Twenty-Seven Bones by Jonathan Nasaw Page A

anything to improve their dispositions.
    “From that point on, anarchy reigned in the streets of Frederikshavn—those that were still above water, that is. Although I suppose it reigned in the drowned streets as well. The loyal Mr. Featherston, whom I remember only as a bald brown head with a woolly gray fringe, locked the spiked wrought-iron gates of the Mansion and sat outside under the dripping portico with a big old horse pistol across his lap. I suppose he was thinking that the mere sight of the antique Colt would serve as a deterrent. Instead, somebody shot him dead from outside the gates.
    “Auntie Aggie dragged me into the huge mahogany wardrobe of her room, next to mine on the third floor, when the looters broke in a few minutes later. I still remember the smell—stale cedar potpourri mingled with Aggie’s sour powdery eau-de-old-maid—and the darkness, and the terrible sound of Bougie, who’d been screaming downstairs, being cut off in midshriek by a shotgun blast.
    “After that there were footsteps and shouting, doors banging open and shut, heavy furniture being dragged around. I heard the worst language I’d ever heard in my life and so, I suspect, did my auntie, who clapped her hands over my ears. I wriggled away and put my eye to the crack between the wardrobe doors just as the bedroom door came crashing inward and two men burst into the room. One of them began rummaging through Aggie’s bureau; the other lowered his double-barreled shotgun and pointed it directly at the wardrobe—directly at me. It was an ancient side-by-side; I remember looking down those two black barrels. I pushed open the wardrobe doors and stepped out, hands in the air.
    “ ‘Eh, eh, well me gad,’ said the man with the shotgun. ‘Look heah, mon, we done ketch us a scuppy.’
    “ ‘Me ain’ no scuppy,’ I told him. ‘Me a titi-bitah!’ ”
    Lewis had dropped into the dialect that was a first language to him. Me ain’t no was pronounced as one word, meeyaino, the u sound in scuppy was halfway between uh and oo, a scuppy was a bony saltwater fish, an utter waste of bait, and titi biter was the local name for the freshwater mullet, Agonostomus monticola, which according to local legend lurked in streams in order to bite unsuspecting maidens on the breast when they went bathing.
    “I remember the two men glancing at each other in surprise to hear a little white boy talking pure Luke—and full mout’ing them, at that.”
    “Full mowting?”
    “Sassing. That’s probably what saved my life. Instead of killing me on the spot, they laughed. Then the one with the shotgun waved it in the direction of the wardrobe, and whispered, ‘Anybody else in there?’ so softly I had to read his lips.”
    As he paused for a much-needed sip of water, Lewis glanced at the psychiatrist, still scribbling furiously in his notebook. Vogler looked up. “What happened next?”
    “Good question. What I told the Guv and the police was that the men just yanked me and my auntie out of the wardrobe.”
    “I gather that’s not what really happened?”
    “No. What really happened was that I nodded and stepped aside, out of the line of fire.”

5
    Mm-mmmmm mm-mmm, mm-mmmmm mm-mmm …
    Holly found herself humming the theme from Gone With the Wind as the Apgard Great House, alabaster white, winged and colonnaded, appeared at the end of a half-mile-long, ruler-straight driveway with a whitewashed five-rail fence on either side to separate the hybrid Senepol cattle in the fields on one side from the woolless sheep on the other.
    But the Great House was not Holly’s immediate destination. Just before she reached it, she turned left and followed a rutted dirt drive lined with handsome bay rums until she reached the eighteenth-century stone house that had once served as the overseer’s quarters for the Apgard sugar plantation.
    The overseer’s house was one and a half stories high, built in the Danish manner with thick stone walls mortared with