The Romance of Certain Old Bones Read online

  So he sat, while his heart slowed to normal and the ache of nightmare loosened its grip on his chest. The air was cool but not uncomfortably so. The night sounded of wind and the business of wild creatures: the slow solemn dance of life and death, another layer of time being laid down on this stretch of prairie. There was enough star-and-moonlight he could faintly see Bosley’s profile, the sheen on his dark skin like the gleam of a high-polished saddle. It was as if he could see Bosley’s soul shining out through his pores, proof of the basic goodness and steadiness that had attracted Jacob to him in the first place.

  Jacob knew he was a good judge of character. He’d always had a knack for telling when people were lying, and he’d never once had to fire a man he’d hired on his own inspection. If pressed he put it down to his own morals and hard-won experience. But here in the softening dark, with no loud bright distractions to his outer senses, he knew his feel for people came from the same place in him that heard the voices in the rock—an extra chord of awareness that even now was tuned toward the bluff wall and the stirring horror there. That part told him something was Wrong, the same way it knew Bosley was Good.

  “Who’s out there now?” he whispered, a moment before they heard the sudden snuffling complaints of horses.

  “Nobody I know.” Bosley moved for the tent’s doorway at the same time Jacob grabbed for his shirt and gun.

  They moved out quiet into the dark, with the sweeping sky overhead and the endless sigh of wind through the prairie grass. Jacob sensed, rather than saw, movement over by the bluff wall—murmurs that were not the wind, movement of boots on gravel, metal biting into stone.

  And then a sudden loud grating noise, a sort of coughing gasp and a shriller, frightened sound, like a scream in reverse. Then a scrabble and thud, and fast soft footsteps pounding away across the butte.

  Bosley got to the bluff first and was bending over the man on the ground, but Jacob was right on his heels, and even he couldn’t have said why he grabbed the back of Bosley’s shirt and yanked him back from that wall with every ounce of strength he had.

  The two of them bowled over backwards just as there was a massive shudder of the earth and rock overhead, and a great swath of the bluff came crashing down at their feet. A stinging hail of stone pelted their faces and arms and Jacob got most of his breath knocked out by Bosley’s landing on his chest, but by the time his hearing came back there were Yalies stumbling across the plateau with lanterns, calling questions and offering hands to help.

  8

  In the cold light of dawn they removed the last large stones from the corpse’s back and turned him over. It was a much more solemn moment than any of their previous excavations had been.

  Although the dead man was not one of their party—all of the Yalies were whole and accounted for—he was clearly of their tribe: a young, clean-shaven white man in new-looking jeans and boots. The back of his chest and head had been caved in; his hands and one side of his face were black from the blood pooling and cooling inside his skin.

  Hope took one lip-pinched look and then turned away. “He is not known to me.”

  “Me either,” Ryan said, white-faced and too quick. The others shook their heads.

  Jacob felt inside the corpse’s pockets, found a wallet, a notebook, and a gold watch that had taken a pretty good beating. He pried it open and shook out the broken glass. “Geo. G. Carruthers” was engraved inside, and there was a picture of a pretty dark-haired girl.

  “Carruthers,” Hope repeated. “There is a Albert Carruthers at the Smithsonian. I believe he is one of March’s backers.”

  “This his son?” Jacob asked.

  “I really couldn’t say. I am unfamiliar with his family status or relations. At the moment I am more curious to know what he was doing here, at our dig site.”

  “Maybe you can ask them.” Bosley nodded across the butte toward the men coming up the trail.

  Big Bone Chief Red Beard March himself was in the lead, followed by a phalanx of students with picks over their shoulders, a couple of old prospectors carrying rifles, and three young Indians done up in buckskins and paint as if they were riding off to war. P.T. Barnum himself could not have made a more dramatic entrance.

  Jacob heard Hope suck in his breath, saw the Yalies tighten grips on their pickaxes, and made a move to put himself between March and Hope, in hopes of forestalling an outright massacre, but Bosley caught his arm and held him back.

  “Leave ’em,” he said, low, while the others advanced toward March’s party. “Help me here.”

  “Hope! I’ll have words with you!” March’s voice was booming and bullish, the tones of a man used to throwing his weight around. He was taller than Hope, thick-bodied like a bear and swinging a well-fed girth in front of him. Hope’s reply was too low for Jacob to make out, but its dry cutting tone was clear.

  “Don’t look at them,” Bosley advised. “Be invisible. Just a couple of darkies takin care of the finer folks’ dead.” Jacob lifted an eyebrow and Bosley gave him a sour smirk. He handed over two corners of the big canvas cloth they had brought out to serve as a shroud, and they spread it on the ground beside the body.

  “What’re you lookin for?” Jacob asked as Bosley ran his fingers through Carruther’s dusty hair.

  “The rockfall didn’t kill him,” Bosley said. “He was already on the ground before that slide came down.” He glanced up. “Thanks for that, by the way.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Jacob said, remembering how every nerve and muscle had screamed at him to get Bosley away from that wall. He’d had a few warnings of danger over the years, but none so clear and strong, and never on another’s behalf.

  There was no blood in Carruthers’ hair, even though his skull bones shifted unpleasantly beneath the scalp. But there was blood on his shirt, in small regularly-spaced patches. Jacob had seen men crushed before: by rockfall, by wagons, by horses. Usually they died of suffocation or bleeding in their guts. They didn’t generally leak unless a bone broke the skin.

  Bosley peeled the shirt back to reveal two lines of puncture wounds crossing Carruthers’ torso: one above the nipples, the other just below the ribs. They were hard to see against the discolored mottling of his skin, but it looked like he had been stabbed a few times with a pitchfork.

  Jacob swore softly.

  “Yeah. Rockfall didn’t do that.” Bosley shot a wary glance up at the two professors, who were now nose-to-nose, hollering about Precedence and Legal Notice and Professional Standards. “Help me turn him.”

  They rolled the body onto the canvas—it was beginning to stiffen—and found similar wounds on Carruthers’ back. Deep, wide, in two straight lines that slanted toward each other, as if to converge on a point beyond the armpit.

  Jacob felt a prickle up his neck. “Those look like—”

  “Teeth marks.” Bosley stuck his little finger in the largest of the wounds; it went in up to the second joint. He extracted the finger with a grimace and looked over his shoulder at the bluff wall. The mosasaur’s eye-socket seemed to gaze at the sky, innocently minding its own business. “Somebody went to a lot of trouble here.”

  His words were so close, and yet so at odds, with what Jacob was thinking—what he was trying not to think—that it took him a moment to frame a reasonable response. “Wait, you think somebody tried to make this look like the fossil did it? Why would—”

  “To scare the competition away,” Bosley said, with a speaking glance toward March’s three Indian scouts. Unlike their posturing swagger when they had first followed March up the draw, they were now clustered away from the High Priests’ summit, shooting glances at the body and the bluff wall and muttering amongst themselves.

  “Yeah, but the professors don’t believe in that stuff.”

  “There’s enough dead bodies, they might. And anyway, it’s a good enough warning to the others to keep off our dig. You heard the professor sayin how valuable this critter was—”

  “I think he meant valuable in t
erms of science, not money.”

  “It’s valuable to his reputation.” Bosley tugged the canvas over the dead man. “That means jobs, and backers, and money. I don’t know if you heard, but Hope’s in hock up to his eyeballs. He had to beg money from his pa and everybody else to make this trip. March there’s got the money cuz he’s got government contracts.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Folks talk in front of the colored help.”

  “Folks are damned fools,” Jacob grunted.

  “Tell me about it sometime. Let’s get him up.”

  They hoisted poor George Carruthers between them and carried him across the butte to where the battle was still raging.

  “—further evidence of your slipshod methods,” March was saying.

  “—typical lack of sensitivity,” Hope riposted. “A young man is dead here—”

  “—due to your lack of planning—”

  “For all we know your savages brought him over here to dispatch—”

  “And there you reveal your bias,” March crowed. “You Lamarckists, so quick to credit your own blue blood, condemning the rest of us to perpetual barbarism—”

  “You condemn yourself, sir, I only record the evidence!”

  “Hey!” Jacob said, using his cattle-range voice. That, and the fact that he wedged between them with a dead body, seemed to have an impact. The two men fell back from each other, breathing hard, Hope’s eyes rolling like an agitated horse. March was grinning, affecting to enjoy the conflict, but his color was high and he took out a handkerchief to wipe sweat from his balding head.

  Jacob dropped the body at March’s feet, which caused a murmur of shock and disapproval from both sides.

  “Take your man,” Jacob said, holding out Carruthers’ watch and effects. “Take him and bury him, or put him on a riverboat back to his people, or drop him in a hole. But get him off our dig. And the rest of you keep your sorry asses to your end of the valley.”

  “And who the devil are you, sir?” March exclaimed.

  “I’m the man in charge of this expedition, bound to see these boys get out of this godforsaken place alive. So you wanna explain to me what your man was doin over here in the middle of the night?”

  March began to splutter that he had no idea, he could hardly be responsible for the movements of every man in his party, and Jacob cut him off, watching the faces of March’s students as he spoke. “This fella here died cause he was wanderin around in the dark someplace he wasn’t supposed to be. And I ain’t makin no claims as to why he was here or how he died, but it seems to me everybody might be better off if they kept to their own flock from here on out.”

  He dropped a hand to the butt of his Colt as he spoke. March’s eyes followed, a look of incredulity crossing his florid features. He was a blowhard and a bully, but Jacob could bet he’d never been on the receiving end of a physical threat before. Jacob didn’t often make them, either. A real hard case would look at you with contempt, but a hothead might throw down on you then and there. A coward would sneer to your face and then shoot you in the back. But March was a civilized man, and as such he could only react with unease and disbelief that anyone could be so uncouth.

  The two old prospectors in his party were not so skeptical, Jacob saw. They recognized the line being drawn, and they would respect it. The three Sioux braves just looked like they wanted to be somewhere else, more so when March snapped his fingers at them, signaling that they should pick up poor Carruthers. Jacob was embarrassed for them—three tall strong young men, painted up to serve as carnival attractions, hoisting a canvas-wrapped corpse onto their shoulders—but he held his hard-line pose until March’s party were well away down the draw.

  Then he turned and passed a withering eye over the Yalies. “Get to work,” he snapped, and they broke the line and scattered, all except Hope and Ryan.

  Hope was white-faced and tight-lipped. “Thank you for that show of support, Mr. Tracy. I fear my temper got the better of me.”

  “I didn’t do it for you,” Jacob said. “Somebody murdered that kid. Probably somebody here in this camp.”

  Hope’s head went back. His mouth opened but Ryan was the one who spoke. “It was an accident—”

  “No, it weren’t,” Bosley broke in, and the two paleontologists looked at him as if one of the mules had started to talk. “He was dead before that slide came down on him. Somebody stabbed him full of holes and knocked that rock down to cover it up.”

  “How could anyone—?” Ryan spluttered, and Hope demanded, “Do you have any proof of this?”

  “Whaddya mean, proof?” Jacob retorted. “This isn’t a court of law, professor!”

  “This is my expedition, Mr. Tracy,” Hope said, “and part of what I hired you to do was protect not only our lives but our livelihoods. I warned you March was likely to be a problem, and you assured me this butte was well-protected and we should be in no danger.”

  “And I also told you, the two of us” —Jacob wagged a thumb between himself and Bosley— ”weren’t gonna be enough against a crew of cutthroats or a posse of murderin Indians. But you didn’t wanna hire guards. You said this was a scientific expedition and the Sioux should have no beef with us. And you kinda neglected to tell me before last night that March was the murderin kind of claim-jumper.” Not that Jacob believed he was, but the point stood. “And if you want me to protect this camp, then you’d damn well better start doin what I tell you, and that means settin watch at night and keepin your boys armed.”

  “For the good of your fossils, if not the boys,” Bosley said in that bland way of his, which Jacob was coming to recognize as thinly veiled contempt. “Don’t suppose you noticed, but there was a pickaxe next to the body. Could be Carruthers came here to work some mischief on your mos-a-saur, and somebody put a stop to it.” Jacob noticed how Ryan went stone-fixed at this assertion, his eyes riveting to Bosley’s face. “Seems to me it’d be less trouble to keep the vultures off your dig in the first place.”

  Hope’s lips pinched with distaste. He did not interrupt Bosley’s speech, but he also didn’t look at him while he spoke. “See to it,” he said to Jacob, and stalked away with Ryan slinking after.

  There was a moment of thorny silence, and then Bosley said, “It ain’t the army.”

  “It’s three hundred dollars,” Jacob said. “And it’s August. We ain’t gonna pick up another job this late.”

  “Maybe not here, but California—”

  “No. Rather not risk it. I gotta be back to St. Louis by snowfall.”

  “You got family there?”

  “Baby sister. Back with the nuns.” Jacob sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “Look, if you wanna go, I won’t blame you.”

  “No,” Bosley said. “I got nobody waitin on me. And like I said, it ain’t the army.”

  They regarded each other for a moment, and Jacob felt something settle between them, unspoken. Men of a certain stripe made a habit of looking each other in the eye, he had noticed over the years. It was a way of establishing rank, dominance. It was very rare to meet a man’s eyes and find oneself on a level: met, accepted.

  Then Bosley broke the gaze and said in a low voice, without moving his lips much, “You notice how Ryan went all-overish when you said that boy was murdered?”

  “Yeah, I did,” Jacob said. “And as broody as he is over that fossil…”

  “I think he was lyin bout not knowin Carruthers.”

  Jacob nodded, thinking of Ryan’s white-faced denial, and March’s claim not to know why Carruthers had been scouting their camp in the middle of the night. “If they had a deal, and Carruthers decided to go back on it—“

  “Or maybe Ryan wanted to keep the find to himself, to impress the professor.”

  It felt plausible. To that alert, unwanted sense in the back of Jacob’s mind, it felt accurate. And very, very worrisome.

  “We’ll keep an eye on him,” Jacob said. “Whatever game he’s playin, he ain’t much good at it. He’
ll slip up sooner or later.”

  9

  At suppertime, two of the Yalies—Matheson and Ebury were their names—came up to where Jacob and Bosley were eating and said they wanted to take their turns on the night-watch.

  “Well that’s mighty big of you,” Jacob allowed, with a touch of sarcasm.

  They squirmed. “Look, the professor,” Matheson began, and looked at his schoolmate for help.

  “He gets blinders on,” Ebury said. “He’s no fool, he just—”

  “He isn’t reasonable where March is concerned,” Matheson finished. “And if he admits we need to be on guard against Mr. March, it’s like the professor admitting he’s afraid.”

  “Which are you more afraid of?” Bosley asked. “March or Hope?”

  They looked at him uneasily, and back at Jacob, as if they needed permission to answer. They had all capitulated more or less amiably to Bosley’s authority in the past month, at least in his capacity as Jacob’s right hand. But his suggestion that their superiors, their High Priests of science and scholarship, were less than perfect was more than they were comfortable with.

  “You think March is capable of murder?” Jacob said.

  “Well,” Ebury said, “somebody killed that fellow. And there’s been other weird stuff going on.”

  “Like what?”

  “Petty theft,” Matheson said. “Little things, taken out of our tents. Combs and handkerchiefs, Clark’s hat band—”

  “My razor,” Ebury added, rubbing his knuckles over the gingery thistle-down that had sprouted across his cheeks in recent weeks.

  “And that’s only been happenin since you got out here?” Jacob asked. “Not on the train or in town?”

  Matheson shook his head. “We all lived in the dorm together. If there was a thief the rest of us would’ve caught him out long ago and settled his hash. This’s some new nigger in the woodpile.” He shot an awkward glance at Bosley. “Not accusing present company, of course.”

  “Course not,” Bosley said blandly.