Deadly Shoals by Joan Druett Page B

“It’s just a skull,” he mumbled.
    â€œWe’ll see what the rest of the body looks like, shall we?” Enough time had elapsed for the kehua —the man’s earthly ghost—to have fled to the underworld, te pou, and so it was reasonably easy for Wiki to make his tone practical.
    Without waiting for an answer, he stood up, looked around, and handed the mare’s bridle to one of the gauchos. Then he picked up a horse’s shoulder-blade bone, and used it as a spade. After a moment, Stackpole did the same, and gradually they uncovered the body of a slightly built man, clothed in a checkered shirt and rough duck trousers held up by an elaborately tooled leather belt, and lying on his back. Every fold of his clothes was full of white crystals, which sifted away with an audible rustling. The torso, arms, and legs were almost entire, having been preserved by the salt from both putrefaction and the carrion eaters. This was why the vultures circled and waited, Wiki thought—they knew there was more to the feast than one well-scoured skull, but because of the salt they couldn’t locate it.
    He put aside his spade and crouched down again, studying the body where it lay in the opened trench. The unbuttoned neck of the shirt exposed a tarnished gold medal hanging from a braided string. Below the metal disk the cloth was flooded by a stain that had spread all the way to the fancy leather belt. The great blot had been bleached to a pale rusty color by the salt, but undoubtedly had been blood, because it had flowed out of the wound left by a big knife that had been shoved into this man’s chest and then yanked away. He had been frozen by death into a position where the shoulders were hunched higher than the waist, as if he had curled himself over the agony of the thrust that had killed him … and yet there was that bullet hole in the middle of the skull’s forehead.
    It was ghoulishly easy to picture what had happened. Wiki straightened, and said, “Whoever stabbed him thought he was dead, and buried him, but then he came to life and lunged up in a last spasm, jerking his head out of the salt. The murderer must have been thoroughly spooked—he shot him to finish him off, but instead of burying him properly again he ran off, leaving him so that the skull was exposed to the vultures.”
    Stackpole’s throat pulsed as he swallowed hard. He said in a low voice, “It sure does look that way.”
    â€œDo you recognize him now?”
    Instead of replying, Stackpole unfolded a jackknife, hunkered down, and cut the medal away from the string. He inspected it, and looked for a sick moment as if he wanted to throw it away. Instead, he closed his fist on it, and said briefly, “Aye.”
    Wiki had a preternatural feeling that he knew the answer already. He said, “Adams?”
    â€œAye. That man was Caleb Adams.”

Four
    January 26, 1839
    When Wiki woke up, wrapped in his poncho and lying on his saddle blanket with his saddle fleece as a pillow, it was dawn, and he was covered with a heavy layer of dew. He was thirsty, because they had carried too little water for a decent draft of maté the previous night, but when he skimmed a palmful of droplets off his poncho they were too brackish to swallow. His skin and hair must be impregnated with salt as well as his clothing, he realized, for when he yawned his face felt stiff enough to crack.
    The fire the gauchos had made out of horse bones had almost died down, and there was no water left and nothing to cook, so they put it out by throwing salt on it, setting up a little cloud of vivid blue sparks. Their steeds, thought Wiki, looked as hungry and thirsty as the men. They bucked angrily as the reassembled saddles were put on their backs and tightly cinched, and his gray mare was just as uncooperative.
    Once he was finally mounted, he paused to study Caleb Adams’s grave. Perhaps, he mused, they should have