Island of Bones(3)

Setting the bundled shirt on the chair near the door, he picked up the phone. Still dead.

He walked back to the chair and unwrapped the shirt, staring at the skull. Damn...there were two holes in it that he hadn’t noticed back on the beach. He squatted down to get a better look.

One hole right on the top about the size of a quarter and a second smaller one farther back. The holes were shaped like diamonds, and both were too perfectly formed to look like they had been made by accident. They reminded him of a wound profile he had seen in his police academy textbook. The wound had been made by a pickax.

With a sigh, he rose. Who would hit a baby hard enough to drive an ax through its skull? And where the hell had the skull come from?

He thought of Bev and her stories about Hurricane Donna. The storm had been so fierce, she said, that boats harbored in Pine Island Sound had been found ten miles inland, wrecked along the banks of the Caloosahatchee River. Someone had found a roulette wheel on Fort Myers Beach that was eventually traced to a casino in the Bahamas.

The skull could have come from anywhere. Louis knelt down again to stare at it. It was so small. So sad. And probably so far from home, wherever that was.





CHAPTER 3




Louis set out a bowl of water and Tender Vittles for Issy and left the cottage, heading up the sand path that wound through the other cottages. Maybe Pierre had a radio he could use to call the sheriff. Up near the office, he saw Pierre standing out in the road, staring at the “Branson’s on the Beach” sign. A slash pine had fallen across it, knocking it down.

Pierre saw him coming and pointed at the sign. “Look! C’est foutue!” He gestured wildly at the tree limbs and debris littering the grounds. “Un vrai foutoir!”

“I can’t understand you, Pierre.”

“You can fix, no?” Pierre asked, nodding at the sign.

“No,” Louis said, bracing for the usual fight with his landlord. He got a break in his rent for serving as Branson’s “security chief” but it meant putting up with Pierre’s attempts to turn him into his personal serf.

“No? No? J’ai d’autres chats a fouetter! You can fix!”

“No,” Louis said more firmly.

Pierre launched into a tirade of French as he began to tug on the tree limb.

“Pierre,” Louis said, “do you have a CB radio or something?”

“Quoi?"

“A radio. The phones are out and I have to call the sheriff’s department.”

“The sheriff? Forget that! I don’t have radio and I need you to help here!”

“I’ll help later. I have something important to take care of first.”

Louis turned and walked off, leaving Pierre yelling after him. He paused, looking at all the gawkers on the beach then decided to walk down to the Island Store. He went the beach route, walking slowly along the shoreline, scanning the sand and hoping that if there were more bones the shell scavengers would not know what they were seeing and would leave them alone. But he saw nothing in the trash-clogged kelp.

The store was open. A small crowd milled outside, a few dazed-looking tourists and locals jawing about the storm.It was hot and stuffy inside, the AC above the door silent. The shelves were stripped clean. Batteries, toilet paper, bottled water, and anything worth eating had been snatched up the day the hurricane warning went out. Louis suspected that Roberta Tatum had made a small fortune selling everything she’d had in her store, right down to the last bottle of Perrier.

Louis was eyeing a lone can of pinto beans when she came up to his side.

“Well, I see you survived,” she said. Her dark face was shiny with sweat, her hair hidden beneath a pink bandana.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Could have been a lot worse.”

Louis nodded. “You don’t have a CB radio or something, do you, Roberta?”

“Nope. Why?”

Louis hesitated but decided not to bring up the skull. “Got to get a hold of someone, that’s all.” He nodded to the can of beans on the shelf. “This all you got left?”

“I warned you to stock up. But you weren’t hearing me, were you?”

“I guess not.” Louis’s eyes went to the coolers along the back wall. They looked empty. He sighed and picked up the can of beans.

“Jesus, you’re pathetic,” Roberta said. “Come with me.”

He followed her up to the front counter. She reached beneath and tossed a loaf of wheat bread, a jar of Jif, and a package of Ho Hos on the counter.

She stood looking at him, hands on hips, a frown creasing her face. “Go on, take it.”

Louis grinned. “Thanks.”

“Next time, listen to what I tell you. You don’t screw around with a hurricane, even a small one. You hear me?”