Aaron Elkins: Murder In The Queen's armes

There was a round of stifled giggles, and the unhappy-looking Mrs. Kimberly lined the children up. "You’d think there’d be something to see after coming all this way," she grumbled querulously and marched them off. Barry ran after them to let them through the gate.

It was another minute before the older man looked up for the first time, lifting a pouchy face with eyes as mournful, moist, and droopy as a basset’s.

"Yes?" he said morosely to Gideon.

"I’m looking for Dr. Marcus. Can you tell me where to find him?"

"And you are…?"

"Gideon Oliver. An old friend."

The man sighed lugubriously and stood up. "I’ll see if he’s available." He climbed gravely from the far side of the pit, a small, soft man with little feet who seemed out of place on a field expedition, and made his way fussily around the backfill piles toward a prefabricated building of corrugated metal.

Barry had returned and was looking at Gideon with frank but somewhat puzzled awe on his open countenance. "Gee," he said, "are you the Gideon Oliver?"

Gideon was asked this from time to time, sometimes by a person familiar with his publications on Pleistocene hominid taxonomy, but a great deal more often by someone who’d read a lurid account of his consulting work with the police or FBI. He had never hit on a satisfactory response.

"Well," he said, smiling modestly, "I’m a Gideon Oliver."

Understandably, this seemed to confuse Barry, so Gideon added, "I teach anthro at Northern Cal."

The serious, friendly face cleared somewhat. "Gee, sir, I’ve sure heard of you."

From a slight vacancy in the smile, it was clear that the young man knew Gideon was someone, but didn’t quite know whom.

The rewards of fame, he thought. "Thanks, Barry, how about introducing me to your friends?"

The other two were absorbed, or pretending to be absorbed, in their scraping, but Barry called to them enthusiastically. "Hey, guys, this is Professor Oliver from Northern Cal." Then, indicating the woman, he said, "This is Sandra Mazur."

From her knees she looked up, and Gideon saw a thin, pale face, long-nosed and elegant in an edgy, horsey way, with sharp, delicate cheekbones over which the skin was tightly stretched.

"Hi, there, Prof," she said brightly. With one hand she took a cigarette from the corner of her mouth. With the other she gave him a sober mock salute, tipping her trowel to her forehead. It seemed to Gideon there was something false in the casual, easy greeting, something that didn’t go with the shadows under her eyes or the tense, almost haggard set of her thin lips. The trowel at her forehead tossed back a few pale, wispy strands that had straggled from under a woolen headband.

"Good morning," he said. "Looks like you have something there." He indicated a small black object before her, lumpy and shapeless, and still only partly coaxed from the earth.

"Yes, I think it’s a leather belt buckle. What do you think?"

"Could be, or maybe a wristguard-you know, for an archer."

"Yes!" she cried. Again Gideon had the feeling she was overdoing it. "These holes could be where the thongs went, couldn’t they?" She bent over it again, crouching to blow away the crumbs of dirt as she loosened them. Her teeth were sunk in her lower lip-to show her concentration?- and when the wisp of fine hair fell over her eyes again, she ignored it.

"And this," Barry said, "is Leon Hillyer."

The third person in the trench was already rising and wiping his hands on his jeans. There was something slightly familiar about the good-looking, self-assured face with its well-trimmed golden beard, the compact body, and the concise, almost prissy movements, but Gideon couldn’t remember where he’d seen him before.

"The skeleton detective," Leon said-a little dryly, Gideon thought, but the intelligent face wore a cordial enough smile and the cleaned hand was extended.

"Right," said Barry, and then, with pleasure as it clicked, " Right, the skeleton detective! Damn!"

Gideon shook Leon’s hand. "We’ve met, haven’t we?"

"Not exactly," Leon said. "I delivered a Grabow Award paper at last year’s Triple-A meeting in Detroit. You probably saw me."

Gideon remembered. The Grabow Awards were three one-thousand-dollar prizes given by the American Anthropological Association for the best student papers of the year, and Leon’s had dealt with the inferring of broad cultural values from ceramic analysis. Gideon had found it rather long on broad cultural values and short on ceramic analysis, but it had been competently done. He remembered being put off by a certain insolence in Leon’s manner, a smug expectation of esteem due him from an audience composed of distinguished men and women, many of whom were two or three times his age.

"I did," Gideon said. "I thought it was a fine paper."

"Thanks. I sat in on your panel on Neanderthal population genetics the next day. I thought you made some damn good points."

This was delivered man to man, one colleague to another, and Gideon was freshly and unreasonably nettled by Leon’s offhand self-satisfaction.

While they had been talking, Barry had begun to pick up crumpled gum and candy wrappers that had been left behind by the school group. "You know the way Dr. Marcus is about housekeeping," he said to Gideon.

"No, I don’t. Is he a stickler?"

It was Leon who replied. "White-glove inspection every day. One tool out of place, one shovelful of dirt where it’s not supposed to be, and we have to stay after class for a twenty-minute lecture."

The three students snickered among themselves and settled back to work.

When the older man still had not emerged from the shed after another minute or two-what was taking so long?- Gideon said, "Looks like you have an interesting dig going. Mind if I come down and have a look?"

"Sure!" Barry said. "You can tell us about the ribs."

"Ribs?" Gideon ducked under the rope and dropped easily into the pit.

Sandra pushed at her sandy hair with the back of her wrist. "We uncovered a couple of broken ribs over there in the northeast quadrant," she said, squinting through cigarette smoke, "and we’ve been arguing about them for days. Everybody but Leon says they’re human. And he won’t give up, because he can’t believe he could be wrong." She turned a bright, toothy smile on Leon.

Leon did not return it. He jerked his head petulantly. "It’s just that I happen to be right."

"Well, let’s have a look," Gideon said.

In the wall of the trench, two sections of rib had been carefully excavated, the dirt around them shaved away so that they lay like an offering to the gods on an eight-inch pedestal of earth. Gideon knelt to look briefly at them, then straightened up.

"What makes you so sure they couldn’t be human, Leon?"

His lips pursed, Leon studied the bones with professional nonchalance. Absently, he took a roll of mints from the pocket of his windbreaker and pushed one into his mouth with his thumb. "It’s the shape. It’s hard to put into words, but they just don’t look human."

"But they’re the right size," Barry put in. "Too small for a cow, too big for a dog."

"No, Leon’s right," Gideon said. "They’re not human; not enough curvature. If you made a cross section of a human body and looked down on the ribs from above, the rib cage would be kind of heart-shaped, sort of like a big, fat apple, with the stem at the back, where the spine is. But a quadruped’s rib cage-a deer, say, which I think this is- would be shaped more like a… oh, like an elongated egg-like a bucket, really."

"Gee," Barry said, "they sure look human to me."

"No, human ribs are more curved, like arcs of a circle. You can see these are much more flattened."

"Yes, it’s caused by evolution," Leon said easily. "In a four-footed animal, gravity would make the weight of the internal organs bear on the front of the rib cage, so it would naturally be shaped like a bucket to hold them in. But a human stands on his hind feet, so to speak, so his organs aren’t supported by his ribs, and they spread out into a nice, roomy circle instead."