Aaron Elkins: Unnatural Selection

“Times change,” Gideon observed.

Mr. Moreton’s hand swept the surroundings. “I’m told the duke found his lodgings here quite comfortable.”

“And I know we will too,” said Julie.

Pleased, Mr. Moreton brushed a finger along either side of an immaculately trimmed, pencil-thin mustache. “The reception is at six,” he told them. “A number of local dignitaries have been invited.”

“Thank you, Mr. Moreton,” Gideon said.

“Dinner will be at seven-thirty, in the dungeon. Madam. Sir.” He closed the door soundlessly behind him.

“Now there’s a line that hasn’t been heard since The Addams Family ,” Gideon remarked when he’d left. “Dinner in the dungeon. What do we get, gruel?”

“I doubt it,” Julie said, laughing. “As dungeons go, it’s pretty nice. You’ll see, you’ll be impressed.”

“I’m already impressed. I never met a real majordomo before.”

A few minutes later, with their bags open on the beds, she paused in her arranging of the bags’ contents in the armoire. (This was a task that always fell to Julie. The alternative was chaos, bewilderment, and wrinkled clothes.)

“Gideon?”

“Mm?” He was wandering absently around the room, testing out the window seat that was cut into the three-foot-thick walls, running his hand over the rough-plastered walls themselves, the age-darkened wood of the eighteenth-century armoire, and the smooth round columns of the bed, and taking in the primitively carved, dark-painted beams that supported the low ceilings. “Those are real adze marks on them,” he mused, his head tipped back. He was able to reach them with his hand and feel the delicate scoring from the individual adze blows. “Probably the original sixteenth-century beams.”

“Gideon, tonight’s reception-you will be there for that, won’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you’ll be nice to everyone?”

He looked at her, surprised. “When am I not nice to everyone? I was nice to Joey Dillard, wasn’t I? And he was wearing buttons.”

“Well, I was just thinking… if it’s like last time, Vasily will be making a sort of speech to set the agenda, and he does have some, uh, odd ideas about evolution and things that even I can spot. If he should say something that isn’t exactly accurate, you won’t jump all over him, will you?”

Gideon sighed. “I can’t win, can I? Last night you were upset because I didn’t want to participate. Today all you want is for me to keep my lip buttoned.”

“I just want… Oh, come on, you know perfectly well what I mean.”

“Julie,” he said, as they closed the door to their room behind them, “you can count on me. I will be the very model of decorum and restraint; the perfect spouse.”

And at first, he was.

With the weather as mild as it was, the reception was held outdoors on the castle ramparts. Eighteen feet wide and bordered by sturdy, four-foot-high stone parapets, these earth-filled, star-shaped walls (with cannon ports, some empty, some with rusted seventeenth-century cannons in the points of the stars) surrounded the castle itself, creating a deep, narrow passageway that circled the building on the inside. On the outside, the ramparts overlooked a dry moat, with a wonderful view over Hugh Town harbor, the bright, blue-green sea beyond, and the low, mounded green silhouettes of the nearby islands. Kozlov or a previous owner had sodded the top of the thick walls so that there was now a rich, green lawn underfoot, with a few old picnic tables scattered about, and a well-stocked bar that had been set up for the occasion.

Vasily Kozlov, dressed in a bright yellow T-shirt, Bermudas, and sandals, was there to greet them-and to exuberantly embrace Julie-when they arrived at the top of the stone steps that led to the ramparts. Striking in appearance, with a short, bouncing, bullet-shaped body and an amazing head of corkscrewed white hair (he looked like Pablo Picasso in a fright wig, a magazine article had once said), he pumped Gideon’s hand-an energetic, two-handed grip-and beamed up at him.

“So, comes to my house famous Mr. Skeleton Detective! Welcome, welcome!”

“Thanks for having me, Mr. Kozlov. I’m glad to be here.”

“Please, please, is ‘Vasily.’ You come sit in consortium, yes? Any time, any time. Talk all you want. What you say?”

“If I do, do I get a discount on lodging costs?” It had made Julie laugh. He thought it might do the same for Kozlov.

It did. “Harr, harr,” Kozlov rumbled, reaching up to thump Gideon on the shoulder and turning to welcome the next of his guests, still chuckling. “Is funny.”

“Looks as if you’ll just have to resign yourself to that twenty bucks a day,” Julie said. “Come on, let me introduce you to some of the others.” She took his arm and led him toward a group milling near the bar. As they approached, a tall, gaunt man, with a gold chain around his neck and overdue for a haircut, shifted his highball to his left hand and stuck out his right. “Hello, Gideon, I’d heard you were coming. It’s been a while.”

Gideon stopped, puzzled. He freely admitted to being more generally absentminded than most, but not when it came to people. People, he remembered. But this cadaverous, round-shouldered guy with the lined face and the sour twist to his mouth, and the gold chain.. .

“Uh-it’s nice to-” he began.

Julie rescued him. “Why, hello, Rudy. How are you?”

Gideon’s heart contracted. This grim, walking ghost was Rudy Walker, the friend of his youth, the man he’d been so looking forward to seeing again? Where was the easy, open-faced smile, the lively, cocky tilt of the head, the suggestion of good fun just around the corner? He recognized him now, but the changes were very great. It was as if he were looking at a faded monochrome photograph of the full-color Rudy he’d known. It had been more than twenty years, of course, and Rudy, older than Gideon, would be pushing fifty now, but still…

“-to see you again, Rudy,” he finished, taking the proffered hand. It was clammy, possibly from the drink he’d been holding. “How’s Fran, is she here?”

“Fran died,” Rudy said without expression. “She got cancer.”

Ah, was that it, then? They had been extravagantly, almost embarrassingly, in love, Rudy and Fran. Was it her death that had changed him so? It wasn’t so hard to imagine. Gideon too had lost his much-loved first wife some eight years ago, in an automobile accident. Nora had been the center of his life, his anchor, the reason that he drew breath, and her death had undone him. For one long, terrible year he was drowning in grief, unable to come to terms with it. But then, as more time passed, the extremity of his sorrow-of all his emotions-diminished, and he felt himself dwindling into a husk, without aims, or interests, or passions, isolated from everything and interacting with others by rote. He looked on the outside world as a sort of television set; the power was on but it was permanently tuned between channels, so that there was life in there somewhere, but it was just static and fuzz, unimportant and without meaning. He couldn’t remember-literally could not remember-how it was that one smiled, and when he tried, it hurt his face.

And then, astonishingly, wondrously, along had come the funny, pretty park ranger Julie Tendler, and he had thawed, fallen in love once more, and come thankfully to life again. But his meeting her at all had been so random, so unlikely-she had been peripherally involved in the finding of some remains he’d been asked to examine in Olympic National Park-it would have been frighteningly easy to have missed each other. What would have happened then? Without Julie, would he have turned into Rudy?