Aaron Elkins: Murder In The Queen's armes

He took her hand from the glass and brushed the backs of her fingers over his lips. Her eyes glowed suddenly in the semidarkness of the restaurant, and he felt his own moisten. How extraordinary it was to be married to this marvelous woman. For a moment he held her hand against his cheek, then replaced it on the glass, recurving her fingers around the handle.

"Never mind how much I love you," he said, "I’m not about to encourage complacency. Anyway, all I intend to do when we get to Charmouth is to pay an hour’s visit to the site and say hello to Nate. That’s it."

"And after that we’re on our own? No more bones? Just cream teas and country walks and pub lunches?"

"No bones, no stones, and, thank God, no corpses. The skeleton detective is traveling incognito and nobody knows where to find him." He put down his nearly empty mug with a thump. "And now, if you think steak-and-kidney pie is good, wait till you try treacle!"

The walk from Charmouth to Stonebarrow Fell was so magnificent that Gideon almost went back to the Queen’s Armes Hotel to bring Julie along, but she had been adamant. He was making a professional visit, she had pointed out, and she wasn’t going to tag along to hang around like an ignoramus while everyone else was chattering on about Mycenaean transmigration and cultural diffusion.

"Besides," she’d said, "we’ve been married six days and I have yet to perform a single wifely function."

He grinned at her, but she laughed before he had a chance to say anything. "Fun things don’t count; I mean chores. Do you know, I have yet to do the laundry? We’ve been washing our stuff in sinks, and things are getting grubby. I want to go to an honest-to-goodness Laundromat."

She seemed to mean it, and Gideon had let it go at that. After lunch he had left her to her wifely chores and walked out Lower Sea Lane, past the bright, clean bed-and-breakfast houses and private cottages of the village, to the sandy beach. There, in its grander days, the River Char had worn a soft, lush U-shaped valley down to the sea between the towering coastal cliffs. High up on those cliffs, reachable by a gentle but relentlessly ascending path, was the prettily if redundantly named Stonebarrow Fell-Stonehill Hill, in modern English.

He crossed the wooden footbridge over the now-tiny River Char and headed up the green, sweeping slope at a good, swinging pace, enjoying the crisp ocean air and the welcome sensation of muscles working. It was a cool, cloudy day, with an immense fog bank a few miles offshore, but the air was clear, and the sea was green and silvered, lit by narrow columns of sunlight that slid over its surface like spotlights. To the east, behind him, was Char-mouth in its picture-book valley, and a mile beyond it, down the curving coast, there was Lyme Regis, compact and pretty, with its famous stone breakwater-the Cobb- snaking out into the ocean. Ahead of him the green, round-shouldered hill rose to the top of the fell, and a few miles farther on, the aptly named Golden Cap loomed, solid and squarish, over the Dorset coast.

Near the top of the hill, the path swung out to the very edge of dizzyingly sheer cliffs and Gideon instinctively moved back. He was a good four hundred feet above the beach, and the land under him was obviously unstable. The rim of the path had crumbled away in places, and even while he looked, a few pebbles dropped free to start a small, slithering landslide. Still, he paused to take in the scene. These were famous cliffs to anyone who knew something about fossils. It had been here at the base of this wall of blue lias clay, about half a mile beyond Charmouth, that ten-year-old Mary Anning had chanced upon a twenty-five-foot icthyosaurus skeleton and set the scientific world of 1811 on its ear. Which was just what Nate Marcus hoped to do with his "incontrovertible evidence" of a Mycenaean landing. Well, good luck to him, but Gideon would be very surprised if he had that evidence, or if it existed.

A hundred feet from the crest of the hill, where the path cut through a dense thicket of gorse, was the last of four stiles. Here a ten-foot wire fence had been put up, and on it was a stenciled sign: Archaeological excavation in progress. Visitors admitted only with prior authorization. Wessex Antiquarian Society. A heavy padlock on a thick chain made good the warning.

There was no information on how to get authorized, and he was thinking about climbing the fence and taking his chances with the wrath of the Wessex Antiquarian Society when a puff of wind carried a few syllables of barely audible conversation down from above, from the far side of the summit.

"Hi!" Gideon shouted. "Anybody home?"

Within a few seconds a husky, pink-faced young man came trotting down the path and up to the other side of the fence.

"Hiya," he said. "Want in?" He was an American in his mid twenties, thick-necked and slope-shouldered, with downy cheeks and a healthy farm boy’s smile. A scant blond mustache, painstakingly groomed, but obviously never going to amount to much, glistened on his upper lip.

"Yes," Gideon said. "I’m an anthropologist; an old friend of Dr. Marcus’s."

"Sure, no problem." From the pocket of his jeans he produced a key. Once Gideon was through the gate, the young man closed and locked it again, shaking the lock to test it.

"I’m Barry Fusco," he volunteered.

"Glad to know you, Barry. You’re a student at Gelden?"

"Uh-huh, all of us are. The workers, I mean: me, and Sandra, and Leon, and Randy. Dr. Marcus and Dr. Frawley are profs, of course." He flashed his engaging smile. "Not that they don’t work. I just meant that the ones who do the real work-you know, the peon work-are the students. Not that I’m complaining…" He carried on in this affable if muzzy manner while they climbed to the crest.

Once there, Gideon saw that the summit of Stonebarrow Fell was a grassy, rounded meadow that seemed to be at the very top of a world of rolling green downs and endless sea, with cliff and hillside falling away in every direction. The dig itself was about a hundred feet from the edge of the cliff, and consisted of two wedge-shaped pits about twelve feet across at their widest points, situated like two great pieces of a pie that had been quartered.

There were three people in the shallower wedge, which had been dug down about a foot and a half: a young man and woman about Barry’s age who were on their knees scraping at the pit floor (peon work?), and an older man- not Nate Marcus-who leaned over them, watching closely.

"You just want to watch?" Barry asked.

"For a few minutes."

While Barry climbed down into the trench and got to work, Gideon walked up to the single strand of rope that protected the excavation from a listless group of nine or ten schoolchildren and a glum-faced woman. The rope restraint was hardly necessary: the onlookers could not have been less enthusiastic.

And no wonder. Archaeological digs did not very often turn up bronze masks, or cups of gold, or ancient skulls with jewels in their eye sockets. Mostly, a dig consisted of hour after slow hour of scraping gingerly away at the earth. When something was uncovered, the chances were ninety-nine out of a hundred that it was fragmentary, nondescript, and muddy-brown-a piece of a sooty cooking pot, a two-inch segment of a bone awl, a discarded flake of waste flint or granite; all unrecognizable and of no conceivable interest to the lay observer. And even then, one did not just "dig up" a piece of a pot or a bone tool. One cleared the area around it millimeter by millimeter, photographing it, drawing it, measuring and recording it as one went. The basic tools were the trowel, the hoe, and the brush, not the pick and shovel. As spectator sport, it was far from riveting.

"Mrs. Kimberly, may we please go now?" a fat boy pleaded fretfully. "I’m awfully hungry."