Her Boyfriend's Bones Page 23

  “Turn here,” she said.

  The Mercedes swung into the lane, hardly registering the rough cobbles. The glaring lights and antiseptic smells of the hospital had seared her senses. She let down her window and breathed in the sweet night smells. The cicadas were singing and the moon was full. Antonis turned into Marilita’s driveway and parked behind a blue Vespa. The Picanto was nowhere to be seen and the house was dark.

  He got out and opened the door for her.

  She had seen that Vespa somewhere before, hadn’t she? She chewed her lip. “Will you come inside with me? I don’t know who is here.”

  He slid a gun out of his inside jacket pocket, held it low at his side, and walked ahead of her to the front door. He turned the knob, pushed the door open, and stepped inside. There were no lights. She clung to his back like a shadow. They looked right, down the hall to the kitchen, then left, toward the living room. Music wafted from that direction.

  …sunk in pain

  Obsessed with love and clouds and rain…

  Antonis raised his gun and whispered. “When we enter the room, can you find the light?

  “Yes.”

  The two of them skulked down the dark hall in tandem. They crept into the living room and Dinah hit the light switch. K.D. was lying on the couch, her head resting in the lap of the young man who had given Dinah directions to Mentor’s house after her tires were slashed. The boy saw Antonis’ gun and his eyes stretched wide as saucers.

  K.D. raised her head off his lap and gave Dinah a wan smile. One of her eyes glistened with tears. The other was red and swollen shut. “I wrecked the car,” she said, sitting up and holding a wet cloth against her forehead. “This is Farris. He gave me a ride home.”

  Sorrowing Jesus, thought Dinah, and went to examine her injuries.

  Farris leapt to his feet and shut off the music. “I tried to take her to the hospital but she would not go.”

  “I didn’t want to cause you any more worry,” said K.D., her voice quavering. “How is Thor?”

  “Still unconscious.” Dinah ran her fingers over the goose egg on K.D.’s forehead.

  “Ouch!”

  “Did you black out or feel disoriented?”

  “No. I was clear as a bell, wasn’t I, Farris? I know I should’ve been wearing a belt, but…”

  “Hush. How about the other car? Anyone hurt?”

  “There wasn’t another car. I swerved to keep from running over this old lady. There was no crosswalk and it was really her fault. I ran into the side of a building and the shop owner didn’t speak English and I was so lucky because Farris came along and gave the police your name and number and somebody will call you tomorrow.”

  “Are there any cuts? Anything that needs stitches?” Dinah lifted K.D.’s swollen eyelid.

  “No.”

  “How long ago did this happen?”

  “About nine hours,” said Farris, looking sheepish. “I have been taking care of her.”

  “I’ll bet.” A loving parent would have rushed the kid to the hospital for observation, but Dinah wasn’t a loving parent. She was a barely functioning nanny with too many troubles on her mind and she was utterly depleted. “It’s up to you, K.D. You might have internal bleeding and not realize it. This gentleman,” she waved a hand behind her toward Antonis, “will drive you to the hospital if you want to go. If not, I can’t make you.”

  She said, “I’ll be okay. Daddy always used to joke that the Dobbses have harder heads than most people. I guess I’m living proof.”

  Dinah frowned.

  K.D. put her hand over her mouth. “Oh.”

  Farris retrieved his helmet from behind the sofa. “I will go now. I will come to see you tomorrow, Katarina.”

  “I will go, too,” said Antonis. “Tell me where the sculpture is, please.”

  “Wrapped in a tarp under the sink,” said Dinah.

  Farris left and Dinah followed Antonis down the hall. He looked inside the tarp at the bloodstained arm and whistled. “This would have caused much damage.”

  “Yes.”

  He blushed and appeared eager to get away. “I will come back and drive you tomorrow when you are ready. Lock the door when I leave.”

  “I will. Efkharistó.”

  She heard the door close and leaned her arms on the table. Her biceps ached from the strain of all the lifting she’d done. There wasn’t a muscle in her body that didn’t ache. Her nerves were pulsating and her thoughts tangled in knots. A glass of wine would relax her and probably put her right to sleep. K.D. would have sore muscles, too. No one who’s been conked on the head should drink or go to sleep, but it had been hours since the accident and Dinah had already abdicated the role of minder. K.D. had passed the point where she could be managed.

  She uncorked a bottle of wine, took out two glasses, and carried them back to the living room—pausing en route to bolt the door.

  K.D. sat prim and erect on one end of the couch. “How is Thor?”

  “Stable. Prognosis uncertain.” She poured two glasses, handed one to K.D., and curled up on the other end of the couch. “Thank you for what you did this afternoon, K.D. I couldn’t have done it without you. If he pulls through, it’s because you were there to help. You are definitely not a feeb.”

  Her open eye glazed with tears, which she was quick to hide. “Did he say anything after I left?”

  “Nothing coherent.” Dinah was still puzzling over that one word, staff. It was probably just a neural glitch. Or if he’d had a moment of lucidity, he was trying to call Stavros’ name, perhaps to let her know that he was a friend. She lay her head back and stared up at the ceiling, its plaster crazed by a web of minute lines. It seemed as if reality itself was crazed. There was no pattern, no coherent whole, just a mosaic of pieced-together recollections and fleeting perceptions—Stavros’, Alcina’s, Thor’s, and hers.

  K.D. said, “Thanks for not chewing me out about the accident.”

  “We’ve both had a rough day.” Dinah picked up a CD sleeve on the coffee table, Memory Comes Back. “Farris looks familiar to me.”

  “He gave you directions to Mentor’s house, don’t you remember?”

  “Yes, but I saw him somewhere else. In the airport the day you arrived. He was wearing a “Raining Pleasure” T-shirt and you gave each other a flirty look. Did you meet him on your flight from Athens?”

  K.D. pressed the cloth over her eyes with both hands. “Yes.”

  “It was serendipity that he showed up so promptly that morning. He was probably prepared to offer you a ride into Karlovassi on the back of his scooter.”

  K.D. made a little soughing sound through her nose.

  “Did you ask him to slash my tires?”

  She lowered the cloth and tears streamed from both eyes. “I’m sorry, Dinah. Truly, I am. But he and I just so totally bonded, like instantly. We couldn’t let Fate separate us before we had a chance to truly know one another. I didn’t know he would slash all of the tires. And it turned out for the best, didn’t it? Thor might have died if we hadn’t stayed on the island, right?”

  “You didn’t know that, K.D. And self-justification is a dangerous habit.”

  “God, I’m such a hopeless git.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up, K.D. Your instinct about Galen Stavros was right. It turns out he’s a policeman.”

  “I knew I was right about him. I went online and looked up that Sextus Empiricus dude he quoted. Sextus was all about suspending judgment, which is how everybody ought to be but totally is not. Sextus said some pretty heavy stuff, but it was sort of like, everybody’s different and no two people see a thing the same way. Like you didn’t see Galen the way I did and my mother doesn’t see anything the way I do and the police, not Thor, but I mean the Atlanta police, are total morons. I’m not making excuses. I know I have to take responsibility, but it�
��s enervating.”

  Dinah straightened up and drank a few sips of wine. The painting of the Spanish knight held her attention. It was crazed and crackled, too. Either it was very old or the artist had wanted it to look old. Her brother, a budding art forger, used a craquelure varnish on some of his paintings to effect the illusion of age.

  She got up and went to look at the knight more closely. Marilita had told Nasos, aka Galen that the face reminded her of someone she couldn’t be with, probably Alcina’s unnamed father. Alcina had the same prominent eyes and drooping lower lids. That had to be a hereditary trait. There were computer apps that could show what someone would look like as he aged. Dinah tried to imagine what the knight would look like as an old man. His high forehead, long neck, and high, rounded hairline resembled Egan. The aging resins had darkened the skin tone to brown, like Stavros’ skin, and it was possible to see something of Stavros’ character in the bleak smile. But the raptor-like nose, thin lips, and square chin brought to mind the photo of Phaedon hanging next to the front door in Zenia’s house. The knight’s face was a Rorschach test.

  And suddenly she saw it. “I can’t believe how blind I’ve been.”

  K.D. got up and joined her in front of the painting. “What is it? What do you see?”

  “The whole shebang,” said Dinah. “Call Farris back. I need to borrow his scooter.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The Vespa growled to a stop in front of Zenia’s house. Dinah turned off the ignition, unbuckled her helmet, and dismounted. There were no lights in the house, but moonlight illuminated the curved stairs and bathed the boulder in a silvery glow. She rolled her borrowed conveyance behind a tree out of sight and crept down the paved drive toward the garage.

  She held the beam of her flashlight low until she reached the garage. She killed the light and waved her arms up and down in front of the door, but there were no motion sensors. No lights flashed on. She was relieved, but a little surprised. Zenia had bought a gun to scare off the wolf, but she hadn’t installed the simplest of safeguards. Or so far it seemed so.

  Zenia had opened the door with a remote control device. Most modern garage door openers had a wireless, keyless entry system. Dinah shone her light along the side of the garage looking for an outside keypad. Bingo. The little box was attached to the inside of the jamb on the right-hand side, a few inches below eye level. With luck, Zenia had been equally negligent when setting the security code. Dinah lifted the cover, punched in the last four numbers of Zenia’s telephone number, and hit enter. That wasn’t it. She tried 1-2-3-4, the typical sequence used by people who didn’t like to burden themselves with complexity. That didn’t do the trick and she tried 4-3-2-1, then repeated combinations of each number, which also failed.

  She kicked herself for not knowing Zenia’s birth date, but the year was 1928. That didn’t work, either. The numerical equivalent for the name Hero had too many digits. The road was known simply as Quarry Road and the house had no number. If she had a coat hanger, she might be able to reach the emergency release lever inside the garage and open the door, but she didn’t have a coat hanger. Grudgingly, she supposed that if she’d brought K.D. along, she’d have finagled her way inside like abracadabra. But K.D.’s expertise wasn’t available and time was wasting. Already, it was four in the morning and she didn’t want to take the chance that either Zenia or Egan was an early riser.

  Frustrated, she circled around looking for a window to break or a back door to force, but the garage appeared to have been hollowed out of solid rock. She returned to the keypad and the answer came, as K.D. would say, like “duh.” Of course. Everything related back to that bad day at the beach. She entered the numbers 6-9-7-3 and the door began to rise, more noisily than she would have liked, but neither Zenia’s ears nor Egan’s were lynx-like.

  No interior light came on, another security omission that worked in her favor. She left the door open and shone her flashlight into the darkness. She walked past the Isotta and headed straight for the arched stone doorway into the underground passage. Once inside, she found the main switch and a dozen recessed lights snapped on in the niches that lined the tunnel. Light didn’t alleviate the feeling of being in a catacomb. When she had followed Zenia through here the first time, she had paid scant attention. This time she knew what she was looking for.

  In the first niche on her left stood a large, two-handled amphora, probably for storing olive oil or wine. It depicted two warriors, one with his spear raised over his head, poised to slay the kneeling other. Across from the amphora, on her right, was a pair of disembodied marble feet. The figure they supported must have been colossal. The next object on her left was an exquisitely painted pot which Dinah recognized as a loutrophoros. She had seen ones like it in the Louvre. Such vessels were used in funerary rituals and placed in the tombs of the unmarried. She could see nothing about the thing that would make it more applicable to unmarrieds than marrieds, but she wasn’t a pottery wonk.

  The next sculpture was a swan—its wings enfolding a terrified woman, Leda. In Greek myth, Zeus was forever turning up in disguise to rape some hapless hottie. With the king of the gods, it was one perfidy after another. No wonder Hera had been jealous and resentful.

  A whooshing sound behind her made her jump and she pasted herself flat against the wall between the amphora and the funeral pot. She heard another whoosh like fluttering wings punctuated by a loud thud. She pictured a large bird, an owl or a hawk, driving a smaller bird into something hard, the back of the Isotta, perhaps. More fluttering and then silence. In her mind’s eye, the hawk was flying away to its aerie, prey held tight in its talons.

  She let out a breath and continued her tour. The next statue was the one she had come to see. Asclepius, the god of medicine. In his right hand, he held his serpent-entwined rod. The Staff of Asclepius. The staff symbolized healing and the serpent symbolized the sloughing off of old age in the way that a serpent sheds its skin. This was the staff that Thor had meant. There could be no doubt. The left arm was broken off at the elbow.

  She made a quick inspection of the remaining niches and statuary. She had no idea how valuable these pieces were, but she felt sure that this subterranean hideaway was more than a private museum. Phaedon had designed it to be the repository for the weapons he diverted from the armory in Samos Town. Thor had figured it out and come here looking for them. There must have been a fight and Asclepius fell out of his niche. Someone had picked up the broken arm and clobbered Thor, then took the weapon a short distance up the mountain to the quarry and tossed it. He couldn’t afford to be seen driving Thor’s car, so he pushed it off into the gorge, stuffed Thor in the trunk of his own car, drove to the kalivi, and entombed him in the well in order to incriminate Mentor.

  The only problem with that scenario was that the guilty party had to be Egan. Other than Zenia, he was the only one with unfettered access to this cave. He would have been in the house on the morning when Thor drove up here. He looked old and innocuous and could have sneaked up behind Thor. But Egan didn’t look strong enough to lift a wet sponge, let alone push a Peugeot off a cliff or move that heavy stone from the kalivi. Lifting Asclepius back into his niche would have given Hercules a hernia. Constantine must have been in on it. If he didn’t take part in the actual assault, he was paid to “discover” the bloody arm and put his brawn into the heavy work. She still wasn’t sure about Brakus and Papas, but one thing at a time.

  Where were the weapons? Was there a secret panel? She ran a hand from the serpent’s tail up to its mouth and tongue and from the top of the staff to the bottom, but there were no magic buttons or levers. She squatted down and felt around the feet and in the interstices of the cloak. She could find no hidden mechanisms. She was in the process of standing when she banged her knee against the edge of the niche and lost her balance. As she fell backward, she grabbed onto the staff and Asclepius swiveled sideways—throwing her onto her bum.

 
When she righted herself, she saw that the rear wall of the niche had opened out to reveal another tunnel or room. She leaned her head and shoulders inside. It was dark and emitted the earthy fug of a crypt, but the floor had been swept clean and far in the back, a dehumidifier thrummed. Her flashlight picked out a bank of wooden crates stacked on pallets. Each crate bore a stenciled “United States of America.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  Dinah’s heart knocked against her chest. It wasn’t the voice she’d expected. She turned to see Zenia, cocooned in an oversized yellow kimono from which the barrel of her pistol emerged like the proboscis of a wasp.

  “I should have known you’d come back.” Without her lipstick and eyebrows, she looked blank, like an unfinished cartoon. She held up the trailing skirt of her robe and minced around for a better look. “What is that?”

  “The storeroom where your husband kept the weapons he stole from the junta.”

  “No such thing.” Keeping a firm grip on the pistol, she bent over and cocked her head inside. “I don’t see any weapons.” She stepped back and scrunched her eyes. “What have you done to Asclepius? His arm is gone.”

  Dinah weighed the possibility that she didn’t know about the guns. “Are you covering for Egan, Zenia? That arm was broken off the statue when you and I walked past it on the morning Thor disappeared. I didn’t realize that anything was amiss, but you noticed. You looked furious. Did you ask Egan about it?”

  “Someone broke in. Those Iraqi vandals.”

  “Is that what he told you? Maybe it was Nasos Lykos. Like he said in that letter he wrote to you, the wolf is at the door.”

  She bobbled the gun, but recovered immediately and backed away. “Don’t be absurd.”

  “Have you considered that Egan might be writing those letters?”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Is it also nonsense that Egan is selling Phaedon’s guns to terrorists?”