Aaron Elkins: Old Bones

"That’s great!" he cried, taking in their violet sweatshirts and green shoes. "All you need are matching beanies. What are you going to do for your first number?"

It was hardly the snarl of a confounded murderer. Gideon’s doubts began to mount again.

As they regarded him silently, Ben’s grin rigidified. "All right, I give up. What are we playing?"

"Ben, you still got that tide table?" John asked, smiling.

"Sure, of course I do." He folded the newspaper neatly, stood up, and began patting his pockets. "At least I think I do. Ah." He produced it from the left hip pocket of his mohair jacket. John took it and handed it to Gideon.

"What’s going on?" Ben asked uncomfortably. "Why do I have the feeling everybody’s mad at me? Did I read the table wrong or something?" Abruptly, his face fell. "You’re kidding. I couldn’t have."

"Let’s just see," Gideon said. He turned quickly to the page for March, found the line for the current day, and moved his finger to the column headed basses mers -low tides. He stared, blinked, and stared again. Then he looked up at the others, thoroughly confused.

"According to this, low tide was at 5:15," he murmured.

"Well, of course," Ben said. "That’s what Isaid, isn’t it?"

Gideon took out the booklet he had bought at Mono-prix and compared it to Ben’s. The covers were the same, all right, and at first glance so were the contents. Sixty-four pages in all, mostly boating data and advertisements, and bound with a single hefty staple through the middle. The tidal information for March was on page 32, which was the left center page in each book, and the dates and days of the week in the two booklets matched. March 1 was shown as a Sunday, and so on. But the contents of the columns-the times and heights of the tides-were entirely different. As were the data, Gideon quickly ascertained, for the months on pages 31, 33, and 34, which were the other pages printed on the same folded sheet. The other pages seemed to be the same in each booklet.

"Ben, where did you get this thing?"

"From the car. It was in the door pocket. I wanted to see if we’d have a chance to watch a flood tide come in."

"The car? What car?"

"I told you; the one we picked up at Mont St. Michel. Guillaume’s car. The Citroen. How about telling me what’s going on?"

"Nothing, Ben," John said. "Just looking up some things."

"Don’t give me that, John. I may not be the brightest person in the world, but I sure know the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad." He laughed softly. "So my Aunt Gussie was wont to say."

They left him staring bemusedly after them and walked out into the hallway.

Gideon looked at John. "Well, I guess that answers that."

"What answers what? What’s the question?"

"The question is: Why did Guillaume go out into the bay without checking a tide table? And the answer is that he didn’t. He had this little gem right in the car with him; a perfectly nice little schedule, except for the small matter of a few pages in the middle. Which day did he die, do you remember? Last Sunday?"

"Monday. That would have been, uh-"

"The sixteenth." Gideon found the relevant row. "He went out in the morning, and with this to guide him, he wouldn’t have been expecting a high tide until early evening. Whereas, actually…" He closed the bogus tide table and opened the one from Monoprix. "…it crested at five minutes after ten. a.m. A nasty little surprise. The same sort of thing happened to us, you may recall."

John nodded grimly. "Okay, Doc, you win. I’m a believer. He was set up. So what do you think, Ben-"

"Not necessarily Ben. Any one of them could have doctored the thing for‘Guillaume’s’ benefit, and then Ben could have done just what he said he did: innocently picked up the table when he saw it in the car. I hope so."

"Me too." He shook his head. "Look, doesn’t it seem a little odd that a murderer would leave evidence like this just sitting around in the car for a week?"

"Not really. Whoever did it probably never dreamed that anyone would get suspicious about Guillaume’s death. I practically had to get us all drowned to convince you. "

"That’s what I like about you. You never rub it in." He took the open booklets from Gideon and looked hard at them. "What did you mean,‘doctored’? You’re talking about a major production here. Look at the paper and the printing on the phony pages. They’re exactly the same as the real ones. That took work. It would have had to be set up way ahead of time, and whoever did it would have had to have a real tide schedule on hand, which means-"

Gideon was shaking his head. "No, I think it was simpler than that. If I could get into Guillaume’s files, I think I could show you."

"Guillaume’s files? They must be right here in his study, where Joly’s been doing most of his interviewing." He walked a few steps to a closed door and turned the handle. The door opened. "What’s stopping us?"

Gideon hesitated. "Don’t you feel a little awkward about snooping around other people’s homes without being invited?"

"Are you kidding me?"

"Well, I do."

"Doc," John said with a sigh, "you got to get over these over-fastidious sensitivities. That is, if you ever hope to operate anything like an honest-to-God detective."

"That’s the last thing I hope to do," Gideon muttered, but in he went behind John. They left the door ajar as a salve to his conscience (it wasn’t really snooping if they did it openly) and flicked on the light.

The study was very different from the other rooms Gideon had seen, its contents reflecting the wintry personality of its dead user: functional, gray metal desk with nothing on it but a marble pen set with the two pens neatly inserted in their holders; two three-drawer file cabinets of matching blue steel (a grudging concession to cosmetic considerations?); a tripartite glass-fronted display case filled with tiny seashells meticulously arranged in long, dull, rows. Everything labeled, efficient, and ruthlessly neat, a private sanctuary of austerity in the lush manoir.

Gideon went to the right-hand file cabinet, to the drawer labeled "M-P." There, in a hanging folder under "Marees," he quickly found what he expected to find: Guillaume’s tide schedules, a set of blue booklets all looking just like the ones he had already seen, except for the years. There were eleven in all, arranged in order (naturally) from 1976 to 1986. The table for 1987 was not in its place. Presumably, that was the one he’d gotten from Ben, which he now put on the desk alongside the one he’d bought at the store.

He sat down and began going through the stack, starting with 1976, opening each one to the page for January, glancing briefly at it, and moving on to the next booklet.

"So what are we looking for?" John asked, leaning over his shoulder.

"We’re looking for a year where the dates-" But he had already found it. "Here," he said, "Nineteen-eighty-one. Look." He pointed to the entry under Jours for January 1. "‘J’," he said, "for jeudi. Thursday."

"Yeah," John said. "So?"

"So in 1981 January started on a Thursday, just the way it did this year, which means-" He flipped a few pages. "-that the days for March also must correspond."

"Unless 1981 was a leap year."

"It wasn’t."

"I bet anything there’s some point to this," John said.

"You better believe it. Look at the afternoon high tide for March 23, 1981." He put his finger on the place.

"Sixteen-forty-three," John said, still not comprehending. "Huh. The same time as it was today. That’s funny."

"It’s more than funny. If we match the rest of the times with the ones on the schedule from Monoprix, I think they’ll match too. But only on pages 31 to 34." He opened the Monoprix booklet to compare, and sighed with satisfaction. "See?"