Carved in Bone

charged admission every year, then retired early and rich.
    “That was an interesting case,” I said. “I think we finally got everybody put back together right, but when we first stacked up all those arms and legs, I wasn’t sure we’d be able to.”
    Williams was safe now, I guessed, so I cut the small talk. “What can I do for you, Sheriff? Your deputy here said it was mighty important, but he didn’t say what it was.”
    “There’s a body I need you to look at.”
    “I kinda figured that. Is it in the morgue?”
    “Morgue?” He snorted. “Doc, the closest thing we got to a morgue up here’s the walk-in beer cooler at the Git-’N’-Go.” He and Williams shared a laugh at the image of a body laid out atop cases of Bud Light. “The body’s still where we found it at yesterday.”
    The look of alarm on my face made him smile. “Don’t you worry—another twenty-four hours in that place ain’t gonna hurt it none.” He winked across me at Williams, and Williams laughed again, this time not so much at what Kitchings had said as at what he hadn’t said. Williams laughed with the relief of a child who’d come home from school expecting a whipping and gotten a cookie instead. At that, I smiled, too.

CHAPTER 3
    “OKAY, BOYS, SADDLE UP and move out.” Kitchings swung a leg over his mount, and Williams and I did the same. I hit the ATV’s starter button and the Honda engine purred to life. They’d offered me a choice: double up with Williams or ride solo. I’d ridden with Williams once today, and I hadn’t much liked it, so I opted for a machine of my own.
    I had never driven an all-terrain vehicle before, but I’d seen kids tearing along highway shoulders and across fields on them, so I figured there couldn’t be much to it. There wasn’t, at least on flat ground. The throttle was a lever on the right handgrip that you pushed with your thumb, just like the Honda jet ski I rode once at a colleague’s lake house on Fort Nasty.
    The sheriff’s ATV had a hand brake for the front wheels and a foot brake for the rear—just like the English three-speed bike I pedaled to campus back during my own graduate student days. So far, so good. The gearshift was an oddly placed pair of buttons on the left handgrip—my first few shifts lurched comically—but after a few uneventful laps of the courthouse parking lot, the sheriff seemed satisfied that I’d make it back in one piece from wherever it was we were headed.
    The serpentine road we’d taken into Jonesport was a superhighway compared to the track we followed out of it. It started out as a lane of gravel, turning off the highway a half-mile south of town. The first time we crossed the river, we did so on a sagging wooden bridge. The next four times—or was it five?—that we forded it, the current piled up against the balloon tires of the ATVs. Before long the single lane of gravel gave way to a pair of parallel ruts, and soon those turned into a single muddy gully. Our progress, as we lurched and fishtailed upward, was excruciatingly slow—which was the only thing that kept me from getting sick again. The ATV had seemed simple to handle on the road. On the trail, it was a whole different beast. Keeping my balance and maintaining control required half-sitting, half-crouching, in a posture that I could tell was going to send my academician’s thighs and buttocks into fits of agony. But every time Kitchings and Williams looked back to see how I was faring, I gave a quick thumbs-up, trying not to look completely clumsy and panic-stricken as I made my grab for the handlebars again.
    Gradually a limestone cliff reared out of the mountainside, and the trail, such as it was, edged close to its base, at times running beneath overhangs framed by towering hemlocks and glossy rhododendrons. At one such overhang the officers slowed, turned toward a cleft in the rock face…and then plunged into the bowels of the earth. I sucked in my breath, gritted my teeth, and plunged in after them. Okay, I didn’t actually plunge—crept, more like it—but I fol lowed. The key point is, I followed, finding the switch for the headlamp just as the last glimmer of daylight dwindled behind me.
    The floor was surprisingly smooth and level—dry sand in some places, packed mud in others. The headlights of the ATVs fell away into nothingness, which told me we were in a huge subterranean chamber, the blackness so thick you could almost touch it. Then, after a distance that