Make No Bones (2 page)

“He is twenty-eight years old,” ventured Will Martinez, who couldn’t have been more than a couple of years older. “You’d think—”

Callie decided it was time to assert her authority. Enough was enough. “I’m glad you’ve all shared your thoughts with me,” she said briskly. “I’ve learned a lot from listening to you, but it’s clear to me we have a way to go here. I think we should devote our team-building session Thursday to some hands-on training in nondirective counseling. I’ll ask Dr. Mehrabian from human resources development to put us through some problem-solving role play. Does that make sense to everyone? Does anyone see any problem with that? Is there any feedback?”

Aside from the resigned, almost imperceptible slumping of three sets of shoulders, there was no feedback.

It hadn’t been one of her better faculty meetings, Callie thought with irritation as the door closed behind them. She hadn’t elicited enough response, as exasperating as that invariably turned out to be. She hadn’t made them feel that the training was
their
idea. Well, what could she expect? The letter from Miranda had arrived only an hour earlier, and of course it had upset her. She was a high-strung person; she’d never claimed she wasn’t.

Harlow must have received his copy in the morning’s mail too; that would be more than enough to account for his having looked even more gray-faced and dyspeptic than usual.

She pulled it out of the desk tray and scanned it again. Whitebark Lodge. What a host of wretched memories that name stirred up.

Not that it had started badly, of course. It had been Nellie Hobert’s idea in the first place, as she recalled: an informal conference-cum-retirement-party-in-the-woods for Albert Evan Jasper, put on by the celebrated anthropologist’s grateful and adoring former students. Never mind that Callie had felt neither grateful nor adoring toward the chauvinistic old bully; never mind that she had left him after two maddening years to come and study with the less demanding Harlow Pollard, himself a browbeaten former student of Jasper’s. The facts were that she had learned a lot from Jasper, that she’d been flattered to be invited to the meeting, and that some sort of send-off seemed his due.

Well, the old man had gotten a send-off, all right. Straight out of this life. She couldn’t claim to be sorry about that even now, but it had been a miserable experience for her all the same. For a long time she had dragged around a burden of guilt, as if it had been her fault, her personal doing, that had driven him to his death.

Which it hadn’t been, of course; hers or anyone else’s. The therapeutic-psychodrama group at Esalen had helped her get that unwholesome idea out of her mind, and the marathon encounter weekend with its follow-up week of transformational body-mind work had put things in their true perspective: Albert Evan Jasper had been “driven” to nothing; he had made his own decisions, followed his own course, and marched—decisively and arrogantly as always—to his own violent end.

And now, even in death, even ten years later, even after she’d gotten it out of her system—or so she’d believed—here he was, still blighting her life. And no doubt doing the same to Nellie Hobert, and poor old Harlow, and the rest of them.

Damn him, she thought.

In his smaller, dustier office two floors below Callie’s, Harlow Pollard stared hollowly at Miranda’s letter. He was filled with a sense of impending doom, of a fateful circle coming closed. Whitebark Lodge. When he’d first read those words a few hours ago, his immediate reaction had been an instinctive aversion. He wouldn’t go. How could he? How could Callie, how could any of them? But then a sort of desperate, horrible resignation had come over him. Oh, yes, he would go back. A part of him had always known that one day he would, that his long ordeal would be resolved there.

He frowned, probing with his middle finger at the spot below his sternum where the familiar pain was focused, where he was sure he could feel the acid eating through his stomach lining. He took a couple of chewable Pepto-Bismol tablets from the family-sized box in his lower desk drawer and forced them down a dry throat with a gulp of herbal tea that had been on his desk since yesterday.

My God, my God, Whitebark Lodge.

Not that he bore the responsibility for what had happened there. No one could say that. Of all of them, he was probably the least to blame. Whose fault was it, then? Well, that depended on how you looked at it. On the one hand, you might say it was everyone’s, in an indirect sort of way, of course. On the other, wasn’t it really Jasper himself…

Harlow passed his hand over his eyes. With puffy, unsteady fingers he tore the plastic wrapper from two more pink, heart-shaped Pepto-Bismol tablets.

A few hundred miles to the east, in a similar office in a similar building on the campus of the Colorado Institute of Technology, Professor Leland Roach was suffering no such distress. Happily engrossed in his work, his spare and narrow-shouldered form hunched over the laptop computer on his desk, he clicked away at his latest contribution to the
Southwestern Journal of Paleopathology.
His own words, elegant and authoritative, blinked comfortingly into existence on the screen:

…these fecal samples were then rehydrated in an aqueous trisodium phosphate solution, resulting in the recovery of four oocysts of a parasitic protozoan identified as belonging to the genus Eimeria; most probably E. piriformis. This provocative burning…

>The steady clicking faltered, then stopped.
Burning?
A tic of annoyance jogged his old-fashioned, pencil-straight mustache. Leland moved the cursor back and hit the
delete
key.
Burning
vanished, to be replaced by
finding
. Leland consulted his notes, flexed his fingers, and hunched forward again. But further words did not appear on the screen. His thought processes had been disrupted.

He’d read Miranda’s letter when it arrived that morning, clipped a note to it instructing Eloise to make airline and lodging reservations for him, and put it out of his mind. Or so he’d thought. But now, here was burning popping up when he’d meant
finding
. A Freudian slip, he thought with distaste. Leland disapproved of Freudian slips as not being in accord with his notions of the way one’s mind ought to work. To his way of thinking, they represented a sort of mental disloyalty, a sneaky double cross by some perverse corner of one’s own brain. Leland prided himself on how infrequently he made such slips.

It particularly bothered him that he would make one now. There was no reason for his mind to play tricks on him. He was repressing nothing, hiding nothing from himself. What was there to hide? Terrible things happened to people. Nobody could be blamed.

Some of the others looked at it differently, of course, but that was their problem, not his. No sackcloth and ashes for Leland Roach, no rending of garments, no chest-beating and mea culpas. Life was difficult enough without taking responsibility for things that had not been under one’s control.

Calmed by these eminently reasonable reflections, he mentally opened a drawer in an imaginary cabinet, filed away the disturbing thoughts—the metaphor was his own—and slammed the drawer shut. Then he returned more calmly to the intellectual pleasures of the subject on which he had been expounding. The quiet clicking resumed.

This provocative finding serves to highlight the potential contribution of feces to a greater understanding of…

“Screw you, buddy!” Les Zenkovich yelled, responding to the curses just hurled at him. For emphasis he brandished his middle finger out of the window of his Porsche.

The driver of the other car, leaning across his seat, opened a mouth already twisted with rage, but then got his first good look at Les:
Shit, the guy was built like the Incredible Hulk.
With a gulp he clamped his mouth shut, hurriedly braked, and drifted back. If that monster wanted the whole bridge to himself, he could have it, and welcome to it. “What do you give an eight-hundred-pound gorilla?” ran the old joke. Answer: “Anything he goddam well wants.”

In the Porsche, Les adjusted the volume on the Creedence Clearwater tape and continued threading his way eastward through the ossified traffic on the Oakland Bay Bridge. The exchange had not perturbed him. By the time he got home to Kensington it would be forgotten altogether. People were jumpy these days, that was all, especially on the bridge. It had been that way since the earthquake, and according to the psychologists it was going to be that way for a while yet.

Not that it had made much of a dent in Les’s psyche. Few things did. Les prided himself on a laid-back approach to life, “Mr. Mellow,” they had called him in graduate school, and not just because he’d been a pothead back then. Take things as they come, that was his motto. Nobody gets out of this world alive, and you might as well enjoy things while you’re here. A good part of the enjoyment, he’d learned, was watching other people unnecessarily screwing up their lives every which way they could.

Life was complicated enough without inventing problems, but sometimes he seemed to be the only person who understood that.

Now take Miranda’s letter, for example. He’d received it that afternoon at his office on Mission Street. Assuming the others had gotten it today, too, there were four people who were pulling their hair out over it right now: Nellie, Leland, Harlow, and Callie. Well, not Nellie. No hair to pull. But none of them could be real happy about going back to Whitebark Lodge. Talk about bad karma.

If they’d just come out right at the start and told everybody what had happened, it’d all be ancient history by now. Les had said so at the time, but everyone else had shushed him, and so he’d gone along, dumb as it was. And now, for ten years, whenever they met, there had been this undercurrent, this squalid, crummy little secret between them.

They’d played it so close to the vest, in fact, that even Miranda hadn’t been told what had happened. She lived in Bend, not far from the lodge, and she’d been lucky enough to be at some kind of family affair that night—probably getting married or divorced; she did a lot of both. All she knew was that Jasper had decided to leave suddenly, no explanation, which was true enough. Obviously that was still all she knew about it, or she’d never have arranged another meeting at Whitebark.

At the end of the bridge he turned north onto the still more clogged Highway 80. Even in the Porsche he had no maneuvering room but had to wait out the crush like everyone else. All the same, there was a half smile on his face as he tapped out time to “Rollin’ on the River” on the steering wheel.

He could hardly wait to see how the old farts were going to deal with this.

“Twelve o’clock already?” Nellie looked up from where he was kneeling, his nostrils filled with the sharp, sweet smell of thyme.

“Yes,” Frieda said. “You’d better think about getting ready. Here, I’ve brought some tea.”

“I can’t believe I’ve been at this almost two hours,” Nellie said, brushing dirt from his thighs. He pushed himself up and winced as his knees unlocked. “Oh, my. On second thought, maybe I can.”

He sat gingerly beside Frieda on the stone bench and took the mug she offered. “Ah,” he said with pleasure, “just what I needed. What do you think of the plants?”

“They’re just lovely. Nellie, I was wondering about something.”

“About what?”

“About Albert Jasper. About his remains. Don’t I remember some problem about what to do with them? Whatever became of them?”

Nellie, who had recovered his customary cheerfulness as he’d worked, grinned. His short gray beard stuck jauntily out. “Ah, well, that’s an interesting question. As it turns out, I think we’re going to have a little surprise in store for everyone on that score. You too.”

“What kind of surprise?” she asked distrustfully. “If I told you, it wouldn’t be one, now would it?” As he gulped tea, Frieda studied him with that over-the-tops-of-her-glasses stare. “I don’t like that look on your face.”

His eyes opened wider. “Look?” he said predictably.

“I can see that morbid sense of humor glinting away in there,” Frieda said.

Nellie drew himself up. “Why, Frieda, what a thing to say.”

   “Let me get this straight,” Julie said, swabbing up cream-cheese dip with a carrot stick. “You want me to use up a week’s vacation so I can go listen to a bunch of anthropologists mumble in their beards about the place of Marapithecus in hominid evolution? Like last year in Detroit?”

“That’s
Rama
pithecus,” Gideon said unwisely. “And those were evolutionary anthropologists. True, they can get a little stuffy. But these are forensic anthropologists. Chardonnay or Chablis?”

“Which one’s open?”

“Chardonnay.”

“That’s what I’ll have.”

He poured glasses for both of them, the cold wine clucking into the bottoms of the hollow-stemmed glasses, then carried Julie’s to her.

“Fancy glasses,” she said. “I almost forgot we had them.” “Fancy dinner,” Gideon told her. “As you’ll soon see.” Julie was in the living room, browsing through the day’s mail, while Gideon worked in the open kitchen, talking to her over the wide counter. Thursday was one of his nights to make dinner, inasmuch as he had only a 10:00 A.M. class, and an easy one at that, while she worked her usual 8:00 to 5:00, winding up with the dreaded weekly staff meeting. Today’s, from what she’d told him, had been even more lunatic than usual, and he was happy to see her start to relax.

“Anyway,” he said, “forensic anthropologists are a much looser crowd, more lively, more irreverent.”

“Oh, I’ll bet. I can just imagine all the great ‘topics of conversation: handling decomposed remains, time-of death estimates…”

“Well, yes, but it’s not all business. A lot of people bring wives and husbands. There’ll be plenty of time for taking in the sights and just being lazy. Look, read the letter, will you? The one from Miranda Glass, with the Museum of Natural History letterhead.”

Julie foraged in the plate of raw vegetables and came up with a broccoli stalk. Then she fished the letter out of the pile of mail. Behind her, the big bay window looked out onto a wet, somber world. It had been a typical early-May day in Port Angeles, Washington: raw, overcast, and drizzly. The sky at 6:00 P.M. looked exactly the way it had at 8:00 A.M., a featureless and dismal slaty gray. According to the KIRO weather report, it was going to look much the same tomorrow.