Jonathan Nasaw - Twenty-Seven Bones

Emily would not cry-she wouldn’t give Bennie the satisfaction. She had never been struck before, not once in all her years. She retreated to the white room and lay down on one of the rattan mats. The whiteness was unbearable. She switched off her headlamp, felt the darkness closing in around her.

It can’t end here, she told herself. Not here, not like this. There’s a way out of the cave. Those two corpses found it-so can I. And I won’t tell Bennie-let him rot. Phil, too. Selfish bastard-I told him to leave the girl alone. She had no doubt what had happened-Apgard had turned on them. Because of the girl: she’d seen it in his eyes.

It was too much, too soon. Given time, Apgard would have learned to see the world from her point of view, as Phil had. But Phil had sabotaged that. The older and weaker he got, the more he liked the little powerless ones. The ones who didn’t know the difference between a limp dick and a hard one, didn’t even know what a hard one was for. Pitiful old man-she told herself she was glad he was dead.

And with that potential emotional sinkhole paved over (most psychopaths are geniuses when it comes to compartmentalizing emotions), she sat up and took off her poncho, rearranged the big ’uns, tugged her brassiere straps back into place, tightened the chin strap on her helmet, and set off down the next passageway, in the direction of the cross chamber.

Pebbles scattered and rolled underfoot. The passageway leveled, then widened out into the chamber with the horizontal crucifix. Emily turned her head, surveying the room with the beam from her helmet lamp. There was a kerosene torch in the natural sconce, but no way to light it.

The first sacrifice in the chamber, a sailor named Brack, had helped Bennie carry the crucifix there in pieces, thinking it was bracing for the hole in the treasure chamber, not noticing how the two timbers dovetailed to form a cross until it was too late. The ground under one arm of the structure was stained black with blood, some of which was Brack’s.

The rest belonged to Frieda Schaller, to big old Tex-his blood was spattered all around the chamber-and to Andy Arena. The crucifix itself had a forlorn, abandoned look. Emily pictured some archaeologist stumbling across it a few hundred years hence, trying to imagine what dark religion had practiced its bloody rites there.

But perhaps they’d know, thought Emily, thinking of Phil’s manuscript. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing that he’d written it. Especially if she never made it out of-

Whoops. There’s an ugly little thought that needed to be stomped out before it got a chance to breed. There had to be a way out. And once out, all she had to do was determine whether Apgard had survived the explosion, as seemed likely if indeed he was the one who’d set it off.

Because if he had survived, then sentimental and value-ridden as he was, he couldn’t possibly have been self-destructive enough to let the cop and the little girl survive as well. Apgard would have to help her escape, give her money. If we don’t hang together, etc….

And if Apgard hadn’t survived, so much the better. As long as the manuscript remained undiscovered, there was no evidence linking her to any of the murders, nothing she couldn’t blame on Bennie, whose fingerprint was on the machete, or Phil, or even Apgard himself.

But first she had to find a way out. She thought she could hear water trickling deeper in the cave complex, in the direction of the Oubliette. That was how the corpses got out. Not an inviting prospect-more like a last resort. But the Bat Cave also lay in that direction, and she knew there had to be some sort of chimney leading to the surface from there, wide enough to permit easy ingress and egress for the enormous bats and their equally impressive testicles. Whether it was also wide enough for Emily and her big ’uns remained to be seen. But one way or another…

Emily thought back to Nias, the defining moment of her life. She’d always known she was superior to most people, in any of the ways that counted (that confidence was one of the psychopath’s greatest allies), but after the horror at the chieftain’s deathbed had come the illumination, the elevation, a sense of having been chosen. And despite everything that had happened, it was still with her. Emily Epp wasn’t beaten yet, not by a long-

“Oh.” Startled, Emily put her hand to her breast. She hadn’t heard Bennie coming down the passageway from the white room, didn’t know he was in the cross chamber until he touched her shoulder. Nobody ever heard Bennie coming unless he wanted them to. “What do you want?” she asked without turning around. The old imperious tone-it had never failed before.

“Only what is mine,” he said politely, then he applied his heavy rubber sap to the back of her head with a deft touch, hitting her just hard enough to render her unconscious, but not so hard as to fracture her skull.

The headrest and seat back of the Rover were wet with Apgard’s blood. Apgard himself seemed to lapse in and out of consciousness. Just before he was loaded into the ambulance, his breathing grew labored, sporadic. The paramedics hooked him up to an oxygen tank and rushed him to the hospital.

That left Dawn. They wanted to take her to the hospital, too, but Holly put her foot down. Julian debriefed the child personally, with Holly present. Warm and dry, wreathed and turbaned in towels, sitting in her auntie’s lap in her auntie’s bed, Dawn felt a little like Madeline in the storybook, after she’d had her appendix out. She remembered almost everything except how terribly, terribly afraid she’d been. (In that respect at least-the way the memory lets go of fear and pain-somebody had done a nice job of programming the human mind.)

She told them how Mr. Pender had rushed the Japanese guy. When she described the beating Pender had taken, and how she hadn’t seen him move afterward, Julian pursed his lips, bent his head to his notebook, and scribbled furiously, channeling all the emotions he would not allow himself to feel down his arm to his writing hand, breaking the point of his stubby silver mechanical pencil again and again.

“And then the lady and the old guy left,” Dawn continued, “and Mr. Apgard told me to run, and there was a big explosion, and we were the only ones who got out. And Mr. Apgard said he had to blow up the tunnel because they were coming after us. He gave me the flashlight and told me to hide behind the elephant’s ear tree, and there was another big explosion and then we ran back to the car and he brought me home but it took such a long time because Mr. Apgard kept falling asleep.”

When he left the cabin, Julian had five pages of notes and two pages of questions-what was Apgard’s involvement? was he a hostage or a perp who’d had a change of heart? what caused the explosion? — including the biggest question of all: where was the cave? Somewhere on the north end, was about all Dawn could tell them.

But St. Luke wasn’t that large an island, and the part they called the rain forest was smaller yet. And at one time or another every inch of it had been explored-somebody had to know about a cave that size.

Julian started making mental lists: old-timers, geologists, pot growers, old Mr. Wicker at the Historical Society. Have to roust some people out of bed. Tough titi. The girl hadn’t seen Pender move, but she couldn’t say for certain he was dead. And Julian of all people knew what a thick skull his old friend had. So if he had to wake up every person on the island, one by one, until he found somebody who could lead him to the cave, then that’s what-

“Chief Coffee?”

He turned, saw a woman he failed to recognize-a rarity for him, outside of tourist season. “Yes?”