Island of Bones (33 page)

Frank was silent, looking down at the Bible.

“Ana killed her,” Louis said. “That’s how this all started?”

Frank looked over at him and nodded. “Later, long after I left here, I figured out that Taresa probably just had a condition called spinal muscular atrophy.”

“But why the others?” Louis asked.

Frank stared out at the open door. “
Mama was afraid they would be the same, their bones twisted. She was convinced our blood had become tainted somehow.”

“Why just the girls then?”

Frank covered his eyes with his hand.

“Why?”

Frank pushed the open Bible across the table. Louis came forward, pulled his reading glasses from his pocket and put them on. His eyes traveling over the names and the lines that linked them. Each del Bosque man was connected to his wife. Each child was connected to his parents.

He was seeing exactly what was there. Then suddenly he saw what wasn’t there.

Four lines connected Ana del Bosque’s children to her. The same four lines connected to Mateo del Bosque. There was no line between Ana and Mateo. Mateo wasn’t Ana’s husband, as she had told Horton. He was her brother.

“Incest?” Louis
said. “That’s what this is all about?”

Frank looked up, wiping his face. “I didn’t know any of this for sure until yesterday.”

“When you were talking to your mother in Latin,” Louis said. “That’s when she told you?”

Frank nodded. “I always suspected it. I mean, I didn’t have a father. Mama told us his name was Eli and that he had died and was buried with the rest of the family in the cemetery, but I never saw a marker with that name on it.”

“So Mateo was your father, too?”

Frank nodded woodenly. “My grandparents had died, so it was just the three of them living here by then
—- Mama, Mateo, and Alfonso. Mateo started raping Mama when she was just fifteen. She gave birth to my brother Edmundo. It didn’t stop, and she had me and Emilio. Mama was twenty-two when Taresa was born. She shot Mateo soon after that.”

Louis looked down at the Bible. “And Alfonso?”

“Mama told him the blood had to be purified, that he had to go off the island and bring back a wife. He was the first to do it.”

Louis was silent, thinking, putting the pieces together. “And the baby girls? They were killed to prevent more incest?”

Frank hesitated then nodded. “To keep it from happening again.”

Louis turned away, shaking his head. After a moment, he turned back to Frank. “Did you know about the babies?”

“No, we were not told until it was necessary. I didn’t find out until Sophie got pregnant,” Frank said. “A few weeks before she was due, Mama came to me and told me she would take care of birthing the baby.”

Louis didn’t say anything.

“But I couldn’t stay away,” Frank said, his voice soft. “I snuck out to the birthing house and waited. It took forever. Then I heard a baby cry and Mama came out carrying my daughter. I asked her where she was going and Mama told me the baby had to be given back to God.”

Frank looked up at Louis. “I couldn’t let it happen. I told Mama we would leave, that I would take my wife and baby to the mainland and live.”

“She just let you go?”

Frank nodded. “But I was never to come back. That was our agreement.”

Louis took off his glasses and put them away. He went slowly to the open door, drawing in a full breath. He remembered the cabin where he had found Angel. It was isolated, away from the family compound, away from the eyes and ears of the other women. Maybe so they could deny it was happening? Ana del Bosque had told Horton that she had smothered the babies.

But then Louis remembered how Rafael had looked as he led Angel to that cabin. Had it become the man’s responsibility to kill the newborn if it
was
a girl?

Louis closed his eyes. Responsibility. Jesus, was that even the right word?

The rain had stopped and it was quiet for a moment. Louis could see the cops outside in their yellow slickers standing under a tree, laughing as they lit up cigarettes.

“Why didn’t you tell the police any of this?”
Louis asked, turning back to Frank.

“I wanted only to stop it
,” Frank said. “Besides, you have an old woman to put on trial. What more do you want?”

Louis
shook his head.

“Diane doesn’t know any of this,” Frank said.

“You need to tell her.”

F
rank shook his head.

“She has a right to know, Frank.”

When Frank looked up at him there was a spark of anger in his eyes. “About what? About the incest? About what I carry in my blood, what I have passed on to her? She told me once she never wants to have children. Can you imagine hearing that from your own child, can you imagine how that makes you feel?”

His eyes welled. “Relieved. I feel relieved.”

Frank looked away quickly. Louis didn’t know what to say. He started for the door.

“You won’t tell her, will you?” Frank
asked.

Louis turned back. “No.”

Frank nodded slowly. “Good. I just want her to be happy and have a normal life. If I stay away from her, she still has a chance.”

“Where will you go?” Louis asked.

“My place is here,” Frank said, closing the Bible. “
Vulpes pilum mutat, non mores
. The wolf changes his skin, not his habits.”

When Louis came out of the restaurant, he saw a man coming around the side of the building. He was carrying a large plastic evidence bag, but it was the way that the man was holding it that told Louis what was in it.

The man was cradling it gently, respectfully.

Louis watched the man take the bag down to a waiting patrol boat and carefully hand it over to another man. It had begun to rain again, just a light drizzle, and in the flat light the green of the trees and the yellow of the cops’s rain slickers seemed to jump with color.

Louis w
atched the men in the patrol boat for a moment, then came down off the porch and headed to the fence.

He went through the open gate and walked slowly up the path. There was no one in the compound when he got there, but the yellow tape was still draped around the house and cabins. He
crossed the compound and headed down the path on the far side, following the path as it sloped downward toward the mangroves.

A
head of him, he could hear the thud of shovels against dirt, and a murmur of voices.

He came to the c
emetery and stopped behind the yellow tape. It looked like a small camp. A canvas canopy had been erected over most of the cemetery, with a second smaller one off to one side. There was a portable aluminum table under the small canopy, and a man in a blue windbreaker was bent over some equipment, looking at something with a magnifier.

There were two men working on the graves. One was digging with a small shovel and pouring small amounts of the dirt onto a screen held by the second man, who then sifted through it. They worked slowly, searching for small bones.

A flash drew Louis’s attention to his left. Another man in a raincoat was photographing the process and the site.

Louis heard one of the men say something about a blanket. He looked back to see the man with the small shovel carefully extracting a piece of cloth from the dirt. When he held it in his latex-gloved hand, Louis could see it
—- black with mold but with its satin edging still intact.

The
man put the cloth in an evidence bag. Then he carefully reached into the hole and lifted out a tan object, like a tiny bowl. Louis felt a small kick in his heart.

It was a piece of skull.

The man put it in an evidence bag. The technician working behind the table stepped away, ducking under the tape. He stopped under an oak tree and lit a cigarette, cupping his hand over the match against the drizzle.

Louis went over to the aluminum table, stopping outside the tape. He looked down. There were two plastic evidence bags, both about twelve by fifteen inches, sealed and signed. Both bags seemed to be filled with what looked to be just old rags.

Louis bent closer. Inside one bag, he could see some bones in the cloth. They were stained brown from the tannin that had seeped in from the mangroves.

Louis reached out and
touched one through the plastic.

Tiny. They were so tiny.

His throat tightened, and for several seconds, he stood perfectly still, the sound of the rain on the canopy in his ears.

“Hey, get away from there.”

Louis drew his hand back and looked up. The man who had stepped out to smoke was staring at him. He tossed down his butt, crushed it out in the mud, and came over.

“You got any authority to be here?” he asked.

Louis shook his head.

“Well, get moving. We’ve got work to do here and you’re in the way.”

Louis stepped out from under the canopy. He stood there for a moment in the rain. Then he wiped his face with the heel of his hand and went back up the path.

Someone was out on the porch, banging on the screen door. Louis dropped his armload of dirty laundry on the bed and started out to the living room. When he saw Pierre standing behind the screen, he tried to duck back in the bedroom before he was seen.

“Louis!” Pierre called out. “I know you are in there! Let me in!”

Louis let out a sigh and went and unlatcehd the screen door.

“Why did you lock it?” Pierre asked, coming in. “You never lock your door
.”

“What do you want, Pierre?” Louis asked, going to the kitchen. He jerked open the refrigerator.

“The pool needs skimming,” Pierre said.

Louis popped the top on a Dr Pepper and took a swig. “I told you I’d get to it.”

“When? For a month you do nothing around here,” Pierre said. “If you don’t start pushing your weight around here, I will have to charge you rent and —-”

The phone rang and Louis went to the bedroom, picking it up.

“Louis, it’s Mel.”

“Hey,” Louis said. “Where you been hiding for the last two days?
I thought maybe you went back to Miami or something without saying good-bye.”

“Nah, not yet.” Landeta paused. “Listen, how about meeting me for lunch at O’Sullivan’s? I got some news on the case you might want to know about.”

Louis glanced back at Pierre standing at the bedroom door. “Sure, give me a half hour.”

He hung up and started out the door.

Pierre hurried after him. “Louis! Where are you going?”

“F
lic business. Close the front door when you leave, Pierre.”

A tirade of French followed Louis out to the Mustang parked under the gumbo limbo.

On the drive across the causeway, Louis thought about Landeta, wondering again what he was going to do now that the Away So Far case was over —- or at least their part of it. He wondered what he himself was going to do.

Probably skim the friggin’ leaves out of the pool for the rest of my life.

At O’Sullivan’s, Louis paused just inside the door to take off his sunglasses. It was a little after eleven a.m. and the place was near empty. He saw a couple of guys at the end of the bar sipping Bloody Marys, and way in the back, his bald head silhouetted by the jukebox lights, he saw Landeta.

Louis stopped at the bar, got two Diet Cokes and some lemon wedges, and headed back.

“Morning,” Landeta said, looking up.

Louis sat down. “So what’s up?”

Landeta was just finishing a cup of coffee. “The women are being released this afternoon.”

“How do you know?”

“I got a friend at the prosecutor’s office. Since the old lady confessed, Sandusky can’t make a case against the others. The old lady, yeah, but not the other women.”

“What about the men?”

“Charges are still pending, but it doesn’t look good there, either.”

“How can they believe the old lady did all of this? How can they not prosecute the whole family?”

“You’d need a Bugliosi for that.”

“The Manson prosecutor
?”

Landeta
nodded as he pushed his empty coffee cup away and drew the Diet Coke near. He squeezed the lemon wedge into the Coke. “People said Bugliosi would never be able to convince a jury that Manson was guilty without a motive, that he would never be able to explain why Manson would send those girls off to kill somebody and why they obeyed him. That’s when he came up with the Helter Skelter theory. And suddenly a jury could understand the crimes.”

“I don’t see the parallel,” Louis said.

“Well, not one of the del Bosques is talking. We have no physical evidence. And what did you and I really see on that island? A man holding a rifle and walking away with a pregnant woman so she could have her baby in private. A family argument. And five little graves, with no way anyone can tell how they died.”

Landeta took a drink of his Diet Coke before he went on. “Unless Sandusky can tie all that together with a well- constructed and intelligent theory about families, Roman soldiers, incest, and tradition, and make it believable, he will never get a conviction. It was hard enough in the Manson case, and Sandusky doesn’t have half the brains of Bugliosi.”

“Mel, Those women let their children die.”

Landeta nodded. “Yeah, they did. But did they really have a choice? Emma, Cindy, Paula
—- they all had nothing before they got to that island. Then suddenly, they have a man who loves them. And a nice, big family. Such as it was.”

“You’re making excuses for them,” Louis said.

“Not excuses. Reasons.”

Louis was shaking his head.

“It’s over for them, Louis,” Landeta said. “DCF has their hands in it now. Little Louisa’s mother is dead and her aunts, even if they don’t go to trial, are certainly weird enough to call unfit. She won’t have a problem finding someone to adopt her.”

“What about Roberto?”

“DCF will probably charge the family with truancy and other crap like neglect and living in an unsafe environment. Sandusky will make sure he at least saves the souls of the two surviving children. Makes a nice sound bite, don’t you think?”

Louis was quiet.

“I know people over at family services. I can arrange for you to see him, if you want,” Landeta said.

“Roberto?”

Landeta nodded. “Someone needs to let him know things will be all right eventually.”

“I’m the last person who should be telling him anything like that,” Louis said.

Landeta was working on his lemon peel. “We did the right thing, Louis,” he said.

Louis didn’t reply. His fingers picked at the cocktail napkin under his soda.

“They let Woods go,” Landeta said.

“I know. I saw him out at the restaurant. We had a long talk.”

“Oh, yeah? You get anything out of him?”

“Yeah
, the ‘why.’”

“He told you why they did it?”

Louis nodded. A part of him didn’t really want to go over it again. A part of him just wanted to forget the whole damn thing. But he knew now that Landeta wanted to know the why as much as he himself ever had. He told Landeta about Ana del Bosque, the incest, and the daughter born with a birth defect.

“
Why did they kill the others?” Landeta asked.

“An attempt to keep the blood pure
. Jesus, you’d think this was the Middle Ages or something.”

Landeta didn’t ask any more questions
, just took a drink of his Diet Coke.

“Well, if the old lady ever
comes to trial, she’ll have motive for one of the murders at least,” Landeta said. “But I doubt she will see the inside of a courtroom. For any of this.”

“The county closed down the restaurant,” Louis said.

Landeta pushed on the lemon peel with his thumbs, exposing the pulp. “Well, maybe Frank can sell his story to the
National Enquirer
or someone will pay to make a movie of the week.”

Louis was quiet, staring down into his glass.

“What’s the matter?” Landeta asked.

“They deserve to be in prison,” Louis said.

“Everyone knows who they are and everyone thinks they’re guilty,” Landeta said. He bit into the lemon. “The world is going to be one big prison for them for the rest of their lives.”