Aaron Elkins: Skull Duggery

She leaned forward. “Let me tell you something about my father. He is the most loyal, honest, decent man you will ever meet. What he seems like is exactly what he is like. After Mom took off, he figured his job was to raise me, and that’s just what he did.” She paused for a wry smile. “But I inherited my mother’s genes, I guess-in everything but looks, dammit-because at nineteen I ran off with that miserable shmuck Billy Nicholson, idiot that I was. Why? Because he looked like Robert Redford. And then when I came crawling back here with my tail between my legs? Pop took me in without a word of reproof and got me set up in this job, for which I am eternally grateful. That was eight years ago, and there’s still never been a word of reproof, not a single word. Never even an I told you so, which he had every right to say. That man is something else, let me tell you. My hero.”

The somewhat awkward silence that followed this soul-baring was broken by Dorotea, who called loudly from the doorway in Spanish that their breakfast was on the buffet table, and in they filed.

“If this is a ‘late breakfast snack,’ ” Gideon said, “I can hardly wait to see what an actual breakfast looks like.”

On the table in front of them were the promised quesadillas-seven of them, not the expected three-freshly made tortillas covered with cheese and chiles, folded into half moons, and arranged in a semicircle. But there was also cubed melon and papaya, a bowl of yogurt, biscuits, jam, a pitcher of pink, frothy juice that, on inquiry, turned out to be ginger-spiked hibiscus juice-and, of course, more of the wonderful coffee. The three of them loaded up (“Well, since there are extra quesadillas, I guess I’ll have a couple, after all,” Annie said. “Wouldn’t want them to go to waste.”) and took their food back out to the terrace. The sun had climbed higher by now, and although it wasn’t unpleasantly hot, Gideon put up the umbrella to give them some protection from the glare.

Gideon and Julie, who hadn’t eaten anything since dinner the night before, were ravenous and the food was marvelous, and for a few minutes their only conversation had to do with how wonderful it was, much of it expressed in appreciative grunts and murmurs of one syllable. Annie took a proprietary pride in Dorotea’s skills, explaining that what made the tortillas so exceptional was not only that they had been made that morning with fresh masa -hand-ground corn flour-but that real, old-fashioned lard had gone into it “by the handful.” This did nothing to take the edge off their appetites, and all of the quesadillas were efficiently demolished, three by Gideon.

When they were back to drinking coffee and picking at the biscuits and jam, Annie suddenly clapped her hands together. “Damn, I almost forgot! Hey, Gideon, are you interested in helping out our police chief and looking at this skeleton they found?”

“A skeleton?” Gideon’s world was suddenly flooded with light.

“I mean, a mummy. I mean, this dead guy they found, a murdered guy, they couldn’t find the bullet-”

It took a minute or two, but eventually she got the story out, and a beaming Gideon said he’d be pleased to help if he could. Or even if he couldn’t.

“Okay, let me give Chief Sandoval a call right now.” She got up to go to the office, which was in a separate building. “The body’s in this little room at the cemetery. When do you think you could look at it?”

“How about now?”

“Now?” Julie exclaimed. “Gideon, you were on a plane all night. When I came out here fifteen minutes ago you were falling asleep.”

“Well, I’m wide awake now.” He beat a tattoo on the table to prove it.

Julie shook her head. “I knew skeletons could do that to him,” she said to Annie. “Now I know mummies can too.”

“Oh, your room’s ready,” said Annie, who had caught a signal from Josefa in the courtyard behind them. “Why don’t you go get yourself unpacked up there while I call?”

The Hacienda Encantada consisted of five nicely restored nineteenth-century buildings around a cool, tree-shaded brick courtyard with hammocks and rocking chairs in various pleasant niches. Sombreros and binoculars hung from the walls for the guests to use.

Other than the Casa Principal with its dining room, kitchen, and terrace, there was the old sisal factory storehouse, the largest structure, with fourteen guest rooms; the old chapel, now cut up into the lodge office and the meeting room; the old factory building itself, the Casa de Maquinas, converted into five upscale guest rooms, one of which was Gideon and Julie’s (the best, according to Julie); and the Casa del Mayordomo, a beautiful old house with a pillared portico, once the estate manager’s home, now divided into five suites for the Gallaghers and their relations: one for Jamie, one for Annie, one for Carl, the smallest one for Josefa, and the largest one kept available for Tony.

“Like it?” Julie asked as Gideon pulled open the heavy, studded oak door of their room. “It’s been fifteen years, and as far as I can tell, the whole place looks better than ever.”

He would have said he loved it in any case because Julie was obviously anxious for him to be pleased, but in fact he liked it a lot. As promised, there was no television set, no telephone, no alarm clock.

It was a single large space with an eighteen-foot beamed ceiling and smoothed, red-painted concrete flooring. Through a door was a tiled bathroom. The furniture-king-sized bed, nightstands, lamps, round table and chairs, wardrobe, bureau-was all hand-carved in a rustic, squarish, pleasingly simple mission style. All very uncrowded and open. Geometric weavings, finely done and probably local, were on the floor on either side of the bed and in front of the wardrobe. A hammock hung in one corner.

“This is great. The whole place is great.”

There was a double tap on the door. “Okay,” Annie said, letting herself in. “Chief Sandoval’s on his way. It’s only a two-minute drive up from the village. He’ll tell you all about it on the way back down. You’ll find his English is pretty good-well, passable.”

“That’s good. I don’t think my spanish is quite up to ‘passable.’ ”

Julie was chuckling. “I told him something like this would turn up,” she said to Annie. “It never fails.”

Gideon hunched his shoulders. “What can I say? Remember what that psychic in Hawaii said? She said it was my aura. skeletons are very attracted to me.”

“And vice versa,” said Julie.

As mummified remains went, they weren’t that bad.

The body had been out there long enough, and in an environment that was hot enough and dry enough, so that there was nothing anyone would call a stench-just an earthy, musty smell, like decaying bark on the forest floor. And it had dried out enough that the skin-the hide was more like it, at this point-no longer glistened with exuded fat or other nasty effluvia. It had become a stiff, brown parchment-like object whose appearance had more in common with the mummy of Ramses II than with anybody who’d been walking around on two legs six months earlier.

All of this came as a welcome relief to Gideon. Like any forensic anthropologist, he took satisfaction and pleasure in working with skeletons, in reconstructing, at least in part, the living human being-sex, age, habits, appearance, occupation, the whole history of a life, and often the nature of its death-from a pile of bones. But fresh, or rather not-quite-fresh, corpses were another thing. Unlike most of his forensic colleagues, he had never inured himself to the nasty phases that bodies went through on their journey from flesh and blood to bare bones-“decomps,” as they were called in the trade. In what he considered the immortal words of the Munchkin Coroner of Oz, he preferred his corpses “not only really dead, but really most sincerely dead,” the older the better. A decade was usually a safe bet, a millennium better still. He was, in a word, squeamish.