“Well, I’m absolutely certain it’s an anthropoid,” Katharine said, attempting to mask the crankiness she was feeling, but failing to fool Rob. “And I’m fairly certain it died from a blow to the head.”
Rob squatted down. “May I pick it up?”
“Be my guest,” Katharine said, crouching down next to him. “I have to tell you, right now I’m thinking you’re wasting a lot of Takeo Yoshihara’s money on me. Either that, or I’m missing something that’s staring me right in the face.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Rob told her. “If this was going to be an easy one, I wouldn’t have needed you at all, would I?” He held the skull up, rotated it, then stuck a finger through the hole that had been pierced in the left parietal bone. “What do you think caused this?”
That, at least, was something she felt confident about. “A spear. I’ve seen exactly the same kind of wound in hundreds of skulls in Africa. And you can see by the position of the skeleton that while this head wound appears to be the mortal blow, the body was moved.”
“You can see that,” Rob countered. “Explain, please?”
“For one thing, it’s lying on its back. If you assume someone threw the spear that killed it, it would have just collapsed.”
“So whoever threw the spear pulled it out.”
Katharine nodded. “But someone also laid the body out,” she went on. “See how the arms are? They’re not just lying at its sides.” With a forefinger, she traced along the right humerus, which lay parallel to the spine. But the arm bent at the elbow, with the radius and ulna angling inward toward the center of the pelvis. The bones of the left arm mirrored their counterparts on the right, and the small bones that had made up the hands and fingers were jumbled together, as if one hand had been placed on top of the other.
“Like it was laid out for burial,” Rob suggested.
“Exactly,” Katharine said.
“Sounds as if we have a murder mystery on our hands,” Rob said, laying the skull carefully back in the exact position in which it had been resting. “Someone killed this guy, and then his family brought him up here and buried him.”
Katharine shook her head. “Doesn’t add up,” she said. “First, he wasn’t buried. Everything I scraped away was natural debris, the kind of stuff that builds up in a hurry in rain forests. I don’t find any evidence of burial. Just laid out, and then left here. And the Hawaiians didn’t do that, did they?”
“Absolutely not. They have a great respect for their dead. The burial grounds are sacred, no matter how old they are. And bodies were always buried.”
“So what went on here?” Katharine asked.
“Whoever killed this guy laid him out, then walked away?”
“Maybe,” Katharine agreed, straightening up from her crouch, but keeping her eyes fixed on the skeleton. “But that’s not my biggest problem.” Rob looked up at her. “My biggest problem is that I can’t figure out what it is.”
“It’s human, isn’t it?” Rob asked.
“Not from what I know of humans,” Katharine replied. “It’s barely four feet long, which makes it awfully small for a full-grown Homo sapiens.”
“Maybe it’s a child.”
“The skull doesn’t look like a child’s skull. It seems to be fully developed.” Stooping again, she traced her finger along the seams between the parietal and occipital plates. “See? The bones are fully fused, which means the head is pretty much full size. Yet it’s no larger than your average six-year-old’s. Also, look at the forehead — way too sloped for Homo sapiens. The mandible’s all wrong, too.”
“So it’s some kind of primate,” Rob suggested.
Katharine fixed him with a withering look. “First, there are not now, and never were, any primates on these islands, except for the ones in the zoo in Honolulu. But more important than that, when a chimpanzee or a gorilla dies, you don’t lay it out as you do a human.”
Rob chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip. “If it was a pet—”
“Forget it,” Katharine interrupted, her annoyance toward herself now widening to include Rob. “Believe me, I’ve thought about that. This was no pet.”
“So what is it?” Rob asked, deciding to ignore her annoyance. “Come on, you’ve got to have some idea.”
Katharine took a deep breath. “All right,” she said. “Since it’s just you and me, I’ll tell you. But you have to promise not to laugh.” Rob’s brows rose in a noncommittal arch, which Katharine suspected was as far as he’d commit himself. “What it looks like is utterly impossible. You won’t believe it any more than I do.”
“Try me,” Rob suggested.
“Early man,” Katharine said.
Rob shook his head. “You’re right. Not possible. Aside from the fact that there was no such thing as early man in this area, these islands weren’t even formed when early man was poking around the planet. Even if Maui was here — which I seriously doubt — what we’re standing on wasn’t. This is a volcanic island, Kath. Layer after layer of lava. I’ll bet the layer we’re standing on isn’t more than a couple of thousand years old, and probably a lot younger than that.”
“I didn’t say I believed it,” Katharine said. “And I can add half a dozen other reasons why it’s impossible, starting with the fact that every early man specimen I’ve ever seen — and I mean every one — is a fossil. And these bones, in case you haven’t noticed, aren’t fossils. They don’t look more than a few hundred years old, if that.”
“So what do we have?” Rob asked.
“I wish I knew,” Katharine sighed. “What I’d really like to get my hands on is a computer, so I could check some things out on the Net.”
“Well, at least that part’s easy,” Rob told her. “Come on.”
The funny feeling started almost the minute Michael emerged from the locker room and trotted out to the field for his fourth-period gym class. At first he hardly noticed it, but as he jogged across the grass toward the spot near the far end zone of the football field where his class was falling in for the morning’s round of calisthenics, he felt it again. It was like last night, when he’d awakened from the nightmare and felt as if there was something in his lungs that wasn’t quite letting him catch his breath, or fill his lungs with air.
Asthma.
But even as the word popped into his consciousness, he rejected it.
It didn’t feel like asthma, and besides, he was over that — he hadn’t had an attack in months!
Ignore it, he told himself. It’ll go away.
He fell into place in the loose formation just in time to yell out a loud “Yo!” when the teacher called his name, then dropped down to the ground for the set of ten quick push-ups that opened the gym class. The class was quiet this morning, and everyone knew why.
Kioki Santoya.
All morning, people Michael didn’t even know had come up to him, asking if there had been anything strange about Kioki last night. What was he supposed to say? He’d hardly even known Kioki — even this morning he had still been having trouble remembering his last name. Now, as he did his push-ups, he could sense the other guys watching him, wondering if there was something he wasn’t talking about. He made it through the push-ups, and though the odd sensation in his chest was still there, it didn’t seem to be any worse. Along with the rest of the class, he scrambled to his feet and starting doing jumping jacks. By the time they’d finished a set of twenty-five, Michael was starting to sweat and he could feel his muscles warming up.
“O-kay!” the teacher said. “Run in place!”
Michael’s arms dropped to his sides as he began running, lifting his knees high with each step, working his legs like two pistons. This was one of his favorite exercises, for in the long months it had taken to build his lungs, his legs had developed, too, and he’d almost come to think of their strength as a kind of barometer, proof positive that his entire body was growing stronger every week, forever throwing off the terrible grip in which his disease had held him.
This morning, though, after only a few steps, the muscles in his legs started to burn. But that was crazy — he was barely getting warmed up! At this rate, a single lap around the track would wear him out.
