Twenty-Seven Bones

9

Holly took the kids back to the Core. Dawson stuck around. The sexist pricks wouldn’t let her into the tunnel to dig, so she joined the bucket brigade passing the shoring upward and the excavated dirt downward. She was close enough to the mouth of the tunnel to hear the cheering inside when they spotted Pender’s light. After that, it only took another two or three eons until the hole was wide enough for the first paramedic to squeeze through.

Chief Coffee was the second one through. He emerged after a few minutes shining a flashlight onto a thick sheaf of paper. Whatever was written on it, it must have made fascinating reading, thought Dawson-Coffee was reading as he crawled out of the tunnel, still reading when he stood up, still reading by flashlight as he hurried back down the trail.

It was full daylight when they brought Pender out on a stretcher. Somehow Dawson, despite having spent more than half her life hiding in shadows and ducking authority, had no trouble pushing her way through the crowd. Pender’s head was turbaned in gauze, an oxygen mask covered his nose and mouth, an IV dripped clear liquid into his arm. She fell in behind the stretcher bearers, and when they called for a relief crew halfway down the trail, Dawson was first in line.

And when the paramedics tried to stop her from getting into the ambulance, she told them she was his fiancee and climbed in anyway.

For his second stay in Missionary Hospital in less than a week, with no alibi witnesses required this time, Lewis Apgard had demanded a private room. He continued to profess amnesia. Dr. Vogler was called in. Lewis repeated what he’d told Detective Hamilton after “regaining” consciousness: that the Epps and Bennie had appeared at his door after Pender left, demanded to know what they’d talked about, then forced him at gunpoint to help them kidnap Pender and the girl and drive them into the rain forest. Everything after that, until he woke up in the ambulance, was a blank.

Vogler bought it, diagnosed him with temporary amnesia as a result of the traumatic reinjury of his head wound. Afterward Lewis slept surprisingly soundly (considering they had refused to give him any painkillers or sedatives, because of the head trauma), and if he’d had any dreams, he didn’t remember them.

Until the last one, that is. It came when he fell back to sleep after being awakened at dawn by the nurse who was taking his vital signs. Lewis found himself in the drawing room of the Great House. He was a boy again, and somehow the Guv had found out about Lewis’s role in Auntie Aggie’s death. The old man was mad lak fuck. I should have known, he said. I should have seen it in your eyes. Then he pointed to a mirror, which now hung beneath the portrait of Great-great-grandfather Klaus.

Reluctantly, the boy crossed the room, his feet sinking into the thick carpet with every step. When he reached the mirror, he saw the ram’s eyes staring back at him, brown and mournful, from his own face. He wanted to scream, but couldn’t.

The Guv laughed his crackly dry laugh. You take after your mother, he said. That’s her side of the family. But when Lewis turned around, he saw the same eyes looking out at him from the old man’s face. Lewis, said the Guv. Lewis, wake up.

“Lewis, wake up.”

Lewis opened his eyes to see Chief Coffee standing over him. The customarily natty old guy was a mess. His khaki uniform was spattered with drying mud, his face was smeared with it, and he even had muddy streaks in his nappy silver hair. “Good morning, Lewis,” he said.

“Good morning, Chief Coffee,” said Lewis, as the memory of the dream receded to wherever dream memories go.