Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 02 - The Dark Place

by The Dark Place

  He expected an argument, but the big man merely dropped to his own knees to see better. "How can you tell?" he asked quietly.

  "There’s no sign of a stride, no dynamic. With a basically human foot like this, you’d expect a basically human stride that starts when the heel strikes the ground, runs down the lateral edge of the foot, swings to the ball, and then ends with a toe-off." He rose to his feet and gestured at the track. "But this print was put down all at once, flat, and then picked up heel first in a clumsy attempt to imitate a stride. I imagine a horse or deer would leave that sort of print, but of course I don’t know much about tracks—"

  John, still on his knees, looked up. "You what?"

  "More accurately, I don’t know anything about tracks. I couldn’t tell a bear print from a rabbit’s."

  "Well, Jesus Christ, how can you be so godawful sure that this isn’t real?"

  "It’s not a matter of footprints at all. It’s a question of the biomechanics of locomotion—"

  John was on his feet, his hands chopping the air. "Oh, boy, Doc, whenever you start talking like that I know you don’t know what you’re talking about."

  "That’s not true at all," Gideon said testily. "I can’t help it if you can’t follow perfectly direct scientific language for—"

  "Now, boys," Julie said, sitting on a fallen log and beginning to take off her shoes, "I do know something about tracks, and I think Gideon has a point. But let’s test this empirically."

  Her feet were strong and brown, as Gideon thought they would be, with square little toes, and wide at the base. "Ooh," she said, "this feels good; you guys ought to take your shoes off." She wiggled her toes. "Okay, what should I do?"

  "Go across to the other side of the clearing, then walk back across it as normally as you can," Gideon said.

  She did so and marched right up to Gideon. The top of her head was a little above his chin. "Now," he said, "next to that right footprint you left over there, stamp down your right foot hard."

  They stood together looking at the prints. It was hardly necessary to explain anything, but Gideon explained anyway. "You will note," he said professorially, "that the single footprint stamped into the ground is clear and sharply delineated all around the edges. But look at the tracks made while walking. Only the heel and toe portions have any depth to them; the outside margins, while generally visible, are indistinct and shallow. The inside margins, between the ball of the foot and the heel, haven’t left any imprint." He looked at Julie and leered, twirling an imaginary moustache. "You have lovely arches, m’dear, lovely."

  "Thank you," she said.

  "Most important," Gideon went on, "the walking tracks have little ridges of earth just behind the toes. Those are thrown up when the toes push off on each step. Equally diagnostic, the toes make the deepest impression, the heel a shallower one, and the sole the shallowest of all. Whereas the stamped-in print—"

  "Okay, okay, Doc," John said with resigned good humor, "you’re right. It’s a fake."

  "It’s obvious, really," said Julie.

  "Sure," Gideon muttered, "as Watson was always telling Holmes—a posteriori."

  On the way back down the trail, a gray-white, lichen-spotted bone gleaming in the pearly light caught Gideon’s eye. He bent and picked it up.

  "Probably an elk," Julie said. "There are plenty of them here."

  "Probably," said Gideon. "It’s a femur from one of the Cervidae."

  The three had continued walking while he turned the bone in his hand.

  "What’s special about it?" John asked.

  "I’m not sure anything is. It’s just…" He stopped, continuing to turn the bone, and the others stopped with him. "See how it’s split, with this big dent right here at the start of the split?"

  They nodded, and Julie fingered the dent.

  "That’s just what bones look like in ancient-man sites where they’ve been broken open with a stone chopper to get at the marrow. I’ve turned up a couple like this at the dig I’m working on."

  "Couldn’t another animal have done it?" Julie asked. "Or a bullet? Or a fall?"

  Gideon looked at the bone for another long second, and flung it over his shoulder into the woods. "You’re absolutely right. Even world-renowned authorities have one-track minds."

  They continued down the trail, and emerged so suddenly onto the road that Gideon almost walked into the truck.

  Chapter 5

  Gideon lay on his stomach in the dirt, at the back of the low, shallow cave, cramped and aching, his knees and elbows scraped raw. He had been wedged in like that for hours, choked and half blinded by the showers of pebbles and dust every movement brought down. His hair was heavy with dirt, his nostrils caked with it, his teeth on edge with it.

  He was happy as a clam.

  He lay the tiny pick and brush next to the newly uncovered humerus and inched his big frame backward on his elbows, bringing down a rain of pebbles. At the entrance, where the cave widened, he sat up and stretched, wincing as joints creaked and muscles burned.

  He found the last of the apple juice he’d had with lunch and drank a great gulp from the bottle. It had warmed in the sunlight, but it washed away the dust in his throat. Aching and content, he sat back against the cliff face and looked at the lovely scene below. It would have been far less pleasant thirteen thousand years ago.

  The cave dwellers who’d lived there would not have been thirty feet above a small, pretty beach of dark pebbles, but miles from the water’s edge, facing a huge, gray expanse of desolate land scoured flat by the retreating Cordilleran glacier. Treeless it would have been, and swampy, and full of kettle lakes holding the slowly melting, stagnant ice that the glacier had left behind. Far in the distance they would have seen the ribbon of invading seawater that was the Strait of Juan de Fuca aborning. On the very horizon would have been the trailing edge of the immense ice sheet itself, black with churned-up rocks and earth, slowly retreating back into what is now British Columbia.

  There was no ice sheet now. Where its grim edge had been was the green, soft outline of Vancouver Island. And between Vancouver and the algae-covered beach just below him was only the thin, white curve of Dungeness Spit a thousand feet offshore, and twenty miles of water. Juan de Fuca Strait—named by an eighteenth-century English captain for a sixteenth-century Greek sailor traveling incognito on a Spanish vessel—had swelled and flowed over the glacier-scarred land until it formed a deep, mighty channel, from Vancouver to the Olympic Peninsula, and from the Pacific to Puget Sound.

  He finished the last of the apple juice and stood up on the narrow ledge, looking with pleasure at the placid water, glasslike except for the sporadic, silvery splashes of leaping salmon, always where one didn’t expect them. Overhead, seagulls and elegant, black-headed Caspian terns cried and planed in great, flat circles.

  Gideon sighed happily. There was still almost a month of this before heading back to the teaching routine at Northern Cal. And tomorrow morning he’d be driving back down to Lake Quinault, not to look into some musty, ancient murder, but to see Julie. If the investigation was still going on, they’d drive elsewhere to be away from it; to the beach, perhaps to Kalaloch or La Push.

  With three easy, powerful strides he clambered up the old, warped planking that he had dragged up to serve as a ramp to the clifftop. As always, the scene at the top startled him momentarily. It was a constant source of surprise that ten feet above this marvelous, seemingly isolated site in the side of a beach cliff was Dungeness with its wide, carefully tended lawns and flowerbeds, its big homes and sedate cottage motels.

  He walked across Marine Drive directly onto the close-cropped lawn of Bayview Cottages, five tidy, gray-shingled little houses with white trim that looked as if they might have been transported whole from the coast of Maine. All were identical except for little rustic signs over the porches. Seagull Cottage, said Gideon’s.

  Inside, he picked up the telephone and dialed a Sequim number.

  "Hello, Bertha," he said.
"Is Abe there?"

  A few seconds later, an old man’s voice, thin but full of energy, said, "Hello, Gideon, this is you?"

  Gideon smiled. Abe Goldstein had been born in a ghetto near Minsk and had fled to the United States at the age of seventeen, speaking no English, having no money, and possessing no marketable skills. He had peddled thread and ribbons from a pushcart on Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn and gone to night school to learn English. In six years he had graduated from the City College of New York, and four years later, in 1934, he had a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. For twenty years he’d taught at Columbia, then gone to the University of Wisconsin for another twenty, where he’d been Gideon’s professor. He’d finished his teaching career with a few distinguished years at the University of Washington.

  Almost sixty years in America, most of it spent as an eminent scholar of worldwide repute, and he still spoke like an immigrant ribbon peddler. Most of the time, anyway; the accent varied noticeably. More than one academic adversary had suggested it was a studied eccentricity, and Gideon, no adversary, was inclined to agree. If ever there was a studied eccentric, it was Abraham Irving Goldstein.

  "Yes, Abe," he said, "this is me."

  "So how is the dig?"

  "So how should it be?"

  "Of an old man you shouldn’t make fun. So tell me."

  "I had a great day, Abe. That’s why I called. Uncovered a juvenile humerus today, eleven, twelve years old, from stratum four. So it looks like it was a family habitat. Also a piece of wood; I’m not sure what. Rectangular, two, three inches wide, with a hole at one end. About a foot long, unless we only have part of it. It’s pretty rotten—needs to be set in plaster of Paris in situ."

  "Wonderful. So."

  Gideon waited. The "so" said that something besides the dig was on Abe’s mind.

  "Listen, Gideon, you didn’t happen to see yesterday’s Chronicle?"

  "No, what’s in it?"

  "All about you is what’s in it. You want to hear?"

  "I don’t know. You’ve got me worried. You sound a little too happy about it."

  Abe’s delighted cackle, strong and hearty, came over the wire, and Gideon, smiling to himself, poured some Teacher’s into a jelly glass from the cupboard. He couldn’t reach ice or water without putting down the telephone, so he stood there sipping it neat, one elbow on the television set atop the cupboard.

  "What’s it about, Abe? That interview in Quinault?"

  "You bet it is. Give a listen. First the headline. You ready?" There was some theatrical throat clearing, then: "Quote. Unknown Creature Stalks Quinault. Could Be Bigfoot, Says Noted Skeleton Detective Gideon Oliver. End quote."

  "Oh, boy," Gideon said and sighed, sinking into a plastic armchair with the drink and the telephone.

  "Gideon, tell me, what’s a skeleton detective, something new? This I never heard of."

  "Come on, Abe, let’s hear the rest." He kept his voice irked to please Abe, but he was more amused than annoyed. He understood now what Julie had been talking about.

  "Believe me, even better it gets. But look, what are you doing tonight? Why don’t you come over to Twilight Harbor Estates? You can read it yourself, and Bertha’s got already a pot roast on the stove. We’ll drink a bottle beer, have a nice glass tea. And then…"

  That singsong "and then" meant that something besides pot roast was cooking. Not that there would be a pot roast or bottle of beer at Professor Emeritus Abraham Goldstein’s house. The dialect remained, but the street peddler’s tastes were long gone.

  "And then what, Abe?"

  "Nu, so come on over, you’ll see. What else better you got to do? Come on, make happy an old man’s heart."

  Gideon laughed. The accent was growing more atrocious by the second. "Okay," he said, "but I have to clean up first. May I bring something?"

  "A bottle of red wine would be fine, a Cabernet, but California, not Washington. French I wouldn’t ask."

  "What happened to the bottle beer and the glass tea?"

  "For me, good enough, but you’re a guest; I got to treat you right. Hurry up, it’s depressing here at the old folks’ home."

  Abe lived neither at Twilight Harbor Estates nor at an old people’s home. He lived in SunLand, a peaceful, wooded community of sumptuous homes grouped around a golf course on which he never played. SunLand, as the name implied, lay in the famed rain shadow of the Olympics. Storms moving in from the Pacific would drop most of their moisture on the windward slope of the mountain range, leaving only about fifteen inches a year to fall in the "banana belt" on the other side. Thirty-five miles away the annual rainfall might be fifteen feet.

  Abe complained frequently that there was too little excitement and too many sun-seeking old people (most of whom were decades younger than he), but Gideon knew that Abe had found his earthly paradise there in the green, soft hills between Sequim and Dungeness.

  Abe met him at the door. "Welcome to Restful Acres," he said. "Come in the study." He led the way, his soft old slippers whispering over the gleaming hardwood floor. With a sigh he eased himself into one of two leather armchairs in front of a wall filled with photographs of an unbelievably young Abraham Goldstein peering at a skull in Kenya, surrounded by shy Pygmies in the Congo, crawling out of an Aleutian igloo, and arm-in-arm with a grinning, frizzled-haired Melanesian with a bone through his nose and Abe’s own pith helmet perched atop his head.

  At seventy-five, the old man in the chair had aged better than most. He was arthritic and terribly frail now, but he hadn’t put on weight and was easily recognizable as the young man in the photographs. The kinky mat of black hair had turned white without thinning, and Abe wore it in an outrageous, flamboyant Afro. The eyes were still playful and sprightly, if anything enhanced by the papery wrinkles that nearly buried them.

  "Mix yourself a drink," he said, "and one for me, too."

  "What would you like," Gideon asked, "a glass seltzer? A cup prune juice?"

  "Don’t be funny. Give me a Chivas, but light. The old liver ain’t what it was."

  Gideon mixed two Scotch-and-waters and sat down next to Abe. Then he picked up the copy of the Chronicle on the coffee table and followed Abe’s jabbing finger to the article on the second page.

  UNKNOWN CREATURE STALKS QUINAULT. COULD BE BIGFOOT, SAYS NOTED SKELETON DETECTIVE GIDEON OLIVER

  by Nathaniel Hood

  QUINAULT—Experts say that a charred skeleton found buried in the Quinault Valley is that of Norris Eckert, twenty-nine, one of two hikers who disappeared there in 1976. Physical anthropologist Gideon Oliver, a highly paid consultant to the FBI, said that Eckert had apparently been killed by a large bone spear point which was found still imbedded in the skeleton’s backbone, at the seventh cervical vertebra. "It would take superhuman strength to drive that bone point in so deeply," the California scientist said. When questioned about what sort of creature might have such strength, Oliver said, "I suppose Bigfoot could have done it," and further described the creature as "eight or nine feet tall and built like a gorilla."

  Eckert’s remains were discovered during the continuing search for Claire Hornick, eighteen, of Tacoma, reported missing in the same area last week.

  Gideon folded the paper and put it back on the low table. Abe picked it up and pretended to read it again, shaking his head and clucking. "Such a thing," he said. "Eight or nine feet tall, hah? Oy, oy, oy." He was practically singing. "Like a gorilla, yet." He laughed outright. "God forbid, you really said this?"

  "Well, they got the vertebra wrong, as you know. It was T-7, not C-7. And I’m afraid they were very much mistaken about the ‘highly paid.’ Other than that, they were pretty accurate, I’m sorry to say. I’m going to have a heck of a time living this down at Northern Cal."

  Abe patted his knee. "Live and learn," he said. "Come on, time to eat. Bertha said six o’clock."

  Bertha was Abe’s unmarried, fifty-year-old daughter, who had lived all her life in the shadow of her brilliant father. She had got
ten an M.A. in anthropology and had taught for a while in a community college but had long ago settled with apparent complacency into the role of his housekeeper. She was a superb cook and had prepared a luscious dinner of boeuf a la mode (pot roast after all, but what a pot roast!) with broiled tomatoes and buttered, homemade noodles.

  As usual, talk of anthropology ceased over the meal, and the three of them chatted like the old friends they were of past times and old acquaintances. Bertha and Abe frequently used Yiddish expressions which Abe would laboriously, and for the most part unnecessarily, explain to Gideon.

  As soon as Bertha cleared the dishes and went to get coffee, Abe said, "Listen, I want to talk to you about this Bigfoot business."

  "Abe," Gideon said, "I was quoted out of context; you know that. I don’t really—"

  "I know, I know." His thin hand fluttered dismissively. "You know a Professor Chace from Berkeley?"

  "An anthropologist? No."

  "You heard of Roy Linger?"

  Gideon shook his head.

  "You never heard of Roy Linger?"

  "Abe, if you have a point to make, I wish—"

  "All right, hold your horses, don’t get excited. This Roy Linger is a famous explorer, a hunter, a rich man. In textiles or something—"

  "Your old line."

  Abe looked confused for a moment, then laughed delightedly, slapping his hand on the table. "You’re right. Maybe his father had the next pushcart! Anyway, this Linger, he’s very active in the Sasquatch Society; always making expeditions to go off in the mountains to find Bigfoot."

  "Has he had any luck?" Gideon asked dryly.

  Abe waved his finger under Gideon’s nose. "Don’t be so smart, mister. You’re a young man yet; you got a lot to learn. Listen, this E. L. Chace from Berkeley, he’s supposed to be the number one expert on Bigfoot; he’s all the time talking in some seminar, or on the television. Wrote a couple of books. You sure you never heard of him?"