Aaron Elkins: Unnatural Selection

“I’m gratified to hear it.”

“What’s your favorite game?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I was asking what kind of animals you like to hunt-deer, ducks, um…” What else did hunters go after? “… elk, geese, um…”

“What kind of-” Pinckney blinked at him, pained. “Are you serious? Do I look to you to be the sort of man who’d go around with a gun, shooting ducks and geese? Let alone gutting them and all the rest of it?” He gave a small shudder. “No, thank you.”

“But I thought-I mean, don’t you-”

“Donald is an advocate of ethical, environmentally sensitive hunting,” Julie said, enjoying this. “It doesn’t mean that he likes doing it himself.”

“Any more than I would enjoy electrocuting people, which I wouldn’t,” Pinckney explained, “just because I support capital punishment, which I do.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Gideon said, with enough doubt in his voice that Pinckney felt it necessary to expand.

“I was an administrator with the Pennsylvania Department of Fish and Wildlife for twenty-one years, Gideon, and in that time I moderated a good many meetings with various lobbying and pressure groups. Against my own instincts, I eventually concluded that, motives aside, the pro-hunting lobby had an extremely sound approach to wildlife conservation; a good deal sounder-and considerably less shrill-than the anti-hunting groups.” He directed a disparaging flick of his head in the direction of Joey Dillard, who was busy proselytizing a small, captive audience a few yards away. “I’ve been saying so ever since, that’s all.”

He looked again toward where Joey was holding forth. “Would you mind excusing me? I feel a strong need to go and correct whatever distortions of reality our earnest young friend is inflicting on those unfortunate people. I’m very happy to know you, Gideon.” He nodded briskly at Julie. “Julene.”

There was the delicate sound of a musical triangle being rung for attention, and they turned to see the pale, stately Mr. Moreton standing in front of one of the gun ports, delicately striking it with a metal rod that he held with pinky extended. Tink. Tink. Tink.

Kozlov, who had clambered onto the two stone steps leading up to the port, waved happily to his guests, arms high, like a feisty bantamweight entering the ring. The sun, setting directly behind him, turned his wild hair into a halo of steel wool.

“Here comes the speech,” Julie said. “Remember, you promised.”

But Kozlov uttered only four words, thoroughly garbled, but full of good cheer.

“Hawkay, evwerybawdyss… lat’s itt!”

“ What did the man say?” someone next to Gideon asked. “Was he speaking Russian?”

“No, English,” Gideon said. “He said, ‘Okay, everybody, let’s eat.’” And to Julie: “And I’m certainly not going to argue with that.”

The dungeon was indeed “pretty nice,” as dungeons went, with coves and niches that roughly corresponded to the castle’s star-shaped exterior, and a paramecium-shaped bar in the small, open central area. The rough-finished stone walls bore a clean coat of white paint and were adorned with eighteenth-century weaponry and navigational equipment. At one end of the bar, a bronze plate screwed to the top said: “African hardwood from the wreck of HMS Retort, sunk by French gunfire off the Stones in 1799.”

Because there was no single space large enough to hold all the guests at one table, people were seated in groups of three and four in the various niches. Gideon’s place was at a table also apparently made from the remains of the unfortunate Retort, along with Rudy Walker and Madeleine Goodfellow, the director of the Isles of Scilly Museum in Hugh Town. Earlier, Madeleine had announced that on Wednesday, the consortium’s midpoint, the museum would be pleased to host a picnic-dinner for the participants on Holgate’s Green, the pleasant little park at the other end of the village. Kozlov had graciously accepted on behalf of all.

The other person at the table, according to the place cards, was Cheryl Pinckney, Donald’s wife, to whom Gideon had been introduced at the reception. But her chair was empty.

Madeleine, a buxom, amiable woman in her fifties who wore her glasses on a lanyard and several rounds of jangling jewelry on her wrist, and who was given to knowledgeable if somewhat disjointed prattling, made conversation easy-or rather, unnecessary-at first by talking at some length about the history of the castle while the roasted-vegetable salads were served and eaten. Star Castle had been built in 1593 by order of Queen Elizabeth, as a defensive response to the “Spanish Menace,” and had often seen action through the centuries. As for the dungeon in which they presently sat, yes, it had been used as a prison for enemy sailors and soldiers early in the seventeenth century. Later, when the Scillies had become a sort of in-country exile for aristocrats who had gotten themselves in trouble of one kind or another with the crown, Star Castle had once again served as a prison. But this time its inhabitants, being of a higher class, were usually transferred directly from the Tower of London and lodged-often with their servants in attendance-in the “apartments” in which the consortium participants were now staying. In 1646, the future Charles II, on the run from the Roundheads, had taken refuge at the castle; and in 1847 Queen Victoria had taken tea in what had then been, and still was, the lounge on the second floor. In 1921, the Prince of Wales, later to become the Duke of Windsor, had lunched…

After a while, this subject, extensive as it was, petered out, and conversation slowed to a crawl, what with Cheryl’s being absent and Rudy as good as absent. He sat in silence, drawn in on himself like a bird in a pelting rain, moodily nursing his drink and no doubt brooding upon the vindictive consequences visited upon free thinkers who had the temerity to challenge the established orthodoxies of their field.

“And what is your field, Gideon?” Madeleine asked with a well-bred show of interest as the salads were cleared away. She had a fluty, mezzo-soprano voice that would have gone perfectly with a lorgnette, Gideon thought with a smile, suddenly realizing who it was she reminded him of. She could have doubled in looks, and even in manner, for Margaret Dumont, that grande-dame of the silver screen whom Groucho Marx had persecuted and punctured with such relentless glee in movie after movie. (“Captain, this leaves me speechless.” “Well, see that you remain that way.” “Mr. Hammer, you must leave my room. We must have regard for certain conventions.” “One guy isn’t enough, she’s gotta have a convention.”)

“I’m a physical anthropologist,” Gideon said. “I teach at the University of Washington.”

“No!” She put down her wineglass. “Do you mean you know about bones?”

Rudy surfaced. “Does he know about bones!” he muttered with a laugh. “Lady, you’re talking to the Skeleton Detective himself.”

“The, er, Skeleton…”

“I do a fair amount of forensic consulting,” Gideon explained. Not for the first time did he wish to hell the reporter who’d pasted that nickname-as impossible to peel off as a stuck-on label from a tomato-on him all those years ago. “Mostly on skeletal remains.”

“How totally fascinating.” Her interest now was genuine enough. She pulled her chair closer to the table and closer to Gideon. He caught a strong whiff of talcum powder. “I wonder-were you planning on visiting the museum?”

“Of course. I’m looking forward to it.”

Julie had told him about the place. “It’s your kind of museum,” she’d said. “Small, simple but thorough, nicely done. Nothing fancy. You’d like it.”