The trouble was that none of this made sense. Dave told Kent he thought the San Pedro tablet was real, but not from Chile. Kent told Jasper. Given that the Chile connection was absolutely key to his theory, Jasper presumably went to talk to Dave, and it is possible he killed Dave to prevent him from telling the world. Then what? Jasper didn't bash his own head in. Seth decided Jasper had killed his friend Dave and took his revenge? Seth had gone all quiet when I'd said I thought maybe Dave was murdered. He'd said he was sure he was. How could he be sure? Was it because he knew something the rest of us didn't? Was he not really sure a) first, did he have doubts about killing Jasper in revenge doubts that I had inadvertently assuaged?
Or maybe Jasper killed Dave, and Kent killed Jasper be cause he was leaving her for another film company. I thought she hadn't been truthful about her relationship with Jasper. I was willing to bet her marriage failed because she fell for her star in a very big way. It would certainly ex plain her willingness to help him fake his early adventures She was paying alimony, and she'd lost custody of Brittany That meant some court somewhere thought she was more a fault than her former husband.
There was always the possibility that Gordon killed Jasper, I suppose. Fuentes had been right when he said that Jasper had set out to deliberately embarrass Gordon and Rory. It would have been quite possible to present the Sai Pedro tablet without making it nearly so personal. But if Gordon had been humiliated, so had Rory. Was Gordon the suspect because he had a temper and Rory didn't? Perhaps Rory had an alibi and Gordon didn't. Kent said that Jasper and Gordon had gone off together, Jasper with the table under his arm. Was that the evidence—that Gordon was the last person to see Jasper alive? I very much doubted that Fuentes was going to discuss the case with me in this kin of detail.
And where exactly was this San Pedro tablet, fake or otherwise, and what was its place in all of this? I could see it as reason for Dave to die, but Jasper? Gordon kills him because he faked a rongorongo tablet's find spot? Kent killed her because he faked a rongorongo tablet? Why? Why not It the truth come out, as Kent intended in her documentary and let him suffer the public humiliation that would ensue What if it was a fake, start to finish? Just how did Jasper fake this thing, if indeed he did? I couldn't have done it, and I've read The Art Forger's Handbook from cover to cover. I could have found the wood, all right. I'd have done a better job on that, something native to northern Chile, some kind of tree that would have been there for a very long time. Algarrobo, maybe, although I'd have to do a little work on its particular properties. But I could find something. And I could age it, so to speak, put the little worm holes in it and so on. As someone who sold antique furniture, I knew what to look for in wood. The rongorongo, however, would have posed a major problem for me. From my visits to the shops and markets of Hanga Roa, I could see that lots of people carved rongorongo-type symbols onto their particular work. But Seth had said someone had gone a long way toward deciphering rongorongo, so it would not be enough to just carve a bunch of symbols; you'd have follow whatever conventions the ancient carvers had.
Did Jasper know enough about rongorongo to do that? Maybe. Maybe not. The man was a cypher to me, really. I hadn't been one of the women attracted to him like moths to his flame. I'd seen him in action a few times, up at Rano Raraku, and then at some sessions at the congress, and finally at his big announcement. He hadn't endeared himself to me any of those times. Maybe he paid someone to carve it for him. Seth might have been that person, and maybe it was one of the people of Rapa Nui. Did this mysterious person kill Jasper because he or she didn't get paid, or because he or she didn't realize that Jasper was going to present the work as authentic, and worse still from that perspective, from Chile?
Or maybe, and this was a different thought, Jasper had been the butt of a practical joke that had got out of hand. Maybe someone planted it deliberately to deceive him. If so, who? Albert or Edwina perhaps? They were there. None of the other Moaimaniacs had been, as far as I knew. Maybe Seth was a part of it, somehow, and that was what he was sorry about, the deed for which he was trying to make amends.
And maybe… if I didn't stop thinking so hard about all these maybes, I was going to give myself another migraine. At least Moira had a pharmucopia that she could put at my disposal.
At the end of the day, the other disturbing aspect of this was that on an island with three thousand plus inhabitants and a congress with about forty attendees, there were two murderers. It seemed statistically excessive, if nothing else. What was also alarming was that in a group of eleven—or was it twelve?—members of an Internet group on this island, three of them were dead.
What was it I wasn't noticing? All this thinking was making me toss and turn, and at some point in the night Moira asked me if I was okay. I realized I was keeping her awake, too. So I lay very still until I knew she'd gone to sleep, and then I pulled on my clothes and went out to look at the stars.
I'd done this once before with painful result, when I'd found poor old Dave. This time I saw no dead bodies. What I did see, however, was a light in what had been until yesterday Seth Connelly's room. It was just a little light, a flashlight most likely. I positioned myself so that I could see the door, without, I hoped, being seen. It was a bit of a wait, but eventually the light went out, the door opened, at first just a crack, and then someone slipped out. That someone looked a lot like Poikeman to me.
I intercepted him just before got to his room. "Taking an evening stroll through a dead man's room, are we?" I said. Lewis jumped about a foot at the sound of my voice.
"I guess I've been caught," he said.
"I guess so," I said. "I don't suppose you'd care to share your reasons for this expedition while I consider whether or not to tell Pablo Fuentes about it."
"I would prefer you didn't," he said. I waited. I wasn't too nervous. He was in his underpants, and although he had his hands behind his back, I didn't think he was hiding a weapon.
"I lent Seth a book," he said. "And I figured I'd just go and get it before they cleared out his room. I thought if I asked for it, they wouldn't believe me."
"I see," I said. "Did you find it okay?"
"Yes," he said, showing me. He didn't tell me which book it was, but I knew anyway. The Art Forger's Handbook was making its way around the place pretty well. I wondered if the rongorongo tablet was, too.
"Albert was supposed to be on lookout duty. Not very good at it, is he?" Poikeman said. We found Albert in his candycane-stripe pajamas, seated on the ground, his back against a tree, snoring.
"I've been caught, Albert," Lewis said when we'd roused him. "We have to persuade this young lady not to rat me out."
"Would you two care to join me for a little libation?" Albert said. "I have some rather good cognac."
"Why not?" Lewis said. "We're up anyway."
Why not, indeed. We must have looked quite the picture, Lewis in his underwear, Albert in his outrageous pajamas, and me with jeans over my nightie. Albert reminisced about his life as a PR consultant in Washington, and he was hilarious.
"I have a question for you, Albert," I said, well into my second tumbler of cognac.
"Fire away, my dear young lady," he said.
"I'm wondering about this Moai Congress," I said. "I get the impression that Jasper Robinson himself came up with the idea for this event."
"Possibly. And your question is?"
"Is that normal? To create your own event when you ha an announcement to make?"
"Where I come from it is," he said. "Long and dishonorable tradition. Suppose you're a congressman who wants make an announcement of some sort. You could look around to see if there is an event in your neighborhood that would suit—a hospital opening, for example, if you wanted to talk about health care, let's say. So you get one of your staff, or my case your PR consultant, to phone up the hospital and put out feelers out as to whether they'd like to have you a tend, if there would be enough media there to suit you, they would give you enough time to make a long-winded-to say nothing of self-serving—speech. Or, if you ha something on them, if they need your client's support on vote soon on their funding, for example, you tell them your man will attend. Or you could ask some supporters if the organizations they are involved with would like to host the event at which your client, the congressman could speak.