The Dark Place (18 page)

He shook his head to clear away the images. Let John find them; it was his job. And probably a good thing, he thought moodily. The rainy season was about to arrive, and Gideon was, as Julie had pointed out, no woodsman. A jungly wilderness in the rain was no place for him.

He had finished his drink but was too gloomily comfortable to go inside and get another. A heron floated down to the shoreline below, sending the gulls squawking away, and wading a few elegant steps into the quiet, dark water, there to stand staring absently at the distant lights of Victoria on the Canadian shoreline.

He must have dozed, because when the telephone rang in his cottage, he jerked upright, startling the heron, which croaked roughly and rose on slow, lolloping wingbeats into a sky of burnt crimson.

"You’re back?" Abe said. "And you didn’t call to say even hello?"

"I got in late, Abe. I didn’t want to bother you."

"Eight o’clock is too late to bother me? What am I, an invalid? You ate dinner?"

"Yes, I stopped in Port Angeles."

"So come on over for a glass tea and a Danish, maybe. Bertha went to a movie in Port Angeles. I’m all alone."

Gideon looked out the window at the darkening straits, now a misty mauve. He was in a somber, solitary mood. He wanted to fix another drink, take it back outside, and watch the evening turn to night. Maybe the heron would return. "Actually, it’s been a long day, Abe," he said. "I’d like to get to bed early. How about tomorrow?"

"Tuesdays the warden doesn’t let us have any visitors. Only Mondays. Come on, a glass tea, a piece cake, tell me how come it’s been such a long day. And then…"

"The last time you gave me one of those ‘and then’s’ I wound up on center stage at the great American Bigfoot debate."

"No, no, nothing like that. I just got something interesting to show you. You’ll see."

   "KBYO, Seattle. what is it, a TV channel?" Gideon asked, looking at the return address on the thick envelope Abe had wordlessly handed to him after listening absorbedly to his account of the past three days in the Quinault Valley.

"Radio," Abe said. "You sure you don’t want some honey cake? It goes good with the tea."

"No, thanks." He pulled the stapled sheaf from the envelope and looked at the title on the first page:
The Joe Ambeau Show, February 28, 1982
. "Is this a script?"

"A transcript. I just sent for it. I remembered a few months ago I was listening to this talk show—"

"You listen to talk shows?" Gideon was unable to keep the disapproval from his voice.

"Why not?" Abe looked honestly surprised. "I’m not interested in my own culture? I’m only supposed to listen to Ph.D.s and professors? Truck drivers and old ladies ain’t worth my time? Gideon, you got elitist leanings, you know that? For an anthropologist you got some funny ideas. Did I ever tell you?"

"Many times."

"It’s not a joke," Abe muttered. "Go ahead and read. Start on page seven, where the check is."

Gideon found Abe’s spidery red mark and settled back in his chair.

Mr. Ambeau: Joe Ambeau. You’re on the air.

Caller: Hello, Joe? Am I on?

Mr. Ambeau: You’re on the air, ma’am. Go ahead.

Caller: I just wanted to tell you that there are creatures that we don’t know about that hide in the rain forest. But they’re not like gorillas, they’re just funny little brown men.

Mr. Ambeau: Ma’am, we’ve been on this subject all morning, and I’m getting just a little tired of it. So here’s a notice to you and any other kooks out there. Unless you can prove what you’re talking about, don’t bother me or our listeners with any more fairy tales about monsters in the woods.

Caller: But I do have proof, Joe.

Mr. Ambeau: And what kind of proof would that be?

Caller: I wrote down what they said in my diary, which I just happened to have with me.

Mr. Ambeau: Happened to have with me. Uh-huh. This wouldn’t by any chance be my old friend who saw the giant flying saucer land at Copalis Beach last summer, would it?

Caller: Well, yes.

Mr. Ambeau: I thought so. It’s Looney Tunes time again, folks.

Caller: Now, Joe, don’t be funny. I was near that old trail they closed up, near where Seldes Creek runs into Finley Creek, panning for gold a few summers ago—

Mr. Ambeau: Panning for gold. Yes, uh-huh.

Caller: Yes, and I got a little lost, and I fell asleep, and I heard some voices—

Mr. Ambeau: Glory, hallelujah.

Caller: And so I opened my eyes, you know, just a little? So they wouldn’t know I was awake. And I saw them sort of sneaking among the trees, looking at me.

Mr. Ambeau: That’s really fascinating, ma’am. I could just sit and talk with you all day, but we only have another thirty seconds.

Caller: Well, I lay there very quiet, and I heard what they said. One of them, anyway, a little old man. He said, "kooknama reemee."

Mr. Ambeau: I see. You sure these were little brown men? You sure they weren’t little green men from that flying saucer of yours? Wearing space suits?

Caller: Oh, no, they were little brown men. And all they were wearing were little aprons, sort of.

Mr. Ambeau: Gotta go, dearie. Time for a commercial. Give us a call next time the moon’s full, hear, now?

When Gideon looked up, Abe said, "So what do you think?"

"I don’t know. It might be true, but—forgive my elitist leanings—my credulity is not enhanced by the flying-saucer bit."

"Good," Abe said. "A nice, healthy skepticism. Now, the first question is: Is there such a place as—what was it?—where Seldes Creek runs into Finley Creek?"

"The answer is yes."

Abe’s moist eyes widened. "You
know
this?"

"No, but I can see you have a topographic map unrolled on the dining-room table, and something tells me that you’re about to lead me over there and show me that, verily, there is such a place." But it wasn’t only that. Finley Creek had a familiar ring.

As soon as Abe jabbed his finger onto the map, Gideon remembered. And he knew they were onto something. "That’s where Pringle found the spear head; right where you’re pointing!"

Abe clucked softly. "So. What do you think of that? You wouldn’t happen to remember where those two hikers got lost five or six years ago? The ones who got killed?"

"I don’t think I ever knew. They were found in the cemetery. That’s only a few miles from there."

"I did a little looking in the old newspapers. It looks like they were both on a new trail that just opened up, the Matheny trail, that runs from the Queets River—what a name—all the way up Matheny Creek"—his finger slowly traced the line from left to right—"and then to this North Fork Campground along Big Creek. In between, for a few miles, it runs—guess where?—down Finley Creek."

"Why doesn’t it show on the map?"

"It’s not there anymore, not officially. It opened up in 1976 and inside of a month those guys disappeared. They closed the trail—a good thing, it looks like—and they never bothered to reopen it. Now the Park Service says it ain’t really necessary, and they ain’t got funds to maintain it, and so on and so forth. So it’s not on the map, and the signs are all down, and it’s all overgrown, and nobody knows it’s there. If you want my opinion, Mr. Skeleton Detective, that’s where your Indians are."

"But what about the ledge we found? That was up on Pyrites Creek, over ten miles away. So was Claire Hornick’s body. And that’s where Pringle found two of his points. You’re not going to say there are
two
groups in there, are you?"

Abe waved off Gideon’s comments. "Use your noodle. Think about what you know about the Yahi—"

"What do the Yahi have to do with it?"

"I’m just giving you an example," Abe said. "Keep your shirt on. When the Yahi were hiding in California all those years, they had two villages. In the summer they lived up on Mount Lassen, where it was nice and breezy. In the wintertime, they came down and lived in the valleys. Much warmer. Why shouldn’t
these
Indians do the same thing?"

"You think the ledge on Pyrites Creek is their summer home, and when it turns cold they move down to Finley Creek?"

"Why not? And if you do a little checking, which I did, you’ll see that the two hikers on the Matheny trail, they got killed in the winter, when the Indians would have been there, near this Finley Creek. But the Hornick girl, according to you, she’s dead two weeks, right? Late summer. The Indians would still be
there.
" He pointed at Pyrites Creek. "But now that the weather’s all cold and crummy, you can bet your life they went lower down, where it’s not so cold. Here." The finger thumped Finley Creek.

That would explain why the ledge had been deserted. The Zanders must have happened on it just after the Indians had left. The same day, apparently, if they’d smelled smoke. The Zanders had been lucky.

"Why are you looking so glum?" Abe said. "Cheer up. Now I really got something to knock your block off. Come."

Gideon followed Abe back into the study. Abe whistled tunelessly under his breath, a sure sign he was enjoying himself. The old man seated himself stiffly in one of the wing-backed chairs in front of the wall with the photographs and reached for a book at his side. "Come look."

Gideon pulled up the other chair. The book was a bilingual dictionary: one column was English, the other an unfamiliar language, definitely not Indo-European.

"The lady of the talk show," Abe said. "You remember what she said the old man said?"

"’Moona Kameemee?’"

"
’Kooknama reemee.’
Now look here."

Gideon followed the knobbly forefinger down the page to the last line, where it hovered.
"’Ku’naamari’mi,’"
Gideon read with interest. "Close enough."

"And what does it say it means?" The forefinger shifted slightly.

Gideon read it aloud. "’Old woman.’ Son-of-a-gun. What kind of dictionary
is
this? What’s the language?"

Abe closed the book so Gideon could see the plain gray paper cover:
A Yahi Dictionary.
Compiled by Edward R. Chapman. University of California Publications in American Indian Linguistics, Volume 13, 1914. "Fascinating, huh?"

"Yahi!" Gideon said, his blood stirred. "But that’s…There aren’t any more Yahi…" His hand went to his shirt pocket and found the small notebook there. He flipped rapidly through it, searching for the notes from his talk with Pringle. "Look at this, Abe:
cara
and
sin-yah.
See if we can find them."

In ten minutes they had them both. In Yahi,
kara
was "please," and
ciniyaa
was "no."

"Well, well, well," Abe said quietly.

"Abe…they speak Yahi.
Yahi!
" His mouth had gone dry. "How…who are they?"

"Don’t get so excited," Abe said, flushed and excited himself. "Don’t jump so fast to conclusions. Listen, a minute ago in that notebook, when you were flipping, I saw a picture. Show me again."

Gideon turned back to the drawing he had made of Pringle’s baskets. "This?"

"Let’s go in the library," Abe said suddenly.

Abe had had the wall between the family room and the master bedroom knocked out—he and Bertha slept in the smaller bedrooms—and had created a huge room that he’d filled with secondhand metal library shelves, freestanding in rows as well as along the walls, and blocking the windows, so that the whole was satisfyingly like a fusty corner of the stacks in some graduate library of anthropology.

The books, some fifteen thousand of them, Gideon had once estimated, were shelved in amazing disorder of which only Abe could make sense: books behind books, books in piles on their sides, books overflowing onto the floor in three-foot stacks. Gideon strongly suspected the existence of a precise but arcane cataloging system specifically invented for the bafflement of visitors. If there were one, it had successfully baffled him.

He stood respectfully in the doorway while Abe scurried about the labyrinth. Every few moments there would be a "feh!" or a "phooey!" and Abe would scuttle sourly around a corner of the shelves to disappear down another cluttered lane. After a while, "bingo’s began to outnumber "phooey’s and Abe emerged regularly to put an old, dark, serious-looking volume in Gideon’s hands. In ten minutes he had an armload.

Abe came out with a final thick book, frowningly plumped it on the top of the stack Gideon was holding, and looked at him as if he were startled to see him. "What for are you standing there like a
shmegegge
? Put them on the table so we can see."

With the books on the dining-room table, Abe propped Gideon’s open notebook in front of them and thumped it with his forefinger. "This basket pattern I’ve seen before."

"But it won’t tell us anything. Pringle said a student told him it’s a California design. They must have traded for it."

"Of course it’s a California design. Any dope could see it’s a California design. That’s why these are California monographs we got here. So start looking."

Right, Gideon thought. Any dope. He opened the volume nearest him,
Material Culture of Aboriginal California,
and turned to the index. "Basketry," he read, "36—41, 122—23, 174—83…"

Abe wasn’t bothering with indices. He was starting at the beginning of each book and turning the pages with amazing rapidity, using just a flick of the finger. After every fifteen or twenty flicks, barely pausing, he would moisten the finger with his tongue. He was in the middle of his third book as Gideon finished his first.

"Bingo," Abe said. He turned the open book so it faced Gideon. "Is this it, or isn’t it?"

It was definitely it: the same double, stepped columns of dark rectangles on a light background.

Abe’s face was glowing. He closed the book so Gideon could see the cover:
Basketry of the Indians of North Central California, Vol. VI. The Yahi.

"The Yahi," Gideon murmured, conscious of the slow, powerful pounding of his heart. "But is it possible Abe? Ishi was the last. No one’s ever mentioned a splinter group."