Amaz'n Murder. William Maltese

Roy explained. “But, dig down to bedrock, anywhere on this side of the river, and you’ll not find another stone like this one, here. It’s water-smooth and round.”

      “Rivers flood,” Teddy reminded. “Stones in those rivers bang together and get smooth.”

      “Indeed,” Roy agreed. “However, indicative geology says this river always floods eastward. It’s a matter of a steep western gradient formed by an intrusion of igneous rock along an ancient fault line.”

      “All you grad students understand?” Charles was delighted by his comprehension. “We’re right back to passion as a motivation for murder.”

      “You’re back to saying I killed him, you silly old fool?” Teddy challenged.

      “Self-defense is an acceptable motive for murder,” Charles reminded. “Maybe, that rock was meant for your head before you wrestled it away from him.”

      “Assisted by a conveniently handy hungry jaguar? Take my word: had I wanted Gordon dead, I would have shot him and dumped his body where no on would ever find it.”

      “Stop, you two!” Carolyne insisted.

      She turned back to Roy who seemed the only man present with his full wits about him. “Let me see if I’ve this geology stuff straight.”

      He obliged by reiterating in layman terms. “The river flows along a fault line with harder rock on this side than on the other. The softer, more easily eroded, soil has always seen the water flood in its direction. No matter the volume, the water wouldn’t naturally have put that river rock, here, where it presently is. To have it here, someone would have had to go to the river and get it.”

      “There’s always the possibility someone, for some other reason than murder, toted that rock here,” Carolyne pointed out. “There was once a substantial Indian population in residence, correct?”

      Melanie confirmed, in that her father’s journals had mentioned as much. “Likewise, prospectors, geologists, anthropologists, zoologists, lepidopterists, botanists, and who knows who else tramp, tramp, tramping through.”

      “The world is full of weirder coincidences than a man attacked by a jaguar and gone down to hit his head on a rock brought in by natives to sharpen spear points.” Carolyne decided that was a more comfortable alternative than murder.

      Teddy turned on Charles. “If you don’t buy that, you old fool, how about you as the killer?”

      “I?” Apparently, Charles found that notion so ludicrous that it bore repeating. “I? Why would I want Gordon dead?”

      “He attacked your niece. You weren’t the one to protect her. That must have played havoc with your manliness.”

      “Absurd!” Charles looked around for additional support.

      “You have an alibi for the time of the murder?” Teddy pressed; Melanie wished he’d quit goading her uncle, and vice versa.

      “You tell me the exact time of the murder,” Charles said, craftily, “and I’ll tell you exactly where I was.”

      “It’s doubtful any of us have alibis.” Carolyne figured it was time to pull them together, their bickering not helping anything. “Gordon died between leaving Charles on the other side of the gully and.…”

      “With him at the last, weren’t you, old man?” Teddy interrupted.

      “Please!” Melanie gave a small tug on Teddy’s muscled arm; he glowered but shut up.

      “Just when did he leave you, Charles?” Carolyne stepped in.

      “Eleven o’clock. I waited until almost noon to cross back over that rotting tree trunk he insisted was a viable bridge.”

      “He told you where he was headed, did he?” Teddy remained prosecutorial; Melanie suspected it was in return for Charles’ romantic fantasies, but she couldn’t enjoy her uncle pitifully on the defensive.

      “He was going to the toilet if you must know.”

      “Mighty long potty break,” Teddy decided to no one’s appreciation but his own.

      “He complained of dysentery. We’ve all had it.”

      Teddy enjoyed the spotlight shifted to Charles; Melanie continued to think her fiancé cruel to bombard her uncle who, despite all his ridiculous conjecture, had always given Teddy the out of self-defense. “I figure Charles followed Gordon, did the dastardly deed, and scurried back to camp before I found what his obliging accomplice, the jaguar, had left of the corpse.”

      “Even I could have gotten here and back without being seen,” Melanie emphasized Carolyne’s earlier comment that any one of them could have committed the deed—if the deed had been done.

      Teddy didn’t like her blood-thicker-than-water attitude. “Melanie had a motive, too, did you, my dear, having been mauled by Gordon even if in a different way than Gordon was mauled by the jaguar?”

      Melanie’s response was sarcastic to cover her hurt. “Thank-you so much for that!” She broke all physical contact with him and moved apart. “How quickly I’ve gone from poor little thing, hardly up to photographing a dead man, to cold-blooded killer responsible for making the man dead in the first place.”

      Teddy looked apologetic but didn’t say as much. This did little to endear him to Melanie who stepped closer to Charles without completely closing the gap; Charles’ accusations remained as ridiculous.

      “Let’s leave the cross-examination to those more qualified, shall we?” Carolyne couldn’t swallow the love sick psychopath, the jealous fiancé in self-defense, the irate uncle, or the Melanie only got kissed, as real motives for murder. Maybe, she was too old to remember intense passion sparked by love, lust, infatuation, or whatever, but this Gordon-Melanie-Teddy-Charles quadrangle seemed too sophomoric as foreplay to murder. Pretty young women, even those with good-looking fiancés, had always flirted with other handsome young men; those same young women, as often as not, having second thoughts when things got too far out of hand. The world over, fiancés defended their bruised honors by fisticuffs, not murder. It was a rite of passage that only occasionally exploded into the seriousness of homicide. Besides, Gordon had simply not seemed all that smitten by Melanie, or all that resentful of his well-deserved comeuppance at the hands of Teddy, to go off the deep end and get himself killed in the process. As for her even imagining that Charles hit Gordon with a stone carried from the river, her mind’s-eye picture of that would have made her laugh aloud if not for the sobering body laid out less than six feet from her.

      “Do we bury the evidence?” Roy’s question sounded more aptly put to cohorts in a crime than to the present group; belatedly, Carolyne realized he referred to the body. “If so, we’ll have to take him across the river, in that any grave in this insufficient layer of topsoil invites vulnerability.”

      Carolyne didn’t ask, “Vulnerability to what?” what with a hungry jaguar still on the prowl. Claws that had done what they had already done would have little trouble displacing a few feet of newly turned soil. Nor did she need it pointed out that any grave on the other side of the river was vulnerable, in its own right, albeit to subtler despoilers, like heat, moisture, and bacteria. Things were recycled mind-bogglingly fast in surroundings like these. Obviously, the killer, if there was one, had taken advantage by assuring expert analysis of his deed was more than a week away. Whatever forensics had to work with when they arrived, it wouldn’t be nearly as good as if a radio transmission or satellite-transmitted SOS had brought them running sooner.

      “Definitely, I don’t think we should give the jaguar another chance at him,” Charles decided. “Surely, between us, we can get him to a suitable site and buried deep enough.”

      “I say we inter him behind the waterfall.” It was a suggestion made by Carolyne with some trepidation. She hadn’t liked Gordon all that much, and antagonizing his possible killer wasn’t something at the head of her to-do list. On the other hand, she never took kindly to