Aaron Elkins: Old Bones

There was one shower per floor, and while Ray, gorgeously draped in a royal blue chenille bedspread, stalked like an Indian chief through the dim hallways in search of it, Gideon and John, a couple of braves in plain gray blankets from the closet, sat in the room, nursed their bracing coffees, and talked.

"What do you think, John?" It was hardly necessary to say about what.

"I think Claire was right; tide tables don’t lie."

"That’s what I think. So why should Ben Butts want to do us in?"

"I don’t think he did, Doc. I think he wanted to do you in, and the rest of us just lucked out by being along."

"Me?" Gideon put his cup sharply down on the low table. "Why?" Before the words were out of his mouth he nodded at John. "Never mind, dumb question. I wonder why I have such a hard time getting used to the fact that someone’s trying to kill me." He picked up the cup again and took a fortifying swallow, then held it under his nose and savored the thick, sweet, pungent aroma of brandy.

"Ben," he mused. "Why Ben? What would he have against Claude? What would he have against Guillaume? Why kill them?"

"Guillaume?"

"The fake Guillaume, I mean; Mr. X. I don’t know what else to call him."

John poured the last of the coffee into their cups. "You don’t ever quit, do you?" he said, laughing. "You’re going to prove the poor guy was murdered whether he was or not."

"John, are you serious? If we didn’t learn anything else out there, at least we know how it was done now. Ben came damn near drowning all of us-" He downed the last warming slug of coffee. "-vital and nimble-witted though we are. Is it really so hard to believe he did the same thing to‘Guillaume’? Where do you suppose we’d be right now if we were sick, and old, and lame?"

John nodded slowly. Wrapped in the blanket, with his arms folded on his chest and his dark, flat, high-cheekboned face thoughtful, he really did look like a nineteenth-century Plains warrior sitting for his portrait by Catlin, remote and unfathomable.

"Doc, you got a point," he said fathomably.

"I just thought of another point. Ben’s a corporate lawyer for Southwest Electroplating."

John’s look suggested that if anybody was being unfathomable, it wasn’t him.

"Electroplating’s the same thing as silver-plating, isn’t it?" Gideon said. "Didn’t you tell me cyanide is used in silver-plating? Surely Ben wouldn’t have had any trouble making off with a little cyanide from his own firm without anybody knowing it."

"Yeah," John said, unconvinced, "only cyanide’s not that hard for anyone to get. But Iguess it’s something to think about." He shook his head. "Idon’t know, Doc. It’s hard to see Ben as the one behind it all. Does it feel right to you?"

No, Gideon admitted with a sigh, it didn’t. And the more he thought about it, the less right it felt. For one thing, he liked Ben too much to willingly accept him as a killer, but let that pass. There were too many other things that didn’t add up, too many downright absurdities. Surely Ben Butts was smart enough to think up a less whimsical plan than this for murder. How could he possibly know Gideon would show up at Mont St. Michel that particular day, and just in time to be hustled out into the incoming tide? And if he did somehow know, was he really the kind of monster who would sacrifice the others too? Say he was; how could he gamble they’d all be killed? Because if they weren’t, embarrassing questions would arise, such as the questions he and John were now asking. And how could Ben know that they would want to walk in the bay, anyway? What had he been doing, carrying around a tide table on the slim chance that he’d have an opportunity to play his droll little trick on them? It just wasn’t credible.

On the other hand, if not for that purpose, then why did he have a tide table with him? He certainly hadn’t planned to go out into the bay himself. And on the same hand, there was the one overwhelming, inarguable fact that overrode everything else: Ben had peered amicably into that tide table of his and calmly given them misinformation that was not merely a little bit off-the sort of error you’d make if you happened to read the wrong line in a tide table-but hugely and serendipitously off. The sort of error you’d make if you were trying to drown a few of your friends.

"I suppose," John said, "that what we ought to do is call Joly and tell him about this." He paused and lifted his eyebrows pensively. It wasn’t his first choice.

It wasn’t Gideon’s either. "I don’t know about you, John, but I’m tired of bugging Joly with every little thing. Why don’t we just go and have a little talk with Ben ourselves?"

"You’re on." John grinned and hugged the slipping blanket closer around his shoulders. "I can hardly wait to see what that mother says when we walk in the door."

What Ben said was, "Hee, hee, hee."

On the surface this was not unreasonable. They had stopped at a Monoprix department store near Dinan to buy sweatshirts (their coats hadn’t dried) and sneakers to replace their lost or sopping shoes. The French are not particularly large people, especially in Brittany, and clothing in sizes to fit John and Gideon was not easy to come by. As a result, the two men emerged from the store in identical lurid violet sweatshirts, each with a plump and smiling escargot on the chest. On their feet they wore loose, slipper-like canvas shoes of a particuarly repulsive yellowish-green, with elastic side bands instead of laces; the sort of thing Quasi-modo might have worn to good effect.

Gideon had also bought a tide schedule, the cover of which was identical to Ben’s. While Ray and Claire shopped he had taken a few minutes to go through it with John. They were not surprised by what they found. The afternoon low tide for March 23 was not shown at 5:15, as

Ben had said, or anywhere near it. It was more than five hours later, at 11:33 p.m. But high tide was clearly shown as 4:43 p.m.-16:43, in the French system-when Ben had had every reason to think they’d still be in the bay. Gideon whistled softly at the height: 13.05 meters, with the previous low at 0.90 meters. A change of nearly fifty feet in a single tidal cycle! He breathed out a long sigh. They really had been lucky.

Every month was on a different page, one day per line. He scanned the entire page for March, seeking without much hope for some source of honest error on Ben’s part. But there weren’t any 5:15 low tides, a.m. or p.m. He thumbed through the rest of the booklet to see if there was a low tide at 5:15 on the twenty-third of any month, just in case Ben had gotten the right line but the wrong page. There wasn’t. There was no tide at precisely 5:15, morning or afternoon, high or low, on any day of the year.

It was impossible to get around it, then; whether it felt right or not, Ben Butts, in his smiling and easygoing way, had deliberately sent them out into a Mont St. Michel flood tide that even at that moment had already been rolling steadily towards them.

All of which made his whicker of laughter when they walked into the salon thoroughly surprising. He had been alone, apparently the first one down to await the call for pre-dinner cocktails, and he had been seated in one of the wingbacked chairs in front of the fire, his back to the door, seemingly absorbed in the sports section of the International Herald Tribune. On John’s firm suggestion, Ray and Claire had gone up to their rooms to change, having stoutly maintained their belief in his innocence during the drive.

"Hello, Ben," Gideon had said quietly from behind him, watching carefully for a giveaway sign when he turned- the sudden pallor of astonishment, perhaps, or the deep flush of rage. Instead, that high-pitched and convincing whinny of pleasure.