Aaron Elkins - Skeleton dance

Situated in a pleasant, wooded valley lined by low cliffs, Prehistoparc wasn't nearly as bad as Gideon had feared; neither seedy nor phony-baloney, although there was a definite Disney World feel to it. One paid an admission fee and then walked along a footpath that meandered through the natural forest, where two dozen life-sized, extensively labeled groupings of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon men and women going about their lives were artfully placed. The Neanderthals were perhaps a little exaggeratedly brutish-looking and the Cro-Magnons were maybe a tad over-clean and refined for people who lived in muddy rockshelters and wore animal skins, but on the whole the displays were interesting and within the bounds of scientific knowledge.

"So what's your opinion, Gideon?" Julie asked after he had filled her in on the day's bizarre developments while they strolled between the exhibits. " Did we all have it backwards? Was it Bousquet who killed Carpenter and not the other way around?"

"Maybe, but there are other possibilities." He stepped aside to let a couple of French kids waving rubber "Neanderthal" axes bought in the gift shop romp by hooting Plains Indian war whoops out of North Dakota by way of Warner Brothers.

"All we know for certain," he said, getting back on the path, "is that it's Ely Carpenter, not Bousquet, who's dead. But who killed him-that's anybody's Just because he had problems with Bousquet doesn't mean he didn't have them with somebody else."

"Somebody else at the institute, you mean."

"Well… yes. I didn't want to think so at first, but there's sure something funny going on. It's not just that everybody's playing it so cagey and close to the vest-well, everyone except Emile, who may just have his own axe to grind. There's also the theft of the bones from the morgue in St.-Cyprien, what about that? We assumed it was to keep me from identifying the skeleton as Bousquet's-which might conceivably have implicated Ely-but now we know it wasn't Bousquet's skeleton, it was Ely's, so what was that all about?"

"Oh, that," said Julie. "I already explained that."

"You did? When? Where was I?"

"It was right after we got back from the hospital, and you were right there. You brushed it off at the time. I can even give you your exact words: you said no way, impossible, uh-uh, couldn't be, you knew these people, they thought like scientists, and so forth. You went on for quite a while. If I'm not mistaken there was even a 'whereas' and a 'therefore' in there somewhere. It was quite impressive."

"Oh, gosh, did I really do that? I'm sorry, it must have been the concussion. Um, what was it you said again?"

"It wasn't the concussion, it was just you being professorial and smarter-than-thou," she said pleasantly. "You can't help it; I'm used to it. Anyway, what I said was that the bones might not have been Bousquet's at all-and that was exactly what someone didn't want anybody to know."

"I have admit, that has a familiar ring," Gideon said. "It's also starting to make sense, given what we know now." They paused briefly to take in the next scene, a messy but probably fairly accurate rendition of "Dismembering the Reindeer with Stone Implements."

"And," he continued as they moved on, "the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. Somebody-one of those five people at the institute-didn't want it known that the body in the cave was Ely's, that he hadn't gone down in the plane, or even left Les Eyzies-that he'd been murdered right there and the plane crash never happened." He took her hand as they walked. "You had it right, Julie; you were way out ahead of Joly and me. We should have paid attention."

"Apology accepted," Julie said, "if that's what that was."

"It was," Gideon said, "abjectly offered."

"You think Carpenter found out who was behind the hoax and threatened to expose him, and that's why he was killed?" She frowned, wrinkling her nose and looking askance at him in a way that never failed to make him laugh. "What, is that too melodramatic?"

"It's melodramatic, all right, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be true. You notice I've learned my lesson. I'm not brushing off your ideas any more-no matter how far-fetched they are."

Julie didn't bother to respond, and they continued companionably along the path, stopping to admire "Pursuing the Woolly Rhinoceros," "Harpoon Fishing During the Magdalenian Era," and "Prehistoric Artists at Work."

"I do have a question, though," Julie said as they walked on. "I understand Lucien's theory of how Carpenter could have gotten away with a fake crash, but this wasn't Carpenter. So who was in the plane? Did it go down, or didn't it go down?"

"Joly thinks the whole thing was a set-up, that the crash was faked just the way he thought before, except, of course, that it wasn't Ely at the controls. With Ely supposedly dead in a plane wreck, nobody was going to get suspicious and start looking into his disappearance in Les Eyzies; the killer was off the hook. As to who was piloting it, that's anybody's guess. Not Ely, that's all we can say for sure."

"And the 'Tell them I'm sorry'-what would have been the point of that?"

"Probably just a little added fillip to give it credibility."

"Pretty ambiguous, though," Julie said. "It could mean so many things."

"Yeah, I imagine the idea was to not overdo it by making everything too cut-and-dried. This way it seems more natural, more real. I'm guessing, you understand."

"Yes, but it makes sense-except don't pilots have to file a log or a flight plan or something? Could someone really get away with pretending to be someone else."

"Apparently yes. According to Joly, you can file your flight plan over the phone, just by calling ahead. If you have all the details on the plane right-tail number, air speed, probable route, fuel, that kind of stuff-no one's going to question who you say you are."

"It must have taken a lot of planning," Julie said.

"True, but Joly thinks that came later; that the murder itself wasn't premeditated-and I think he's probably right."

"Not premeditated? How do you come up with that?"

"Well, apparently he was shot with his own rifle."

"So?"

"People who have murder on their minds generally bring their own weapons; they don't rely on whatever happens to be at hand-and especially not on exotic Korean air rifles."

"I see. Yes, that makes sense."

They had stopped at "A Magdalenian Hunting Scene," with a spear-holding, loincloth-clad man and a tawny, crouching, cougarlike animal staring at each other across the face of a low ridge.

"Who's hunting who?" Julie said. "Whom."

"Hey, you know who that is?" Gideon gestured at the feline. "That's Felis spelaea herself-the cave lynx; that's the animal those four perforated bones at Tayac came from."

"Oh, that's interesting," Julie said. But she didn't quite manage to stifle a yawn; after almost two hours she'd had her fill of Paleolithic daily life.

So had Gideon, if he was going to be honest about it. "Want to go?"

She nodded. "Seeing all this activity's worn me out: killing mammoths, hunting bears, painting caves, picking berries, fighting tigers… do you suppose these people ever had time to just sit around?"

"And do what? Read books? Watch TV?"

"Sure, what's the matter, you never saw The Flintstones?"

"Well, that's a point," Gideon said laughing and throwing an arm around her shoulders. "Come on, it's getting a little chilly. Let's head back; I'm ready for a drink and some dinner."

The short drive back to Les Eyzies took them first through the tiny village of Tursac, clumped at the base of its massive, forbidding Romanesque church, and then along the valley of the Vezere, through a landscape of willows, poplars, and occasional stone houses, rimmed by low, white, mineral-streaked cliffs, and always threaded by the green, slow-flowing river. It was the same route they had taken to get to Prehistoparc only a couple of hours earlier, but then Gideon had been so absorbed in telling her about Carpenter, and Julie so engrossed in listening, they they'd hardly noticed the scenery. Now, with Julie driving (she was both the better driver and the jumpier passenger; they had discovered long ago that they both tended to be happier when she was the one behind the wheel), they took advantage of having largely talked themselves out to take in the sunny, fresh, agreeable countryside.