Twenty-Seven Bones

been an absolute lamb all week, and she hadn’t smelled rum on his breath even once.

“Mmm, that’s nice.” He’d begun soaping her back and buttocks.

“Did you win your match today?”

“Mmm-hmmm. Oh, that’s nice, too. Wait, I don’t have my diaphragm in.”

“Let’s take our chances.” Lewis was powerful ready, as the men say on St. Luke-he’d been watching Hokey through the semiopaque glass of the shower enclosure for several minutes, fantasizing that he was peeping on a stranger.

“Easy for you to say, me son.”

“I mean it, let’s take our chances.”

She turned to face him, squinting against the hot cascade. “Do you know what you’re saying, Lewis? Because this isn’t the sort of thing that-”

His arms had snaked around her. He grabbed a buttock in each hand, pulled her body tight against him, kissed her tenderly on the lips. “Yes, I know what I’m saying,” he said over the roar of the hot water. “I’m aware of how the process works.”

Hokey felt like crying. After all these years of wanting a child and being denied by her child of a husband, she’d all but given up hope, so to hear this at last was almost more than she could bear.

For Lewis, what had begun in the shower as an improvisation designed to get himself laid, ended in the bedroom in a deadly earnest missionary position orgasm. The more time he spent with Hokey, he was beginning to find, the more he found himself thinking about ways to kill her, and the more he thought about killing her, the hotter it made him.

Until he solved the Bendt problem, though, his recent brainstorm about copycatting the serial killer was still unworkable. And certainly the last thing on earth he wanted to do was raise a motherless child.

But reasoning with the single-mindedness of a man with an erection, in a shower with a naked woman, it had dawned on Lewis that Hokey wasn’t going to be around long enough to bear any child they might conceive. And whatever plan he eventually adopted, it could only be furthered by winning her over, keeping her off guard.

So let her last days be happy ones, Lewis thought-it’s no skin off my bumsie. And accordingly, after another hard-earned orgasm, he turned to his wife, lying beside him in their two-hundred-year-old bed. “Hoke?”

“Mmm?” Her attention had been focused inward: she fancied she could feel those millions upon millions of Apgard sperm swimming determinedly upstream, their tiny little tails flagellating earnestly.

“I’ve been thinking.”

“About what?”

“That property by the airport.”

“Please, Lewis, please please please please pleeeeaze don’t start that again. Not now, not when everything’s so sweet.”

“You don’t understand. I was thinking you’re right, that you’ve been right all along. This baby we’re making? I was thinking I’d be proud to take him-or her-up there, show him those trees, tell him how at a time when people were destroying the rain forests all over the world at a rate of hundreds of acres a day-”

“Thousands.”

“Okay, thousands of acres a day-that on the day he was conceived, his mommy and daddy agreed to protect the forest land they owned for as long as they both drew breath.”

Hokey felt a fluttering so deep inside it had to have been her womb. “Lewis, I don’t know what you and Dr. Vogler have been talking about,” she said softly, “but if this is the upshot after two days, I can’t wait to see what you’re going to be like after a few months.”

“Me either, Hoke-me either.”

Wednesday was cook’s night off. Lewis took it upon himself to go down to the kitchen and fix sandwiches. But he never made it as far as the refrigerator-the newspaper on the kitchen table caught his eye. It was that morning’s Sentinel, which he hadn’t seen yet. The photograph of the missing Floridian in his high-crowned white cowboy hat, captioned Have You Seen This Man? was on the front page.

“Cheese-an’-bread,” Lewis muttered aloud. He grabbed the table for support and lowered himself carefully into the broad-bottomed, spindle-legged kitchen chair. “Bloody cheese and bloody bread.”

Because he had-he had seen that man, back in August, while crouched behind an oleander bush, peering into the living room of the overseer’s house. At the time, he’d been disappointed-there’d been nothing of any interest going on. Everybody was fully dressed. Bennie, Phil Epp, even Emily, who often went around topless.

And the fourth person Lewis had seen in the overseer’s house that night, the man who according to Fran Bendt had been brutally murdered not long afterward, had also been fully dressed, from his well-worn cowboy boots to his big, white, ten-gallon hat. There was no question in Lewis’s mind that this same man was looking up at him from the newspaper.

As soon as he had his legs under him again, Lewis found the bottle of St. Luke Reserve Sally, the cook, liked to keep in the freezer. He poured himself a shot, tossed it back, reread the story under the photograph, poured and tossed another, reread the story again. By the third shot he had convinced himself that one or both of his tenants in the overseer’s house had to be the killer or killers. The fourth shot was for inspiration, as he hatched a plan born as much of white rum as reason. Contact the Epps, let them know that he knew, offer them a substantial sum to help him with the Hokey problem.

But did he really want to get mixed up with people like that? Lewis asked himself. Well, yeah, came the answer. You’re looking for somebody to kill your wife, that sort of rules out the Eagle Scouts.

The fifth shot was for courage.

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