“Oh, I think I know the answer to that.”
He looked at her. “You do?”
“Sure. It was a kind of insurance policy, just in case anyone was able to trace the theft to her. She picked a place where she could take people later on and say: ‘Don’t you see? The only reason I removed them from the museum was to give him a decent burial-here in the outdoors he loved so well, in this rippling brook among the whispering pines…oh, and look! Here are a few fragments that just happened to catch on this bush, thereby verifying my claim.”
He nodded his approval. “Could be. I never thought of that.”
“But you notice that none of the teeth-the only parts that could prove it wasn’t who it was supposed to be-happened to catch on the bush, did they? No, they were nowhere to be found.”
He smiled and shook his head. “You used to be such a nice, unsuspecting type. When did your mind start working like this?”
“Well, it didn’t before I met you, that’s for sure.”
Just before Port Angeles they rounded a broad curve that opened into a stupendous view of the Olympics, looking up the wide, densely treed Elwha River Valley to the vertical green wall of Klahane Ridge in the national park; Julie’s turf.
“Isn’t it good to be home?” she said with a sigh. “My God, what a week. WAFA will never live it down.”
“Oh, I don’t know. There’s one good thing to be said for it. Aside from wildly increased registration in 1993, I mean.”
“What would that be?”
He laughed. “I don’t imagine they’re going to have any problem picking the wildest, weirdest case of the last ten years.”