Aaron Elkins: Where there's a will

“Still-” Keoni said.

“I don’t want to argue about it,” Dagmar said. “I’m sure they’re not overcharging us. You go ahead and tell them to do it, my dear.”

“Don’t forget about getting permission from the Kiribati government,” John said.

“They say they’ll take care of all that,” Malani said. “They’ve dealt with the Kiribatis before.”

“They’ll need to file a flight plan,” Axel said. “They’ll have to-”

“They know all about that; they’ll get started as soon as I call back.” She paused, chewing on her lip for a moment. “Oh, there is one other thing. They’ve never recovered human bones before, and they’re nervous about how they’re supposed to handle them, and even how to recognize them. So you can imagine how excited they got when I told them that we had the world-famous Skeleton Detective himself staying with us”-she turned a brilliant smile on Gideon and actually batted her eyelashes-“and he just might be willing to…” With a teacherly motion of her hand she encouraged him to finish the sentence for her.

“Go with them?” Gideon said. “I’d… be happy to help out any way I can.” He’d been on the narrow edge of exclaiming “I’d love to!”, which would hardly have been appropriate in the circumstances, but the fact was that he’d been hoping they’d ask him ever since John had told him about the find.

What he had told Axel about being interested in cattle-ranching was true enough, but when it came to real, gut-level interest, cows didn’t hold a candle to bones. For Gideon, as for every other forensic anthropologist he knew, the skeleton was a source of inexhaustible fascination, and to sit down with the bony remains of some anonymous, long-dead human being was to accept a challenge: What could be told from them about the person’s life, the person’s death? About who and what the person had been, had looked like? The skeletal system, the part of us that was left after everything else had rotted away, retained, for the knowing eye, an exhaustive and indelible record of the habits, diet, health, injuries, and activities of an individual’s life.

What could be determined, of course, depended on how much skeletal material was left, which bones they happened to be, what their condition was, and a host of other things. But there was always something to be learned, some connection to be made with a human being no longer living, a being whose future was gone, but whose past could still be brought back, at least a little. The forensic anthropologist, one of Gideon’s teachers had liked to say, was the last one to speak for the dead.

“Oh, I’m sure Gideon has other things to do than-” Hedwig began.

“No, I’d like to,” he quickly interrupted.

“Well, that’s just great, Gideon,” Felix said. “Thank you. We’ll pay your usual fee, of course. That goes without-”

“ I’ll pay his usual fee,” Dagmar said.

Gideon waved them off. “No, no, no. Thank you, but it’s a pleasure to repay you all for your hospitality.” He hesitated. “There is something you need to know, though.” He wasn’t eager to throw a monkey wrench into the closure machinery, but in good conscience he couldn’t let it pass. “At this point, unless I missed something, you don’t really have any way of knowing for sure whose bones are in that plane. You’re assuming it crashed the night he left and that it’s been there ever since, but for all anybody knows it might have gone down months or years later. The plane’s ownership might have changed hands.”

“Uh-uh,” Inge said. “According to the police, the plane was never registered to anyone else. Hoaloha Ranch is still the last recorded owner.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean a lot,” said John. “Trust me, planes can change hands without paperwork. Doc’s right, it’s most probably him, but it could be anybody.”

That made for a few wrinkled brows, until John spoke again. “Doc, couldn’t you tell from the bones whether it was him or not?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go as far as that,” Gideon said, addressing everyone. “But depending on what there is, I could probably narrow it down some. With a little luck, I might be able to determine the sex, age, race, and maybe the approximate height. That’d help.” With a little luck-and the right bones-he could very likely come up with a lot more than that, but he didn’t like to promise more than he could deliver.

“But you have to remember, exclusion is a lot easier than positive identification,” he went on. “That is, say the bones are those of an elderly white male of such and such a height-”

“My brother was not ‘elderly,’” Dagmar said crossly. “He was an extremely vigorous man, not yet out of his seventies.”

“-a white male in his seventies of such and such a height,” he amended, “then we’d know that they could be Magnus’s, and we could reasonably conclude they probably are, given that it’s the ranch airplane and no one’s seen it or him since he flew off in it. But if we were to find the bones of a female, say, then we’d know with a hundred percent certainty that it couldn’t be him.”

“Well, of course not,” Dagmar said. “ I could have told you that.”

Axel had found an atlas somewhere and brought it, open, to the table. It took him a while to locate Maravovo Atoll. “This place is absolutely in the middle of nowhere. Where the heck were they trying to get to?”

“‘They’?” Gideon said. “He wasn’t alone?”

“No, there was a pilot,” said Inge. “Magnus didn’t know how to fly.”

“Lydia What’s-Her-Name,” Dagmar said.

“No,” Inge said, frowning. “It wasn’t ‘Lydia’…”

“Could they have been trying to get to Tarabao Island?” Malani asked. She had gotten up to lean over her husband so she could see the map. “Or Beckman Atoll? Maravovo is between them.”

Axel studied the map and fingered his chin. “Maybe, but it’s an awfully long way from either one.”

“They were a long way from anything,” said Malani. “Wherever they were headed, they must have gotten good and lost.”

“Well, frankly, I can’t say I’m bowled over,” Hedwig said. “Lydia wasn’t really much of a pilot.”

“Wasn’t much of anything,” Dagmar grumbled. “Should never have hired her.”

“Claudia, that was her name,” said Inge. “Claudia Albert. Oh, she wasn’t really a bad person, Auntie Dagmar. She’d had it hard growing up-”

“And how do you think I had it?” Dagmar said heatedly.

“Or Magnus, or Torkel, or your father? But we didn’t turn to drugs, we didn’t get in trouble with the police, we just worked for a better life, not like that big lummox of a Claudia-Lydia. And we got it, we got a better life for ourselves, and now you have it. We didn’t have to run off to the psychologist because we had some imaginary eating disorder… anorexia-”

“Actually, it was bulimia, and it’s not really imaginary,” Hedwig said, “although there is a psycho-spiritual component. No that I ever thought mainstream psychologists would do her any good. Remember, I offered her a place free of charge in the Self-Evolvement Wellness Seminar, but she-”

“It wasn’t free,” Dagmar pointed out. “Torkel was going to pay for it.” She relit her dead cigarillo, making a show of it.

“Well, yes, technically,” Hedwig mumbled, “but only to cover the cost of food and refresh-”

“Gideon, let me ask you something,” Inge said. “Or maybe this is a question for you, John. Isn’t it possible that there might be some identifiable personal belongings still in the plane, even after all this time? A watch, a ring, maybe even a driver’s license or something? Wouldn’t that settle the question of who it is?”