good weather was a July day in Yuma, Arizona. Even Hawaii had been too cool to suit him, and too wet. The FBI, with bureaucratic caprice, had assigned him to Seattle, with its two months of sunshine (in a good year) and ten months of bone-penetrating drizzle.
'We could probably justify two or three days there for you,” Gideon said. “You'd be welcome to sit in on the other sessions if you wanted...or you could just lie around the swimming pool.'
'Three days?” John said, and Gideon knew it was settled. He could picture John on the other end of the line at his fifth-floor desk in the Federal Building, wistfully looking out on the rainy streets of downtown Seattle and the gloomy, fog-drenched Sound a few blocks away. In a way, Gideon had cheated, or at least stacked the deck; he'd waited a few days before calling, letting a brief spell of relatively tolerable weather pass, until another truly miserable day came along.
'Might be nice,” John said. “Who pays?'
'We do. And if you want, I can have a letter sent on WAFA letterhead requesting your services.'
'That'd be good. Applewhite would probably let me do it on work time.'
'Great, I'll take care of it right now.” He started to hang up.
'Wait, wait!'
Gideon brought the receiver back to his ear. “What?” “Don't
'Why not?'
'Because you make Applewhite nervous,” John said with his usual candor. “Nothing personal. He just says every time we use you, things get weird.'
'I report what I find,” Gideon said. “I'm sorry if it makes things difficult for you.'
'Hey, don't get mad at me. Applewhite just likes nice simple cases, no complications.'
'Well, this isn't a case; this is just a bunch of graybeards getting together to talk about bones, remember?” “Yeah. But all the same, do me a favor, okay?” Gideon sighed, then laughed. “All right, I'll have Miranda Glass sign it, how's that?'
'Fine. Just keep your name out of it altogether, okay? No offense, Doc.'
* * * *
When it came time to book their airline tickets, they changed their minds and decided to drive. Eight or so hours in a car would be a sort of floating, between-two-places decompression period for Julie, whose job wasn't being made any easier by the usual freezes, cutbacks, and other hysterics that traditionally went along with the federal government's fourth fiscal quarter. They took their time, not that there was any choice in this part of the world. Port Angeles was situated at the very top of Highway 101, where it narrowed to two lanes and looped around the Olympic Peninsula, and you could go either east or west and still wind up in Los Angeles three days later, presuming of course that that was what you wanted to do.
They drove east and then south, skirting the Olympics, down along the Hood Canal, dawdling through sleepy towns built around oyster beds, down past Duckabush and Liliwaup and Dosewallips, none of which looked as if they gave much of a damn about fourth-quarter reallocation problems. They stopped for lunch at Tumwater and did their duty as tourists, touring the brewery and enjoying it.
Then it was out of the mistiness and ferns of the peninsula and onto Highway 5, a genuine freeway, where the country opened up and flattened out. South of Chehalis, Mount St. Helens reared into view, colossal and unmistakable, its scooped-out summit obligingly trailing a monumental, picture-postcard plume of white steam.
They spent the night at a motel in Portland, relishing the quiet sense of adventure that went along with being in a place where no one in the world knew they were. In the morning they stopped in Salem for a late, unhurried breakfast and took the Santiam Pass road up into the Cascades, over the weird, black volcanic crest of the pass itself, and halfway down the wooded eastern slope, covering in three easy hours what had taken the wagon trains ten grueling, dangerous days not so very many years before.
At two o'clock they pulled into the shaded parking area in front of Whitebark Lodge's main building. Miranda's letter had led them to expect a decrepit hulk of a place, and it was true that there were signs of neglect everywhere: forest-brown cottages unpainted for years or possibly decades; ample, once-lush lawns that now looked like goat-cropped meadows, hummocky and dandelion-infested; lavishly planted flower-borders half hidden by weeds; rust-colored algae thriving on the surface of the shallow pond that had been formed by diverting an arm of the creek that ran through the property. But the overall effect was of rustic comfort and rugged Western homeliness, of a relaxed and cordial matron (or better yet a madam), perhaps a little down on her luck right now, but with plenty still going for her.
Their three-room cottage had dust balls in the corners and a curling, soiled flyswatter lying on a windowsill, but there was also a fresh country quilt on the pine bedstead, a reasonably clean kitchen that dated back no further than the fifties, and a massive river-rock fireplace in one corner of the living room. There was thickly shellacked, gleaming, knotty-pine paneling on the wails, the doors, the floors, the cabinets, even the ceilings. Underneath the surface dust, which was easily gotten rid of with a broom from the closet, everything seemed clean, and all in all they thought it was just fine.
As far as Gideon was concerned, the sunshine slanting through the windows as if it were the most natural thing in the world didn't hurt either.
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CHAPTER 3
* * * *
The conference began much like any other. The attendees reported to the conference registration desk, where they picked up their badges (Gideon's said: “HELLO! My name is OLIVER GIDEON'), milled about with the other early arrivals, and renewed old acquaintances.
