Unnatural Selection

by Aaron Elkins

  “I see.” She hesitated. “Then may I take it that you might be inclined to stop by for a few minutes and sort through them some time during the week?”

  “I’d love to,” he said sincerely. “How about tomorrow morning? And for more than a few minutes—for as long as it takes, if you like.”

  There were, in fact, few prospects that pleased him more than having an entire morning—an entire day, if possible—sitting by himself in some dusty lab or storeroom with a pot of coffee cooling beside him, surrounded by anonymous fragments of human bone; patiently using Elmer’s glue to piece together the skeletons; equally patiently using his education and intellect to piece together the lives of these now-forgotten people who had come before. There was a near-mystical contentment in it, a sense that he was speaking on their behalf, telling the world for them: Here I am, I did exist; this is who I was, this is what I did, this is how I died.

  “Oh, you dear man, that’s super!” Madeleine shrilled. “We have a few other old bones in our storage room as well—odds and ends, mostly, I suppose you’d say—but if you’d care to see them as well—”

  “These are what—Iron Age? Bronze Age?”

  “Oh, dear, no,” Madeleine said. “Any human remains that come out of a prehistoric site go straight to the BM—the British Museum. No, these are simply the odd ulna or tibia that pops up on the beach from time to time. Old shipwrecks and such, don’t you know. Not all that unusual, really. People don’t know what to do about them, so they get turned in to the museum. We keep them a year or two for appearances’ sake, and then we quietly dispose of them.”

  “Ah.” Gideon was disappointed, but not very. The older the better, as far as he was concerned, but bones were bones. There was always something of interest.

  “We’d keep them longer, I suppose,” she rattled on, “if there were any hope of having them looked at by an expert, but we’ve never been able to lure one out here to go through them. No context, no skeletal populations of any size at all, do you see, so there isn’t much to be learned in any broad sense.”

  “I understand their point, but I can’t agree with that. There’s always something to be learned.”

  “My dear man, I’m thrilled to hear you say that.” She had puffed up with pleasure like a pouter pigeon. “Are there any tools you’d like me to have there for you?”

  “Sure, a metal tape measure and a magnifying glass would be good.” He shrugged, thinking. “Oh, and some glue, in case there’s any repair to be done—Duco or Elmer’s would be good, but whatever you use for pottery would do.”

  She nodded. “I’ll have them there for you. And is that all you need?” She seemed surprised. “Don’t you people use calipers and such? We have both kinds, spreading and sliding.”

  “Well, yes,” he said a little defensively, “if I were doing a really exhaustive analysis. But all I’ll be trying to do here is to give you some general idea of who the guy was. I don’t think there’s much reason to—”

  “No, no, of course not,” she said quickly, “a general idea is precisely what I want, and I appreciate it enormously.” She chewed tentatively on her lower lip. “And, er, Gideon, I suppose I should have mentioned this earlier, but—”

  “Hello, everyone, sorry to be late.” Cheryl Pinckney, Donald’s wife, had arrived in a cloud of musky perfume and slipped into her seat beside Gideon as the main course of Chicken Kiev and rice pilaf was being set out.

  Madeleine smiled coolly at her. Rudy gave her a surly, vaguely lustful nod.

  “Just the rice for me,” she told the waitress, turning her head away from the Chicken Kiev as if it smelled bad. “And some salad, no dressing, oil and vinegar on the side. Pardon me, Gideon,” she said huskily as her forearm grazed his.

  A moment later a smooth, pant-clad thigh brushed solidly against Gideon’s as she crossed her legs. “Sorry about that,” she said casually. “I guess my legs are a little too long for the table.”

  He had chatted briefly with her during the reception. Cheryl was a nature photographer whose pictures had appeared in National Geographic, Travel and Leisure, and a few airline magazines. If she hadn’t told him, he wouldn’t have guessed that she was the wife of the prissy, balding Donald. On looks, she might have been a model. With her jutting cheek bones, long nose, and thin lips, no one would call her beautiful, but striking she was, and she moved with a catlike, self-assured grace that had drawn male eyes to her at the reception like iron filings to a magnet.

  As far as Gideon was concerned, however, she could have stood to put on a few pounds. On the living, he preferred his skeletons a little better covered.

  “As I was saying, Gideon,” Madeleine continued, “I suppose I should have mentioned this earlier—but I’m afraid we won’t be able to arrange anything like your normal fees.” She gave him a fluttery, winning smile. “If I were to buy you lunch, do you suppose that would do?”

  “Madeleine, I’ll buy you lunch.”

  When the waitress passed behind him with a tray of wine, Cheryl reached over his shoulder for a glass. As she did, a small, firm breast pressed unmistakably against his upper arm and then stayed there while she spoke to someone at the next table, her arm very nearly around Gideon’s shoulder. A few strands of her long, dark hair, held back with a barrette, grazed his neck.

  This was something that didn’t happen to him very often these days. He had long ago learned that he was attractive to women—six-one, broad-shouldered, with an only slightly middle-aged version of the fighter’s body that had seen him through the brief professional boxer’s career with which he’d paid his way through graduate school. And the broken nose that had come with it was an intriguing counterpoint to his sometimes pedantic manner, or so he’d been told.

  All this he knew. But he also knew that no woman had to check his ring finger to tell whether or not he was married. It was written all over him. He was one of those men who emanated husbandly contentment, and women on the prowl were quick to sense his unavailability. He was taken, happily married, and couldn’t have hidden it if he’d wanted to, which he didn’t.

  Still, his forehead was warm as he tried as nonchalantly as possible to separate himself from the undeniably stimulating pressure of that warm, pokey little mound of flesh. Now wait a minute, he lectured himself. What are you getting embarrassed about? You haven’t done anything to feel ashamed of.

  When Cheryl smiled knowingly, and a little patronizingly, at him as he shifted gingerly away, he turned grumpy. Now he felt stodgy, and old-fashioned… and just plain old.

  “Everybody?” Standing in front of the bar, Kozlov was calling for attention. Gideon took advantage of the opportunity to turn his chair still farther around. In doing so, he caught Julie’s eye from across the room. She blew him a discreet kiss that instantly whisked away his sulk. He returned it somewhat less discreetly, and Julie gestured something to him. He knit his eyebrows to show he didn’t understand.

  She repeated the message, emphasizing the movements a little. With a couple of tips of her head she indicated that she was referring to Kozlov and to the welcoming speech that was apparently on the way, then mouthed: “Be… good… You… promised.”

  Gideon bowed his head and placed his hand over his heart to show his good intentions.

  FOUR

  HE had no trouble sticking to them during Kozlov’s presentation, a witty, charmingly accented, and unobjectionable condemnation of the existence of close-mindedness in scientific inquiry, followed by an introduction of the five Fellows, who then described the subjects of their papers. The Fellows had known this was coming, so it went smoothly, if dully, each one standing in his or her place and reading a brief, dry abstract in AcademicSpeak.

  Julie was first, soberly explaining the importance of “fire management polices that replicate as closely as possible the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of natural fire regimes, taking into account the importance and reality of anthropogenic fires in woodland subsystems and thereby achieving the maintena
nce of biodiversity in a form adhering as closely as possible to its natural facets and fluxes.”

  Damn, he thought with pride, she’s almost as good at that stuff as I am. When she took her seat again and glanced furtively in his direction he gave her a vigorous thumbs-up.

  The others followed with equally turgid descriptions of their work, and although he took mental issue with a few things that were said, it wasn’t too hard to keep his peace through most of them, including even Victor Waldo’s rattling on inscrutably and at length about holistic and naturalistic paradigms that would reconstruct the nature-human dynamic of the postindustrial world.

  But Donald Pinckney, speaking last, broke through his self-restraint when he dipped a toe into the treacherous waters of Darwinian theory.

  “… and therefore demonstrate that hunting, properly regulated, positively impacts wildlife populations by preventing game from exceeding the carrying capacity of their habitat areas, thus serving as a valuable adjunct to the mechanisms of natural selection and the survival of the fittest.”

  “Nggkk,” Gideon said.

  To his dismay, this strangled, inadvertent squawk, wholly unintentional, dropped smack into a dead spot in the presentation and was heard clear around the room. Donald, with the faintest of frowns, glanced questioningly at him and prepared to continue reading, but Kozlov interceded.

  “Mr. Skeleton Detective wants say something?”

  No, Gideon didn’t want to say anything, but by now his professorly instincts were beyond his control. “Well, it’s only that Donald may have made a small… a very small but nonetheless important, um, misinterpretation of the way that natural selection works.”

  Donald’s pale eyes glittered behind his glasses. “Oh?”

  “The thing is,” Gideon said, as delicately as he could, “in nature, natural selection works by selectively eliminating the more vulnerable— those animals that are least ‘fit’ to survive in their current environment. By removing them from the gene pool, the stronger—or I guess I should say the better-adapted—animals are more likely to reproduce, to contribute their genes, and to thus keep the species genetically strong; that is, genetically well-adapted to their environment…”

  Unnoticed by Gideon, a pursed-mouthed Donald slid silently back into his seat.

  “Hunting by natural predators has the same result,” Gideon went on, well-launched now. “They’re most likely to catch and kill the weak, the old, the slow, the sick, and so on. But modern human hunters, with their intelligence and technology, are a kind of super-predator that’s never been seen on earth before. They kill the strongest and ablest animals, which of course means that the less ‘fit’ animals have a relatively greater opportunity to reproduce and pass on their genes.”

  “Ha-ha, that’s exactly right,” a delighted Joey Dillard cried. From the looks of him, he had had more to drink than was good for him. “What it is, is, it’s evolution in reverse.”

  “Well, no, I wouldn’t exactly say that. The idea that evolution can reverse itself, while it has a certain poetic appeal…”

  “I tried, I really did,” Gideon told Julie afterward, when they had come back outside to take a few turns around the ramparts, watching dusk turn to night as the sun dropped toward the sea beyond the Western Rocks, a jumble of offshore boulders that had been the end of many a seagoing vessel during winter storms, but in summer served mainly as a picturesque backdrop for the sunset-watchers who picnicked on Garrison Hill as the evening came on. Julie and Gideon could see several groups of them on the bluffs below the castle walls.

  “Actually, I thought what you said was quite interesting,” Julie told him loyally. “I think everybody did. Honestly.”

  “Not Pinckney.”

  “No, not Donald,” Julie agreed. “But then he does tend to be a little touchy, a wee bit sensitive.”

  With a predatory wife like Cheryl, Gideon thought, who wouldn’t be?

  “So, what did you think of his wife?” Julie asked.

  “Urn… his wife?”

  “Cheryl? The person sitting next to you? Certain parts of whom were more or less on top of you there for a while?”

  “Oh, that Cheryl,” Gideon said, laughing. “I didn’t think you noticed.”

  “I bet you noticed.”

  “I did, but I hope you also observed that she didn’t get to first base with me. Why would she? I can do a whole lot better than Cheryl Pinckney.” He swung an arm around her shoulder, pulled her to him, and kissed her warmly. “Have I mentioned to you today that I’m in love with you?”

  A gruff “Hey, you two, knock it off there” came from a nearby niche in the walls, where Liz was having a post-prandial cigarette, its end glowing red in the dark. “We’re running a G-rated consortium here. This time, anyway.”

  “Hey, yourself,” Gideon growled back, leaving his arms where they were, “go find your own parapet.”

  But after another lingering moment with their arms wrapped around one another they separated and resumed their slow tour of the ramparts, their fingers entwined.

  “This time?” Gideon said. “Meaning, ”As opposed to last time‘?“

  Julie nodded. “It got pretty torrid around here a couple of years ago.”

  “Rats,” Gideon said. “I was hoping it was just something about me that brought out the beast in Cheryl.”

  “ ‘Fraid not, the beast in Cheryl is pretty easy to bring out. But it wasn’t just Cheryl—well, it was, but the hanky-panky was really pretty general. I mean, I know this stuff happens at conferences, but that was the first time I’d ever experienced anything quite like that.”

  “Not first hand, I hope.”

  She squeezed his fingers. “Not a chance. Edgar was at the center of it all, and I guess I wasn’t his type. He made only one move on me that could be construed as a pass—about as subtle as Cheryl’s move on you—and then quit.” She smiled. “I suppose I should have been insulted, because I was the only one he didn’t keep after. He managed to have affairs—well, to have sex with—all three of the other women. Not that he had to try too hard.”

  “In one week?”

  “Well, you know, the man was brilliant, famous, moody, edgy, good-looking in a dangerous sort of way… the kind that appeals to a lot of women.”

  “But not to you, I take it.”

  “Ugh, no!” He was absurdly pleased by her enthusiastic shudder. “Not that I have any objection to brilliant, famous, and good-looking, but I like my men a lot bigger, and sunnier, and friendlier… and I already have me one of those.”

  You sure do, Gideon thought. And just you try and get rid of him. “But I thought Villarreal was supposed to be some kind of loner, a recluse—preferred living with the bears and the wolves to being around people. Was that all hype?”

  “No, as far as I know it was true. He spent a lot of the year in the wilds. When he left here he was heading straight out to the Alaskan wilderness to spend the summer all by himself, keeping tabs on a cluster of bear families—you know, tracking their eating, and mating, and migration activities. All alone with the bears, that’s what he loved.” She shook her head. “But when he was around people— women, anyway—he got very, um, shall we say, social.”

  “Yeah. Well, who knows, maybe I would too, if I spent my summers all alone, watching bears have sex.”

  They walked on a few steps, still hand-in-hand. “You said all three of the women,” he said. “That means Cheryl, which is not exactly a huge surprise, and Liz—which is a surprise, because I wouldn’t have pictured her going for a one-night stand—but who else was there?”

  “Victor Waldo’s wife, Kathie, was here with him too, and she—”

  “Ah, that’s right. You asked after her when we met him on the boat and he said they were separated, and you and Liz gave each other a couple of ‘aha’ glances.”

  “Really? Was it that obvious?”

  “Hey, don’t forget you’re talking to the Skeleton Detective here. Not too much gets by me. So you think
they broke up on account of what went on between her and Villarreal?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. She and Victor had a real wingding when it came out. It was pretty bad. I’m surprised you didn’t hear them back in Port Angeles.”

  They had taken four turns around the ramparts now, and had them all to themselves, with Liz having gone back inside, and they stopped to lean their elbows on the parapet, overlooking the lights that were beginning to twinkle on in Hugh Town.

  “It started right on the first night,” Julie mused, “the night of the opening reception.”

  You’d have to have been out to lunch, she told him, not to notice that Cheryl and Villarreal had begun circling each other like storks doing a mating dance, about five minutes after they’d set eyes on one another. An hour into the reception, both had disappeared for a while, not even bothering to disguise the fact that they’d left together and returned together. Afterward, their little shared giggles and glances at dinner, and even at breakfast the next day, had left little doubt about what was going on. At first Julie had been embarrassed at their behaving that way in front of Donald, but it was soon obvious that he was used to it, and it wasn’t long before Julie was used to it too.

  Villarreal’s affair with Cheryl lasted all of two days, Sunday and most of Monday, after which it cooled perceptibly. By Monday evening, he and Liz were a pair, a relationship that continued for most of the week, to Liz’s transparent delight.

  “She really thought he was in love with her,” Julie said, shaking her head. “She thought she’d found the man of her dreams. Liz and I were pretty close, and I could see what was going on even if she couldn’t… anybody could, really… and so I tried to calm her down a little, get her to take the long view, but, you know, when somebody is like that…” She shrugged. “And anyway, I didn’t want to rain on her parade.”

  “No, of course not. Poor Liz. She’s a smart lady, but she’s honest herself, and so she can be a little gullible when it comes to other people.”