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"And when I watched him from the door, I knew for the first time that I found both men and women erotically beautiful. R

ebecca in the lace-trimmed bed, Goblin in the warm steamy thunderstorm of the shower. Fr. Kevin Mayfair with that dark curly red hair and those green eyes and not a freckle on his pale face. Men and women.

"I went out back and walked way over to the right to the bungalow in which Jasmine, Ramona, Clem and Lolly lived. Jasmine was in her green-painted rocking chair, just rocking and smoking.

"I was in a daze. I tried not to notice Jasmine's breasts in her tight shirt. I tried not to look at the front seam of her jeans. When she turned away from me to exhale I saw the light down the line of her throat to her breasts. Beautiful woman. Aged thirty-five. What were my chances? Like, maybe if I sold her a bill of goods that I doubted my manhood???

"Oh, that was a lovely thought. Wonderfully comforting. And where could we do it? Just go over to the shed, go up the steps and do it in Patsy's bed? I rolled that dream around for a moment. You don't get HIV from a bed. What if -- and then -- and so -- and I felt the panic when I looked at the dim house -- they had forgotten the four o'clock lights.

" 'What's going to happen now?' I asked.

" 'Come sit with me, little boy lost,' she said. 'I've been asking myself that very question. ' "

Chapter17

17

"FOR THE NEXT WEEK I was under lock and key, or armed escort.

"I didn't find out about it until the morning after Pops' funeral, when I tried to leave my room and discovered I had a security guard with me, pledged to go where I would go.

"I didn't too terribly mind, since I alone knew how real the mysterious stranger had been and I didn't want to be shocked by him. But I made a nuisance of myself by warning everyone about the dangers of the island.

"Our investigations proceeded rapidly, and I know that I focused on them to escape the pure horror of Pops' death -- the loss of the only man who had ever been my father. We had the reading of his will to attend to, and I was dreadfully concerned that he might have cut out Patsy altogether. If I had been left anything at all I resolved to split it with Patsy or at least to give her some of it.

"Meantime she was still out roaming the South, playing beer joints and small clubs, and Aunt Queen was desperately chasing after her by phone, trying to get her to come back so we could all face what Pops had done, whatever it was.

"Now let me return to the investigation.

"Regarding the mysterious letter, Mayfair Medical's laboratory could find no discernible fingerprints on it and reported that the brand of paper was rare, marketed in Europe and not in the United States, the ink was India ink and that the writing did not indicate any pathology and might have been done by a woman or a man. They noted further that the writer had used a quill pen, pressing down uncommonly hard for such an instrument, implying that the letter writer had been extremely sure of himself.

"In other words, they could tell almost nothing about the letter. And it had been passed on to a true graphologist with our happy permission.

"As to the rest of our concerns, we had better luck.

"Mayfair Medical confirmed in short order that the DNA collected from the residue in the Hermitage matched the DNA in the hair found in Rebecca's trunk. The materials were very old but there had been an abundance of both and the testing had been simple.

"Aunt Queen now felt certain that Rebecca had met her death at Manfred's hands, and that my dreams weren't entirely the work of a diseased mind, if she'd ever had any doubt in the matter.

"I cleaned all those cameos found in Rebecca's trunk and the cameos I'd taken from the island. These I placed in the china cabinet on the first floor with a display card, explaining they were gifts from Manfred Blackwood to a woman with whom he had been passionately in love. I explained the connection between Rebecca's name and the theme of the cameos, and I felt in so doing -- in making this display for the public eye -- I had done right by Rebecca.

"After long and intense discussion involving Aunt Queen, Jasmine and me (Aunt Queen had been bedridden since the night of Pops' burial), we agreed that we would include in the tour information that the Old Man, Manfred, was believed to have murdered a young woman with whom he was romantically involved, and her remains had only recently been discovered and properly interred.

"As to this interment, I was going to handle it, if and when allowed to do it. A small marble tombstone was ordered with the name Rebecca Stanford carved on it, and the tombstone guys had it delivered in one day. I put it down in the cemetery to wait until I could bring the remains to the spot.

"Meantime, the FBI could find no DNA material from the site which matched the material of any current missing person. Nevertheless, they were deeply courteous about having been called in, and they did confirm that the DNA of several persons was present in the evil morass and that the whole resembled an antiquated but gruesome crime scene.

"Finally, a full week after Pops' funeral, with Aunt Queen still in bed and refusing to take any nourishment, which had me and everyone else in near critical hysteria, I set out for Sugar Devil Island at dawn with all of the eight Shed Men coming in small pirogues behind me. We all had our guns -- I now carried Pops' thirty-eight -- and two security men brought up the rear. Clem was with us too, and Jasmine was at my side, in her skintight jeans, with her thirty-eight pistol, determined to have a front-row seat for everything.

"We brought with us plenty of tools to open the grand gold-and-granite tomb, and I had with me a small ornamental casket -- a jewelry case, actually, which had been purchased from a gift shop -- into which I meant to place whatever remained of Rebecca. The horrid collecting of her remains had to be done with a small spade. There was no way out of it.

"It was a convivial party, with Allen, the nominal leader of the Shed Men, referring to us as the Pirogue Posse, but beneath my smiles and laughter was an absolute dread as we set out to reclaim the Hermitage.

"What could I do but warn all the men of what was involved? The trespasser had had the gall to come into the house! How much they believed was a matter of conjecture.

"At last, after some forty minutes of pushing and pulling our way through the bog, we came to the bank overgrown with blackberries. There stood the house like a ship that had run aground, the violent thorny wisteria trying desperately to swallow it.

"I went onto the island, cracked open a beer and just watched as the men verified with their own eyes everything or almost everything that had been told to them. Allen and Clem, who had seen it all the first time around, also stood with me until the excitement was over.