Leland regarded her with open distaste. “I hate to change the subject,” he said, “but need I remind anyone that the evening is slipping away? Are we going to play poker, or are we not? There are traditions to be upheld here.”
John turned to Gideon, surprised. “You people play poker?”
Gideon laughed. “Do birds eat worms?”
John surveyed the table of academics with undisguised avidity. “For money?”
Miranda, on John’s other side, waggled her eyebrows at him. “Care to join us, young man?”
“I wouldn’t want to horn in.”
“The more the merrier. You too, Julie.”
“Well-sure,” she said, then whispered to Gideon: “Will you make me one of those charts?”
“What charts?”
“You know, that shows which hand beats which hand.” “Why do I foresee disaster here?” Gideon said. “Harlow, we’ll use your cottage,” Leland announced. Harlow hesitated. “I don’t know, Leland. I think I’ll sit this one out.”
“Nonsense,” Leland told him. “We don’t want to keep other people up all night, and you have the most out-of-the-way cottage. Besides, I lust after your money.” Leland had had a few glasses of wine by this time.
Harlow smiled wanly. “Couldn’t I just give you ten dollars right now?”
“That,” said Leland, “wouldn’t be sporting.”
CHAPTER 5
“Whuff,” Gideon said, holding out his cup.
Julie refilled it for him from the ancient percolator. Making morning coffee was generally his job, but Julie had wisely quit the poker session early and been in bed by midnight. She’d won $9.50 too, which had mildly irritated him at the time, but in the end it made up for most of his losses. Leland, as usual, had been the big winner. Gideon had finally figured out why he was always so successful. With that perpetually joyless expression on his face, you couldn’t help thinking that this time his cards really were awful.
“I just hope none of the students were trying to find somebody to confess to last night,” she said. “All the professors were holed up in Harlow’s cottage gambling and boozing until three in the morning.”
“Two.”
“Three. You woke me up when you came in. You were quite cheerful at the time. Playful, too, although I must say that didn’t amount to anything.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Are you very hung over?” she asked sympathetically.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said, yawning. The coffee was beginning to clear his head. “I could’ve used a little more sleep, though.”
“Well, I should think so.” She leaned her elbows on the little dining-room table, holding her cup in both hands. “Gideon, maybe I’m getting paranoid from living with you too long, but the whole thing sounds fishy to me.”
He scratched his cheek, playing her words back. “I think I missed something.”
“What happened to Jasper’s…remains, or whatever you want to call them. Why are you all so ready to assume it’s just a student lark?”
“What else?”
“Wouldn’t they have left a note or something to show it was a joke? They wouldn’t leave you all worrying about what happened to the bones. No, I think there’s more to it than that. I think somebody might not want them out there in full view with dozens of professional anthropologists peering at them.”
“You are getting paranoid.” He yawned again, sipped some more coffee, and shuddered. Percolators certainly made a powerful brew; you had to say that for them. “Or do you know something I don’t?”
“Maybe one of you-one of your friends, I mean-liked it better when they were out of sight in a drawer somewhere. Maybe somebody has something to hide.”
“Like what?”
“Like maybe Jasper wasn’t killed in that bus crash.”
Ah, he’d wondered if that was where she was heading. “That’s Jasper, all right, Julie. Teeth are like fingerprints; when you get a match, it’s a match. Besides, five highly competent anthropologists worked on that crash, and they don’t come any better than Nellie Hobert-”
She was shaking her head. “No, no, I’m not suggesting it wasn’t him, I’m suggesting maybe he didn’t die in the crash. Maybe-who knows?-maybe he was already dead when it happened, and someone’s afraid one of you bigwig experts will be able to tell it from the skeleton.”
Gideon looked wryly at her. “That would have made getting on the bus a little tricky, wouldn’t it?”
After a second she smiled. “Well, I didn’t say I’d figured it all the way out. But I don’t think you have either. I’m just surprised to see you jumping to conclusions, that’s all. That’s not like you.”
“Well, maybe you’re right.”
“But you don’t think I am.”
“No, I think it was just some of the kids.”
“Well, maybe you’re right.” She stood up. “Let’s talk about something important. Any chance you can break away this morning for a short horseback ride?”
“Well, I hate to miss the sessions.”
“We ought to get our muscles limbered up for Thursday.”
“Thursday? Oh, God, the trail-ride chuck-wagon breakfast.”
“You’ll love it.”
“I don’t know, I’m a city boy. Getting on a horse makes me nervous. They’re too damn high.”
“Now look, you. I’m taking vacation time so we can be together and have fun and relax, and that means-”
“That I’m going on a horseback ride. Yes, ma’am.”
“All right, then. I’ll let you off this morning, though.” She leaned over to kiss his cheek and winced. “Ouch. Take a shave, will you? Then let’s go get some breakfast, I’m starving.”
They got to the breakfast buffet at seven-thirty, drank some orange juice and some more coffee, and on Gideon’s suggestion carried their plates of fried eggs, hash browns, and biscuits outside to look for a place to enjoy the slanting, high-country sunlight for a while. They had the grounds to themselves, the other attendees preferring to eat inside. Most of them were from the Southwest; catching up on sunshine was not one of their priorities.
They found a reasonably comfortable low wall-actually part of the rock-and-mortar foundation of an old building that had once stood there in a grove of ponderosa pine-looking out over the near-deserted road to a broad meadow with a few fat cows grazing in it. Happily vacant of mind (was there anything that made one more contentedly empty-headed than watching cows?), Gideon ate his breakfast enjoying Julie’s quiet company and relishing the morning sun’s warmth on the back of his neck. He could feel it, with pleasure, on the rims of his ears. It had been a long winter on Puget Sound.
After a pleasantly indeterminate time they looked around to see Nelson Hobert come tramping ebulliently up the path, arms pumping, wearing a T-shirt that said: “Young at heart, other parts a little older.” Red bermuda shorts displayed lumpy knees and squat, bowed calves. With him were a group of half-a-dozen people, including three of his students from Nevada State, extraordinarily attractive females in their twenties, trailing behind him in a row. Gideon smiled, remembering something that a frankly admiring Les Zenkovich had once said: “I think the old geezer imprints them, you know? Like ducklings.”
Despite his being five-foot-five, bald, potbellied, billygoat-bearded, and unashamedly into his sixties, Nellie Hobert had a remarkable knack for attracting a steady stream of worshipful and attractive young women students. To his colleagues (and to Nellie himself, Gideon thought) it was a source of wonder and amusement; to some of the more predatory among them a source of envy. Hobert’s harem, they called them, which pleased Nellie immensely, patently unpredatory though he was.
Not that he didn’t glow when surrounded by those fresh and adoring faces. Who wouldn’t?
Nellie had arrived the previous evening, accompanied as always by his wife, Frieda. Tired from a long day, he had nevertheless joined the poker party at about ten and stayed almost to the bitter end. An enthusiastic but hopeless card player, he had contributed handsomely and without complaint to Leland’s profits. And as Gideon had known he would, he’d taken the news of Jasper’s disappearance in his stride.