The Dark Place (6 page)

"Actually," Julie said, "it hardly rains at all from July to October. All the rain falls in the winter."

"How much rain does it get in a year?" Gideon asked, then quickly said, "Too goddamn much," in time with John’s growl.

They all laughed. Julie said, "Ten or fifteen feet a year; about a hundred forty-five inches." She waited for Gideon’s obligatory low whistle and went on. "Strictly speaking, it’s not a rain forest. The term technically applies to tropical forests with broadleaf trees and woody vines and clay soil. These trees are evergreen, and the soil is fantastically rich. You can dig through two or three feet of humus with your fingers. But it’s temperate and wet, and it has a pretty solid roof of treetops, and lots of ferns and flowers and mosses on the ground, and most botanists would agree nowadays that that qualifies it as a rain forest—the only one in the Northern Hemisphere, and the only coniferous one in the world."

"I am suitably impressed," Gideon said.

"Too much like Hawaii," said John. "Everything’s so damn wet and soggy it falls apart if you touch it."

"John," said Gideon, "you must be the only person in the world—certainly the only native—who hates Hawaii."

"Too damn wet," John said again. "I wish they’d assign me to Tucson."

After half an hour’s drive, they crossed over the river on a surprisingly modern bridge and followed a sign toward the North Fork Ranger Station. Julie swung the truck suddenly to the left shoulder of the road—until then, the shoulder had not been wide enough to park on—and stopped.

"Here we are," she said. "It’s up on that ridge."

They walked up the shallow incline on a narrow trail with frequent switchbacks. Gideon, who had poor woods sense, lost sight of the truck and the road in thirty seconds. Within two minutes, he had no idea of which direction it lay in. The trail was well cut and easy to walk on, however, and the fragrances and varied greens of the rain forest absorbed him.

They left the trail after twenty minutes, climbed a fifteen-foot slope, and stood in a small clearing. The trail was swallowed up at once; they might have been miles from the nearest path. Before them, a twenty-by-twenty-foot area had been stripped of undergrowth and pockmarked with deep trenches cut in right-angled patterns.

"Looks like a dig," Gideon said. "This is where they found the bodies?"

"Right," said John, "and here are the tracks." He went to the far edge of the clearing, with Gideon and Julie following, all three working their way carefully among the trenches. "The tracks apparently came from over there," John continued, "skirted the edge of the clearing, and then left through here."

"They’re pretty well trampled over, aren’t they?" Gideon said, frowning.

"Yeah, with the Sasquatch Society people and our own men making casts, I guess there isn’t much left."

Julie walked a few feet into the undergrowth in the direction from which the tracks had come. "Unless it’s been messed up since yesterday, there should be at least one good print… Here it is."

Cut crisply into the soft duff of the forest floor was a gigantic, splay-toed footprint, roughly human in form, but much elongated.

Gideon knelt and pulled out a tape measure.

"Eighteen and a quarter inches," Julie said, "by eight at its widest point."

Gideon quickly confirmed the measurements, then lay prone on the spongy, fragrant earth, supporting himself on his elbows and peering at the footprint, his nose a foot away from it. After a minute he got back to his knees and brushed himself off, still looking at the track.

"Sorry, folks," he said. "Believe me, I’d love to say this looks like it’s from a live creature." He looked up at John and shook his head. "It’s a fake."

He expected an argument, but the big man merely dropped to his own knees to see better. "How can you tell?" he asked quietly.

"There’s no sign of a stride, no dynamic. With a basically human foot like this, you’d expect a basically human stride that starts when the heel strikes the ground, runs down the lateral edge of the foot, swings to the ball, and then ends with a toe-off." He rose to his feet and gestured at the track. "But this print was put down all at once, flat, and then picked up heel first in a clumsy attempt to imitate a stride. I imagine a horse or deer would leave that sort of print, but of course I don’t know much about tracks—"

John, still on his knees, looked up. "You
what
?"

"More accurately, I don’t know
anything
about tracks. I couldn’t tell a bear print from a rabbit’s."

"Well, Jesus Christ, how can you be so godawful sure that this isn’t real?"

"It’s not a matter of footprints at all. It’s a question of the biomechanics of locomotion—"

John was on his feet, his hands chopping the air. "Oh, boy, Doc, whenever you start talking like that I
know
you don’t know what you’re talking about."

"That’s not true at all," Gideon said testily. "I can’t help it if you can’t follow perfectly direct scientific language for—"

"Now, boys," Julie said, sitting on a fallen log and beginning to take off her shoes, "I
do
know something about tracks, and I think Gideon has a point. But let’s test this empirically."

Her feet were strong and brown, as Gideon thought they would be, with square little toes, and wide at the base. "Ooh," she said, "this feels good; you guys ought to take your shoes off." She wiggled her toes. "Okay, what should I do?"

"Go across to the other side of the clearing, then walk back across it as normally as you can," Gideon said.

She did so and marched right up to Gideon. The top of her head was a little above his chin. "Now," he said, "next to that right footprint you left over there, stamp down your right foot hard."

They stood together looking at the prints. It was hardly necessary to explain anything, but Gideon explained anyway. "You will note," he said professorially, "that the single footprint stamped into the ground is clear and sharply delineated all around the edges. But look at the tracks made while walking. Only the heel and toe portions have any depth to them; the outside margins, while generally visible, are indistinct and shallow. The inside margins, between the ball of the foot and the heel, haven’t left any imprint." He looked at Julie and leered, twirling an imaginary moustache. "You have lovely arches, m’dear, lovely."

"Thank you," she said.

"Most important," Gideon went on, "the walking tracks have little ridges of earth just behind the toes. Those are thrown up when the toes push off on each step. Equally diagnostic, the toes make the deepest impression, the heel a shallower one, and the sole the shallowest of all. Whereas the stamped-in print—"

"Okay, okay, Doc," John said with resigned good humor, "you’re right. It’s a fake."

"It’s obvious, really," said Julie.

"Sure," Gideon muttered, "as Watson was always telling Holmes—
a posteriori
."

On the way back down the trail, a gray-white, lichen-spotted bone gleaming in the pearly light caught Gideon’s eye. He bent and picked it up.

"Probably an elk," Julie said. "There are plenty of them here."

"Probably," said Gideon. "It’s a femur from one of the Cervidae."

The three had continued walking while he turned the bone in his hand.

"What’s special about it?" John asked.

"I’m not sure anything is. It’s just…" He stopped, continuing to turn the bone, and the others stopped with him. "See how it’s split, with this big dent right here at the start of the split?"

They nodded, and Julie fingered the dent.

"That’s just what bones look like in ancient-man sites where they’ve been broken open with a stone chopper to get at the marrow. I’ve turned up a couple like this at the dig I’m working on."

"Couldn’t another animal have done it?" Julie asked. "Or a bullet? Or a fall?"

Gideon looked at the bone for another long second, and flung it over his shoulder into the woods. "You’re absolutely right. Even world-renowned authorities have one-track minds."

They continued down the trail, and emerged so suddenly onto the road that Gideon almost walked into the truck.

   Gideon lay on his stomach in the dirt, at the back of the low, shallow cave, cramped and aching, his knees and elbows scraped raw. He had been wedged in like that for hours, choked and half blinded by the showers of pebbles and dust every movement brought down. His hair was heavy with dirt, his nostrils caked with it, his teeth on edge with it.

He was happy as a clam.

He lay the tiny pick and brush next to the newly uncovered humerus and inched his big frame backward on his elbows, bringing down a rain of pebbles. At the entrance, where the cave widened, he sat up and stretched, wincing as joints creaked and muscles burned.

He found the last of the apple juice he’d had with lunch and drank a great gulp from the bottle. It had warmed in the sunlight, but it washed away the dust in his throat. Aching and content, he sat back against the cliff face and looked at the lovely scene below. It would have been far less pleasant thirteen thousand years ago.

The cave dwellers who’d lived there would not have been thirty feet above a small, pretty beach of dark pebbles, but miles from the water’s edge, facing a huge, gray expanse of desolate land scoured flat by the retreating Cordilleran glacier. Treeless it would have been, and swampy, and full of kettle lakes holding the slowly melting, stagnant ice that the glacier had left behind. Far in the distance they would have seen the ribbon of invading seawater that was the Strait of Juan de Fuca aborning. On the very horizon would have been the trailing edge of the immense ice sheet itself, black with churned-up rocks and earth, slowly retreating back into what is now British Columbia.

There was no ice sheet now. Where its grim edge had been was the green, soft outline of Vancouver Island. And between Vancouver and the algae-covered beach just below him was only the thin, white curve of Dungeness Spit a thousand feet offshore, and twenty miles of water. Juan de Fuca Strait—named by an eighteenth-century English captain for a sixteenth-century Greek sailor traveling incognito on a Spanish vessel—had swelled and flowed over the glacier-scarred land until it formed a deep, mighty channel, from Vancouver to the Olympic Peninsula, and from the Pacific to Puget Sound.

He finished the last of the apple juice and stood up on the narrow ledge, looking with pleasure at the placid water, glasslike except for the sporadic, silvery splashes of leaping salmon, always where one didn’t expect them. Overhead, seagulls and elegant, black-headed Caspian terns cried and planed in great, flat circles.

Gideon sighed happily. There was still almost a month of this before heading back to the teaching routine at Northern Cal. And tomorrow morning he’d be driving back down to Lake Quinault, not to look into some musty, ancient murder, but to see Julie. If the investigation was still going on, they’d drive elsewhere to be away from it; to the beach, perhaps to Kalaloch or La Push.

With three easy, powerful strides he clambered up the old, warped planking that he had dragged up to serve as a ramp to the clifftop. As always, the scene at the top startled him momentarily. It was a constant source of surprise that ten feet above this marvelous, seemingly isolated site in the side of a beach cliff was Dungeness with its wide, carefully tended lawns and flowerbeds, its big homes and sedate cottage motels.

He walked across Marine Drive directly onto the close-cropped lawn of Bayview Cottages, five tidy, gray-shingled little houses with white trim that looked as if they might have been transported whole from the coast of Maine. All were identical except for little rustic signs over the porches. Seagull Cottage, said Gideon’s.

Inside, he picked up the telephone and dialed a Sequim number.

"Hello, Bertha," he said. "Is Abe there?"

A few seconds later, an old man’s voice, thin but full of energy, said, "Hello, Gideon, this is you?"

Gideon smiled. Abe Goldstein had been born in a ghetto near Minsk and had fled to the United States at the age of seventeen, speaking no English, having no money, and possessing no marketable skills. He had peddled thread and ribbons from a pushcart on Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn and gone to night school to learn English. In six years he had graduated from the City College of New York, and four years later, in 1934, he had a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. For twenty years he’d taught at Columbia, then gone to the University of Wisconsin for another twenty, where he’d been Gideon’s professor. He’d finished his teaching career with a few distinguished years at the University of Washington.

Almost sixty years in America, most of it spent as an eminent scholar of worldwide repute, and he still spoke like an immigrant ribbon peddler. Most of the time, anyway; the accent varied noticeably. More than one academic adversary had suggested it was a studied eccentricity, and Gideon, no adversary, was inclined to agree. If ever there was a studied eccentric, it was Abraham Irving Goldstein.

"Yes, Abe," he said, "this is me."

"So how is the dig?"

"So how should it be?"

"Of an old man you shouldn’t make fun. So tell me."

"I had a great day, Abe. That’s why I called. Uncovered a juvenile humerus today, eleven, twelve years old, from stratum four. So it looks like it was a family habitat. Also a piece of wood; I’m not sure what. Rectangular, two, three inches wide, with a hole at one end. About a foot long, unless we only have part of it. It’s pretty rotten—needs to be set in plaster of Paris
in situ
."

"Wonderful. So."

Gideon waited. The "so" said that something besides the dig was on Abe’s mind.

"Listen, Gideon, you didn’t happen to see yesterday’s
Chronicle
?"

"No, what’s in it?"

"All about you is what’s in it. You want to hear?"

"I don’t know. You’ve got me worried. You sound a little too happy about it."

Abe’s delighted cackle, strong and hearty, came over the wire, and Gideon, smiling to himself, poured some Teacher’s into a jelly glass from the cupboard. He couldn’t reach ice or water without putting down the telephone, so he stood there sipping it neat, one elbow on the television set atop the cupboard.