Read Online Uneasy Relations by Aaron Elkins - Free Book Online

who fell off the Rock wouldn’t be able to talk about it afterward,” Pru pointed out. “You had a little luck on your side.” She and Julie were both clearly disinclined to believe anyone had pushed him.
    Julie gently touched the back of his hand. “No offense, sweetheart, but you’re . . . how do I put this? You’re really not very good with heights.”
    “Tell me about it,” he said with a sigh. “All the same—”
    “Gideon, listen. Let’s assume for a minute that somebody really did push you. If that were true, it would pretty much have to be someone right here in this room, wouldn’t it? Who else would have any idea where you were? Who else that you know would be in Gibraltar? Why would anyone else want to . . . well, kill you?”
    “Why would anyone in this
room
want to kill me?”
    “That’s what I was wondering.”
    He nodded. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “I guess.”
    A few moments of meditative silence followed, until Pru, having wrested the last shred of white meat from her half chicken, jerked her head and gestured decisively with her fork. “Okay, I’ve thought it through, and I simply can’t see anyone having pushed you. It doesn’t hold water.” She shoved her plate away and moved her wineglass nearer.
    “Look,” she whispered, leaning closer in. “Do you really believe someone here — one of these people — harmless, fusty, certified academics right down to their sensible shoes — not only
wanted
to murder you . . . well, on second thought, that part I can believe—”
    “Thank you so much.”
    “—but went so far as to actually try to
do
it? No, that’s straining credulity. Think about it. Aside from the guts it would take, he would have had to follow you down the trail, carefully keeping out of sight, then follow you up the steps, then—”
    “That’s not necessarily true. He could have heard me say I was going to go up there, and then gotten there before me and waited.”
    “Even so, he would have had to hide behind a rock or something until you went into the hut, then skulk up and crouch behind it, waiting for you to come out, then shove you over at exactly the right moment, when you were right on the edge — all without being seen, I might add — and then run back here before anyone noticed. And act as if nothing happened.” She sat back. “That, if you’ll permit me to say so, is a pretty bizarre hypothesis.”
    Yes, it was, but that hadn’t stopped him from entertaining it. When he’d walked in with Pru only a few minutes late for lunch, after getting his bloodied knuckles washed and sprayed with an antibiotic, he couldn’t help scanning the room, searching for a guilty face, or more likely, one that looked astonished at seeing him alive. He didn’t find any. They all looked exactly like their everyday selves, with no special interest in him. And none of them did have any special interest in him, that was a major sticking point. Except for Pru, he knew none of them very well, and most hardly at all. His only connection to most of them was his lab work on the First Family and the subsequent paper that came out of it, and there had been nothing in those to provoke their antagonism. On the contrary, his phrase describing Gibraltar Boy — “a seeming phenotypical mosaic of Neanderthal and
Homo sapiens
traits” — had helped catapult almost everyone associated with the dig to vastly increased prominence. (When they quoted it, which they often did, the “seeming” usually fell by the wayside.)
    All the same, he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind. If he squeezed his eyes shut he could feel . . . he could almost feel . . . he could imagine he could feel . . . that quick, firm shove at his hip. . . .
    “Well?” Pru pressed when nothing was forthcoming from him.
    He came back to the present. “He wouldn’t have had to be hiding while I was inside the hut,” he said. “All the openings — the doorway, the little windows — looked out in the