“Is there anything else you can tell us about the family?” Louis asked.
Bessie shook her head slowly. “Like I said, they keep to themselves. They come over here or go down to St. James City for their supplies, but I never seen any of them myself.”
She frowned. “Hold on a sec. Let me go check my library.” She got up and went inside, coming back out with a book. Louis recognized it as a copy of the same book he had checked out of the library that day he had first begun surveying Frank, the book about the settlement of the outlying islands in the 1800s.
Bessie put on her glasses. “Okay...Isla de los Huesos. Well, says here it’s 125 acres and was originally nothing but mangrove forest. But the interior is man-made.”
“How can that be?” Louis asked.
“Back in prehistoric times, it was nothing but a flat oyster bar island,” Bessie said. “But when the Calusa Indians settled this area around a hundred A.D., they used it as one of their main camps. They started building it up with discarded shells, bones, pottery, and junk, mainly as protection against tides and hurricanes. And over the last two thousand years all the stuff piled up and the island grew higher and bigger.” She smiled. “Kind of like a big Indian landfill.”
“How did the del Bosque family get it?” Louis asked.
Bessie ran a finger down the page. “Here it is. A Spaniard named Marcelo Leon del Bosque and his wife, Bianca, came to Florida during the second wave of Spanish settlement, probably in the late 1800s. They got the island on a land grant thing. They were the ones who named it Isla de los Huesos because of the Indian mounds. They were from Asturias, a region in northern Spain.”
“Asturias?” Landeta looked at Louis.
They were both silent. Louis had filled him in on the Asturian lupercalia rite on the drive out. Louis noticed Bessie staring at him over the rim of her glasses.
“Do they speak Latin in Asturias?” Louis asked her.
“How the hell should I know?” Bessie said.
“Latin was spoken in most of Spain at one time or another and survived for centuries in isolated places,” Landeta said. “I read that in one of Frank’s books.”
Now Bessie was eyeing Landeta. “Okay, what is this all about? What are you boys really after?” she asked.
Louis glanced at Landeta but said nothing.
“C’mon,” Bessie said. “They’re just a little strange. Every town has a weird family. What do you think is going on out there anyway?”
The sun was high in the sky now, blazing down on the stilt house. Louis felt the sweat trickle down his back.
“I can’t say, Mrs. Levy,” he said. “All I can tell you is we’re investigating any possible connection between that island and Frank Woods.”
Bessie pushed her fuzz of red hair away from her face. “Woods? That the dead man’s last name?”
“Yes, Frank Woods. Why?”
“Del Bosque. That’s Spanish for ‘of the woods.’” Bessie snorted. “Some detective you are.”
Louis and Landeta exchanged a look, and then Landeta held out his hand to Bessie.
“You’ve been kind. Thank you,” he said. “And thank you for the coffee.”
“You’re welcome,” Bessie said.
Bessie went to the railing, stuck her fingers in her mouth, and let out a shrill whistle. Louis could see the old man back on the dock at Bokeelia look up. The old man waved and got in his boat.
Louis could hear the putt-putt of the boat as it slowly made its way out to them. He brought up a hand to shield his eyes and looked back out over the sun-silvered water.
Far away, out on the very edges of the northwestern horizon, he could make out the ghostly gray green of the most distant islands. In the heat-hazed air, the islands seemed to be floating, like a mirage.
As Bessie busied herself gathering up the coffee mugs, Landeta came up to Louis’s side. “Now we know why Sophie’s father thought Frank was Mexican.”
Louis nodded slowly. “And why Frank went back to the island.”
“Maybe it’s time to bring Horton in on this,” Landeta said.
Louis squinted out at the water.
“Louis, did you hear me? We need to talk to the chief.”
“Not yet. We still don’t have anything linking Frank Woods to the other missing girls,” Louis said.
Landeta let out a breath. “Well, we can run a background check for him under del Bosque, see what comes up.”
Louis shook his head. “Diane told me she was born at home. Chances are her father was, too. Whatever past Frank Woods had is out on that island.”
“Okay, any other bright ideas then?”
“Yeah,” Louis said. “Let’s go get some lunch.”