“I’ll come with you.”
Oscar scrambled down the dune; the incoming tide immediately soaked his shoes. Kneeling beside the pile of bones, he gently picked up a skull and turned it over in his hands.
There was a hole in the side, as if its owner had been shot. But there were other marks as well, almost like cuts around the jaw and base of the skull where the neck would have attached.
“I think this body was dismembered,” Oscar said shakily. He turned the skull so Chris could get a good shot of the cut marks.
The next skull was the same, and the next, and the one after that. Dear God, how many were there?
“Oscar?” Chris’s voice trembled as they crouched beside what looked like one of the bones in the forearm—the radius, Oscar thought. “Can you take a look at this and tell me I don’t see what I think I’m seeing?”
Oscar picked up the bone and squinted. More cut marks on the ends, where the joints would have been…but this time, they were accompanied by what looked disturbingly like the imprint of human teeth.
His gorge rose. Definitely not the remains of a shipwreck, or of executed pirates, and the bullet holes ruled out it being the result of some ancient famine.
The hunting scenes in the paintings came back forcefully. Had Gloria actually fallen down the stairs? And if so, had she been fleeing her father when it happened?
Bile rose in his throat, and it was everything he could do to choke it down. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe there had been an undocumented European settlement on the island, and the colonists resorted to cannibalism like at Jamestown.
Chris circled the mass grave, making sure to catch everything with the shoulder camera. “I think there’s jewelry and other things mixed in.”
Sure enough, gold glinted dully beneath the veil of sand. Oscar brushed the sand aside, then pulled free what looked like a locket, its chain lost somewhere in the pile. As he did so, he began to notice other objects he’d missed, too busy staring at the horror of the bones.
An earring, caught in a mass of hair sloughed from one of the skulls. A fountain pen, corroded but still identifiable. Scraps of rotted cloth and lace. The remains of a hair brush, the wooden handle decayed almost to nothing but the bristles intact.
While Chris swapped cameras to take some photos, Oscar wiped sand and residue from the locket. The front bore engraving: X.R.J., 06.17.03, Now with God. Inside the locket nestled a lock of fine hair, like that from a baby.
Given the style of the fountain pen, this was no colonial-era tragedy. 06.17.03 surely meant June 17, 1903. Someone had lost their baby, come to this island a few years later…and been murdered. Then eaten.
And the Pack were the prime suspects.
CHAPTER
FORTY-SIX
Rain drummed against the now-closed bay windows in the dining room, where Nigel and Tina had just watched the footage of the mass grave. Nigel felt as though the floor of the house had just collapsed out from under them.
Oh god, they were in the dining room. Had the butchered remains of people been served at the very table where they’d been sitting? Where they’d eaten their cups of ramen noodles and instant eggs?
“This is…bad,” Tina said, voice shaky. “I mean, it would have been bad enough if they were just killing people, but cannibalism…”
Though his fingers were numb from shock, Nigel opened the briefcase and took out the ledger. He turned to the page marked “Montague” and went down the list. “I think…I could be wrong…”
“What?” Oscar asked.
He swallowed and read. “Sow - R, G - $100. Boar - Bl, Br - $50. Sow - Br, Br - $35. Sow - Bl, Bl - $100.”
Tina shook her head. “And?”
“The shorthand…we know they weren’t killing pigs here on the island. A woman had red hair, green eyes. A man had blonde and brown. Two more women, Brown and brown, blonde and blue. The ones who were considered more attractive fetched a higher price.”
A look of utter horror passed over Oscar’s face. “Noah Montague owed money to Ullman, so he acted as a procurer to work off his debt? Is that what this means?”
“I could be wrong. I hope I’m wrong.” Nigel closed the ledger, unable to look at it any more. “But it would explain why Ms. Montague wanted this hidden. Bad enough the family fortune was built on tobacco—it wasn’t the best PR, but also not uncommon. But cannibalism and human trafficking is a different level altogether.”
“But everyone involved has been dead for over a century,” Chris protested. “It’s not like Ms. Montague is out there eating people.” They grimaced. “I mean, as far as we know.”
“A lot of people get pissed when anyone points out their ancestors enslaved their fellow human beings longer ago than that.” Nigel shook his head. “The Montagues have social standing, the sort of reputation old southern families care about. And their holdings are large enough for the story to be picked up by news outlets if this came out.”
