Icy Clutches

'Julie has this thing about Jocelyn,” Gideon explained. “She seems to think it was Jocelyn who killed Tremaine, that she wasn't killed on the glacier.'

'Yesterday it was Pratt,” Minor observed mildly.

'Killed Tremaine!” John said fiercely, then quickly lowered his voice. “Now how the hell—'

'There's no real proof that Jocelyn's dead,” Julie said. “None of her bones have turned up.'

'Is that right, Doc?'

'That's right, none that we know of,” Gideon said abstractedly. He thought he knew where Julie was headed, and this time “offbeat” hardly did it justice.

'Which means,” Julie said, “that she could still be alive.'

'All right, sure, she could be,” John said reluctantly.

'For the sake of argument,” Minor interposed.

'But how could she kill Tremaine? How could she get here without anybody seeing her? We're really talking boonies here, Julie. There aren't exactly any crowds to melt into. And nobody saw anybody who wasn't supposed to be here.'

'I know, but they saw Shirley.' Julie jerked her head impatiently, as John and Minor continued to look at her with tolerant incomprehension. “Maybe I'm not being very clear. Look, how do we know that woman over there is Shirley Yount? How do we know it isn't her sister Jocelyn?'

'No,” John said, “it won't wash. Tremaine, Judd, Henckel—they all knew Jocelyn. They'd recognize her.'

'Would they? It's been thirty years. They were twin sisters.'

'Not identical twins,” John said.

'Even so, everybody would expect them to look alike. And from what you told us, Shirley does look like Jocelyn.'

'I take your point,” Minor said.

'Yeah,” John said thoughtfully. “I take your point.'

'In fact,” Julie said, heartened, “for all we know, maybe Jocelyn never had a twin sister. Maybe the whole thing was made up just for this.'

Minor shook his head. “In point of fact, I'm afraid not. Shirley Yount quite definitely exists. She's been employed by Montgomery Ward for twenty-two years. She has a valid Social Security number, a driver's license—'

'Those can be faked,” Julie said, like an old hand at false IDs. “Maybe after the avalanche she took on another identity, maybe—” She stopped with a laugh. “How do I get myself into these positions? All right, forget it. I hereby retire from the case. Again.'

All the same, as if on signal, the four of them cast lidded, sidewise glances at Shirley, who was at that moment staring emptily across the misted cove and shoving a quarter of a buttermilk donut into her mouth with a large and spatulate thumb.

* * * *

The Jocelyn-as-Shirley theory failed to survive the day. At 3:30 P.M. the Spirit of Adventure returned with Julie and the other trainees, back from their final field session; with Frannie and Russ, who had put in some more bone hunting; and with a small box of bone fragments. Pickings had been slimmer today. At Frannie's request, Gideon had given her a copy of Bass's Human Osteology field manual, and the ranger had been able to eliminate most of the nonhuman material herself. There were only three objects in the box. One was the sacrum of a large bird. One was the partial skeleton of a bear's foot, still held together by dried-out ligaments. And one was a complete human femur.

Jocelyn Yount's right thigh bone.

'It has to be,” Gideon said half an hour afterward. “It's from an adult female, somewhere in her mid-twenties, obviously well muscled. Tall too, it looks like. Let's see...” He slid the adjustable segment of the osteometric board up against the end of the bone. “Maximum morphological length is 53 centimeters. Yeah, she's going to be big, all right.” He flipped open the cover of his pocket calculator and punched in the Trotter and Gleser formula to calculate overall stature from the femur. “Yup, that's what I thought.” More key-clicking to convert from centimeters to inches. “Estimated height between 71.37 and 74.30 inches.'

He looked up from the calculator to Julie, who was sipping tea and lounging deservedly in the contact station's only armchair after her day on the ice field. “Tall.'

She was frowning over the rim of her cup at the long, gracefully bowed bone. “Can I ask a question, or will you go all defensive on me again?'

'I?” Gideon said. “Defensive?'

'Well, yesterday you said that, basically, the way you tell male bones from female bones is that the male ones are bigger and more rugged. Right?'

'Right.'

'But here you have a big bone, a rugged bone, and what's your conclusion? That it's a big, rugged woman. I don't get it. Why isn't it a man?'

'If that's all I had to go on, you'd have a point. Fortunately, the femur has some good sex criteria of its own. Lateral pitch, for instance.” He stood the bone upright on the board, resting it on the condyles, the smooth, rounded upper surface of the knee joint. “See how the bone tilts instead of standing straight up and down, when I just let it rest naturally? Well, that happens to be a seventy-six-degree angle. Anything lower than eighty is probably a female, and seventy-six is a near certainty.'

She sighed. “I guess it's easy when you know how.'

'And why. That inward tilt is there because women have wider hips than men, so they have to be built more