Twenty-Seven Bones (30 page)

Digging continued through the night. There had been no mudslides. Apparently Apgard’s grenade (they knew it was a grenade—they’d found the pin in the first hour of digging, and continued to find fragments of shrapnel) had already brought the more unstable sections of the hillside down to their angle of repose.

By dawn the rain had turned to a steady drizzle. The tunnel, shored by timbers supporting a platform of interlocking iron pipes, was deep enough by then for four volunteers to lie head to foot on their backs, passing buckets of newly excavated earth over their heads to the bucket brigade waiting outside the mouth of the tunnel. Every fifteen minutes, the personnel changed and more shoring was added. It was a slow process but a steady one.

At the other end of the blocked tunnel, Pender had cleared a few feet with his bare hands, dredging at least his own weight in dirt and rocks and piling them in a cairn at the bottom of the tunnel.

But the farther up the tunnel he went, the worse the air quality. His breathing grew deep and labored, the pressure in his head seemed to be building, there was a ringing in his ears, an acid taste in his mouth, and a burning in his nostrils.

Pender, who knew far too much about far too many ways to die (an occupational hazard), recognized these as symptoms of carbon dioxide poisoning. Still he refused to give up. Instead, every time he dragged a pile of debris back down to the cave, he’d fill his lungs, crawl back into the tunnel, and continue digging for as long as he could hold his breath, then crawl back out with the debris for another gulp of good old Oh-Two.

The time came, however, when he just couldn’t make that uphill crawl one more time. Back to Plan A: conserve oxygen. Pender dragged his makeshift pallet to the bottom of the tunnel, where the air quality seemed to be a little better, aimed his flashlight up the tunnel, lay on his back with his head pillowed on the Epp manuscript, closed his eyes, and waited for rescue or death.

He was hoping for the former of course—mostly so he could catch those other sons of bitches—but he wasn’t afraid of the latter. Some two years earlier, Pender had had a near-death experience on the floor of a holding cell in the old Monterey County Jail in Salinas, California. Not only had he seen the glowing light at the end of the tunnel, but his father, former Marine Sergeant Robert Lee Pender, had made an appearance in his dress blues, and ever since that moment, Edgar Lee Pender had known with a certainty that amounted to spiritual conviction that there was nothing to fear there.

Still, he fought against sleep as long as he could. Eventually, though, he succumbed, and when he opened his eyes again and saw the light at the end of the tunnel, he couldn’t be sure which light it was, or which tunnel, the one made of dirt or the one made of the glory.

Doesn’t matter, he told himself, closing his eyes again—you’ll find out soon enough.

Holly took the kids back to the Core. Dawson stuck around. The sexist pricks wouldn’t let her into the tunnel to dig, so she joined the bucket brigade passing the shoring upward and the excavated dirt downward. She was close enough to the mouth of the tunnel to hear the cheering inside when they spotted Pender’s light. After that, it only took another two or three eons until the hole was wide enough for the first paramedic to squeeze through.

Chief Coffee was the second one through. He emerged after a few minutes shining a flashlight onto a thick sheaf of paper. Whatever was written on it, it must have made fascinating reading, thought Dawson—Coffee was reading as he crawled out of the tunnel, still reading when he stood up, still reading by flashlight as he hurried back down the trail.

It was full daylight when they brought Pender out on a stretcher. Somehow Dawson, despite having spent more than half her life hiding in shadows and ducking authority, had no trouble pushing her way through the crowd. Pender’s head was turbaned in gauze, an oxygen mask covered his nose and mouth, an IV dripped clear liquid into his arm. She fell in behind the stretcher bearers, and when they called for a relief crew halfway down the trail, Dawson was first in line.

And when the paramedics tried to stop her from getting into the ambulance, she told them she was his fiancée and climbed in anyway.

For his second stay in Missionary Hospital in less than a week, with no alibi witnesses required this time, Lewis Apgard had demanded a private room. He continued to profess amnesia. Dr. Vogler was called in. Lewis repeated what he’d told Detective Hamilton after “regaining” consciousness: that the Epps and Bennie had appeared at his door after Pender left, demanded to know what they’d talked about, then forced him at gunpoint to help them kidnap Pender and the girl and drive them into the rain forest. Everything after that, until he woke up in the ambulance, was a blank.

Vogler bought it, diagnosed him with temporary amnesia as a result of the traumatic reinjury of his head wound. Afterward Lewis slept surprisingly soundly (considering they had refused to give him any painkillers or sedatives, because of the head trauma), and if he’d had any dreams, he didn’t remember them.

Until the last one, that is. It came when he fell back to sleep after being awakened at dawn by the nurse who was taking his vital signs. Lewis found himself in the drawing room of the Great House. He was a boy again, and somehow the Guv had found out about Lewis’s role in Auntie Aggie’s death. The old man was mad lak fuck. I should have known, he said. I should have seen it in your eyes. Then he pointed to a mirror, which now hung beneath the portrait of Great-great-grandfather Klaus.

Reluctantly, the boy crossed the room, his feet sinking into the thick carpet with every step. When he reached the mirror, he saw the ram’s eyes staring back at him, brown and mournful, from his own face. He wanted to scream, but couldn’t.

The Guv laughed his crackly dry laugh. You take after your mother, he said. That’s her side of the family. But when Lewis turned around, he saw the same eyes looking out at him from the old man’s face. Lewis, said the Guv. Lewis, wake up.

“Lewis, wake up.”

Lewis opened his eyes to see Chief Coffee standing over him. The customarily natty old guy was a mess. His khaki uniform was spattered with drying mud, his face was smeared with it, and he even had muddy streaks in his nappy silver hair. “Good morning, Lewis,” he said.

“Good morning, Chief Coffee,” said Lewis, as the memory of the dream receded to wherever dream memories go.

Dawson was separated from Pender at the hospital, but somebody must have passed on the word that she was his fiancée, because in a few minutes the neurosurgeon, an East Indian doctor with a name that was so close to Ramalamadingdong that that was how she would remember it for the rest of her life, came out into the waiting room to tell her that they were taking Pender down to Radiology for a CAT scan.

Nobody said she could come along, but nobody said she couldn’t. She followed the gurney to the elevator, then took the stairs to the basement. For pure, concentrated suspense, waiting alone in a molded plastic chair in the corridor outside the swinging doors marked
RADIOLOGY
beat everything that had come before, because there was nothing she could do but wait. No cave to find, no buckets to pass, no stretchers to bear.

There was a clock at the end of the hall, by the elevator. She couldn’t see the second hand, but the minute hand was moving so slowly she decided the clock had to be broken. She closed her eyes and forced herself to count to a hundred; when she opened them to see if the minute hand had moved, Dr. Ramalamadingdong was standing over her.

“How’d it go? Is he going to be all right?”

“We didn’t get a chance to run the scan. Follow me.”

“How are you feeling?” Chief Coffee asked Lewis.

“Much better.”

“Do you remember—”

Lewis interrupted him. “Like I’ve been telling everybody, I don’t remember much about last night.”

“I wasn’t going to ask you about last night.”

“I’m sorry, go on.”

“I was going to ask you about last Thursday, when Agent Pender and I informed you that Hokey had been murdered.”

“What about it?”

“Do you remember the last thing you asked me, just before we parted company?”

“Afraid not,” said Lewis.

“You asked if you could be present when we hanged whoever was responsible for Hokey’s death.”

“And…?”

“And the answer is yes, you will be.”

Dawson’s heart sank. She followed Dr. Ramalamadingdong numbly through the swinging doors and saw Pender struggling to sit up on the gurney, with a tech and a nurse fighting to hold him down.

“Ed!”

“Dawson?”

He stopped struggling, went limp. The tech and the nurse stepped back. Dawson found herself standing beside the gurney without any memory of having crossed the room. They had started to unwind Pender’s bandage—he was trailing gauze like the Mummy. “The little girl?” he said hoarsely.

“She’s fine—she’s back at the Core with Holly.”

“Thank God.”

The doctor cleared his throat. Dawson turned, slightly surprised—for a moment there she’d forgotten there was anybody else in the room. “I’ll leave you alone with your fiancée for a moment,” he told Pender, in a hearty doctor’s voice. Then, sotto voce, to Dawson, “Persuade him to let us do the CAT scan—we want to be sure there are no hematomas.”

“Fiancée?” said Pender, when they were alone.

Dawson felt herself blushing. “I had to tell them that so they’d let me ride in the ambulance.”

“Did they catch the Epps?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Apgard?”

“He’s the one who saved Dawn.”

“He’s also the one who had the Epps kill his wife, then he killed Bendt.”

“Are you sure?”

“The damn fools wrote it down.” He raised his head, wincing, looked around wildly. “The manuscript—where’s the manuscript?”

“That must have been what Chief Coffee was reading when he came out of the tunnel. He couldn’t tear his eyes away.”

Pender’s head fell back onto the gurney. “That’s okay, then—it’s all in there. I even dog-eared the pages.”

Dawson bent over him, stroked his brow. “Ed, the doctor wants to take a CAT scan, make sure there’s no…I don’t know, hema something.”

“Subdural hematoma,” said Pender, who’d been down that road before. “Scout, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last couple of years, it’s that you can’t kill a Pender by hitting it over the head.”

Dawson laughed. That was a mistake—it opened the emotional floodgates, and before she knew it she was sobbing, her head resting on Pender’s massive chest while he stroked her hair. “I thought I’d lost you,” she said, when she could speak again. Her head was facing away from him, which made it easier to talk. “I was so scared I made a vow that if you and Dawn got through this, I’d turn myself in.”

“Lewis Apgard, I’m placing you under arrest for the murder of Francis Bendt, and for suborning the murder of Lindsay Hokansson Apgard. Both of which are hanging offenses. And I’m sure we’ll be adding more charges as the investigation progresses. Say, two counts of kidnapping, two counts of attempted murder—I’ll let you know. In the meantime, you have the right to remain silent—anything you say may be taken down and used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney—if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand these rights?”

“Sure, but—”

“Do you wish to waive them at this time?”

“Chief, this is crazy—the Epps killed Hokey. And Bendt—I saw them Friday night, at their house, when they were supposed to be in Puerto Rico. They must have snuck back or something.”

But having read the dog-eared pages of the Epp manuscript, and never having been much of a proponent of the affective school of interviewing anyway, Julian was in no mood for any of Apgard’s bullshit.

“Stick it where the monkey hid the nuts,” he said as he handcuffed the Baby Guv to the rail of his hospital bed.

Dawson luxuriated in the touch of Pender’s hand on her hair. He had enormous hands, but a surprisingly gentle touch.

“You know, I’ve had two or three concussions tonight, so maybe I’m not thinking too clearly,” he whispered as she raised her head from his chest. “But it seems to me you put yourself in a no-win situation. And you’re not the only one who’s gonna lose. What about the wife and kids of that researcher who died? If I were them, about the last thing I’d want is to have the whole goddamn can of worms opened up again.”

“Horseshit,” said Dawson.

“Granted. But what about me? What about us? You gonna throw that all away for some silly superstition?”

“No,” said Dawson.

“Because if you think…What?”

“I said I made a vow, I didn’t say I was gonna keep it. I just don’t want to bullshit myself as to why.”

“Fair enough,” said Pender. “Now help me get the hell out of here—I hate hospitals.”

“No way,” said Dawson. “You’re here ’til the doctor says you’re okay.”

“Traitor.”

“Only for the best of causes.”

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

After exploring the cave system all night, chamber after chamber, always descending deeper, never finding an exit, Bennie returned to the Oubliette. When he peered over the rim of the well formation, the laser beam of the helmet lamp turned the maelstrom a few feet below as red as blood.

Bennie switched the helmet lamp to the white beam, shrugged off his knapsack, rummaged through it for his copy of
Moby-Dick.
He tore off the front cover, folded into a coracle, just as he had done with banana leaves as a boy on Nias, and dropped it down the Oubliette. It hit the water, spun lazily a few times, then darted away, disappearing from sight. Back cover next—it too darted off in the same direction.

Bennie lowered himself over the side. The water was warmer than he would have expected, and the current wasn’t as strong as it looked. Treading water, keeping his helmet lamp dry, he saw how the water swirling up from the Oubliette flowed into a three-foot-wide natural spillway a few feet below the lip of the well to form an underground stream. It wasn’t big—about two feet deep, with another two feet of clearance above the surface of the streaming water—but it was big enough. He switched the beam to laser red and searched the tunnel—there was no sign of the two paper boats he’d sent on ahead of him.

He climbed back up, boosted himself out of the water. He took his blanket roll out of the waterproof stuff bag, transferred the freezer bags full of bones, hands, and money, along with the now coverless copy of
Moby-Dick,
from the knapsack into the stuff bag, zipped it closed, tightened and knotted the drawstring, then threw the bag over his shoulder. Leaving the rest of his earthly possessions behind in the knapsack, he slipped over the side of the Oubliette and lowered himself carefully into the water again.

He was afraid the weight of the bag was going to drag him down, but he’d captured enough air inside to make it at least partially buoyant. He slung it into the spillway ahead of him, climbed in after it, and tied the end of the drawstring around his ankle.

Then he chanted his favorite prayer—
Let he who travels the sea return within a cycle of the moon; let he who travels to the grave be seen no more on earth
—and set off on the long, splashing crawl through the darkness, either to the grave or the sea, it didn’t matter which. With his money, his hands, and his father’s
eheha,
Bennie figured he was covered either way.