Aaron Elkins - Skeleton dance

…as it inevitably, necessarily was found out. The words drifted back through his mind, so distinctly and separately that his lips involuntarily shaped them. Had exposure of the fraud truly been inevitable? If so, then yet another possibility had to be considered: what if everyone had been looking at the hoax the wrong way round? What if its purpose had not been to promote the sensitive-Neanderthal school of thought but to dis credit it? Looked at that way, it had been a great success: Ely, Montfort, Jacques, and their brothers-and-sisters-in-arms had come out of it bruised and winded, along with their theories. But for the other side, the Neanderthal-as-hopeless-knucklehead-side, it had been a great shot in the arm; their theoretical stock had soared.

And looking at it from that angle, Gideon thought, tipping the bottle up to get the last cool, sweet swallow out of it, meant that Audrey, Emile, and Pru might have had the very same motive as anyone else in planting those doctored bones for the luckless Ely to find and to crow about-namely, giving a leg up to their side in the theoretical wars when the truth came out.

Wonderful, he thought with a shake of his head and a wry smile, this was real progress. When he'd started off this morning he didn't have a single suspect, beyond Ely himself, on whom to hang the Old Man of Tayac. Now there wasn't anyone who wasn't a suspect.

It just went to show what the scientific method could accomplish when properly employed.

Yawning, he reached for the cone of frites, saved for his dessert, and stood up. Carpenter was on his mind too as he started back up the path. Pru and Jacques had both jumped defensively, almost angrily, to his support. Ely had been "the very model of integrity"… "a really, really neat guy." But had he, really? When Gideon had known him three years before, he'd found him competent and likeable, with an entertaining flair for the dramatic, but at the same time there had been something about him-unexpected gaps in his erudition, a surprising unevenness in his knowledge-that had made Gideon wonder. Once, when Gideon had made a passing reference to Paranthropus robustus, he'd been shocked to see that Ely hadn't had any idea what he was talking about, although he'd done a good job of covering it. Of course, that alone didn't- "Ah, it's a pleasure to see a man that deep in thought. Dare I interrupt?"

It was Audrey Godwin-Pope, striding stoutly along at his side-all hundred-and-ten pounds and five-feet-two of her-in her swaying tweed skirt, gray cardigan, and crepe-soled, lace-up shoes, with her sturdy tortoise-shell glasses hanging from a lanyard around her neck and a pencil sticking out of the gray bun at the back of her head (in the past, he'd seen as many as three at a time).

"Oh, hi, Audrey, sorry I didn't get to you this morning; I ran a little late."

"Not to worry. So what is it that's furrowing that manly brow, or shouldn't I ask?"

"I was thinking about Ely Carpenter, as a matter of fact." He slowed his pace to let her keep up more easily and held out the paper cone. " Frites?"

She reared back. "Do you have any idea what they fry those things in around here? Thinking about Ely along what lines?"

"Oh, his background, his education; wondering what kind of a person he was, really."

"A one-of-a-kind," she said warmly. "A really splendid man. The usual male hang-ups, of course, but in his case-"

"What do you mean, a one-of-a-kind?"

"Just that." She smiled and shook her head. "There'll never be another Ely Carpenter, Gideon. I'm sure you know about his amazing past-grew up out West, parents divorced, got into trouble early, spent a couple of years on a juvenile detention ranch in Montana, learned about cowboying, got onto the professional rodeo circuit at seventeen-"

"No, I had no idea about any of that. Really?"

"Really. And what's more he was good. I've seen the cups and the ribbons: bull-riding, calf-roping-"

"When did he go into archaeology?"

"Oh, much later. After he got tired of falling off bucking broncos he spent some time in the Air Force as a mechanic, then did the same thing for another dozen or so years with a commercial air transport company. And then, of course, he won the lottery. Well, you know, perhaps I will try one of those frites. How much harm can one do?"

"They're all yours," he said, passing her the cone, which she didn't refuse. "Won the lottery in what way?"

"In the real way, the way that counts. State of Connecticut, almost a million dollars. Whereupon he decided that, more than anything else in the world he wanted to be an archaeologist. Quit his job, went back to school with a vengeance-here's this forty-six-year-old airplane mechanic, not even a high-school graduate, mind you, but in less than five years he had his M.A. Wrote a letter to his hero-Michel Montfort-declaring his passionate interest in the Middle Paleolithic and his admiration for Michel's work, and begging for the chance to study under him. Michel said come ahead, three years later he had his doctorate… and the rest is history."

That explained a lot, it seemed to Gideon. Ely had essentially been a self-made man, starting school in middle age and then immediately plunging into a narrow, obscure, and difficult subject area. It was an admirable course to follow-people had done a lot worse with lottery winnings-and it had a lot of things going for it, but breadth of education and systematic scholarship weren't among them. Certainly, it explained the gaps in his knowledge. Possibly, it also explained why he'd been so easily taken in over the Tayac hoax-assuming, of course, that he was the victim and not the perpetrator.

"Fantastic story," he murmured. "Actually won the lottery."

"Yes, but, you know, he really had no interest in the money. He had a retarded, grown daughter, did you know that?"

They were coming to the turn-off in the path that led up to the mairie, the town hall, where Gideon would be filing his report on the previous day's attack, and his mind was turning to that. "Yes, I heard," he said a little absently. "Back in the States."

"Yes, and I think most of it went to take care of her," Audrey continued, lost in recollection. "But then, apart from his airplane, Ely didn't have any use for a lot of money. He wasn't a fancy dresser or a high-liver. He drove an old clunker." She finished the frites and absently wiped her fingers on her sweater. "Aside from flying and shooting, archaeology was his whole life. Two or three times a year he'd take a few days to fly off to one of his air-rifle competitions in Lisbon or Barcelona, and that was it. Other than that…" She drifted pensively off.

"Well, I head up this way," Gideon said. "Thanks for-" He stopped in his tracks and stared at her, dumbfounded.

"One of his WHAT?"

"Air rifle competitions," Joly mused with one of his less scrutable expressions. "So Ely Carpenter owned an air rifle." If anything he seemed pleased.

"Yes, at least one. Audrey said she'd seen his favorite. He showed it off to her when it came. I guess it was something special."

"She wouldn't know what kind it was?"

"No, just that it was made in Korea. She didn't really pay that much attention."

"Well, well." Yes, definitely, Gideon thought; that little tremor at the corners of his mouth was Joly's version of a cat-that-gobbled the-canary smile.

They were in the snack room of the mairie -a modest, utilitarian space with a hulking red Coke machine, an old refrigerator, coffee fixings (a simmering glass pot of water on a warmer and a crusted jar of Nescafe), and three small, round plastic tables with two plastic chairs each. Making his statement for the police had taken only twenty minutes with Joly's assistance, and doing his best to help put together a composite sketch of "Roussillot" hadn't taken much longer. (Unfortunately, the result, like most composite sketches, had more in common with composite sketches in general than it did with any recognizable human being.)