Aaron Elkins - The Dark Place

The head came up and Gideon saw that the man wore a knit, dark blue watch cap pulled tightly down over a long, lean-fleshed head. He was even older than Gideon had thought, more than ninety, with waxed-paper skin stretched painfully over a large-boned skeletal face, and purplish-brown discolorations on his cheeks. Astigmatic and winking, he looked emptily about, everywhere but at Gideon.

Senile, Gideon thought, his heart sinking further. "Mr. Pringle?" He spoke gently. If the old man were frightened or failed to comprehend, he would go. "My name is Gideon Oliver…"

"Ah, there you are," said the man in a thin, cheerful voice, fixing a pair of astonishingly lucid blue eyes on him. "The old eyes are getting a bit queer these days. Not what they used to be."

Gideon saw, as if by the light of those luminous eyes, that he had a tiny white moustache, pencil-thin and meticulously trimmed, midway between his long nose and thin gray lips, with plenty of pale skin showing all around it. Cheered by the sight of that absurdly sprightly ornament on the ancient face, Gideon smiled. "Mr. Minor of the FBI told me about your collection. I wondered if you might show it to me."

The man’s eyes lit up even more. "With the greatest of pleasure," he said, and began to rise, gripping a cane with one hand and the shaky arm of his folding chair with the other. He was, Gideon realized, a very tall, rawboned man, and he had a lot of difficulty getting out of the chair. Taking his arm to help him to an unsteady balance, Gideon was struck by the freshly laundered smell of his woolen shirt. There was nothing slovenly about him.

The old man laughed. "Got going too fast. Wouldn’t have had any trouble if I’d gotten myself organized first."

The front door opened into the kitchen, and Pringle shuffled slowly onto the ancient linoleum, concentrating heavily on his balance, carefully predetermining each spot on which the thick rubber tip of his cane would come down.

"Forgive the hat," he said over his shoulder. "Had an operation or two, and the surgeon did a little excavating up there. Are you with the FBI, too, Mr. Oliver?" His large hand groped for support at the old, white-painted chairs, the table, anything within reach.

"No, I’m an anthropologist."

"Anthropologist? Well, I’m really delighted. May I offer you a cup of tea?"

"No, thank you," Gideon said, not even wanting to think about watching him try to manipulate kettle and cups at the old-fashioned gas range.

The living room was fusty and stale, with brown, flowered linoleum nearly as worn as that in the kitchen, but the collection was neatly housed in three clean, glass-fronted cases of mahogany. There were bottles and belt buckles and old nails, but there were also a great many Indian artifacts.

Gideon examined the three bone spear points at length. All were cut with the same technique and in the same shape as the two he’d already seen.

"Do you remember when you found these, Mr. Pringle?"

"The one you’re holding in 1950. That one, in 1934 or 1935. And this…let’s see, it was my first summer here. I was twenty-five, so that would make it 1913," he said without any apparent pause for calculating.

"And all from around here?"

Pringle nodded. "The one you’ve got was way up along the east fork of the Quinault-of course, there wasn’t much of a trail then-and a little ways up one of the creeks that run down from Chimney Peak."

"Pyrites Creek?"

Pringle was surprised. "Why, yes, that’s right, about a mile up, on the east bank."

Nineteen thirty-four. Did that mean the ledge had been inhabited for nearly fifty years? It seemed probable. At least fifty years. "And the other points?"

"The other old one also came from around Chimney Peak, but the one in 1950, that was near Finley Creek. Here, let me show you on the map."

"That’s not necessary," Gideon said quickly as Pringle began to gather his gangling, tottery legs under him.

"No, no, it’s quite all right. It’s a question of preparation and organization, you see." Midway through preparing and organizing, when he had gotten his lanky frame to the edge of the chair and was about to make the final effort, he looked at Gideon with those surprising, brilliant eyes and smiled. "My," he said, "everything takes a long time when you’re old."

When Pringle had meticulously pointed out the precise locations, Gideon said, "You know, nobody seems to believe there are Indians in the rain forest, Mr. Pringle. How would you account for the points?"

"Of course there are Indians. When I first came out, it was common knowledge. They’d come out at night and steal things from the cabins. Naturally, that was before it became a national park. All the cabins are gone now. But in those days, lots of people saw them. I saw them myself."

"You saw them?"

"Certainly. I talked to them, too, or at least we made noises at each other. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a cup of tea after all? It’s an interesting story, I believe."

There was already water in the kettle, and Pringle, moving slowly and carefully, put it up to boil and produced from a cupboard a tin of Earl Grey tea bags. They sat at a kitchen table with a surface that was spongy from many paintings, the last one green, and pushed aside a pile of newspapers to make room for themselves.

"I generally use one bag for two cups," Pringle said. "Is that all right? The cups are quite clean."

"That’s fine," said Gideon. There were, he saw, only two bags left.

Pringle paused with his long fingers in the tin. "If you want a whole tea bag, just say so. No trouble at all."

"No, this is fine. I don’t like it too strong." He tasted the watery tea. "This is delicious."

"Do you like it, really?" Pringle asked. "It’s the bergamot that gives it the flavor, you know." He drank some with ponderous care, steadying the cup in both enormous, knobby hands, and reaching for it with his lips as it neared his mouth. Then he put the cup down, sighed, and closed his eyes. With the clear, cornflower-blue irises hidden, the face was suddenly cadaverous, a death mask.

"It would have been 1913," he said suddenly in his quavery tone, with his eyes still closed. "I was pretty young."

It was late April of a long, wet winter, and Big Herb Pringle was twenty-five then, six-feet-six, two hundred forty pounds, a powerful, red-haired ox of a man who didn’t have to worry about dribbling when he drank his tea. He’d already established himself as a schoolteacher in Olympia, and three years before, he and his father had built the hunting cabin on Canoe Creek with their own hands, cutting the trees down, shaping the logs, all of it.

It must have been a weekend, because that was about the only time Herb was able to get away from Olympia. He was coming back with some squirrel on his belt and his rifle on his shoulder when he heard a noise from the cabin, and he stepped quickly into the trees to watch.

Three Indians climbed out of the cabin’s single window, one after another. When Herb stepped from behind a tree with his rifle, they stopped, thunderstruck, and then docilely lined up against the cabin, shaking and looking at the ground.

There was an old man who had taken a shabby coat and a rusty, worn-out saw blade from the cabin, a filthy woman who might have been twenty or fifty wearing two of his old jumpers and just about nothing else, and a boy of no more than eight with a horribly crippled left foot.

"Luther Yacker did that," Pringle said, suddenly opening his bright eyes. "The year before. He’d shot at a woman and a child rifling his cabin one night. There were three or four cabins built on the creek, you see, and I remember I grabbed my rifle and ran over when I heard the shooting. The woman was lying there dead. Luther was all excited and telling Billy Mann and Si Keeler about it." Pringle sat pursing his lips and blinking at the table. "I can remember just what he said. He said he’d hit the papoose, too, and the little bastard was going to have a hard time finding all his toes. He was really excited, trying to find the bloodstains with a lantern so he could show us.