Aaron Elkins - Old Bones

Only one point seemed to rouse Joly’s interest. "A knife," he said. "Do you mean it literally? Not an axe? Or a cleaver?"

"Maybe a cleaver, but he was cut up, not chopped up. If you chop a man’s foot off with an axe you naturally do it at the thinnest part of the lower leg, just above the ankle bulge." A slow, undulating shiver rolled up his spine. What a hell of a thing for a reasonably serious, moderately scholarly professor of hominid evolution to be chatting indifferently about.

"Well," he went on, doing his best to ignore this unprofessional reaction, "that bulge isn’t made by the foot bones, it’s made by the leg bones-the lower ends of the tibia and fibula-so if you chopped through the narrow point, you’d get the last inch or two of those bones in with the foot bones. But all we have here are the foot bones. It’s the same with the other cuts. They were made between and around bones, not through them. You can’t do that swinging an axe."

Joly stroked the skin behind his ear with a finger. "You know, one of the men upstairs is a butcher. He boasted about once having studied medicine. You don’t suppose…?"

"One of the men upstairs? This happened forty, fifty years ago."

"He was in the area forty or fifty years ago. He’s been gone since. Claude Fougeray." He said the name with slow, thoughtful emphasis, and repeated it. "Claude Fougeray. Not an endearing man."

"This is done pretty crudely," Gideon said. "It doesn’t suggest any anatomical knowledge."

"I believe he only studied for a year or two."

"Even a first-year med student would do better than this. So would a butcher."

Joly nodded. "All right. Is there anything else you can tell me?"

"Not at this point, but I’d like to have another look at these and bring a few more tools. Something might turn up."

"Of course," Joly said. He did not look overly hopeful. "By the way, our Mr. Fougeray expressed interest in coming down here to watch you at work. Would you object?"

"Why would he want to?"

"Morbid curiosity, I have no doubt, but he seemed to feel that his medical skills might make him helpful. Or perhaps his butchering skills. He pointed out rather smugly that he was the one who diagnosed the bones as human."

Gideon didn’t think much of the idea, but he couldn’t come up with a valid objection. "Fine, as long as he stays out of the way."

"Good, I’ll tell him. I want to be there when he comes."

He rubbed his hands briskly together. "Now. The bones will remain here, with the room sealed, until Monday, when our forensics people will pick them up. Will that be time enough for you?"

"Sure, I’ll come out tomorrow morning. I don’t have any lectures scheduled, and there isn’t anything particular I planned to do."

A sudden, unexpected image of Julie jumped into his mind, and he almost allowed himself a rueful smile. To be in France with nothing particular to do! It would have been different a few years ago, but a few years ago he hadn’t met Julie. Now, the idea of grand sights and great meals depressed him if he couldn’t enjoy them with her.

He chided himself, a man of forty so lovesick that being away from his bright, laughing, beautiful wife of a little more than a year turned everything gray and dull. He didn’t approve of it; being that dependent on anyone else was rotten psychology. But how terrific it was to have someone to miss so much. After Nora had died, he had thought for four long, black years that it could never happen to him again. But it had. In the person of a robustly pretty supervising park ranger at Olympic National Park.

It had really come home to him on this trip. When he’d agreed to speak at the conference he’d been sorry, of course, that she’d already committed herself to a week-long seminar for National Park Service supervisors at the Grand Canyon training center, but it hadn’t dampened his anticipation of the pleasures of France. And yet here he was, glad for the diversion of some rat-gnawed, soiled old bones in a dank cellar…with Paris a few hours away.

How absurdly adolescent, he thought proudly. And now he did permit himself a little smile, while John and Joly were preceding him up the cellar steps and couldn’t see.

As the three of them walked down the hallway past the entrance to the salon, the stoop-shouldered, teacherish-looking man who’d smiled at Gideon before looked up from his chair and offered another diffident, tentative grin. With a start Gideon realized it wasn’t someone who looked like Ray Schaefer, it was Ray Schaefer. He returned the grin enthusiastically, and Ray came out into the hall to shake hands, watched curiously by the knot of people in the salon.

"Ray, I didn’t recognize you before," Gideon told him unnecessarily. "You’ve taken off the beard."

Ray blinked at him in what seemed to be happy astonishment. "You remember my beard?"

"Sure I do. It was bright red; you looked terrific-like a pirate."

"Well…!" Ray laughed, delighted, and blushed spottily. "A pirate! Well, now…What in the world brings you to Brittany, Gideon?"

"There’s a forensic sciences meeting in St. Malo. Ray, I heard about Guillaume. I think you know how sorry I am."

"Yes, well… these things happen, I suppose. He really enjoyed meeting you, you know. And he wasn’t the kind to take to many people."

Gideon introduced John and Joly, and they all nodded and smiled, or perhaps Joly didn’t quite smile.

"Yes," Ray said, "I’ve already met the inspector." The awkward smiles continued for a few moments.

"How are things at Northern Cal?" Gideon asked.

"Oh, fine, just fine. Yes, I’m doing a new seminar on Restoration comic dramatists next semester. You know, Etherege, Wycherly, the whole rollicking bunch. Who knows, maybe even Vanbrugh and Farquhar."

"Ah," said Gideon.

"Huh," said John.

"Mm," said Joly, gazing down his long, thin nose. "Will you excuse me? I see that Fleury is finished with his report, and I want to go over it with him."

The others watched him go. "He interviewed me for ten minutes," Ray said. "I’m afraid he didn’t like me very much."

"He seems to do that to people," Gideon said. "My working hypothesis is that it has something to do with his upper lip."

"It could well be," Ray said thoughtfully. "Do either of you read Henry James?"

John shook his head. "Not on purpose."

"Well," Ray said, unoffended, "there’s a passage in Portrait of a Lady in which he describes communicating with Caspar Goodwood as being like living under some tall, austere belfry that towers far above one, striking off the hours and‘making a queer vibration in the upper air.’ " He laughed. "Doesn’t it make you think a little of Inspector Joly?"

"A lot, " John said with feeling.

Ray looked happily up at Gideon. "I don’t believe I’ve seen you since you left Northern Cal. Did I hear you and Julie are married now?"

"Yes, we are. Look, I’ll be coming back tomorrow morning. Why don’t we have lunch together and get caught up on things?"

"Oh, I’m sorry, I’m, er, busy for lunch." Ray blushed again. "What about coffee when you get here?"

"Fine. Nine o’clock?"

"Wonderful. Let’s just-"

A wan, pale-haired woman with soft, hesitant eyes in a face too worn for her three decades had come unobtrusively down the stairs and stopped, startled to find strangers.

"Oh! Pardon -" She saw Ray then, and her face came alive. "Raymond." She said it with a slight tremor, pronouncing it the French way, liquid and delicious. Suddenly she didn’t look so wan.

"Why, Claire," Ray said. His rounded shoulders had squared the moment he saw her. He tugged cavalierly but without effect at the ends of his bowtie and shot a quick, proud glance at the two men before he went to her and took her hand.