“Yes.” I watched lacy shadows slide across his face.
“Probably an old Indian burial.”
“Not with this dental work.” I rotated the mandible and sunlight glinted off gold.
“That’s what got J-7’s attention,” he said, staring at the crowns.
“And this is flesh,” I added, pointing to a brown glob clinging to the joint.
“What does that mean?”
I raised the jaw and sniffed. It had the dank, cloying odor of death.
“In this climate, depending on whether the body was buried or left on the surface, I’d say this person has been dead less than a year.”
“How the fuck can that be?” A vein throbbed in his forehead.
“Don’t yell at me. Apparently everyone who comes to this island does not clear through you!”
I glanced away from him.
“Where the hell did he get it?”
“He’s your monkey, Sam. You figure it out.”
“You damn well better believe I will.”
He strode toward the field station, took the stairs two at a time, and disappeared inside. Through the open windows I heard him call to Jane.
For a moment I stood there, hearing the click of palmetto fronds and feeling surreal. Had death actually penetrated my island of tranquillity?
“No!” cried a voice in my head. “Not here!”
I heard the whirp of the spring as the screen door flew open. Sam emerged with Jane and called to me.
“Come on, Quincy. Let’s round up the usual suspects. Jane knows where O group goes when it’s not in camp, so we should be able to pick up J-7’s collar. Maybe the little bugger will give something up.”
I didn’t move.
“Son of a buck, I’m sorry. I just don’t like body parts showing up on my island. You know my temper.”
I did. But it wasn’t Sam’s outburst that held me back. I smelled the pine and felt the warm breeze on my cheek. I knew what was out there and didn’t want to find it.
“C’mon.”
I took a deep breath, as enthused as a woman on her way to a meeting requested by an oncologist.
“Wait.”
I went into the field station and rooted in the kitchen until I found a plastic tub. I sealed the jaw inside, hid the container in a cabinet in the back room, then left a note for Katy.
We took a trail behind the field station and followed Jane toward the center of the island. She led us to an area where the trees were the size of offshore rigs, the foliage a solid canopy overhead. The ground was a plush of humus and pine needles, the air heavy with the scent of decaying vegetation and animal matter. A swish in the branches told me monkeys were present.
“Someone’s here,” said Jane, turning on her receiver.
Sam searched the trees with his binoculars, trying to make out tattoo codes.
“It’s A group,” he said.
“Hunh!”
A juvenile crouched on a branch above me, shoulders down, tail in the air, eyes fixed on my face. The sharp, throaty bark was his way of saying “back off!”
When I met his gaze the monkey sat back, ducked his head, then raised it diagonally across his body. He repeated the bob several times, then spun and did a cannonball into the next tree.
Jane adjusted dials then closed her eyes to listen, face tense with concentration. After a while she shook her head and continued up the path.
Sam scanned the treetops as Jane stopped again and rotated clockwise, totally focused on the sounds in her headset. Finally,
“I’ve got a very faint signal.”
She veered in the direction in which the cannonballer had disappeared, paused, pivoted again.
“I think he’s over near Alcatraz.” She pointed toward ten o’clock.
While most of the trapping pens on the island are designated by letter, a few of the older ones have names like O.K. Corral or Alcatraz.
We moved toward Alcatraz, but just south of the corral Jane left the path and cut into the woods. The vegetation was thicker here, the ground spongy underfoot. Sam turned to me.
“Watch yourself near the pond. Alice had a mess of babies last season, and I suspect she’s not feeling sociable.”
Alice is a fourteen-foot alligator who has lived on Murtry for as long as anyone can remember. No one recalls
