Twenty-Seven Bones

6

Before he left the Great House Saturday evening, Johnny laid out Lewis’s black suit for Hokey’s funeral Sunday, folding the trousers over the dowel of the dumb valet and slipping the coat over its rounded mahogany shoulders. Lewis was in the shower, washing away a late-afternoon hangover. He’d kept on drinking after Pender left, and eased his nerves further with a pipeful of chronic. Maybe more than one-his subsequent nap had lasted through suppertime.

After another slug of overproof to wash down a handful of aspirin, then a hot shower, using one of Hokey’s shower caps to protect the bandage on his head, Lewis was feeling more himself. Before leaving the bathroom, he opened the window to air it out-in this climate, new life-forms had been known to spring up overnight.

When Lewis returned to the bedroom, the suit on the dumb valet gave him a turn. It looked a little like the Baron Samedi effigy they used in voodoo ceremonies. And he hadn’t worn black since the Guv’s funeral. He remembered reading somewhere that the Chinese or the Africans or somebody wore white for mourning. Wouldn’t that cause a stir at First Lutheran tomorrow, thought Lewis.

He had to get through the night first, though. Hopefully without leaning quite as hard on the Reserve, he promised himself as he changed into a pair of Bermudas and a crimson-and-blue rugby shirt. But the worst was behind him, and he’d come up with a plan in the shower. Might as well take advantage of the Epps’s absence to go through the overseer’s house, find out what he could about his new…what was the word? collaborators? conspirators? partners?

Because as soon as the deal had gone down, Lewis had begun to have second thoughts, if not about the deal itself, then about the Epps. Second, third, and fourth thoughts. Three nights ago, it hadn’t seemed to matter. He’d been looking for something he’d almost despaired of finding-a way to get rid of Hokey-and then it turned up right next door. A gift horse like that, you don’t look in the mouth.

But now that he was mixed up with the Epps, he was beginning to realize that he knew almost nothing about them. Except that they’d murdered at least…he had to tick them off on his fingers…the St. Luke girl, the two bodies found on the cliff, Hokey, possibly Arena…five people.

Lewis slipped on a pair of well-worn loafers and walked to the overseer’s house. His intention was to search the entire place, but he never even made it to the front door, because when he reached the landing where the stone staircase turned left, the archway leading to the old Danish kitchen caught his attention. He played the flashlight beam around the cellarlike room. Low ceiling, stone walls, dirt floor. Three big steamer trunks, padlocked. Bunch of suitcases, unlocked. Empty.

But across the room there were signs of disturbance. The rectangular stone hollow in the wall that had once housed the oven was still boarded over with the tin Maubey Soda sign he’d nailed to the masonry years ago to discourage rats from nesting. But there were no cobwebs, the dirt under the sign was sprinkled with masonry dust, and the old nails had been removed and replaced so many times he had no trouble pulling them out with his fingertips.

He put the flashlight down, lifted the sign away, leaned it against the wall beside the hole, picked up the flashlight, played it around the hole. Four feet high, wide, and deep, set three feet above floor level, it appeared empty at first, but it was obvious from the lack of dust that the grate in the bottom had been removed recently.

Again, Lewis set the flashlight down. He lifted the grate out with both hands, put it on the floor, then leaned into the oven, holding the flashlight next to his cheek and aiming the beam straight down into the old fire pit under the oven hole, once a good three feet deep, with ancient ashes and charred log ends scattered at the bottom, but filled in now with dirt to within six inches of the top.

The flashlight had begun to flicker and dim. Lewis switched it off and put it down to save what was left of the batteries. Gingerly, with his fingertips, he began sifting and probing the loose-packed soil, which had to have been hauled in from the garden. Obviously his tenants had gone to a good deal of trouble to bury something under the oven. But what? Treasure? Their life savings? Some Indonesian artifact too valuable to be displayed upstairs with the rest of their-

His fingers struck something metallic. Eh, eh, well me gad, and what have we here? Further excavation, and a quick shake of the dying flashlight, revealed a white-and-gold canister roughly the size of a coffee can buried on its side a few inches beneath the surface. John McCann Steel Cut Irish Oatmeal, he read, just before the flashlight beam flickered out entirely.

Working in the dark, Lewis prised the can free, shook off the clinging dirt. The contents rattled dully-they were neither heavy nor metallic. He pried off the lid with his fingernails. A puff of stale air escaped, faintly dusty, organic-smelling but not unpleasant.

Lewis felt around in the front pockets of his Bermudas, came up with his windproof butane joint lighter. The flame was forceful, but narrow and blue, not meant for illumination. Lewis tilted the can, held the lighter up to the rim, and mindful of the blue flame hissing and dancing only inches from his face, he cocked his head and peered in.

As Lewis’s eyes adjusted to the light, what had appeared at first to be a can of ivory-colored sticks and stones proved to be a can of disarticulated bones, some like sticks, long and thin or short and thin, but flared out delicately at the ends, others roundish, like irregularly shaped stones, and still others short, with conical tips.

They were, of course, the bones of a human hand. If he’d counted, he’d have found twenty-seven of them-eight carpals, five metacarpals, and fourteen phalanges-and if he’d measured them against the bones of his own hand, he might have concluded that they were the bones of a child named Hettie Jenkuns.

But Lewis Apgard neither counted nor measured the bones. Instead, once he’d recovered from his gruesome shock, he replaced the lid on the can, replaced the can in the dirt, replaced the grate at the bottom of the oven and the Maubey Soda sign over the hole in the wall, and hurried back to the Great House as fast as he could without actually breaking into a run.