Aaron Elkins: Make No Bones

Once off Third Street they were back in rural Oregon. They passed the Elks Lodge, complete with a bronze elk on the roof, crossed over the Deschutes River, and went by a little white church that would have been right at home in Vermont. At College Way they turned right to head uphill toward Central Oregon College, where the museum was located.

“And?” Julie prompted.

“And,” Gideon said, laughing as he remembered the long-ago scene, “Jasper motions him to bend down, feels his head all over, and gives him a reading, a five-minute one. The waiter was absolutely delighted.”

Julie laughed too. “He sounds nice.”

“Well…”

“But definitely a character.”

“That for sure.”

Julie folded the letter, meditatively brushing it against her lips. “I suppose I’m not looking at this the right way, but doesn’t this thing tonight strike you as rather…well, macabre? I mean, there’s Jasper, identified after his death by his own friends and colleagues-”

“Colleagues,” Gideon said. “I don’t know about friends. From all I’ve heard, he really was a hard guy to like.”

“All the same, it’s pretty grisly. And then ten years later, what’s left of him ends up in a glass case right back where he got killed, with the-the exhibit being unveiled right in front of those same colleagues. Brr. That doesn’t seem downright gruesome to you?”

Gideon thought it over while he turned into the parking lot beside the low, modern, stained-wood museum building.

“No,” he said. “Creepy, yes. Gruesome, no.”

For almost an hour the fifty-odd people had attentively followed a cheerful and outgoing Miranda Glass through the Lucie Kirman Burke wing of the Central Oregon Museum of Natural History, beneath murals of bears and cougars. They had trooped slowly by glass cases illustrating the principles, problems, and oddities of forensic anthropology: skulls punctured with bullet holes, or with axes or arrows still embedded in them; skeletons twisted by rickets or achondroplasia; trephinations, scalpings, beheadings; fractured bones, split bones, crushed bones, cannibalized bones; murder victims from two thousand years ago and from two years ago; pelves, mandibles, vertebrae, and long bones that demonstrated the criteria of aging, sexing, and racing skeletal material.

It was all very well done; eye-catching and grisly enough to grab anyone’s attention, but thorough enough to teach something to those who had the patience to look and to read.

But it was in front of one of the least spectacular cases that the group gathered for the longest time: a sparse, gray-black assemblage consisting of half a mandible, the base of a cranium, a few vertebral fragments, and three or four cracked, misshapen long-bone segments, all of them embedded in an irregular mud-colored mass, like a set of fossil relics from the La Brea tar pits. In this case, however, the mass was known to be the melted-down plastic cushioning material from Seat Number 34 of Bus Number 103 of Cascade Transport Lines.

On the wall beside it was a placard coolly detailing the effects of heat on bone and explaining how anthropologists analyzed burnt skeletal material. In small upper-case letters at the bottom were the words, “Bequest of A. E. Jasper.”

Gideon had wondered how he would react to the display. He hadn’t known Jasper very well, and their limited acquaintance hadn’t done much to make him like the older man. A top-notch scientist, certainly, and a legendary wit and iconoclast; but to Gideon the jokes had seemed contrived, the personality beneath them mean and self-centered. Gideon had seen him publicly cut a hapless student to shreds-wittily, to be sure, but the student hadn’t looked any happier for that.

Still, how often did you look into a glass case in a museum and see someone you’d shared a pepperoni pizza with? To his great surprise, sudden laughter bubbled up in his throat. He covered his mouth and converted it-unconvincingly, he was sure-to a cough. At the sound, there was a sudden splatter of similarly unpersuasive snuffles and throat clearings. Was it tension relief, the same nervous reaction one saw at funerals? Or simply the freakishness of the situation? Some of these people had known Jasper a lot better than he had. Some of them, as Julie had said, had actually handled and pored over these remains immediately after the bus crash.

Miranda Glass was one of them. He looked up and accidentally caught her eye. She stared fixedly back at him, eyes very wide and on the edge of fluttering, mouth pursed, soft chin tucked in, while her hand went to the nape of her neck to wrap a strand of hair around her index finger. You bastard, don’t make me laugh. She couldn’t have said it more clearly if she’d spoken.

An entertainingly freewheeling woman about fifteen years older than Gideon, with a round, deceptively cherubic face, she’d been a student of Jasper’s once, but had never finished her doctorate and never gone on to teach. Instead, she’d drifted into museum work, where she’d established a solid and well-deserved reputation. Although she still served the local police as a forensic consultant, her paramount interest was the museum, and all but the simplest and most unambiguous cases were forwarded to the state medical examiner in Portland for analysis.

An unsettling tendency to say whatever came into her head made some people uncomfortable in her presence. Others, Gideon among them, found Miranda a bracing change of pace; something like being slapped in the face with a paImful of Aqua Velva.

She had successfully fought down her own urge to laugh and was now soberly finishing her reading of the official letter of transmittal from Nellie Hobert. “‘…given his very bones to continue in the service of education, to which he so selflessly devoted his life. Surely Albert Evan Jasper would be pleased.’”

There was a spatter of polite applause, after which Miranda added some comments of her own.

“As most of us know. Dr. Jasper was also quite a showman; some might say an exhibitionist.” She paused, pushing oversized octagonal glasses up on her nose and managing to look droll doing it. “If you ask me, the man would have died for an opportunity like this.”

Those who didn’t know Miranda glanced around them for cues on how to respond. Those who knew her laughed, or groaned, or shook their heads.

“In conclusion, folks, you have to admit that this is a pretty appropriate windup for a teacher of anthropology. So, when you get back home, remember us in your wills. There’ll always be a place for you in the Central Oregon Museum of Natural History.”

The laughter now was more general. “Don’t get any ideas,” Julie said to Gideon. “I’m not about to be the widow of a museum case, no matter how beautifully laid out.”

“Ali, but there are advantages,” said the spare, fiftyish man on Julie’s other side. “I had a woman once-I speak figuratively, you understand-who donated her husband’s skeleton-he’d died under somewhat ambiguous circumstances-to our lab on the condition that she be allowed to visit him monthly. She did, too. We’d pull out the drawer for her and she’d sit down and look at him for a while. We always made sure he was quite attractively displayed. After half an hour she’d leave, always with a sad, thoughtful smile.”

Julie’s mouth curled downward just a little.

“Personally,” the man went on, “I’ve always been convinced she poisoned him. I suppose she needed the periodic reassurance that he was really dead.”

“That’s really touching, Leland,” Gideon said. “That’s a wonderful story.”

“But seriously now,” the man said, wide-eyed behind heavy, plastic-rimmed glasses. “Surely you wouldn’t deny the world the bones of America’s Skeleton Detective, the ‘Quincy’ of the bone labs, the darling of the media?”