Aaron Elkins - Skeleton dance

"Professor Beaupierre," Madame Lacouture began.

Beaupierre looked up vacantly, focused with some effort, and smiled. "Hello, Gideon, what are you doing here?"

"We had an appointment."

"Today?"

"I'm afraid so. We made it at yesterday's staff meeting, but if it's not convenient-"

"No, of course it's convenient. I'm at your service. Merci, Madame Lacouture."

"Next time," she told him in French, "please try to remember to inform me of your schedule." It was something she told him a lot, Gideon guessed.

"Sit down, sit down," Beaupierre said. "Just give me a moment, a single, er, moment… extremely interesting… Bulletin de la Societe Prehistorique Francaise… want to see…" He returned to his journal while Gideon took the armchair beside the desk. At his elbow was a holder with two photographs, one of Madame Beaupierre, a svelte, glossily handsome woman whom Gideon had once met, and the other of Beaupierre's two grown daughters, women who had been cruelly tricked by their genes in that it was their dough-faced, sausage-shaped father they took after.

"How very interesting," Beaupierre said, pulling off his glasses and looking up from the journal at about the time Gideon was wondering if the director had forgotten he was there. "Were you aware that Revillion has conclusively demonstrated that the blade cores from Seclin have a closer relationship, volumetrically speaking, to Upper Paleolithic than Middle Paleolithic forms?"

"Ah… no, as a matter of fact I wasn't."

"You must admit, it raises a number of intriguing issues."

"It certainly does." For starters: who was Revillion, where was Seclin, and what the hell was "volumetrically speaking"? "Jacques, do you suppose we could get on to Tayac? We only have half-an-hour."

"Of course, of course." Beaupierre closed the journal, pushed it to one side, and made a visible effort to concentrate on his guest, peering at him as if through misted glass. His open, friendly face was all concentration. "How can I help you?"

"How about starting by giving me an overview of the whole affair in your own words? Just to make sure I have it straight."

Beaupierre nodded gravely, crossed one knee over the other, steepled his stubby fingers in front of his mouth, and proceeded, in a relatively coherent fashion, to tell Gideon the familiar story: how Carpenter had been working the Tayac site on his own; how he had jubilantly proclaimed his great find of four perforated bones; how an anonymous letter to Paris-Match had soon charged that they had actually come, not from a Paleolithic abri, but from the collection of a small, out-of-the-way museum where they'd been stored for upwards of forty years.

Gideon teetered on the edge of asking Jacques' opinion on whether or not Jean Bousquet had been the writer of that anonymous letter, but he couldn't quite talk himself into the conviction that to do so would not be crossing the forbidden line between legitimate research and 'playing detective,' something he'd promised both Joly and Julie not to do. Reluctantly, he set it aside for the time being. Maybe later he'd figure out a way of talking himself into doing it. That, or renegotiate.

"What museum did the bones come from, Jacques?" he asked instead. "It's near here somewhere, isn't it? I'd like to go and see the bones for myself."

"What? Oh, it was… yes, not too far…" He snapped his fingers ineffectually. "The name escapes me, mm…" He rolled his eyes upward but apparently found no clue on the ceiling and went on with his recounting of the hoax: how the shocking accusation of fraud had been substantiated, and how a wretched, repudiated Carpenter had had to resign in disgrace.

"Such a terrible, terrible end for him," he finished with a sigh. "Would you care for some coffee? It should be… I can ask Madame Lacouture to, mm, ah…"

"I sure w-no, thanks," Gideon said, remembering barely in time the pot of black, gluey matter on the warmer. "Jacques, what do you honestly think Carpenter's part in all this was? I know you've thought about it a lot. Could he have planted those bones himself, or-"

Beaupierre nearly came out of his chair. "Certainly not!" he exclaimed, shocked. "What a thought! Ely Carpenter was the very model of integrity." "I'm only asking the question; I'm not suggesting anything," Gideon said placatingly.

"Ha, you'd better not ask such a question of Michel. He'll throw you out the door. Ely was like a son to him-not in age, of course, but otherwise-and the idea that… that… well, the very idea that Ely himself would…"

"Well, who then?" He didn't like upsetting Jacques, but this was one of the questions that had brought him to France in the first place. And now he had more reason than ever to ask it.

"I'm sure I-I have no idea."

"Come on, Jacques. You must have thought about it."

"Thought about it? Oh, well, of course, thought about it… but… to what purpose… mm…" His fingers crept longingly across his desk toward the journal, his eyes toward the printed page.

That seemed to be that; for Beaupierre, after all, it had been a pretty long attention span. Gideon got to his feet.

"Well, thanks, Jacques. I'm off to see Pru; which way's her office?… Jacques…?

"So tell me, what else is going to be in this book besides the Old Fart of Tayac?" Pru McGinnis asked. "Piltdown, I suppose?"

Her chair creaked under her considerable weight as she leaned back, ran her fingers through her already disordered red hair, clasped her fingernail-chewed hands behind her head, and propped her snakeskin-booted feet on an opened drawer, one over the other, clunk, clunk. After getting her doctorate from Northern California State, she had taught for four years at the University of Missouri, from which she'd emerged with a country-western drawl and a style of dress to match-jeans, boots, belt buckles the size of dinner plates. The accent had soon gone, but the Western garb remained.

"Piltdown, of course," Gideon said. The Abominable Snowman, the yeti, the Tasaday hoax, the Formosan Psalmanzar story-"

"Ah, good old Psalmanzar. Well, I'll give you one I bet you don't have. What do you know about the Lost Hippopotamus of Lake Mendota?"

"I never heard of it."

"Aha. See, that's because we kept it a secret till now. The world was not yet ready. But today… today at last, I break my silence."

Gideon put down his note pad and settled back. If Pru was in the mood to tell one of her fish stories the only thing to do was relax and enjoy it because he didn't know any way to stop her. The Old Man of Tayac would have to wait.

"What are you putting your pen down for, are you crazy?" she asked. "This'll be the best part of your book. This'll make it a best-seller."

"I figure I'll just memorize it. That way I'll get every word."

"Sure, I can see how that makes sense. Okay, this happened when I was an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin. You went there too, didn't you?"

"A long time before you," Gideon said.

"Not that much. Anyway, my roommate, Gloria Kakonis-she was track and field too-had this old umbrella stand that she got somewhere that was made from this humungous, motheaten old hippopotamus foot, you know? Gross. So late one night, in the middle of January, right after a snowstorm, we drop a couple of heavy books inside it, hook up twenty feet of clothesline to either side, and take it outside, up to the campus, right out in front of Bascom Hall. Then Gloria grabs hold of one rope, and I get hold of the other rope, and we start carrying this thing down the hill suspended between us, okay? Only every couple of feet we set it down in the snow so it looks like a footprint. But our footprints are so far away nobody connects them. What? What are you grinning at?"

"It's a funny story, Pru. I'm just imagining it."