Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 151, Nos. 1 & 2. Whole Nos. 916 & 917, January/February 2018

There Are No Elephants in Peru by Margaret Maron

In June 2017 Grand Central Publishing brought out what MWA Grand Master Margaret Maron has said is her last novel. Entitled Take Out, it earned starred reviews from both PW and Library Journal, the latter saying that the book “...ends her distinguished writing career on a high note. Her many fans will enjoy this while wiping away tears of farewell.” No tears for fans of her short stories, however, for she tells us there will be more.

June 1977

Victoria Hoyt Gardner was as delicate as her china: very thin, very old, very expensive.

Seated in a massive carved armchair beneath the head of a snarling jaguar, she poured tea from an antique silver pot and said, “You shatter all my preconceptions, Dr. Webster. I expected an anthropologist as old and dried up as myself and here you are so young and pretty.”

Her face had appeared in too many society pages and her family was too much a part of Carlisle College’s history for me not to have an accurate impression of her.

“My doctorate’s in archaeology,” I said as I took the fragile cup she offered.

Biff Oliphant gave me a glare that was the visual equivalent of a sharp kick to the shins. “Archaeology, anthropology, all those — ologies confuse me too,” he chuckled.

Biff is Vice President of Institutional Advancement. He is not Carlisle College’s gift to academia, but he is very good at what he does, which is getting blood from turnips. Or, as Biff himself describes it, his job is to seek out wealthy individuals and corporations and “present them with opportunities for giving.”

Ever since Mrs. Gardner returned to the area last autumn and opened up the old Hoyt mansion that abuts the campus, Biff has tried to interest her in renewing her family’s past financial ties to the college, a nondenominational school here in Raleigh. From where we sat, we could look out through French doors to the 1947 Hoyt Golf Course given by her father. Beyond are the 1898 Hoyt Chapel and a 1923 Hoyt Dormitory, both endowed by her grandfather. Biff had burst into my office yesterday afternoon almost giddy with excitement because he thought Mrs. Gardner might donate a Hoyt-Gardner wing to the library.

Ordinarily, he considers me too socially unreliable to be taken along on a fund-raising mission, but Mrs. Gardner had specifically asked for someone in anthropology, which is how I came to be sipping tea in this wood-paneled hall surrounded by the stuffed heads of many animals now on the world’s endangered-species list.

“Carlisle College isn’t large enough to support separate departments, so anthropology and archaeology are lumped together in the history department and I get to teach both,” I explained.

“Dr. Webster is too modest,” Biff said heartily. “She’s an authority on Aztecs and her courses always close out. Very popular.”

Aztecs are Johnny-come-latelies compared to the Olmecs, my particular specialty, but Biff muddles all pre-Columbian cultures and I’ve quit being outraged by administrative ignorance. Small private colleges usually teeter too near the edge of financial insolvency to afford the luxury of intellectual administrators and Carlisle was no exception to this general rule. After all, someone has to raise money for salaries, Xerox machines, and red tape.

While the pleasantries continued, I studied our hostess’s face.

Victoria Hoyt Gardner had been a great beauty in her youth. I’d stopped by the library that morning to read up on her family’s history and in one of the yearbooks I’d found a grisly picture of her on safari with her grandfather.

Her thick brown hair and a rather hatchet-shaped nose had combined with enormous brown eyes to give her face an exotic symmetry that must have been bewitching. She wore khaki pants and shirt in the photograph and her booted foot rested carelessly upon the head of a dead lion.

Three lionesses and several slaughtered gazelles were arranged around the girl, and her grandfather, in a pith helmet, leaned upon his gun and beamed at her across the carnage. Her “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” essays must have turned this all-female college on its ear before she dropped out.

Good bones always remain even after the skin that covers them grows slack and wrinkled, and Mrs. Gardner was now well past seventy. She was thin almost to emaciation, with long bony fingers and long narrow feet, but her face still held the ravaged remains of that oddly compelling beauty. Her once-brown hair was clipped short now and covered her skull like a helmet of white egret feathers, contrasting with skin that seemed permanently tanned from her South American days.

In the mid twenties, she had married a famous playboy-sportsman and for several years they had amused themselves by leading safaris across the Peruvian Andes until Gerald Gardner disappeared one night while tracking a wounded jaguar. It was thought that the animal’s mate had ambushed him and dragged him off into the underbrush, never to be found.

This was in the late thirties, around the time Mrs. Gardner discovered that the back pains she’d ignored for a couple of years were caused by tuberculosis of the spine.

After the war, she had sold her cocoa plantation, parked her own trophies and keepsakes with her grandfather’s collection here on the Hoyt grounds, and then spent the next thirty years in and out of hospitals and health spas all over the world, seeking first a cure for her disintegrating spine and, finally, simple cessation from pain.

It was assumed that she had come home to die.

She seemed well enough that spring afternoon, though, even stylish in a high-necked dress of coral linen. Her only piece of jewelry was a chain of beaten gold with some sort of primitive bronze medallion.

She saw my curious glance and slipped it from the chain so I could hold it.

“A fertility totem?” I asked, examining the heavy-breasted figure engraved on the reverse.

Her dark eyes became veiled. “Did no good, I’m afraid. I’m the last Hoyt. Last Gardner too, for that matter. Do you have children, Dr. Webster?”

“A little girl,” I said. “She’s three.”

Biff broke in on what he considered an awkward moment. Even though we’re almost ten years past Woodstock and Carlisle College has moved with the times, this is the Bible Belt and he still finds it a bit uncomfortable to acknowledge a faculty member who’s had a child out of wedlock.

Me.

Everyone knows about Jenny. I certainly hadn’t kept her in a closet, but Biff launched a discourse that tactfully maneuvered Mrs. Gardner back to her plans for Carlisle.

“It’s my grandfather’s collection,” she said. “I want to create a museum in his memory.”

Although her father had hunted occasionally, his real killings were on Wall Street, where he had parlayed a comfortable family fortune into enormous wealth. It was his father, Mrs. Gardner’s grandfather, who had manfully gunned for big game from the Arctic to the Argentine with a few side trips to Africa and Asia thrown in for variety. In addition to the animal heads in this room, he often stumbled upon the ruins of ancient cultures and, with the indiscriminate pack-rat acquisitiveness of the nineteenth century, he had simply carted it all home with him.

He shot alligators in the Florida swamps and brought back Seminole pottery; he tracked mountain lions in the Rockies and discovered flint projectile points beside the remains of an imperial mammoth. Returning from an expedition to bag polar bears near the Arctic Circle, he had stopped off long enough in the Pacific Northwest to collect three Chinook totem poles.

“The barn is crammed to the rafters,” said Mrs. Gardner. “This house has been standing a hundred and sixty years and architects assure me there’s no reason it can’t last another two hundred. I propose to leave it and the grounds and a sizeable endowment to Carlisle College.”

On the couch beside me, Biff tried not to quiver.

“The outbuildings can be torn down, but the house will become a museum. My grandfather’s discoveries will form the core collection and for that, Dr. Webster, I need an expert.”

“Me? But I’m an archaeologist,” I repeated. “I know absolutely nothing about setting up a museum or—”

She brushed aside my objections with the airy wave of wealth. “Architects will supervise the physical conversions and the endowment will eventually salary a curatorial staff, but that comes later. First, someone must go through everything crate by crate, to inventory and evaluate. I hope that will be you, Dr. Webster.”

She shifted her small frame and pain shadowed her face even though the capacious chair was heaped with cushions.

From nowhere, a stocky, dark-skinned woman with straight blue-black hair glided across the room. I had heard that Mrs. Gardner’s personal companion was from the Peruvian Andes, but this was the first time I’d seen her. She gently repositioned the pillows behind Mrs. Gardner’s back and disappeared as silently as she had come.

Biff seemed not to have noticed. Visions of acquiring the Hoyt property for Carlisle had dazzled his eyes.

“Isn’t it lucky, Ellen, that you decided not to go to Mexico this summer?” he exclaimed.

“Very,” I answered coldly.

My old mentor from the university had pulled several strings so that I’d be offered the assistant directorship of an important excavation in Guerrero this summer, but I’d had to turn it down.

Academically, it was a brilliant opportunity. The pay, however, would barely cover my expenses down and back and I desperately needed more money. Dahl Mackey’s the best lawyer around, but very expensive. So instead of participating in what looked like the most promising Olmec discoveries in years, I’d contracted to teach summer school at Carlisle. Two classes a day, I reminded Biff.

“Someone else can teach them,” he said.

Mrs. Gardner murmured that she would make it worth my while, and since the figure named was nearly three times what I’d make teaching, we shook hands on it.

Her hand in mine was like cool bone china.

When I got home that afternoon, Jenny and her sitter were squirting each other with water pistols. Naked except for a pair of Minnie Mouse underpants, Jenny ran barefooted across the grass and flung her wet arms around my knees.

“Dr. Bob bringed us some fish,” she announced.

“Brought us, you ungrammatical imp,” I said, dodging a blast from her water pistol.

Bob Carson’s a dentist who lives next door. Widowed now and nearing retirement, he loves to fish, but hates to scale and clean them. I grew up on a working farm that still slaughters its own pork, beef, and poultry, so gutting a few fish doesn’t faze me.

“He left them in a bucket on the porch, Dr. Webster,” said Gail. “They’re still alive.”

Gail’s one of four undergraduates who share Jenny’s care this semester during my working hours. They tidy up and throw things in the washer, but I’ve always made it clear that Jenny was the only reason they were hired.

The telephone rang as I finished cleaning the fish and my stomach knotted at the sound of my lawyer’s voice. I took a deep breath, prepared to hear the worst.

“Good news,” Dahl Mackey said briskly. “The judge agreed to the restraining order, so if Dr. Davis attempts to speak to you or Jenny before the hearing, he’ll be in contempt.”

Relief at winning the first skirmish over Jenny made me almost giddy.

Mrs. Gardner was being diplomatic when she called me young and pretty, but Jenny could pose for Gerber ads. While I don’t exactly stop clocks with my face or gross out the men with my body, people do tend to use tactful adjectives like “healthy” or “sturdy” to describe my build. Jenny has my fair hair and blue eyes, but she’ll be truly beautiful someday because she dipped into the genetic pool and came out with Aaron’s slender frame, sidelong smile, and devastating eyelashes.

Aaron is Aaron Davis. More properly, Dr. Aaron Davis, Ph.D.

He was an ambitious grad student still fumbling around for a thesis subject when we met four years ago at a dig in Mexico. One kiss behind the processing tent and I had gone right up in flames.

Friends tried to douse it. They said he was a user and a taker, but I wouldn’t listen. Our fiery summer passion burned into autumn — just long enough for him to finish outlining a doctoral thesis based on my original observations before he dumped me.

But not before I was pregnant with Jenny.

At first, in my hurt and bitterness, I considered an abortion. Then I got logical: I was twenty-eight, already tenured, and happily climbing the academic ladder. I might never marry, so why throw away this one sure chance at motherhood?

Until this spring, it had worked out beautifully. Friends were supportive and, when I was in class, responsible students looked after Jenny. Even summer digs were no problem. I simply bought an extra plane ticket for Jenny’s sitter and took them both along. My work was starting to be published in various scholarly journals and I honestly believed I was going to get it all.

Then Aaron showed up on my doorstep this spring.

He was teaching anthropology at the university here. Through the grapevine, I’d heard that he’d married the daughter of one of the trustees. I also heard that he wasn’t publishing. Perhaps it was professional jealousy or maybe his wife couldn’t conceive or maybe it was pure ego that made him think he could get away with it. I really didn’t care what his motives were.

All I knew was that once upon a time, I had given Aaron my love, my body, and my notebooks on Olmec culture. No way would I give him Jenny too.

“Unwed fathers have rights,” he said smugly.

“Like hell!” I’d snarled. “You don’t get rights without responsibility and you haven’t contributed a penny to Jenny’s upbringing. No judge in the world will give you any rights to her at this late date.”

“We’ll see. There’s no father figure in her life. I can give her paternal love and a full-time mother too.”

“Big deal,” I’d sneered inelegantly.

“It may be enough to get her for the summers,” he said. “A normal American summer in a two-parent home instead of being dragged off to a primitive camp in a backward region where she nearly died of dysentery.”

“I see your data’s as faulty as ever,” I answered. “Jenny had a light case of chicken pox last summer, not dysentery. And Acapulco’s hardly a backward region.”

Aaron flushed at the reference to flawed data. That was what had gotten his foundation grant withdrawn the year after we split up. Archaeology may seem a dry subject to outsiders, but those within the field care passionately about accuracy. Speculations and theories, when labeled as such, are allowed. Falsifying the evidence isn’t.

“Okay,” Aaron had snarled. “You want a fight? You’ve got it.”

He began legal action that week and I retained the very expensive Dahl Mackey, who warned me that I might indeed have to share Jenny’s custody.

“I’ll swear he’s not the father.”

“Unless a blood test excludes him, it’ll just be your word against his,” Mackey warned.

The hearing was scheduled for the end of summer, but Aaron had developed a nasty habit of showing up at the house while I was in class, bullying the sitters and confusing Jenny with talk of a new mommy and daddy.

At least the restraining order would keep him away for the time being.

I turned in my final grades a week later and the very next day met at the Hoyt barn with Mrs. Gardner and Eustis Hill, the handyman who had used a dolly to bring several crates into a large workshop area of the ground level where there was a stone sink and several long tables for spreading out my finds.

“This was my grandfather’s favorite place,” Mrs. Gardner said, stroking an enormous Kodiak bear that guarded the door with wicked claws and bared fangs. “He was an accomplished taxidermist and mounted his own kills.”

For a moment I was surprised that a young society girl would be exposed to the bloody reality of taxidermy, but then I decided it wasn’t that much different from my own upbringing on a working farm. No one had ever worried that my girlish sensibilities were being violated during the annual hog-killings or when I was sent out to chop off a chicken’s head, then clean it for Sunday dinner.

Mrs. Gardner lingered only long enough to show me where her grandfather’s journals were shelved before returning to the house. Her spine had so deteriorated that sitting was almost as painful as standing.

I was pleased to learn that William Pierson Hoyt had documented his hunting trips — the animals shot, the oddities collected. There were separate three-by-five-inch pocket notebooks for each year and while his entries weren’t as precise as I could have wished when he wrote about inanimate objects, they would help authenticate the provenance and geographical origin of the artifacts, a thing of crucial importance.

To use a simplistic example: If you should pick up a carved elephant’s tusk while rummaging in an East Indian antique shop, you’d have a nice souvenir of your trip. But if that elephant’s tusk came out of a preColumbian burial mound and you could document your discovery, you’d set off shock waves in the archaeological world. The earliest known elephant in our hemisphere arrived with a circus around the turn of the nineteenth century, so you’d go down in history as the first person to prove a definite link between the Old World and the New after the original inhabitants crossed over the Bering Strait, about thirty thousand years ago, give or take a few thousand. It is thought that Pacific currents could have swept Asians with later knowledge and later skills out to sea to fetch up on the coast of Ecuador or Peru, but it’s never been proven.

Eustis Hill and I spent the first few days shifting everything around by way of the large freight elevator in the center of the barn. Europe and Africa on the top floor with the Americas on the second.

If I couldn’t be in Mexico, I had to admit that cataloging William P. Hoyt’s collection was the next best thing. It was Christmas every morning with unexpected treasures in almost every crate.

Beefy, middle-aged Eustis was more phlegmatic. The only time he showed any real interest was when he pried the lid off a long box and said, “Is that a coffin?”

It was a battered blue-and-rose mummy case with faded hieroglyphics. I checked the journals and found an 1887 entry: Mummy case. Gift of the Khedive.

His pudgy face went pale when I lifted the lid. “Somebody’s still in it!”

“Don’t worry,” I said, smoothing the frayed linen wrapping. I am always moved by ancient human remains, moved and filled with awe by what those hands have touched, what those eyes have seen. “He’s two thousand years past hurting you.”

Before we carried it up to the third floor and set it in an out-of-the-way space, I adjusted the floodlights I’d brought in and took several black-and-white pictures with my 35mm camera. Supplementing the journals with a detailed photographic record would make the eventual curator’s job easier.

By the end of the week, the rough sorting was done and after that I mostly worked alone. Every few days, Eustis would haul several new crates down to the workshop area and move out the ones I’d catalogued and photographed.

The Mexican crates were interesting — some Toltec temple carvings and an almost perfect Mazapan bowl old William P. had found while gunning for cougars in the spring of 1892 — but nothing from my Olmec period.

Although I worked alone, the barn was not solitary confinement. Besides Eustis, there was Mrs. Powell, the housekeeper. Every morning around ten, she would bring me a fresh thermos of hot coffee and she often stayed to gossip while I drank the first cup.

From her I learned that Mrs. Gardner’s Indian companion was named Luz and that Luz probably understood English much better than she spoke it. Like my employer, Luz came and went so silently that I often was unaware of her presence until she spoke. Despite my smiles and attempts at conversation, she would deliver Mrs. Gardner’s messages with an impassive face and immediately depart. The most response I ever got from her was when the large atlas was open on the workbench to pictures of the Andes. She examined them with such intensity that the next time she came, I gave her a lavishly illustrated travel guide to the region. She thanked me with a formal, unsmiling nod but Mrs. Gardner told me that Luz had been quite pleased. “You’re the only other gringa who ever gave her a present.”

From Mrs. Powell, I also learned that Mrs. Gardner was in constant pain although she seldom complained. “Poor lady! That TB’s eating her backbone right up.”

On days when it was unbearable, Mrs. Gardner kept to her room and saw no one except a nurse and Luz. On good days, she would drop by the barn to hear what new treasures I’d found.

Like her grandfather, Victoria Gardner had been more physical than bookish in her pursuits and she knew very little about the artifacts. She remembered the mummy from her childhood, though, and was sharply protective of it.

“You didn’t unwrap it, did you?”

“No, I’m not qualified. That’s something the curator will do.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” she snapped. “I used to feel so sorry for him, brought away from his quiet tomb. My lawyer will stipulate that the bones are not to be further disturbed.”

“But the historical value—” I protested.

“History will manage without my mummy, Dr. Webster,” she snapped and her dark brown eyes glowed feverishly.

Those eyes were now the most vibrant feature in her ravaged face, huge and burning and vaguely predatory. She moved quietly when she visited the barn and often I would be aware of her watching presence long before I had heard a sound.

Not that one more watcher should have made a difference. I was daily surrounded by rapacious eyes. From grandfather to son to granddaughter, the Hoyts had hunted hunters more often than prey — leopards, bears, even a python stuffed and mounted in coils around a wild-eyed goat. They crowded the walls and perimeters of the large area where I worked until I finally clumped them together in one corner under the pretext of needing more clear space.

Mrs. Gardner noticed my distaste for her family trophies. “You don’t like them, do you?”

“I never understood the need for blood sports,” I said, a little sanctimoniously, I admit.

“Too uncivilized?” she asked with amusement. “Blood lust is in our genes, Dr. Webster. Bullfights, cockfights, and what about your Aztecs with their priestly kings drinking the blood of human sacrifices? At least a hunted animal has a chance.”

“Against guns?” I countered.

“Even against guns.”

The dryness of her voice brought me up short.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I forgot about your husband. That must have been horrible.”

“Gerald had a good run for his money and then he got careless.” She shrugged. “At least it was quick. Jaguars kill with a single bite. He had nothing to complain of.”

I wondered if she envied his fate, a clean death at the height of physical power rather than her own painful wasting away.

“Why didn’t you marry your daughter’s father?” she asked abruptly.

I was becoming used to her brusque manner.

“He didn’t want to,” I said. “Fortunately.”

Her laugh was a short explosive bark. “At least you got a child out of it.”

Her fingers went to that fertility pendant and I saw that the bronze edges were shiny from constant touch.

By the end of June, I was well into the South American artifacts, which interested me the most. William Hoyt wrote that he and some Andean Indians had found some “old jugs and bones” during an 1883 hunt. I was doubly interested because Paul Hines, a former classmate, planned to dig in the Lambayeque Valley of northern Peru later that summer. I was amused to think that relics collected almost a century ago might rival Paul’s fresh finds.

The intrepid Hoyt wrote in his journal that he and his party had been hunting several miles above the Piura River when guides told him of a cave they had found a few years earlier and never explored.

That’s all the man had to hear. By nightfall, they had pitched camp on that isolated spot and went into the cave the next day with torches. They found animal bones and pottery shards but nothing else until someone noticed a large stone standing alone at the end of the cave. They rolled it aside and found a small opening into a continuation of the cave. Inside that second cave were “some native burial jugs.”

Here, Mr. Hoyt’s journal became even sketchier than usual because his guides had heard a jaguar’s cough nearby and he was too anxious to bag it to give many details about burial jugs.

Eustice Hill carefully pried open the two crates and set the contents on the floor. The first crate contained a single large jug. The second crate held three jugs that were decorated with simple incised figures that reminded me of Chavin ware, dark-fired and highly polished. Two were fairly large and empty, except that one of them had a much smaller jug nested inside. The protective moss crumbled to dust as I lifted it out. The large urn in the other crate came from a later period I didn’t recognize, but if the smaller three were Chavin, they could date back to between 900 and 200 B.C. Most of the funeral urns I’d studied had been buried in pits and I wondered how these had found their way into a cave.

The seal on the large urn had loosened over the years and I lifted the lid to peek in. Evidently Hoyt and his party had disturbed the original wrappings for I found myself suddenly eye to eye with a grinning, mummified face.

No way to tell its sex or age at death without doing possible damage, so after photographing it from all sides, I recapped it and lifted the smaller jug onto the worktable instead. Being very careful not to chip the ceramic, I unsealed the lid.

The child inside was so small that I could easily lift it out onto the worktable. As was usual for that time and place, it had been interred with knees drawn up under the chin and arms hugging the knees, then completely swathed in cotton cloth.

I looked again at the head painted on the urn. Lines radiated beneath the eye and I knew they symbolized the tear trails of heavy weeping. A vivid picture of Jenny’s small energetic body filled my head while my heart flashed back across the centuries and grieved for those who had loved this child. Human rituals may have changed; human emotions hadn’t.

I gently unwrapped the tiny form, using sketch pad and camera to document each fold and twist of the cloth as I went along so that I could restore what I undid. It was like a little mummified monkey, impossible for me to guess its sex.

A thin copper bracelet slipped to the table and I didn’t need my magnifying glass to see the signs of annealing along the edges, an indication that they had learned metallurgy. A gold repoussé ornament on the child’s breast confirmed it, but there was something so familiar about that ornament that an involuntary shiver ran down my spine.

I looked again, hardly daring to breathe. When the room finally stopped spinning, I used the last six film exposures to take close-ups of it.

Part of my brain clamored with giddy excitement, the other part had turned coldly calculating. Confirmation’s the first step, I thought.

I carefully covered the worktable and the small urn with a clean drop cloth, turned off all the lights, and hurried through the side door, where I almost barreled into Mrs. Gardner’s frail body.

“Dr. Webster!” she protested.

“I’m so sorry. I just remembered — I mean, I forgot—”

Relief that she hadn’t walked in on my discovery three minutes earlier had turned me into a babbling idiot. As protective as she’d been of that adult mummy, she would probably forbid me to do anything with a child, so I forced myself to calmness as I locked the door behind me. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Gardner, but I really am in a dreadful hurry. See you tomorrow?”

Without waiting for a reply, I ran up the drive that encircled the barn to a break in the tall hedges that separated the rear of the Hoyt estate from Carlisle’s nine-hole golf course and cut across the campus to my office. Happily for the state of mind I was in, most eyes were on Liz Fair-cloth’s golf clinic where several students were learning the most efficient way to get out of a sand trap.

I do not keep the neatest office, so it took me several minutes to locate the book I wanted. Professor Mitsuharu Yasukawa is the standard authority on early Japanese culture and once I had it in my hands, I called home. Jenny’s sitter cheerfully agreed to send out for pizza and to put Jenny to bed later.

Reassured, I carried the Yasukawa back across the golf course and slipped through that gap in the hedges, grateful for all the overgrown bushes and low-branched trees that shielded the barn from the house. There was no sign of Mrs. Gardner and I made it inside unseen.

With no exterior windows to give me away, I turned on the lights in the workroom and flipped through the pages of Yasukawa’s authoritative book until I found the illustration I’d remembered from earlier reading: a gold-and-shell ornament that had been found on the island of Kyushu. Carbon dating and other factors placed them at about 600 B.C., long after the first waves of migration crossed the Bering Strait and spread south.

And it was practically identical to the one worn by this child mummy! The same shell mosaic in the center and the same number of tiny gold balls around the edges. Surely both ornaments had to have been made by the same hand.

A longstanding archaeological problem still unsolved here in 1977 is when and where did true metallurgy begin in the New World? Gold and copper had been beaten into crude shapes with stone hammers for a few hundred years and more sophisticated metalwork appears after 500 B.C., but nowhere have transitional stages from cold to hot metalworking been found. Some people argue that the techniques must have been brought fully understood by those hypothetical castaways from Asia, while purists hold for independent development at some still-to-be-discovered Central American site.

Yet here before me was solid proof that metallurgy had travelled directly from Asia to South America.

My very own elephant tusk.

For one dizzying moment, I stood with my feet on Atlantis and my head in the clouds of Olympus.

“Ellen?”

I turned, startled to see Aaron in the doorway, looking preppy in khaki slacks and a light blue polo shirt, that easy smile on his lips.

“Sorry. I did knock. You were miles away.”

“Speaking of which, isn’t that where you’re supposed to be?” I asked coldly, kicking myself that I hadn’t locked the door when I came in.

His smile broadened. “Now what’s a court order between old friends.”

“If the judge knew you’d violated it, he might throw out your claim.”

“Your word against mine. No one saw me watch you cross the golf course. My car’s parked between those bushes out back and a friend of mine’s prepared to swear that he and I have spent the whole weekend at his fish camp in New Bern. He thinks I’m having an affair with one of the teaching assistants here at Carlisle.”

“Are you?” I immediately waved my curiosity aside. “Never mind. I don’t care. What do you want, Aaron? Tell me and then get out.”

He walked over to the worktable nearest him and carelessly hefted one of the hunting spears propped against the workbench. According to the journals, they came from the Amazon jungles.

“Is this what you turned down Guerrero for?” he sniffed.

“What do you want?” I repeated.

“Guerrero,” he said. “Call old Hodges and tell him you think I’m available for that assistant directorship.”

“Forget it. He’s already signed someone else.”

“Then what about your buddy, Paul Hines? He’d make room for me on his staff if you asked him to.”

“Why are you so anxious to dig this summer?” When he didn’t answer, the pieces fell into place. “You really are having an affair with a T.A., aren’t you? Is your wife getting suspicious?”

His smile turned into a sheepish smirk.

“So instead of facing the consequences, you’re off to South America?”

“It’s not just that,” he said, trying to look earnest. “I’m stifled here. One good productive dig, a paper published in one of the journals, and I could be on a tenure track at one of the ivies. Come on, Ellen. Bury the hatchet and I promise I won’t hold you to the letter of whatever judgment comes out of our custody fight.”

I was tempted. The thought of losing Jenny’s summer had tortured me, and Aaron was right. A word from me and Paul would take him on. Aaron wasn’t physically lazy on a dig. In fact, he had the delicate touch of a good pick man.

He also knew me well enough not to press while I decided. Instead, he set about being charming.

“So how’s it going here?” he asked. “Finding anything interesting in old Hoyt’s relics?” His eyes lit on the burial urn. “Hello! What’s this beauty?”

The excitement of discovery engulfed me again. Aaron and I might be antagonists and I might not respect his integrity, but he was a trained archaeologist and would know what I was talking about without my having to explain its significance.

“Oh God, Aaron!” I exclaimed. “It’s incredible! I think I’ve found the trans-Pacific link in metallurgy! Look at the Yasukawa picture and then tell me this ornament wasn’t made by the same craftsman.”

He looked, compared, and the excitement in his eyes mirrored mine. “Where was that urn found?” he demanded.

I showed him William Hoyt’s journal, the description of the cave and its location. I opened the large atlas that I’d used to chart other finds and we tried to figure out just where it could have been in relation to the Piura River.

“Damn!” Aaron said. “It’s not more than a hundred and fifty miles from where Paul is digging.”

“Great! I’ll write him tonight and you and he can go and check it out.” In my excitement, I had decided to be generous.

“No,” he said.

I was puzzled. “But this is what you wanted. A major find. And even if you don’t locate the cave this year, you can still get a marvelous paper.”

“To hell with a paper! This is a whole goddamned book. Book? It’s a career. There’ll be foundation grants, international conferences—”

I drew back in distaste. It was Mexico all over again. In the flush of discovery I’d let myself forget who I was really sharing this moment with. “You’d plan your own discovery, of course?”

His dark eyes took my measure. “Of course.”

I could almost hear the wheels spinning behind that arrogant handsome face.

“I’ll go down early alone, locate the cave and put that little urn back in its original spot. You’ll write Paul a letter and mention that Hoyt had found some adult urns near the Piura River. I’ll take a weekend off from Paul’s dig and toddle up and voila!”

“Why will I give you the urn?” I asked quietly.

“Not give, love. Sell. I get the urn and you get my signature on the tightest document your lawyer can draw up to give you all rights to dear little Jenny forever.”

A cold anger began to build inside me.

“You’d sell your daughter just like that?”

“Grow up, Ellen. I can always have another kid, but a discovery like this doesn’t happen more than once in a lifetime.”

“No,” I said. “I won’t do it. In case you’ve forgotten, this urn doesn’t belong to me.”

He shrugged. “Who cares? Does Victoria Hoyt Gardner give a twopenny damn about any of this? From what I hear, all she wants is a few arrowheads and potsherds to scatter around as a background for all those stuffed animals. Use your head, Ellen. There’s enough glory here to go around. I’ll give you full credit for setting me on the right track and pointing me to the cave.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

A glance at the clock on the far wall reminded me that day must be fading to twilight. I stacked the books and started to put away Hoyt’s journal when Aaron shoved me aside and grabbed it.

“You’ve always got to be so stupidly righteous, don’t you? You think you’re smarter than me because you got published and tenured and everybody smoothes your way. Well, this time it doesn’t work. Let’s see how you like having someone question the integrity of your findings with nothing to back it up.”

I sprang for the journal but he knocked me away with a vicious backhand.

“I’ll tell!” I gasped.

He sneered at my frustration. “Don’t forget my fishing friend. He’ll swear that I never left his sight all weekend. From now on, I’m a model husband and a model father. By the time I’m finished, you’ll be lucky to get Jenny on the weekends.”

To this day I can’t say whether it was to save the journal or to save Jenny. All I know is that one of those Stone Age spears was suddenly in my hand and a moment later, I had whacked him over the head as hard as I could.

As he staggered forward, I lunged for the journal. An instant later, Aaron was on me, grabbing for the journal and punching me in the stomach.

We struggled and the journal went flying across the floor. I aimed for his groin and scrabbled for something to protect myself with. My hand closed around another spear, but before I could bring it up, he hit me in the head so hard that everything went black.

When I came to, my head throbbed with pain. There was no sign of Aaron, but a trail of blood led to the door and I found where he had parked his car earlier. No sign of it now.

Back inside, I saw blood on the spearpoint. Somehow I must have managed to wound him.

The journal we had fought over lay under the worktable, but it gave me no joy. Once he told a judge how I’d stabbed him, I would probably lose custody of Jenny completely.

Bruised and battered in body and spirit, I headed home. Jenny was already asleep when I got there and after the sitter left, I poured myself a glass of wine and went out on the deck to ponder my options. The whole nightmare unreeled itself over and over in my mind as I waited for Aaron to call and gloat.

When I stepped out of the shower next morning, ugly bruises had come up on my body and my mirror showed a dark blue one beneath my right ear. I was stiff and sore all over and still no call from Aaron or his attorney, so I gave Jenny her breakfast and drove her to nursery school before heading for the barn.

To my astonishment, the barn floor had been scrubbed clean, the spears were back in their stand, and there was no sign of the burial jugs.

Instead, Mrs. Gardner sat in the wheelchair that she was beginning to use more frequently and Luz was just stepping off the elevator.

I was dumbfounded.

Mrs. Gardner fixed me with a cold eye. “Were you trying your hand at taxidermy, Dr. Webster? You seem to have made much more of a shambles of it than my grandfather ever did.”

“Mrs. Gardner, I—”

“And I believe I told you not to disturb my mummies. Luz has taken them up to the top and you are not to touch them again. Is that understood?”

I nodded mutely.

As Luz took her place behind the wheelchair, Mrs. Gardner reached up and touched my cheek. “I should put some makeup on that if I were you,” she said and then they were gone.

Mrs. Gardner sent for me late in the afternoon. A police detective was there to tell me that my daughter’s father had been found in his car on the other side of campus.

I was stunned. “Dead? How?”

“He appears to have been stabbed by a large knife. We think it happened between four-thirty yesterday afternoon and eight o’clock last night,” he said. “Mrs. Gardner says she saw you shortly before five. Can you account for the rest of the time? It’s purely a formality, Dr. Webster, but since you did have a restraining order against Dr. Davis...”

Shaken, I said, “I walked over to my office for a book I needed and returned about fifteen minutes later.” I named the colleagues who had seen me. “After that, I worked here alone until I left around eight.”

“Not entirely alone,” said Mrs. Gardner. “You forget that Luz brought you some fruit and cheese. Luz?”

She translated Luz’s answer, which effectively eliminated me from any involvement with Aaron’s death, and by the time the detective glanced back at me, I had erased every trace of surprise from my face.

He took down the name of Jenny’s sitter, then assured me again that it was merely a formality.

When he was gone, I looked at Mrs. Gardner. “How—? Why—?”

“Luz did bring you fruit and cheese, Dr. Webster. She was there when that man struck you down.”

I stared at her, speechless.

Mrs. Gardner gave me a wintry smile. “Luz saw my husband hit me like that once.”

To my relief, Aaron’s death soon moved from the front page to the back and then appeared to join the city’s backlog of unsolved murders as the police ran out of viable suspects. Both his wife and his girlfriend had rock-solid alibis and the friend who was supposed to cover for him could prove that he was in New Bern at the time, a hundred miles away. I like to think that I would have come forward had someone been arrested and charged, but it didn’t happen and I certainly wasn’t going to bring it up. Nor did Mrs. Gardner refer to it again.

By the end of August, I had finished cataloging William P. Hoyt’s collection. All that remained was to develop and label the pictures I had taken and pick up my final paycheck.

The night before that happened, though, Bob Carson showed up at my back door with a bucket of bluegills he’d caught that afternoon and a hopeful look on his wrinkled face. “If you’ll fry ’em, I’ll make the hush puppies,” he’d said.

“Deal!” I’d said.

Next morning, I gave Mrs. Gardner the card file of labeled and numbered photographs I’d created for a future curator.

She frowned when I handed her six negatives and held one of them up to the light. “What is this supposed to be?”

“These are the only negatives and I haven’t kept any copies,” I said as I showed her the black-and-white pictures that I’d taken of the grinning mummy in the large burial urn.

“My next-door neighbor is a dentist,” I said. “When he saw these pictures last night, he said that this man’s dental work was probably done in the nineteen thirties.”

Mrs. Gardner closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair.

“Your husband wasn’t killed by a jaguar, was he?”

She shook her head. “No. And tuberculosis didn’t destroy my spine or destroy my chance of ever having children either. Gerald knew he had syphilis, but he didn’t care and he didn’t tell me till it was too late.”

“But why ship him back here?”

She shrugged. “Somehow it seemed appropriate to stash him here with the rest of my family’s kills.” Her dark eyes glowed with feral intensity. “After all, I could hardly stuff him, could I?”