Aaron Elkins - Skull Duggery

Indeed, they were luscious. Feather light, but moist and chewy at the same time, and subtly sweetened with honey, they ranked right up there with the best confections he’d ever tasted. And that coffee! He was beginning to see why Tony and the others so willingly put up with the woman’s crabbiness.

“What did Jamie mean,” he asked after a couple of blissful swallows, “about Manolo talking weirdly? Did he have some kind of impediment?”

“Not before Carl gave him one,” Tony said, laughing. “Busted his jaw in two places.”

“Carl hit him?” Julie exclaimed. “It’s hard to imagine that. He’s always so in control, so calm.”

As if to illustrate her point, a smiling, serene Carl, looking handsome and very much at home on horseback, was heading slowly out through the corral gate, followed by a line of devoted, mounted females. Like a gaggle of imprinted ducklings scurrying after mama, Gideon thought. Well, maybe not quite.

“Not when his wife is screwing around on him, I guess, pardon the language,” Tony said. “I guess he did feel bad about it, though. He paid for getting the guy’s jaw wired.”

Another turron slid down Tony’s gullet, and then another, the last of them. (“You guys weren’t gonna eat this, were you?”) He finished his coffee, pulled over the one Dorotea had brought out for Jamie, and started happily on it as well.

“And Blaze was never heard from again?” Julie asked. “She never even wanted to hear about her daughter?”

“Nope, never.”

“She just up and left with her boyfriend? No note, no anything?”

“No nothing,” Tony said. “I mean, I hadn’t got here yet-I didn’t show up until a couple of days later-so all I know is what everybody tells me. Blaze used to go into Oaxaca for lessons once a week, and she’d stay overnight-Wednesday, I think, and come back on Thursday. So one week she leaves for her lesson as usual-this is, like, one day after this creep Manolo gets kicked off the ranch by Carl-only she doesn’t show up the next morning the way she always does. And that happens to be Thursday, the morning Jamie brings back the payroll from Tlacolula. So Jamie gets in the van with a suitcase full of cash as usual, and starts driving back here, and as soon as he gets to a deserted stretch of road, Manolo jumps up and sticks a gun in his ear-he was hiding on the floor in back-grabs the cash, and drives off in the van, leaving the poor kid standing out in the desert, shaking like a leaf. I don’t think he’s ever gotten over it, even though there’s no way it’s his fault. He had to bum a ride on a manure wagon to get back.”

“And then?” Gideon asked.

“There isn’t any ‘and then.’ Good-bye Manolo, good-bye Blaze, good-bye payroll. End of story. Hey, look who’s here!”

Jamie and a broadly smiling Annie were coming across the terrace toward them.

“How the hell did you guys get back so fast?” Tony said, getting up and holding his arms open for Annie, who responded with her own enthusiastic hug.

“Tony, it’s so good to see you. I’m so glad I didn’t miss you!”

There were a few minutes of chatter, mostly to explain that Annie had caught an earlier flight than expected and had taken a taxi to Teotitlan rather than wait for Jamie. The taxi had pulled into the Hacienda’s parking lot just as Jamie was starting out for the airport in one of the vans.

“What happened to the turrones?” Jamie asked. “What happened to my coffee? I saw Dorotea bring it all out. I was gone, what, ten minutes, and it’s all gone?” He shook his head. “Never mind, if I put my mind to it, I think I can figure it out.”

Tony hunched his shoulders. “I was hungry.”

“Turrones?” Annie said. “Did I miss turrones?” She was back on her feet and headed for the kitchen. “Maybe she made a few more.”

Smiling, Tony watched her go. “One thing we got in this family, we got healthy appetites,” he said approvingly, then called after her. “Hey, bring out whatever she’s got in there. We could use some more coffee too!”

“What kind of lessons was she taking?” Julie asked Tony.

“Huh?”

“You said Blaze went into Oaxaca for lessons every week. I was just wondering what she was taking.”

“Oh hell, I don’t know. I think it was some kind of-”

“Dance,” Jamie said. “Blaze’d been taking ballet lessons since she was nine. She was really serious about it too; practiced three solid hours every morning, seven days a week, even right after Annie was born. That’s one of the reasons I couldn’t believe it when she actually-”

It had taken all this time since the word “dance” for Gideon to find his voice. “She was a ballet dancer?” he croaked.

Jamie looked at him, puzzled. “That’s right, a good one. We all expected her-”

“How many teeth did she have?”

Now everybody looked confused, including Julie.

“How many teeth?” Jamie echoed with a hollow laugh. “I have no idea.”

“Tony, do you know?”

“No, how the hell would I know how many teeth she had?” Like the others, he’d been thrown off by Gideon’s sudden intensity. “What’s this with teeth?”

“How many teeth do you have?”

“How many-I don’t know, how many teeth does anybody have?”

“Mind if I peek?”

Tony looked at him peculiarly, then shrugged. “What the hell, help yourself.” He opened his mouth and Gideon peered in.

“No, they’re all there. Damn,” he added softly.

“Damn?” Tony echoed. “What do you mean, damn? Why shouldn’t I have all my teeth?”

A thoughtful look had settled over Jamie’s face while this was going on. Gideon could see that his tongue was poking at his teeth.

“What about you, Jamie? Are you missing any?”

“Well yes, it’s odd that you should ask. Four of my teeth never did come in. I forget which ones. Not the important ones; the second somethings.”

“Premolars,” Gideon said. “Bicuspids.”

“That’s it, bicuspids. But what in the world-”

“I don’t have all mine either,” Annie said, having arrived with a plate bearing a few more turrones. “Mine never came in either. It runs in the family. Doesn’t really cause any problems, though. Who needs bicuspids? Why are we talking about teeth, anyway?”

Gideon sighed. “I have some news for you, folks.” Boy, did he have some news. He looked up at Annie. “Annie,” he said gently, “maybe you’d better sit down.”

He couldn’t blame them for refusing to accept it at first. He was having a hard time accepting it himself, and he was new to the story of Blaze’s abandoning her child and running off with Manolo to Juarez, or whatever it was. He’d never heard of either of them before last Sunday, three days ago. But these others-Jamie, Tony, Annie-they had lived with the tale for almost twenty years; it was established family history by now, validated by time and by retelling. Besides that, they all remembered the policia ministerial ’s onerous investigation, only a year earlier, of the “little girl’s” skeleton that had been discovered in the mine.

And now, just because Gideon Oliver, after a few hours’ perfunctory work, without instruments or laboratory facilities of any kind, concludes that the police pathology experts from Mexico City were dead wrong, that the “little girl” was actually a big girl, they were supposed to accept it as proven fact? And even more unimaginable, that out of all the unidentified skeletons in Mexico it could possibly be, it was that of their own Blaze? They were supposed to swallow that as well?

With all due respect, other than Julie they did not; not at first. But slowly he explained, and slowly they came around; first Tony, then Jamie, and finally, most reluctantly, Annie. The probability of a nineteen- or twenty-year-old woman, who happened to be a ballet dancer and who shared a rare genetic condition of missing teeth with Annie and Jamie and who had been found in this remote, barely populated region only a few miles from the Hacienda Encantada and for whom no identification had ever been made and who had been killed at about the right time-the probability of such a person’s being anybody but Blaze Gallagher Tendler was simply too implausible for them to hold on to in the face of Gideon’s coherent exposition.