Aaron Elkins: Skull Duggery

“God willing,” Sandoval mouthed to himself, watching with relief as the bus got on its dusty, noisy way.

Six months later.

Strait of Juan de Fuca, aboard the ferry Coho

“Folks, if you look out the windows, you’ll see a pod of orcas only a hundred yards off the port side, at about eleven o’clock.”

At the announcement, most of the starboard passengers arose en masse to make for the windows on the other side. Ordinarily, Julie Oliver would have been among the first, but this time she simply sat there, her eyes glued to the laptop on the table in front of her. She and Gideon were returning from one of their periodic weekend “city fixes”-a concert or opera at the Royal Theatre, a walk in the gardens, a good restaurant or two-in Victoria, British Columbia, closer by forty miles to their home in Port Angeles, Washington, than Seattle was. Like the cyber-enlightened twenty-first-century couple they were, their noses had been buried in their laptops since the MV Coho had left Victoria’s Inner Harbor, the Empress Hotel-that grand, old, ivy-covered dowager-had disappeared behind the headland, and the ferry had slipped into the pale, thready winter fog of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

“Julie,” Gideon said, “did you hear? There are orcas on the other side.”

“Can I ask you a question?” she said instead of answering and then didn’t wait for his reply. “Can you tell me what in the world made me think this Hacienda thing next week was a good idea?”

“Sure. You said it would be nice to go somewhere warm and sunny for a week. You said it would be a snap, a free vacation; you said there would be good food, interesting surroundings, and exotic ruins. You said it involved next to no work for you and none at all for me.”

“Did I?” she said grimly, still staring at an e-mail. “It appears I may have misspoken.”

The “it” they were talking about was the result of a telephone call from Julie’s cousin Annie, who managed the Hacienda Encantada, a small, rustic/luxury dude ranch and resort, mostly patronized by Americans and Canadians, located in the hills above the peaceful little weaver’s village of Teotitlan del Valle in Oaxaca, Mexico. Annie, it seemed, had to go back to Winston-Salem in mid-December to clean up the final details of a messy divorce, and could Julie fill in for her for a week or so? It was the slow time of year, so there really wouldn’t be much to manage. Julie would live right there at the Hacienda-best room in the place-so lodging and food would be taken care of. And Gideon was more than welcome to come along if he wanted to. The food alone, Julie assured him, was worth coming for. They had a wonderful Oaxacan chef that he would love. Dorotea’s cooking was famous. Her recipes had been featured in Sunset and Gourmet.

It meant that Julie would have to take vacation time off from her supervising park ranger post at Olympic National Park, but December was a slow time of year in the Olympics-not many wayward hikers to rescue-so it had suited her fine. As icing on the cake, the Hacienda would pick up the round-trip airfare-for both of them.

It hadn’t been hard for Julie to convince Gideon to join her. Not only did it sound terrific, but mid-December would be during his winter break from the University of Washington-Port Angeles, and so Julie had called Annie back the next day to tell her the deal was on.

It wasn’t as outlandish a proposition as it seemed on the surface. The Hacienda Encantada was owned by a man named Tony Gallagher, Annie’s uncle, a long-time expatriate American, who ran the place pretty much as a family affair, with the managerial staff made up of fellow expatriate Gallaghers, and one or two in-laws. One of the in-laws was Julie’s favorite uncle, Carl Tendler-Annie’s father-who had lived and worked there as head wrangler and stockman for well over thirty years, since its preresort existence as a working ranch. He had first come as a twenty-two-year-old in 1972 for a summer job, had fallen in love with and married Tony Gallagher’s sister in 1975, and had settled down. Annie had come along a few years later and had lived her early life there, attending an American boarding school in Oaxaca City. But in 1997, at nineteen, she’d fallen for a sharper named Billy Nicholson, a flashy, good-looking yoga instructor from North Carolina who was conducting a workshop at the Hacienda, and had followed him back to North Carolina and married him, against her father’s warnings. When they broke up five years later, she returned to the resort, remorseful and contrite, to gratefully take on the job of resident manager.

As for Julie, she had spent her high school vacations helping out at the Hacienda and had found the life so exotic, so glamorous-to say nothing of having a schoolgirl crush on her handsome, taciturn, Gary-Cooper-like Uncle Carl-that, against the advice of her parents, she had entered a community college to study hotel management with the aim of eventually working full-time at the resort. Although a year in the program and a bit more maturity made her conclude that the hospitality industry might not be her cup of tea, she had at least a basic grounding in the field.

Thus, taking over for a week-or so she said at the time of the phone call-was a no-brainer. True, she hadn’t been there since she was nineteen, but all she’d have to do was coordinate meals and meal times for the guests, arrange transportation from the airport for them, plan recreational outings, handle intake if any new guests came along, and one or two bits of administrivia that might or might not require her input… in other words, a piece of cake. There’d be plenty of time to do things with Gideon. She expected that her afternoons and evenings would be virtually free.

And then had come this new e-mail from Annie. Tony’s brother, Jamie Gallagher, who was their accountant/bookkeeper, would be leaving for Minnesota in a couple of days, a long-awaited opening for arthroscopic knee surgery at the Mayo Clinic having popped up. Would Julie mind keeping an eye on his part of the business too?

“So now,” she said, “I’ll have to post expenses to the ledger, record income, make sure the peso-dollar conversions balance, pretty much all-around handle the revenue and expense streams, really. I hope the Hacienda survives.”

“I’ll help out,” Gideon said gamely, although he didn’t see how.

She responded with a gentle smile. “Thanks, honey, but I don’t see how. You have many wonderful strengths, but keeping expense accounts isn’t one of them.”

She was putting it nicely. He was hopeless with money. Before Julie came into his life, he had stopped even trying to balance his checkbook. Whatever the bank told him his account contained at the end of the month (and it often came as a great surprise), that’s what he compliantly posted.

“I could be your enforcer,” he offered. “You know, the strong-arm guy if they don’t want to pay up?”

“I’ll certainly keep that in mind,” she said with a smile. “Oh, heck, it won’t be that bad. The place is going to be practically empty. Only a few rooms booked. Frankly, I’m more worried about you.”

“About me? What’s to worry?”

“Well, if I have less time available, what are you going to do? You can’t spend all your time visiting the archaeological sites.”

“I’m not going to do anything. I’m going to vegetate. That’s the point.”

“So you say, but I’ve yet to see you do it. You’re not taking along any work at all?”

“Nope. My prep for next quarter is done, the paper on Neanderthal locomotor biomechanics has already gone off to Evolutionary Biology, and I have no outstanding forensic cases. Nothing.”

She closed the laptop’s lid. “Well, I don’t know why I should be worried. Some old skeleton will turn up for you; it always does.”