Island of Bones(93)

“I don’t know. Two men...Wait.” Louis watched as one of the men shined the flashlight in the face of the other man. It was Frank. They argued again and finally Frank swatted the flashlight away and went up into the house. The other man shouldered his rifle and followed.

Louis pulled out the Glock. “I’ll be right back.”

“Where you going?”

Louis could hear the anxiety in Landeta’s voice. “Up to the house. Something’s going on in there and I want to find out what.”

Louis crawled to the house, sliding up against the wood. The window was open, and he could hear voices. He took a quick look inside. Five men, and the old woman.

He slipped down against the house and listened.





CHAPTER 42




Ana del Bosque ran her hand over the smooth wood of the chair. The chair had belonged to her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother before that. She had never known her great-grandmother; she had died many years before Ana was born. But Ana knew her name —- Bianca Quinones Marquez y del Bosque. The name was written in the family Bible alongside her great-grandfather, Marcelo Leon del Bosque. All the names of the del Bosque women were written there: Great-grandmother Bianca, her grandmother, Esperanza, and her mother, Lourdes.

Ana’s thin fingers explored the indentations of the old chair’s carving, all its small nicks and holes. She could barely remember her mother’s face anymore, just her long black hair. She had died of fever when Ana was only nine. After that, her father had drifted into madness until he walked into the water one night and drowned. Ana was eleven when it happened. After that, there were just the four of them on the island —- Ana, her grandmother, her older brother, Alfonso, and her younger brother, Mateo.

Abuela Esperanza...Ana could remember her grandmother clearly. She could remember coming in from playing and sitting on the wood floor, looking up at her grandmother as she sat in the chair. Ana loved the big chair, with its shiny wood and swirling carvings. And she loved her abuela, loved hearing her tell her stories about a magical place called Asturias. A place of high mountains and cool forests, where silver fish jumped in the water and the wolves sang in the night.

We come from a family that is very old, Analita, a family that descended from the great Roman soldiers, a family of the purest blood.

And then her grandmother would talk to her in the old language. Not the Asturian Spanish that her mother and father had spoken, but the old Latin tongue of the Romans. Ana would try hard to learn the odd sounds and words. When she had finished with her lesson, Abuela Esperanza would let her sit in the chair. It was big like a throne, and it made her feel like a princess.

Ana eased her seventy-seven-year-old body into the chair. She was still small, but the chair fit her now.

Abuela Esperanza had been gone for a long time now. And her brothers —- they were both gone now, too, buried in the family graveyard with the others.

She looked around the room at her family. Her eldest son, Edmundo. Her grandsons Pedro and Carlos. And standing off to the side, her nephew, Orlando. She had devoted her life to keeping the del Bosque family alive, keeping the Isla de los Huesos the way her ancestors had wanted it to be. But it struck her now, an idea that pierced her heart.

She had failed. The outside world was closing in, and she couldn’t stop it.

"Tempora mutantur, et nos in illis mutamur,” she whispered.

Frank was standing at her side and looked down at her. “Mama? You said something?”

She shook her head and reached for his hand. She felt eyes and looked across the room to see Orlando staring at her. She looked across the room to her grandsons Pedro and Carlos. Like Orlando, they stood stone-faced and-rigid. All of them were staring at Francisco, as if he were a stranger, an invader.

Which is exactly what he is to them, Ana thought. They had grown up hearing only the sketchiest stories about the uncle who had left. She had never told any of them why.

The only thing they knew was that Emilio was dead, and that a man with his face was now taking his place.

Ana’s gaze went to her oldest son, Edmundo. He was sitting at the table, his eyes red from crying. He had been close to Francisco and Emilio when they were boys, playing the role of father, teaching them the ways of the island, about the tides and the winds, about the ospreys that nested in the highest dead trees and the manatees that cradled their calves in the shallows. It had broken his heart when Francisco left. And now Emilio was dead by his twin brother’s hand.

Would they listen to her? Would they stand behind one of their own or treat him like the stranger he was?

A bang of the screen door made Ana look up. Tomas came in, his long dark hair matted to his forehead with sweat.