Old Bones

Guillaume had lived as long as he had. “Of what?” he asked.

'He was caught by the tide in Mont St. Michel Bay while collecting seashells. On Monday, I believe; the day the conference started. There was a report filed.'

Gideon nodded, smiling faintly. Well, there was a sort of rightness in that. Certainly Guillaume would have preferred it that way, out there on the ocean floor, rather than having his wrecked kidneys or liver give out while he was in a hospital bed buried in tubes. It was too bad, though; Gideon had been looking forward to re-opening the debate.

They turned through the open gate of iron grillwork set between two tall stone gateposts with carved spheres on top, the only opening in a low wall of lichen-stained granite blocks. To the left, what had been a small kitchen garden was being substantially enlarged. Workmen were setting in the walls of a raised bed, and piles of lumber and black earth littered the ground.

Otherwise, everything was the same. The manoir itself was set at the back of some 200 feet of pea-graveled courtyard, a gray stone building as starkly beautiful as he remembered, with five slender stone chimneys, and a complex jumble of smaller wings branching off behind.

Much of the front was covered by ivy—a solid, rippling mass of green when he'd been here in the summer, but now just beginning to break out into rust-colored new leaves, so that the thick, gnarled, old vines could be seen clinging to the stone blocks. The only signs of ostentation were the early Baroque decorations carved around the window casements, all curlicues and rosettes, looking sheepish and subdued in the otherwise classical facade. An ancient, eroded stone coat of arms, possibly older than the building, had been fitted into the wall above the arched doorway.

With a crunch of tires on gravel, Joly pulled the car to a halt directly in front of the door. John looked up at the coat of arms as he got out.

'A poodle?” he said after a moment.

'A lion, I think,” Gideon said. Not that it didn't look like a poodle.

'A lion,” Joly confirmed, “wearing the collar of the Order of St. Michael. A family emblem, I suppose. They hadn't seen many real lions in those days.'

'I can see that,” John said.

The bell-pull was answered by a large woman in a vast brown housedress, who opened the thick door six inches and peered uncongenially at them.

'Bonjour, Beatrice,” Gideon said.

She craned her head forward to see him better. “Ah,” she said, her eyes brightening, “the gentleman with the good appetite!'

Gideon laughed. “It's nice to see you.'

'OPJ, madame,” Joly said sternly, showing her his identification. “May we come in, please?'

As soon as they walked through the vestibule and into the salon, a small man with glowing pink cheeks and a scant moustache hurried to them. “I'm the one who called the police, Inspector,” he said with pride. “My name is Rene du Rocher.” He held out his hand and Joly shook it, again with a slight, stiff-backed bow.

Du Rocher gestured around the room, in which several people sat in clusters. “These are members of my family. My wife—'

Joly cut him off unceremoniously. “Perhaps first you would be good enough to show us the remains, monsieur.'

'Of course, Inspector. Certainly.” He led them briskly through the room. One of the men, vaguely familiar, smiled at Gideon in a particularly friendly way. Stoop-shouldered and slight, there was something about him that reminded Gideon of Ray Schaefer, so perhaps it was a relative he'd met when he'd visited Rochebonne before. If so, he'd forgotten completely. A little self-consciously, he returned the smile in passing.

The big cellar was damp-smelling and gloomy, lit by four plain bulbs dangling from a wire stapled to the disquietingly sagging ceiling. Against one of the rough stone walls was an ancient, rickety worktable on which was an untidy package of what looked like rotted white butcher paper, much soiled by blood, or earth, or both. The package had been opened and spread out under a table lamp to show a jumble of brownish-yellow bones.

At the near end of the room some of the big rectangular paving stones had been raised and tossed haphazardly into a pile, uncovering a bed of earth about twelve feet by three. Into this a two-foot-wide trench had been cut, but it had come to a halt after only a yard. A pick and two spades still lay where they had been dropped onto the mounded dirt. Around the brief trench a chalk line had been drawn.

'A body outline for a skeleton wrapped in a package?” John said. “You guys are thorough.'

Joly looked at him for a moment, his bare upper lip growing longer than ever, but decided not to reply.

'Good afternoon, Fleury,” he said to a small, heavy-lidded man in a buttoned-up suit and a red scarf wrapped several times around his throat. “Nothing's been disturbed?'

'Not if you don't count the crew from the lab,” said Fleury, who gave the appearance of treating his chief with sleepy, skeptical amusement, until it became apparent that the sardonic V's of his eyebrows were permanently set that way. “They were here for an hour.'

'And?'

'The usual. They crawled around on their stomachs picking up invisible things with tweezers and putting them in their little plastic bags, but I don't think they found anything. Aubin said he thought it was something from the war, maybe even before.'

Joly nodded. He went to the empty trench and squatted on his haunches, first carefully hiking up his trousers. He wore stocking suspenders, a fact that struck Gideon as being in keeping with what he surmised of the inspector's approach to life. After a few moments of peering at the empty hole—if there was anything to see, it escaped Gideon—he got up and dusted off spotless, gray-clad knees that hadn't come within ten inches of the soil.