Aaron Elkins - Skeleton dance

She lowered the Patrick O'Brian paperback she was reading and looked sympathetically at him. "Not all that great, huh?"

They were in the side garden of the hotel, having come back an hour earlier from an after-lunch stroll along the river and a pause for coffee and pastry on the terrace of the Cafe du Centre. (With Joly interrogating the institute personnel, Gideon's interviews were necessarily on hold and they were in tourist mode again.)

"Aside from the fact that they're a tad on the sensational side," he said, "that they're just plain stupid, and that they don't have anything to do with what I'm trying to do in the book, they're fine. I just wish I hadn't been dumb enough to give him our fax number. I could have been carrying on in happy ignorance."

"Poor baby. I don't think writing for the masses agrees with you."

"The masses are great, I don't have any problem with the masses. It's Lester that scares me."

"Dr. Oliver-I didn't realize you had returned." It was Monsieur Leyssales, the hotel's bearded proprietor, calling from the doorway. "There were two telephone calls for you a while ago. I believe messages were left."

"Joly, maybe?" Julie said to Gideon. "Something may have turned up."

"I'll go see," he said, standing. He gestured at the faxed sheets. "Whatever it is, it has to be better than dealing with this." He turned. "If it's Lester, I can always say I never got the message."

Beneath its rustic exterior the Hotel Cro-Magnon was a thoroughly up-to-date establishment, boasting not only a fax machine but an elaborate voice-mail telephone-messaging system, getting through the intricacies of which took Gideon several minutes. When he finally pressed the right sequence of buttons, he was surprised to hear the more-distracted-than-usual distracted voice of Jacques Beaupierre.

"Gideon, I must talk to you… I thought perhaps, as a friend… may I speak with you confidentially?" Jacques could hardly be heard; Gideon pressed the telephone closer to his ear "Now? It's extremely important, I assure you, or I wouldn't… I haven't been completely truthful in the past, I'm afraid, and now I don't know how to… I'll wait for you here."

Click.

Vintage Beaupierre. Talk about what? Where was "here"? At least he knew when "now" was, but that was no thanks to Jacques; according to the voice-mail system, the call had come in at 11:50 a.m., about two hours before.

The second message was also from Jacques, a marginally more coherent postscript. "No, not here at the institute," he whispered. I don't know what I was thinking of. No, I'll meet you at… the Musee Thibault."

"Ah, you remember the name, after all," Gideon said to the recording.

"Yes, that's better, the Thibault. You know where it is, yes? In La Quinze? I'll go there now, this moment. You'll come, won't you? I'll wait for you. Gideon, there's been a… a misunderstanding… I have a dreadful confession… that is to say, mm, ah…"

La Quinze was less than eight miles from Les Eyzies, but it might have been on a different continent, a gray sprawl of nondescript buildings with mildewed, stuccoed walls clumped alongside the road. Unlike Les Eyzies-or St.-Cyprien, or most of the other villages of the Dordogne, for that matter-La Quinze had no flower boxes, no colorful awnings over the shops, no decorations, no trees, nothing at all to brighten the tired streets. Once upon a time the fortified church at its hub must have been imposing if not handsome, but it was sagging and decrepit now, with its roof partially caved in. Altogether, the place looked more like southern Sicily than southern France.

It was 2:15 by the time he located the museum, situated as it was at the rear of a building housing the village bakery. There he mounted two shaky wooden steps to a plain wooden door with a cardboard sign thumbtacked to it, identifying it as a "musee d'histoire naturelle de la Dordogne" and indicating that the regular hours were 10 a.m. to noon on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month, but that if the door were to be found locked at other times, the key could be obtained from M. Chatelard in the boulangerie out front.

It was a Thursday, but the door was unlocked. Gideon pushed it open to find himself in a room about thirty feet by twenty, crowded with the simple artifacts of Paleolithic men and the bony remnants of third interglacial and Wurm glaciation fauna, housed in appropriately dusty glass display cases and scrupulously arranged in row after row after row, to illustrate patterns and progressions, developments and deviations; each item with its own lovingly handwritten label beneath it, in Latin and in French, most of them penned in faded brown script and curling with age.

It was, as a matter of fact, just the kind of good, old-fashioned, no-nonsense museum he liked: no buttons to push, no moving parts, no dumbed-down interactive frippery to get in the way of all that information, and as he closed the door behind him he drew a deep breath for the pleasure of taking in the clean, dry smells of stone dust, bone dust, and wood polish.

And stopped with his hand still on the door handle, apprehensive without knowing why. He sniffed again. There was the smell of stone dust and wood polish, all right, but of something else as well, something that didn't belong. The fragrance of roasted almonds from the bakery at the front of the building? He breathed it in. Yes, that was there too, but "Jacques?" he said, directing his voice toward the open door of what appeared to be a workshop-storeroom off the exhibit area, dimly lit by a couple of long, narrow windows near the ceiling.

No answer.

He called again, although no one in the adjoining room could have missed hearing him the first time. "Jacques? It's-"

He stopped, almost against his will placing the alien odor for what it was. Gamy, musky, sickish, his years of forensic work had made it unhappily familiar to him: the mingled smells of blood, of sphincters suddenly relaxed, of fluids and tissues that belonged by rights inside, not outside, the human body's fragile envelope of skin. He went to the open door. The grim smell grew worse, but all he could see was an empty room with unmatched storage cabinets along the walls and, drawn together in the center, two work tables strewn with stone implements and taking up almost all the floor space. A column of dust motes, caught in a shaft of sunlight, rotated slowly above the tables.

But the moment he stepped through the doorway he saw something more: there on the floor, at the back, partly hidden by the rear table, a blackish, viscous blotch soaking into the soft, splintery old floor.

With his stomach turning over, wishing himself anywhere but there, Gideon walked toward it, jumping when something crunched under his heel. Jerking his foot back he saw a pair of twisted, broken spectacles with heavy, black, 1950's-style frames.

Beaupierre's.

Steeling himself, knowing now what must lie on the floor, wedged into the space between the far side of the table and the wall-cabinet but hoping against hope that he was wrong, he went toward it, heavy-hearted and unwilling.

Blinking in the sunlight, Joly emerged from the doorway of the Musee Thibault and avidly, gratefully lit up another Gitane, getting it out of the pack, into his mouth, and alight with what seemed one motion

"How's it going in there?" Gideon asked.

Joly flapped his hand: wait, let me get in one good puff first.

Gideon obliged. He'd already been waiting for over an hour as it was. When Joly had first arrived in response to his telephone call, along with Roussillot- the real Dr. Fernand Roussillot, deputy medical examiner of the regional directorate of judicial police-and three plainclothes investigators, they had wasted little time in unceremoniously hustling him out from underfoot. He had walked around the block, had stopped at a mean little bar for an espresso, had drunk it while the bristle-chinned regulars eyed him with mute, open suspicion, and had then returned to the museum, leaning against the well-equipped crime lab van from Perigueux that was parked in the alley beside it.