Twenty-Seven Bones

5

Mm-mmmmm mm-mmm, mm-mmmmm mm-mmm…

Holly found herself humming the theme from Gone With the Wind as the Apgard Great House, alabaster white, winged and colonnaded, appeared at the end of a half-mile-long, ruler-straight driveway with a whitewashed five-rail fence on either side to separate the hybrid Senepol cattle in the fields on one side from the woolless sheep on the other.

But the Great House was not Holly’s immediate destination. Just before she reached it, she turned left and followed a rutted dirt drive lined with handsome bay rums until she reached the eighteenth-century stone house that had once served as the overseer’s quarters for the Apgard sugar plantation.

The overseer’s house was one and a half stories high, built in the Danish manner with thick stone walls mortared with crushed seashell and molasses, and deep windows with dark green shutters. The half story was represented by the original Danish kitchen under the main floor, now a hollow, stone-walled ruin recessed into the landing of the outside front staircase, accessible through a low stone archway.

Holly parked Daisy in the driveway. Bennie, a wrinkled brown man wearing his customary sarung, came out to meet her and carried her fold-up massage table into the house.

As always, she set up the table in the living room, which was decorated with artifacts and souvenirs the Epps had brought with them from Indonesia. Ornately carved bureaus and tables, rattan chairs, batik wall hangings, bamboo screens, woven straw mats on the floor. Masks and spears, brass gongs and gamelan chimes. An Indonesian wedding headdress flattened behind glass. Two-dimensional shadow puppets in rough wooden frames, so lifelike they looked as if they had been frozen in mid-dance.

Holly did the woman’s massage first. Emily wasn’t in bad shape, but her back was always sore from the strain of supporting that enormous, gravity-challenged bosom (whenever she worked on women like Emily, Holly thanked her genes and lucky stars for her own, somewhat more modest endowment), and from the way she groaned when Holly deep-massaged the quads and hammies of her stubby thighs, Holly could tell she’d been overexerting recently. “No rest for the wicked,” Emily explained, when Holly mentioned it.

Compared to Emily, Phil Epp had a difficult body to massage. Long, tense muscles, very little body fat, very little pectoral sag for a man in his sixties or seventies, however old he was. One of the hairier apes, too: arms, legs, chest, belly, back, covered with curly black hair, gone white at the chest and loins, that seemed to repel the massage oil. And although Holly had massaged him at least once a month for the past year, his muscles were as tight as if they’d never been rubbed before.

“Have you been overexerting, too?” Holly asked him, as she worked his spinal muscles with the balls of her thumbs.

He grunted with pleasure. “Just a little treasure hunting.”

“Find anything?”

“Getting closer.” He turned his head to glance at her. “You ever have any interest in that sort of activity?”

“Treasure I could use-hunting I don’t know about.”

“Maybe we’ll take you along sometime-but only if you promise not to tell anybody-I mean, not a word to anybody, not even about this conversation.”

“Hey, a masseuse is like a doctor or a lawyer: what I hear on this table stays on this table.”

Holly’s next appointment was only a few hundred yards away, at the Great House. As she took her massage table out of the bus, Holly pictured horse-drawn carriages clippety-clopping up to the wide marble steps, being met by liveried servants, and discharging Danish beauties in decollete silk ball gowns, accompanied by planters in white suits and wide-brimmed Panamas.

Lewis Apgard trotted down the steps to meet her halfway. He was wearing white bermudas and a blousy white shirt open at the throat. His golden blond hair was cut short and neat, parted on the side; the turquoise stud in his left ear matched the color of his eyes.

“Good afternoon, Miss Holly. Glad you could make it. I decided to give up booze-I’m detoxing like a madman.” He took her fold-up massage table from her, carried it the rest of the way up the steps, through one set of French doors, past a tastefully appointed formal drawing room furnished with museum-quality Danish West Indian pieces carved from mahogany, purple heart, and other endangered rain forest trees, and out a second set of French doors to the patio. The Olympic-sized pool was as turquoise as Apgard’s eyes and earring. Holly, who’d worked up a pretty good sweat on the Epps, asked him if she could take a dip before they started.

“Sure thing,” said Apgard. “My wife is playing golf out at Blue Valley, and it’s the servants’ day off, so we have the place to ourselves all afternoon.”

Holly’s uh-oh alarm went off again. “You make it sound as if we were having an affair,” she said-lightly, she hoped-and forced a laugh.

“Is an affair so out of the question?”

“So out of the question,” Holly replied.

“Too bad,” said Apgard. “Let me know if you change your mind-we could just write off the rent.”

When pigs fly, thought Holly. When kosher pigs fly.