John nodded slowly. “Just like on the skeleton Nellie dug up.”
“Sure, because the skeleton’s really Jasper. But at the time, it was buried under the floor of the shack where nobody knew about it-and the remains Harlow said were Jasper’s were nothing but those teeth and a few splinters of bone that were just about unreadable. Every damn joint in the body could have been arthritic, and nobody would have known the difference. So there wasn’t any risk. All Harlow had to fake was the dental stuff. And that’s what he did.”
“You think.”
“I think.”
They pulled off the highway and into the graveled parking area at the entrance to the lodge. Even in the shade of the ponderosas, getting out of the car was like stepping into a smelter. Gideon glanced at the rusting metal Dr. Pepper thermometer nailed to the bulletin board. Ninety-four, it said, and it felt as if the relative humidity was about the same.
“God, what weather.”
“Yeah,” John said absently, “great, isn’t it?”
They began walking toward the main building. John had a ruminative look on his face. “Harlow,” he said, as if he were testing the name on his tongue. “Seems like such a meek, harmless little guy. Kind of hard to see him as a killer.”
Gideon nodded. “It’s a surprise. I was starting to wonder if Julie might not be right, if you want to know. About Callie.”
“Let’s concentrate on Harlow. Any idea why he’d want to do in Jasper?” He looked up at Gideon’s laugh. “Did I say something funny?”
“John, let me quote Les Zenkovich on Albert Jasper: ‘To know him was to want to punch him out.’ That would have applied to Harlow as much as any of them.”
“Why? What’d they have against him?”
“Well, he wasn’t the kindliest man in the world. From what I know about him, he was short-tempered, spiteful, contentious…inconsiderate…”
John waved an impatient hand. “Doc, you don’t usually kill people because they’re inconsiderate. Or even inconsiderate and contentious.”
“John, you asked me what they had against him, and I’m trying to tell you.”
“Right, sorry.”
“I’m doing the best I can.”
“Right, go ahead.”
“I mean, don’t expect me to solve your whole case for you.”
John emitted a rolling growl. “Will you go ahead?” “With pleasure, if you’ll let me. The thing is, they were all his graduate students at one time or another-” “All of them? Even Nellie?”
“All of them. Nellie was the first. And from the war stories I’ve heard, none of them had an easy time. If I remember right, it took Harlow eleven or twelve years to get his Ph. D. Jasper kept changing the ground rules on him. It was the way he was with them all, I guess.”
“But he finally got his degree?”
“Oh, he got it, but his marriage came apart during the struggle, and I understand Harlow’s always blamed Jasper for that. In his own quiet way, of course. Had two kids, I think, but he never talks about them. Never remarried either, as far as I know.”
John weighed this. “Well, I guess it’s a place to start.”
With Gideon, he stood at the entrance to the lodge building. “This where your round table is?”
“Yes, it started ten minutes ago.”
“Well, don’t let me hold you up. When’s it over?”
“Five o’clock. But the later it gets in the week, the earlier the sessions seem to let out. It’s a natural law. I’d say four-thirty.”
“Good enough. I’ve got some stuff to write up, and Harlow’ll keep till then.”
“I guess so. He’s kept for ten years.”
“Yeah.” John took the last, cold french fry from the bag he’d carried from the car and crumpled it into his mouth. “Boy, am I ever gonna spoil his day.”
With blinds drawn against the sun and air conditioners groaning, the meeting room’s temperature was wonderfully cool, but the atmosphere was heated with hypothesis and conjecture. The startling news about Jasper had quickly spread, and knots of academics had turned their chairs around to face each other, the better to argue over what it might mean.
Gideon made his way to the front, where seven of the nine participants in the odontology round table were seated: Miranda, Les, Leland, Callie, and three others. Gideon, taking the empty chair next to Leland, made eight. The ninth, Harlow, had yet to arrive to take his place as moderator.
“HAAAR-lowww,” Les was singing softly to the ceiling, “where AAARRRE you?”
Leland looked irritably at the wall clock, then at Callie. “Yes, where is he?”
It took a few seconds for Callie to look up from her notes. “What are you asking me for?”
“Well, he came back with you, didn’t he?”
She laid down her notebook and concentrated on getting a cigarette out of its slim metal case. “From where?” she asked absently.
Leland looked at her. “From where?”
They stared at each other with the bafflement of communication gone askew.
“From Nevada,” Leland finally said. “Where else?”
Callie had gotten her cigarette going. She squinted at him through the first acrid explosion of smoke. “Leland, Harlow didn’t go to Nevada with me.”
“Of course he did.’
“Are you telling me?” Her voice was beginning to rise. “I’m telling you, he didn’t go. He didn’t feel well, he didn’t want to fly.” She had taken only two puffs of the cigarette, but she jammed it out angrily against a flat metal ashtray, smoke pouring from her nostrils. “A year’s planning, and he misses the whole damn thing. How is he going to hold up his end of the reciprocal contracting if he doesn’t share ownership ‘u the development process, tell me that.”
“I really couldn’t say.”
Leland had a way of looking at people as if he were examining them through a lorgnette. Callie was briefly subjected to this scrutiny before he spoke again.
“Well, then, where’s he been?”
Callie’s attention had returned to her notes. With a sigh she closed the binder. “Leland,” she said between set teeth, “I already told you-”…
Gideon got up and left the room, crossing the lawn and taking the footbridge over the pond toward Harlow’s cottage. Halfway there he hesitated, changed his mind, and made for John’s cottage instead.
“Harlow hasn’t shown up at the meeting,” he told him. “I think we ought to check his cottage.”
John had come to the door with a legal pad in his hand and his mind obviously elsewhere. “I don’t know, maybe he’s-”
“Nobody’s seen him since Tuesday. Two days.”
“I thought he went to, where was it, Utah, with Callie.” “Nevada. And she says he never went.”
“Well, maybe he-”
Gideon blurted it out. “John, I’ve got a hunch he’s killed himself. I think he may have realized it was all over when we found the burial,”
John eyed him. “What’s this, another ‘feeling’?”
“I guess that’s what it is, yes. I’m telling you, he looked like absolute hell when we found the grave. And he practically started shaking when we talked about bringing in the police. Nobody’s seen him since, and-look, I’m probably making too much out of it, but let’s check it out anyway, all right?”
John looked gravely at him for another moment, tossed the pad onto a sofa, and closed the door behind him. “Let’s go. We’ll get a key from the office first. Just in case we need it.”
Most of the cottages at Whitebark Lodge were on the main lawn, in a cluster that curved around the big pond, but an additional half-dozen trailed away from these along the first few hundred feet of the bridle path; into a clump of woods, then out again into the sun, beside the stream. Harlow’s cottage was the last in this row, all alone on a grassy, creekside bank, forty feet from its nearest neighbor on one side, and with nothing but ponderosa forest on the other.
“He sure got himself an out-of-the-way place,” John said as they approached it.
“That’s why we had our poker game there, remember?” “How can I forget?”
As if by agreement, they stopped before climbing onto the porch. Behind them the creek burbled happily over stones and gravel, and from the woods on the opposite side floated a lovely, fluid trill of bird song, but the cottage itself seemed hunched in its own aura of torpor and decay. Sunlight glinted dustily from dirty windowpanes. Around the knob on the door a flyspecked “Please-do not disturb” sign had been hung.