Twenty Blue Devils

'What do you mean, mosquitoes and things?' John asked. “What else you got in there?'

Parks laughed. “Oh, that's about it. Actually, they shouldn't be much of a problem. Been a dry year. But nobody's used these cottages for a couple weeks, so you never know. Oh, yeah, one more thing: when you spray, always spray down. Don't never aim it at the ceiling.'

John glowered suspiciously at him. “Why not?'

'Because whatever's up there living in the thatch, you'd best just leave it alone, that's for dang sure.'

After a brief pause John spoke. “Say, Dean, you wouldn't have any rooms with regular walls, would you? And a regular ceiling? I mean, this is real nice and everything—'

'Hell, don't worry about it. It's nothing but lizards. The worst they do is fall off, kerplunk, once in a while, but they just pick theirselves up and scoot back up the walls. Besides, they eat the bugs.'

'Oh, lizards,” John said, relieved. “We had lizards in Hilo when I was a kid. Lizards I can live with.'

Gideon wasn't so sure he could, but there didn't seem to be much choice, and he was too tired to worry about it. There was only an hour or two left until daylight and he was aching to lie down. If he didn't sleep on his back with his mouth open, which he usually didn't, how much of a problem could falling lizards be?

'Nighty-night, then,” Parks said. “I'll see you fellas tomorrow.'

They waited until he was out of earshot, John spoke first. “What's this about Nick's not getting around to telling them what we're doing here?'

'What's this about Nick's not getting around to getting the body exhumed yet?” Gideon answered. “I should have been able to get going tomorrow, John. The body could have been back in the ground long before the memorial service. You'd think he'd want that, wouldn't you?'

John nodded. “Something weird's going on, don't you think?'

Gideon slowly climbed the steps, turning around before he opened the door.

'That's for dang sure,” he said.

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Chapter 10

* * * *

As Parks had promised, there was an aerosol spray can on a little shelf beside the door. Gideon read the label in the light from the bathroom. Timor—Protection Contre Insectes Rampants was the alarming legend, on a background depicting a particularly large and depraved-looking cockroach.

The bathroom was full of flowers and potted plants. He fancied he could hear a contented buzzing coming from it. Above his head, in the bedroom, a tiny movement caught his eye, and when he spotted a three-inch gray lizard, lit by the light from the bathroom, on one of the slanting roof struts, it seemed to run shyly from his sight, burrowing into the thatch. He felt very much the intruder, barging in on creatures that had been living there together for weeks, maybe months, symbiotically if not always peacefully.

He returned the can to the shelf, pulled back the bedcovers, and started getting out of his clothes.

The hell with it, he thought. Live and let live.

* * * *

Once, in the short time he slept, he was awakened by a little plop on the wood-plank floor, followed by a silence during which he fancied a small, surprised animal was collecting its dignity, and then a patter of tiny, scurrying feet making for the far wall. He turned over under the sheet and was asleep again in seconds. But with the first gray smudges of daylight, the tremendous, froglike-cricket-like-crow-like racket from the mynah birds roosting in the trees behind the cottages woke him up for good after not much more than an hour's sleep. He was grumpy and tired, but at least he had established a successful quid pro quo with the mosquitoes. Not a bite on him

Even after he'd showered, using the ubiquitous coconut-scented soap of French Polynesia, and sleepily gotten dressed in a pair of lightweight L.L. Bean pants and a short-sleeved shirt, the sun had yet to come up. Tropical sunsets were famously sudden, but sunrises took their time, as they did anyplace else. The sky was barely streaked with mauve and purple, the land dark, the sea the color of pewter. It was 5:00. Well, he was an early riser at home too, if not quite this early. You could get a lot done getting up early.

A solitary dawn walk along the beach would be a fine way to start the day, he thought. He had some ideas about Nick's odd behavior and he wanted to think them through. With the two-hour time difference it would be 7:30 in Port Angeles by the time he got back. He could give Julie a call before she went off to her job—like John's sister, Brenda, she was a supervising park ranger—at the administrative center of the Olympic National Park, a convenient five minutes from home. After that he would have a few cups of good Tahitian coffee in the dining room and put in some prep time for the upcoming symposium on Bronze Age congenital abnormalities at the winter paleopathological meetings—for which, with commendable foresight, he'd brought his notes.

And all this, he thought with something uncharitably close to smugness, he would do while John, a notoriously late riser at the best of times, snoozed the morning away. He got a pair of beach sandals from the closet and sat down on the bed to slip them on. Still a little drowsy, he stretched and yawned, then lay back against the headboard and closed his eyes for a moment.

When he awakened the sun was streaming hotly through the windows and John was pounding at the door. “Come on, Doc, wake up already! It's nine o'clock! You gonna sleep all day, or what?'

* * * *

Beneath the outrigger canoe suspended from the ceiling in the Shangri-La's dining room they breakfasted on