Society, so the satellite dish was mounted on the roof in the back of the stable/garage, where it couldn’t be seen from the drive.

The financial news was not good. Lewis made a few notes, then switched to a soft porn channel. But soft porn wasn’t making it either. Absent any of his other drugs, he needed something harder, so he went online, surfing his favorite voyeur-themed sites, of which there were dozens available. Most of it was pretty tame stuff, though: guys using peephole and minidigital cameras to take up-skirts or down-blouses, or capture their wives or girlfriends sleeping, peeing, bathing, or stepping out of the shower. Before the Net, Lewis wouldn’t have believed how sick so many people were.

Some of the sites, however, had membership areas, where for a premium Lewis could download jpegs and mpegs of real people having sex—real people who hadn’t known they were being spied upon. That had been Lewis’s secret passion (he didn’t really think of it as a vice) since he was a boy, even before puberty. (And wouldn’t Dr. Vogler have loved to hear about that; fat chance, Doc.)

It had gotten him in trouble more than once, but even nowadays, when thousands upon thousands of images were available on the Web for less than it cost to buy binoculars, he still found himself going out on the prowl occasionally.

Because it wasn’t only the images that Lewis craved, it was also the risk, the uncertainty, the thrill of the hunt. And unlike the stereotypical Peeping Tom of movies and literature, who stalks only the prettiest of young women, looks were not of paramount concern to Lewis. In fact, one of his more memorable strikes in recent years had involved his tenants in the overseer’s house, the Drs. Epp.
And
their so-called houseman Bennie—Lewis knew a thing or two about
that
household they wouldn’t have wanted broadcast to the general public.

Just thinking about the time he’d seen the three of them together gave Lewis more of a rise than any of the digital images he was accessing. One of these nights he’d have to check in on the old reprobates again, he promised himself as he logged on to yet another disappointing site. One of these nights soon.

If Lewis
had
gone peeping at the overseer’s house Tuesday night, he wouldn’t have found any hanky-panky going on.

Bennie was alone in his room, rereading
Moby-Dick,
which for reasons the Epps had never been able to ascertain, he read like some Christians read their Bible, or Muslims their Koran. When he reached
Finis
he’d turn to the beginning and start over again at
Call Me Ishmael.

Phil and Emily were watching home movies in the living room. They were in the process of cataloging Phil’s old collection, from his first tour of duty on Nias, twenty-five years before he met Emily, prior to having it digitized. The colors were already badly faded, and the images flickered and jumped, but much of the footage was priceless nonetheless.

The film currently spooling through the projector was labeled
Fahombe Ceremony, South Pulau Nias, 8/57.
Two pillars of stone stood at the end of a broad plaza paved with great stone tiles and flanked by tall, narrow houses with fantastically pitched ski-jump roofs and hooded, overhanging gables. The nearer pillar was about a yard high, the farther one twice as tall, with wooden spikes embedded in the top.

A brown-skinned Niassian boy of sixteen or so, dressed only in a loincloth, leapt sideways into the frame, brandishing a sword and a torch over his head. He danced around for a few seconds, bouncing from one bare foot to the other and grimacing fiercely, then turned and ran away from the camera, straight down the middle of the plaza toward the first of the two stone pillars, which he used as if it were a springboard to propel himself feetfirst over the top of the second pillar. And no matter how many times Emily had seen the film, she still gasped as the boy twisted and turned in midair, torch and sword waving above his head: there seemed to be no way for him to avoid being impaled on the sharpened spikes.

But as always, he drew his feet up at the last second to clear the spikes by the barest fraction of an inch before disappearing behind the second pillar.

The screen went white; the last frames of brittle old celluloid slid through the gate and
flipflipflipflipflipped
around the uptake reel until Phil reached over to turn off the motor.

“I hear a hundred and fifty thousand roops will buy you a private performance,” he told Emily as he rethreaded the film the short way for rewinding. He’d recently learned from a correspondent that the
Fahombe,
once used to train young warriors to jump over the walls of enemy villages, had been terribly commercialized in recent years. “Minus the spikes, of course.”

“Of course. What’s that nowadays?”

“Hard to say—twenty, twenty-five bucks?—the rupiah’s pretty volatile.”

“So’s the dollar, for that matter,” said Emily, over the
whirr
of the reversed projector motor. She switched on the lamp next to her armchair and made some notes while Phil relabeled the film canister numerically for transfer to disk. “Have you given any thought about whom you want to get for the next sacrifice?” It was Phil’s turn next.

“I’m not sure yet. I did plant a seed with Miss Holly this afternoon.”

“Treasure?”

“Yes. I think there’s a good chance she’ll go for it.”

“Be a shame to chop off one of those wonderful hands, though.”

“I know,” said Phil. “I’ve also been thinking about another virgin—it’s been a long time.”

“You and your virgins—you just want a young girl, you perv,” said Emily, almost affectionately. She didn’t mind the little girls—it was the high-bosomed young ladies that sometimes gave her a twinge of jealousy.

“And what if I do? You have to admit they’re a lot easier to handle than these big bruisers you’re always choosing.”

“I didn’t hear any complaints from you yesterday.” Not only were the Epps both highly sexed individuals (the big four-oh had scarcely slowed Emily down, and if there was such a thing as male menopause, it hadn’t hit Phil yet—he still got hard at the drop of a hat, and the age or sex of the person who’d dropped it didn’t much matter to him), but according to their way of thinking, they had long since transcended any culturally based sexual mores.

This transcendence they thought of as an occupational hazard, or benefit, depending on how you looked at it. Because to an anthropologist—or at least to a good anthropologist, in their opinion—every culture, society, and religion had its taboos and proscriptions. None were universal, and none had a place above or below any of the others on an objective moral scale, for the simple reason that there
was
no objective moral scale.

That’s how they saw it, anyway. A psychiatrist would probably have disagreed, diagnosing them instead with primary Antisocial Personality Disorder, and secondary Delusional Disorder, Subtype Grandiose, which is to say, they were both psychopaths with literal delusions of grandeur. In their case, they believed that they had stumbled upon—or had been fated to stumble upon—an important discovery, with potentially earthshaking implications.

But even if they’d received their diagnosis from the lips of Freud himself, they’d have been unconvinced and unimpressed. Psychopaths consider themselves superior to psychiatrists. Nothing personal there: for the most part, psychopaths consider themselves superior to everybody. They also believe in their hearts that none of the rules that hold other people’s wills in check apply to them—even those that believe in God, believe in a God that thinks and feels as they do.

Phil took another film out of its canister, slipped the reel onto the projector, and began threading it. The truth was, until he said it out loud, he didn’t even know he was thinking about another virgin. The last one had been the Jenkuns girl, whose untimely reappearance had spurred them to find the caves and the Oubliette. A virgin, yes, but at twelve she’d already had a few coils of soft curly black hairs at the pubis, and swollen little bubbies.

This time he was thinking of something younger—like that little mixed-race girl he’d seen with Holly in August, at the strip mall. Prettiest little thing he’d ever set eyes on. Phil had been loitering around the phone booth outside the supermarket, waiting for a call from Tex Wanger at the time, so he hadn’t approached them, but he’d asked Holly about the girl at their next session. Her niece, she said; six years old, she said. Which meant the child was a virgin for sure—how sweet that would be, Phil told himself. And there was yet another advantage to choosing the niece: when it was all over, the aunt would still be around to give him one of her marvelous massages.