Twenty-Seven Bones

“Let’s have a meeting afterward. My office. You, me, Hamilton, Felix.”

“Do I get time and a half for working Sundays?”

“Double time,” offered Julian grandly-they both knew that two times nothing was nothing.

8

The Caribbean chapter of the Association of Anthropologists and Archaeologists of the Americas were not a rowdy bunch. Following an afternoon of papers and slideshows and schmoozing, a cocktail party with a no-host bar and more schmoozing, then a sit-down dinner with an after-dinner speaker who could have put a roomful of hyperactive kindergartners to sleep, the Epps were only too happy to repair to the casino.

Bennie was already there. He’d been there off and on for twenty-four hours, playing poker, winning steadily, and using his winnings to move up to higher-stakes tables. At present he was up a few grand, but you couldn’t tell from his expression or demeanor. Bennie had a few advantages over most of the players he faced, punters and professionals alike.

His advantage over the amateurs had a lot to do with his fanatic concentration. Bennie’s zenlike ability to tune out distractions was bred from a complete lack of interest in most things Western. This world over the water wasn’t real to him, none of the people had status he recognized-they were like shadow figures, easy to tune out. When Bennie read Moby-Dick, he read Moby-Dick; when he played poker, he played poker.

His advantage over the professionals was that coming from a culture where status was formally determined by wealth, he had a pure appreciation for money, in and of itself. Nobody in his village of Lolowa’asi ever called money the root of all evil, or told you it couldn’t buy happiness, or even that you couldn’t take it with you. You could, as long as you had paid your debts in life, and carried both tribute and a human head (later amended to a human hand-a right hand-after the Dutch outlawed head-hunting) across the bridge to the next world, where your ancestors were waiting to welcome you and accept your tribute.

In fact, to a Niassian way of thinking, not only could you take it with you, you had to: if you showed up without the head or the hand, or the tribute, instead of welcoming you, your ancestors chucked you off the bridge into the bottomless chasm below.

So unlike the professional gamblers, for whom the game was the thing, for Bennie it was purely the money. When Bennie’s younger brother had stolen their father’s eheha from him, then passed it on to Ina Emily in an act of dying spite, the line of inheritance had been disrupted and the family wealth scattered.

Nor could Bennie simply kill Ina Emily and take his inheritance back. She was a married woman, and Ama Phil had done him no harm: if Bennie had killed her, he’d have ended up owing her widower every last pig and rupiah he owned.

Still, Bennie had been determined to recover his rightful heritage. He had followed the Epps halfway around the world, performed tasks that would have debased one of his former servants, and made himself indispensable to them. They thought his reasons were twofold: because the debacle of his father’s deathbed ceremony had rendered him impoverished, and because he was infatuated with Ina Emily.

Not so. The real reason was that Bennie was determined to be at Ina Emily’s side when someone finally killed her or she died of natural causes. Unless of course Ama Phil died first-then there’d no longer be any reason for Bennie not to take what was his.

Then when he returned to Nias to live out the rest of his life, and in due course pass his eheha on to his heir on his deathbed, he wanted to bring with him as much earthly wealth as possible, enough to reestablish his family as the richest in the village, if the village still stood, with enough left over to get himself across the bridge to the other world.

And never mind that Ama Phil and Ina Emily had promised to leave Ama Bene their fortunes. Their fortunes were something called lastwillsandtestaments. In casinos they gave you your winnings in cash, and if you buried it under your house along with your heads or hands, the spirits of the owners of said heads or hands would protect it for you until you needed it, just as they would protect the house itself.

In contrast with Bennie, the Epps were lackadaisical gamblers. Emily played the slots for an hour or two, Phil the wheel. A little after midnight, after catching Bennie’s eye from the rail and signaling that they were going up, they returned to their room. Emily took one of the queen beds, Phil the other. When Bennie returned to the room around 2:00 A.M., he crawled in with Emily. Half-asleep, she wasn’t sure which one of her old men was poking at her from behind, the smooth one or the hairy one, until she realized which orifice he was poking at. In Lolowa’asi, Bennie always said, a woman may let many men into the house, but only her husband is permitted to use the front door.

Chapter Seven 1

Sunday morning. Funny how somehow you always know it’s Sunday, thought Dawson. Even here on St. Luke, two thousand miles and three decades removed from the little Wisconsin town she’d grown up in, there’s that same Sunday stillness in the air.

Only here, it’s always a summer Sunday, which is even better. No homework hanging over your head. No chores, either, as long as you went to church. That was the choice in the Bannerman household: church or chores. Her older brother Randy, who took indolence to places it hadn’t been before, used to ask if he could get out of chores entirely, if he stopped off at church every afternoon after school or football practice, depending on the season.

She hadn’t seen or talked to Randy since 1970, her ill-fated freshman year at Madison. She had managed to talk to her parents several times over the years, and even visited her mother twice, once not long after Dad died and the second time just before Mom passed away, but Randy had let it be known through their younger brother Danny, who’d arranged the last visit, that if she showed up at the funeral, he’d turn her in so fast her head would spin.

Come to think of it, there was to be a funeral today. For poor Mrs. Apgard. Dawson wouldn’t be attending- she’d been avoiding public gatherings for thirty years and didn’t see any reason to change her routine now.

Then she remembered that soon she might have to change everything, now that an FBI man had not only moved into the Core, but seemed to be attracted to her-and vice versa. The very fact that he kept telling her she looked familiar meant he hadn’t recognized her yet; when he stopped trying to place her, though, it would probably be time to take it on the lam again.

Or would it? When you’re young, when you’re eighteen or twenty-eight or even thirty-eight, you can think about starting over, but at fifty? Screw it, she thought-maybe I’ll just take my chances.

And there went that luxurious Sunday morning feeling, right down the old Crapaud. Dawson’s heart was pounding; she’d grown warm under the covers. Holly’s covers-she’d baby-sat for Holly again last night, and again she’d slept over. She’d pretended to be asleep when Holly crawled into bed around two-thirty, this time without taking a shower first.

Dawson couldn’t blame her-she’d taken her own shower at ten in the evening, with Miami Mark standing guard outside the Crapaud door, armed with a twelve-gauge over-and-under. Corefolk had patrolled in shifts all night; they’d also strung lights in the tamarind trees and set tiki torches around the perimeter of the clearing.

Around nine o’clock, Dawson slipped out from under the mosquito net. A few minutes later Holly joined her in the next room, lured by the smell of fresh coffee. They folded the table down, sat across from each other, and spoke in whispers. The first topic of conversation was the Machete Man, who’d also been topic number one at the ’Hands last night-apparently the rumor had already spread around the island-and when that was exhausted, Holly