Aaron Elkins: The Dark Place

Julie finished her sandwich and crumpled up the waxed paper and threw it into a wastepaper basket near the desk. She took the lid off her Styrofoam cup of coffee and drank. "It’s funny, you discuss someone’s theories and ideas for ten weeks almost as if you were arguing with him personally, but you never wonder what he looks like, or think of him as human."

John laughed. "Oh, he’s human, all right. On the quirky side, in fact."

John Lau’s laugh was the kind that made other people join in, and Julie laughed, too. "How so?"

"Well, he might seem a little prickly at first, and he talks like a professor most of the time, and his head’s usually in the clouds somewhere. One time I watched him spend twenty minutes looking for a notebook that was tucked under his arm." He laughed again, tilted his head back, and tapped the last crumbs of potato chip into his mouth. "He’s a funny guy, kind of a quick temper, but at the same time he’s, I don’t know, gentle. You’ll see."

"He sounds fascinating."

"Yes," John said, nodding, thinking back to other times. "He’s the kind of guy who’s liable to go bonkers at little things, but in a crisis, when the chips are really down, there’s no one I’d rather have around. And I know what I’m talking about."

Julie sipped her coffee quietly, smiling at the faraway look in the agent’s eyes. "It sounds like you like him a lot," she said softly.

"Yeah, I like him."

The look left his eyes abruptly, almost with embarrassment. He clapped the potato chip bag into a crumpled ball and tossed it into the basket. "You’re not going to leave that doughnut, are you?"

From the air the lake was beautiful, deep blue in the warm sunlight, and dotted with white sailboats. Their occupants waved as the pilot dropped the little Cessna 210 smoothly toward the water, its engine rackety and echoing. The dense woods that began at the shore and stretched many miles to the northwest were the rain forest, Gideon knew. He studied them curiously, just a little disappointed to find them pleasant and cool-looking, not in the least sinister.

The plane landed on the water not far from what he knew must be Lake Quinault Lodge, a set of big, rambling buildings set comfortably at the back of a huge, lush lawn that sloped down a good two hundred feet to the lakeshore. Turning, the blue and white Cessna, rocking gently in its own wake, taxied slowly toward the dock at the foot of the lawn.

He spotted John at once among the two dozen people lounging on the dock. One of the many things he enjoyed about him was how genuinely pleased the big Hawaiian always seemed to see him and there he was, steady and solid-looking in his denim shirt and jeans, grinning happily at Gideon through the airplane window.

When Gideon jumped down from the Cessna’s doorway, there were a few moments of handshaking and back-clapping, and finally a powerful hug. Not for the first time, it occurred to him that of all the men he knew, John Lau was the only one he could comfortably and unselfconsciously embrace.

With a final thump on Gideon’s shoulder, John turned to a black-haired woman of about thirty in the gray shirt and olive pants of the National Park Service. "This is Julie Tendler. She’s the chief ranger. Been a hell of a lot of help."

"Hi, Professor," she said. "I really enjoyed your book. I was an anthro minor," she added by way of explanation.

"I’m glad you liked it," he said with the tolerant smile of a gracious celebrity. Actually, he was delighted. As the author of A Structuro-Functional Approach to Pleistocene Hominid Phylogeny, he’d yet to become jaded by the approbation of the masses.

Gideon swung his suit bag over his shoulder and they walked up the sloping lawn to the main hotel building. On the way, John explained about the three missing persons. Two had disappeared six years before on the then new but since closed Matheny trail between the Queets and Quinault rain forests. The third, Claire Hornick, had vanished only a few days ago, about eight miles from there. The search for her had turned up the bones, and that’s when the FBI had been called in.

Gideon checked into the lodge and left his bag at the registration desk. They walked across the grand old lobby with its ancient, wicker furniture, old-fashioned and comfortable.

"I haven’t seen wicker writing desks in an American hotel for a long time," Gideon said. "Or a parrot in the lobby."

"Yes," Julie said, "it’s a great old place."

John held open the door, and Gideon awkwardly bowed Julie through, not at all sure if she would like the gesture. She went through with a pleasant smile, and they stepped out into the town of Quinault. It was a shock. They had entered the hotel building from a spacious, sunny lawn peopled with sunbathers and laughing volleyball players, and with ten square miles of open lake at their backs. When they walked out through the rear entrance, no more than forty feet away, they stepped into a sunless shadowy world of almost solid green, hushed and perceptibly cooler and more moist than the lawn.

The "town," invisible from the air, consisted of several buildings out of the nineteenth century along either side of a narrow road. On the right was an old post office and a weathered, rustic general store-"Lake Quinault Merc," the sign said-with a wooden porch complete with an old dog sprawled drowsily on it. On the left was the Quinault Ranger Station, a group of small frame houses. Everything was dwarfed and hemmed in by towering walls of cedar and spruce, so tall and close together that the sky was visible only as a narrow slit high above the road. The road itself gave the illusion of being cut off at either end by more tree walls, and the overall effect was like being at the bottom of a sunken corridor, a narrow, gravelike canyon cut deep into the living mass of trees.

It was in its own way extraordinarily beautiful, but the impact on Gideon, used to the scrub oak and open hillsides of California, was so oppressive that he unconsciously moved his hand to his already open collar to get more air.

"This is fascinating," he said. "I’ve never been in a rain forest before."

Julie laughed. "Oh, this isn’t the rain forest," she said, her eyes looking down the road beyond the barrier of trees. "The rain forest’s in there. This is just regular woods."

The ranger station complex was better. The growth had been cut away to provide an open space, probably by some early, claustrophobic chief ranger, and Gideon breathed more easily as he stepped into it.

In the workroom at the rear of the main building, the burials were neatly arranged on a scarred oak table, each one consisting of a pitifully few fragments in front of a numbered paper bag. Four of the groupings sat next to frayed, soiled baskets with red and black designs. On the table, in front of the one chair with arms, were the magnifying glass and calipers that Gideon had requested on the telephone.

Gideon quickly identified five of the six, including all those that had been in baskets, as Indian burials that had been in the ground at least twenty years.

John nodded disappointedly. "That’s what Fenster told us."

"I don’t think there’s any doubt about it," Gideon said. "The baskets, the fact that the bodies were cremated, the fact that some of them have been buried a lot longer than others-a hundred years at least, I’d say, for that one there-it all suggests an old, established burial ground."

Julie was frowning. "I don’t know. I think I know the history of this rain forest as well as anyone does, and I never heard of any Indians who ever lived here. And I don’t remember cremated burials in baskets being very common among North American Indians."

"Maybe not. I’m not an ethnologist, but I know the practice exists, or existed. Some of the central California peoples used to do it."