Well, wait a minute. Combing his damp hair in front of the mirror, he paused. What about Frieda? She'd been there for the first meeting too, hadn't she? According to John, Leland had come to him with a story about her having a thing with Salish. Was it possible that Jasper had found out about it, and she had killed him to keep him from telling Nellie? For a moment he managed to seriously consider it, but even if he could make himself believe it, how did Harlow figure into it? Why had he been killed? Why would he have engineered—as he surely had—the dental- chart fakery that had led to the misidentification of Jasper?
'Hi, there,” Julie said. “Gorgeous, isn't he?'
Buried in thought, he hadn't noticed her come into the cottage. She had found him in front of the bedroom mirror, stock-still, staring at himself.
He turned to smile at her. As always when she came in from the outdoors, she had a way of bringing some of it in with her; some indefinable freshness of skin and hair and fragrance. His spirits lifted.
'Did I ever tell you you're extremely wholesome-looking?” he said.
She laughed. “Just when you get carried away on the wings of passion.” She came up behind him, hugged him gingerly, avoiding the scrapes, and stretched to kiss him on the back of the neck. “Do you feel okay?'
He reached around, drawing her head closer. “I love you.'
'Munn,” she said, nuzzled him a moment longer, gave him a final hug that made him grunt, then flopped into an armchair and kicked off her shoes.
'So,” she said, “how'd it go this afternoon? Anything interesting happen around here?'
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CHAPTER 17
* * * *
'And that's about it,” Gideon said, summing up. They were standing on the footbridge over the pond, their elbows on the railing. After three blistering days, the layer of streaky clouds in the west had risen to veil the late- afternoon sun, and with it had come a moist breeze. The temperature had dropped a few degrees to marginally tolerable. They had walked slowly around the grounds while he told her what had been going on, finally stopping on the bridge while he concluded.
Julie had been quiet through the recital, asking few questions, making few exclamations; merely shaking her head occasionally. They began walking again. At the end of the footbridge was a weathered wooden sign that said, “Limit 3 Per Day.” Three what, Gideon wondered. The pond was all of four inches deep, and he had yet to see anything move in it.
'So the skull was Jasper's,” Julie said. She was chewing on a grass blade she'd picked up somewhere. “That explains a few things, doesn't it?'
He looked at her, surprised. All he seemed to have was questions, not explanations. “Not to me, it doesn't.'
'Well, it explains why those remains were taken out of the case and destroyed. Someone was afraid one of you would somehow spot that they weren't Jasper's.'
'Yes, that's probably true.” The fate of those burned shards of bone had plummeted to a lower priority this afternoon. He'd forgotten all about them.
'And it gives us a reason for Callie to knock you off your horse.'
'It does?'
Now it was Julie who stopped to look at him. “Of course, don't you see? It's what I said—or at least it could be. She was trying to keep you from finishing the reconstruction. She was afraid you'd find out it was Jasper. Which you did. Gideon, I'm telling you—'
'Julie, we've already been through this. If I didn't finish it, somebody else would have, so—'
'But they wouldn't have; that's what I'm getting at. You explained yourself—very publicly—why there wasn't any real point in doing a reconstruction on that skull: If it was Salish, there were better ways of proving it; and if it wasn't, then who was there to show it to? The only reason you were doing it was as a demonstration of the technique.'
'Well, yes—'
'So if you didn't finish it, if she could put you out of commission just for this one afternoon, that would have been the end of it. It would have gone back to Nellie for analysis and wound up in a box somewhere, or wherever they keep unidentified skulls. There would have been no reason to reconstruct it, and certainly no reason to think it might be Jasper's.'
They had circled the pond a second time and begun to head back toward their cottage. “Well, what do you think?” she said.
'Well—'
'In fact,” she went on excitedly, “she would have had the same reason for getting rid of Harlow to keep him from telling whose skeleton that was. Both of them could have been involved in Jasper's murder, and she could have seen that he was starting to crack. After all, you did.'
'You know,” Gideon said, “you're starting to make a certain amount of sense.'
'Why, thank you. It's about time.'
'Except...'
She sighed. “I knew it.'
