The Gideon Oliver Mysteries Volume One by Aaron Elkins

Author:Aaron Elkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

THREE

THE walk from Charmouth to Stonebarrow Fell was so magnificent that Gideon almost went back to the Queen’s Armes Hotel to bring Julie along, but she had been adamant. He was making a professional visit, she had pointed out, and she wasn’t going to tag along to hang around like an ignoramus while everyone else was chattering on about Mycenaean transmigration and cultural diffusion.

“Besides,” she’d said, “we’ve been married six days and I have yet to perform a single wifely function.”

He grinned at her, but she laughed before he had a chance to say anything. “Fun things don’t count; I mean chores. Do you know, I have yet to do the laundry? We’ve been washing our stuff in sinks, and things are getting grubby. I want to go to an honest-to-goodness Laundromat.”

She seemed to mean it, and Gideon had let it go at that. After lunch he had left her to her wifely chores and walked out Lower Sea Lane, past the bright, clean bed-and-breakfast houses and private cottages of the village, to the sandy beach. There, in its grander days, the River Char had worn a soft, lush U-shaped valley down to the sea between the towering coastal cliffs. High up on those cliffs, reachable by a gentle but relentlessly ascending path, was the prettily if redundantly named Stonebarrow Fell—Stonehill Hill, in modern English.

He crossed the wooden footbridge over the now-tiny River Char and headed up the green, sweeping slope at a good, swinging pace, enjoying the crisp ocean air and the welcome sensation of muscles working. It was a cool, cloudy day, with an immense fog bank a few miles offshore, but the air was clear, and the sea was green and silvered, lit by narrow columns of sunlight that slid over its surface like spotlights. To the east, behind him, was Charmouth in its picture-book valley, and a mile beyond it, down the curving coast, there was Lyme Regis, compact and pretty, with its famous stone breakwater—the Cobb— snaking out into the ocean. Ahead of him the green, round-shouldered hill rose to the top of the fell, and a few miles farther on, the aptly named Golden Cap loomed, solid and squarish, over the Dorset coast.

Near the top of the hill, the path swung out to the very edge of dizzyingly sheer cliffs and Gideon instinctively moved back. He was a good four hundred feet above the beach, and the land under him was obviously unstable. The rim of the path had crumbled away in places, and even while he looked, a few pebbles dropped free to start a small, slithering landslide. Still, he paused to take in the scene. These were famous cliffs to anyone who knew something about fossils. It had been here at the base of this wall of blue lias clay, about half a mile beyond Charmouth, that ten-year-old Mary Anning had chanced upon a twenty-five-foot ichthyosaurus skeleton and set the scientific world of 1811 on its ear. Which was just what Nate Marcus hoped to do with his “incontrovertible evidence” of a Mycenaean landing.

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