Aaron Elkins: Old Bones

Even the three-line advertisement at the bottom of page 32 matched. "Le Galle Freres, Opticiens," it proclaimed. "L’ ami de vos yeux." But the advertisement on page 32 of the one Ben had found in the car was for aluminum boats.

"Doc," John said, frowning over the booklets, "I still don’t-"

"John, look at the individual pages. Do you see any indication of the year? There isn’t any. Just "Mars," or "Avril," or whatever. They’re printed up in exactly the same format every year, and the only place you can find the date is on the cover. Just like the schedules we use to go clamming at Sequim Bay. It’d be the easiest thing in the world-"

"-to open up the staple and switch pages from one year to another!" John smacked the table. "Damn! As long as you used a year where the dates fell on the same days of the week you could get away with it!"

"At last, the light."

"Not bad," John said appreciatively. "Somebody hears the old guy say he’s going tidepooling the next morning, sneaks in here during the night, switches a few pages from 1981 to 1987-"

"And vice-versa, so there aren’t any missing pages in the 1981 schedule, just in case Guillaume happens to look."

John nodded slowly. "And goodbye, Guillaume."

"Right. Only of course it wasn’t really Guillaume."

"Oh, yeah." John tapped his temple with a forefinger. "It’s hard to keep these little details straight. Sometimes I start wondering who I am. Hey, we better cut Joly in on this right now, don’t you think? Most of these people aren’t going to be around after tomorrow."

Gideon used the telephone in the study to contact the inspector, reaching him at home. Joly listened without interruption to his account of the altered tide tables. He was impressed enough to dispense with his usual mordant observations on Gideon’s continuing contributions to the case, but not so much that he admitted to having been wrong about "Guillaume’s" murder.

"I thought I asked you to exercise reasonable prudence," was his comment. "I should have thought that would include keeping your distance from Rochebonne."

"I did, Lucien, but, uh, events intervened."

"I’m not sure I like the sound of that. Are there any other developments you should be telling me about?"

"Nothing important." It seemed a poor time to mention that the four of them had almost staged their own recreation of the drowning in the bay.

"Well," Joly said, "I think it would be best if I came there, and you might as well wait for me now, if you don’t mind. Is John there? Stay close to him. I don’t want anything happening to you."

"Right, right," Gideon grumbled.

"And keep the falsified schedules for me. Better yet, give them to John to keep."

"Lucien, it might surprise you, but I’m perfectly capable-"

"And do try not to handle them. There may very well be fingerprints."

"Oh," Gideon said. "Sure." He looked down at the two schedules spread flat on the desk by the pressure of all five fingers of his left hand. "Glad you mentioned it."

While he was putting the other schedules back into the cabinet, Mathilde loomed in the doorway, dowdily imposing in navy blue sweater, pearls, and dark, boxy, pleated skirt.

"Is there something I can help you with, Dr. Oliver?"

"Oh… uh, no," Gideon said, caught with his hands in the till, so to speak. He closed the file drawer sheepishly. "I was just, uh…"

"Yes," she said frostily. "I understand you were kind enough to drive Raymond back. You’ll stay for dinner, I hope? You too, Mr. Lau?"

"Well-"

"Great," John said from his innocent perch on the corner of the desk. "We’d love it."

She looked frigidly at the friendly purple snails smiling from their breasts, at the giant green slipper-shoes on their feet. "You wouldn’t happen to have any…ah, less fantasque clothing with you, I suppose? Well, no matter. Please join us upstairs for aperitifs when you’ve finished here-" She smiled thinly. "-with whatever you’re doing."

"Whew," John said when she’d left. "I bet it feels like hell to get caught snooping around somebody’s house without permission."

"It does," Gideon said. "Sometimes I wonder how I let myself-" An echo from their earlier conversation drifted unexpectedly through his mind. "John, what you said before about wondering who you were sometimes-" He clapped his hands together. "It’s a long shot, but, my God, why didn’t I think of it before?"

"I can’t imagine," John said blandly.

"Shut the door, will you? We need to make another call."

"Dr. Loti, do you remember telling me that when Guillaume du Rocher was found in the rubble in St. Malo he was hallucinating?"

"Yes, certainly." The doctor had been roused from his evening meal; he was still chewing.

"And that he didn’t know who he was?"

"Yes, that’s right."

"Well, can you remember whether he had simple amnesia, so that he had no idea who he was? Or did he imagine he was somebody else?"

"Oh," Dr. Loti said, "I remember very well."

"And?"

"He imagined he was someone else. He claimed it for two days." Continuing to display an unexpected flair for suspense, Dr. Loti continued his leisurely mastication.

"And that was…?"

"He believed he was his cousin Alain."

Bingo. A whole set of puzzle pieces clattered into place.

"Perhaps you’ve heard of him?" Dr. Loti prompted, possibly disappointed in the lack of an overt response.

"I sure have," Gideon breathed. To John he made a raised-fist gesture of success that elicited a mystified frown.

"It was quite a strong delusion," Dr. Loti continued and chuckled at the memory. "He very nearly had me convinced, even though I knew full well that poor Alain du Rocher had been executed by the Germans some years before. And then one morning, suddenly, his memory returned. He was himself, Guillaume du Rocher, just like that."

Just like that. Alain du Rocher, Resistance hero of beloved memory, mourned as dead at the hands of the SS these forty-five years. Only now-just like that-it seemed he had been alive the whole time, until a week ago, living high off the hog as Guillaume du Rocher, lord of the manor… while Guillaume himself lay moldering to dust and bones in the gloomy cellar. Gideon nodded with something like gratification. Not so much because he’d anticipated this (he had, but it hadn’t been much more than a shot in the dark), but because it seemed to satisfy a certain daffy symmetry in the increasingly bizarre twists and contortions in the House of du Rocher.

"Yes, yes, I remember it very well," Dr. Loti said in a settling-down-in-his-chair tone, clearly more inclined to reminisce than to return to his dinner. "An extremely interesting case…"

Gideon headed him off. "It certainly is. You’ve been very helpful, Doctor. Thanks very much."

"ALAIN!" John exploded. "How the hell could it be Alain?"

Gideon, foreseeing this reaction, had taken him outside before telling him what he’d learned. "You’re nuts, you know that?" John raved to the black sky while they strode over the courtyard. "You’re always doing this! You-Ouch!"

He had stubbed his toe on one of the beams for the kitchen garden’s new retaining wall. "Damn it, why don’t they have any lights out here?" he grumbled, and bent to rub his toe through the thin canvas shoe. "Look, how could Alain be alive all these years? The Nazis killed him in 1942; there were witnesses. The SS-"

"-marched him into the mairie early one morning, and he was never seen again. That’s not necessarily the same thing as being killed."

"Okay, so what happened to him, then?" John demanded, straightening up. "How did he get away? Where was he between 1942 and 1944?"

"Who knows? He could have been anywhere."

John snorted and made one of his spasmodic gestures of impatience. "All right, tell me, what’s the theory supposed to be? That while he was in the hospital he suddenly comes up with this plan to kill the real Guillaume and take over his property?"