Island of Bones (6 page)

It was dark by the time he swung the Mustang into Branson’s on the Beach and parked by his cottage. He popped open the glove box and took out the Glock. Getting out of the car, he clipped the holstered gun at his hip and picked up the Federal Express box. Closing the door with his foot, he started toward the cottage. He drew up short when he saw his front door wide open. The living room was dark but he could see a light on back in the bedroom.

Silently, he set the box on the porch step and crept up to the door. He could see through the cottage to the open bedroom door and to the nightstand with its small bedside lamp. The shade had been knocked off and in the bare-bulb light he could see a shadow moving along the wall. He pulled out his gun and crept forward.

Banging and scraping sounds, like someone searching through the dresser drawers. He spun into the doorway, gun raised.

“Don’t move!”

The man crouched in the corner jumped, dropping something to the floor as his head snapped to Louis.

"
Putain de merde
!”
he screamed.

Louis lowered the gun, letting out his breath. “Jesus, Pierre. What the fuck
—-?”

Pierre was cowering, one
hand outstretched and the
other to his bare chest. “Louis! You scared the shits from me!”

Louis came into the bedroom, his eyes going up to the plastic drop cloth covering his bed
, the ladder, and finally up to the ceiling with its fresh coat of plaster.

Pierre shrugged. “You said to fix the leak. I did.”

Louis lowered the gun. Pierre was wearing only his underwear —- old shorts that hung low under his belly. He was streaked with sweat and white plaster.

“Jesus, Pierre, why didn’t you turn on the AC?”
Louis asked,
moving to the wall unit.

“It is dead.”

Louis stopped and looked back at Pierre, who shrugged again.

“I don’t suppose you can fix it,” Louis said.

Pierre shook his head. “Too old. It was its time.”

“How am I supposed to sleep?”

Pierre shrugged again.

“What about a new one?” Louis asked. Sweat was already starting to drip down his back.

Pierre shook his head slowly, but then he smiled. “I bring you a fan,” he said, bending to pick up the trowel he had dropped.

“Come on, man, it’s like a hundred degrees tonight,” Louis said.

“It’s a good fan,” Pierre shot over his shoulder.

Louis heard the screen door slapping shut behind him.

“Shit,” he muttered, staring at the air conditioner.

He stood looking at the mess for a moment
, holstered his Glock and placed it in its usual spot in the nightstand drawer.

He peeled off his sweaty shirt, throwing it at the pile of
dirty clothes in the corner. Pulling on a clean T-shirt, he went out to the living room and switched on a lamp.

He glanced at the living room AC unit, but he knew it was on its last legs, too. He went to the jalousie windows and cranked them wide open. Nearly eight at night and the temperature was still in the eighties, typical mean August weather. But at least there was a breeze blowing in from the gulf tonight. He could feel it, warm and moist on his sweaty skin. He could hear it,
whipping through the palms and rattling the auger shell chimes out on the porch.

The porch...he had left the Federal Express box out there.

He went out, retrieved the box, and came back in, setting it on the kitchen table. His rumbling stomach made him realize he hadn’t eaten so he pulled out a jar of Jif, some jelly, and a loaf of bread and sat down at the table.

As he slapped together two sandwiches, his thoughts went ba
ck to the Jane Doe autopsy report. Abused...and twelve weeks pregnant.

And that coral ring. She wore it on her left hand but it didn’t look like any wedding ring he had ever seen. And if she
was married, why hadn’t the husband come forward? Men who abused women were usually hyper-possessive. Maybe she had been trying to leave him and he snapped and shot her.

Louis stood up and got a Heineken, coming back to finish his second sandwich.

He thought about what Landeta had said, that they had to consider a possible lover. Maybe the abusive husband shot her in a jealous rage and the pregnancy was just a coincidence.

Coincidence...like Diane Woods showing up at his door and telling him her father had a rifle and a collection of articles about missing women?

Louis took another swig of beer. He was trying to see Frank Woods as Jane Doe’s secret lover. He was trying to see Frank Woods as the kind of man who could shoot a woman.

Louis rose and went to the bedroom. He rummaged through some papers on the dresser until he found the copies of the articles Diane Woods had given him. Taking them back to the table, he read the one from 1953 about the missing Fort Myers
girl, Emma Fielding. No mention of her being pregnant. But then again, there was no mention of her even being dead.

Louis set the article aside. Now he was trying to picture Frank Woods in 1953. He would have been what, about twenty- five? He was trying to picture him with a wife and a baby daughter
—- and a girlfriend on the side.

But to do it twice? It was one thing for Frank Woods to get involved with Emma Fielding when he was a young man. But did he make the same mistake thirty-four years later? Did a fifty-something widower librarian have an affair with a young woman, get her pregnant, and then shoot her just so he could keep his life nice and neat?

Louis took another long swig of beer.

T
o all appearances, Frank Woods was ordinary. But sometimes ordinary people did extraordinary things. Like have affairs. And then they often did something stupid when things went wrong. Like getting a young woman pregnant.

He rose and went to stand at the open screen door. It was pitch-black out in the yard but he could hear the soft hiss of the waves breaking on the beach.

Roberta asking him --
You ever had a baby?

Almost...

When he turned back, his eyes fell on the Federal Express box sitting on the table. He went to it and opened the cardboard flaps. He carefully lifted the skull out of the Styrofoam peanuts and held it up to the light, turning it over, looking at the holes on the top.

It was so light, and the whole thing fit neatly into his hand. He stared into the empty sockets, little holes no bigger than pennies.

What color had its eyes been?

Brown, like hers? Or gray, like mine?

What had its hair been like?

Coarse, like hers? Or soft, like mine?

What color was its skin?

Black, like hers? Or... like mine?

Louis set the skull down on the table and took a step away from it. He could see her in his mind, see her face the way it had looked that last day he saw her. Jaw clenched, tear-filled eyes that snapped with anger.

It’s yours, Louis, you know it is.

Shit, Kyla, what do you want from me? I’m twenty years old and I don’t want my life to be over!

Your life! What about mine! I’m getting rid of it!

Go, then. Just go....

Louis reached up to wipe the sweat off the back of his neck. The room was stifling
, like the night breeze had suddenly died.

He heard a noise out in the
dark and a moment later, he saw Pierre coming up the steps. He was lugging a large fan.

Pierre pushed open the screen and came in, setting the fan down with a huge exhalation.

“
Voila!
” he said.

“I still want a new air conditioner,” Louis said.

“Yes, yes,” Pierre said, flapping a hand. His eyes went to the skull on the table. He stared at it for a long time then turned to look at Louis.

“What is that?” he asked.

“A baby,” Louis said.

“
Mon Dieu
. Where did you get it?”

“I found it on the beach.”

Pierre’s tan face went a little chalky. “Dead babies on my beach?”

“No, no...it’s old.”

“Who is it?”

Louis shrugged.

Pierre started to pick it up.

“Don’t touch it, please.”

Pierre backed up, looking at Louis oddly. “You are not going to find out who it is?”

“It could have come from an abandoned cemetery. There’s no way to know.”

“You should ask Bessie,” Pierre said.

“Who?”

“Bessie Levy. She knows about old things.”

“Is she a historian or something?”

Pierre frowned. “Historian? Oh, no. Bessie is
une vieille femme
. She has been here forever, up in Bokeelia. She is old, very old, that is all. And maybe a little
gaga
.”

Pierre wagged a finger at his temple.

Louis sighed. He had been thinking about trying to trace the skull ever since Landeta had asked him what he was going to do with it. But he knew he needed to spend his time on Frank Woods. Diane Woods had already paid him five hundred dollars. And he hadn’t done much yet to earn it.

Louis picked up the skull and carefully laid it back in its box. He heard a whirring sound and turned to see Pierre positioning the fan near the sofa.

Pierre spread an arm out to the fan. “You will sleep good now.”

“I doubt it,” Louis said.

It took an hour to get through the traffic jams in Cape Coral and another half hour before he was past the new subdivisions that were sprouting like mushrooms after a heavy rain. By the time Louis touched on to Pine Island, he knew he was going to be a good forty minutes late.

“Be on time. I got a hot date at four,” Bessie Levy had told
him on the phone. She had hung up without another word.

Louis turned north on Stringfellow Road. The Federal Express box on the passenger seat slid and he grabbed it before it fell. He glanced down at the skull, but it was snug in its bed of Styrofoam peanuts.

Chances were slim to none that the woman could tell him anything about the skull. Even if she could pinpoint where it might have come from, there was no way he could ever find out its identity.

Still, it was like starting to read a book and leaving it unfinished. And searching for a nameless baby was a helluva lot more interesting than tailing a boring middle-aged librarian.

He had been wrong about Frank Woods. He wasn’t ordinary. He was dull —- depressingly, desperately dull.

The last t
hree days and nights spent watching him had been like watching paint dry. Watching the guy get into his old Honda Civic at seven forty-five every morning. Following him to the library. Trailing him to the Denny’s down the block at noon. Waiting for him outside the library and tailing him home again. Sitting in the Mustang, watching the blue light of the television play against the drapes until Woods turned it off at eleven-thirty and went to bed.

Three days and three nights and the guy hadn’t changed his routine. Right down to sitting in the same seat at the Denny’s counter and ordering the same patty melt with fries. No one came to visit him and Woods never went out. The only change in the man’s stupefying routine came on Saturday, when Diane came over to pick him up and they went to Shoney’s for dinner. They
returned ninety minutes later and Diane dropped him off, barely stopping long enough to let the guy out at the curb before she sped off. Louis noted that she looked upset, but Frank seemed his usual mundane self. He went inside and a moment later, the blue light of the TV came on.

That night, Louis had stayed outside, just to make sure Frank wasn’t slipping out after the TV went off. But he never left. Finally at three
a.m., Louis had gone home, lying awake on the sofa while Pierre’s fan cooled the sweat on his body.

This morning he had called Diane Woods. He heard relief in her voice when he told her he had found out nothing.

“So what now?” she asked.

“Your father is as normal as the sun coming up every day,” he told her. “I can’t go on taking your money.”

“Please, just a few more days,” she said “I want to be sure.”

Louis
had reluctantly agreed to stay with it for one more week. He needed the work, but he knew it wasn’t right to take Diane Woods’s money. Especially since he was taking the day off today to see Bessie Levy about the baby skull.

A green road sign announced he was coming into Bokeelia.

Bessie Levy had said to go to the marina across from Cap’n Con’s Fishhouse and ask for directions from there.

Louis pulled up to the white clapboard restaurant and got out. The bright orange sign in the window said CLOSED. The marina across the street was nothing more than a dock with about ten slips. He spotted a man on one of the boats and went out to him.

“Excuse me, can you tell me where Bessie Levy lives?” Louis asked.

The man’s eyes disappeared into his catcher’s mitt of a face as he squinted at Louis.

“There,” he said, flicking a hand over his shoulder before turning back to his lines.

Louis looked out over the blue waters of Charlotte Harbor and saw a ramshackle wood house built up on stilts about five hundred yards offshore.

“How do I get —- ” he began.

“Well, you can swim. Or I’ll take you out for ten bucks,” the man said without looking up.

Louis hesitated. “Okay, I’ll be right back.”

The man had the boat’s motor running when Louis came back carrying the box and they motored out to the stilt house. Louis handed over a ten and climbed up the wood ladder, the box tucked under his arm.

Bessie Levy was waiting at the open front door. She was tiny, not even five feet, dressed in a faded denim shirt, old khakis, and green rubber waders. Her hair was a thin fuzz of brightly dyed red around a face deeply creased by age and spotted by the sun.

Her buckshot eyes immediately silenced him.

“You’re late,” she barked.

She stood there, arms akimbo, legs planted on the warped wood deck, her chin scored by frown lines. With the red fuzz of hair and little puppet chin, she reminded Louis of Howdy Doody.

“I know, I know,” Louis said quickly.

She started gathering up a pail and shovel by the door. “I told you, I got
—-”

“A hot date, yeah, I know.” Louis shifted the box to his other arm. “Look, Miss Levy, I need
—-”

“Too late. I gotta get going, ’cuz if I’m not in that bed by four, I don’t get any.”

“Please, Miss Levy, I just want you to take a look at my skull.”

Her black eyes shot up. “Your skull?”

Louis held up a hand. He set the box down and opened the flaps. Bessie Levy came forward and looked in. Her eyebrows twitched.

“Where you find that?”

“Captiva. On the beach after the hurricane.”

She looked up at Louis. “That’s a baby skull.”

“I know.”

“It’s old.”

“I know that, too. But that’s all I know. I was hoping you could tell me more.”

Her eyes went out over the waters, now tipped with silver from the slanting sun.

She looked at Louis. “You like oysters?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Well, too bad. You ain’t getting any tonight and neither am I.”

She set the pail down with a clang and nodded to the door. “Come on in then. Let’s go have a look at your baby here.”