The Bone Readers

by Jacob Ross

  ‘Okay,’ he said rubbing his face. ‘I want you to go through the whole thing again step by step.’

  ‘Ease up, Malan! Give the woman a chance!’

  We were on the white road down into San Andrews. The town was at its usual Sunday ease. The concrete houses on either side of The Avenue sat back from the verge in a green display of neat front lawns and trimmed bougainvillea hedges. We drove through the smells of spiced rice, steamed vegetables and rich meat sauces.

  As we entered San Andrews, the clock tower on Church Street measured out the hour with lazy, resonant gongs. Eleven o’clock.

  On top of Market Hill, Malan tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Go get your vehicle, Digson. I’ll take her to the hospital.’

  Malan adjusted himself behind me, leaned forward, and placed his lips against my ear. ‘That’s an order.’

  In the rear-view mirror, I saw Miss Stanislaus stir, her bright eyes switching quickly to Malan’s face, then mine.

  ‘Is Sunday,’ I said. ‘S’far as I concerned, I off duty; I not taking orders right now.’

  I thought I saw Miss Stanislaus nod but I wasn’t sure. It could have been the fast-changing play of light from the window on her face.

  Malan leaned back, his whole body rigid with dissatisfaction.

  I, too, was dissatisfied with Miss Stanislaus’s account. My head was swarming with uncertainties because, from the moment I saw Deacon Bello on the sand with a bullet through his shoulder, I knew that his death could not have happened as Miss Stanislaus described it. And if it did, this woman could not be the person she’d led us to believe she was.

  I knew Malan wanted to have her on his own to drill her. He would use every trick he knew to catch her out, even if it meant stopping the vehicle in the middle of the road or at the hospital gate and pointing his Sig Sauer in her face. And from the little I knew about Miss Stanislaus, she would not allow that kind of liberty from any man.

  22

  Up here, the air was a mixture of sea-salt and the heady antiseptic emanations from the old colony hospital. There was something else – for me at least. It was part of the smell, yet separate from it. Almost like a memory of blood.

  As soon as we stepped out of the car, a very short woman in a pale green uniform came out of the building signposted Accident and Emergency. She looked up at us from under the stiff, white peak of a nurse’s cap, miraculously stuck halfway down her forehead. Her eyes halted on Miss Stanislaus’s face, travelled over the bloodied shirt draped around her shoulders. She eye-balled me in my vest, then the welts and lacerations on Miss Stanislaus’s legs and arms and suddenly Malan and I were staring into two very hostile eyes. ‘Which one ov you done this to her?’

  ‘We police officers,’ Malan said. ‘We…’

  ‘That make it worse then!’ The woman swivelled her eyes at me, ‘What you done to her?’

  I spread my palms in self-defence. The woman placed a hand on Miss Stanislaus’s shoulder and manoeuvred her away from us.

  ‘Miss Lady? You wamme call the real police?’

  Miss Stanislaus muttered something I did not hear. The nurse soured her face, turned on her heels and guided Miss Stanislaus through the doorway.

  Malan looked stunned. He threw his weight against the car.

  I thought I heard Miss Stanislaus’s voice, soft and girlish, punctuated by the nurse’s deeper, animated tones.

  Then brisk footsteps returning along the corridor.

  The nurse pushed out her head, raised her chin as if she were talking to the air. ‘She under observation.’

  Malan frowned at her. ‘What’s that s’pose to mean?’

  ‘We keepin her in.’

  ‘When she coming out?

  ‘We’ll notify her next-of-kin – as and when.’

  ‘We the people you got to notify, y’unnerstan?’

  ‘Well, if that is so,’ the woman glared at us, ‘nobody goin get notify.’ She slammed the door behind her. I followed the padding of her footsteps as she moved deeper into the building.

  A string of obscenities rolled off Malan’s tongue.

  ‘Digger,’ he turned to me, his forehead bunched. ‘Hospital people s’pose to behave like that in de presence of de law?’

  I shrugged, swallowing on a chuckle. ‘Mebbe is procedure? Anyway, where’s your heart, man. You don’t see the condition Miss Stanislaus in?’

  Malan strolled over to the horizontal bars of metal piping that served as a barrier against the drop to the sea-slicked rocks below. I drifted after him.

  ‘She don’t realise that I could put her lyin arse in jail: she, Bello’s wife, the whole damn church. I could put all their arse in jail and throw away the key! You want to bet me?’

  He leaned forward abruptly. The bones of his face looked sharper, his jawline more pronounced. Again, it struck me how anger transformed him.

  ‘Digson, you part of this?’

  ‘Part of what?’ I snapped. I held his gaze until he looked away.

  ‘Because yuh see, a situation might arise when I have to explain to people that Miss Santa Claus was forced on my department by Chilman – that sonuvabitch – to undermine my authority. You was witness to how she insult me in my office. Now she insultin my brains. Like I ain’ got no training. Like I can’t visualise a fuckin scene. Like I dunno when people tryin to gimme bullshit. Is like Chilman send she to make a pappyshow of me. Again!’

  Malan was frothing with rage. That one word threw me back to an afternoon in the office when we were eight months in the job and still shadowing experienced officers in various departments around the island. Malan was on a six-week placement in Customs at the international airport. He’d stopped a foreigner who owned one of the offshore islands in the south and insisted on searching his luggage. The man called him a con. Malan understood the insult and threw back, ‘Same to you.’ The French-man slapped him in the face.

  The news reached Chilman and he sent a car to pick up Malan. When Malan arrived, Chilman sat him down in the middle of the office, drew up another chair and placed himself in front of him.

  ‘So! The whitefella box you in your face; what you do?’

  ‘I tell the boss.’

  ‘And what the boss do?’

  ‘He tell the French-fella he not s’pose to do that.’

  ‘And what the French-fella say?’

  ‘He say I make him vex; then he offer to settle.’

  ‘Settle – how?’

  Malan shrugged.

  ‘How!’

  ‘He gimme a coupla hundred dollars.’

  Chilman stood up. He gestured Malan to his feet. The DS put all his weight behind the punch, hit Malan so hard Malan fell back and brought down the desk with him. Chilman strode into his office, pulled out his drawer, returned with a wad of notes and dropped them on the floor. ‘Coupla hundred dollars,’ he grunted. He headed for the door.

  At the threshold, the DS raised his fist at us. ‘I only hit Malan Greaves with this, fellas. What that Frenchman hit my officer with is completely different. He use the hand of history. If he try it again with any of y’all, you got my permission to shoot him.’

  Chilman got into his car, drove off and was away for the rest of the day.

  Malan pulled me out of my thoughts. He’d turned his back on me, his voice edgy with resentment.

  ‘She not employed by the Department. She don’t have the protection of the job; she therefore liable…’

  ‘And when they ask you how she came by the gun?’

  ‘Believe me, Digger, it wouldn’t reach that far.’

  ‘You forgetting one thing,’ I said.

  ‘Wozzat?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘Naaah, man,’ Malan forced a chuckle. ‘First thing I thought about was you.’

  Back in his vehicle, he pressed his back against the seat and started the engine. I stood outside, my hands in my pockets.

  ‘You not coming?’

  ‘Nah,’ I said. ‘I decide to walk.’

  He gu
nned the engine, swung the jeep around and shot off.

  23

  I dialled Chilman’s number five times. My calls went straight to voicemail: Say someting, or call back, but only if you have to.

  I decided to leave a message. ‘DC Digson here. Miss Stanislaus in trouble. Like it or not, I coming to your house tonight because I needing some answers… Sir.’

  I had a couple of hours to kill so I showered, laid back on my bed and tried to think my way through the events of the morning. I reviewed everything – from the moment I took the call from Bello’s wife on Miss Stanislaus’ phone, to finding Deacon Bello dead on the beach.

  I imagined myself sitting in front of Miss Stanislaus, as choked as I felt now, still smouldering at the disappointment I was feeling. I never know you wuz a liar; you fool me good…

  My phone buzzed. ‘What’s your headache, Digson?’

  ‘Not mine, Sir, yours.’

  Chilman coughed in my ear. ‘Go on, then, tell me.’

  I described the situation. The old man was silent all the way through. When I finished I was breathless. ‘You still there, Sir?

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Chilman cleared his throat. ‘You got to go talk to her, Digger. Go talk to her right now. Find out what really happen. How Malan taking this?’

  ‘Not well.’

  ‘Go talk to her; then call me.’

  I glanced at my watch. ‘Is past visiting time, Sir.’

  ‘Digson, what wrong with you! You a police officer! Make up a story if you have to. Tell them she’z your woman or something. Find y’arse down there and talk to her. Then call me afterwards.’ Chilman steupsed – a dirty wet sound – and switched off.

  I stared at the handset. There’d been something in the old man’s voice I’d never heard before – the quavering undertones of distress.

  On the road to the hospital, I thought about Miss Stanislaus; how, without thinking, Lisa, Pet and I had aligned ourselves with her. When she was in the office the women laughed more often; their conversations were quick-witted and relaxed. And me – I had no words for it – this feeling that my job had become something else as soon as she arrived.

  An old security man in grey khaki had a shoulder against the hospital gate. I held out my ID. He unbolted it and stepped back briskly.

  I waded through the smells of iodine and benzyl alcohol. On the bottom floor, people in all manner of disrepair were laid out in rows on iron beds. A couple of juvenile nurses drifted in soft-soled shoes along the passageways between the beds. Above the barely audible murmurs of distress, I picked up the keening of a woman – probably in childbirth – somewhere in the ward above.

  I intercepted one of the nurses. ‘I looking for Miss Stanislaus,’ I said. ‘I brought her in today, round midday. She’s my, erm, next-of-kin.’

  The young woman looked at me from head to toe, nudged a ribbon of hot-ironed hair back under her cap and frowned.

  ‘Which ward?’

  ‘Not sure,’ I said.

  ‘Her name, again?

  ‘K. Stanislaus.’

  ‘First name?’

  ‘K will do.’ I offered her my best smile.

  ‘Hold on.’ She spun on her heels and disappeared through a swing-door at the far end of the aisle.

  The young nurse returned with the same woman we met when we brought in Miss Stanislaus. Hers was a brisk waddle towards me: busy swinging arms, chest pushed out. I prepared myself for another round of accusations.

  ‘You the one call Missa Digger?’

  ‘I’m the one,’ I said.

  ‘Is your modder give you that name?’

  I felt a blood-rush in my head. ‘How my mother become your business, now?’

  ‘De nice lady check out. She say you goin work out where she gone?’ Her eyes were luminous with curiosity.

  ‘Who picked her up?’

  ‘Two woman in a hire-car.’

  ‘How you know it was a hire-car?’

  ‘It had “for hire” mark on it.’ She muttered something under her breath and waddled off.

  I shouted thanks at her back and hurried out.

  I drove through Grand Beach Valley, up the Eastern Main, turned into the thick greenish gloom of a mud track that was half-hidden by an overhang of flamboyant trees – a rocking, punishing drive against which my little Toyota protested with every dip and swerve.

  The flags of the church rose out of the vegetation like a row of outlandish flowers. I glimpsed two figures trailing behind the car, each balancing a hefty log on his shoulder – the Watchmen of the flock.

  Miss Stanislaus was sitting in the yard in a blue dress that flowed down to her ankles. She was balancing an enamel plate on her right knee and a mango in her left hand. A little girl stood on the other side of her, her head a mass of curls and ribbons.

  The yard was full of children – I counted eleven – most of them gathered around a noisy game of hopscotch. The little boy we knew as Amos sat on a log with a toddler between his knees. A hive of women’s voices rose up from behind the church.

  Miss Stanislaus did not look up, not even when the girl beside her went still and stared at me. She kept on slicing the mango with fussy, delicate movements of her hand.

  I lowered myself on the stone beside her.

  Miss Stanislaus held out the plate of fruit to the child. The little girl sighed a prolonged thank you – more a movement of her lips than sound – and began a dainty walk towards the back of the church.

  I couldn’t help smiling. ‘She even walk like you,’ I said.

  ‘Daphne.’ Miss Stanislaus reached for the blue handbag beside her foot. She drew out some tissues and wiped her fingers. It was then that she turned those eyes on me. My heart flipped over. I couldn’t say exactly why, except that no one had ever looked at me like that before.

  ‘Missa Digger, you here to talk, not so?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go ’head.’

  ‘Miss Stanislaus, I want to know what really happened in Sadie Bay. I want the truth.’ I found it difficult to go on.

  Miss Stanislaus was staring straight ahead, one hand nesting inside the other. The welts along her arms and legs had darkened into purple ridges. She exuded the mild astringency of ointments, which I supposed the women had rubbed on her.

  ‘Missa Digger you upset…’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I could ask you why?’

  I closed my eyes, forcing back the agitation. ‘Miss Stanislaus, let me tell you why your story don’t make sense. You say that Bello dragged you in the water and tried to drown you, right? Then Bello’ wife, The Mother, and some of the other wimmen pull him off you. You got out of the water and started running away from him. He caught up with you and started to beat you up. So you had to shoot him to save yourself. Right?’

  Miss Stanislaus shifted her weight, said nothing.

  ‘Well, first, you got no reason to believe Bello want to drown you, so why you carrying that gun in the middle of your baptism? On which part of your person you hide it so he didn’t see you got that gun?

  ‘Okay! Okay! Let’s pretend you manage to hide the gun on some part of your body. Even so, I still got a problem with your story because you say you got out of the water and started running with Bello chasing after you. That is when you shot him. You notice how Malan kept stopping you and coming back to that part?

  ‘That’s because Malan and I know you only see them kinda fancy action in movies: to pull out a gun from wherever you hiding it while running, turn around while running, aim and fire while running and still get a perfect shot. Nuh! Make matters worse, is only a coupla weeks since I show you how to use that gun.’

  I realised I’d raised my voice. The children had stopped their game of hopscotch. They stood in a nervous knot at the far side of the yard, their eyes on us. I forced a smile in their direction and sat back.

  Miss Stanislaus raised her chin at the children. Her words came soft and quick from the side of her mouth. ‘Look at all dem chilren, Missa Dig
ger, and tell me what you notice.’

  I shrugged. ‘Children!’

  ‘Watch the lil boy ’cross there, wearin khaki pants, the happy-jumpin long-hair girlchile who was playin lil while ago. And that one there – de lil baby Amos holdin in front ov im. Watch de face an mouth an eye.’ She slid a glance at me. ‘You don’t notice nothing ’bout them children?’

  ‘They just children,’ I said. ‘That’s not what I here to talk about.’

  ‘You right, Missa Digger, they children; they Bello children. All ov dem. Same shape head, same face-bone, same teeth and eye. Same big-bone body. None of them belong to Bello wife, but Bello blood so strong in dem, it pushing outta dem skin.’ Miss Stanislaus kissed her teeth. ‘So, Missa Bone Reader, with all your foreign-sick eddication, how come you never notice that?’

  She said it quietly, earnestly – as if she really wanted to know. Still, I felt the sting of her reproach.

  ‘Make it worse, Missa Digger, every one ov them lil children got a different modder. Mek it even more worse, all dem children modder not older dan fourteen or fifteen when dem have dem chile.’

  Miss Stanislaus spoke softly, urgently, with her lids lowered, so that I could not see her eyes.

  ‘That start me wonderin about all them woman here. What could make that happm to all dem likkle girlchile in dis church and nobody make a stink about it? It bring me back to Nathan. You wamme tell you why?’

  I said nothing; I was still staring at the children.

  ‘Nathan was a Pointer in de church. And like you know, a Pointer look after dem Mourners on the Mournin Ground. Dat mean Nathan witness everything that go on inside dat lil concrete house.

  ‘I believe that Nathan see how Bello pick-an-choose whatever girlchile he fancy and do as he please with them. And it mus ha been so damn easy, Missa Digger…’ – Miss Stanislaus raised appalled eyes at me – ‘because, after seven or fourteen or twenty-one days of starving on dat Mourning Ground, I askin you, where a woman goin get de strength or sense to fight off a bull like the Deacon? Eh? He been doin it for years. Most ov those lil girls hardly know what happm to dem until they with child.

  ‘I believe that Nathan see all dat and he confuse. He couldn make no sense of a man of God who condemn him for what he is and that same man doin a lot worse tings right in front of him. And it look to me that Bello wife couldn stop im eider because…’ Miss Stanislaus plucked a tissue and patted her face. ‘She know if she complain, she good as dead.