Aaron Elkins - Skeleton dance

Gideon cordially accepted for both of them, after which they went downstairs for a satisfying "English" breakfast of bacon and eggs, then set themselves up in the Cro-Magnon's downstairs lounge, a cozy, overstuffed room that looked as if it should have had Charles Dickens-or more appropriately, Gustave Flaubert-seated at the writing desk, lost in reflection and chewing pensively on his quill.

Instead it was Julie who took over the desk to work on a quarterly report on park security problems that she'd brought with her while Gideon worked on his laptop, polishing his chapter on the bizarre case of "George Psalmanzar" the eighteenth-century "Formosan" who had flummoxed the British scientific world of his day by inventing not only himself but an entire, highly detailed Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, complete with imaginary customs, language, clothing, and religion. (They lived to be over 100, they drank snake blood, they sacrificed 18,000 children a year to their gods, they beheaded and ate wives who committed adultery.) It had been swallowed hook, line, and sinker; "Psalmanzar"-nobody ever learned his real name-became a respected friend of Samuel Johnson's and was given an appointment to Oxford as-what else?-a lecturer on Formosan history.

With the lounge all to themselves, rain thrumming on the windows, a pot of hot coffee on a nearby sideboard, and a mantel clock ticking lazily away, they looked forward to passing a quiet and companionable Sunday.

For the Greater Cincinnati Elderhostel's "Footloose in France" tour group, Sunday was day nine of a twelve-day hike through the French countryside, and with 100 dusty miles on towpaths and country lanes behind them, they were a tanned, fit, seasoned crew of twelve. Still, with the morning temperature approaching eighty, with a median age of sixty-nine, and with all of them still damp and steaming from the rain shower they'd passed through an hour earlier, no one objected when Yvette, the French tour leader (looking cute as a button in her leather hiking shorts and mountaineer's boots), signaled that the mid-morning break was at hand.

"This place, how you like to stop here?" she asked in her delightfully mangled English. (Only the resolutely negative Mrs. Winkelman-at 83 it was allowable-contended that Yvette's accent was put on.) "The coffee and the juice, they wait themselves in the van, and also some nice French snacks. If you like, we go and sit beside the river, where there is a most nice view of Les Eyzies, the place of lunch for today. Then I tell you some of the facts of this most charming village."

But practiced open-country hikers that they were, they first split into two groups, the men making for the copse of stunted oaks on the left, the women for the one on the right. Five minutes later, perceptibly more relaxed and expansive, they lined up at the supply van, which had gotten there before them and had their juice, coffee, and pastries ready and waiting.

"Joe." Merle Nichols put her hand on the arm of her new friend Joe Pfeiffer, recently widowed, recently retired from the Dayton police department. "Is that a person down there?"

"Down where?"

"Nah, it's just a bundle of clothes or something," somebody said. "It probably washed up from somewhere."

Someone else thought it might be a drunk, someone else a hiker taking a nap. But no one moved any further down the gentle slope. They all stood there holding their cups and pastries, looking doubtfully at Joe, their expert in such matters.

"I'll go see," he said with a sigh. He had sighted it now, down by the riverbank under the willows, and it wasn't any bundle of clothes; the fourteen years he'd spent in homicide told him that much. And he was betting it wasn't a drunk or a sleeper either.

"Hey, buddy?" he called from fifteen feet away, although he would have been surprised to get an answer. "You okay?… hey, monsieur?"

He stood there for a moment longer, resisting the urge-an urge more deeply ingrained than he'd realized-to have a closer look, to take over, then turned on his heel, and walked back up to his silent, wide-eyed companions.

"Yvette, you better call the cops, the gendarmes. That guy's been dead a while."

"Oh, for the love of Mike," said Mrs. Winkelman to her neighbor. "Does this mean we don't get to have our tea?"

The crime scene investigators grumbled at having to park the crime lab van alongside the highway and carry their equipment down to the riverbank (which meant they'd have to carry it back up afterward), but once there they got quickly and efficiently to work.

A twenty-by-twenty-meter area was cordoned off with tape and the nosy gaggle of American grannies and grandpas was helped on their way after a brief interrogation. A panning videotape of the over-all scene was made, and a diagrammatic sketch. The position of the body was measured and photographed. The cordoned-off area was then divided into five-by-five-meter sections and each of them meticulously searched by investigators working two at a time, one shuffling along with his eyes to the ground and the other taking notes. Two fairly distinct heel prints from a man's shoe-both probably from the same shoe-were photographed and cast in plaster of paris by the third member of the team. Various objects were diligently recorded, photographed, labeled, and bagged: several different kinds of cigarette stubs, including one with lipstick on it, a cigar wrapper, three ring-tabs from beer or soft-drink cans, burnt paper matches, a wadded-up facial tissue, two flattened cardboard drinking cups, odd bits of plastic and aluminum foil, a woman's imitation leather belt, worn-out and cheap, two rubber bands, a used adhesive strip decorated with Minnie Mouse pictures and with a little dried blood on it.

None of it was very promising; the typical detritus of a place that was an attractive spot for a riverbank picnic and also happened to lie within flinging distance of a highway. The one object of real interest-the investigators were practically slavering to get their hands on it-was a rifle, the wooden stock of which could be seen sticking out from under the right thigh of the corpse. But Joly and Roussillot were just getting started on the body, and until the two of them were through there was no hope of getting at it. And that wasn't going to be for a while; they were both sticklers for the rule book, as slow as boiled honey.

"Georges," Joly called to the lead investigator, "you've finished with the victim? We can shift him now?"

"Absolutely, inspector, everything by the book."

"We might as well turn him over then," Roussillot said.

The body, fully clothed, lay on its front between them at the foot of a knee high rock. The face was turned to the left, the arms caught underneath the torso, one leg extended and the other bent-kneed and drawn up to the side. It was plain to both men that it had been there for some time. Maggots wriggled in the nostrils, the eyes, the mouth, the ears. What skin could be seen was a pasty, greasy, coppery color, mottled with greenish veins. The clothes, still moist from the passing showers, looked as if they'd been out in the rain more than once. Joly, smothering a grimace, instinctively held his breath and kneeled to take hold of the shoulders and Roussillot of the legs.

Between them they rolled the flaccid body carefully and deliberately onto its back. They had both rolled over enough cadavers not to be surprised at the strange, heavy inertia of the dead, the seeming chill that seeped through the clothing.

"Ah," said Roussillot, "what do we have here?" He pointed with his chin at the black, ragged, hole, almost certainly a bullet hole, in the center of the man's chest, with a knot of maggots squirming about in it. The surrounding denim of his shirt was stained a rusty brown, with a few spatters and spots as far away as his sleeves. Not much blood, really, considering the size of the hole.