Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 10 - Skeleton Dance

by Skeleton Dance

  "It's the story of my life," Noyon murmured.

  With a resigned glance, first at the dirt floor of the crevice and then at his crisply creased trousers—what immutable law was it that ordained that he would have to be wearing the new suit from Arnys today?—Joly settled to his knees and began to crawl through the corridor. Behind him, the amazed, deeply offended Toutou yapped loudly away.

  "Marielle," Joly called back as he neared the end, "it gets quite narrow in here. If it's too difficult—"

  "Don't worry about me, I can make it fine," Marielle snapped, and by dint of a few contortions, a torn epaulet, and an iron determination not to be outdone, he did.

  By the time he reached the cave, Joly was sitting on a rounded boulder near the entrance, trying to make sense of the jumbled bones and disturbed earth around him. Obviously, the body had originally been buried in the center of the space, where some of it—the pelvis, the lower part of the vertebral column, and at least one of the upper leg bones were still partially interred. As for the rest—as much as was still there—it was clear that Toutou had been busy, and probably some of his friends as well. Dozens of bones had been wrenched out of the ground and scattered around the cave. There were a shoulder blade and some hand and foot bones in a little heap at the rear, a rib practically at the inspector's feet, vertebrae here and there, and half of an upside-down human jawbone near the cave entrance. All had been heavily gnawed, with edges and bone-ends virtually chewed away. Many, if not most, of the bones were missing altogether; possibly they were in the cardboard box at the Les Eyzies mairie, courtesy of Toutou.

  Marielle, on his hands and knees, emerged huffing and red-faced from the crevice into the abri. "Ha," he said jovially, getting to his feet, "what do we have here?"

  Joly held up his hand. "Stop there, please. We don't wish to disturb the site any further until it's been processed."

  Marielle smiled at him. "Inspector, I hope you won't think it impertinent of me," he said, "but I find myself wondering what process you are referring to. This is a Cro-Magnon abri, many thousands of years old. I assure you, I'm familiar with these things. You see those bits of flint scattered about? They are tool flakes."

  "I believe so, yes."

  "And the black deposits up there? The result of centuries of fires."

  "Yes, I thought as much."

  "The cave opening, as you observe, is oriented toward the south to take advantage of the sun, as was typical of the Stone Age; the rock fall which now blocks it is clearly recent. And this—" he gestured at the skeleton. "—is without doubt a Cro-Magnon burial."

  "There I have to disagree. I'm afraid we have a homicide investigation on our hands."

  "If so, I fear the perpetrator may be somewhat beyond our reach by now."

  Joly was astonished. Was the man capable of humor then? "No, I don't think so. I believe this is a recent burial."

  "Recent!" Marielle shook his head. "Everything here bespeaks antiquity. Believe me, I've studied these things. Observe the placement of the body, the flexed position, the orientation relative to the cave opening. Observe the fact that the skeleton is without any sign of clothing. Observe—"

  "I'm not a student of these things myself, Marielle," Joly said shortly, standing up and coming within a couple of inches of striking his head on the stony roof. The smug and gassy Marielle had finally gotten his goat, as he usually managed to do after an hour or so. "Do you suppose that's why I wasn't aware that the Cro-Magnon people went in for dentistry?"

  "Dentistry?…?" Marielle took a harder look at the broken jawbone, where he was dismayed to see the dull sheen of a gold crown on one of the rear teeth. He felt himself flush, hoping that Joly couldn't see it in the dimness of the cave. "It's, ah, possible that I was mistaken about the age…"

  "Highly possible, I should say. Now then, Marielle—"

  "But on the other hand," the stung Marielle interrupted, "with all due respect, it seems possible that you are mistaken as to the immediate need for a homicide investigation. Where is the evidence of a crime? Many people—villagers, campers, tourists—explore these caves. People have died in them before. They slip and fall, they are crushed by loosened rocks, they die of natural causes—"

  Joly looked at him, only barely managing to keep from shaking his head at the man's never-ending obtuseness.

  "And do they bury themselves as well?" he asked.

  Chapter 3

  "All right, then, how does this one sound?" Julie said, talking through a ballpoint pen clenched like a pirate's dagger between her teeth. "It's just a few miles from Piltdown." She smoothed the copy of "Holiday Rentals in Southeast England" that lay open on her lap, took the pen from her mouth, circled an entry, and read aloud.

  "'Huffield Manor. Surrounded by flagstone terraces and overlooking its own six acres of wooded hillside near the handsome medieval village of Horsted Keynes, this beguiling eighteenth-century stone priory has been converted to a luxurious six-room manor house, completely renovated in 1997. Original beamed ceilings throughout. Large, marble-tiled entry hall with sweeping oak staircase and oak-balustraded minstrel gallery—'"

  Gideon looked up from the fresh-from-the-printer sheets that were spread over his own lap. "Hey, hold it, I think you're getting confused. I get half-pay while I'm on sabbatical, not double-pay. What does this place rent for?"

  "I haven't gotten to that yet. Ummm… . yikes, scratch that!" She went back to turning pages while Gideon returned to his own reading. "Okay, here's one. 'Cozy stone cottage, a rustic, romantic little charmer…'"

  "That sounds more like it," Gideon said.

  They had been sitting in their living room for an hour, unwinding over wine and cheese, listening to Mozart, and savoring the view that ran from Puget Sound and the pearly Seattle skyline a few miles to the east, to cozy Eagle Harbor closer at hand, where one of the big, green-and-white ferries from the city was amiably lumbering up to settle against the Bainbridge Island ferry dock, only two blocks away from where they sat and no more than a five-minute walk. The easy access to downtown Seattle—in effect, one could walk to it from semi-rural Bainbridge—was one of the big selling points of their recently purchased house, set higgledy-piggledy with its neighbors on the hillside above the dock.

  The next ferry would be leaving at 5:10 and they planned to be on it for a Friday night dinner with friends and then a Mariner game at the new ballpark. In the meantime Gideon browsed through the day's output on the book he was working on and Julie fine-tuned their upcoming travel schedule—-a four-week jaunt to Germany's Neander Valley, to Oxford and Sussex in England, and to the Dordogne in France, in that order, scheduled to begin the following week. The itinerary had been determined by Gideon's research needs. Julie, a supervisory park ranger at Olympic National Park's administrative headquarters in Port Angeles, would be visiting one or two parks while they were overseas, but was basically going along, as she freely put it, for the ride, and to provide much-needed "logistical support" for the notoriously absent-minded Gideon.

  "'… situated in a small, rural village on the banks of the Ouse, within easy driving distance of Sheffield Park, Cuckfield, Pilt Down, etc. Sitting room with river view, one bedroom, one bath, small but modern kitchen with fridge…'" She stopped reading and waved the brochure at him. "Hello? Anybody there?"

  "Hm? Oh, sorry. Sure, that sounds fine."

  "What sounds fine?"

  He cleared his throat. "What you said."

  She put down the brochure. "What are you working on, anyway—the book?

  The Book. Bones to Pick: Wrong Turns, Dead Ends, and Popular Misconceptions in the Study of Humankind. It had grown out of a public lecture he'd given a year earlier at the university, part of a survey-of-the-sciences extension series. His presentation, "Error, Gullibility, and Self-Deception in the Social Sciences," had been attended by Lester Rizzo, the executive editor of Javelin Press, who had approached Gideon afterward to ask if he would be interested in expanding the subject and turning it into a
book for publication under Javelin's "Frontiers of Science" imprint.

  Gideon had agreed, partly because he was flattered at the idea of joining the roster of distinguished scientists who had already contributed to the series, partly because he was looking for something different to do on his upcoming sabbatical, and partly because almost anything that was still ten months away from doing was likely to seem like a pretty do-able idea, whatever it was. The $15,000 advance—ready money, up front; a startlingly original concept to anyone accustomed to writing for the academic presses—hadn't hurt either. Even Lester's first editorial suggestion—the first of many ("You're writing for the masses here. What do you say we dumb down the title a little?") —hadn't put him seriously off; surely Lester knew more about selling books than he did. So stifling his natural reservations, he'd gone along with it, although not as far as Lester would have liked (Bungles, Blunders, and Bloopers). Hence Bones to Pick, a reasonable compromise.

  He nodded, filling their glasses from the bottle of Merlot. "Yeah, the book. I've been stuck on the same section for two days. I can't figure out how to get into it."

  "What section is it?"

  "You want Lester's title or mine?"

  "Yours."

  "'The Case of the Neologistically Prolix Hyperboreans.'" He smiled. "What do you think?"

  She made a face. "Well, to tell the truth…"

  "Julie, it's meant to be amusing, for Christ's sake."

  "Oh. And Lester's version?"

  "'The Myth of the Eskimos' Two Dozen Words for Snow,'" he said testily. "Something like that." He cut a few more slices from the loaf of French bread, loading them with wedges of Gorgonzola, and arranging them on the plate.

  "Well, don't get mad, but I have to admit that I like Lester's version better. " Not," she added quickly, "that it's as amusing as yours, of course, but—hey, wait a minute—the myth of the Eskimos' two dozen words for snow? You mean they don't have them? Separate words for dry snow, and wet snow, and slushy snow—"

  "Not two dozen, not fifty, not nine, not forty-eight, and not two hundred and two—each of which has been reported by 'authorities,' most of whom probably know as much Eskimo as I do."

  "But… well, how many do they have?"

  "Ah, you see, that's the hard part. Maybe two, maybe a hundred, depending on whether you're thinking of Inuit or Yupak, or whether you're counting lexemes, or morphemes, or derived—"

  "Careful, you're losing me. To say nothing of the waiting masses."

  "Look, the important thing is, it doesn't matter, it doesn't prove anything. However many they have, it's no big deal. Look at it this way: How many words do we have for water?"

  "Well, I was going to say one, but now I think I'd better wait and see."

  "Good move. What about 'ice?' 'Fog?' 'Mist?' 'Snow,' for that matter?"

  "Yes, I guess if you want to stretch a point—"

  "But it's not stretching a point. They all stand for water in different forms. And what about 'river,' 'stream,' 'brook,' 'creek,' 'eddy'? They all mean water—water moving at different rates in different conditions."

  "And you're saying that's the kind of thing the Eskimos do for snow?"

  "Sure. And if some Eskimo linguist studied us, he'd probably say English is amazing: separate, completely independent words for standing-water-in-large quantities, standing-water-in-medium-sized-quantities, standing-water-in-small—quantities—"

  She wrinkled her nose. "Hold on now.…"

  "'Ocean,' 'lake,' and 'pond,'" he said. "We even have one for standing-water-in-teeny-weeny-quantities."

  "Mmm…" Thinking, she stared out the window. "Puddle?"

  "Now you're catching on, see?"

  "Yes, I'm starting to. It's interesting. Now, what's your problem, exactly?"

  "I can't seem to come up with a simple way of starting."

  "Why don't you write what you just said? The whole bit, from the beginning?"

  He looked at her. "That's a good idea, I will." But his face, which had momentarily cleared, fell. "What did I say?"

  "Sorry," she said, "if I'd realized you weren't paying attention I'd have taken notes."

  "God help me," he wailed, but he was laughing.

  He was laughing more these days, she noted with pleasure. Not that he'd ever been ill-humored; far from it. But over the last year or so she'd begun to sense a lessening of verve, of the essential liveliness and interest in everything that had always been such a big part of him. She'd pondered on the possibilities of midlife crisis (he was 44), of career dissatisfaction (he was a full professor at the University of Washington's Port Angeles campus; where did he go from there?), and even—but only briefly and when she was in one of her own rare periods of insecurity—of boredom with their marriage.

  It had taken her a while, but in the end she'd put her finger on it: it was Port Angeles itself, the remote, one-time lumbering town on the far side of the Olympic Peninsula, where the university, in an effort to be ready for the sure-to-come population expansion from Seattle, had built a well-endowed, full-scale campus. The problem was that they had gotten there a bit too early. Port Angeles was a lively, attractive town in a glorious location, but a cultural center—a city—it wasn't; not yet. And Gideon, she had belatedly realized after five years of marriage, was a city person through and through, born and bred in Los Angeles. He had taken the Port Angeles position, an associate professorship at the time, largely for her sake, so that she could continue working with ease at Olympic National Park.

  He'd never once complained; indeed, in many ways it was obvious that he loved the place—the clean air, the nearby Olympic Mountains, the startlingly beautiful Alpine lakes tucked into pristine green valleys, the laid-back atmosphere of the university campus. But no opera, no real theater or museums, no fine restaurants, no Mariner games. To get to any of those meant a four-hour round trip by highway, bridge, and ferry boat, and when the weather was bad, a pretty common occurrence in these parts, it meant a night spent in a Seattle hotel and a pre-dawn start home the next day if it happened to be a workday. And so, little by little, they'd pretty much stopped going, except for the occasional university event at the main campus. That had suited her fine; she was a country girl at heart, never at her best in cities. But, she had only recently come to realize, it hadn't suited him.

  And so when the opportunity had been offered him to join the faculty at the main campus in Seattle—he'd turned down a similar chance once before—she had encouraged him to accept, and this time he had, and they had moved to Bainbridge Island, still on the Olympic Peninsula side of the Sound but only six miles from downtown Seattle, a comfortable 35-minute ferry ride. She had pushed for the move in an open-hearted spirit of self-sacrifice—it would mean a ninety-minute drive to work for her each way instead of her former ten-minute walk, but she'd found that it was a good thing for her too. Her drive was beautiful and uncrowded, a relaxing, mind-clearing ramble over the Hood Canal bridge, through grand, fragrant forests of Douglas fir, and along the lush flanks of the Olympics all the way to Port Angeles. With a new flex-time arrangement, she went in only four days a week now. And she and Gideon were now getting into the city a couple of times a week for one thing or another—and, except for the one night the ferries had stopped running because of the high seas, they had been getting home the same night regardless of the weather.

  Things were good. It had been a smart move.

  "Going to have any more wine?" she asked, reaching for the bottle.

  "I don't think so, thanks," he said, smiling, just as the telephone in the kitchen rang. "Oh, jeez," he said, "that has to be Lester. Would you mind taking it? Tell him I'm anywhere but here, and you don't know when I'll be back."

  "I'll do what I can," she said, getting up, "but you know, you'll have to talk to him sometime."

  "Not if I can help it. Tell him I went out for a quart of milk last Monday," he called after her, "and you haven't seen me since."

  For over a week his editor had been pestering him
about the title page. Lester wanted the author listed as "Gideon Oliver, the Skeleton Detective," making use of the irksome nickname that had been applied to him years before by a reporter and had stuck to him like a blood-sucking leech ever since. Lester thought that it might sell a few extra books. After all, he had pointed out in his straightforward way, a lot of people had heard of the skeleton detective, even if they couldn't say exactly where, but who the hell ever heard of Gideon Oliver

  Gideon could hardly argue with that, but he'd put his foot down anyway. His academic colleagues, who were a lot more important to his daily happiness than Lester was, would never have let him live it down.

  Julie was back in a few seconds with the telephone. "It's not Lester, unless Lester pronounces your name Geedyong Ohleevaire." She handed him the phone and went back to her chair and her brochures.

  "Gideon? This is… ahum…"

  "Lucien?"

  "Yes, that's right. I'm pleased that you recognize my voice."

  "Well, of course I would."

  Actually, it wasn't the voice, or even the accent; it was that "ahum." Lucien Joly, a formal type, wasn't all that comfortable referring to himself by his first name. Gideon had considered it a major accomplishment that afternoon in the little French village of Dinan, when the inspector had first done it. At the time, Joly had been been attending a forensic sciences seminar in St. Malo a few miles away, where Gideon had been one of the speakers. Afterward they'd worked together on a case and had become friends of a sort. Later Joly had been transferred to Périgueux, the capital city of the département of the Dordogne, and when Gideon had made his current plans to go to nearby Les Eyzies to research the celebrated archaeological hoax known as The Old Man of Tayac, he had telephoned him to suggest that they get together. They had agreed to meet for dinner at the restaurant Au Vieux Moulin in Les Eyzies, one of Joly's favorites, on October 7. That was still five weeks away.

  "Is there a problem with the seventh?" Gideon asked. "Need to change our date?"