Murder In The Queen's armes

TWELVE

A murderer? Try five. He’d been telling himself none of them looked like killers, but now the whole crew looked guilty as hell.

Gideon and Abe, flanked by Robyn and Arbuckle, had found Nate Marcus in the shed, seated at the cleaned-off worktable with his staff. All the dig members looked up, blinking into the daylight when the door was opened, and Gideon was afforded a frozen, snapshot glance. They might have been a cast assembled by a film director and told to look as edgy and disreputable as they possibly could.

Sandra Mazur was posturing exaggeratedly as she smoked a cigarette, holding it out in front of her between two rigidly stiffened fingers and theatrically sucking in her gaunt cheeks as she pulled in great lungfuls of smoke.

Next to her, Leon Hillyer picked nervously at his golden beard and smiled an unconvincing welcome to Gideon.

Jack Frawley’s face looked like soggy, gray plaster of Paris, sunken in on itself and flabby-jowled. His basset’s eyes slid and shifted like beads of mercury, from the blank tabletop to Nate, to the newcomers, and back to the tabletop.

Even the ingenuous Barry Fusco, with all his farm-boy freshness, looked shifty, his all-American grin a nervous parody. And Nate was the most blatantly agitated of all. He was literally chewing on the knuckles of his left hand, and when the door opened, he jumped to his feet, wiping his hand on the side of his pants. His face was greenish, and his eyes were sunken, as glazed as a couple of four-minute eggs.

It was obvious that Bagshawe had indeed come and told them about the murder, and Nate’s first words confirmed it. "Sorry, meant to meet you at the gate," he said, sounding short of breath, "but the police just left, and we’ve been talking about…what they told us. It looks like they’ve found my missing student. He’s been, uh… killed."

Gideon could feel him flinch away from the word murdered, but the archaeologist recovered himself as he spoke. Brusquely brushing aside Robyn’s and Arbuckle’s startled ejaculations and Abe’s cluck of sympathy, he continued more firmly, even aggressively; Nate never went very long without taking the offensive. "The cops are down on the beach poking around, but they’re coming back, so let’s get on with it."

As Gideon trooped back out with the others into the gray morning, he found Stonebarrow Fell, which had seemed so lovely two weeks before, ugly and sinister. The hacked-out trenches with their stark, vertical sides and their dew-concealed piles of gray dirt looked raw and naked, and somehow shocking, like open graves. Far below, beyond the fell’s sharp edge, the sea was mole gray, the same color as the sky, and sullen-looking whitecaps scudded on the water’s surface. As they walked in a solemn file over the broad crown of the hill, the wind lowed forlornly around them, driving long, shuddering ripples through the dense grass.

He really was depressed. Since when did digs remind him of graves? He realized as he plodded on that it was more than the weather, more than even the murder, that was making him so gloomy and apprehensive

…something entirely different. For an idea was taking unwelcome root, an unsettling idea that he knew exactly what Nate’s "astonishing and sensational" discovery was. And he wished to hell it had popped up before this, when he might have done something about it.

They stopped at a small rectangular canvas-draped pit a hundred feet from the main trenches, in a rough area of bushes, vines, and chalky rock. Nate began at once.

"As all of you know," he said in a shrill, rapid monotone, "the Wessex culture has long been viewed as a manifestation of the pan-European trade and travel of the Bronze Age, and is believed to have arrived in Britain in slow stages from Britany-this notwithstanding the three hundred-year difference in radiocarbon dates between Breton and Wessex graves. But be that as it may…"

It was evident that Nate had prepared this speech-he didn’t talk like this naturally-and that he was hardly listening to himself. Gideon studied him; unless he was shamming-and his brash, outspoken personality didn’t lend itself to pretense-he was genuinely upset. Although he’d spoken rather harshly of Randy’s lackadaisical ways, it was apparent that the news of his death had stunned him.

"It is also well known that the Bretons were and are a race of round-heads," Nate droned on. "Of brachycephals, as Dr. Oliver would say." At the sound of his name, Gideon snapped to attention. "And for that matter, the immediate predecessors of the Wessex people, the Beakers, were also notably brachycephalic. Thus, we have always assumed the

Wessex also to be round-headed. Also so they are, in the later Wessex sites.

"But here," Nate said, and now the old, challenging electricity crackled in his speech; his eyes came up from the canvas-covered pit to engage those of the others. "Here at Stonebarrow Fell we’ve got the earliest known Wessex site-maybe the very first. What would you say if we found someone here who wasn’t brachycephalic at all, but long -headed- dolichocephalic -just like the Mycenaeans of 1700 b.c.?"

Gideon’s heart seemed to flop and plummet. Now there wasn’t any question about where Nate was leading, incredible as it seemed. The excavation crew fidgeted in subdued excitement. All, that was, except Frawley, who, with his head down and his hands clasped very much like a grave-side mourner’s, chewed somberly on his cheek. Abe and Arbuckle stood there looking stoic and patient, and Robyn’s sole reaction appeared to be the raising by one millimeter of his left eyebrow.

"What would you say," Nate went on, seemingly made more contentious by the lack of response, "if the guy buried here wasn’t just long-headed, but was so long-headed that was outside the range of every- every – known Beaker or Breton skull, but easily within the range of the Mycenaeans?"

Without waiting for a reply, he reached down, pulled up the canvas, and flung it away from him. It sailed directly into Barry, who grabbed it, snickered nervously, blushed, and stood there holding it.

"There," Nate said throatily.

Everyone’s eyes were riveted on the two-by-three-foot pit. Nate, seemingly unable to stand the momentary silence, burst into a low, agitated babble. "Would you believe that was sticking right out of the ground-part of it anyway? Huh? Abe? Gideon? Englishmen have been walking over it for a hundred years, probably, and nobody ever noticed it!" Here there was a lancing, triumphant glance at Robyn. "The ground around it was weathered away, and you could barely see it. I almost didn’t see it myself; I just stumbled onto it…"

The skull fragment was in the precise middle of the rectangle. The rounded eminence of the right parietal, Gideon could see, would indeed have projected a fraction of an inch above the surface of the ground, but no one-except perhaps a particularly alert anthropologist-would have taken it for anything but a rock. It had been dug-dissected out, really-with the scrupulous care typical of Nate Marcus, so that it lay partially embedded in a two-inch-high shelf of earth, like the museum exhibit it had once been.

It was Pummy, all right.

Gideon couldn’t think of any way to say it other than to say it. "Nate, that’s the Poundbury calvarium… the skull fragment missing from the Dorchester Museum."

Nate’s expression went from self-satisfied to blank to furious in two seconds. The flesh around his lips grayed and seemed to sink into his face. Gideon observed this transparently genuine reaction of astonishment and indignation with relief. Nate was as honestly surprised as everyone else.

"Bullshit!" he shouted, as soon as he could speak. "You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!" He turned on Gideon, his fists clenched at his side, his body tightened as if he was going to spring at him. Gideon, used to Nate’s irritating habit of automatically hitting out when challenged, didn’t take offense.

"It’s Poundbury, without a doubt-" Gideon began.

"Bullshit, bullshit-"

Abe reached over and patted Nate on the shoulder. "Now, Nathan," he said mildly.

Robyn’s voice cut icily through. "Professor Marcus, will you kindly keep your observations, cogent as they are, to yourself for just a few moments? Oliver, are you quite positive?"

"Completely."

Nevertheless, Gideon stepped into the trench and knelt to look more closely at the fragment. He blew away a thin layer of chalky dust. "You can see that it’s been placed here recently," he said. "Look at the color: that same amber tone all over. If a part of it had actually been sticking out, exposed to the elements, it would have been darker than the rest, wouldn’t it? More weathered, too."

"You’re nuts," Nate said. "What are you talking about? I don’t believe this."

Abe shushed him gently, his hand on his arm, and Nate subsided with a strained laugh.

Carefully, with his forefinger, Gideon brushed at the earth around the bone. "And it wouldn’t have mineralized to this brownish color in such a chalky, white soil. Besides that, if it had really been here for over three thousand years, the soil would fit around it like a plaster mold, which it obviously doesn’t." He brought his face even closer to it. "And look, the earth’s compacted here-and here-from digging a hole and then forcing the bone into it. And I think…yes, I can see where the identification number’s been scraped away and the bone’s been stained to make it look-"

"That," said Robyn, "is ample, and quite instructive. Obviously, Professor Marcus was so intent on proving his fantastic theory that he disregarded the signs that point so unequivocally to this object’s being a fraud."

Arbuckle, who had been blinking and frowning behind the thick, none-too-clean lenses of his glasses, appeared to suddenly understand. "Unless," he murmured in a shocked whisper to Nate, "you buried it there in the first place." He took a backward step away from Nate, as if afraid of catching something.

"Buried it?" Nate repeated blankly. "Why would… You mean planted it? Me? You’re out of your mind!"

Arbuckle held up both hands. "All right, Nate," he said quickly, "I didn’t mean to accuse you." He lowered his chin and went doggedly on. "But somebody must have, er, planted it."

Nate stared hard at the shrinking Arbuckle, then at Gideon, and spoke through compressed lips. "Okay. All right. I blew it. You’re right, I should have seen the signs. Somebody must have buried…No," he said slowly, "that’s impossible. What would be the point? How could they know anyone would find it? I could have missed it easy…It could have lain there a hundred years. It wasn’t even near the trenches…"

"First things first," Robyn interjected. "We’re here today to look into whether Professor Marcus has been conducting his research in a sufficiently professional manner." In an undertone he added, "As for myself, frankly, I consider that this latest…happening…makes the question moot."

Nate’s dark face turned a mottled red, but before he could respond, Abe stepped in, with a quick glance toward the enthralled students. "And I think," he said mildly, but in a tone that encouraged no argument, "this discussion should be continued in private, with only the parties concerned." He grasped Nate’s arm and steered him in the direction of the shed. Nate went unresistingly, and Arbuckle and Robyn, after an exchange of grim looks, moved to follow, as did Frawley.

"Gideon," Abe called over his shoulder, "maybe you’ll finish up with the skull so we can send it back to where it belongs?"

An embarrassed silence descended as soon as the others left, until Gideon spoke.

"I’ll need some tools."

"I’ll get them," Sandra said hastily. "We keep a toolbox at the excavation." She trotted elegantly off.

"I can get a packing crate," Leon offered.

"I’ll go with you," Barry jumped in. All of them were eager to get away from the scene of disaster, and no wonder.

When Sandra returned, Gideon, also wishing himself elsewhere, took an angled dental pick, a toothbrush, and a small paintbrush, and quickly worked loose the dirt around the bone. By the time the crate arrived, he was done. He lifted the calvarium with both hands, settled it among the Styrofoam peanuts, and closed the lid.

"Will you see that this goes to Dr. Arbuckle?"

"You bet, Gideon," Leon said.

There was another awkward silence until Barry literally shook himself into speech. "Mr. Robyn gave me his keys for you to use to get out of the gate," he said, producing a leather key case. "He said you could leave them with the guy at the Queen’s Armes."

Gideon’s mood was gloomier than ever as he crested the hill and started down. At the fence he found a slender young man in a fawn-colored suit delicately rattling the lock.

"I’ve been calling out for half an hour," he said when Gideon got within speaking distance. "I was beginning to fear I’d have to scale the thing." He smiled genteely, the English sort of smile that raises the inside corners of the eyebrows and wrinkles the forehead charmingly. "It would have been hard on the suit."

"It would also have been trespassing," Gideon said, not disposed to banter.

Unabashed, the young man announced, "Curtis Honett. I’m with the West Dorset Times. "

The West Dorset Times. The newspaper that seemed to know so much. "Sorry to disappoint you," Gideon said, slipping out and relocking the gate behind him, "but I think Professor Marcus will be canceling his press conference."

"What press conference?" Honett moved closer. "I understand that the bone missing from the Dorchester Museum turned up here today. Is that true?"

Gideon barely managed to hide his astonishment. "Where did you hear that?"

The reporter drew his motile, auburn eyebrows together. "It isn’t true? Mr. Chantry was certain-"

"Mr. Chantry?"

"My boss, the editor. He’s been working personally on the Stonebarrow story."

"And just where does Mr. Chantry get his information?"

"You wouldn’t want me to divulge our sources, would you?" He grinned brightly. "So it is true then?"

"Sorry," Gideon said, "I’m afraid ‘no comment’ is the most you’re going to get from me." He turned to head down the path. "And don’t quote me on that." Then, relenting slightly, he added. "You’ll want to talk to Dr. Arbuckle of Horizon or Mr. Robyn of the WAS on this. But I think they’re going to be tied up for a while."

"The West Dorset Times," said a cultivated voice, "at your service."

"Good morning. May I speak with Mr. Chantry, please?"

"One moment. What name shall I say?"

"Gideon Oliver."

In a few seconds another voice came on, whispery and apologetic. No, Mr. Ralph Chantry was not in his office at the moment. No, no one else was familiar with the Stonebarrow matter. No, no one was sure just when he would return, but tomorrow was likely. Could Mr. Oliver try again tomorrow? Gideon replaced the receiver and leaned back in the leather armchair, staring out unseeingly at the ragged fog that obscured the hillside he’d come down half an hour before.

He wondered moodily about the inquiry still going on in the bleak little shed on the fell. Whatever the explanation for the amazing "happening," as Robyn had called it, Nate’s career was finished. Even Abe’s ability to smooth rough waters was unlikely to do much good, given the cold look in Robyn’s eye and the equally dark, if less penetrating, one in Arbuckle’s. Whether or not Nate had planted the skull himself-and Gideon couldn’t believe that he had-was immaterial. Nate was in charge of the dig and had to bear responsibility for everything that occurred on it. And, of course, he had personally done all the work on the calvarium himself, and had been braying about it in his usual obnoxious manner for weeks. There was no way he could ever possibly live it down.

"Gideon," Julie said, "I think it’s time for you to forget about Stonebarrow Fell. How about a hike in the country? I’ve got a booklet that shows some local walks."

"Looks like rain."

"So we’ll take our ponchos. You know, you can still hike along some of those old right-of-way footpaths that have been there for centuries."

"It’s been a wet winter; they’ll be awfully muddy."

She laughed and plopped herself into his lap. Her arms went about his neck. "My, you’re feeling adventurous, aren’t you?"

He smiled and clasped his hands around her waist. "I guess I’m a little mopey. I don’t like thinking about what’s going to happen to Nate, even if he brought it on himself. And the murder…"

"You need a hike," she said firmly, "and you are going to get one."

He had continued to stare out the window, but now he put his hands on her shoulders, set her straighter on his knees, and looked at her face. She was smiling down at him, her black, luminous eyes so lit with love that his breath caught unexpectedly in his chest. How had he ever done without her? If she were to leave, the hole in his life would be so vast…

"Yes, ma’am," he said. "Where will we hike to?"

" ‘Wootton Fitzpaine, a tiny village a few miles from Charmouth,’ " she said, reading from a booklet, " ‘and one of the vicinity’s most popular rural walks.’ "

"And why Wootton Fitzpaine in particular?"

"Because," she said, "it has such a nice name."

He rose from the chair, lifting her in his arms as he did so, pleased with the solid weight of her. "I can’t imagine a better reason."

THE walk to Wootton Fitzpaine began, according to Scenic Dorset Walks, only a block from The Queen’s Armes, at the opening to a rough and muddy track-two wheel ruts, actually-laughably signposted Barr’s Lane. The track ran for about an eighth of a mile, forming a narrow alley bounded on either side by crude, head-high stone walls of some antiquity. At the end of this lane a stile led into open meadows, but just before this stile the wall on the left side gave way to a sturdy, seven-foot-high chain-link fence that enclosed an extensive dog run at the back of a neat, thatch-roofed house.

As they were about to push through the stile to get into the countryside, they were astounded by a roar so loud that Gideon at first thought it must be a caged and furious lion inside the house. Momentarily petrified, they stood with their hands frozen on the stile.

When he saw it, Gideon thought at first it was a lion-a long-legged nightmare lion-but it wasn’t. It was a dog.

Huge, malevolent, and bellowing-"barking" wasn’t the word for it-it came tearing around the side of the house, racing toward them with death in its red eyes.

Instinctively, Gideon stepped in front of Julie as the thing bounded wildly against the fence. The animal, which must have known from experience that it couldn’t get at them, gave it its best nonetheless. Raging and slavering, it leaped again and again at the shuddering fence, its forelegs as high as Gideon’s head, its thick chest on a level with his own.

"Is that a dog? " Julie asked in a small voice, peeking around his shoulder, and making a move to get out from behind him. He could see fingers of color returning to her cheeks and had no doubt that his own face was also on the pale side.

"I don’t know what else. The Hound of the Baskervilles, maybe."

From the house behind the dog came a petulant call. "For heaven’s sake, Bowser, be quiet!"

Gideon and Julie looked at each other. Bowser?

A stocky man in late middle age, with a military bearing, a gray, bristling military mustache, and a sandy toupee, came grumbling from the back door.

"Be quiet, I said!" The dog, with bad grace, reluctantly stopped trying to devour them and instead satisfied itself with ferocious glaring and panting.

The man approached the animal and grasped it firmly by its wide collar. Its head, Gideon noted, was not far below the man’s shoulders, its neck almost as thick as his waist.

"Hullo," the man said, smiling crisply. "I’m Colonel Conley. I hope the Beast didn’t frighten you."

"Frighten us?" Gideon said. "Not at all. He was just being friendly."

The colonel laughed. "Hardly. He’d as soon eat you as look at you. Americans, are you? Out on a walk to Wootton Fitzpaine?"

"Yes," Julie said. "That’s quite an animal. What in the world is he?"

"Crossbreed," Colonel Conley said. "I went into dog breeding after the war, you see, and Bowser is my prize. Proper name, Pyecombe Sable of Hempstead. Half mastiff, half staghound, with perhaps a little werewolf thrown in. Magnificent creature, don’t you think? Ran in the Count de Vergie’s pack, you know?" Gideon and Julie looked mutely at him. "At Chateau Touffon? Near Vienne? You really haven’t heard of it? Famous for its stag hunts, and the count’s pack is disputably the best in the world. Unfortunately, Bowser tends toward over enthusiasm, and he tore the throat out of a horse." He dug his knuckles fondly into the root of a huge, tawny ear. "And," he whispered respectfully, "came as near as dammit to doing in a man. I’m afraid he has a bit of a mean streak in him."

"Does he really?" Gideon said, eyeing Bowser, who was quivering and twitching with convincing blood lust.

Again the colonel laughed. "I’m sure you’ve noticed. Don’t worry, though. There isn’t any way he can get through." He shook the gate in the fence, jangling a sturdy padlock on a heavy chain. "I take extreme precautions. It’s perfectly safe. Enjoy your walk, and don’t pay any attention to him on your way back. He gets accustomed to you after a time or two."

As they twisted their way through the stile to enter the open country, Bowser thundered again, deprived of his rightful prey, but Colonel Conley tugged on his collar and said, "Bad show, Bowser," and the dog sat down, mumbling and drooling. Julie and Gideon walked a few hundred yards into the meadow, out of sight and sound of the dog, and then Julie sat suddenly on a log and started thumbing through Scenic Dorset Walks.

"Are we lost already?" Gideon asked.

"No, I’m looking for an alternate way back."

"And disappoint Bowser?"

"You better believe it." She chewed the corner of her lip and wrinkled her nose. Strange. Gideon had always thought nose-wrinkling ridiculous and unsightly; on Julie it devastated him.

"No," she said, "we have to come back through Barr’s Lane unless we want to go way out of our way and walk along A-35." She closed the booklet. "Uh-uh. What kind of country walk would that be?"

"Right. Besides, don’t worry about Bowser. I had him in the palm of my hand." He sat down next to her on the log. "Hey, just look at where we are. Can the world be all bad if there are still places like this?"

"This is Dyne Meadow, according to the book. It is nice, isn’t it?"

They were in a green and gently undulating grassy field bordered on one side by a dark copse of pines, and on another by a sparkling, tree-lined stream. To the west they could see a ruined stone barn around which grazed a few placid cattle; and to the north, half a mile off, a farmer plowed his field near a stark, whitewashed farmhouse. The noise of his tractor was like the far-off, lazy buzzing of a bee. It might have been 1940 or 1920. If not for the tractor, it could have been 1720.

"How lovely," Julie sighed. "Let’s just stay here forever."

They stayed, in fact, half an hour, just drinking in the peace, and then, pacified themselves, proceeded hand in hand.

As Gideon had predicted, it was extremely muddy, especially near the stiles, where the ground had been churned into glue by cattle hooves. But it was Dorset mud, of which the locals were justly proud. Gray and gloopy as it looked and felt, it was solid enough so that it hardly wet their feet, yet liquid enough to slide from their shoes without caking. The lowering sky, while it threatened to burst with rain at any moment, held off, and the moisture-heavy air was fragrant with Dorset’s grassy smell.

Rights of way in rural England are not quite what Americans imagine them to be. They are unlikely to be posted, and they frequently do not consist of paths visible to the naked eye. Following a guidebook, one simply skirts the western flank of this coppice of larches, bears slightly right, and walks through the northern end of that beech spinney, then crosses the gravel road, bearing north-northeast at a spot one hundred yards west of the signposts to Knickers-on-Tyne, just beyond a lightning-shattered pine tree. Even with a map, one is likely to spend a lot of time lost and trespassing. After a while Julie and Gideon settled for following the instructions in Scenic Dorset Walks in only the most approximate fashion, taking care to give plenty of room to the bulls they occasionally saw, and to avoid walking over worked fields that weren’t supposed to be there.

They never managed to find Wootton Fitzpaine, but they walked through quiet woods and over grassy hills from which there were misty views of rolling, impossibly green countryside quilted into squares and trapezoids by trim, winter-brown hedgerows, and dotted by scattered groups of two or three thatch-roofed old buildings. They climbed over wooden stiles and walked through little white picket gates (who kept them all so spruce and freshly painted?) with gateposts set neatly in the middles of hedges, and they crossed little burbling brooks on footbridges consisting of a single plank. And always there was the fragrance of rain-wet grass. They saw no other people except farmers, and those at great distances, but there were cows and sheep and great black birds that squawked overhead.

"Are those crows?" Gideon asked. "Or ravens?" His voice startled them both; they had been walking in easy, companionable silence for almost an hour.

"Let me know if one lands on a ruler, and I’ll tell you."

"Come again?"

"The crows are a few inches smaller. Otherwise I can’t tell; at least not from here. There’s something about the tails, I think."

"Some park ranger you are. I thought you knew all about birds."

"But I’m not a park ranger anymore. I got married, remember? And, being a good, old-fashioned wife, I left my lovely job in lovely Olympic National Park to go where my husband went."

"Yea," Gideon said, "even unto San Mateo, California." He said it lightly, but it was something that worried them both. When they had met, she had been senior ranger at the park in Washington and he’d been teaching at Northern California University, where he’d been made full professor the year before. They ran into trouble at once. There had been no ranger jobs for Julie anywhere near San Francisco Bay, and the newly opened Port Angeles campus of the University of Washington-the first university on the Olympic Peninsula-did not yet have a graduate anthropology department to which Gideon might apply. Somebody’s career had to be interrupted for a while.

There had been a lot of discussions, but no arguments. To both of them, the idea of Gideon doing anything but teaching anthropology was absurd, so Julie had resigned her position-or rather, taken a leave of absence, just to be on the safe side. They had justified the decision on the grounds that Gideon’s salary was the greater of the two, but Gideon suspected that underneath, she really was an old-fashioned wife for whom the husband’s career came first. And underneath, Gideon knew very well that he liked it that way, closet chauvinist that he was. At any rate, when they got back from Europe, Julie would face the unenviable prospect of job-hunting; she wasn’t old-fashioned enough to want to stay home and take care of him.

That he liked, too, so maybe there was hope for him. On the other hand, what was there he didn’t like about her?

"I’m glad I quit," she said a little timidly. "Being with you is everything to me. You know that, don’t you?"

"Yes. I know." He squeezed her hand, trying to put everything into it.

"Good." She squeezed back. "Now tell me what that telephone call to the Times was about. And about what happened at Stonebarrow Fell this morning."

While they walked with loosely linked fingers in a dimly lit wood of mixed beech and pine, he told her.

"That’s crazy," she said. "Why would a reputable archaeologist like Nate Marcus do something as stupid as that? You said he’s a little odd, but you never said anything to suggest he wasn’t ethical."

"I think he is ethical, even if his judgment is off sometimes and his mouth is a couple of sizes too big. To tell the truth, I don’t think he did plant the thing. But Robyn thinks so; I could see it in his face, and I can’t blame him. Paul probably thinks so too, but who can tell with him?"

"Gideon," she said, "can I ask you something? If your friend Nate is a good archaeologist, the way you keep saying he is in spite of everything, how could he have been fooled? You recognized Poundbury Man right away. Why didn’t he?"

"Good question, but you have to remember that I’m a physical anthropologist and he’s an archaeologist. He’d heard of Pummy, sure, but he wouldn’t know it from any other skull you put in front of him-just the way I might not recognize some famous piece of pottery that he’d spot from a hundred yards away. It’s worse for him, really, because all skulls look pretty much alike if they’re not your business."

"But why didn’t he recognize the other things-the compaction of the earth, those things…"

"That’s harder to explain away. I guess he was so intent on proving his theory, so overjoyed at what he thought was evidence, that he ignored all the signs-refused to let himself see them. It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened."

"I suppose so," she said doubtfully. It was a while before she spoke again. "But I’m still mixed up. If Nate didn’t put it there, who did?"

That was the question, all right. If not Nate, who? Frawley? What could he possibly gain from it? It was Nate’s dig, not his, and Frawley didn’t go along with the Mycenaean theory anyway. One of the students? For what possible reason? No, the only person who could conceivably benefit from the bogus find was Nate. And Nate, as wacky as he could be sometimes, would never try to pull off something like this. No matter how much he might have changed. Or would be?

They emerged from the trees near the crown of a long green hill that sloped gently away below them, idyllic and inviting, toward another holly-green copse at its base. A soft, cold mist had begun to drift around them-under the trees, they had failed to notice it-and they slipped into their hooded ponchos before continuing.

"You know what I keep wondering?" Gideon asked. "Where the heck is the Times getting its information? They knew about the inquiry, they knew about the skull-"

"Obviously from someone on the dig."

"No, not so obviously. How could anyone on the dig know I was going to visit the site? Except for you, Abe was the only one who had any idea I was coming, and he certainly didn’t call the Times from Sequim, Washington."

"Are you sure? Have you asked him about it?"

"Of course not." Then he smiled. "Never mind ‘of course not.’ With Abe, you never know, do you? I’ll ask him, but how could he? And why?"

They had gone a third of the way down the hill when the mist congealed into a pelting, freezing downpour as abruptly as if someone had turned on an ice-cold, needle-spray shower.

"Time to go back," Gideon said unnecessarily. He could hardly hear himself with the hammering of the rain on his hood.

Julie nodded, her face running with water. "Maybe Bowser will be off sleeping in his doghouse in weather like this, and we can sneak by."

"Doghouse?" Gideon shouted over the rain. "He probably lives in a cave strewn with bloody bones."