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.
7
The Raintree Room, and every piece of furniture in it, was said to have been carved from the same Saman tree. The food was strictly St. Luke: conch fritters for appetizers, then kallaloo soup thick as stew. For an entree, Dawson had the triggerfish broiled in butter. Pender passed on the goat entrees, and ordered honey-ginger pork chops. Both meals came with a side of fungi-heaping yellow mounds of cornmeal boiled with okra.
Over dinner, they exchanged life stories. He gave her his, she gave him C. B. Dawson’s-by then she knew it as well as she knew her own. But just the skeleton, no embellishments, and when he pressed her, she deflected his questions with questions of her own. She had a million of ’em. What was happening in the investigation? Were the police any closer to finding the killer? How many victims had he claimed thus far?
For a change, Pender was free to answer at least some of her questions. Tomorrow’s
It was only a matter of time before the story broke anyway, Perry Faartoft had told Julian, who’d informed Pender. Newspapers can sweep a lot of things under the rug, but the death of a reporter isn’t one of them. The afternoon hydrofoil had brought reporters from Puerto Rico and St. Thomas-poor Fran had scooped himself with his own death.
After some heated bargaining, including a conference call with the governor and the head of the St. Luke Chamber of Commerce, the publisher had agreed to hold back news of the bodies that had washed up on the rocks beneath the Carib cliffs and not to bring up Hettie Jenkuns again. With only two deaths, there’d be at least a chance the stateside papers wouldn’t be picking up the story.
That chance soon diminished considerably, however. As dessert was being served (flan drizzled with pomegranate syrup), the maitre d’ stealthily signaled to Pender that he had a phone call.
He took it in the bar. It was Julian. “How’d you find me?” asked Pender.
“I have my sources.”
“What’s up?”
“Headquarters just received a fax from Germany. The identity of the second corpse from the cliffs, the female, has been confirmed through dental records. Frieda Schaller.” The name had come up before, Julian explained-Schaller was a tourist from Swabia, wherever that was, who’d failed to return home from a two-week cruise last Christmas. The ship laid over for the Three Kings Day carnival; the cruise line had lost track of her somewhere between St. Thomas and Barbados.
Coffee and Pender talked it over in cop shorthand. A cruise ship passenger was much more likely to have been a target of opportunity. And if it was a pickup or a random snatch, someone was much more likely to have seen the vic with the perp. No subterfuge, no cloak-and-dagger arrangements as with Tex Wanger.
Their next moves were obvious: get a detailed description and some head shots of the woman, publish them in the
“Could be the break we’ve been looking for,” said Julian hopefully.
“Could be.”
“Give my best to your lovely companion, me son. Maitre d’ says she’s a knockout.”
“I can roger that.”
“You’re coming to the Apgard funeral tomorrow, right?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” said Pender-an astonishingly large percentage of murderers showed up at their victims’ funerals.
