Dead Man's Bones Read online

  Alana nodded at me, flashed Brian a rueful grin, and turned to Donna. “Okay if I use your phone, Donna? I need to call the sheriff.”

  “Sure,” Donna said. “I’ll show you where it is.”

  “Hey, Alana,” I said. “What’s this about a skeleton?”

  “Ask Brian,” Alana tossed over her shoulder. She was already on her way to the house. “He knows as much about it as I do.”

  I turned to Brian. “So the skull was smashed?”

  “Yeah. Looks like a big rock fell on him.” Brian hunched his shoulders, suddenly small and vulnerable. “Dying in a cave like that . . .” He shuddered.

  I put my hand on his shoulder. The dry bones of ten-thousand-year-old humans are one thing, the skeleton of a caver is quite another, especially when you’re just fourteen and a caver yourself. “You need to be careful when you’re poking around in caves,” I said. Mom-speak, with love. “Your dad and I don’t have any Brians to spare.”

  We were back on accustomed territory now, a landscape that both of us knew, a vocabulary that we shared. He flashed me a quick grin. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I’m always careful. Can we go home now, Mom?”

  Chapter Two

  Stichwort (Stellaria holostea) got its name because it was traditionally used to treat a pain (a “stitch”) in the side. The name “Dead Man’s Bones” was perhaps derived from a confusion with another plant that was traditionally used to treat fractures, or because the stems were brittle and easily snapped, like the dried bones of the dead. In lore and legend, Dead Man’s Bones was a plant that belonged to the elves and goblins, and children were warned that if they picked the flowers, the Little People would drag them off to their houses under the hill.

  Although he was more relaxed now, Brian was obviously spooked by his find, and talking about it as we drove home seemed to help him. I was curious, too, about what he had found. His enchantment with Mistletoe Springs Cave and its various subterranean life forms—cave-adapted salamanders, snails, spiders, beetles, bats, and rats—not to mention its rocks and crystals and deposits of mineral salts, has made the cave a frequent topic of family conversations, and his room is crowded with cave stuff he’s carted home to add to his collection. I had the feeling that we’d be talking about the bones he had found for a very long time.

  The Hill Country looks solid enough when you walk on it, but looks are deceptive. Underneath, it’s like a chunk of Swiss cheese, riddled with big and little caverns—what scientists call karst topography. Some of these caverns are isolated, others are interconnected; some are filled with water, others are bone dry. Some are explored, a few are mapped, and many others lie secret and undiscovered. Of the explored caves in the Hill Country, five or six are open to tourists, and you can pay an admission fee and take the naturally air-conditioned underworld tour, a cool thing to do on a blistering August afternoon.

  Mistletoe Springs Cave, however, was unexplored and almost unknown when Aunt Velda stumbled into one of its two or three subsidiary openings—the same one that Jess Newton had stuck his saddlebag into the night after he and his brothers robbed the Pecan Springs bank. Because the cave is on private property, only a few of the neighbors knew it was there, and these folks—ranchers, mostly—had no idea that it might have any special significance, scientific, archaeological, or otherwise. To them, it’s always been just a curious and not very attractive hole in the ground, hardly worth the effort it takes to reach it, which is considerable. The main opening lies at the far end of a craggy, rock-rimmed ravine, created by Mistletoe Creek. You can get there by following the badly rutted road that loops through what used to be the Swenson Ranch, or you can take the shorter but equally rutted road that parallels the creek. Both roads are private, though, which makes the site inaccessible to the merely curious.

  I’ve been in the cave only a time or two, and I’ve gleaned most of what I know of it from Brian’s dinner-table reports. The cavern is long and snaky, its labyrinthian network of mazelike passageways eaten into the soluble limestone by eons of seeping, dripping, trickling, flowing water. The archaeologists recovered the Paleo-Indian skeletons at the rear of the arched main opening, which is something like a large shelter carved into the limestone bluff. A rockfall had almost closed off a narrow passageway that, once opened and entered, proved to branch off in several different directions. Brian and a college-student helper from the dig had been exploring one of those passageways. Since the route had not yet been documented, the boys were not sure where they were going and were moving forward cautiously, mapping as they went.

  They encountered the mud hole—the product of an underground seep—about thirty yards from the main cavern, Brian told us at dinner that night. Not far beyond that, the passageway pitched steeply upward and curved to the right. The boys were moving single file through the close, dusty darkness, with Brian in the lead. As they turned a corner, the light on his caver’s helmet illuminated a splintered human skull beside a large rock.

  The skeleton was hardly more than a heap of disarranged bones, webbed with shreds of what had once been clothing. The light glinted on a metal zipper, Brian said, startling him, and he realized that the skeleton was wearing jeans. It was this bit of modern technology that made the bones seem less like an archaeological discovery and more like the remains of a person—a cave explorer, he thought immediately, struck and killed by a falling rock.

  The two boys had beat a nervous, hurried retreat to the main cavern. Brian didn’t believe in ghosts, he said, but secrets seemed to hang like dust in the air over the silent, grinning skull. He was glad to get out into the light. He told his story to Alana Montoya, who went to have a look for herself before she drove down to Donna’s to call the sheriff.

  The longer Brian talked, the more comfortable he became, and I stopped worrying that he was going to be permanently scarred by his discovery. He went back to the cave on Saturday, but the people who were running the dig told him that it had been temporarily closed down. They weren’t able to answer any of his questions about the skeleton.

  Blackie could, though—Blackie Blackwell, the Adams County sheriff and a longtime fishing and poker buddy of McQuaid’s. On Monday afternoon, he dropped by the house to talk to McQuaid about their annual fall hunting trip—they’re partners in a deer lease near Brownwood—and ended up joining us for an early supper.

  The friendship between Blackie and McQuaid goes back to the time when both were lawmen, McQuaid a Houston homicide detective and Blackie the newly elected sheriff of Adams County. I met McQuaid somewhat later, when he was testifying for the prosecution against the woman I was defending, a much-battered wife who had finally taken a fatal revenge on her husband. The jury found that the woman had acted in self-defense and acquitted her, but McQuaid didn’t let that come between us. I was hardly suprised when, after I had moved to Pecan Springs, he walked into Thyme and Seasons and told me that he had left the force and taken a teaching position in the Criminal Justice department at CTSU.

  But McQuaid has learned from experience that academic politics can be just as deadly as street fights (even deadlier, sometimes), and that classroom teaching, without the stimulus of real-world investigation, can get tiresome. A few months ago, he reduced his teaching load to part-time—he has just one class this semester, seven to ten on Monday nights—and hung out his shingle as a PI. M. McQuaid and Associates, Private Investigations. (By “associates,” he doesn’t mean me, of course. He plans to use people like Bubba Harris, a retired Pecan Springs police chief.)

  This change in career direction has also changed our lives. There’s less money, which is rather worrisome, especially since the shop isn’t bringing in very much just now. And there are other worries. McQuaid’s first case, in which I became inadvertently involved, began with a routine investigation of an embezzlement at Morgan’s Pickles and included two murders and an exchange of gunfire. The second—a missing teenager found living with her new boyfriend in Houston—was far less thrilling, and the third (on which h
e is currently working) is a blood-chilling, spine-tingling case of résumé fraud. He hasn’t confided any details, but this ho-hum stuff is definitely okay with me. I nearly lost McQuaid to a bullet several years ago. He still walks with a limp and, when he’s tired, with a cane. As far as I’m concerned, the more commonplace and less life-threatening his investigations, the happier I’ll be. I can get all the drama I want in my life, and then some, from watching reality cop shows on television.

  The shop is closed on Mondays, which means I’m not as rushed as I am on other nights. Since we were having a guest, I was making curried chicken. McQuaid and Blackie like theirs extra hot, so along with curry, rice, veggies, and a large green salad, I opened a jar of McQuaid’s six-alarm chutney and spooned it into a red bowl. Martha Stewart I’m not, but since we had company, I set the pine-topped kitchen table with my favorite antique Appleware. I added red placemats and napkins and a vase of autumn wildflowers and felt pleased with the way it looked.

  Blackie and McQuaid are both big guys, and when they’re in the same room, even as large a room as my kitchen, it feels a little crowded. Blackie is still a bachelor (although he and Sheila Dawson have been engaged for almost two years), and the closest he’s likely to come to a home-cooked meal is Lila Jennings’ meatloaf, at the Nueces Street Diner. So he sat down at the table with an enthusiastic grin and a thank-you for me.

  Blackie Blackwell is quintessentially a cop, as though all the copness in the world has become concentrated in this one man. He’s as square as they come—square shoulders, square jaw, square chin, military posture, sandy hair-cut in regulation style. You almost expect him to salute.

  But in spite of his by-the-book look, Blackie knows when to set the rules aside and act on his gut instinct. He comes from a family of lawmen—his father, Corky Blackwell, was Adams County sheriff before him, while his mother Reba ran the jail and the sheriff’s office. He’s smart and tough. He’s compassionate, too, when compassion is required. Even people who aren’t overly fond of cops (and there are plenty of those in the Hill Country) have to admit that Blackie Blackwell is one of the good guys.

  The men were already seated when Brian came barreling into the kitchen, Howard Cosell right behind him, and dove for his chair.

  “Hands,” I said, without turning around from the counter, where I was pouring iced tea. There was a silence. “And wiping them on your jeans isn’t good enough,” I added.

  The chair scraped against the floor. “How’d you know?” Brian asked.

  “Eyes in the back of my head,” I replied, and Blackie chuckled. I put the filled glasses on the table. “Vamoose, kid.”

  While Brian was washing and McQuaid and Blackie were helping themselves to curry, I fed Howard Cosell, who gave me one of his doleful “surely-there’s-more-to-life-than-this” looks when he saw the dry dog food in his dish.

  I hardened my heart. “That’s all you’re going to get, Howard, old boy,” I said firmly. “You heard the vet. You need to lose four pounds, before the next visit.”

  Bassets are almost too smart for their own good, and Howard is certainly no dummy. He inhaled his dry dog food with one scornful breath, then padded over to take up his station under the kitchen table, where McQuaid promptly dropped a chunk of curried chicken in front of him. Howard licked it up and thumped the floor gratefully with his tail, a performance that earned him another hunk of chicken as soon as McQuaid thought I wasn’t looking. At the rate we’re going, that four-pound loss isn’t likely to happen in Howard’s lifetime.

  I sat down, Brian joined us, and a few moments of silence followed as we all heaped our plates. We were digging in to our food when McQuaid said, “Have you ID’d your John Doe yet, Blackie?”

  Brian looked up quickly. “You’re talking about the dead body in the cave? My body?”

  “It can’t be your body that’s dead,” McQuaid deadpanned. “Your body looks very much alive to me.”

  “Do we need to talk about dead bodies while we’re eating this wonderful dinner I’ve cooked?” I inquired.

  “It’s not really a body, Mom,” Brian explained, with a touching concern for my sensibilities. “It’s just a bunch of dusty old bones.”

  “A distinction without a difference,” I said, but I could see I was backing a losing horse. Judging from their expressions, all three of the guys wanted to pursue the subject.

  “There was no wallet, so IDing Brian’s caveman won’t be a piece of cake,” Blackie said, with a half-apologetic glance in my direction. He ladled a generous spoonful of McQuaid’s chutney onto his curry. “I think we might’ve narrowed down the date of death, though.”

  “Oh, yeah?” McQuaid asked. He raised his eyebrow as Blackie took a second spoonful of chutney. “Watch that stuff—it’s a little hot.”

  “Yeah,” Blackie said. “There were a few coins lying under the skeleton, like maybe they’d been in a pocket when the cloth rotted. They were mostly from the 1950s and ’60s. The latest was a 1975 penny with a crisp rim, no scratches. Looks like it hadn’t been in circulation for more than a few months.” He forked curry into his mouth.

  “So you’re putting the date of death somewhere after 1975?” McQuaid asked.

  Blackie sucked in a breath, his eyes watering. “Wow,” he said reverently. “Oh, man, this is good stuff. Did you make this, China? Will you marry me?”

  “She’s already married,” Brian explained, with a teenage literalness.

  “You’ll have to marry McQuaid,” I said. “The chutney in the red bowl is his. Mine’s in the green bowl. It has more flavor and less firepower.”

  “He can’t marry him, either,” Brian explained. “Guys don’t marry guys.” He frowned. “Except that I saw something on TV about these guys in Massachusetts who—”

  “Thanks, Brian,” McQuaid interrupted in a meaningful tone. Dad-speak.

  “Didn’t know you could make stuff like this, McQuaid,” Blackie said. “Hotter’n an El Paso sidewalk in August.” He spooned more chutney onto his curry, adding, “We’re putting the date of death after 1975. We checked the regional missing-person reports for that time period, and came up with a list of possibles. Nobody local, though, which strikes me as a little odd.”

  “Yeah?” McQuaid asked.

  “Yeah. That cave’s never been on the tourist trail, and only a few of the locals knew about it—until that crazy old lady stumbled onto the robbery cache.” Blackie shook his head. He and Aunt Velda do not get along very well. He had a little trouble swallowing her tale about the Klingons, when she found that gold in the cave. I wondered what he would say if I told him she had recently been to Mars.

  “Brian said the guy’s skull was crushed,” McQuaid remarked.

  “Like maybe that big rock fell on him,” Brian put in, looking up from his plate. “It weighed ten pounds, at least.” He dropped a piece of chicken for Howard Cosell, who shot out his tongue and snapped it up. Howard may look slow and lazy, but where food is concerned, he’s as fast on the draw as Billy the Kid.

  “That’s what it looks like.” Blackie sounded cautious. “We don’t know for sure that this is a man, though.”

  “He was wearing jeans,” Brian said definitively. “And sandals. At least,” he amended, “I thought I saw a sandal—like a Birkenstock, I mean. It had some foot bones in it.” He shivered. “I didn’t stick around to have a look.”

  “Oh, please,” I said. “Lots of women wear jeans.” At that very moment, I was wearing jeans and one of my Thyme and Seasons T-shirts. I stuck out my right foot. “And sandals. My sandal has foot bones in it, too,” I added, wiggling it.

  “Yeah, Brian,” McQuaid said, mock-stern. With a wink at me, he added, “The devil is in the details. If you’re going to be a scientist, you have to learn not to jump to conclusions.” He turned to Blackie. “So you think it was a caving accident?”

  “I’m not so sure,” Blackie said, in a tone that sounded unusually cautious, even for him. “It’s those sandals that’ve got me wondering.”
He frowned. “Brian, if you were going caving, would you wear sandals?”

  “Heck, no,” Brian replied, with the disdain of the expert. “I always wear leather boots. Anyway, it’s not just the cave. First, you’ve got to get there, which usually means a hike. Most caves are in the backcountry, and hiking in sandals is no fun. You can’t tell when you might stir up a rattlesnake.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Blackie said. “And that cave is way back, just off the ridge, on what used to be the old Swenson Ranch. A caver would have to drive ten miles across the ranch—which raises a question about his vehicle. He’d have to have left it, but how come nobody’s spotted it, during all these years?”

  “Maybe he came in at the Flower Farm and hiked up the road along the creek,” Brian suggested. “That would be a lot shorter.”

  Blackie shook his head. “The road that’s there now wasn’t built until the early eighties. Which means that this person had to hike up the creek bed and climb the bluff in sandals. That’d be some rugged hike.” He frowned. “And either way, there’s still the question about the vehicle.”

  “Well, then,” Brian said, “maybe he rode a horse across the ranch.”

  “In sandals?” I asked. Even in boots and chaps, riding across that ranch wouldn’t be any picnic. I’ve been there, and it’s nothing but miles and miles of prickly pear, mesquite thickets, and scrub cedar.

  “There’s the missing wallet, too,” McQuaid said thoughtfully. “No matter how he got there, a caver wouldn’t have any reason to leave his ID at home.”

  “You didn’t mention finding a flashlight,” I said.

  “That’s because there wasn’t one,” Blackie replied.

  I took an involuntary breath. No light? I visited Mammoth Cave once, and the guide—with appropriate warning—turned off the lights. The darkness that abruptly engulfed me was not just the absence of light; it had weight and texture and movement and intention, and I suddenly knew why, in every culture, darkness is a symbol for consummate evil. I’m not especially claustrophobic, but I was glad, very glad, when the guide turned the lights back on.