Twenty-Seven Bones

mirror-amplified, superwhite LED lanterns, shadows were effectively wiped out, and the enveloping whiteness leached the vitality from even the brightest colors. It was like living in the perpetual glare of a photographer’s flash.

The floor of this third chamber had been partly covered with rattan mats, which had seemed odd to Andy. The kiss, the cave, the lights, the mats: things were getting a little weird around the edges, he remembered thinking. But then, the edges were where the action was.

“So where do we start digging?” he’d asked, switching off his superfluous miner’s lamp.

“We don’t,” Phil Epp had replied, pulling a pistol out from under his safari jacket-a serious-looking.38 or.40 caliber semiautomatic, judging by the slide and the size of the hole in the barrel.

“What the fuck is going on?”

“You want the short version or the long version?”

“Start with the short version.”

“There’s no treasure. Take your clothes off.”

At first he thought it was a joke. After Emily, too, had stripped off her clothes (the temperature in the cave was an ambient seventy-four degrees, day or night), knelt in front of him, taken his flaccid member in her wide mouth, and brought him to attention, he decided it was some sort of sex game. With gazongas like that, he’d thought, she didn’t need the goddamn gun. But then Phil, to Andy’s growing horror, had handed the pistol to Bennie and stripped off his own clothes.

For the next several hours Andy had been abused in ways he’d never imagined, at least in relation to his own body, then abandoned, left to lie in the darkness for several more hours, gagged, with his hands and feet bound. Upon the return of his tormentors, he had been abused again, with renewed vigor, by both Epps. Bennie had continued to hold the gun, but had neither undressed nor shown much interest in the proceedings.

When he made his little private joke about being ready to hear the long version, Andy understood that they did not mean for him to leave this cave alive. Up to a certain point, he had been able to argue that they didn’t have to be afraid of him turning them in for kidnap and rape if they let him go. “Jesus H. Christ, who am I going to tell? You think I want anybody hearing about this?”

Now, though, that argument was no longer salable. In the intense heat of their sadomasochistic tango, a fierce bonding had occurred. The three of them could read each other’s eyes as well as each other’s bodies by then, and the Epps had to have known as well as Andy that it was no longer a question of his merely turning them in if they set him free. He wanted them dead, vanished from the planet along with the memory of what they had done to him, and would gladly have killed them himself, with his bare hands, if given the chance.

But the chance never came. Instead, Phil Epp took Andy’s shoulders and Bennie took his feet, and with Emily leading the way holding a kerosene-soaked torch, carried him down another passageway, higher and narrower than the others, and into a fourth chamber, smaller than the rest, with a wooden cross made of heavy timbers fitted together and laid out horizontally on the smooth limestone floor.

“Is there going to be much pain?” Andy asked as they laid him down upon the cross.

“Not much,” replied Phil, moving briefly out of Andy’s line of sight and reappearing above his head. “Hold still.” And with that wide leather belt that Andy had come to know so well over the last however-long-it-had-been, Phil strapped Andy’s head to the top of the long axis.

“Please,” said Andy.

“Please what?” Emily, who with Bennie’s help was in the process of strapping Andy’s outstretched arms to the crosspieces with nylon rope, sounded more surprised than annoyed, as if once he’d been strapped down, she’d forgotten Andy could still speak.

“Please…don’t?”

Which was obviously not worthy of a reply. Andy closed his eyes as Emily and Bennie tied his ankles. When he opened them again, Emily’s face was floating above him, just off to his left, while Phil stood at his feet, holding the torch in one hand and a Polaroid camera in the other. Bennie was over to Andy’s right, wearing a gilt-threaded sarung around his waist and holding a machete.

All that was left to Andy by then were a few stray thoughts and a few physical sensations that would not have time to become sense memories. He heard the other three chanting in a language he did not recognize, saw the flare of the torchlight reflected like a silver sun in the blade of the machete as Bennie raised it high, then brought it down hard on his wrist. He felt a cold dull blow, and then, as the blood began to spurt and the pain pulsed up through his arm to the very center of his being, Emily’s face floated sideways over Andy’s. Her mouth with its chipped front tooth was astonishingly wide-open, like one of those throw the beanbag through the clown’s mouth cutouts. It came closer and closer and closer until it filled Andy’s world.

Don’t go down there, Andy thought again, as she pinched his nostrils closed and covered his mouth with hers.

8

Holly had rules. She didn’t drive stoned, she didn’t work stoned, and she didn’t get stoned around the kids, which meant that it wasn’t until nearly ten o’clock that night that she finally got a chance to sample her new purchase. She rolled the world’s thinnest joint in her room and took it outside to smoke.

It was a quiet night. There was no moon, but the stars were bright enough to read by. The temperature was perfect-if there’d been an outdoor thermostat, this was where she’d have set it-and the air smelled of the rain forest. It was a scent that was hard to describe and even harder to forget, all undertones, sweet and earthy, ripe and rotten, a rose garden planted over a shallow grave. Most of the cabins and Quonsets dotting the cleared hillside were dark, but Holly could see Peeping Fran, her nearest uphill neighbor, lying on a chaise longue on the screened- in veranda behind his cabin, writing by the blue-white light of a Coleman lantern. He looked up and waved; she held up the joint by way of invitation; Fran shook his head.

After the initial hit Holly felt herself begin to truly relax for the first time since her encounter with the dickhead at Blue Valley. After the second hit she was obliged to concede that Vincent had been telling the truth: this was indeed two-toke smoke. Which was about how long it took for word to get around among the mosquito population that supper was being served.

Holly wetted the tips of her thumb and forefinger with her tongue, clipped the joint, and turned to go back inside. As she opened the screen door she heard Dawn crying and hurried into the kids’ bedroom.

“What is it, baby?”

Sniffling; hiccups.

Holly switched on the battery-powered lamp between the twin beds-nothing short of a tornado would wake Dawn’s ten-year-old brother at this point-ducked under the mosquito netting, and crawled into the narrow bed beside Dawn. “C’mon, baby doll, tell Auntie Holly what the problem is.”

Dawn, tight-lipped, between hiccups: “Something…in my eye.”

Oops, thought Holly. My bad. “Dawnie, this afternoon, when I picked you up at school and you asked me if I’d been crying, and I said no, I’d just gotten something in my eye, that wasn’t only a lie, it was a BPM. A big fat BPM.”

Two years ago, when Holly took on the role of single mother, she’d felt so utterly unprepared that she’d decided there was no point even trying to bluff her way through it. So when she realized she’d blown a call, deciding arbitrarily to enforce bedtime by the clock instead of the sun, for instance, or insisting upon helping Marley perform some everyday task instead of letting him do it himself, regardless of how long it took or how uncomfortable it was to watch, she had no problem apologizing, declaring a BPM-Bad Parenting Move-and reversing her own ruling.

“Unh-unh.” Dawn shook her head doubtfully.

“Unh-hunh,” said Holly. “When something scares you or makes you sad, it’s always better to talk about it instead of keeping it bottled up-even when you’re a grown-up.”

“You go first, then.” Dawn rolled over to face Holly. Her eyes were startlingly bright and blue, and her skin was the color of medium toast, just a shade darker than her tawny hair in its tight cornrows. Plaiting West Indian style was another skill Holly had had to learn on the job. A shaneh yid, Holly’s late rabbi grandfather would have