Aaron Elkins - Make No Bones

“No, I think it was just some of the kids.”

“Well, maybe you’re right.” She stood up. “Let’s talk about something important. Any chance you can break away this morning for a short horseback ride?”

“Well, I hate to miss the sessions.”

“We ought to get our muscles limbered up for Thursday.”

“Thursday? Oh, God, the trail-ride chuck-wagon breakfast.”

“You’ll love it.”

“I don’t know, I’m a city boy. Getting on a horse makes me nervous. They’re too damn high.”

“Now look, you. I’m taking vacation time so we can be together and have fun and relax, and that means-”

“That I’m going on a horseback ride. Yes, ma’am.”

“All right, then. I’ll let you off this morning, though.” She leaned over to kiss his cheek and winced. “Ouch. Take a shave, will you? Then let’s go get some breakfast, I’m starving.”

They got to the breakfast buffet at seven-thirty, drank some orange juice and some more coffee, and on Gideon’s suggestion carried their plates of fried eggs, hash browns, and biscuits outside to look for a place to enjoy the slanting, high-country sunlight for a while. They had the grounds to themselves, the other attendees preferring to eat inside. Most of them were from the Southwest; catching up on sunshine was not one of their priorities.

They found a reasonably comfortable low wall-actually part of the rock-and-mortar foundation of an old building that had once stood there in a grove of ponderosa pine-looking out over the near-deserted road to a broad meadow with a few fat cows grazing in it. Happily vacant of mind (was there anything that made one more contentedly empty-headed than watching cows?), Gideon ate his breakfast enjoying Julie’s quiet company and relishing the morning sun’s warmth on the back of his neck. He could feel it, with pleasure, on the rims of his ears. It had been a long winter on Puget Sound.

After a pleasantly indeterminate time they looked around to see Nelson Hobert come tramping ebulliently up the path, arms pumping, wearing a T-shirt that said: “Young at heart, other parts a little older.” Red bermuda shorts displayed lumpy knees and squat, bowed calves. With him were a group of half-a-dozen people, including three of his students from Nevada State, extraordinarily attractive females in their twenties, trailing behind him in a row. Gideon smiled, remembering something that a frankly admiring Les Zenkovich had once said: “I think the old geezer imprints them, you know? Like ducklings.”

Despite his being five-foot-five, bald, potbellied, billygoat-bearded, and unashamedly into his sixties, Nellie Hobert had a remarkable knack for attracting a steady stream of worshipful and attractive young women students. To his colleagues (and to Nellie himself, Gideon thought) it was a source of wonder and amusement; to some of the more predatory among them a source of envy. Hobert’s harem, they called them, which pleased Nellie immensely, patently unpredatory though he was.

Not that he didn’t glow when surrounded by those fresh and adoring faces. Who wouldn’t?

Nellie had arrived the previous evening, accompanied as always by his wife, Frieda. Tired from a long day, he had nevertheless joined the poker party at about ten and stayed almost to the bitter end. An enthusiastic but hopeless card player, he had contributed handsomely and without complaint to Leland’s profits. And as Gideon had known he would, he’d taken the news of Jasper’s disappearance in his stride.

“The old boy just won’t stop making waves, will he?” had been his comment once he’d gotten over the initial shock. “Well, don’t worry about it,” he’d generously told Miranda, “we’ll get the old crock back. Who’d want to keep him?” Julie had taken to him at once.

“Good morning, Julie, Gideon!” he called now. “Guess what! Meredith here has spotted what she thinks are some cremains on the National Forest trail along the meadow. We’re going out to have a quick look before things get going. Care to come?

“Cremains?” Julie repeated.

“Cremated remains,” Nellie said.

“ Human remains?”

“Yes, but don’t excite yourself. We’re talking about ordinary, legal funerary cremations. People scatter the ashes everywhere, you know. Want to see?”

She jumped up. “Sure! Gideon?”

He declined with a wave. “Go have fun. I’ll pass.”

For one thing, it felt too good to sit without moving in the warm high-country air. For another, as Nellie had said, the finding of cremated remains-Gideon still resisted calling them cremains, but it was a losing battle-had become an everyday occurrence. Regardless of laws to the contrary, people were always emptying urns filled with white ashes and chalky fragments in scenic areas-deserts, mountains, beaches, parks. He’d come across two in the past year himself: one in Mount Rainier National Park, the other near a dig on a beach along Washington’s wild Olympic Peninsula. No doubt, if he was in the habit of keeping his eyes on the ground when he walked, he’d have spotted more. Even the police shrugged them off these days.

Still, it was good for the students to know what they looked like-Julie too, being a park ranger-and Nellie, more power to him, never passed up a chance to teach anybody about anything, even after forty years as a professor.

As they left, Gideon mopped up the last of the egg with his biscuit and looked around him. Many of the resort’s outlying buildings had been razed, mostly in the last few years from the look of them, and in the fall the rest would come down. Not that the owners were hurting. The manager had explained that the lodge was being bulldozed out of existence, older, unused structures first, in preparation for its transformation by a developer. Somehow, what had once been an out-of-the-way tract of useless meadows and woods had become two hundred acres of prime country land in the booming resort district west of Sisters. By next year at this time, the rambling, aging lodge would have metamorphosed into “Witch’s Butte Estates, Forty Prestige Ranchettes in Central Oregon’s Newest and Most Exclusive Golfing Community.”

Well, things changed. The departed building whose foundations he was sitting on now, for example; it had been older than the lodge itself, dating back to the time when there had been a working ranch here. The rough old rock-and-mortar foundation suggested this, as well as some photographs that were in a scrapbook in the lounge. They had been taken in the sixties and they showed this structure as one of several ramshackle, tottery old sheds crammed with moldering, ancient ranch equipment, long disused. Black, split yokes and harnesses, and rusty, spiked implements of metal, sinister and inscrutable. All gone now.

He yawned, stretched, and got up, his eyes roving instinctively over the ground. The building had been almost a hundred years old, more than enough to spark his anthropologist’s curiosity. Not much to see, though. No intriguing bits of history poking up out of the soil. The floor of the shack, once probably hard-packed earth, had reverted to a softer soil, covered with pine needles and dotted with spindly tufts of rabbit brush, little different now from the surrounding countryside.

Still, as always, there were a few things. The scraping off of the topsoil by the bulldozer along one side had revealed the ghostly vestiges of a row of postholes running diagonally through the building. So there had been an even earlier structure here, perhaps from Indian or pioneer days. Well, that was mildly interesting, he thought lazily, squatting down to take a better look.

But there wasn’t much to see. The darker soil of the filled-in postholes disappeared into a nest of straggling brush growing out of the corner of the foundation. Without getting up, he turned on the balls of his feet to see if he could tell where they met the other corner of the foundation. Abruptly, the ground gave way beneath his left foot. He managed to keep from tumbling over by grabbing for the foundation, and as he did so he realized that he had been squatting on the very edge of a depression, the rim of which had crumbled under his weight.