Old Bones

by Aaron Elkins

  "But we weren’t talking about that at all," Ray said.

  "All right, then," Ben said agreeably, "at least invite them in to sit down and have a drink. They could probably use one after two hours down there."

  "That sounds good," John said, and Gideon agreed.

  "Oh…" Claire said, drawing back. "I must go. I can’t stay…"

  "Don’t be like that, honey," Ben said gently. "Nobody in there’s going to hurt you—"

  But with a murmured excuse, she was gone, trotting quickly back up the stairs.

  Ben watched her go with a sigh, and exchanged a troubled look with Ray. "I sure wish we could get that girl to come out of her shell a little. I’m afraid we have a few frictions here at the old manoir," he said to John and Gideon, "just like normal families do. Ray, did I ever tell you what my Uncle Beau Will’m said about families?"

  "No," said Ray, beginning to smile, "I don’t believe you did."

  "Well, my Uncle Beau Will’m," Ben said, slipping into an East Texas drawl, "that is, my Uncle Beau as was married to my mother’s sister Essie, he said ain’t no problem at all keepin’ peace in the family, just so long’s you don’t ever make the mistake of tryin’ to get ’em all together."

  While they laughed Ben bowed them into the salon and Gideon had his first good look at the room. It was here that he and Guillaume had had their lively discussion over coffee and local brandy, observed by a bemused but entertained Ray. Everything was exactly as he remembered— the high ceiling with the warped, orange-painted beams, the rough, hammered-iron chandelier with its anachronistic little light bulbs shaped like candles, the great Louis XIV table in the center, the leggy rubber plants, the age-browned tapestries of barely visible stags and skirted hunters. It felt somehow wrong that they should all be unchanged, while the vital, incisive Guillaume, who had seemed the very heart of the manoir, breathing life into it, should be dead. Indeed, the people in the room— introduced by Ray as Ben’s wife Sophie, and Mathilde, René, and Jules du Rocher—struck him even before he spoke to them as intruders who had no right to be there. Ben was right, he decided; he could stand a drink. Something to eat too.

  The amiable Sophie Butts quickly set him more at ease. A graying woman with an open, mannish face, she moved over on the couch with a smile and patted a place beside her.

  "Bonsoir, madame," he said politely to Mathilde, who informed him that he might as well speak English. She and her husband had spent many years in London; Jules had been born there. Since Guillaume’s death, as a matter of fact, French had generally been spoken at Rochebonne only when addressing the servants…or certain distant relatives who found it difficult to comprehend English.

  Within a few moments, Marcel, as inscrutable and silent as he’d been two years before (Did he recognize Gideon? There was no way to tell), had brought Dubonnets for him and John, and for the next twenty minutes, while he sipped and munched hors d’oeuvres, he answered questions about the bones in the cellar.

  "And was he actually beheaded?" Jules du Rocher asked. "And his hands and feet cut off?" The puffy Jules had shown a morbid interest in the more lurid aspects of the case. For some minutes, with his little eyes glittering,

  he had held a half-consumed salmon-and-olive canapé in one hand, forgetting to eat it.

  "Well, the body was cut up, yes," Gideon said, looking at him with distaste.

  "Fascinating," said Mathilde, who evidently didn’t share her son’s sensational interests.

  "But who was it?" René asked. "Why in heaven’s name was he buried in the cellar? Who killed him?"

  Gideon shrugged. "The police will have to figure that out. About all I can hope to do is give them a description that might help. And so far I haven’t come up with anything useful." Here he was equivocating a little, but it didn’t seem like a sensible idea to broadcast even the few specific conclusions he’d reached. "But maybe I can find out a little more tomorrow."

  "How?" Jules asked. "What can you do that you haven’t done already?" As he spoke he waved one hand before his face, saw the canapé in it with visible surprise, and popped it into his mouth, shoving it the last inch or two with a fat thumb.

  "Jules," Mathilde breathed.

  "Well," Gideon said, "of course the police are still looking for more bones, and if they find the pelvis or the skull, there’s a lot we might be able to tell. Still, even if not, a closer look might turn up, oh, some old injury like a healed fracture that might help in identification…Or maybe signs of disease, even a childhood disease—"

  "A childhood disease?" Ben echoed. "Can you really tell that from the bones?"

  "Depends on the disease," Gideon said, having taken advantage of the question to toss down a quick triangle of smoked trout on toast. He was careful not to push it in with his thumb. "A lot of them leave permanent signs on the skeleton: TB, rickets, polio…And then there can be signs of operations too—oh, for mastoiditis, say."

  He downed a shrimp-and-egg-decorated cracker while they digested this. John, he noticed enviously, was putting canapés away at a far steadier rate, being unencumbered by conversation.

  When Beatrice announced dinner, Mathilde, who looked as if she had hoped to avoid this awkward situation, unenthusiastically invited John and Gideon to dine with them. When they declined, saying they would be leaving with Joly in a few minutes, she expressed her regret with a warmly genuine smile and left for the dining room, followed by all but Jules, who stayed in his chair hoping for a few more of the grisly details.

  "Dr. Oliver? Monsieur Lau?" It was Joly, standing in the entryway, plainly disapproving at this fraternizing with the household. "I think we can go now, please."

  At the doorway he turned to Jules. "Oh, monsieur—I haven’t seen Monsieur Fougeray for a little while. Perhaps you would be good enough to tell him he is welcome to examine the bones tomorrow at ten o’clock?"

  Jules drew his soft body together and lifted a rudimentary chin. "I will see to it," he said coldly, "that Marcel informs him."

  "A Nazi what?" John asked. He was in the front seat this time, Gideon in the rear, as Joly drove them back to St. Malo.

  "Obersturmbannführer," Joly replied, turning off the graveled road onto the highway. "It’s equivalent to a lieutenant-colonel. SS Obersturmbannführer Helmut Kassel. You remember the executions in Ploujean that I mentioned? They were on his orders. And among the dead was one Alain du Rocher, who, if you take it on the word of the people in that house, was the nearest thing to an angel you’re likely to find on this earth."

  He extended his lips to accept the Gitane he had just lit at the dashboard. "Perhaps he was. In any case, according

  to what they said, Guillaume du Rocher—your old friend, Dr. Oliver—killed the Nazi in retribution for his cousin’s death. Certainly, there is no question but that Kassel disappeared with no trace in October 1942. I think that now we have some reason to think that Guillaume—"

  "—buried him in the cellar," John said.

  "So it would seem. No one appears to know for sure what was done with the body, and Guillaume, they tell me, hadn’t talked of it for over forty years. He didn’t happen to mention it to you, Dr. Oliver?"

  "Not a word. I was only here for a couple of days. We talked about phylogenetic relationships between the Middle Pleistocene hominids and the western Neanderthals."

  "Hey, no kidding," John said. "That must have been a blast. I’m sorry I missed it."

  It was a blast, Gideon remembered. Afterwards, the ailing old man had told him he hadn’t enjoyed an evening so much in years, and Gideon had believed him. He thought about Guillaume some more, staring without seeing at the lights of the big trucks flashing by on their night hauls to Rennes. "Inspector," he said, "do you know just what it was that happened to Guillaume?"

  "He was drowned in the tide."

  "Yes, but do you know how it happened? Did he have an attack of some kind? A stroke?"

  "No, I don’t think so. He was rather far out collecting shells, and he didn’t
become aware of the tide until it was too late for him to get back. When he began to run, he stepped into some quicksand. It’s very treacherous there."

  "Mm."

  "Exactly what is it that bothers you?" Joly asked after a pause.

  "It’s just that he didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d go out there without knowing exactly when the tide was coming in and exactly when he’d have to start back. He was fascinated by the tides. He had some kind of theory

  about biannual cycles, and he kept tide schedules going

  back a dozen years."

  "When was it you saw him?"

  "Almost two years ago."

  "Ah. Well, as I understand it, his health had declined since then; his alertness too, I’m sorry to say. He might easily have become confused."

  "I suppose so," said Gideon, unconvinced. "Still—"

  "Dr. Oliver," Joly said briskly, "I can assure you there is nothing questionable about Guillaume du Rocher’s death. He was simply caught unawares. Half a dozen witnesses saw it, one with binoculars. Afterwards his body was found buried in the sand up to the hips. It’s happened many, many times before, and it will happen again. The bay is famous for it."

  "I guess so."

  John turned around. "Okay, Doc, let’s hear it. What’s your theory?"

  "I don’t have one," Gideon said truthfully. "It’s just that… hell, I don’t know. It doesn’t sound right."

  "Perhaps we would do better," Joly said with authority, "to discuss the case at hand—the skeleton in the cellar. Several of the people at the manoir remember Kassel; their descriptions corroborate one another, and I am hoping that your investigation will bear them out: a tall, powerful man, very Aryan in appearance—"

  "What?"

  Joly’s cool eyes flicked at him in the rearview mirror. "Pardon? Have I said something—? Ah, of course. You prefer not to know who it is you’re trying to identify. I apologize; you told us on the first day of the seminar."

  "Well, that’s true. Forensic anthro’s like anything else. You tend to find what you’re looking for. But—"

  "Still, inasmuch as it’s almost certain that the bones are Herr Kassel’s…" Again he glanced at Gideon. "You think not?"

  The words were courteous enough, but even in the small mirror the afflicted expression in Joly’s eyes was unmistakable: What have I done that God has seen fit to inflict this difficult man on me?

  "I think not," Gideon said, and told him straightforwardly about his height and weight calculations. "Five-feet-nine, tops. A hundred and forty pounds, tops. There’s no way anybody could mistake him for‘tall and powerful,’ Inspector."

  Joly considered this without pleasure. "Don’t forget about the psychological component, Dr. Oliver. We’re dealing with memories forty-five years old. Isn’t it likely that people’s image of this feared, powerful commandant has been warped by time into something even more terrifying than he was?"

  "That’s true," John said, on Joly’s side for once.

  "Sure, but this guy was built along the lines of Ray Schaefer. Do you think even forty-five years could warp that build into an Aryan superman’s?"

  "Yeah, but don’t forget about the fudging component, Doc," John contributed. "You said down in the cellar you weren’t sure about the height and weight, didn’t you?"

  "I didn’t say I wasn’t sure, I said the indicators didn’t provide technically cogent data."

  "Oh, the indicators didn’t provide…Well, that’s different. That’s a whole ’nother story. Excuse me."

  Gideon sighed. "Okay, okay, you’re right. I can’t prove it, but my gut tells me this was a little guy, not a big one. Is that better?"

  John hooked an elbow over the back of the seat and turned around, his dark eyes round. "I’m right?"

  "In principle."

  "Oh, in principle." He swung back around to the front and nodded sadly. "You had me shook up there for a minute. I thought I was just plain right."

  If Joly found this exchange entertaining he didn’t show it. "Dr. Oliver, to speak frankly, it seems to me that you’re going out of your way to be obstructive—"

  "Obstructive?" Gideon repeated, offended. "You asked me in to give my opinion, and that’s what I’ve given. If you’ve already made up your mind who that skeleton is, you don’t need—"

  "No, no, I’m sorry," Joly said hurriedly. "I didn’t mean it that way. It simply occurred to me that with all the available information pointing to its being Kassel…Well, I find myself wondering if your modus operandi perhaps involves a certain skepticism, a need to quarrel with the obvious, to make the simple complex…"

  "Every time," John said cheerfully. "That’s his MO, all right. That’s how he got to be the Skeleton Detective of America."

  The look that Joly shot him made it icily clear that he knew when he was being put on and it didn’t amuse him. He exhaled smoke through his long nose and ground out his cigarette in the ashtray. "Perhaps we’ll learn more tomorrow," he said curtly. "I’m having the rest of the cellar excavated, of course."

  "Of course," John said, and wisely held his peace.

  Each with his own thoughts they said no more until Joly swung the blue Renault off the N137 at the St. Malo exit.

  NINE

  GIDEON was one of those people who could wake up at a set time without an alarm clock, but it was an instinct he never wholly trusted. As a result, he usually set an alarm before going to bed and generally wound up jerking awake ten minutes before it went off, thus allowing him to punch down the button and avoid being shaken out of his sleep by the alarm itself. Thus also losing him ten minutes’ additional sleep that he wanted dearly at the time. It was one of those little problems he had yet to get around to figuring out.

  But he was surprised the next morning when the alarm went off while he was still asleep. He slammed the button down twice before he realized it was the telephone. Blindly, he reached for it, his heart racing. He didn’t like telephone calls in the middle of the night; that was the way he’d learned that Nora was dead. As he groped for the receiver he saw the time on the glowing clock dial and relaxed: ten after seven. Not the middle of the night at all.

  Still, damn early.

  He growled something into the telephone.

  "Oh-oh, sounds like he hasn’t been fed yet. I didn’t wake you up, did I?"

  "Julie?" He smiled and fell back against the pillows, closing his eyes again, letting her voice flow over him. "I love you."

  He’d already called her twice in the five days he’d been in France. They’d talked and laughed for almost an hour each time, like a couple of kids with crushes. He hadn’t yet had the courage to inquire about the bills.

  "I love you too. I miss you horribly. When are you coming back?"

  "Wednesday. I keep telling you."

  "I know, but I like to hear it. Four more days." She sighed. "That’s still a long time."

  "Mm, I’m glad you miss me. Are you home now? How did the supervisors’ seminar go?"

  "I just got back from Arizona an hour ago. And I know all about effective supervision now. It’s nothing but a matter of providing a climate conducive to the maximization of intra-group cooperation."

  "I always thought it had something to do with planning, delegation, that kind of stuff."

  "That shows how out of date you are. How’s life in St. Malo? Still pretty dull?"

  "Well, no, as a matter of fact. Remember the Guillaume du Rocher I mentioned to you? They’ve found a dismembered skeleton in his basement, and the police have asked me in. What are you laughing at?"

  "It’s amazing. This always happens to you, doesn’t it? So tell me about your dismembered skeleton." He could tell from her voice that she was settling herself comfortably.

  He went over it with her briefly. "Everybody," he concluded, "is convinced it’s this SS officer Kassel that Guillaume killed in 1942. Even John thinks so. But I’m just as positive it isn’t. Maybe I’ll find out more today."

  "What does your friend
Guillaume have to say about it?"

  "Guillaume’s dead. He drowned Monday, the same day I got here. The funeral was a couple of days ago."

  "Oh, I’m sorry, Gideon. I know you liked him." She was quiet a moment. "Doesn’t it strike you that there’s something funny about that?"

  His eyes popped open in surprise. "It sure does, but what makes you think so?"

  "Well, I was just thinking…It’s an awfully big coincidence; here’s a body lying hidden under the house for forty or fifty years. Then when it finally gets found, it turns out that the person who’s supposed to have done it got buried the day before. How convenient."

  "You know, that’s a good point," he said admiringly. "I never thought about that."

  "The bones are found," Julie went on, "the victim is identified, the killer is identified, and the case is all wrapped up—all in one day. Only the only person who can confirm it—or argue with it, I bet—just died. And you never thought about that?"

  "No."

  "You’re slipping, Dr. Oliver. I think marriage has made you soft. When you get back I’m going to have to keep you less contented."

  "Just try it," he said, then got himself more comfortably stretched out on his back and got down to the sweet, serious business of telling her just how much he missed her. And how he was going to show it when he got home.

  An hour later, while John went lamenting to Professor Wuorinen’s final lecture ("Larval Invasions of Calliphoridae in Unburied Corpses from Two to Four Weeks Old." Many graphic color slides), Gideon was picked up at the hotel and driven to the manoir by a sharply dressed, intense young man with red hair and elevator heels, who introduced himself as Sergeant Denis. Ray met them at the thick oak door and politely invited Denis to join them for coffee.

  "No, thank you, monsieur," Denis said, as firmly as if Ray had suggested a double brandy. He bobbed a Joly-style bow and went to break the police seal on the cellar door and get the workmen started digging.