Island of Bones (9 page)

In her hand was a white coral ring. It looked exactly like the ring Louis had seen on the finger of the dead woman on Monkey Island.

“You’ve had that the whole time?” he asked.

She nodded.

Louis looked away, his chest tight. “Where did you find it?”

“In a box in the bottom of one of his desk drawers.”

“You never saw it before?” Louis asked.

Diane shook her head. “No, never.”

“What about your mother? You’re sure she never wore it?”

She shook her head again. “No, her wedding ring was a plain gold band. After she died, my father gave it to me.” She held up her right hand. “I wear it now. It’s the only thing I have to remember her by.”

She looked like she was going to cry. It struck Louis that it was the first time he had seen her look genuinely upset.

“You should have given me that ring the first day,” Louis said. “How the hell can you expect me to waste my time on something when I don’t have all the evidence?”

“If I had given it to you, you would’ve turned it over to the police.”

“Damn right. And that’s still what I’m going to do,” Louis said. “This is important. This is more than just suspicion. This is a link, Miss Woods. To a murder victim.”

She closed her fist quickly over the ring and stepped back.

Louis held out his hand. “Give it to me.”

“No.”

“Suit yourself. I’ll just tell the cops what I know and what you have and you will be charged with obstruction. How’s that?”

“You can’t do this to me.”

“You’ve done it to yourself,” Louis said. “I’m leaving. Put your last check in the mail.”

Louis started away but she grabbed him again. This time, he jerked away and spun to face her.

“Look, lady
—-”

“I’ll give you five hundred dollars more to find him first. Just give him ten minutes
. Talk to him, please.”

Louis headed to the front door and pulled it open.

“A thousand!”

He turned. “You can’t afford that. Look, just
—-”

Diane came to stand in front of him. “You said yourself he’s an ordinary guy. You said he was normal."

Louis rubbed his face. “I don’t know what normal is any more than you do, Miss Woods.”

“Please,” she said. “I just want this to be quiet
.”

Louis just looked at her.

“The police,” she said, “I don’t want...”

Her voice trailed off and Louis knew what she wanted. Or rather didn’t want. Diane Woods didn’t want to see the spectacle of her father being hauled into the police station on the
nightly news. For a moment, he was disgusted. But then, who in their right mind would want to be part of the circus?

He looked at her balled fist. And there was the ring. No way was she going to give up that ring without a fight, and he had no authority to take it from her. Hell, for all he knew, she was just going to go throw it in some canal as soon as he left.

“All right. If I don’t find him by tonight, you give me the ring and I go to the cops.”

She nodded. “Just find him. And make sure he doesn’t get hurt...or try to hurt himself.”

Louis looked back around the room, his eyes falling on the filled ashtray. There was a book of matches next to it. Louis picked it up. Sutter’s Marina. He knew that place. It was down the street from Roberta Tatum’s store. It was a popular place for fishermen or anyone looking to rent a boat or catch a ferry.

“Now what happens?” Diane asked.

Louis pocketed the Sutter’s Marina matches. “We hope your father has just gone fishing,” he said.

The leather-faced guy behind the counter at Sutter’s Marina handed Louis the picture of Frank Woods and went back to picking his teeth.

“So have you seen him?” Louis asked.

“Not sure. Maybe.”

“Think harder.”

The guy tugged on his sweat-stained ball cap. It was embroidered with a blue Grateful Dead bear. “You a cop?”

Louis had a feeling the guy had spent some time in the backseat of a squad car. “No, I’m not.”

The guy pursed his lips. “Yeah, I saw him. He was in here yesterday asking about ferry service.”

“To where?”

The guy shrugged.

“Okay, so where do your ferries go?” Louis asked.

“Anywheres with a dock. Useppa, Cabbage Key, Cayo Costa, Bird Island, Safety Harbor.” The man leaned over the counter. “And me personally, I got a skiff that can take you a few places without docks. If you know what I mean.”

Louis knew exactly what the guy meant. His eyes drifted out the open door to the sun-silvered waters of Pine Island
Sound. Even from here he could see about a half dozen small green islands and he knew there were dozens more. Some owned by the state, some private, some inhabited, some nothing more than tidal flats colonized by mangroves. But dense and isolated enough for a man to get lost in, especially if he wanted to.

“So did he take a ferry or not?” Louis asked.

“Seems I remember him buying a ticket, yeah.”

Louis was losing patience. “To where?”

The guy shrugged his bony shoulders again. “Cayo Costa. But I sure as hell wouldn’t want to go camping out there, man.”

“He had camping equipment with him?” Louis asked. When the guy nodded Louis went on, “Why do you say you wouldn’t want to go there?”

The guy looked at him like he was crazy. “It’s August, dude. The skeeters eat you alive unless you stay out near the gulf.”

Louis glanced at his watch. Nearly four. “Give me a ticket to the island.”

The guy eyed Louis’s khakis and polo shirt. “Kinda late to be going out there. There’s only one boat coming back at six.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Louis
said, slapping some bills on the counter.

He was the only passenger on the ferry. As it chugged out into the open waters of Pine Island Sound
, his thoughts came back to something that had been bothering him from the day he looked down at Jane Doe’s body lying twisted on that stinking little mangrove island.

Water...it touched everything here. Literally, water surrounded the barrier islands and streamed up the river and estuaries of the Fort Myers mainland. Figuratively, water touched the lives of the people, from the shrimp fishermen to the girls who sold suntan lotion on the beach. Water was probably the most important part of his new home’s makeup. Yet he knew almost nothing
about it, or the whole outdoor thing really.

Neither did Frank Woods, if Diane knew what she was talking about. But something told him she didn’t.

The ferry let him off at a small dock on the east side of the island. He saw a sign with an arrow that said CAMPGROUND. He followed the path through the mangroves and came to a large clearing sheltered by high-arching Australian pines. There were some tent sites, picnic tables, and a few primitive-looking cabins. But not one person.

Louis stood there, listening to the wind in the pines. Shit, now what? He thought about what the Deadhead had said about no one wanting to camp this time of year. Maybe Frank had camped somewhere over on the gulf side of the island. He glanced at his watch. He had more than an hour until the ferry came back.

With a look up at the sun low in the western sky, he started toward it, down a path leading into a tunnel of brush and trees. Soon he was dripping with sweat and the mosquitoes were starting to swarm in the heavy motionless air. Sounds rose up around him in the gathering dusk. A strange cry of a bird somewhere above. A groan of some unknown creature below. He felt his heart quicken slightly and picked up his pace.

Bessie Levy came to his mind, something she had said as she motored him back to the Bokeelia dock.

A pelican had soared over the boat and she had pointed to it saying, “Look! Ain’t that beautiful?”

“It’s ugly, like one of those prehistoric birds,” Louis had said.

She had laughed at him. “Well, that’s what this place is. Pterodactyls on our docks, centrosauruses crawling out of the canals to eat little dogs. Florida is a prehistoric place, young man, where the sea is still close and the sky still burns at night. Here in this place, we humans are still very close to the moment we crawled out of the slime.”

He had looked at Bessie Levy, looked at her sitting there
holding the tiller of her boat, face lifted to the sun and salt spray. He looked at her and saw an old woman unafraid of the seething, sodden mysteries of the natural world.

He knew he could never be like her. He could face a psychopath waving a knife. But he could live a hundred years and still would always jump when he heard an animal cry in the dark.

Louis paused at a fork in the trail. He could just make out the small sign that read CEMETERY TRAIL. It seemed to go back inland. He could see the sky reddening above the tops of the trees. He decided to take the other path.

He walked more slowly now since the path was just a streak in the quickening dusk. The path narrowed into heavy brush and he had to push his way through. He brushed against something and jerked back, feeling a sharp sting.

“Shit,” he muttered, grabbing his arm.

He had been pricked by something, and a small bubble of blood was already visible. He looked at the short palm he had brushed against. It had five-inch thorns on the fronds. He clamped a hand over his bleeding
arm and moved on.

He stopped abruptly. Something white loomed before him.

Jesus...bones?

They looked like giant animal bones sticking up from the sand. He crept forward and let out a breath.

Trees ...just dead trees. They looked like the sea grape trees in front of his cottage, but these were dead and bleached pure white, twisted and bent low by the wind and salt tides.

He stopped. The huge silen
ce rushed in, and he heard the soft hiss of the tide on the beach. He was near the gulf. Then he saw something about a hundred yards ahead, beyond the naked white trees —- a faint light, moving slightly.

A lantern. It had to be Frank.

Louis started across the grove of dead trees, picking his way carefully over the exposed roots, crouching to move beneath the giant rib cages the trees formed over him. Finally, he made it to the other side. He stood dripping with sweat, his heart hammering. The lantern light had disappeared.

He felt a jab in the back and froze.

“Don’t move,” a voice said. “Put up your hands.”

Louis drew in a breath. “Frank? Frank Woods?”

“What are you doing here?”

When Louis didn’t answer, Frank jabbed him harder in the small of the back.

“Easy, man, put the rifle down,” Louis said.

Frank was silent but he hadn’t moved the barrel.

“I just want to talk, Frank, that’s all.”

“You’re bleeding,” Frank said.

Louis felt the gun barrel leave his back.

“Turn around
,” Frank said.

Louis turned slowly, lowering his hands. Frank was standing there in the deep shadows. In his hand was a stick. Louis let out a breath. He could feel his own gun on his waist and debated pulling it, but decided against it.

“How’d you know I was here?” Frank demanded. Then he shook his head. “Never mind. That’s not important. Why are you following me?”

“Look, Woods
—- ”

“You’ve been following me for days now. I want to know why. Who sent you?”

Louis couldn’t make out Frank’s face but he could hear the tension in his voice. The man was afraid of something.

“You got a camp somewhere?” Louis asked.

“Yeah, over on the beach.”

“Let’s go and talk.”

Frank hesitated then started away. Louis let him lead the way. They emerged from the brush onto a wide beach and Louis saw the lantern again. And then a small tent sitting between two dead mangrove trees.

“Wait here,” Frank said
. He dipped inside the tent and emerged with a first-aid kit.

“What happened to you
r arm?” Frank asked.

Louis had been holding his
arm and when he let go, he was shocked to see a knot forming on his wrist. “Walked into a tree with thorns the size of stilettos,” he said.

Frank made a wry face. “Probably a date palm. If any of it’s still in your skin, it can get septic. It happened to me once.
You’d better clean it up.”

He held out the kit. Louis took it and sat down on a piece of driftwood near the Coleman lantern. As Frank bent down to turn
it up, Louis got his first good look at him. He was wearing old jeans and a worn denim shirt, an old fishing hat covering his hair. In the white glow of the Coleman lantern, Frank’s eyes were underscored with bruises of exhaustion. He looked nothing like the benign librarian of a few weeks ago. Now he looked like a haunted —- or hunted —- man.

Frank moved away and Louis concentrated on the puncture on his arm. It had swelled up to the size of an egg and he could feel his
forearm stiffening. Probing at the wound, he couldn’t see any remnant of the thorn.

“Pour on some hydrogen peroxide,” Frank said.

Louis found the small plastic bottle and poured it over his arm.

“Is it bubbling?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ll live then.”

Frank came back toward the light, pulling off his fishing hat, letting loose a bush of gray hair, again far different from the trimmed look Louis had seen in the library. Frank crouched by the fire and added some new branches from the small pile nearby. Louis noticed the fire had been made in a pit scooped out of the sand and lined with shells.

“You’ve been watching me,” Frank said. “Why?”

Louis looked up at Frank but said nothing.

“You are a private investigator, Mr. Kincaid,” Frank said. “I knew that when you came in to get your library card. People
hire private investigators to do things. Who hired you?”

“Your daughter
,” Louis said as he twisted the cap back on the bottle.

Frank’s expression stiffened. “Diane hired you?”

Louis nodded.

Frank stood up and took a few steps toward the tent, then stared out at the gulf. The sun was gone, leaving only a bruise of purple on the horizon. Louis glanced around the campsite for Frank’s rifle but didn’t see it.

“She’s worried about you,” Louis said.

“She worries too much.”

“She’s your daughter.”

Frank glanced at him then looked back out at the water.

Louis heard a whine in his ear and then the sting of a mosquito at his neck. There wasn’t a hint of a breeze coming off the gulf tonight, nothing to keep the mosquitoes from swarming out from the nearby mangroves. Louis turned his arm toward the lantern to get a look at his watch. Almost seven. The last ferry had left. No way to get off this damn island tonight.

“Daughters,” Frank said softly.

Louis looked up at Frank’s back.

“Most men want sons
,” Frank said. “You know, someone who looks like them, acts like them. They want sons so they can see themselves young again and fool themselves into thinking they aren’t going to die.”

Frank turned but didn’t look at Louis. “Daughters are different. They aren’t you. They are what you could have maybe been.”

He met Louis’s eyes. “You got kids?”

Louis shook his head slowly.

“There’s something about a daughter that makes a man do strange things,” Frank said. He looked away again.

“I need to ask you some questions,” Louis said.

“Does my daughter think I’m getting senile?”

“No.”

“Then why did she hire you?”

“She found some newspaper clippings in your desk drawer. One is about the unidentified body found on Monkey Island last week and the other is about a missing girl, from 1953.” Louis could see a tension in Frank’s jaw and a vein moving in his neck. He couldn’t tell if Frank was upset about this revelation or just about the fact that his daughter had gone through his desk.

Frank reached to his pocket and Louis tensed. But Frank just withdrew a pack of cigarettes and some matches. He cupped a match to light the cigarette, took a long slow drag, and let it out in a tired sigh.

“I thought I recognized the dead woman, that’s all,” he said. “I was wrong. I forgot to throw it away.”

“What about Emma Fielding, the missing girl from 1953? Why did you keep that article?”

“I knew her in high school.”

“Do you know what happened to her?”