Icy Clutches (29 page)

He doubled over, sucking in his breath, eyes streaming, cradling his arm against his chest. His hand was numb, as heavy as concrete.
Not broken,
the rational gray matter of his cerebral cortex was smoothly assuring him.
Merely a sharp blow taken directly on the “funny bone,” that exquisitely sensitive spot where the ulnar nerve lies directly on the bony medial epicondyle of the humerus just below the skin. Discomfort acute but short-lived. Not to worry.

Merely, hell!
the primitive, raging brain stem structures of his limbic system shrieked back.
That sonofabitch on the other side of the door just tried to break your fucking arm! Go get that mother!

I think we'd just better think this through, don't you?
his cortex sneered predictably.
That person on the other side of that door may well be armed. Wouldn't it make more sense to—

For once Gideon went with his brain stem. Snarling half in pain and half in anger, pressing his arm to his side, he threw himself in a flying kick at the door, which was slightly open and still shuddering with the force of the impact against his arm.

Unfortunately, the sonofabitch on the other side of the door wasn't there. In the second or so that it had taken Gideon to react, he or she had stepped to the side. The door sprang unresistingly open to bang against the wall, and Gideon came flying through. His foot came down on the flashlight barrel, which spurted out from under his sole and sent him careening the length of the room until he was brought up short by the counter, the edge of which caught him painfully below the rib cage on the left side.

Meanwhile the door had rebounded to clatter shut again. The room was completely dark, utterly, startlingly silent after all the noisy door-banging and galumphing over the wooden floor. Whoever had slammed the door on him was still in the room; there had been no time for anyone to slip out.
Who's there?
almost sprang from Gideon's lips.
Where are you?
But he held back. Whoever it was couldn't see any better than he could. Why broadcast where he was? Quietly, he shifted his body away from the counter and turned back to face the area near the door, balancing his weight evenly over his feet, getting ready for whatever came next.

As usual, his cerebral cortex had been correct; the searing pain in his arm had been short-lived. Already it was becoming a buzzing, bearable tingle. He breathed quietly, shallowly, through his mouth, standing perfectly still, a little crouched, his hands away from his sides. Let the other person make the first move, the first sound.

The first sound was a soft click, followed by a burst of light; dazzling, pulsing, blinding concentric rings of white. Whoever it was had a flashlight of his own, a powerful one, and was beaming it into his face from a couple of yards away, fluttering it to keep him blinded. The floor creaked as the other person moved forward. Gideon narrowed his eyes to a squint and strained to see between his out-thrust fingers, but the brilliant, darting light seemed to fill his eyeballs, his skull. He could see only his own backlit hands and wrists, raised as if in supplication, exposed and vulnerable. There was another creak. The wobbling, blazing circles moved closer, full of menace. Was there a gun, a knife, a club in the other hand?

Gideon's cerebral cortex had no pertinent advice for him. He did the only thing he could think of, which was to launch himself at the light, or rather just below it, arms spread, hoping to get them around a body. But the person holding it was a step ahead of him. The flashlight was apparently being held well off to the side. Gideon's forearm brushed against what felt like a hip, but his arms dosed around nothing, and he fell heavily to the floor, immediately going into a roll and scrambling toward the light again.

It went abruptly out, leaving him trying to blink away the afterimages, then came on again a foot or two to the left. Was it farther away? Closer? He lashed out at it from his knees, feeling like an animal caught in a net of illumination, unable to get at its captors. The light went out as he thrust at it, and came on almost at once, a little more to the right. Out again. On again.

An abrupt rustling sound, a sudden movement.

Out again.

Chug, chug, chug, chug.
Slowly, the train slipped peacefully away into the darkness, the steady beat of the wheels lulling him into a...

Train?

Gideon opened his eyes. He was lying on his back on the floor of the contact station, a few feet from the open door, with a throbbing head and an upset stomach. Rolling his eyes gingerly upward, he could see the narrow black tops of spruce and hemlock trees framed in the doorway against the not-quite-as-black sky. He realized at once that he had been unconscious only a few seconds; the chugging noise was running footsteps on the path back to the lodge. He could still hear them, or rather the sounds of someone mounting the wooden stairs leading to the main building and the boardwalks that led to the rooms.

He knew better than to try to give chase. It was going to be a few minutes before his legs would be able to take him anywhere; before the rest of him would
want
to go, anywhere. He wiggled his fingers, moved his toes. His nervous system seemed to be working all right. When he became aware of a hot, wet stinging at the left corner of his chin, he touched it with a finger. It was nothing awful; a small, raw scrape coated with a thin ooze of serous fluid and maybe a little blood. That was where he'd been hit, then. Probably with the flashlight. Not over the head, but on the jaw, the way a boxer was knocked out.

That was fortunate; less likelihood of real damage this way. The mobile jaw automatically swiveled away from the force of a blow, diffusing it in a way that the more rigid cranium couldn't. All in all, he was sure he hadn't been seriously hurt. He felt no worse—no better either—than the couple of times he'd been knocked out several lifetimes ago when he was working his way through graduate school by boxing in local fight clubs. The disorientation and nausea were to be expected. And the fact that he couldn't remember the blow that had knocked him out was no cause for concern. That was normal. A transient axial distortion of the brain stem caused by a blow to the chin, which is what a knockout is, almost always resulted in retrograde amnesia that—

"Ah, shut up,” he mumbled half aloud. Christ, what he didn't need now was another lecture from his cerebral cortex. Grunting, he pushed himself up on one elbow and waited, eyes closed, for the queasiness to subside a little. After a minute, he got cautiously to his feet. Everything ached, not just his jaw, but that was hardly a surprise. He switched on the ceiling lights and went to the counter. No surprise there either.

The bones were gone.

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"It's 9:00 A.M.,” Julie said in his ear. “Do you really want to get up, or would you rather sleep some more?"

"Up,” Gideon mumbled into the pillow. “If I sleep any more, I won't be able to move at all."

Softly she stroked the side of his head with the back of her fingers. “How's your jaw?"

Gideon gave the question some thought. “My jaw's okay,” he said finally. “The rest of me feels like hell."

I know, I know, he told his cerebral cortex. Generalized malaise and stiffness went along with postconcussive trauma reactions. Big deal.

"Nothing to worry about,” he said. “I'm just a little achy.” He opened his eyes. Julie, already dressed, was sitting in an armchair she'd pulled to the side of the bed.

"Coffee's on,” she said. “Want some?"

"Uh-huh. Maybe a couple of aspirin, too."

While she got them he worked up to a sitting position against the headboard and checked himself over more thoroughly. His shoulder and arm were all right. The scrape on his jaw was not much worse than a razor burn. Only the area on his left side, at the base of his ribs—where he'd bounced off the counter—was truly sore, and that wasn't as bad as it would have been had Julie not made him press some towel-wrapped ice to it when he'd gotten back to the room. He probed it with his fingers, flinching when he pressed too hard. It didn't feel as if anything were broken, but maybe he'd cracked that twelfth rib. Best to have it x-rayed when he got back home. Not that there was anything to do about a cracked twelfth rib anyway, other than wrapping it with one of those awkward canvas belts for a month. He leaned against the headboard, tipping his head back, muttering to himself. God, he was getting just a little old for this.

He made himself get out of bed—otherwise he'd really stiffen up—got into his bathrobe, groaning under his breath, and shuffled carefully to the table and chairs near the window. It was a pearly, northern kind of day, gray but drenched with light. He grasped the arms of a chair and lowered himself slowly into it.

Julie poured the coffee, watching him settle creakily down. “Gideon, does it ever occur to you that for a scholarly type you lead a—well, a rather physical sort of life?"

"Yes, it does. I was just thinking about that myself. I don't know why it is. It's not as if I invite it."

"Mm,” she said noncommittally, watching him down the aspirin and start on the coffee. “John stopped in about twenty minutes ago. He's been talking to all of them."

He looked up from the cup. “Has he gotten anywhere? Does he know—"

She shook her head. “No more than he did last night."

Which wasn't much. The three of them had sat around the room for almost two hours trying to make sense of things. John had briefly considered a late-night search of the Tremaine party's rooms (on a voluntary basis; they had no warrants), but they had agreed there was no point. What would he be looking for? The chance that the person who had taken the hones had brought them back to his or her room was nil. They had probably been tossed into the thick woods, or buried under some brush or in a rotted log, or thrown into the cove itself.

So Gideon had lain back on the bed, holding the ice to his ribs, while John, with an attention to detail that was new to Gideon, had him describe three separate times what had happened in the shack. Then they had fruitlessly tossed around ideas on what anyone could have wanted with the bones. At midnight Julie finally threw John out, settled Gideon down, and turned out the lights.

Now she poured some coffee for herself and sat down next to him at the table, pursing her lips, frowning into her cup.

"Okay, let's hear it,” he said brightly. Making it to the chair without hurting anything had cheered him up.

She looked at him. “Hear what?"

"Your new theory."

"What makes you—"

"Your expression. When you purse your lips like that it means something is being hatched:.

She eyed him, her head cocked. “We've been married too long."

"Not hardly. Come on, let's hear it."

"Well...” She hesitated. “I keep coming back to Jocelyn and whether or not she's dead."

He smiled at her. “No one's ever going to accuse you of prematurely giving up on a hypothesis. How can she not be dead? We've finally gotten ourselves a female femur—or at least we
had
a female femur. Whose else could it be?"

"No, I was looking at it differently this time; the other way around. That femur is the only real evidence that Jocelyn
is
dead, right? Maybe somebody took it to get rid of that evidence."

"To get rid of the evidence that she was killed? What for?"

"I don't know, but why else would anyone take it? There wasn't anything special about it, was there? Just that it was female."

"Yes, but nobody knew that except you and me. Remember, at the press conference I told them I hadn't sexed it yet."

"All right, then, maybe
they
were trying to keep you from finding out. Maybe—"

"Julie, how would they know it was female?"

"Well, then...” She stretched and laughed. “You sure take all the fun out of it. Okay, what's
your
theory?"

"Oh, no, I'm not even trying to come up with a theory. I'll just stick to what I'm good at: pointing out the flaws in yours. You know what? I'm hungry."

"Good. John went to the dining room to get us all some breakfast. I could tell you'd be waking up in a few minutes, and I knew some food would do you good."

"How could you tell I'd be waking up in a few minutes?"

"Oh, you make these noises when you're starting to wake up."

"Like what?"

"Snork, unk, mrmp. Like that."

He made a face. “You're right; we've been married too long."

He had just finished getting into his loosest shirt and trousers when John got back.

"Hey, Doc, you look great; halfway human again. Breakfast is on the way. Ham and eggs okay?"

"Ham and eggs sounds wonderful.” Gideon lowered himself into the chair again, somewhat less stiffly than the first time. The aspirins were working, and moving around had loosened him up. “Julie says you haven't been getting much of anywhere."

"Not so's you'd notice. But I'm starting to get some ideas. That's what I wanted to talk to you about."

He had barely sat down when there was a double tap on the door. He got up to admit Cheri, the sunny, skinny waitress who'd been serving them at dinner.

"You guys must rate,” she said. “We don't usually do room service.” She edged in sideways to clear the big metal tray on her shoulder, then stooped in a fluid, practiced movement, to put it on the table as smoothly and noiselessly as a professional bowler lays down a ball.

"Ham and eggs, ham and eggs, ham and eggs,” she said, pulling the covers off the plates and setting them out. “OJ. all around. Sourdough toast. Coffee. That do it?"

"Looks great,” John said. “Thanks, Cheri.” He rummaged in his wallet and came up with two dollar bills. “Wait a second. Doc, you got another couple of bucks? All I have is a twenty."

But Gideon was sitting as if suddenly turned to stone, staring hard at nothing, and it was Julie who had to supply the bills. “He's oblivious again,” she said matter-of-factly to John. “Can't you tell from his eyes?"