Aaron Elkins - Unnatural Selection

“Maybe a little more,” he said at last. “For instance, I can tell you he wasn’t a particularly beefy guy. The bones are relatively slender, with no heavy muscle markings.

“Oh, yes?” she said politely. She’d been hoping for more.

“I can also tell you that he had a rough life.” Gideon picked up the partial left femur, the thigh bone, and showed it to her. The upper third was gone, and the lower, or distal, end had been chewed off by rodent scavengers, but the shaft itself was distinguished by an unnatural bend in the middle, with an ugly, uneven excrescence of bone at the site of the bend.

Madeleine looked at it and drew back a little, the corners of her mouth turned down. “It’s as if… as if it got broken, then somebody stuck it together again-not all that carefully, either-and then stuck all this…” She gestured at the roughened area. “… all this gunk on it to keep it from coming apart again.”

Gideon nodded, smiling. “That’s a pretty good description of what happened, Madeleine. The femur was broken, all right, and then it healed on its own. This ‘gunk’ is the protective callus that forms around a break after a couple of months. If the ends of the pieces don’t quite match up, as they don’t here, it temporarily builds up even more to add strength. This is probably what your doctor thought was a sign of disease.”

“What’s it made of?”

“Bone. Lamellar bone, stronger than the original.” He fingered it. “I don’t think it happened too long before he died. The callus is still pretty big. Very little resorption. A year, maybe less.”

Tentatively following his example, she touched it too and was surprised. “It’s jagged. It’s sharp. Wouldn’t that have been painful?”

“Oh, no doubt about it. The musculature around it would have been inflamed and probably infected. He’d have been in constant pain, and he’d surely have had difficulty walking. This leg would have been a couple of inches shorter than the other. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was on crutches.”

“And yet here he was off in the Scillies, far from home, wherever home was. A soldier. Marching.” She shook her head. “The poor man.”

“He had other problems. Look at this.” He proffered another bone.

She complied. “How interesting. Er, what exactly am I looking at?”

“This is a right forearm bone, the radius.” He laid his finger on a point halfway down the shaft. “Now look at this.”

“Oh, I see,” she said, peering at the spot near which he’d laid his finger. “That’s another callus, isn’t it? A smaller one, though. This is a healed fracture too, although it’s not as bad as the other.”

“The callus isn’t as big, no, but the injury is worse. See how the bone below it has this sort of swollen look? That’s not normal.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Okay, see this hole?” He inserted the tip of a ballpoint pen into a small, smoothly rounded opening just below the callus.

“Isn’t that a natural foramen of some kind? It doesn’t look like a puncture.”

“No, it’s not, but it’s not exactly natural, either; that is, he wasn’t born with it. It’s a reaction to infection, to serious infection; an opening to let the pus drain from inside it. In other words, the fracture healed fine, yes, but the bone got infected-and stayed infected. I imagine this poor old guy was just one mass of infection and pain. That might well be what killed him.”

She shivered. “I’m beginning to be sorry I asked you to do this.”

“Well, you know, war isn’t-” Whatever homily had been on his tongue stopped in mid-sentence. “Oh, Lordy,” he said.

Madeleine cringed. “What now, or don’t I want to know?”

He had shifted his attention to the proximal end of the bone, the one near the elbow, and now, using the magnifying glass and holding bone and lens close to his face, he slowly rotated it beneath the magnifying glass.

“The end of this one hasn’t been completely gnawed off,” he told her. “And it’s not completely ossified.”

Madeleine frowned. “You’re talking about the, what is it, the epiphery, the diastysis…”

“The epiphysis.”

Long bones-arms, legs, ribs, clavicles-grew by depositing material at their ends: the epiphyses. At first this material was cartilaginous, but with time it ossified and fused permanently to the shaft of the bone, which was then done growing. And when the last epiphysis had fused to the last shaft, somewhere in the person’s mid-twenties-a bit later for the clavicle-the person was also done growing. The amount of time the process took, researchers had learned long ago, varied from bone to bone, but was highly predictable for each individual bone. So at least for the first quarter-century of life or so, one could fairly reliably estimate age from the skeleton by how much fusion had taken place on the various bones. If they were all completely fused, the person had been, physiologically, at least, an adult; if not, he or she hadn’t yet been fully grown.

And this particular epiphysis on this particular person was not. A cleft, thin but plainly visible, still ran halfway around the base of the coinlike disk of bone that formed the top of the ulna; fusion had been incomplete at the time of death.

“So how old was he?” Madeleine asked when he’d pointed this out.

He shrugged. “For white males, it usually closes up anywhere from fourteen to eighteen. There’s some variability, of course, but-”

“You mean he’s… he’s not even eighteen years old?”

“Fifteen or sixteen would be my guess.”

The grizzled, scarred old veteran that they’d been imagining had suddenly become a teenaged boy, a youth who had hardly lived, who had died wretchedly, in pain and misery, far away from home, probably weeping for his mother or his girl.

He laid the bone back in the box with more tenderness than he’d picked it up. “Just a kid,” he said softly.

“Now I’m depressed,” Madeleine said. “I could use some coffee. How about you?”

“Same here. Thanks.”

“Be back in a minute.”

There wasn’t much more to be learned from the bones, and there were no pieces to be glued together, not that gluing would have been a good idea anyway until the bones had been stabilized. If he’d had some standardized tables with him, he could have come up with a formal stature estimate from measurements of the long bones, but he didn’t. He did, however, have a pretty good feel for such things, and from eyeing and hefting the bones, he was able to arrive at an estimate that he’d hardly stake his reputation on, but in which he had confidence all the same. His estimate was five feet to five-feet-four inches, even shorter than he’d thought from the costume display.

So it was not only a kid, it was a runty, probably ill-fed one at that. Gideon sighed as he fitted the lid back onto the carton.

Now I’m depressed.

He pulled up a stool and opened the other carton, the one that had once been home to two dozen jars of Prince’s Tuna and Mayo Paste. It now contained five small white paper bags, each crisply folded over precisely three times, and one larger sack from Porthmellon Store (Groceries, Fruit and Vegetables, Beers and Wines). There was place-and-date information printed on each one with a marking pen: Town Beach, nr Holgate’s Grn, 21 May 2002; Rat Island, nr quay, 4 Nov 2003; Woolpack Pt, 15 Jan 2004…

Each bag contained a single bone or bony fragment, which he laid out on its own bag. He saw at once that his promise to Madeleine-“There’s always something to be learned”-was a bit exaggerated. The two smallest weren’t human; flattened and streamlined, like miniature paddles, they were probably metapodials, the fingerlike bones from seal flippers. The other four, while human, had little to offer. Two fragments of femur, one near-complete tibia, and half of an ulna. Not even enough to make respectable guesses as to age and sex. The two humeral fragments and the ulna were old, maybe as old as the kid in the other box. And they’d probably been in the sea for a long time, given the nematode encrustations. For them, Madeleine’s guess of old shipwreck remains was as good as any.