“Only that the dog had turned up some more bones. Not that you thought they were Pete’s.”
“Well, who told everybody, then?”
“Madeleine.” She picked up a couple of cardboard plates and handed one to Gideon, along with a plastic knife and fork wrapped in a paper napkin.
“Madeleine? How the heck did Madeleine know?”
Julie shrugged. “It’s a small town. News gets around.” She began working her way down the table, putting a little of almost everything on her plate, in line with her current philosophy of healthy eating: lots of variety, but all in tiny portions. This “French” approach, lately recommended by their nutritionist friend Marti Lau, had recently replaced Julie’s devotion to an Atkins-style low-carb diet. Gideon gave it about a year, which would be about standard.
“I guess so,” Gideon said, shaking his head. “It made it from the police station to here before I did.” He helped himself to two cheese-and-tomato finger sandwiches, two of cucumber, a heaping scoop of couscous salad, and a bag of Brannigans Roast Beef and Mustard Flavor Thick Cut Potato Crisps. He was still able to eat just about whatever he wanted without putting on weight, knock on wood. So was Julie for that matter, but keeping up with the latest diets seemed to entertain her, and that was fine with him, as long as he wasn’t required to join in, which he wasn’t. The way they handled it was that whoever took on the cooking that night called the shots. As to dining out, they were on their own. A reasonable and satisfactory arrangement.
The dining table, made up of two folding tables pushed together end to end, was squeezed into the narrow space on the other side of the Klondike. To reach the remaining two chairs they pretty much had to climb up and over some of the others, but everyone was in good humor, and eventually they got there, Gideon at the “foot” (assuming Madeleine, at the far end, was at the head), with Julie around the corner from him on one side, and Kozlov on the other.
The group, seemingly realizing that they had more or less ambushed him on the way down, gave him ten or fifteen minutes of respite for eating and chitchat, which he appreciated. But then, one by one, the individual conversations died away and heads began turning politely in his direction, smiling and anticipatory. Time for the gruesome details, please.
Gideon smiled back. The food and drink had done him good, and simply seeing Julie had revived his spirits, as it always did, and he was ready to talk about the day’s developments. He finished the last of the Old Speckled Hen, drinking from the bottle, and began.
“Let me start at the beginning. Working with the dog on the beach where the first bone was found, we turned up three more caches of human skeletal remains, all almost certainly from the same individual: one of bones from the right arm and forearm; one of hand and foot bones from both sides; and finally, one with most of the bones from the torso—ribs, shoulder girdle, and so on.”
“No skull?” Rudy asked. “No teeth?”
They were an anthropologist’s questions. Of all the bones in the body, the skull—which was actually twenty- one bones soldered more or less solidly together, plus one (the mandible) connected by a hinge—offered the greatest likelihood of a positive identification. And excluding DNA, the teeth, with all their irregularities, patterns, and dental work, were the feature that most often led to a definitive identification.
“Unfortunately, no,” said Gideon. “No pelvis either. Altogether, I’d say we recovered, oh, a third of the skeleton.”
“So where’s the rest?” Donald asked.
Gideon shrugged. “Washed away, taken by carnivores, who knows?”
“Couldn’t they be buried on one of the other beaches?”
“Sure, but which one?”
“Almost the whole of St. Mary’s is rimmed with beaches,” Madeleine said. “It would take months to search them all. Besides, for all we know, the rest might be buried inland. Or just taken out in a boat and dropped in the sea.”
“That’s right,” Gideon agreed. “I think we just go with what we have. We’re lucky to have that much.
“But how you know is Pete Williams?” Kozlov asked.
“We don’t know it—”
“But you think, yes?”
“We don’t even think it, Vasily. As Liz said, it’s our best guess, but it’s no more than that. A guess, and only a working guess at that.”
He told them about the supinator crest and the squatting facets. He could see that it was something of a letdown.
“That’s nothing,” Donald said accusingly. “That’s no kind of proof.”
“Which is what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“Maybe he had some other kind of job turning knobs or something,” Cheryl said. “Wouldn’t that give you a supinator thingie too?”
“Yes, probably.”
“So it doesn’t mean anything,” Cheryl said, the first time Gideon had heard her agree with something her husband had said. “It could be anybody.”
“No, that’s not the way you look at it,” Liz said. “You have to consider the probabilities. Pete Williams has disappeared—that is, none of us have heard of him since the last conference,” she added to cut off Gideon’s protest. “The last any of us saw of him was right here on this island, two years ago. Most of us here now were there when Edgar threatened to kill him—”
“Oh, come on, Liz, not again,” Joey said, stumbling over his consonants a little. He was soused, all right. “He didn’t threaten him, it was just, you know—”
