Twenty-Seven Bones

8

Husband-and-wife teams of anthropologists are not uncommon. What was unusual about the Epps was that Phil was primarily a cultural anthropologist, while Emily was a physical anthropologist specializing in osteology-dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, she liked to say.

After leaving Indonesia, Emily had studied very dry bones indeed-precontact ancestral remains of Northern California Original Peoples, eight hundred to two thousand years old, brownish fragments to complete skeletons, that had been disturbed by construction projects.

She was good at it, too. Give Emily a pubic symphysis, and she could age and sex an individual with the best of them, while Phil had earned acclaim with a study of the population of a prehistoric village in Santa Clara, extrapolated from Emily’s osteological data.

They both sucked at the politics associated with the job, however. In California you could hardly stick a trowel in the ground anymore without some clam digger Indians screaming about somebody disrespecting their ancestors, the Epps used to tell anybody who’d listen.

Understandably, this attitude had not endeared them to the Most Likely Descendants. So when Emily’s father died and left her a tidy sum, they decided upon the move to St. Luke, where the Carib population had been wiped out to the last descendant four hundred years earlier.

This evening, though, the Epps weren’t thinking about Indians, Californian or Caribbean. Instead, another home movie was being screened and cataloged.

Different Niassian village, but the broad plaza with its great stone paving tiles looks much the same, as do the narrow, ski-jump-roofed houses flanking it. Wedding of a wealthy man’s daughter. Dressed in her golden marriage raiment, which will be returned to her village after the wedding, she is being borne around the plaza on a wooden throne mounted on poles, weeping copiously to mourn her symbolic lineage death. After the wedding she will be “dead” to her birth clan and it to her.

“I cried at our wedding,” said Emily, seated next to her husband on a low rattan armchair, making notes while he operated the projector.

“I wanted to,” replied Phil. Emily gave him a sharp, under-the-eyebrows glare. “Just-kidding-it-was-the-happiest-day-of-my-life,” he added quickly.

“That’s better,” she admonished, then reached around the projector, which was on a low rattan table between them, and patted his shoulder affectionately, to show him she was only clowning.

They were both startled by the knock on their front door-they weren’t expecting any late visitors. Phil switched off the projector and turned on the light. Emily, who was wearing only a comfortable wraparound cotton skirt, hurried into the bedroom and donned a smocklike batik overblouse while Phil answered the door.

Twenty minutes later Lewis Apgard, Emily, and Phil were seated side by side by side in matching rattan chairs in the living room. They had just finished watching the last reel of the Niassian wedding. Phil switched off the projector. The room went dark, and the overseer’s house grew so quiet Lewis could hear the wind rustling through the slender leaves of the bay rum trees his great-great-grandfather had planted during slavery days. He patted the butt of the.38 revolver in the inside pocket of his linen sport jacket for reassurance, then withdrew his hand as Emily switched on the light.

“Where was that again?” he asked.

“Pulau Nias, Indonesia,” said Emily. “An island west of Sumatra.”

“Fascinating stuff.”

“Yes, isn’t it? Now what can we do for you, Mr. Apgard?”

“You can call me Lewis, for one.”

“What can we do for you, Lewis? Not that we’re not always pleased to see our landlord, but it is getting rather late.”

Courage, Lewis told himself. Apgard courage. He wished he’d brought a flask with him. Earlier, when he was drunker, and the notion entirely hypothetical, it had seemed so easy. Go over there, tell them what you know, tell them what you want. “I’ll get to the point, then-did either of you see the paper this morning?”

“The Sentinel?” asked Phil.

“Yes.”

“No.”

Lewis took the clipping out of his pocket and handed it to Emily. Her fingers brushed his, lingering just a little too long. He had the feeling, not for the first time, that she was coming on to him. If her husband hadn’t been present, he might have tested the hypothesis. “Recognize anybody?” he asked her.

“Not that I recall. How about you, honey?” She passed the clipping to Phil, who muttered something in a language Lewis didn’t recognize, then shook his head and returned the clipping to his wife.

“Well that’s odd,” said Lewis. “Because about six weeks ago, I was looking through that window there”-Lewis pointed to one of two windows flanking the four-by-six pull-up movie screen-“and I saw that man, in this room, sitting in one of these chairs, with one of you seated on either side of him, showing him a map or something. What do you have to say about that?”

“Too long,” said Emily.

“What’s too long?”

“Too long,” she repeated, even more loudly. “Too long, too long, too long.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” asked Lewis, just before his world exploded into pain and glorious white fireworks.

“Tolong: it’s Indonesian for help,” Emily said quietly, as Lewis slumped forward in his chair, blood beginning to well from a jagged wound at the back of his scalp. “Terima kasih (thank you), Ama Bene.”

“Kembali (you’re welcome), Ina Emily,” replied the little man from Nias, slipping his nontraditional, short-handled, high-impact rubber sap back into the waist of his traditional gilt-threaded Niassian sarung.

Lewis regained consciousness a few minutes later. His head was throbbing, he was tied to his chair with a continuous coil of nylon clothesline, and when he looked up he saw the black hole at the end of the barrel of a gun staring back at him. His own.38, in Phil Epp’s hand. He tried to pull his head back, but Bennie was behind him, pressing a towel against his bleeding scalp.

“My wife knows where I am,” he said softly.

“Then you’ve signed her death warrant, too,” said Phil.

“Yes,” said Lewis. “That’s it-that’s it exactly.”

“That’s what, exactly?”

“That’s what I’m doing here-that’s what I came for.”

The Epps adjourned to their bedroom while Bennie tended to Apgard’s head injury. They were both shaken by their landlord’s revelations. Nor was Apgard’s having seen them with Tex the worst of their problems-it was what he’d told them afterward, about the two bodies washed up under the cliffs, that had them close to panic.

Phil recognized immediately what had happened. The moment the bedroom door closed behind them, he told Emily about hearing the splash when they dumped Arena’s body into the Oubliette.

It was probably something they should have foreseen, he said in a whisper. They’d been careless. In their relief at having solved the disposal problem that had plagued serial killers since time immemorial, they’d forgotten their basic geology. Underground rivers-that’s what had carved out the caverns in the first place, after the Pleistocene era. And even underground rivers have outlets and run eventually to the sea, don’t they? Or at least they do on a tiny island like St. Luke.

Obviously the rising water from the most recent hurricane had somehow floated the bodies up and out to sea, which meant their most important line of defense had been breached. The surest way to escape detection, they’d learned over the years, was to ensure that the deed itself went undetected.

Too late now. Neither the Jenkuns girl’s disappearance nor her reappearance had sparked the kind of intense investigation that had probably begun as soon as the police discovered that they had a serial killer on their island. Now anybody without an alibi could be considered a suspect-the cops might be showing up at the door of the overseer’s house anytime.

So although they had of course been somewhat offended by Apgard’s initial offer-they weren’t contract killers, for the love of God-on another level, a counteroffer wasn’t entirely out of the question. “Tit for tat, quid pro quo, strangers on a train and all that,” Emily whispered to her husband.

“Or maybe we should just kill them both, seal the cave, and get the hell off the island.”

“That’s certainly another possibility,” said Emily. “But we’re the nearest neighbors-there are bound to be questions if they both disappear simultaneously. And you have to admit we’ve been awfully blessed so far. Perhaps Apgard showing up like this is lalu’a tonua.” Lalu’a tonua-the hand of destiny, in Niassian.

“You think so?” said Phil.

“I feel it,” replied Emily. “In here.” She took Phil’s big, bony, hairy-knuckled hand and pressed it against her pudgy lower belly, above her womb.

And although some might have seen it as contradictory for trained scientists like the Epps to be swayed by so unscientific an argument, for a scientist, a true scientist, data always trumps theory. If something is true, it’s true, whether you can explain it or not. Emily’s womb had never been wrong before: that was good enough for both of them.

But even with accurate data, there was still room left for interpretation. Don’t make the counteroffer, Phil suggested-just accept Apgard’s initial offer, and wait until after the deed was done to let him know what it was really going to cost him.

Because when it came to murder, Lewis Apgard was about to learn, you paid the piper what he asked, and you danced to his tune until he said you were done.