Aaron Elkins - The Dark Place

Gideon sighed happily. There was still almost a month of this before heading back to the teaching routine at Northern Cal. And tomorrow morning he’d be driving back down to Lake Quinault, not to look into some musty, ancient murder, but to see Julie. If the investigation was still going on, they’d drive elsewhere to be away from it; to the beach, perhaps to Kalaloch or La Push.

With three easy, powerful strides he clambered up the old, warped planking that he had dragged up to serve as a ramp to the clifftop. As always, the scene at the top startled him momentarily. It was a constant source of surprise that ten feet above this marvelous, seemingly isolated site in the side of a beach cliff was Dungeness with its wide, carefully tended lawns and flowerbeds, its big homes and sedate cottage motels.

He walked across Marine Drive directly onto the close-cropped lawn of Bayview Cottages, five tidy, gray-shingled little houses with white trim that looked as if they might have been transported whole from the coast of Maine. All were identical except for little rustic signs over the porches. Seagull Cottage, said Gideon’s.

Inside, he picked up the telephone and dialed a Sequim number.

"Hello, Bertha," he said. "Is Abe there?"

A few seconds later, an old man’s voice, thin but full of energy, said, "Hello, Gideon, this is you?"

Gideon smiled. Abe Goldstein had been born in a ghetto near Minsk and had fled to the United States at the age of seventeen, speaking no English, having no money, and possessing no marketable skills. He had peddled thread and ribbons from a pushcart on Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn and gone to night school to learn English. In six years he had graduated from the City College of New York, and four years later, in 1934, he had a Ph. D. in anthropology from Columbia University. For twenty years he’d taught at Columbia, then gone to the University of Wisconsin for another twenty, where he’d been Gideon’s professor. He’d finished his teaching career with a few distinguished years at the University of Washington.

Almost sixty years in America, most of it spent as an eminent scholar of worldwide repute, and he still spoke like an immigrant ribbon peddler. Most of the time, anyway; the accent varied noticeably. More than one academic adversary had suggested it was a studied eccentricity, and Gideon, no adversary, was inclined to agree. If ever there was a studied eccentric, it was Abraham Irving Goldstein.

"Yes, Abe," he said, "this is me."

"So how is the dig?"

"So how should it be?"

"Of an old man you shouldn’t make fun. So tell me."

"I had a great day, Abe. That’s why I called. Uncovered a juvenile humerus today, eleven, twelve years old, from stratum four. So it looks like it was a family habitat. Also a piece of wood; I’m not sure what. Rectangular, two, three inches wide, with a hole at one end. About a foot long, unless we only have part of it. It’s pretty rotten-needs to be set in plaster of Paris in situ."

"Wonderful. So."

Gideon waited. The "so" said that something besides the dig was on Abe’s mind.

"Listen, Gideon, you didn’t happen to see yesterday’s Chronicle?"

"No, what’s in it?"

"All about you is what’s in it. You want to hear?"

"I don’t know. You’ve got me worried. You sound a little too happy about it."

Abe’s delighted cackle, strong and hearty, came over the wire, and Gideon, smiling to himself, poured some Teacher’s into a jelly glass from the cupboard. He couldn’t reach ice or water without putting down the telephone, so he stood there sipping it neat, one elbow on the television set atop the cupboard.

"What’s it about, Abe? That interview in Quinault?"

"You bet it is. Give a listen. First the headline. You ready?" There was some theatrical throat clearing, then: "Quote. Unknown Creature Stalks Quinault. Could Be Bigfoot, Says Noted Skeleton Detective Gideon Oliver. End quote."

"Oh, boy," Gideon said and sighed, sinking into a plastic armchair with the drink and the telephone.

"Gideon, tell me, what’s a skeleton detective, something new? This I never heard of."

"Come on, Abe, let’s hear the rest." He kept his voice irked to please Abe, but he was more amused than annoyed. He understood now what Julie had been talking about.

"Believe me, even better it gets. But look, what are you doing tonight? Why don’t you come over to Twilight Harbor Estates? You can read it yourself, and Bertha’s got already a pot roast on the stove. We’ll drink a bottle beer, have a nice glass tea. And then…"

That singsong "and then" meant that something besides pot roast was cooking. Not that there would be a pot roast or bottle of beer at Professor Emeritus Abraham Goldstein’s house. The dialect remained, but the street peddler’s tastes were long gone.

"And then what, Abe?"

" Nu, so come on over, you’ll see. What else better you got to do? Come on, make happy an old man’s heart."

Gideon laughed. The accent was growing more atrocious by the second. "Okay," he said, "but I have to clean up first. May I bring something?"

"A bottle of red wine would be fine, a Cabernet, but California, not Washington. French I wouldn’t ask."

"What happened to the bottle beer and the glass tea?"

"For me, good enough, but you’re a guest; I got to treat you right. Hurry up, it’s depressing here at the old folks’ home."

Abe lived neither at Twilight Harbor Estates nor at an old people’s home. He lived in SunLand, a peaceful, wooded community of sumptuous homes grouped around a golf course on which he never played. SunLand, as the name implied, lay in the famed rain shadow of the Olympics. Storms moving in from the Pacific would drop most of their moisture on the windward slope of the mountain range, leaving only about fifteen inches a year to fall in the "banana belt" on the other side. Thirty-five miles away the annual rainfall might be fifteen feet.

Abe complained frequently that there was too little excitement and too many sun-seeking old people (most of whom were decades younger than he), but Gideon knew that Abe had found his earthly paradise there in the green, soft hills between Sequim and Dungeness.

Abe met him at the door. "Welcome to Restful Acres," he said. "Come in the study." He led the way, his soft old slippers whispering over the gleaming hardwood floor. With a sigh he eased himself into one of two leather armchairs in front of a wall filled with photographs of an unbelievably young Abraham Goldstein peering at a skull in Kenya, surrounded by shy Pygmies in the Congo, crawling out of an Aleutian igloo, and arm-in-arm with a grinning, frizzled-haired Melanesian with a bone through his nose and Abe’s own pith helmet perched atop his head.

At seventy-five, the old man in the chair had aged better than most. He was arthritic and terribly frail now, but he hadn’t put on weight and was easily recognizable as the young man in the photographs. The kinky mat of black hair had turned white without thinning, and Abe wore it in an outrageous, flamboyant Afro. The eyes were still playful and sprightly, if anything enhanced by the papery wrinkles that nearly buried them.

"Mix yourself a drink," he said, "and one for me, too."

"What would you like," Gideon asked, "a glass seltzer? A cup prune juice?"

"Don’t be funny. Give me a Chivas, but light. The old liver ain’t what it was."

Gideon mixed two Scotch-and-waters and sat down next to Abe. Then he picked up the copy of the Chronicle on the coffee table and followed Abe’s jabbing finger to the article on the second page.

UNKNOWN CREATURE STALKS QUINAULT. COULD BE BIGFOOT, SAYS NOTED SKELETON DETECTIVE GIDEON OLIVER

by Nathaniel Hood

QUINAULT-Experts say that a charred skeleton found buried in the Quinault Valley is that of Norris Eckert, twenty-nine, one of two hikers who disappeared there in 1976. Physical anthropologist Gideon Oliver, a highly paid consultant to the FBI, said that Eckert had apparently been killed by a large bone spear point which was found still imbedded in the skeleton’s backbone, at the seventh cervical vertebra. "It would take superhuman strength to drive that bone point in so deeply," the California scientist said. When questioned about what sort of creature might have such strength, Oliver said, "I suppose Bigfoot could have done it," and further described the creature as "eight or nine feet tall and built like a gorilla."