Kathy Reichs: Bare Bones

The shelving pitched forward. Urns flew through the air.

Park threw both hands up, twisted his upper body. The Karnak special caught him in the right temple. He dropped. I heard his skull crack against cement.

The lantern glass shattered and its light went out, leaving only the smell of kerosene.

For what seemed a lifetime, objects crashed and rolled on the floor.

When the noise finally ceased, there was eerie quiet.

Catacomb darkness.

Utter stillness.

One heartbeat. Two. Three.

Was Park unconscious? Dead? Lying in wait? Should I flee? Grope for the tent stake?

Burlap rustled, sounding like thunder in the silence.

I held my breath.

Was Park releasing his malicious present?

A whisper, like the soft brushing of scales on cement.

More silence.

Had I imagined the sound?

The tiny scraping started again, stopped, started.

Something was moving!

What to do?

Then a terrifying, stupefying rattling deadened my every response.

Snakes!

I pictured slithering bodies coiling to strike. Darting tongues. Lidless, gleaming eyes.

Glacial cold cramped my chest, then rolled outward through my heart, my veins, my stomach, my fingertips.

What kind of snakes? Moccasins? Copperheads? Did those snakes rattle? Diamondbacks? Something exotic from South America? Knowing Park’s history, I was certain the snakes were venomous.

How many were out there, slithering toward me in the dark?

I felt totally alone. Totally abandoned.

Please, please let someone come!

But no one was coming. No one knew where I was. How could I have been so stupid?

Struggling to function, my mind flew in a million directions.

How does a snake locate its prey? Vision? Smell? Heat? Motion? Does it go on the attack or try to avoid contact?

Do I freeze? Bolt? Go for the tent stake?

More rattling.

Panic overcame reason. Good eye wide in the darkness, I shot toward the door.

My foot caught on the fallen shelving and I pitched headlong into the rubble. My hand hit flesh and bone, unconsciously jerked left.

Hair. Something warm and wet, puddled on the cement.

Park!

The rattling reached a crescendo.

Fighting back tears, I rolled to my right and felt a wooden leg.

Stand! Raise your head out of striking range!

As I tried to pull myself up I noticed lights rake the window.

Then white-hot fire shot up my ankle.

I screamed from pain and terror.

As I draped myself over a table, the burning moved up my leg, my groin. What little vision I had blurred.

My thoughts floated to a different place, a different time. I saw Katy, Harry, Pete, Ryan.

I heard pounding, scraping, felt my body lifted.

Then nothing.

36

IT WAS A WEEK BEFORE RYAN AND I HAULED OUR SAND CHAIRSacross Anne’s boardwalk and parked them on the beach. I wore the long-anticipated bikini and an elegant white sock. A large-brimmed straw hat and Sophia Loren shades hid the black eye and scabbing on my face. A cane kept the weight off my left foot.

Ryan was dressed in surfer shorts and enough blocker to protect Moby Dick. On our first beach day he’d turned Pepto pink. On our second he was moving toward tobacco-leaf gold.

While Ryan and I read and chatted, Boyd alternated between snapping at the surf and chasing seagulls.

“Hooch really likes it here,” Ryan said.

“His name is Boyd.”

“Too bad Birdie wouldn’t change his mind.”

During the past week Slidell, Ryan, and Woolsey had filled me in on the missing pieces. Ryan and I had zigzagged between discussing and avoiding the culminating events in Lancaster. Ryan could sense I was still subject to flashbacks of terror.

The snakes turned out to be timber rattlers captured in the Smoky Mountains. Park liked to work with natural ingredients. Thanks to Slidell and Rinaldi, I was bitten only twice. Thanks to Woolsey, I was at the ER before the venom spread.

Though I was violently ill for twenty-four hours, I improved quickly thereafter, and Ryan’s daily visits hastened my recovery. Four days after my encounter in the funeral chapel basement, I was back home. Three days after that, Ryan and I split for Sullivan’s Island, Boyd doing his saliva act in the backseat.

The sky was blue. The sand was white. Pink strips were glowing around the edges of my swimsuit. Though my left foot and ankle were still swollen and uncomfortable, I felt terrific.

My sudden epiphany about James Park had been correct. Park and Dorton had been drug-smuggling buddies since Vietnam. When Dorton returned Stateside he invested his profits in hunt camps and strip clubs. When Park got home he went into the family funeral business. Mama and Daddy Park, both born in Seoul, owned a parlor in Augusta, Georgia. After a few years, with a little help from the folks, James bought an operation of his own in Lancaster.

Park and Dorton stayed in touch, and Park booked into one of Dorton’s wilderness camps. Ricky Don, having established himself in the import-export business, pointed out the prosperity to be had from franchises in drugs and wildlife, and Park allowed as how he could tap Asian markets for both the imports and the exports.

Jason Jack Wyatt supplied bears from the mountains. Harvey Pearce hunted on the coast and brought the bear parts to Dorton on his drug runs to Charlotte. Park prepared the galls and hawked them in Asia, often exchanging them for drugs to supplement Ricky Don’s Latin American suppliers.

“Sunscreen?” Ryan waggled the tube.

“Thanks.”

Ryan applied lotion to my shoulders.

“Lower?”

“Please.”

His hands worked their way to the small of my back.

“Lower?”

“Um.”

His fingertips slipped under the elastic of my bikini bottom.

“That’ll be fine.”

“Sure?”

“The sun’s never shined that far down, Ryan.”

As Ryan dropped into his chair, another question occurred to me.

“How do you suppose Cobb uncovered the bear gall operation?”

“Cobb was looking into turtle poaching in Tyrrell County and made the bear discovery by accident when he was shadowing Harvey Pearce.”

Anger welled in me as I thought of Harvey Pearce.

“The son of a bitch baited bears with Honey Buns, then blew their brains out, cut off the paws, cut out the gallbladders, and dumped the rest.”

“Maybe Pearce’s particular circle in hell will be full of bears, and Harvey without so much as a peashooter.”

I thought of something else.

“That note in Brian Aiker’s wallet really threw me.”

“Cobb’s note to Aiker.”

“Yeah. I assumed Cobb meant Columbia, South Carolina. I forgot Harvey Pearce lived in Columbia, North Carolina.” I shook my head at my own stupidity. “I also thought Cobb was referring to Palmer Cousins as the person who was dirty.”

“He meant plural not singular, the Dynamic Duo from Sneedville, Tennessee.” After some grammatical stumbling, Ryan and I had agreed on the masculine pronoun for Charlotte Cobb.

“The Melungeon cousins.”

I watched a pelican swoop over the water, tuck its wings, and plunge toward a wave. Seconds later it came up empty.

“Do you suppose the Spix’s macaw and the goldenseal were just opportunistic sidelines?” I asked.

“Dorton may have asked Cousin J.J. to gather the goldenseal. He probably planned to persuade his regulars that the stuff was effective at masking drugs during urine tests.”

“And Harvey Pearce probably got the macaw the same way he scored the bird Pounder mentioned.”

“Probably,” Ryan agreed. “Tyree sold coke on the street for Dorton. Tyree, Dorton, Pearce, and Park met periodically at the Foote farm. Pearce probably brought the bird to the farm on one of those trips. Sadly for all, it didn’t survive its ordeal.”