I straightened, and the wind gusted again and made me shiver, and from forty or fifty yards away Emil Corda let out a shout. I swung around, saw him beckoning to me, and hurried over to where he was, watching my step as I went. He was standing alongside the fissure he'd been following at a place where it was close to a foot wide. There was an odd look on his seamed face, a mixture of puzzlement, awe, and excitement.
“Found something,” he said, as if he still didn't quite believe it. “First time I been down this far since the quake.”
“Found what?”
“Look for yourself. Down in the crack. This beats that Olema fellow's cow story all to hell. Man, I guess it does!”
I moved over alongside him and bent to peer into the crack. The hairs went up on the back of my neck; a little puzzlement and excitement kindled in me too. Along with a feeling of dark things moving, shifting, building tremors of violence under the surface of what until now had been a routine investigation.
Down at the bottom of that crack were bones, a jumble of old gray bones. The remains of a human skeleton, complete with grinning skull.
TWELVE
E
mil Corda and his son drove back to their ranch to call the county sheriff's office. I sat in my car, off to one side of the dirt road, and brooded a little. Those bones out there didn't have to have anything to do with Harmon Crane; they didn't have to be related to his severe depression during those last few months of 1949 and to his eventual suicide. But they were old bones, there was no mistake about that. And they looked about the way bones would look if they had lain buried beneath the earth for more than three decades.
No, they didn't have to have anything to do with Harmon Crane. But they did. I knew that, sitting there, as surely as I knew that this was a bad day in October. I felt it in my bones.
Corda came back pretty soon, without his son, and I went over and sat in his pickup and talked some. The way he figured it, only the top layers of that fissure were newly split ground; the bottom layers were an old seam, the product of another quake many years ago, that had been gradually sutured and healed and hidden by nature. However the bones had gotten into the original crack, it must have happened while the fissure was still fresh, not too long after the quake that had caused it.
Yeah, I thought. Thirty-five years ago, the quake of October 1949. And maybe it wasn't only nature that had sutured and hid the part of it containing the bones.
A couple of deputy sheriffs arrived within a half hour, and we took them out and showed them what we'd found. One of them got down on his belly, poked around a little, and said, “Some other stuff down here.”
“What stuff?” the second deputy asked.
“Dunno yet. Something that looks like … hell, I don't know, a cigarette case, maybe. Few other things too. It's all pretty dirty and corroded.”
“Better leave it be until San Rafael gets here.”
The one deputy got up and we all trooped back out by the highway, playing question-and-answer on the way. I told the deputies why I was there and let them draw their own conclusions, not that either of them seemed particularly interested. Old bones didn't excite them much. New bones, on the other hand, would probably have had them in a dither.
It was another twenty minutes before “San Rafael”—a reference to the Marin county seat—arrived in the person of a plainclothes investigator named Chet DeKalb and a technician with a portable field kit. We went through the same routine of going out to look at the bones, of Corda and me explaining how we'd found them and what my business there was. DeKalb seemed a little more interested than the two deputies, but not much. He was in his forties, thin and houndish, with a face that looked as if it would crack wide open if he ever decided to smile. He was the unflappable type. A room full of corpses might have thrilled him a little; bones, old or new, didn't even raise an eyebrow.
He and the lab guy began to fish out the bones and bone fragments and other objects from the fissure, with the technician bagging and labeling them. The rest of us stood around and watched and shivered in the icy wind. I moved up for a look at the other items as they came out; as near as I could tell, they included a cigarette case or large woman's compact, some keys, a lump of something that might have been jewelry—a brooch, maybe—and a couple of rusted things that appeared to be buckles. I also took a close look at the skull when DeKalb handed it up to the lab man. It was badly crushed in a couple of places, probably as a result of its internment in the fissure. It would take a forensic expert to determine if any damage had been done to the skull or any of the other bones prior to burial.
When he was satisfied they'd got everything out of the crack, DeKalb led the parade back to where the cars were parked. He took down my address and telephone number, asked a few more questions about Harmon Crane, and said he might want to talk to me again later on. Then he and the technician went away with the bones and other stuff, and the two deputies disappeared, and Corda said he'd better get back home, his wife and son were waiting and besides, it wasn't every day somebody found a bunch of human bones on his property and maybe a reporter from one of the newspapers would want to contact him about it. From the look in his eyes, if a reporter didn't contact him pretty soon he'd go ahead and contact a reporter.