The Dark Place (16 page)

Minor sat primly at the other end of the table some ten feet distant, watching him cut away the dark shreds of flesh and put them in the jar.

"The fact that it’s only a pelvis…" Minor said. "Was mutilation involved?"

"No sign of it. The body’s been in the water a while. I think it was just pulled apart by the current and the rocks."

"I see," Minor said. "May we assume that the remains are those of an individual of the, ah, Negroid race?"

"Negroid?" said Gideon, puzzled. "No, why?"

"The color of the skin is quite dark. Or isn’t that the skin?"

"Some of it’s skin, some of it’s muscle, and other, tissue.
Gluteus maximus,
mostly, and some of the other flexors and extensors; a little
fascia lata.
The soft inside stuff and the external genitalia are gone, decomposed or eaten by the fishes."

Minor’s lips twitched downward. Gideon didn’t blame him. With the forceps he teased out a black ribbon of flesh. "This still has some skin on it," he said, "and you can see it’s black, but once decomposition has begun, the color isn’t any guide to race. Caucasian skin turns brown or black a lot of the time, and black skin is likely to turn whitish-gray."

"I see," said Minor, slightly whitish-gray himself.

"You’re welcome." With his own stomach churning. Gideon stripped off the greasy gloves and stood up. "Now comes your part," he said.

"My part?" Minor blinked, and his hand went reflexively to the knot of his tie. "I don’t take your meaning."

"The solution in the pot needs to be stirred every thirty minutes for about three hours. Then mix this into it." He held up a bottle of sodium hydroxide in fifteen percent solution. "Then, if I’m not back yet, put the pot on the burner, heat it to a low simmer, and put in the pelvis. Take it out in a hour—but I’ll be back before then."

"My understanding," Minor said, not at all pleased, "was that you would be responsible for all the technical details."

Gideon shrugged. "If you’d rather not do it, you can ask the kid with the beard. I’m sure he’d be delighted."

"I think I can manage," Minor said. "I take it this is some sort of caustic solution."

"Yes, using one’s finger to do the stirring is not recommended."

Minor did not seem to find this amusing. Neither did Gideon. He was anxious to get out of the workroom, into the open air. "In the meantime," he said, "I thought I’d run over to Amanda Park and see the man who has the bone spear points."

Minor brightened. "Old Mr. Pringle? That shouldn’t take you any three hours. Amanda Park is only a couple of miles away. His house is a bit off the beaten path, but I can give you directions. It’ll take you fifteen minutes to get there."

   It took him two hours. "Off the beaten path" was an understatement, and Gideon got hopelessly lost on back roads more than once before he stumbled on the place. When he finally pulled up at the side of the road next to the worn, birdhouse-shaped mailbox, he was ready to admit that Julie had a point about his being a city person. He got out of the car and stood looking at the ramshackle old bungalow of dingy white with faded green trim. On a gray day, with no other houses around, and made tiny by the thick forest, it was a forlorn sight. Only after a few seconds did he become aware that a very old man was sitting hunched in a corner of the porch, deep in the gloomy shade of a corroded tin roof.

Sleeping, or perhaps senile, Gideon thought. He walked to the house with a smile but with a distinct sinking of the heart. For an anthropologist he was peculiarly loath—nearly obsessively so—to intrude on others’ privacy.

"Mr. Pringle?" he said quietly when he reached the porch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No, I’m an anthropologist."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And all from around here?"

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

"Pyrites Creek?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You saw them?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And," Pringle said, finally raising his eyes to Gideon’s face, "all they’d taken was a couple of hard-boiled eggs. The woman still had them in her hand."

All three of the terrified Indians who were flattened against Herb Pringle’s cabin were scrawny and dressed in rags or in the old clothes they’d gotten from inside. Except for the saw blade, they’d taken nothing but clothing. They’d left the food untouched because it was all in cans and they probably didn’t know how to get at it or what it was.

The old man shoved the woman forward and she made motions as if she were nursing a baby. Then she fell on her face on the ground and just lay there crying. Herb indicated with gestures that they could keep their pitiful loot and offered them the squirrels as well, but they were afraid to come and take them. They were afraid to leave, too, and just cowered there, so Herb had to send them on their way by shouting and waving his arms to frighten them off.

"Did they say anything that you remember?" Gideon asked.

"Oh, yes, there was a bit of jabbering when I waved at them. The woman kept crying and shouting,
’cara!’
—like the Italian word—and all three of them were yelling,
’sin-yah!’
or some such."

Gideon took a small notebook from his pocket and jotted it down. "That’s quite a story, Mr. Pringle."

"Oh, there’s more," Pringle said.

They had finally run off, the little boy scrabbling sideways like a crab. Herb never saw them again, but when he went up to the cabin one weekend in the fall of that year, he saw that someone had been in it again. He was a little put out, feeling that he had dealt fairly with the Indians.

When he went in he saw that nothing had been taken. Instead, two Indian baskets had been left on the floor in front of the fireplace.

A large yellow tear ran crookedly down Pringle’s face. "Another problem with getting old," he said. "You cry awfully easily." He sipped his tea and smiled wanly. "I haven’t thought about those Indians in a very long time. It
is
a nice story, isn’t it?"

Nice, yes, but was it any more than a story? Pringle was very old, and he was talking about a time sixty-nine years ago. "I don’t imagine you still have the baskets?" he said.

"Oh, yes,
surely.
" Pringle was peaceably offended. "They were gifts. I wouldn’t give anything like that away. They’re the ones on the top shelf of the case to the left."