Old Bones

about the arrangements.'

'And how do you alone come to know this, monsieur?'

'He told me on the telephone last week. He said no one else was to know, so I didn't tell anyone.'

Under Joly's steady gaze, his plump, smooth cheeks colored sullenly. “If you don't believe me, you can check the telephone records. Well, can't you?'

Joly nodded.

'And ask Beatrice. She put the call through. She told me he wanted to tell me what it was about. Go ahead and ask her, if you want to. Anyway, why should I—'

'All right,” Joly said. “All right.” Now that he thought about it, Bonfante, the attorney, had told him that a Swiss hotel concern had been after Guillaume for years to sell the place. He sipped at the coffee Beatrice had brought him ten minutes before; lukewarm then, cold now. “Why only you and no one else?'

Jules shrugged. “It's the way he wanted it, that's all. He told me lots of things before anyone else knew about them. I was his favorite, you know.'

Joly let this improbability pass. “And why were the Fougerays, who were not his favorites, invited to this particular family council after all this time?'

'That's just what I'd like to know,” Jules said, and laughed as if he'd made a joke. He looked meaningfully at the small plate of butter cookies Beatrice had brought along with Joly's coffee.

'Please,” Joly said, gesturing at the untouched cookies. “Now, these ‘arrangements': What sort of arrangements?'

Jules stuffed two cookies into his mouth one after the other, tamping them in like tobacco into a pipe. He licked the residue luxuriously from his thumb and forefinger (leaving them glistening, Joly noted with displeasure) and sighed like a man who'd just gotten a desperately needed fix. “Something about investing the proceeds, or capitalizing the profits, or some such thing,” he said, chewing. “I'm afraid I didn't listen very carefully. I don't have a mind for finance, you know. Poor Father will never understand it, but I live for the arts.” He dropped his eyes modestly. “I'm a novelist. I'm working on a book now.'

'Ah,” said Joly, not caring to encourage this subject.

'It deals with the struggle of a banker's son to actualize his spiritual potential in a world of crass materialism and greed,” Jules volunteered.

Joly studied him for some sign of joking, but failed to find any. Jules’ eyes, which the young man seemed able to keep from the remaining two cookies only with difficulty, fell on them with a look of open longing.

Joly pushed the plate towards him. “Help yourself, please. I'm not hungry. Now, is there anyone else you can think of who might have wanted to kill Claude?'

Jules crammed the first of the cookies into his mouth and got his damp fingers securely around the second before answering with a smirk. “Is there anyone who didn't?'

* * * *

TWENTY feet below Joly and Jules, in the ancient cellar, Gideon was working tranquilly in the warmth of the portable heater, using the ten-power magnifying lens he'd neglected to bring with him the day before. He had pulled the goose-necked lamp down to three or four inches above the tabletop and twisted the head so that the light shone horizontally across the bones, highlighting texture and irregularities. Hunched over them, the lens against his cheek and his face only a few inches from them, he slid each segment by, millimeter by careful millimeter. Claude Fougeray and Lucien Joly faded peacefully from his mind.

After an hour he finished his meticulous scrutiny of the vertebrae and straightened up with a grunt and a grimace as his own vertebral column creaked back into the unlikely S-shape that was its normal and precarious human condition—the penalty, as he told his students, for going recklessly around on your hind legs when you have a cantilevered spine begging for support at each end.

So far he'd found nothing. No skeletal oddities to make identification easier, no signs of cause of death. Only the tiny, scoop-shaped gouges of rodent incisors that had been chewing away for most of the forty-odd years the bones had been there. He stretched, groaned luxuriously, rubbed the back of his neck, and walked over to the work crew.

'Finding anything?” he asked Sergeant Denis.

Denis shook his head with disgust. “But if there's anything here we'll find it.” His eyes flashed with determination.

Gideon accepted him at his word. Denis was obviously a man who took his work seriously. He had been down there all morning, closely overseeing the three-man work crew—who proceeded nonetheless at their own leisurely pace, ignoring with tolerant good humor the younger man's exhortations towards speed and care. So far, moving outward from the original trench, they had taken up the big paving stones from about a third of the cellar floor and were now digging through the compacted, sour-smelling earth to a depth of about three feet. He watched them for a few minutes, long enough for the crick in his neck to smooth out, and went back to the table to get on with his own work.

His slow, tedious examination of the hand and foot bones produced nothing but more mouse nibbles. The same for the sternum, clavicles, and scapulas. He was almost finished with the ribs, and had about given up hope, when he finally found something. It was on the fifth rib of the left side, midway along its length; a crease across the narrow top of the bone, about an eighth of an inch deep. It wasn't a normal indentation, and it wasn't an anomaly either, like a sternal foramen.

And it sure as hell hadn't been made by a mouse. Not scoop-shaped, this time, and not one of a parallel row of two or three. Just a single notch that didn't belong there, all by itself, with a distinctive V-shaped cross-section and edges of telltale sharpness and clarity.

A knife wound. And from the broad, wedge-like shape of the notch it had been a large knife with a blade that thickened markedly as it neared the haft. Single-edged too; otherwise it would have nicked the underside of the rib above it as well. Most likely a big kitchen utility knife or a chef's knife. Or maybe a wartime bayonet, given the time. And of course the breadth of the V made it clear that it had been no mere prick, but a deep, murderous thrust between the ribs.