“It could be anything,” he said after a little while. “Who knows how many people tell you lies during the course of a day.” He reached out and picked up the mandible. “Little lies. Big lies. And we don’t even know it. And I wonder how much difference it would make if we did know?”
The teeth were set solidly in the bone. This guy wasn’t that old. Could’ve been his age. He picked up the skull and carefully fitted the mandible’s condyle into its temporal socket. He looked at it from the side and then turned it so that it faced him.
“I wonder how many lies these jaws have spoken,” he said. “Maybe that’s what got the poor devil killed.”
Alice closed her sketchbook with a loud slap, and Bern checked his watch. She was always right on the second. Alice got down from her stool and together they walked outside and through the courtyard to wait under the mesquite tree for her mother.
Chapter 6
When Bern returned to the studio after walking Alice to her mother’s car, he picked up the letter from Dr. de Aceves that Haber had left on the coffee table. It was brief, clinical, to the point. Beyond what Haber had already told him about Dr. de Aceves’s conclusions, she also estimated that the skull was that of a man in his late thirties or early forties. Bern was indeed going to be reconstructing the face of a man approximately his own age.
He sat down at his computer and created a file for “John Doe (Haber?).” After recording the requisite data for a new file, he turned around in his chair and looked across the room at the skull, which was still sitting on the coffee table. Since the thing was in such good condition, he decided that he would do a two-dimensional reconstruction of the face as well as a three-dimensional one. The drawing wouldn’t take that much longer, and it would give him a quick idea of where he was going.
He looked at his watch, which confirmed what his stomach was already telling him. He backed out of the computer program and hurried up the steps. He turned right into the white corridor and followed the arc around to the kitchen. Glancing out through the dining room, which overlooked the terrace and the lake beyond, he saw a Jet Ski cut a lateral white wake across the water just below the house. In the distance, a trio of sailboats tacked in the meridian heat like single-winged butterflies lofting on the breeze.
Grabbing the car keys from a red clay bowl on the countertop, he went through the doorway and descended a shallow flight of curving stairs to the garage. He got into the old Triumph TR3, a black relic from his London years in the seventies, and cranked it up. The driveway ascended from the garage in a long, rising curve that was cut into the hillside and emerged from the tunnel of overhanging cedars onto Camino Cabo.
It was a seven-minute drive to the Far Point Grill. He sat at a favorite small table in a window alcove and watched the comings and goings in the marina below while he ate a platter of grilled shrimp drizzled with lime juice.
He thought about Becca Haber. She had a hell of a story, and if the remnant sitting on his coffee table turned out to be her husband, her story was only beginning. That is, if her story was true. Some of it had to be true, he supposed, but how much? Maybe it didn’t matter. She had a skull, and whatever its story, it deserved to have its face back, to be freed from the limbo of anonymity.
He had always had a kind of quixotic zeal for his work. The world was awash in anonymous skulls scattered across continents by wars, pogroms, massacres, slaughters, and murder. Somehow he felt he had a genuine mission to turn the wasteland of trivialized death into individual moments of significance, face by face by face. It was a small thing in the grander scheme of things, he knew.
On the other hand, it was no small thing at all to give an identity, a history, and a kind of redemption to what had been only a lost and empty bone before he touched it.
He finished the last shrimp, took one more sip of iced tea, and dug into his pocket for a ten and a five, which he left on the table. That covered the meal and a generous tip. He waved at Katie, who was behind the bar, and she smiled, blew him a kiss, and he was gone. The routine didn’t vary much, two or three times a week.
Back at the studio, he put on three CDs, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, Ellington and Strayhorn’s Jazz ’Round Midnight, and a Dexter Gordon collection. With the first strains of Davis’s horn, he set to work.
One of the worktables was already set up for these preliminary procedures. He put the skull on a cork ring and proceeded to glue the mandible to the cranium, using a specialized glue that dried quickly. While the glue was setting, he began cutting the tissue-depth markers, using the cylindrical refills for machine erasers. He had the depths memorized for the twenty-one various points on the skull of an American Caucasoid, and by the time these were cut, numbered on one end, and lined up on the bench, the skull was ready to go.
The adjustable skull stand was already mounted on one end of the workbench, and now Bern slipped the armature into the base of the skull and secured it. He put the armature on its own base, which was bolted to the bench, and firmly mounted the skull.
With this done, he began gluing the different lengths of numbered eraser pieces to the skull at specified points, each marking the approximate flesh depth according to long-used anthropological specifications. It was a delicate procedure, but experience had taught him to adjust the placement of the markers slightly this way or that, at variance with the traditional marking sites, depending on the particular peculiarities of each skull.
After the markers were in place, Bern carefully leveled the skull. He loaded the camera that was fixed on a stand at the other end of the bench-its distance and angle predetermined to avoid perspective distortion-and adjusted the lighting by using reflectors. Then he proceeded to photograph lateral and frontal views of the skull.
Turning up the CD player, he went into the darkroom to develop the film. Joe Thomas’s trumpet was slipping into “Black Butterfly” by the time he came out. While the prints were drying, he set up his two drawing boards side by side, one for the frontal view, one for the lateral. The mounted skull with its markers in place was still in front of him.
The afternoon shadows lengthened out into the lake as he sketched on the two transparent vellum sheets that covered the frontal and lateral photographs of the skull with its tissue markers. Moving back and forth between the two views, he worked steadily and quickly, his years of experience guiding his judgments when judgments had to be made. He emphasized those features that were most dominant in the skull’s structure, and left intentional ambiguities where no bony architecture was available to guide him. Eyelids and eyebrows were two areas where he often drew the frontal view with each eye having different characteristics, leaving a final judgment until he had more information and was actually in the process of reconstructing the skull.
By dusk, he had most of it done, and two views of a generic version of John Doe sat on his drawing board. But Bern was uncomfortable with them. Something didn’t seem right, though he had no way of knowing what it was. He looked at the two drawings in one of the three mirrors that he moved around the benches when he was sculpting or drawing in order to see what he was doing from a slightly different perspective. But in this case, it really wasn’t much help at all. There was still something about the drawings that left him dissatisfied. In fact, he was oddly uncomfortable with them.
But he had worked long enough.
He turned out the lights, and blue flooded the studio as he walked over to the large glass wall and stood looking out over the lake. Across the water, lights were coming on all along the shoreline, and the hills above them were momentarily purple before nightfall. He pushed on a section of the wall, which swung open on a center-post hinge, and stepped outside. He could smell the water and the cedars on the hills. A waft of cedar-wood smoke came by and was gone, and the sound of a launch way off in a distant cove grumbled across the water.
He didn’t much think of the skiing accident anymore, but after having mentioned it to Becca Haber, it was on his mind again. A year was not enough time for any of the details to have melted away. Every hour of that day was still vivid, too easy to recall.
It had been late August, and Alice and a couple of her girlfriends had talked Dana and Tess into taking them skiing one last time before the summer vacation was over. Neither he nor Philip had been able to go. The sky was bright and blistering as they pulled the Laus’ boat out of its slip at Oyster Landing in midafternoon and headed up the long green avenue of Lake Austin.
The lake was calm, a perfect ski day, and there was a lot of activity on the water. The third girl had just
