Aaron Elkins - Old Bones

But the main questions still remained. How had Alain’s skeleton (a third of it, anyway) gotten into Guillaume’s cellar in the first place? Where was the rest of it? And now most disturbing of all: What possible connection might Guillaume have had with it? For it was next to impossible that Alain had been dismembered and buried in his cellar without his knowing about it. He sighed. The more he found out, the more confusing it got.

Jean-Honore decided that perhaps another Pernod might be very nice after all. Gideon bought it, thanked the old man, and shook hands all around, finding himself bobbing up and down as each one popped out of his chair in turn. As he left he heard the barman’s querulous voice: "Well, what does he care what happened to the bastard’s uniform?"

Gideon glanced over his shoulder as he pulled the door closed behind him. There was Jean-Honore hunching forward over his Pernod, eyes glittering, explaining the situation to his attentive cronies.

" Say…" he whispered knowingly, his forefinger alongside his nose, " Eee…"

John was right. Joly was beginning to appreciate them, or at least he was getting used to their popping up with astute insights to muddle his investigation into Claude’s death. When Gideon got to Rochebonne after a ten-minute walk along the tree-lined road from Ploujean, he found the inspector on a cigarette break from whatever he’d been doing, strolling amicably with John in the courtyard and enjoying the rare spring sunshine. Gideon fell in step with them.

"Alain du Rocher, eh?" was Joly’s greeting. Not exactly a full-hearted endorsement of Gideon’s deduction, but not a contemptuous rebuff either. Just the mildly amused, not unfriendly skepticism with which he tended to receive ideas other than his own. Gideon was getting used to Joly, too.

"You were right, Doc. Lucien doesn’t buy it." So the two of them had graduated to first names too, which was good. John’s pronunciation- Loosh’n -brought no more than a momentary strain to the papery skin under Joly’s eyes. Something like Mathilde’s look when he’d referred to "Roach Bone" in her presence.

"It’s very hard to see how it can be Alain," the inspector said. "I called our local prefect of police as soon as Mr. Lau-ahum, John-told me what you thought. As a matter of fact, it turns out that Alain du Rocher’s height, weight, and age do conform to what you learned from those bones."

"Well, then-"

"But so do many other people’s. Bretons are in general shorter and more slender than other Frenchmen, as I’m sure you’re aware. And unfortunately for your theory, there’s simply no doubt whatever about Alain’s execution by the Nazis."

"Yes, I know. That’s the one thing that doesn’t add up; how he got into the cellar."

"Gideon, he was picked up by the SS at 5 a.m., October 16, 1942, and taken to the mairie. Between 10 a.m. and noon the other five Maquis were brought in. There were many witnesses, including the prefect himself as a child. None of them ever came out again. No," Joly said comfortably, walking erectly along, hands behind his back, face turned up slightly towards the pale sun, "everything suggests that the bones in the cellar are Kassel’s. Surely you see that."

"No, Kassel was run over by a car and left out in the road near the Hunadaie forest."

It was a sign of just how accustomed Joly was becoming to them that he received this without even a hitch in his step and listened with tolerant resignation while Gideon told him the rest of what he’d learned in Ploujean. It was, in fact, Gideon who stopped in mid-stride.

"Hey, I just remembered," he said. "One of the names on the plaque seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it-

Lupis; Auguste Lupis. Aren’t Marcel and Beatrice named Lupis?"

"They most certainly are," Joly said with interest.

"You think maybe Marcel’s father, or uncle, or somebody might have been executed with the others?" John asked. "That would give him a hell of a reason for wanting to kill Claude."

"Indeed it would," Joly said, and raised one eyebrow minutely. "Just what I needed: another motive. Gentlemen, I can’t thank you enough."

Wither Man?

Gideon scowled at the title on the cover sheet. One of three master’s qualifying essays he’d brought with him to grade at his leisure, he’d put it off until last, but now, after two and a half hours spent working on the others in his room, the time had unavoidably come. He looked gloomily at the writer’s name. Tara Melnick. Was it part of some immutable law that in every class, no matter how enjoyable otherwise, there must be one student whose presence made your teeth ache?

Probably so. Just as the president would always have his Sam Donaldson, so would Gideon always have his Tara Melnick. He deliberated longer than he should have about whether to insert the omitted "h," and finally did, but with a heavy heart. He had corrected her spelling before, and had been told for his pains that his slavish concern with outdated rules of orthography and grammar was redundant in the age of WordStar and Perfect Writer. Moreover, she had informed him, it was now commonly agreed among progressive linguistodiametricians-what those were he had been afraid to ask-that individual language variants were valid in their own right as legitimate microcultural expressions.

He shifted in his chair, bored and at loose ends. Graduate students seemed younger these days. And sillier. It was true that at forty he was now twice as old as some of them, but had he ever been as tedious as Tara Melnick?

Tara Melnick. What had happened to the Ruths, anyway; the Dorothys, the Roberts, the Bills? Where had the Taras and Megans and Ians come from? Buried in his work, had he missed some clandestine migration of Celts from across the sea? Did parents get their children’s names from Harlequin romances?

He stared with distaste at the orange-and-brown wallpaper in front of him. At first he’d liked the bright, sprightly pattern, but then John, who had the same wallpaper in his room, had innocently remarked that it made him think of giant orange daisies wearing sunglasses. Ever since, all those hundreds of daisies had been leering through their shades at him, even in the dark when he was sleeping.

Well, he might as well face it. He turned resignedly to the first page of the paper. "Just who does Homo sapiens think (s)he is," it demanded belligerently, "this self-named‘smart primate’? What is this so-called civilization of ours, built on the rape of the air and the water, torn from the innocent, nurturing earth? And what lies ahead for it… if anything!!?? "

He was saved from learning the answer to this alarming question, temporarily anyway, by the telephone’s ring. Let it really be for me, he murmured; not a mistake but an honest-to-God, attention-demanding interruption.

He got his wish. It was Joly, very businesslike. "Gideon, there are several things I want to talk to you about. First, we’ve turned up some more bones in the cellar. I thought you might be interested."

"You bet I am, Inspector!" Gideon said with fervor that must have surprised Joly. With a happy sigh he shoved Wither Man? into a drawer and settled back to listen.

"I’m fairly sure they’re the remaining parts of our burial, whoever it is-"

"Alain."

"Whoever," Joly said again, which seemed reasonable enough to Gideon. "There’s a skull, pelvis, and arm and leg bones. They were in two packages-same paper, same string as the first. Even the same knots."

"Are the bones in good shape?"

"So they seem to me. I’ve had them carefully packed."

"Damn, it would have been better if I’d seen them in situ. "

"I suppose so, but our own people have already gone over them for dust and debris, and so forth. What’s needed is a purely anthropological analysis."