Her Boyfriend's Bones Read online

  She cocked her head and gave Dinah an appraising look. “You’re darker than I thought you’d be. Gallic, I’d guess. Pelerin. French, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am. It means pilgrim. My father was a descendant of French Huguenots. My mother is Native American. Seminole.”

  “I didn’t ask for your biography, although I suppose it accounts in part for the bone structure. You look a lot like your young man. More fine-boned. Prettier in a prosaic way. But the same eyes. I daresay Ramberg’s fallen in love with his own reflection. Like Narcissus. Let’s hope you don’t suffer the same fate as Echo, the nymph who loved him.”

  Dinah knew the crux of the myth, but Zenia seemed keen to expound. “What happened to Echo?”

  “Narcissus spurned her and she died of a broken heart.”

  Dinah got why Zenia was not well liked.

  “Al-ci-na!” The old biddy called down the hallway in a clarion voice. “Bring a pot of tea and two cups. I’ll be in the parlor with the Pelerin woman.” She held out her arm to Dinah. “I’ll want steadying.”

  Dinah took her arm and walked her into the front room. She gave off a strong odor of lilies, reminiscent of a funeral home.

  “This will do.” She perched ruler straight on a French provincial chair under a painting of a Spanish knight. “Sit down across from me so I can see you.”

  Dinah took that as a license to stare, which was fortunate because she couldn’t take her eyes off the woman. “You speak excellent English. Hardly any accent at all.”

  “I can mimic any accent. That’s what actors are taught to do.”

  “You were an actress, too?”

  “I am an actress.”

  “I didn’t mean…”

  “What?” She raised her silver earhorn to her ear.

  “I assumed you were retired.”

  “I can no longer play Antigone. But there are still a few roles suitable to my years. I attended the Stella Adler Studio in New York. And if that ‘too’ I heard is a reference to my late sister, I have always had the greater talent and the wider range. ‘In your choices lies your talent.’ That was Stella’s mantra. Marilita’s carnality reduced her to vulgar, third-rate choices.” She spoke in a dispassionate, matter-of-fact way, as if carnality were neither good nor bad, but merely a limiting factor in the matter of acting roles.

  “Have you acted in any films?” asked Dinah.

  “I despise films. I’m a stage actress.”

  Alcina stole into the room on cat feet and set a tray on the table between them.

  “Thank you, Alcina.” Zenia lifted the teapot and poured two steaming cups. “I’m not foolish enough to believe that a hot drink is cooling. I drink hot tea because I’m old and old people are always cold even in warm weather. I’m accustomed to being indulged. I take for granted that you’ll have a cup with me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Cream and sugar?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  She handed Dinah a brimming cup. Her hand was as steady as a sniper’s and she didn’t need eyeglasses to tong three tiny sugar cubes into her own cup. “What do you think of our island?”

  “I haven’t done much sightseeing yet, but what I’ve seen is lovely.”

  “Ramberg said you’re an archaeologist.”

  “Cultural anthropologist, actually. I don’t have a full-time position with a university or a museum, but occasionally I’m asked to assist an archaeology team. I’ll be working with a team near Troy in a few weeks.”

  “There’s an archaeological excavation underway right here on Samos at the Temple of Hera. Do you know your Greek myths?”

  “I know that Hera was the wife of Zeus and queen of the Greek gods. She was famous for being jealous and vengeful to mortals who displeased her.”

  Zenia stirred her tea and pursed her lips. “She was temperamental, but she’s ours. She was born on Samos. All Samian women have something of Hera in their blood. Some more than others, isn’t that right, Alcina?”

  Dinah looked behind her. She hadn’t realized that Alcina was still lurking.

  Alcina said something in Greek.

  “What did you say?” Zenia raised her earhorn. “Speak up, child. Don’t mumble.”

  “You shouldn’t make sport of the dead.”

  “Make sport? You mustn’t be so prickly, Alcina. Your mother’s lack of self-control is a lesson to the rest of us to hold strong.”

  Dinah did the math and made an intuitive leap. “Marilita Stephan was your mother, Alcina?”

  “And she was not vulgar. The Athens News calls her a martyr to the junta resistance movement and a Greek Joan of Arc.” She gave Zenia a stormy look, caressed her glass blue-eye fetish, and scudded back into the house.

  A drop of perspiration trickled from under Zenia’s cap, rolled past the topaz pendant on her forehead, and followed the curve of a penciled eyebrow down her cheek. She dabbed it away with her napkin. “You must excuse my niece. A mousy creature with a head full of ghosts and old wives’ tales. Of course, she’s anxious about her husband’s plight.”

  “She seemed more anxious to defend her mother,” said Dinah.

  “She has little enough cause for that. She was born…What is it the English say? On the wrong side of the blanket. Marilita scorned marriage the way she scorned every other proper institution. If there were such a thing as the curse of the evil eye, Marilita drew it onto herself with her outrageous behavior.”

  Dinah couldn’t think of a response, but Zenia was already pushing herself up from her chair and smoothing her skirt. She had delivered her best lines and the performance was over. “I have to be at a rehearsal in Pythagório at four. An adaptation of a lesser comedy, but it keeps me from withering on the vine. You must come to my house for tea tomorrow afternoon. Bring Ramberg and that raffish young woman in the harem pants. She looks like a natural actress.”

  Dinah watched her drive away in the maroon Isotta. Zenia Stephanadis might be physically frail. She might be spiteful and eccentric and unpopular with the villagers. But she was the dead opposite of senile.

  Chapter Eight

  Dinah had run across the evil eye superstition in her studies of several ancient cultures. Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Christians—at one time or another, they all held the belief that certain individuals could bestow bad luck, sickness, or even death by focusing their malevolent gaze upon a victim. There were variations among the different cultures, but most people believed that the evil eye sprang from envy, which could be intentional or unintentional. She thought she detected a tinge of envy in Zenia, but it was envy of Marilita, not Alcina. Strange that Alcina would be so eclectic in her choice of protective icons, wearing both the evil-eye fetish and the Greek Orthodox cross. Dinah put it on her mental to-do list to read up on the Aegean variant of the curse and discover how it was that black magic and Christianity could co-exist so easily on Alcina’s ample bosom.

  At the moment, it was the story of Narcissus that occupied her mind. It hadn’t occurred to her that she and Thor looked alike and Zenia’s gibe had piqued her vanity. She lay across the bed on her stomach, propped on her elbows, thumbing through her book of myths. When she found the chapter on Narcissus, she flattened the book wide open and read.

  Narcissus was the son of a river god, Cephisus, and a water nymph, Lirope. After the birth of her baby, Lirope sought out the prophet, Tiresias, and asked, “Will he live a long life?” In the typically cryptic style of prophets, Tiresias answered, “If ever he knows himself, he will die.” Apparently, this warning flummoxed Lirope and she failed to get the memo to Narcissus. Meanwhile, he grew up to be the handsomest of men and the heartthrob of all the nymphs, but none of them could win his heart.

  Back on Olympus, Zeus prevailed on pretty Echo to keep Hera distracted with a shaggy dog story while he sneaked off for a frolic with one of the other nymphs. Echo did a
s she was told, but when Hera tumbled to the trick, she punished her by taking away her ability to speak her own thoughts. She could only repeat the last few words that others had spoken, using their voices and their accents. Thus handicapped, she was at a disadvantage when she tried to win Narcissus’ heart. She smothered him in kisses, but he was cold as ice. And then one day he saw his own face reflected in a forest pool and, like a Capuchin monkey, he thought it was a separate being. Incapable of self-recognition and too infatuated to tear himself away, he pined away beside the pool until he died—spurned by his own reflection.

  Dinah closed the book. If that was what Tiresias meant by ‘knowing himself,’ the prophet had a cracked concept of self-knowledge. She got up and assessed her reflection in the dresser mirror, turning from side to side. Her jaw was square like Thor’s. But his face was broader and his cheekbones more chiseled, which lent an exotic, slightly Ghengis Khan aspect. Apart from having dark eyes and dark hair, she looked nothing like him.

  Where was he? What was he doing? It was three o’clock. In another couple of hours, K.D. would start clamoring to be fed and Dinah didn’t want to go to the taverna without an escort. Besides, she was itching to tell him where she’d seen Brakus and with whom and to break the news that Alcina was Marilita’s daughter. It dawned on her that she’d forgotten to let him know that she wasn’t spending the night in Pythagório after all. She took out her phone and dialed his number.

  “Hallo.”

  “Hi. The hotels in Pythagório were all full and I’m back in Kanaris with K.D. Where are you?”

  “Near Karlovassi on the northwest coast.”

  “What’s there?”

  “Nothing much. I’m walking on a beach called Megalo Seitani.”

  “Can you meet us for dinner at the taverna?”

  “Sure.” It was a tardy “sure,” as if he had to think how to rejigger other plans. “Around six?”

  “See you there.”

  She had told him she wouldn’t be around tonight and he had every right to make alternate plans, but still…

  She moseyed over to his bedside table and debated with her better angel. Mousing around in your lover’s personal belongings is deplorable and unbecoming in the extreme, argued the hypothetical angel. Guns are a special case, countered her tough-minded side. She opened the drawer. His service pistol was gone. He had said he would carry it in his coat pocket. She felt a touch of sympathy. For someone who hated the heat as much as he did, wearing a coat while walking on the beach would be torment.

  There was a soft knock at the door. “Dinah, would it be all right for me to take a walk?”

  K.D. asking permission? Dinah compartmentalized one set of suspicions and opened the door on another.

  The princess had lost the eye make-up and changed into cropped jeans, a white tee with a modest pink overshirt, and sneakers. She smiled angelically. “It’s such a nice afternoon. I won’t go far.”

  “I’ll walk with you. The village is small, but there are lots of confusing little alleyways. I wouldn’t want you to get lost.”

  “Has your boyfriend gotten home yet?”

  “No. He’ll meet us at the taverna later on for dinner.”

  “I can’t keep calling him your boyfriend. What’s his name?”

  “Thor. Thor Ramberg.”

  “Thor. That’s the name of the Norse god of thunder and lightning. Chris Hemsworth played Thor in the movie. Does Thor look as fabulous as Chris?”

  “I don’t know what Chris looks like.” Reading about Echo had given Dinah an idea. She hadn’t yet explored the gorge that separated Kanaris from the next mountain over. Based on the map in her Samos guide book, the trail started at the western edge of the village. A couple of hours of exercise and fresh air would settle her nerves and maybe if she yelled “Go home” and Echo repeated it a few times, K.D. would get the message. “I know just the place for a walk.”

  She swapped her sandals for her walking shoes, put on her Wayfarers, and the two of them set out. The lane back toward the village was beginning to feel routine except for the spot where Fathi’s body had lain. The police hadn’t marked it, but a rabbit ran over Dinah’s grave as they passed. She saw stains where blood had seeped between the cobbles and hoped that K.D. didn’t notice. She walked fast, but when they had passed through the shadowy bower of overhanging trees, the terrain opened and she relaxed and slowed down. The same ginger cat lazed on the same sun-warmed tiles. The sun set the bougainvillea aflame, turning it into a near-psychedelic experience, and the fragrance of wild thyme spiced the air. She’d read somewhere that the ancient Egyptians used thyme as an embalming agent and the Greeks used it as a fumigant. Certainly, this part of Samos was well fumigated.

  As they passed the rear of the taverna and cut through the alley to the main street, Dinah darted a look toward the terrace. There was no sign of Brakus. A few customers, mostly tourists, refreshed themselves with iced drinks and frosty mugs of beer. They all had daypacks stacked around their feet and water bottles. Water! She kicked herself. Well, it was too late now. But they wouldn’t hike far and, from what she’d read, the trail was mostly shaded until they reached the gorge overlook.

  From the center of the village, they walked down a steep hill in the direction from which Yannis had come yesterday evening. Was it less than twenty-four hours ago? It seemed like a lifetime. Where had he gotten those wine bottles? She didn’t recall them having labels. Maybe the winery that processed the grapes grown in Zenia’s vineyard was located along this road and he’d tapped a barrel for his private consumption.

  K.D. barged into her thoughts. “Have you made up your mind about me staying? I didn’t do anything that anybody should go to jail for. If you don’t believe me, you can call Fiona and ask her if I stole anything. She’ll tell you it was all a mistake.”

  “She needs to tell that to the police.”

  “What if you were to call up your ex-boyfriend, that policeman in Seattle, and ask him to talk to somebody in the Atlanta Police Department? Aren’t all policemen sort of like a fraternity or a club or something? They scratch each other’s backs, right?”

  Dinah hadn’t thought about the unspeakable Detective Nick Isparta in months and she had no desire to speak of him now. “I don’t think that’s the solution to your problem, K.D.”

  The cobbled street dead-ended in front of a low, rectangular building with three green, garage-type metal doors, all closed. A sun-bleached mural above the center door featured a black-bearded satyr tipping a horn of wine into his open mouth. An old-fashioned wine press with a wood-stave tank and a rusty iron screw for crushing the grapes rested on a square concrete platform in front of the building. Security cameras had been mounted above each door and the man with the Saddam Hussein mustache was sitting on a cinder block in front of the center door tossing two strands of worry beads with one hand. As the first strand hit the second, they made a sharp, clacking noise. From under lowering black brows, his eyes seemed to frisk them.

  “What a skeeve,” said K.D.

  If skeeve meant scary, Dinah agreed in spades. She put her arm around K.D.’s shoulders and steered her toward a yellow sign to the right of the winery with a stick figure of a hiker. From there, the trail branched off through the forest. Dinah forged ahead. It was curious that a tiny winery in a tiny village would invest in modern security cameras and post a guard to protect its outdated equipment. And there was something diabolical about that man. He might be a Greek, or even a Turk. But in her mind she had classified him as an Iraqi and not an attractive one. Whoever he was, he knew Brakus and the policeman who investigated Fathi’s murder. If he was guarding the winery when Yannis dropped by yesterday, he probably knew him, as well.

  The trail hadn’t been maintained and the farther they went, the denser the foliage became and the more closed-in she felt. Jackals and wolves were nocturnal, but murderers weren’t. She remembered Thor�
��s warning about human trafficking. She pictured herself and K.D. being waylaid and bundled off to a brothel in Burkina Faso or Kiribati or to some hideous laboratory where their organs would be harvested for sale. Thor had a quirky affinity for TV detectives, but he was no flake. He was practical and prudent and his decision to carry a gun began to seem more reasonable, prescient even. Maybe she shouldn’t have ventured off without him. She stopped and waited for K.D.

  “I have another idea, Dinah. You could withdraw a few thousand dollars from my daddy’s account, I mean it is my inheritance, and I could go traveling on my own. I’m old enough to take care of myself and you know what a fanatic Daddy was about people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and making their own way in the world. He’d be so for this plan. You wouldn’t have to tell my mother that I ever arrived on Samos. She could think I’d vanished into thin air. It would be our secret, yours and mine, and I would be eternally grateful. Later on, of course, when all this burglary business has blown over, I’ll call her and explain that I just had to grow and move on. She’ll understand.”

  “Your mother would not understand, K.D., and she would not feel eternally grateful. She would have me jailed for interference with parental custody or contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Whatever the charge, I’d have lots of time to regret it. That much is sure. What’s gotten into you?” Dinah almost laughed. She was echoing Thor asking her what had gotten into her. Samos seemed to infect everyone with the germ of anarchy.

  The canopy overhead thinned, letting in more sunlight. Her jitters passed and she decided to keep walking, staying far enough ahead of K.D. so she wouldn’t have to hear any more of her schemes, at least not until dinner. The trail forked. One branch appeared wider, well trodden, and less densely forested. Shafts of sunlight slanted through the trees picking out flecks of mica in the sandy soil and making them glitter like sequins.