The Bone Field by Debra Bokur (top e book reader txt) 📕

property.” She looked away, back toward the house. “He said everything he did, all of his decisions, sprang from God’s will, and though it might be difficult to understand at times, he had been chosen—just as we had—to fulfill a greater destiny.”

Tomas shook his head. “And what was that?”

Anita leaned toward them, her voice intense. “To create a race of devout people who carried his divine seed and would change the world and fill it with love.”

Tomas stared at her in disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding. So he was going to impregnate every woman who lived here?”

“Oh yes,” said Anita, very seriously. “When I understood fully what my part in that was going to be, I left.” She shrugged. “Kids have never been part of my plan, even divinely conceived ones. I guess you could say it opened my eyes to what was really going on. The next time I was sent to run errands in the town, I headed straight for a friend’s house and never went back.”

“Surely there were other men living on the farm,” said Kali. “Did they have sex with the female members of the group? It seems like it would have been hard to keep track of who was fathering which child.”

Anita shook her head. “No. Only Abraham. His wife was part of it. She kept track of things, as it were. And she would prepare us—a ritual bath, braiding our hair, praying with us before we entered the chamber where Abraham was waiting.”

Kali took a deep breath. “And the little girl, Abigail? His daughter?”

Anita hung her head. When she answered, her voice was barely audible.

“Yes. Abigail as well. I think she was about twelve or thirteen at the time. But honestly, I didn’t know for sure until right before I left.”

Kali felt sick. She walked, half in a daze, through the gate and past the lone pineapple on its peeling post and on toward the truck, leaving Tomas and Anita to discuss the details of her statement. She watched as Tomas thanked Anita, who climbed back into her SUV and drove away.

Tomas opened the door of the truck and climbed inside. He and Kali sat for a few moments in silence, digesting all that they had heard.

“The pineapple is a solid link to Eden’s River and the body in the refrigerator,” said Kali. “And we have Manuel Raso’s identification of the anchor charms connecting them to a bracelet worn by Abigail Waters when she was a child doing her dad’s dirty recruitment work at the pineapple farm alongside her mother. That’s enough to bring him in, plus some.”

“No argument here,” said Tomas. He turned to her. “I feel exactly what you’re feeling. But keep this in perspective: It doesn’t mean he killed anyone. It just means that he’s a depraved lunatic. There were other men living here too—plenty of people who knew about the wooden pineapple, and who could walk across the field to the old planation. Some of them may have even worked there for a time while living at Eden’s River. And they all knew what was going on with Abraham and the women—and his daughter—so they’re all to blame. There was probably a great deal of jealousy. I guess we all know how powerful an emotion that can be.”

She felt her anger rising like a well of lava, threatening to spill over. “Sure. I know all that. But he’s still a total bastard.”

Tomas nodded in agreement. “I’ll send a copy of Anita’s statement along to you. We’re getting close, Kali. I can feel it. Pretty soon there won’t be a single monster left anywhere on Lna‘i—not even in the deepest shadows.”

CHAPTER 27

Back on Maui, the air was humid. Kali ran the fingers of her right hand along the back of her neck beneath the collar of her light cotton shirt, feeling the dampness of her skin, realizing she should have opted for the air-conditioning rather than the open window next to her desk at the police station.

In her left hand, she held a sheet of paper. It was a printout of a report sent a few minutes earlier by Stitches in response to the question Kali had left for her before she’d gone to meet Tomas and Anita on Lna‘i. Kali stared at the report in disbelief. She read it once more, confused, unable to grasp the details laid out before her in black and white. Sparked by the emergency room physician’s question to her about the father of Makena’s child, she’d requested a report on the pineapple-field baby in order to satisfy her curiosity about whether the father of Helen’s unfortunate child had been Reggie McCartney or Abraham, but the results of the DNA testing were unexpected. The baby carried Abraham’s DNA, but not Helen’s or Reggie’s. In the notes included at the bottom of the report, Stitches had written, Helen Stafford was not the mother of the infant found beside her in Grave Site Three. The DNA taken from the infant’s body shows conclusively that both mother and father had a close familial connection. Neither Helen Stafford nor Reggie McCartney was related at all to the child found with them.

The steady hum of traffic going by on the Hana Highway sifted through the screen of the window, punctuated with an occasional blast of conversation or a honking horn. The station was quiet. Walter and Hara were on their way to bring Abraham in for questioning, and Kali sat at her desk, staring at the paper in her hand, waiting for them to arrive. One of the small anchor charms, encased in its evidence bag, rested on the desk surface beside a half-full coffee mug. Absently, she folded the report and reached for the evidence bag, shoving both into the pocket of her jeans.

The coffee was cold. She stood up and stretched, then wandered toward the table where the photographs and notes surrounding Eden’s River and the pineapple-field discoveries were laid out. Her mind