Twenty-Seven Bones

“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.

6

The bad taste from the interview with Mrs. Wanger stayed with Pender for hours. He’d gotten the information he needed, all right-they’d found a circled ad in the back of the July Soldier of Fortune with a St. Luke post office box for a return address. Mrs. Wanger had also produced phone bills for July and August, with several calls to a number with a St. Luke area code. But all he’d given her in return were the usual lame assurances and equally lame advice-call somebody, you shouldn’t be alone. The least he could have done was stay with her until that somebody arrived.

Instead he split-plane to catch. Whoopie ti-yi-yo…your misfortune and none of my own.

The second leg of Pender’s journey took him from Miami to Puerto Rico. One look at the ancient prop-jet waiting on the auxiliary runway at the San Juan airport, and Pender decided to change his seat assignment from a window to an aisle. Enjoyable as it might have been to see the Caribbean from the air, he didn’t want to have to watch it rushing up to meet him if they had to ditch in midocean, as seemed not at all unlikely.

But the weather was clear, the flight was smooth, and the only problem he encountered was a dearth of Jim Beam on the drink cart. Pender was forced to purchase a miniature bottle of Jack Daniel’s (not bad, but it didn’t stand up to ice like Jimbo) from a stewardess with long brown legs he wanted to shinny up like a monkey.

The island first appeared as a lone dot in a wide azure sea. Soon Pender was able to make out the dark tangle of rain forest crowning the north-central hump of the island, the flat patchwork of canebrake and pasture in the middle of the island, and the low mangrove swamps to the east. As the plane dipped its left wing into a bank that was far too steep for Pender’s liking, he looked back and caught a glimpse of the neat half-round bight of Frederikshavn Harbor and the red-tiled roofs of Dansker Hill.

The airport was located in the northeast corner of the island. Although there were only a dozen passengers on the little prop-jet, at least three times that many people crowded the corral at the edge of the tarmac to meet the plane. Julian Coffee, impeccably dressed as always in a spotless white guayabara shirt and twill trousers, was at the back of the crowd, but it parted magically to let him through.

“Good afternoon, Edgar. Welcome to St. Luke. Did you enjoy your flight?”

“Yeah-and I loved the landing.” He turned to look back at the truncated runway. “Short, you’re in the drink; long, you’re in the trees.”

“The St. Luke airport is not currently for the faint of heart,” agreed Coffee, leading Pender into the terminal, which was basically a cavernous lean-to. “But according to rumor, all that mahogany will be coming down one of these days-then they’ll level that near hill, extend both runways for the big jetliners, and we’ll be in a position to duke it out with the Virgin Islands for the tourist trade.” He sounded pleased by the prospect.

Coffee’s car, a cream-colored vintage Mercedes-Benz, heavily upholstered and polished to a buttery sheen, was parked at the curb, in the red zone. The airport road looped back to the Circle Road, the island’s only major artery. Pender yelped and braced himself against the red leather dashboard as Coffee began driving down the left- hand lane of the two-lane highway.

“We drive British style on St. Luke,” Coffee explained coolly. “No one’s quite sure why: we haven’t been owned by the British since the Napoleonic Wars.”

“But the wheel’s on the left,” Pender noted, as they slowed down behind an ancient pickup truck. “How do you pull out to pass?”

“It helps to have a passenger. If not, you hit the horn. If you hear somebody else hitting a horn, you don’t go. Not that anybody’s in all that much of a hurry.”

“God forbid,” said Pender.

Coffee grinned. “You’re livin’ on island time now, me son,” he said. “You’d better get used to it.”

7

Auntie Holly was late. Marley didn’t mind-it only gave him more time to practice penalty kicks in the field behind the school with his friend Marcus Coffee, the goalie on their championship Youth League soccer team. Dawn, however, sitting alone on the school steps with her backpack and Marley’s book bag beside her, grew more forlorn with every minute that passed, though it was not all that unusual for Holly to be late picking them up.

Eventually one of the other kids-the schoolyard was by no means abandoned-told Marley that his sister was bawling out front. He’d been looking to one side and shooting to the other all afternoon, so this time he looked left, faked right, and shot left, yelled Goaaaal! one more time, then foot-dribbled the soccer ball Auntie Holly had given him on his birthday (the leather was already scuffed away in patches) around the side of the school to the front steps, stopped it on a dime in front of his sister, and sat down next to her.

“Geez-an-Nate, gyirl,” he said gently, in the deep island dialect he and Dawn used at school, and sometimes among themselves. “Whatcha bawlin’ about now?”

“I’m scyared somet’in happen a’ Auntie.”

“Poppyshow,” he scoffed. “She be ’long soon.”

“You promise?”

“Sure.” He cocked his head. “I hear Daisy comin’ now.”

“Doan mek naar wit’ me,” Dawn said, shaking her tawny plaits angrily-to make naar meant to tease.

“Meyain’ mek naar-listen cyareful.”

Then she could hear it, too, the distinctive I-think-I-can-I-think-I-can putt-putt of old Daisy’s engine. Dawn slung Marley’s book bag over his neck for him, then ran to the curb as the minibus came around the corner.

“Sorry I’m late-I had to stop off to pay the rent.” Holly reached across the passenger seat to open the door. “What’s the matter, baby doll?” Dawn was still sniffling as she clambered into the back to open the sliding door for her brother.

“She’s scyared something bad happen to you,” Marley explained, while his sister closed the door and fastened his seat belt for him.

“Poppyshow,” said Holly, who’d picked up a little dialect herself, over the last couple of years. “Me so lucky, Mistah Rabbit, he want to wear my foot for luck.”

Dawn laughed in spite of herself. “You cyan’ talk Luke, Auntie-don’ even try.”

8

After the twin disasters of Hurricanes Luis and Marilyn in ’95, when housing was at a premium on St. Luke, Lewis had the interior of the overseer’s house on the old Apgard sugar plantation gutted and subdivided on the cheap into three smaller bedrooms, a kitchen, bathroom, and sitting room, all with freestanding plywood walls that did not reach the high, lozenge-shaped ceiling.

In the autumn of 2002, the Drs. Epp were the sole tenants, but the plywood dividers still stood, so each Epp could enjoy his or her own bedroom, as could their Indonesian companion, Bennie. Another advantage of the setup