Aaron Elkins - Make No Bones

And getting smaller. There was Callie, there was Leland, there was Les, there was Miranda, there was Nellie. That was it; all the people who had been at Whitebark Lodge when Jasper had been killed, and who were here now. Nobody else met both those all-important criteria. One of them, it would seem, had somehow been involved with Harlow in Jasper’s death and the subsequent cover-up, had realized Harlow was starting to come apart, and had killed him before he gave it all away. That, at least, was the best guess of the moment.

Callie. Leland. Les. Miranda. Nellie.

Some were better bets than others. Miranda, he was glad to think, was among the least probable. If it hadn’t been for her, they’d still all be under the illusion that the garroted man was Chuck Salish. And even if they’d eventually discovered that it wasn’t-which probably wouldn’t have taken long-the outlandish idea that it might be Jasper would never have crossed anyone’s mind. Without Miranda, the skeleton would have remained an unidentifiable John Doe, and that would have been the end of it. No uncomfortable old questions raised about Jasper or anything else.

And Callie would seem to be off the hook too, assuming his guess at Harlow’s time of death was anywhere near correct. Despite what Julie saw or didn’t see during the trail ride, Callie had left for Nevada on Tuesday, a full day before he’d been killed. And she hadn’t returned until this morning, long after it had happened. Or could she have planned it all ahead of time, made an unannounced, unseen return visit on Wednesday, killed Harlow, flown back to Nevada, then returned here on Thursday morning…? No, that was getting too fanciful. People might do such things in books, but he’d never known an actual killer to try it.

That left Les, Leland…and Nellie. Reluctantly, it was Nellie he kept coming back to. Nellie, who had pressed everyone to keep the disastrous roast a secret from the beginning; Nellie, who had headed the forensic team after the accident and signed off on the final report; Nellie, who had been so quick to suggest-to insist-that the skeleton was Salish’s and not Jasper’s; Nellie, who was even now maintaining that Jasper had been killed in the crash; Nellie He jerked his head with irritation, angry at himself. Nellie Hobert garroting Albert Jasper? Bringing down that table leg on Harlow’s collapsing skull, not once but three times? No, he could hardly make himself imagine it. It simply wasn’t credible. Not for any of them, really, but especially not for Nellie. True, he’d been a little cranky lately, but who could blame him, with the formidable Frieda hovering protectively around him, straightening his collar for him, stuffing frayed Kleenex down into his pockets when they stuck out, holding her hand out for his keys or coins when he unthinkingly jingled them…

Well, wait a minute. Combing his damp hair in front of the mirror, he paused. What about Frieda? She’d been there for the first meeting too, hadn’t she? According to John, Leland had come to him with a story about her having a thing with Salish. Was it possible that Jasper had found out about it, and she had killed him to keep him from telling Nellie? For a moment he managed to seriously consider it, but even if he could make himself believe it, how did Harlow figure into it? Why had he been killed? Why would he have engineered-as he surely had-the dental-chart fakery that had led to the misidentification of Jasper?

“Hi, there,” Julie said. “Gorgeous, isn’t he?”

Buried in thought, he hadn’t noticed her come into the cottage. She had found him in front of the bedroom mirror, stock-still, staring at himself.

He turned to smile at her. As always when she came in from the outdoors, she had a way of bringing some of it in with her; some indefinable freshness of skin and hair and fragrance. His spirits lifted.

“Did I ever tell you you’re extremely wholesome-looking?” he said.

She laughed. “Just when you get carried away on the wings of passion.” She came up behind him, hugged him gingerly, avoiding the scrapes, and stretched to kiss him on the back of the neck. “Do you feel okay?”

He reached around, drawing her head closer. “I love you.”

“Munn,” she said, nuzzled him a moment longer, gave him a final hug that made him grunt, then flopped into an armchair and kicked off her shoes.

“So,” she said, “how’d it go this afternoon? Anything interesting happen around here?”

“And that’s about it,” Gideon said, summing up. They were standing on the footbridge over the pond, their elbows on the railing. After three blistering days, the layer of streaky clouds in the west had risen to veil the late-afternoon sun, and with it had come a moist breeze. The temperature had dropped a few degrees to marginally tolerable. They had walked slowly around the grounds while he told her what had been going on, finally stopping on the bridge while he concluded.

Julie had been quiet through the recital, asking few questions, making few exclamations; merely shaking her head occasionally. They began walking again. At the end of the footbridge was a weathered wooden sign that said, “Limit 3 Per Day.” Three what, Gideon wondered. The pond was all of four inches deep, and he had yet to see anything move in it.

“So the skull was Jasper’s,” Julie said. She was chewing on a grass blade she’d picked up somewhere. “That explains a few things, doesn’t it?”

He looked at her, surprised. All he seemed to have was questions, not explanations. “Not to me, it doesn’t.”

“Well, it explains why those remains were taken out of the case and destroyed. Someone was afraid one of you would somehow spot that they weren’t Jasper’s.”

“Yes, that’s probably true.” The fate of those burned shards of bone had plummeted to a lower priority this afternoon. He’d forgotten all about them.

“And it gives us a reason for Callie to knock you off your horse.”

“It does?”

Now it was Julie who stopped to look at him. “Of course, don’t you see? It’s what I said-or at least it could be. She was trying to keep you from finishing the reconstruction. She was afraid you’d find out it was Jasper. Which you did. Gideon, I’m telling you-”

“Julie, we’ve already been through this. If I didn’t finish it, somebody else would have, so-”

“But they wouldn’t have; that’s what I’m getting at. You explained yourself-very publicly-why there wasn’t any real point in doing a reconstruction on that skull: If it was Salish, there were better ways of proving it; and if it wasn’t, then who was there to show it to? The only reason you were doing it was as a demonstration of the technique.”

“Well, yes-”

“So if you didn’t finish it, if she could put you out of commission just for this one afternoon, that would have been the end of it. It would have gone back to Nellie for analysis and wound up in a box somewhere, or wherever they keep unidentified skulls. There would have been no reason to reconstruct it, and certainly no reason to think it might be Jasper’s.”

They had circled the pond a second time and begun to head back toward their cottage. “Well, what do you think?” she said.

“Well-”

“In fact,” she went on excitedly, “she would have had the same reason for getting rid of Harlow to keep him from telling whose skeleton that was. Both of them could have been involved in Jasper’s murder, and she could have seen that he was starting to crack. After all, you did.”

“You know,” Gideon said, “you’re starting to make a certain amount of sense.”

“Why, thank you. It’s about time.”

“Except…”

She sighed. “I knew it.”