Aaron Elkins - The Dark Place

Eckert’s remains were discovered during the continuing search for Claire Hornick, eighteen, of Tacoma, reported missing in the same area last week.

Gideon folded the paper and put it back on the low table. Abe picked it up and pretended to read it again, shaking his head and clucking. "Such a thing," he said. "Eight or nine feet tall, hah? Oy, oy, oy." He was practically singing. "Like a gorilla, yet." He laughed outright. "God forbid, you really said this?"

"Well, they got the vertebra wrong, as you know. It was T-7, not C-7. And I’m afraid they were very much mistaken about the ‘highly paid.’ Other than that, they were pretty accurate, I’m sorry to say. I’m going to have a heck of a time living this down at Northern Cal."

Abe patted his knee. "Live and learn," he said. "Come on, time to eat. Bertha said six o’clock."

Bertha was Abe’s unmarried, fifty-year-old daughter, who had lived all her life in the shadow of her brilliant father. She had gotten an M.A. in anthropology and had taught for a while in a community college but had long ago settled with apparent complacency into the role of his housekeeper. She was a superb cook and had prepared a luscious dinner of boeuf a la mode (pot roast after all, but what a pot roast!) with broiled tomatoes and buttered, homemade noodles.

As usual, talk of anthropology ceased over the meal, and the three of them chatted like the old friends they were of past times and old acquaintances. Bertha and Abe frequently used Yiddish expressions which Abe would laboriously, and for the most part unnecessarily, explain to Gideon.

As soon as Bertha cleared the dishes and went to get coffee, Abe said, "Listen, I want to talk to you about this Bigfoot business."

"Abe," Gideon said, "I was quoted out of context; you know that. I don’t really-"

"I know, I know." His thin hand fluttered dismissively. "You know a Professor Chace from Berkeley?"

"An anthropologist? No."

"You heard of Roy Linger?"

Gideon shook his head.

"You never heard of Roy Linger?"

"Abe, if you have a point to make, I wish-"

"All right, hold your horses, don’t get excited. This Roy Linger is a famous explorer, a hunter, a rich man. In textiles or something-"

"Your old line."

Abe looked confused for a moment, then laughed delightedly, slapping his hand on the table. "You’re right. Maybe his father had the next pushcart! Anyway, this Linger, he’s very active in the Sasquatch Society; always making expeditions to go off in the mountains to find Bigfoot."

"Has he had any luck?" Gideon asked dryly.

Abe waved his finger under Gideon’s nose. "Don’t be so smart, mister. You’re a young man yet; you got a lot to learn. Listen, this E. L. Chace from Berkeley, he’s supposed to be the number one expert on Bigfoot; he’s all the time talking in some seminar, or on the television. Wrote a couple of books. You sure you never heard of him?"

Bertha came in with the coffee but stood politely in the doorway, holding the tray while her father continued.

"So this Professor Chace, yesterday he gave a lecture in Seattle, and he’s staying tonight with his old friend Mr. Roy Linger in Port Townsend. And guess what? He reads that wonderful article about you, and he wants to meet you. So this Mr. Roy Linger calls the university to see if they know where you are, and they refer him to me, and so on and so forth."

"I hope," Gideon said, "that you’re not about to tell me that you’ve invited him here. Abe, I really don’t want to meet the number one expert on Bigfoot."

"Certainly not. Of course not." He looked over his shoulder. "Bertha, don’t just stand there. Bring in the coffee."

She poured the coffee, a rich, black Italian roast, into tiny green and white cups that Gideon had once sent as gifts from Sicily. Abe sucked in half a cupful with a smack of the lips.

"Certainly not," he said again. "Would I invite him here without asking you first? Hah?"

"I apologize," Gideon said somewhat dubiously, sniffing the coffee and taking a small sip. "I jumped to conclusions."

"You certainly did." Abe swallowed the rest of his coffee. "No. I told him we would go there… Bertha, what time is it?"

She twisted to look behind her at the wall clock he could have seen merely by looking up. "Eight-thirty."

"In three quarters of an hour."

"Go where?" Gideon said.

"To Port Townsend, to Linger’s house. For after-dinner brandies. Very fancy."

Gideon put down his coffee cup and rotated it slowly, between thumb and forefinger, in its saucer. "Abe, you don’t give any credence to the Bigfoot stories, do you?"

"No, but I don’t rule it out either. It seems crazy to me, but maybe I don’t know everything."

"I did check those prints near Quinault, you know. They were obvious fakes, very amateurish."

"And if you found some fake human footprints, that proves there’s no such thing as human beings?"

"I know, but there’s so much junk written about Bigfoot, so much charlatanism and plain bad science… I just don’t want to get involved in it."

"Look," Abe said gently, "a man who’s written books about it, a professor at a big university, I’m willing to give him a little of my time. Maybe I’ll learn something."

Gideon smiled and turned to Bertha. "How old is this man now?"

"Seventy-five years young last July."

"Don’t patronize, goddamn it," Abe said testily.

"Seventy-five and still giving me lessons in open-mindedness."

"That goes for you, too," Abe snapped. "You’re coming or you’re not coming?"

"Okay, let’s go," said Gideon, still smiling. "But I’m warning you, I’m going to take some convincing."

Abe brightened immediately. "Fair enough. Come, give a listen, keep an open mind. Unless you got some other answers?"

"Answers?"

"To how this Eckert guy got a spear stuck through his T-7. If not a nine-foot gorilla, what was it? Bertha, where’s my black shoes with the buckles that don’t need shoelaces?"

Roy Linger and Port Townsend were made for each other; a pair of handsome, elegant anachronisms only faintly gone to seed. The town, especially the part on the hill, would not have been out of place a hundred years before. The houses were all Victorian, most of them modest, but many with French mansard roofs, gabled cupolas, and widows’ walks that looked far out over Admiralty Inlet and Port Townsend Bay.

Linger himself was pure F. Rider Haggard, an extraordinarily good-looking, silver-haired man in bush jacket and cream-colored ascot.

"Professor Goldstein?" he said in a polished Bostonian accent. He pronounced it the German way: Goldshtine. "Professor Oliver? How good of you to come."

He led them through a long entryway, the walls of which were covered with mounted heads of tigers, leopards, deer, ibex, and animals Gideon couldn’t name. Below each head was a small gold plaque. Gideon managed to read one, under an open-mouthed tiger’s head, as they walked by: Bihar, May 7, 1957, 440 lbs.

The living room, down two carpeted steps, was completely modern, with a huge, rectangular fieldstone fireplace in the middle, rising twenty feet to the canted ceiling. The carpet was a pale rose, most of the furniture white.

Linger paused, smiling, at the entrance. "I’d like you to meet my good friend Professor Earl Chace."

In a deeply upholstered white couch sat a large, beefy, smiling man in a three-piece peach-colored suit that might have been chosen to go with the rose and white and gray of the room.

"A pink suit?" Abe murmured in Gideon’s ear. "Already I don’t like him."

Chace strode forward to greet them, hand extended. "Professor Goldstein?" (He said Goldsteen.) "Professor Oliver? I’m truly glad to meet you, truly privileged."