Jonathan Nasaw - Twenty-Seven Bones

But the prices hadn’t come down much since she’d last investigated the topic. Still between sixty and a hundred grand a pair, however she sliced it-might as well have been a hundred million.

Holly did two massages at Blue Valley in the early afternoon, then picked the kids up and drove them out out to Sunset beach. They swam (Marley undulated along, porpoiselike, propelling himself with a powerful butterfly kick), they surfed, they snacked on crackers and grapes. After snack, Dawn and her Barbie moved a few yards closer to the water, one to build and demolish sand castles and the other to live in them and be rescued.

Marley, who had long since given up protesting Holly’s no-swimming-right-after-eating rule, asked her why she was so down in the mouth.

She started to say it was nothing, then remembered her BPM with Dawn earlier in the week, and decided to tell him the truth. “I was surfing the Web for prosthetic arms again-prices haven’t come down any.”

“Ain’ had ’em, doan miss ’em,” said Marley as he positioned himself behind Holly, rocked back on the base of his spine and began massaging her back with his feet. Like her, he was naturally gifted at massage. She’d taught him a few things-the things you can’t teach, he already knew. “Good, hunh?”

“Great,” said Holly.

“You think I could do this better with metal hands?”

“Probably not,” Holly had to agree, as Marley pressed his heels on either side of her spine and felt around for the trigger points, the acupressure vortices.

“Then doan vex yaself.”

And as the massage continued, Holly couldn’t help remembering how harshly she had once judged her sister’s parenting choices.

For such a cream puff of a woman, Laurel had been awfully hard on Marley. No sympathy, no fuss-it was as if being born without arms was a perfectly natural thing. And she’d insisted on Marley doing everything he could for himself, using his feet for hands. Or almost everything-one of the carpenters at the Core had built the boy an articulated dressing and ass-wiping stick with an alligator clip on one end connected to a rubber handle he could hold in his mouth on the other.

And Laurel had been proved right, of course. Not only was Marley remarkably unself-conscious about his handicap, but over the years the boy had learned to use his toes as fingers and developed a contortionist’s flexibility in his legs.

Good job, Laur’, thought Holly, leaning back and wiggling around until both the pressure and the placement of Marley’s feet on her back made the long, powerful quadratus lumbarum muscles alongside her spine start to relax. The sun was warm on Holly’s face, the sound of the sea was tranquilizing, and the tears rolling down her cheeks, if not quite tears of joy, were by no means tears of sadness, either.

On their way home from the beach, Holly and the kids spied Dawson sitting on a bench under a tin-roofed shelter by the side of the Circle Road. She was waiting for the little blue ride-share bus known as the Too-Too (too small, too slow, too expensive, and far too seldom seen) that circled the island at unpredictable intervals.

“Hey, hepsie gyirl, ya well lollis, come ride wit’ we.” Marley called out the window, in a perfect imitation of a cruisin’ St. Luke buoy. A hepsie girl was well built; well lollis meant provocative.

If I were ten years younger, and you were ten years older, thought Dawson, dragging her backpack full of calabash over to the bus rather than pick it up one more time. Come to think of it, if you were just ten years older, I’d take my chances. (Laurel, Marley’s mother, used to worry about how Marley would do with the opposite sex when he grew up. Dawson used to tell her that as far as she was concerned, a man with no hands might be a refreshing change-most men she knew seemed to have far too many.)

They ended up giving the other two occupants of the bus shelter a ride out to the strip mall. As long as they were there, Holly gave the kids money for ice cream while she stopped into the drugstore for some necessaries. On her way back to the Baskin-Robbins, which was sort of an island joke among visiting statesiders, because it had only a dozen flavors, a newspaper headline in a vending machine caught her eye. She dropped a quarter in the slot and read the lead article as she strolled down the sidewalk.

Dawson was waiting outside the store. Holly handed her the paper. “Did you see this?”

“That’s Apgard’s wife.”

“I know her. She volunteers-volunteered-at the rest home. Nice lady. I can’t believe it.”

“I can,” said Dawson. Then, in pig latin, as the kids joined them: “Ater-lay.”

“Ater-lay ut-way?” asked Marley, taking a lick off his cone, which was in Dawn’s right hand; her own was in her left.

“Ater-lay, ever-you-mind-nay,” replied Holly, distractedly. Part of her was thinking about poor Hokey; another part couldn’t help thinking that if Marley had prosthetic hands, he could have held his own ice-cream cone.

“Johnny?”

“Sah?”

“If anybody else shows up to pay a condolence call, shoot them, would you?”

“To kill or wound?”

“Your choice.”

By Friday evening. Lewis was exhausted to the point of collapse. After Vogler left, he’d spent the afternoon dealing with lawyers, making funeral arrangements (Chief Coffee had assured him they’d be done with the body by Sunday), and receiving callers. The governor showed up, as had almost all of the island’s power elite.

There had also been an endless procession of Hokanssons and Christianssons, Hokey’s maternal line. For an only child, Hokey had a seemingly infinite supply of relatives, especially in light of the fact she was an orphan. Both her parents had died during the Blue Valley Massacre in 1985, when armed men interrupted the Three Kings Night Ball, always a highlight of the social season. The leaders of St. Luke society had been lined up against a marble wall, stripped of their cash and valuables, then gunned down. Eight dead, fourteen wounded, and the remainder of both the social and tourist seasons in shambles.

The Ladies Who Golf contingent, stringy, casserole-bearing women with blond hair and sun-ravaged complexions, were the last callers. They had decided not to cancel the women’s match play tournament that year, they told Lewis, but to reschedule it and name the trophy after Hokey, if that was all right with him.

Sadly, the grief-stricken husband had given his consent. Grief-stricken husband was a part Lewis had been playing all day, with such conviction that by evening, with the help of a steady rum ration administered by Johnny, the role had become the reality, at least on some level. Hokey was gone-never mind why, or who was to blame-and there was certainly no one who had more reason to feel sorry for himself than Lewis.

After the flood of condolence calls dried up, Sally reheated a sampler platter from the hot dishes that had been dropped off, and Johnny set up a TV tray in the study. Lewis picked unenthusiastically at the various offerings while he watched the business report. When Johnny returned to clear the tray, Lewis told him to have Sally take what she wanted and send the rest on to the Governors Clifford B. Apgard Rest Home. Ditto the flower arrangements.

Again, Johnny and Sally offered to spen’ night; again Lewis turned them down. The clock was ticking: he had to kill someone that weekend, and he still had no idea whom he was going to choose. He vaguely remembered Emily having given him some pointers the previous night, after her all-hang-together speech, but most of it had been washed away by the rum.

Emily did have confidence in him-he remembered that much, though he wasn’t quite sure what was behind this confidence. She just kept saying it was lalua kahuna or something, the hand of destiny, and that he would learn more in the fullness of time. Not exactly the sort of practical advice that would have come in useful long about now.