Old Bones

WITHER Man

Gideon scowled at the title on the cover sheet. One of three master's qualifying essays he'd brought with him to grade at his leisure, he'd put it off until last, but now, after two and a half hours spent working on the others in his room, the time had unavoidably come. He looked gloomily at the writer's name. Tara Melnick. Was it part of some immutable law that in every class, no matter how enjoyable otherwise, there must be one student whose presence made your teeth ache?

Probably so. Just as the president would always have his Sam Donaldson, so would Gideon always have his Tara Melnick. He deliberated longer than he should have about whether to insert the omitted “h,” and finally did, but with a heavy heart. He had corrected her spelling before, and had been told for his pains that his slavish concern with outdated rules of orthography and grammar was redundant in the age of WordStar and Perfect Writer. Moreover, she had informed him, it was now commonly agreed among progressive linguistodiametricians—what those were he had been afraid to ask—that individual language variants were valid in their own right as legitimate microcultural expressions.

He shifted in his chair, bored and at loose ends. Graduate students seemed younger these days. And sillier. It was true that at forty he was now twice as old as some of them, but had he ever been as tedious as Tara Melnick?

Tara Melnick. What had happened to the Ruths, anyway; the Dorothys, the Roberts, the Bills? Where had the Taras and Megans and Ians come from? Buried in his work, had he missed some clandestine migration of Celts from across the sea? Did parents get their children's names from Harlequin romances?

He stared with distaste at the orange-and-brown wallpaper in front of him. At first he'd liked the bright, sprightly pattern, but then John, who had the same wallpaper in his room, had innocently remarked that it made him think of giant orange daisies wearing sunglasses. Ever since, all those hundreds of daisies had been leering through their shades at him, even in the dark when he was sleeping.

Well, he might as well face it. He turned resignedly to the first page of the paper. “Just who does Homo sapiens think (s)he is,” it demanded belligerently, “this self-named ‘smart primate'? What is this so-called civilization of ours, built on the rape of the air and the water, torn from the innocent, nurturing earth? And what lies ahead for it... if anything!!??'

He was saved from learning the answer to this alarming question, temporarily anyway, by the telephone's ring. Let it really be for me, he murmured; not a mistake but an honest-to-God, attention-demanding interruption.

He got his wish. It was Joly, very businesslike. “Gideon, there are several things I want to talk to you about. First, we've turned up some more bones in the cellar. I thought you might be interested.'

'You bet I am, Inspector!” Gideon said with fervor that must have surprised Joly. With a happy sigh he shoved Wither Man? into a drawer and settled back to listen.

'I'm fairly sure they're the remaining parts of our burial, whoever it is—'

'Alain.'

'Whoever,” Joly said again, which seemed reasonable enough to Gideon. “There's a skull, pelvis, and arm and leg bones. They were in two packages—same paper, same string as the first. Even the same knots.'

'Are the bones in good shape?'

'So they seem to me. I've had them carefully packed.'

'Damn, it would have been better if I'd seen them in situ.'

'I suppose so, but our own people have already gone over them for dust and debris, and so forth. What's needed is a purely anthropological analysis.'

'Even so, seeing them in their original context and relationships—'

'I'm sorry, my friend, but it's already done. They have to be shipped to Paris in any case, you see. It didn't occur to me that it would make any difference to you.'

'Well, it doesn't matter that much. I'll be glad to look at them for you.” So it wouldn't be textbook forensic anthropology, but it was a lot better than Wither Man? And if it really was a complete skeleton, he was certain he could unequivocally settle the question of its identity, even to Joly's satisfaction.

'As long as they're boxed,” he said, “could you have them dropped off here and save me a trip to—” He was struck with a novel teaching idea. “What about bringing them to the conference center tomorrow morning instead? I'm doing my final session from eight to ten. We could do the analysis right there in class. It'd give the attendees a chance to participate in an actual case.'

There was a long pause while Joly weighed the propriety of this.

'Lucien, they're all cops, you know. They're on our side.'

'Well, yes, all right,” Joly finally agreed reluctantly. “I'll bring them myself.'

'And will you bring the original bones too, if you haven't sent them off yet?'

'Of course.” Gideon heard the scrape of a match and an intake of breath as he lit up. Then some little tck-ing sounds that indicated he was probing with his tongue for a shred of tobacco between his teeth.

'You said there were several things you wanted to talk about?” Gideon said.

'Yes, there are. John will be interested in this too. We've checked for local sources of cyanide, and there are none. The nearest is in Rennes.'

'So that must mean—'

'Second, there is no taxi service in Ploujean, but there is one in Guissand—that is to say, the ambulance from the mental hospital serves as a taxi when needed—and it's had six calls in the last week; none of them involved any of our friends at the manoir.'

'Which has to mean—'