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I had an island to wander about in, on days when nobody wanted me for anything else. I looked through the trees at the pure blue sky. Meek waves tumbled in and the water was glasslike with a greenish-blue color where rocks formed a perfect breakwater. The early summer heat warmed my arms, and I smelled the first blossoms in the air as a butterfly went wafting by.
I took a deep breath, then another.
This was paradise.
Even paradise could have snakes.
I headed behind the little run-down house with the eroded plasterwork and leaf-shrouded roof and kept wandering until I spied something that looked out of place—dark lumps in the ground beyond a screen of vines and branches. I pushed through and found a track heading that way.
And I needed to be more than the submissive girl they could ravish. I wanted to know what the fuck was happening, why the doctor seemed half Ted Bundy and half a saint, and I wanted to know whether Cassius was telling the truth about anything. Asking face to face was never going to satisfy me as they could lie through their teeth. I needed to find some incontrovertible facts, like maybe this…
A small cemetery lay before me. Fifty headstones, at least. Some were terribly damaged and eroded, mold-shrouded and weather-worn. A few looked newer and well-cared for.
12
CHARITY
Lacking pen and paper, I memorized the names on the headstones as well as I could. On another day, I hoped to return with the phone and record them all.Patricia Romanuswas the name that stood out.August 19th, 1942was inscribed on the stone. If that was the day she died, she could be a relative of the doctor, who’d died in the bombing of the tower. The two most recent graves were twenty years apart, and the last had died in 2001. Both of those appeared to be male names, and so they were unlikely to be other Lost Girls, as the doctor had called me.
The earliest graves were from the nineteenth century. Those must have been renewed, for the inscriptions were metal plaques on simple crosses, with peeling white paint. A name and a date was the only information recorded on those earlier graves.
I was almost disappointed. Yet… Did I want him to be a killer? I guess I wanted closure, a reason for everything. Humans liked reasons.
IfIwere a serial killer, I would never put their real name on their grave. In fact…I’d be unlikely to bury them so neatly.
A pale, gray-white object protruded from the soil beside my sandal, and I stooped, squatting to see it closer.A bone. Holy crap. A fucking bone.My eyes stayed wide and fixated. Possibly a finger bone. I recalled the shape of those from my studies.
My train of thought had been blown to the four winds.
The earth near the bone was of a level with the rest of the site. The headstone indicated a woman was buried here, who died in 1821. The grave was too ancient to be evidence of serial killing unless the inscription was fake. Mouth twisting, I eyed the bone. Should I?
I should.
I tucked it into my palm and went to the hut for a place to hide this, praying the doctor wouldn’t come to see what I was doing. I had no pocket, no private bag, so I poked it into the ground at the back right corner of the foundations.
My heart was thudding too fast for a casual stroll, and in this state, I wasn’t going to meet anyone’s eyes without looking worried. I paused for a few minutes to calm myself before heading down the trail to the beach.
I do not believe in omens.
This find was food for thought. I mulled it over as I trudged down the sand. The men watched me from where they idly swam in the quiet water created by the rocky breakwater. The beach was well sheltered from winds due to the headland and its shape, so the lack of holidaying yacht owners sailing in was curious.
Why was there no coffin? A human hand did not accidentally break through a coffin, unless I’d fallen into an old vampire movie with a restless corpse. Was the bone an omen? I didn’t believe in omens, but I did believe in DNA and science. Rock-solid science trumped any Ouija board crap. If that person died centuries ago, nothing was likely to be in public records, but what if they hadn’t? What were the chances of the DNA being registered somewhere?
And who the fuck buried people in a cemetery without a coffin?
During plague times, there’d been hurried burials.
I dropped my towel beside theirs, yards up from the damp sand, and kept going, wading into the water. At ankle depth, I paused to appreciate the temperature—it was colder than I liked but survivable. The scent filled my awareness, a mishmash of molecules that always permeated beach air. Salt, sunshine, fish, crabs crawling in holes, and maybe dead men that tell no tales.
“In!” the doctor bellowed as Cassius waded toward me, hand outstretched.
The water swirled about my toes and withdrew, revealing wet sand that had swallowed a portion of my feet. I squidged my feet about, worming them deeper into the sand. It felt good, as squishing sand always did, and it brought back memories of my holiday in Australia when I was twenty-one and had a girlfriend with wanderlust. The beaches there were bigger and the sun hotter. They were strewn with hot surfer dudes and surfer chicks too. I’d tried to learn surfing and had drowned a little. We’d both tried free diving on a boat tour to a reef, with an expert showing us how to learn. Free diving was scary stuff…
I remembered lazy days of recreational drugs and fun, and friends screaming random insults at each other, and drinking cheap wine around a campfire late at night with the surf roaring in as background music.
The sea washed in again. A gull cried, plaintive and wild. I watched it wheel across the sky with wings unfurled, gliding on the heated air.
Cassius splashed nearer, snatched my hand, and towed me outward.
