Outlander 03 - Voyager

between a hundred-fifty and two hundred years old.”

“She’s what?”

Joe was grinning broadly, enjoying his joke.

“Our friend Mr. Thompson here is from the anthropology department at Harvard,” he said. “His friend Wicklow knows me; asked me would I have a look at this skeleton, to tell them what I could about it.”

“The nerve of you!” I said indignantly. “I thought she was some unidentified body the coroner’s office dragged in.”

“Well, she’s unidentified,” Joe pointed out. “And certainly liable to stay that way.” He rooted about in the cardboard box like a terrier. The end flap said PICT-SWEET CORN.

“Now what have we got here?” he said, and very carefully drew out a plastic sack containing a jumble of vertebrae.

“She was in pieces when we got her,” Horace explained.

“Oh, de headbone connected to de…neckbone,” Joe sang softly, laying out the vertebrae along the edge of the desk. His stubby fingers darted skillfully among the bones, nudging them into alignment. “De neckbone connected to de…backbone…”

“Don’t pay any attention to him,” I told Horace. “You’ll just encourage him.”

“Now hear…de word…of de Lawd!” he finished triumphantly. “Jesus Christ, L. J., you’re somethin’ else! Look here.” Horace Thompson and I bent obediently over the line of spiky vertebral bones. The wide body of the axis had a deep gouge; the posterior zygapophysis had broken clean off, and the fracture plane went completely through the centrum of the bone.

“A broken neck?” Thompson asked, peering interestedly.

“Yeah, but more than that, I think.” Joe’s finger moved over the line of the fracture plane. “See here? The bone’s not just cracked, it’s gone right there. Somebody tried to cut this lady’s head clean off. With a dull blade,” he concluded with relish.

Horace Thompson was looking at me queerly. “How did you know she’d been killed, Dr. Randall?” he asked.

I could feel the blood rising in my face. “I don’t know,” I said. “I—she—felt like it, that’s all.”

“Really?” He blinked a few times, but didn’t press me further. “How odd.”

“She does it all the time,” Joe informed him, squinting at the femur he was measuring with a pair of calipers. “Mostly on live people, though. Best diagnostician I ever saw.” He set down the calipers and picked up a small plastic ruler. “A cave, you said?”

“We think it was a…er, secret slave burial,” Mr. Thompson explained, blushing, and I suddenly realized why he had seemed so abashed when he realized which of us was the Dr. Abernathy he had been sent to see. Joe shot him a sudden sharp glance, but then bent back to his work. He kept humming “Dem Dry Bones” faintly to himself as he measured the pelvic inlet, then went back to the legs, this time concentrating on the tibia. Finally he straightened up, shaking his head.

“Not a slave,” he said.

Horace blinked. “But she must have been,” he said. “The things we found with her…a clear African influence…”

“No,” Joe said flatly. He tapped the long femur, where it rested on his desk. His fingernail clicked on the dry bone. “She wasn’t black.”

“You can tell that? From bones?” Horace Thompson was visibly agitated. “But I thought—that paper by Jensen, I mean—theories about racial physical differences—largely exploded—” He blushed scarlet, unable to finish.

“Oh, they’re there,” said Joe, very dryly indeed. “If you want to think blacks and whites are equal under the skin, be my guest, but it ain’t scientifically so.” He turned and pulled a book from the shelf behind him. Tables of Skeletal Variance, the title read.

“Take a look at this,” Joe invited. “You can see the differences in a lot of bones, but especially in the leg bones. Blacks have a completely different femur-to-tibia ratio than whites do. And that lady”—he pointed to the skeleton on his desk—“was white. Caucasian. No question about it.”

“Oh,” Horace Thompson murmured. “Well. I’ll have to think—I mean—it was very kind of you to look at her for me. Er, thank you,” he added, with an awkward little bow. We silently watched him bundle his bones back into the PICT-SWEET box, and then he was gone, pausing at the door to give us both another brief bob of the head.

Joe gave a short laugh as the door closed behind him. “Want to bet he takes her down to Rutgers for a second opinion?”

“Academics don’t give up theories easily,” I said, shrugging. “I lived with one long enough to know that.”

Joe snorted again. “So you did. Well, now that we’ve got Mr. Thompson and his dead white lady sorted out, what can I do for you, L. J.?”

I took a deep breath and turned to face him.

“I need an honest opinion, from somebody I can depend on to be objective. No,” I amended, “I take that back. I need an opinion and then—depending on the opinion—maybe a favor.”

“No problem,” Joe assured me. “Especially the opinion. My specialty, opinions.” He rocked back in his chair, unfolded his gold-rimmed glasses and set them firmly atop his broad nose. Then he folded his hands across his chest, fingers steepled, and nodded at me. “Shoot.”

“Am I sexually attractive?” I demanded. His eyes always reminded me of coffee drops, with their warm golden-brown color. Now they went completely round, enhancing the resemblance.

Then they narrowed, but he didn’t answer immediately. He looked me over carefully, head to toe.