Douglas Preston: Crimson Shore

“Interesting.”

“The distal end of the bone was severely abraded at the time of death. It seems the man literally scratched or clawed his finger to the bone. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’m at a loss to explain.”

The pale man sat in silence for a moment. Then he spoke. “The gentleman in question was walled up alive.”

Ganesh leaned forward. “Really?”

A nod.

“So this is a murder investigation?”

“Of an antique sort.”

“I see.” She cleared her throat. “The bone was well preserved and had plenty of collagen. I did a radiocarbon date on the sample. It’s fairly recent, relatively speaking. Because of that the age was a little hard to measure, but it appears to date back one hundred forty years, plus or minus twenty.”

“And there’s no way to narrow the margin of error, I understand.”

“That’s correct. Radiocarbon dating works best on artifacts between five hundred and fifty thousand years old. The error bars get longer at both ends.”

“Did you use beta counting or mass spectrometry?”

Ganesh was amused by this. Here was a man trying to show off his knowledge, but he knew just enough to ask a dumb question. “With such a recent date, only accelerator mass spectrometry would give a usable result.”

“I see.”

And now she wondered if, rather than being dumb, maybe he had been testing her. What a strange and compelling man this was. “With the abundance of collagen and the lack of contamination, I did manage to get some really good DNA results. The individual is definitely male, with seventy-five percent African ancestry, the other twenty-five percent western European.”

“Curious.”

“This is a typical mix for African Americans, almost all of whom have a proportion of European ancestry. He would have had a dark but probably not black skin color.”

“And his age?”

“A histological examination indicated an age of around forty. It also showed he was in excellent health, aside from several short but severe bouts of an illness when he was young. Thin sections I studied indicate the illness might well have been scurvy — a severe vitamin C deficiency.”

“The fellow was a sailor, then?”

“The evidence points that way. The same isotope analysis showed a diet high in fish, shellfish, wheat, and barley.”

“How can you tell that?”

“The food you eat and the water you drink get broken down and the carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen become incorporated into your bones. Those three elements have various stable isotope ratios, which differ from food to food — and from water sources. Based on the ratios of those isotopes, we can tell what a person was eating and drinking during, say, the last twenty years of his or her life.”

“Drinking?”

“Yes. As you go higher in latitude, the ratio of oxygen isotopes in freshwater changes.”

“Interesting. And at what latitude did this fellow’s drinking water come from?”

“From around 40 to 55 degrees. In North America, that corresponds to an area roughly from New Jersey to Newfoundland and points west. The test is not very accurate.”

“And his diet?”

“The wheat came from eating bread, and the barley most likely came from beer. Add the fish and shellfish and you get a classic nineteenth-century coastal diet. I tested the bone for antibodies. They came back positive for malaria.”

“Malaria again implies a sailor, no?”

“Absolutely. And he was also positive for TB.”

“You mean he had tuberculosis?”

“No. He was far too healthy. Virtually everyone living in seaport cities in the nineteenth century would have tested positive for TB, however. Everyone was exposed.”

“I see. Anything else?”

“Putting it all together, I’d say what you have here is a large, strong, healthy, forty-year-old African American male, a sailor by trade who worked with his hands, perhaps a helmsman or foretopman, who probably came from a fairly comfortable socioeconomic class, given there were no signs of malnutrition other than the scurvy. He was born around 1840 and died around 1880. When not at sea he lived in a seaport town or city. He sailed at least part of the time in the tropics.”

The FBI agent nodded slowly. “Remarkable, Dr. Ganesh. Truly remarkable.”

“The bones speak to me, Mr. Pendergast. They tell me their stories.”

The pale man rose. “Thank you. You have been most helpful. And now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to retrieve the sample.”

Ganesh smiled. “I wish I could oblige. But you see, every question I ask consumes a tiny bit of bone. As the bone tells its story, it dies just a little. I’m afraid the bone gave up its existence along with its story.” She spread her hands.

As she did so, the man took one of her hands in his, which felt cool and smooth. “I bow before your ability to speak to the dead, Dr. Ganesh.” And he kissed her hand.

Ganesh found herself flushed and warm long after the man had departed.

Constance stepped through the door, then stopped and frowned in instinctual disapproval. The place looked more like a rag-and-bone shop than a historical society. A lot of stuff was randomly hung on the wall — faded maps, old nets, buoys, harpoons, gaff hooks, narwhal horns, sail needles, a gigantic lobster shell on a plaque, another wooden plaque covered with sailing knots, and pictures of Exmouth in the old days. The center of the “museum” sported an old dory, about twenty feet long, with several sets of oars between wooden dowels.

She had jingled a door-opening upon entering and was soon confronted by an eager, gray-haired man with fat-lobed ears stuck onto a narrow, bony face. A badge identified him as a volunteer named Ken Worley.

“Greetings,” said the volunteer, looming into her field of view and proffering a pamphlet. “Welcome to the Exmouth Historical Society and Museum!”

Trying to be polite, Constance took the pamphlet with a murmured “Thank you.” She began an assiduous examination of the dory, hoping he would vanish.

“Nice dory, don’t you think? Disregarded age in corners thrown. That’s the motto of our little museum.”

Parsing this inaccurate spouting of Shakespeare, and without thinking, Constance corrected him: “ Unregarded age.”

A sudden silence. “Are you sure? I’ll have to double-check that.”

“No need to double-check anything,” Constance said. “You’re wrong.”

Temporarily set back, the man retreated to his pile of pamphlets and busied himself with a large register book, opening it and flipping through the pages. Constance, who was studying some old framed maps of Exmouth and its environs, could tell that he was down but not vanquished.

“Would you care to put down your name for special mailings and events?” he asked, pointing at the register book.

“No, thank you. I was wondering — where do you keep your archives?”

The man blinked. “We don’t have any archives.”

“No town papers? Property maps? Old marriage registers?”

“I’m afraid the town records were lost in the Great Hurricane of ’38. They called it the Yankee Clipper. It swept away the old Exmouth docks and wrecked half the town. You can still see the ruins on Exmouth Bay. Picturesque, in its own way.”

“So this is it? This is all you have?”

“It may not look like much, but every item here has a story. For example, that Newburyport dory you were admiring was used to hunt great blue whales. When whales were sighted going around Crow Island, the men would rush down to the beach and launch those dories into the surf, chase a whale, harpoon it, and drag it back to the beach, carve it up right there on the shore. Imagine the courage, the pluck, it took — Disdaining fortune, with his burnished steel, which smoked with bloody execution! ”