Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 02 - The Dark Place

by The Dark Place

  "I know all that," she said impatiently, "but this is a tiny, frightened band of people cowering out there in the woods, living in leaky huts in a rain forest, for God’s sake. And if they really move higher they’ll be in the snow! We could at least get some clothing to them, and food, and tell them they don’t have anything to be afraid of."

  "Except the FBI. Don’t forget, your wee, timorous, cowering band has committed at least two murders, if we’re right. Probably three."

  "You don’t really think they’d be taken to jail…put on trial…?"

  "I don’t see what choice the FBI would have. If they could find them."

  "So we just leave them there?"

  Gideon hadn’t meant to mislead her. "No, I want to find them, too, but it has to be done right. I want time to do some research, to think through the implications for them and for us, to get ready. I’d like to go next spring, after the rainy season."

  "You? Do you mean alone? In the rain forest? Just you?"

  "Your confidence is heartwarming."

  "It’s just that, anthropologist or not, you’re basically a…a city person," she said, laughing. "You’d have gotten lost twenty times without me yesterday. I’m going with you."

  The hell you are, he thought. Not with wild men running around with spears. Not now. Yesterday you were just another nice girl. Today you’re…more. "We’ll see," he said. "Maybe."

  "Definitely. Now that I’ve found you, I’m not about to lose you." She looked suddenly at him. "That sounded possessive," she said soberly. "I’m not that way. I was only joking."

  Sorry to hear that, Gideon thought. He had liked the sound of it. He could see that she had, too. He said nothing, but smiled at her, and they finished their sherries in an easy, companionable silence, gazing into the fire.

  They walked into the dining room hand-in-hand and were conspiratorially asked by the hostess if they wanted a private booth. Julie said yes and Gideon said no, and they all laughed. They took a table at the window. In the cold, ashen light, the lawn was gray, the lake almost black. It was comfortable to be in the warm, clean dining room, awaiting a hot meal prepared by someone else. What would it be like to spend a gray, chilly winter out there in a hut of twigs?

  A relish tray of raw vegetables was plumped heartily before them. "My name is Eleanor," the waitress proclaimed without recognizing them. "Enjoy."

  In the morning they breakfasted in the window nook of Julie’s kitchen, looking out on a day that was colder and more drearily overcast than the one before. They munched hot bran muffins with butter and jelly, and drank steaming coffee, and felt very cozy and protected.

  "Winter’s coming," Julie said dreamily. "It’s the time of year I start wishing I was a bear about to hibernate."

  "I thought you liked the wet weather."

  "Oh, I didn’t really mean hibernate. I meant I’d like to hole up in a nice, snug house like this one, and have fires in the fireplace, and eat hot soup out of mugs, and listen to music, and have some lovely male animal at my beck and call."

  "To light the fires, and make the soup, and turn on the phonograph?"

  "And other duties as assigned. Kiss, please."

  "Is that illustrative of other duties, or is it a request?"

  "A request. Demand."

  "Yes, ma’am." Gideon slid along the cushion of the window seat and kissed her gently. "Umm," he said, "delicious. You taste like apricot jelly."

  Julie laughed and put her arms around him. "I can’t tell whether you’re amorous or hungry."

  "Are they incompatible?"

  "Well, would you like to go back to bed, or would you rather have another bran muffin?"

  Gideon frowned, thinking hard. "Do I get jelly with the bran muffin?"

  "You’re awful," Julie said, pushing him away. "I’m not even going to respond to that." She resettled herself. "Gideon, I’ve been thinking. You really can’t wait until next spring."

  "Why not? They’ve managed to get along in there for a century."

  "Maybe, but there’s never been a fifty-thousand-dollar bounty on them, or a hundred-thousand-dollar reward. The woods have never been so full of crackpots with guns. Someone’s bound to find them, maybe shoot them. And don’t forget about the FBI. John will be here tomorrow, and he’ll want to go right out and check the ledge."

  "You’re right," Gideon said. "They won’t be at the ledge anymore, but the FBI’s likely to come up with a lead on where they went. Do they still use bloodhounds?"

  "I don’t know. I think maybe they do."

  "You know, as good a person as John is, he has to go in regarding them primarily as murder suspects. That’s some way to introduce them to civilization, isn’t it?"

  "So what’s to be done?"

  "There’s nothing we can do. I don’t know where they are, and if I did, I couldn’t communicate. And if I could, what would I say? ‘Greetings from Great White Father. You are going to prison.’ Maybe nobody’ll find them, and maybe by next year I’ll have learned some more."

  "Maybe and maybe. Not too satisfactory a resolution, is it?"

  Gideon agreed, but before he could reply, the telephone rang and Julie went to answer it. At the kitchen doorway she turned and muttered, "You’ll figure something out. And whenever you go, I’m going with you."

  "Hello," she said into the mouthpiece. Then she paused and darted a sidewise look at him, a little uncomfortably, he thought. "Uh, well, no, I don’t exactly know where he is, but I can probably find him. I’ll let him know."

  She came back from the kitchen. "For you."

  He smiled. "Don’t tell me you’re a little shy about letting people know I’m here at seven-thirty in the morning?" He was sorry, as he said it, for the flip, sleazy sound of it.

  "No," she said angrily, and two spots of color appeared on her cheeks. "He just caught me by surprise. And I didn’t know how you’d feel if people knew you were here. You are on the stuffy side, you know."

  "I am?" he said, surprised. That he was a little stuffy, he knew. That Julie knew it was a bit of a shock.

  "Well, sometimes, yes. How would you feel, anyway?"

  "About people knowing I’m here? Julie, you must be kidding. I’m proud of it. I’d like it if everyone knew."

  "Well," she said, still looking angry, "I wasn’t sure." She giggled suddenly. "I think I need another kiss, and a hug, too. I guess I’m feeling insecure."

  He rose and took her in his arms, squeezing until she yelped. "Enough!" she cried. "I’m secure, I’m secure!" He kissed her and felt her throat tremble, and trembled himself. Again he almost told her he loved her, and again a niggling prudence held him back. "What was the call about?" he asked.

  "Oh. Two things. First, a couple of teenagers from Hoquiam admitted faking those Bigfoot tracks."

  "No surprise there. And second?"

  She took her head from his shoulder. "Gideon, they’ve found another body. They think so, anyway."

  Chapter 11

  What they thought was a body had been fished from Pyrites Creek only about a mile downstream from the ledge. It lay on a rubber mat in the workroom, a gummy, greasy mass of brownish-black tissue, formless and tattered, with bones sticking through, like a gobbet from the lion cage at the zoo. Julie had taken one look at it and fled. Gideon wished he could do the same. There was a great deal of difference between the impersonal, dry bones of archaeology and this hideous thing.

  "We’d appreciate your help, Doctor. Can you tell if it’s human?" Julian Minor was John’s assistant, a middle-aged black in a dark suit and tie, with rimless glasses, neat, grizzled hair, and a tidy, complacent chubbiness that gave him the air of a self-satisfied accountant.

  Gideon nodded. "Yes, it’s a human pelvic girdle, but I can’t tell any more than that until we get the bones cleaned."

  "You mean remove the soft tissue?" the agent said with a delicate scowl. "I don’t know if I’m authorized to let you do that."

  Let’s hope not, Gideon thought.

  "But
I’ll call Seattle and inquire," Minor said.

  He dialed, muttered a few secretive syllables into the telephone, nodded three times, said, "Very well then," and hung up. "Mr. Lau says go ahead, but you’re to save the soft tissue for the pathologist."

  "Okay," Gideon said with a sigh. "We’ll need some chemicals, though." Which would, with any luck, turn out to be unavailable.

  No luck. When he went to Julie with the list she called in a young, redheaded ranger who prepared exhibits of birds and animals for the Hoh Information Center and who had everything needed. The young man was patently aggrieved when Minor told him he could not sit in on the operation.

  In twenty minutes Gideon and Minor were back in the workroom at the far end of the table from the grisly chunk of flesh. In front of Gideon were dissection tools, rubber gloves, and measuring cups and containers of various sizes. He prepared a solution of water, sodium carbonate, and bleaching powder in a large dented pot and set it aside. "That’s antiformin," he said. "We’ll boil the flesh off the bones with it." A slightly different mixture was poured into a stone jar.

  "But what about saving the tissue?"

  "I’ll cut away everything I can first, and we’ll preserve it. Now," he said grimly, "to the dirty work."

  He chose a heavy-duty scalpel, a rugged pair of forceps, a probe, and a pair of scissors. Then he talced his hands, slipped on a new pair of rubber gloves, went to the shapeless thing at the other end of the table, and began to work.

  After years of dealing with human remains, Gideon still maintained a remarkable squeamishness. Through long practice he had developed the trick of not quite focusing his eyes on what he was doing at such moments, at least no more than was necessary to keep his own fingers out of the way of the scalpel. He employed the technique now.

  Minor sat primly at the other end of the table some ten feet distant, watching him cut away the dark shreds of flesh and put them in the jar.

  "The fact that it’s only a pelvis…" Minor said. "Was mutilation involved?"

  "No sign of it. The body’s been in the water a while. I think it was just pulled apart by the current and the rocks."

  "I see," Minor said. "May we assume that the remains are those of an individual of the, ah, Negroid race?"

  "Negroid?" said Gideon, puzzled. "No, why?"

  "The color of the skin is quite dark. Or isn’t that the skin?"

  "Some of it’s skin, some of it’s muscle, and other, tissue. Gluteus maximus, mostly, and some of the other flexors and extensors; a little fascia lata. The soft inside stuff and the external genitalia are gone, decomposed or eaten by the fishes."

  Minor’s lips twitched downward. Gideon didn’t blame him. With the forceps he teased out a black ribbon of flesh. "This still has some skin on it," he said, "and you can see it’s black, but once decomposition has begun, the color isn’t any guide to race. Caucasian skin turns brown or black a lot of the time, and black skin is likely to turn whitish-gray."

  "I see," said Minor, slightly whitish-gray himself.

  "You’re welcome." With his own stomach churning. Gideon stripped off the greasy gloves and stood up. "Now comes your part," he said.

  "My part?" Minor blinked, and his hand went reflexively to the knot of his tie. "I don’t take your meaning."

  "The solution in the pot needs to be stirred every thirty minutes for about three hours. Then mix this into it." He held up a bottle of sodium hydroxide in fifteen percent solution. "Then, if I’m not back yet, put the pot on the burner, heat it to a low simmer, and put in the pelvis. Take it out in a hour—but I’ll be back before then."

  "My understanding," Minor said, not at all pleased, "was that you would be responsible for all the technical details."

  Gideon shrugged. "If you’d rather not do it, you can ask the kid with the beard. I’m sure he’d be delighted."

  "I think I can manage," Minor said. "I take it this is some sort of caustic solution."

  "Yes, using one’s finger to do the stirring is not recommended."

  Minor did not seem to find this amusing. Neither did Gideon. He was anxious to get out of the workroom, into the open air. "In the meantime," he said, "I thought I’d run over to Amanda Park and see the man who has the bone spear points."

  Minor brightened. "Old Mr. Pringle? That shouldn’t take you any three hours. Amanda Park is only a couple of miles away. His house is a bit off the beaten path, but I can give you directions. It’ll take you fifteen minutes to get there."

  It took him two hours. "Off the beaten path" was an understatement, and Gideon got hopelessly lost on back roads more than once before he stumbled on the place. When he finally pulled up at the side of the road next to the worn, birdhouse-shaped mailbox, he was ready to admit that Julie had a point about his being a city person. He got out of the car and stood looking at the ramshackle old bungalow of dingy white with faded green trim. On a gray day, with no other houses around, and made tiny by the thick forest, it was a forlorn sight. Only after a few seconds did he become aware that a very old man was sitting hunched in a corner of the porch, deep in the gloomy shade of a corroded tin roof.

  Sleeping, or perhaps senile, Gideon thought. He walked to the house with a smile but with a distinct sinking of the heart. For an anthropologist he was peculiarly loath—nearly obsessively so—to intrude on others’ privacy.

  "Mr. Pringle?" he said quietly when he reached the porch.

  The head came up and Gideon saw that the man wore a knit, dark blue watch cap pulled tightly down over a long, lean-fleshed head. He was even older than Gideon had thought, more than ninety, with waxed-paper skin stretched painfully over a large-boned skeletal face, and purplish-brown discolorations on his cheeks. Astigmatic and winking, he looked emptily about, everywhere but at Gideon.

  Senile, Gideon thought, his heart sinking further. "Mr. Pringle?" He spoke gently. If the old man were frightened or failed to comprehend, he would go. "My name is Gideon Oliver…"

  "Ah, there you are," said the man in a thin, cheerful voice, fixing a pair of astonishingly lucid blue eyes on him. "The old eyes are getting a bit queer these days. Not what they used to be."

  Gideon saw, as if by the light of those luminous eyes, that he had a tiny white moustache, pencil-thin and meticulously trimmed, midway between his long nose and thin gray lips, with plenty of pale skin showing all around it. Cheered by the sight of that absurdly sprightly ornament on the ancient face, Gideon smiled. "Mr. Minor of the FBI told me about your collection. I wondered if you might show it to me."

  The man’s eyes lit up even more. "With the greatest of pleasure," he said, and began to rise, gripping a cane with one hand and the shaky arm of his folding chair with the other. He was, Gideon realized, a very tall, rawboned man, and he had a lot of difficulty getting out of the chair. Taking his arm to help him to an unsteady balance, Gideon was struck by the freshly laundered smell of his woolen shirt. There was nothing slovenly about him.

  The old man laughed. "Got going too fast. Wouldn’t have had any trouble if I’d gotten myself organized first."

  The front door opened into the kitchen, and Pringle shuffled slowly onto the ancient linoleum, concentrating heavily on his balance, carefully predetermining each spot on which the thick rubber tip of his cane would come down.

  "Forgive the hat," he said over his shoulder. "Had an operation or two, and the surgeon did a little excavating up there. Are you with the FBI, too, Mr. Oliver?" His large hand groped for support at the old, white-painted chairs, the table, anything within reach.

  "No, I’m an anthropologist."

  "Anthropologist? Well, I’m really delighted. May I offer you a cup of tea?"

  "No, thank you," Gideon said, not even wanting to think about watching him try to manipulate kettle and cups at the old-fashioned gas range.

  The living room was fusty and stale, with brown, flowered linoleum nearly as worn as that in the kitchen, but the collection was neatly housed in three clean, glass-fronted cases of mahogany. There were
bottles and belt buckles and old nails, but there were also a great many Indian artifacts.

  Gideon examined the three bone spear points at length. All were cut with the same technique and in the same shape as the two he’d already seen.

  "Do you remember when you found these, Mr. Pringle?"

  "The one you’re holding in 1950. That one, in 1934 or 1935. And this…let’s see, it was my first summer here. I was twenty-five, so that would make it 1913," he said without any apparent pause for calculating.

  "And all from around here?"

  Pringle nodded. "The one you’ve got was way up along the east fork of the Quinault—of course, there wasn’t much of a trail then—and a little ways up one of the creeks that run down from Chimney Peak."

  "Pyrites Creek?"

  Pringle was surprised. "Why, yes, that’s right, about a mile up, on the east bank."

  Nineteen thirty-four. Did that mean the ledge had been inhabited for nearly fifty years? It seemed probable. At least fifty years. "And the other points?"

  "The other old one also came from around Chimney Peak, but the one in 1950, that was near Finley Creek. Here, let me show you on the map."

  "That’s not necessary," Gideon said quickly as Pringle began to gather his gangling, tottery legs under him.

  "No, no, it’s quite all right. It’s a question of preparation and organization, you see." Midway through preparing and organizing, when he had gotten his lanky frame to the edge of the chair and was about to make the final effort, he looked at Gideon with those surprising, brilliant eyes and smiled. "My," he said, "everything takes a long time when you’re old."

  When Pringle had meticulously pointed out the precise locations, Gideon said, "You know, nobody seems to believe there are Indians in the rain forest, Mr. Pringle. How would you account for the points?"

  "Of course there are Indians. When I first came out, it was common knowledge. They’d come out at night and steal things from the cabins. Naturally, that was before it became a national park. All the cabins are gone now. But in those days, lots of people saw them. I saw them myself."