Blood in the Water and Other Secrets

by Janice Law

  Now and then Dr. Fuentes gave a soft grunt, but he did not speak until he had completed his examination and was completely sure in his own mind about the conclusions.

  “We would have to do carbon dating to be sure, but I believe this to be a modern skeleton— it’s certainly nowhere near as old as the rest of the bones. She was in her early twenties, a well nourished woman who had never done hard manual labor. The teeth are excellent, only two missing. Caucasian. My guess would be she was of Scandinavian extraction.”

  My heart skipped a beat. Alice Jonken’s maiden name was Grieg. “Do you know how she died?” I asked.

  “She was strangled.”

  I was astonished. “You can tell that?”

  “One of the easiest deaths to spot. See here, damage to the thyroid cartilage and here, this little bone? That’s the hyoid bone. A broken hyoid bone is the defining sign of manual strangulation.”

  “That couldn’t have happened in shipping?”

  Dr. Fuentes gave me a sympathetic look but shook his head. “The bone, maybe,” he said, “but the damage to the cartilage cannot be accidental.”

  “But then the skeleton was surely crushed in transit?

  He shook his head. “The mutilation was post-mortem, thankfully. Most unusual.”

  I felt sick, and to keep down nausea, I kept talking. “When I saw that damage, I thought we had been wrong. I mean, wrong about the bones not belonging.” Thank God we had not put them in the exhibition! Amos, a non-specialist with an eye for publicity, would certainly have been tempted.

  “You were right to wonder, but take a look.”

  He handed me a magnifying glass and directed my attention to the deep and irregular scratches on the split breastbone.

  “Messy,” I said, but I was thinking of Uncle Petrus and trying to bring the Prince of the Wilderness into some relationship with the mutilation before me.

  “Done with a stone knife. No, no,” he replied to my question, “modern steel knives give quite a different cut. This was an obsidian blade, probably. Obsidian can be made razor sharp, but the flaking leaves it jagged.”

  “Human hearts for the sun god,” I said, half to myself. “The gods were fed on blood; without blood the world would end.”

  “A common belief these days as well.” Dr. Fuentes spoke sadly, and I thought that he had reason to know.

  “She was murdered as a sacrifice? As the price of the city?” And Uncle Petrus, my archeological prince, had perhaps paid…

  “Remember that whoever strangled her may not have made these marks. We cannot go beyond the information of the body. And we have no positive ID for the bones.”

  “If the skeleton really came from the expedition,” I said, “who could it be but Alice Jonken?”

  He had no answer for that.

  “One of the three killed her,” I said. “And Ernesto—” I couldn’t finish and ran to vomit in the laboratory sink.

  “If there is no proof,” Fuentes said carefully when I’d recovered myself, “It is as easy to do harm as good.”

  I agreed that it would be a great scandal— even a century later.

  We did carbon dating on the bones to confirm the age, but neither Dr. Fuentes nor I felt that we were required to go further. I had a quiet word with the provost who found a spot for the bones in an obscure mausoleum owned by the university, and over the strenuous objections of some of my colleagues, I arranged to repatriate the majority of bones in the Jonken Bequest. It didn’t seem right to treat them differently.

  I’ve gone back to my specialty, collections and archives, and constructed a little scenario, entirely without proof except for the photograph. I’ve had it enlarged again, in segments this time. I really think Fuentes is right. Alice did take the picture. At another order of magnification, you can see her long hair, distorted, true, but unmistakable in the cast shadow.

  Maybe Jose Antonio strangled her, a crime of thwarted passion, but he was a slight, short man, while Jonken was tall and strong. Regretfully, I’m betting on Uncle Petrus with his cold, bright, questioning glance. I think he’s asking if she’s leaving— and taking her funds with her— or if she’s fallen in love with his handsome archeological apprentice. I think maybe Fuentes’ grandfather gave him an edited version of their story. There’s something else, too, that would never stand up, but which gives me the chills every time I look at the enlargements. I think the camera caught Ernesto, as well.

  You need to get the image up to the highest magnification possible and then the clever technician has to manipulate Photoshop like the wizard he is, tinting, sharpening, adding pixels like fairy dust: and presto! there’s an old man, crouching out of sight, huddling, I believe, from the lens. He’s visible there in the deep shadows and he’s holding something. I see a line of reflected light, and, though the graphics maven is uncertain, I’m sure it’s a knife.

  So there they all are, all the actors in place and the only question is how they got themselves arranged. Who was guilty of her killing, I do not know, but from that one cri de coeur in the diaries, Uncle Petrus must have discovered and been horrified at her mutilation. I am convinced that he stowed the bones years later in one of the crates destined for the Jonken Bequest.

  Why did he do that? Guilt or remorse or a slyness almost beyond imagining? Maybe like Ernesto, he had a sense of ceremony, a concept of what was due to old ways. In any case, sure the skeleton was Alice, who had funded Jonken’s glory and darkened his life, I had the provost promise they would read the burial service for the bones. It was the least I could do for her.

  Someone will find out eventually, I’m sure of that. Someone like me, who trolls the storerooms and pokes into old papers, will come up with the right questions. But the evidence lies safe in the ancient cemetery next to the Green, just a stone’s throw from where my famous relative came to rest. I’m not exactly proud of what I’ve done, but I owe Uncle Petrus such a lot, and concealing evidence does not seem so very bad in this case. But that is the most I’ll do for him. After this, he and his papers and his bones are on their own.

  Perfection

  Even if she had passed the point of absolute perfection, Eric thought that Vanessa was still beautiful. Some women are beautiful into old age: the dying Izak Dinesen’s skull remained splendid, and Lillian Gish had transformed a soulful childish prettiness into an almost equally lovely and ethereal maturity. But Vanessa, would her beauty last? That was a question of some moment with Eric, and, though he wasn’t sure, he thought not. Vanessa’s prime had been early and spectacular: she had been the most delicious, the most perfect, ingenue ever. Even now, some of her early films could bring him to tears, like the moment in Melody in D when she begins playing “The Moonlight Sonata” for her dying teacher. Vanessa had learned enough of the piece so that her hands could be filmed, and Eric remembered the difficult rehearsals, the tears, the thousand adjustments of sound and light. But when he watched the film, all that was forgotten. What lived were Vanessa’s rapt concentration and her dreamy, smiling expression, accompanied so beautifully by Beethoven’s repeated figures.

  Or Last Dance, her debut film. The clothes were ridiculous now, all those baggy slacks and blazers and limp print dresses, and the trendy plot was sadly mildewed. Eric had had a hand in the rewrites, and even he couldn’t say that he’d improved it. But Vanessa! Amazing! Even there, still a little too plump, hair overdone, stuck in a tertiary female role, that was her, not Vanessa Wagner, the aspiring young actress, but Vanessa, a personality destined to be a first magnitude star. Eric hadn’t known that on the set. He’d spent most of his time trying to straighten out the plot and generating new dialogue for its overpaid and under-disciplined stars. One night he’d had a glimmer when he caught the rushes for her scene, but he hadn’t really understood until the film came out. Then the whole world knew. Vanessa was one of the deities, invisible to the human eye, but instantly recognized by the god of their profession, the camera.

  What followed was a string of hits both
artistic and commercial: Bordighera, a big Italian co-production; Blood Moon, a spectacular thriller; Illegal Separation, a comedy, not Eric’s personal favorite, but her all-time money maker, and its sequel, My First Husband. Oh, there were joys in each, little moments, gestures, expressions, turns of phrase so perfect he sometimes wanted to shout at the screen, “Stop there! Not another word! Nothing more is required.”

  As for the important dramatic works, Melody in D, The Undelivered, and Lion Spring, Eric believed he could live in any one of them very happily. If he could step into the golden savannah of Lion Spring, or the rehearsal halls of Melody, or even the bleak hospital ward of The Undelivered, he would have reached the outskirts of paradise. Vanessa’s perfection was his delight, and he would have it there forever.

  Of course, his darling had her faults— even on screen. Eric was not so besotted as to be absolutely uncritical. Quite the contrary. He had for years functioned as her artistic conscience— and as her coach, too, for Vanessa was dreadful at learning lines. More than a few of her scenes had to go out as shot, not as written. In fact, she wasn’t a particularly well trained actress. She’d had the usual classes and some drama school, but her art was basically intuitive, and she had no head for analysis. Characterizations either came to her quickly and easily or they were destined to be stillborn.

  Eric had understood that almost at once, and that awareness had made him invaluable to her. His role, as it developed, began with sorting through masses of scripts and proposals. He eliminated the chaff and then listened while she read scenes aloud from the rest, always alert for the hesitations and awkwardness which sent up warning flags, or, happier, for the sudden rich modulations in her voice that signalled inspiration. What a joy it always was to see her jump up and move around the room, script in hand, to see another person, not supplant her, but modulate her, for Vanessa was a star, and all her characterizations were simply facets of her screen personality.

  Gradually, their on-screen and off-screen lives merged into what the tabloid press liked to call a “power partnership.” Eric tailored material for her, and, with it, Vanessa earned fortunes, which he prudently reinvested in the rights to promising novels and screenplays. All of this managing, investing, and adapting reduced Eric’s own writing, but there could be no complaint about the results, either financial, artistic, or indeed, personal. They were a happy, as well as a glamorous, couple.

  This is not to say that the marriage was perfect— how could that be imagined? Eric was quite aware that his wife had personal, as opposed to theatrical, weaknesses, weaknesses both venial and serious— or, better, for he liked the old Catholic classifications— mortal. This, he thought, was as good a time as any to sum them up. Under the venial sins, he listed a love of praise, possibly inseparable from her profession, a tendency to drink too much when things were going badly, and the habit of taking lovers from among her leading men.

  Another husband might have regarded the latter as a serious, even a mortal flaw, but Eric was complacent. As part of her fantasy screen life, Vanessa’s loves were inseparable from that larger, more important existence. Then, too, her lovers were always either demi-gods of the screen or rising and charismatic newcomers. Pleased with her exquisite aesthetic and theatrical taste, Eric regarded her romances as mere peccadillos.

  But there was a more serious failing in his darling, and Eric’s face, very handsome still if increasingly fleshy, underwent a subtle rearrangement at the thought. This was her newly acquired passion for “growth”— as if a great star were a plant rather than a constellation, which must remain in remote, unchanging perfection. The fact was that, quite suddenly, Vanessa had changed. She had decided she wished to act. She felt she needed to study; she aimed to undertake abstruse, challenging works that Eric foresaw would lose her audience. She even talked about going on stage, which showed, he thought, just how bad her judgment could be. In the theater, she would be just another actress, not so young any more, prettier than most but less talented than many. She didn’t seem to understand that her real gifts existed only in a delicate symbiosis with the camera or to suspect that they were ultimately untranslatable. Vanessa Wagner was an attractive person of moderate talent; Vanessa, the bankable star beloved by millions, was not only the creature, but the creation, of the screen.

  This was somewhat delicate to explain to his darling, particularly when she was in a nervous or a headstrong mood.

  “I’m tired of being an idol,” she said, quite unconscious, Eric noticed, of the arrogance. “I’m sick of staring at the camera and letting my eyes tear. I’m too old for this.”

  Eric protested. Her last stills were ravishing and with the lighting in Demon Lover—

  “Any lower lights,” she said, “and they wouldn’t have known who was who. Don’t think I don’t know why.”

  “That’s nonsense,” Eric said. “A few lines around the eyes— Darling, those can be taken care of.”

  “You see, you admit it,” she said, inspecting her face critically in the big mirror over the mantel. “Though the neck is still good.”

  Vanessa, he had to admit, was realistic about her physical assets.

  “Flawless,” he said. “You have great films in you yet.”

  “But only for a little while,” she said. “I want to be ready. For the transition.”

  “Transition?” Like some damned piece of machinery, Eric thought. “What transition?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, laughing now, “I can’t keep playing romantic leads. Eric, I’m going to be 37 this year.”

  “Thirty-three,” he said quickly. He had revised her biog, but she had no head for details and kept forgetting the corrections.

  “Whichever. It’s not to late for me to improve my craft. To land good character rolls. To position myself as a serious actress.”

  Eric jumped up in exasperation. It was all so logical and sensible— Vanessa was a good deal more practical than he cared to admit— but it was unendurable. “How can you think of it? How can you think of it when you’ve been a major star for fifteen years? Character rolls? Bit parts? It won’t work! Even Garbo. Garbo, the greatest of all. What happened to her? She tried to change and it was disaster, an embarrassment. She quit one film too late, because she was tempted to compromise. It can’t be done. This is all nonsense. It’s unendurable,” Eric said.

  “For whom?” Vanessa asked.

  In reply, his voice rose; he gave examples and reasons, but he was aware all the while that she wasn’t listening. She was concocting other plans even as he described the new property he’d found— the heroine was 28, a wonderful age and still very plausible. He had some other ideas; he’d write something just for her. She was right, no more juvenile leads; he knew exactly what was needed, a mature character, who was still romantic and glamorous. She’d see, she’d see. But Vanessa was looking out the window and whatever she saw there, she did not confide to Eric.

  Thinking it over later in his screening room, he blamed Hugh Greshwin, Vanessa’s most recent co-star, a multi-talented young man who aspired to be a director: in short, the very worst of a difficult breed. Eric considered him carefully. Hugh was intelligent, that was obvious, and well read, “intellectual” even, but not greatly talented. There was, as Eric was only too aware, only a partial correlation between creative talent and intelligence.

  Greshwin was really Vanessa in reverse, that is, a personality much more impressive in reality than he was on the screen. With his long dark hair flopping into his burning eyes, his quick powerful gestures, his sense of pent-up emotional neediness and anger, he had all the ingredients, one would have thought, for a male star. The idea made Eric smile cynically; on screen, Hugh’s pale complexion looked pallid; his smoldering eyes went dead; the emotional charge dissipated. Too bad; he’d better direct.

  But not Vanessa. Though that was Hugh’s aim, Eric could tell. With her backing, Hugh would get a shot at a film, and, given his abilities, Eric would bet on success. At least for Hugh. But
for Vanessa, to whom this Beverly Hills Mephisto was whispering The Seagull and Streetcar— next it would be Sweetbird of Youth!— what would there be for her but disaster? And even if success, relative success, that is, surely there would be a diminishment, for she’d already achieved perfection.

  The whole idea was so upsetting that Eric had promised himself Melody in D after he had it out with her, and he was determined to enjoy the film even if nothing had been settled. Even if Hugh Greshwin still lurked in the shadows. Even if there were still decisions to be made. But there were the credits now, the swell of Beethoven on the sound track, and, there, in long shot across the bare wooden floor of a rehearsal stage, his darling, bending gracefully over a concert Steinway, touching the first chords. Now came the tracking shot Eric knew and loved so well, the camera drawn inexorably toward her, then circling to close on her magical face. Perfect, he thought, unbelievably perfect. Nothing must ever be allowed to spoil that.

  As he always did after watching a favorite film, Eric felt better, calm enough, in fact, to call Hugh Greshwin and make a lunch date. As he drove north a day later, Eric had reason to feel confident. Over the years, he’d dealt with other aspirants, ambitious for a piece of Vanessa, Inc.— writers, producers, directors, co-stars. They’d all settled for something more tangible, if less satisfying. He was the only one who was devoted, totally devoted, to Vanessa.

  He made that clear to Hugh over an expensive lunch. “My first and last thought is always for Vanessa and for her career,” he said.

  Hugh nodded rapidly, his hair flopping into his eyes. He really should try a different cut, Eric thought, or styling gel. “Nobody, nobody doubts that,” Hugh said. “It’s a matter of perspective. Vanessa’s a major, major talent. Naturally, she wants to develop, to grow as a person and as an actress.”