Aaron Elkins - Skeleton dance

"That's certainly possible, but isn't it also possible he was admitting-"

"No, it isn't." She straightened up in her chair and squared her shoulders. "It wasn't Ely, Gideon, definitely not Ely."

"Why 'definitely not'?"

"Gideon,' she said, leaning forward, "I am not going to get into it, okay? Don't push me, okay? Just take my word for it, he wouldn't have done it. Ely Carpenter was a really, really neat guy until this happened to him."

"Sorry," Gideon said meekly.

Pru sat back, suddenly sheepish. Her jaw muscles, which had bunched up, relaxed. "Yeah, me too. I didn't mean to come on so strong, but I really had a lot of respect for the man." She faltered, then went on. "In fact there was a time-oh, hell, you'll find this out anyway-when the two of us… when I came that close to marrying Ely, or did you already know that?"

"No, I didn't know it."

Not that he could claim to be bowled over at the news. Pru's cheerful, brawny amiability had always been attractive to men, and it seemed to work the other way around too, but never for very long. Ever since he'd known her she'd been in and out of affairs, uniformly brief, and rarely associated with any visible trauma. "Why didn't you, or am I getting too personal?"

"Oh, I don't know, I don't really remember-oh, wait a minute, yes I do. He was already married at the time, that must have been it. Later, after he got divorced, I guess I just never got around to it again."

"Well, I didn't mean to-"

"Listen, it's not just that I had a thing for him, trust me. He was a first-rate archaeologist too; he really was. I hate the way his reputation's been raked over the coals over that stupid Tayac thing, I hate it. He'd never in a million years have pulled a dumb stunt like that."

"But apparently he did fall for it," Gideon said gently.

Pru puffed her cheeks and blew out a mouthful of air. "Yeah, that he did, he surely did."

"Okay, if not Carpenter, who then?"

She shook her head. "No. Uh-uh. Look, haven't I given you all kinds of goodies? Isn't that enough? Go bug someone else."

"Pru, help me out, will you? I have to start somewhere. If you say it's a guess, that's what I'll treat it as, unless it leads somewhere definitive on its own."

She took her feet off the drawer and leaned forward, looking her one-time professor in the eye, her elbows on the arms of her chair. "Let's say it was the other way around-let's say I was sitting here asking you to rat on one of your colleagues, and all you had to go on was a guess-no proof, no real evidence, just a hunch- would you do it?"

"So it is one of your colleagues?" Gideon said.

"God, are you pushy. Look, don't get tricky with me, just answer the question. Would you do it?"

"Yes."

"Bullshit"

"All right, no," Gideon admitted, "I don't suppose I would." But even with Pru's unwillingness to answer, she'd told him something, or he thought she had. Colleague. Fellow-archaeologist, fellow-scholar at the institute. Pru didn't go along with the Bousquet-as-perpetrator idea. She had somebody else in mind.

"Suppose, my eye. You know you wouldn't." She returned her feet to the drawer and leaned back again. "Okay, then, enough of that. Anything else I can help you with?"

"Yes, do you happen to know what museum those four metapodials were taken from? I'd love to go have a look at them. All I've seen are photos."

"Sure, but you don't have to go to any museum. They're right here."

"The original cave lynx bones? With the holes?"

"Yes, what are you so surprised about? The museum didn't want any more to do with them, so we hung onto them. They're under lock and key-important historical artifacts. Ask Jacques or Michel to show you."

"Will do. I'm off to see Michel next."

"And for your records, the museum they came from is the Musee Thibault. It's just a hole in the wall, run by one of the local antiquarian societies, but it's been around forever. It's in La Quinze, a few kliks north of here, on the way to Perigueux."

"Thanks," Gideon said, writing it down. "Jacques couldn't remember."

"He couldn't remember?" Pru laughed. "Jesus, how does the poor soul make it from one day to the next?"

"What do you mean?"

"Jacques been involved with the Thibault since he was a kid, for God's sake. He's been on the board of trustees for umpteen years. Armand Thibault was his mother's brother. You tell me, how could any normal person not remember its name?"

How, indeed, Gideon wondered. Was it possible that Beaupierre But Pru was wagging a blunt finger in his face. "No, no, no, no, that's not what I meant. I see what you're thinking, I know how your mind works. You're thinking he was hiding something, he was being devious, am I right?"

"Well, I don't see how I can help it."

"Forget it, prof, Jacques wouldn't know 'devious' if it walked up to him and said bonjour."

"Maybe not, but-"

"Come on, pal, don't make a federal case out of it. You know Jacques pretty well-where his brain is at any given time, nobody can say. The man's not accountable. He's a few peas short of a casserole, shall we say. The receiver's off the hook sixty percent of the time, you know? The elevator usually doesn't go all the way to the top floor, or let me put it this way, the sewing machine ran out of thread a while back, the-".

"Okay, enough," Gideon said, laughing. "I think I get your drift."

More out of courtesy than in hopes of learning anything new, Gideon began his session with Michel Montfort with the same opening question he'd used with Jacques: will you tell me in your own words about the Tayac affair? His account, expectably briefer and more focused than Beaupierre's, was still the same story, and Gideon used the time to study the celebrated archaeologist sitting across the desk from him.

Pru had given him as apt a nutshell description of Montfort as he'd ever heard. "Somewhere along the way," she'd once told him over a glass of wine, "Michel crossed over the line from being a legend in his own time to being a legend in his own mind."

He had known at once what she'd meant; there was a whiff of play-acting in Montfort's famously blunt manner. But not really an unpleasant whiff; in fact it tended to take the edge off his frequently disagreeable remarks and give him a playful, Papa-Bearlike quality. At the same time it could leave you with the feeling that you weren't actually dealing with a snuffly, grousing, basically good-hearted old codger at all but some character actor who had specialized in snuffly, grousing, basically good-hearted old codgers for so long that he couldn't remember how to play anything else. Gabby Hayes with a Ph. D. and a French accent, say.

Not that Montfort could really be called an old codger. He was only in his middle fifties, but he was one of those people who seemed to have been around forever. He had already been a great name when Gideon was an undergraduate. And with his old-fashioned taste in clothes-dark suits, usually blue or black, with matching vests, always buttoned-and his bulb-nosed, fleshy, weathered face ("a face like a two-pound loaf of homemade sourdough," Pru had said at the same memorable tete-a-tete), he was like a holdover from another generation, lacking only a black derby to complete the picture of a self-made, rough-and-ready 1920's merchant king.

But he'd changed a lot in the last three years; more than Gideon had realized at the previous morning's staff meeting. Physically, he was much the same: a little older of course, but still thick and hearty across the chest and shoulders, yet at the same time he seemed in some intangible way diminished, like a man who has successfully recovered from a serious operation, and yet, in an indefinable way, is not-and never again will be-the man he was. The Tayac affair had taken a lot out of him and no wonder. He had put his own considerable reputation on the line backing the "find" and the integrity of man who had made it, he had "Hello there. I've finished," Montfort said.