Lovely in Her Bones (3 page)

“Good idea.” Bill nodded.

“Just be sure you look very carefully. Some bones are pretty small.”

Twenty minutes later they had managed to work back together, having covered most of the clearing with nothing to show for their efforts except jeans streaked with clay from knee to ankle. Elizabeth pushed her hair away from her face with a sweaty forearm. “Whew! This isn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be,” she said. “Maybe we should start looking for the murderer’s tracks.”

Bill groaned. “Milo said five
years
, Elizabeth. Use your head!”

“Oh, that’s right. I forgot.”

“I wish we’d brought some beer. It’s hot out here.”

“Well, I wouldn’t mind getting hot and dirty if we’d found something,” said Elizabeth.

“Hello down there!” called Milo from the top of the ridge. “Made any great discoveries?”

“Get down here!” Bill yelled back.

Milo grinned and made a mock bow. He skittered down the steep side of the embankment, arms outstretched, shifting his footing from one small rock to another. In less than a minute he had made a final bound into the clearing and stood beside them brushing off imaginary dirt. He looked disgustingly clean and eager.

“No rusting and bloody chainsaw?” Milo asked them, beaming. “No buried Viking longboat?”

“Shut up and tell us what you found,” Bill demanded.

Milo became serious. “I think we can call the authorities now,” he said solemnly. “This man was murdered.”

Elizabeth shivered. “I knew it!” she said softly.

“And I can describe the murderer,” Milo concluded.

They stared at him. “How?” they said in unison.

Milo held up a hand for silence. He began to pace as though lecturing a class. “The killer in this case was a white male, between the ages of twenty and forty-five, probably from New York or Pennsylvania, and he was wearing a dark blue suit at the time the killing took place.” He nodded at his audience, gaping at him from a kneeling position.

“Milo, that’s incredible!” Bill burst out. “Did you get all that from a site investigation?”

Milo grinned. “In a way,” he chuckled. “It says on this guy’s tombstone that he was killed at Antietam, so the rest was easy to figure out.”

Elizabeth jumped up. “Are you telling us that this guy was killed in the
Civil War?”

“Right.”

“I thought you said five years,” Bill reminded him.

“I also said that after something has been in the ground, age becomes very difficult to determine,” said Milo.

“But he wasn’t in the ground,” said Elizabeth. “He was just sitting there in the middle of the clearing. And there
wasn’t
any tombstone!”

Milo smiled. “Yes, there was,” he said, pointing to the steep hill in front of them. “It’s up there. There’s a little family cemetery on the top of that hill, and this guy was buried on the edge near the embankment. After so many years, the coffin rotted, the hill eroded some, and
volià!
The colonel rolls down the hill.”

“So there was no murder,” said Bill, “and all this was for nothing.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Milo replied. “I was serious about informing the authorities. I’m sure the family will be glad to have Great-Grandpa, or whoever he is to them, restored to his proper place in the family plot.”

They began to walk back down the wooded slope toward the car.

“Now can I stop and look at plants?” asked Elizabeth.

“No,” snapped Bill. “I’m hot and tired, and we haven’t had supper.”

“But I only have two plants! We were supposed to bring in three.”

“Tell them about the skull,” Milo suggested. “They can’t argue with that.”

“It is pretty interesting.” Elizabeth agreed. “Even if it wasn’t a murder case, it was fascinating to see what you could tell just from looking at bones.”

“Oh, I’m no great shakes at it,” said Milo. “You should see Dr. Lerche in action.”

“How did you get to be his assistant anyway?” Elizabeth wanted to know.

Milo grinned. “It’s a long story. I’ll fill you in on the way home.”

    Milo refused to tell his story until the car windows had been rolled part of the way up so that he wouldn’t have to shout above the wind, then he waited until the car had turned off the gravel road and back onto the main highway.

“There’s the goat, Milo,” said Elizabeth. “You can start now.”

“How did I get to be Dr. Lerche’s assistant?” Milo asked thoughtfully. “Well, it was because of something that happened when he first came here to the university. I was an undergrad in anthropology in those days, and I worked as a security guard in my dorm—sort of like a night watchman. I handled the small stuff and turned the rest over to the campus cops. The hours were murder, though, since I had to get up and go to class the next day, and I wanted a lab job in the department. I had bugged everybody else in the department without success, so when Dr. Lerche arrived with his new Ph.D. to set up a forensic
anthro lab, naturally I went to him straight off and asked if he needed any help.”

“And he hired you?” asked Elizabeth.

“No. He said he’d let me know. He didn’t even have his lab set up at that point; most of the equipment hadn’t even been ordered.”

“So when did he hire you?”

“The next day. Now shut up and let me tell you how it happened.” Milo leaned back against the seat and tucked his hands behind his head. “Okay. Dr. Lerche had already met the district medical examiner because the two of them would be working together on cases. You know forensic anthropologists consult for the state, right?”

They nodded.

“Well, that same day I talked to him, they had a case come in. It was a found body in a pretty bad state of decomposition, and—”

“Wait a minute,” Elizabeth interrupted. “Is this story going to get gross?”

Milo thought about it. “Not really,” he told her. “I won’t get any more graphic than I have to.”

“Okay,” said Elizabeth grudgingly. “Go ahead.”

“All right, the medical examiner brought Dr. Lerche this body and wanted a report on it right away. That meant that he had to get down to the bones quickly so he could go to work.” He glanced over at Elizabeth to see if his explanation had been delicate enough.

“Don’t pay any attention to her,” said Bill. “Go ahead. How did he do that?”

“Well, the method he uses is to boil the body until the flesh comes off—”

“Aargh!” Elizabeth made a face.

“But he didn’t have any place to do it. See, his equipment hadn’t arrived, and he didn’t want to do it in his apartment—”

“Thank God!” said Bill, grateful that precedent had been established.

“All right,” sighed Elizabeth. “What did he do?”

“He called the animal science people and asked if they had any facilities that he could use over in their building.”

“That seems reasonable,” said Elizabeth cautiously. She had been dreading a mention of the cafeteria or some other bizarre site.

“Sure, it was,” Milo agreed. “They offered him their lab facilities right away. The only problem was that the only thing they had for boiling things in was an autoclave.”

“That thing you sterilize instruments in?”

“Yeah. And you know how small it is. No way you could get a whole body in one of those things.”

Elizabeth sighed. “I know I’m going to hate myself for asking this, but—”

“Well, he just put it into the autoclave a piece at a time, right, Milo?” asked Bill.

“Of course. What else could he do? The process was going to take at least twelve hours to do anyway. He started at six o’clock, as soon as the animal science people had gone home for the day. And he just stayed there that night, tending his autoclave and stacking up the clean bones.”

“What does this have to do with you?” asked Elizabeth.

Milo grinned. “There he is, by himself, dressed in ragged cutoffs and an old T-shirt because it’s … uh … inelegant work,” he finished lamely with a glance at Elizabeth. She nodded solemnly, and he continued. “It’s three o’clock in the morning, not another soul in the building, when suddenly the door to the lab bursts open and in walk three campus cops, guns drawn.”

He waited for a moment so that Bill and Elizabeth could grasp the situation. Elizabeth nodded slowly, “So-they think-”

“Oh, sure! They think they’ve caught Jack the Ripper’s grandson! And he doesn’t have any identification
on him. It’s in his good clothes, which he left in his office. At three o’clock in the morning, who’s he going to call? Remember he’d just gotten here and didn’t know many people.”

“Did they arrest him?” asked Bill.

“Yep. He tried to explain what was going on, and they allowed him to go without handcuffs on the strength of that, but they were going to take him down and put him in a cell until they got things straightened out.”

“He went to jail?”

“No.” said Milo. “That’s where I come in. Three a.m. was my break time, when I walked across campus to Burger World for something to eat. That’s what would keep me awake until breakfast time. So I’m strolling past the animal science building when the three cops come hustling out the front door, clustered around a prisoner. I knew the cops, of course. They’d stop in and pass the time with me every now and then. I said hello to Boyce and Wade, and then I saw who it was they’d arrested. Dr. Lerche and I recognized each other at the same time, in fact, but before I could say anything, Dr. Lerche said: ‘This man can identify me! He is my new lab assistant.’ ”

“So you identified him?” asked Elizabeth.

“Oh, sure. I would’ve anyway, but when he said I had the lab job, I would’ve let him be whoever he wanted. The cops apologized and left, and Dr. Lerche and I went over to Burger World and drank coffee and talked. I’ve been working for him ever since. It’s a great job.”

“It sounds interesting,” Elizabeth agreed. “I’d like to study bones—what do you call it?”

“Forensic anthropology. Would you like to work on a dig some time? We often use students as field workers, and I could probably get you hired. I know Dr. Lerche isn’t teaching second summer session, so
he might be planning to do field work somewhere. Are you interested?”

“It sounds wonderful,” said Bill.

Milo turned to gape at him. “You mean
you’d
like to come along?”

“No. I was thinking of getting rid of the two of you for the rest of the summer. Six weeks without bones or weeds. Wonderful!”

A
LEX
didn’t know she was there. His office door was open, but she had heard him in conference with a student, so she waited in the hall without announcing her presence. She didn’t mind waiting. It would give her time to decide what to say.

Tessa Lerche studied the bulletin board beside the door of her husband’s office. It contained the usual end-of-term notices posted by undergrads: ride needed to D.C. area; apartment to sublet; textbooks for sale—cheap! Nothing ever changed except the phone numbers. The “Professional Typing—Reasonable Rates” looked like the cards she used to post when Alex was in grad school, the lean years when a few term-paper jobs meant the difference between peanut butter and hamburger. At the time those years had seemed a long prologue to what she had thought of as “real life.” Looking back now, she saw that time as a golden age. Alex had studied a great deal, but he had also talked to her about his work. She had typed his papers. Now his work was put on computers by one of his assistants, and he seldom discussed it. Perhaps she should have continued to go on digs with him as she had out west, but over the years her interest had decreased and she had been less willing to spend blazing summers in the desert. She was thirty-three now. Her looks wouldn’t stand the weeks of roughing it as they used to. Once you passed thirty, you couldn’t take your looks for granted. She jogged, and moisturized her skin regularly, and she watched her diet. Sometimes people still mistook her for an undergrad. Alex never
seemed to notice, though. He came home for dinner; there was no nonsense about worrying where he was or with whom, but even when he was at home … he wasn’t. He’d eat his dinner in an abstracted way, making polite murmurs to her attempts at conversation, and he’d spend the rest of the evening at his desk in the den, hunched over a column of figures, while she read or watched television. When she asked him what was the matter, he’d shrug and say, “Nothing,” or that he was tired, or the work wasn’t going well. She had decided that their marriage was in a seven-year slump, a thing to be waited out as gracefully as possible—until this morning’s discovery had convinced her otherwise. She had been straightening up Alex’s desk—which he preferred her not to do—when she found the yellow legal pad he made notes on. Scribbled in the margins beside data on Paleo-Indian cultures were the words “Mary Clare” written over and over.

“Excuse me, ma’am. Are you waiting to see the professor?”

Tessa looked up, wondering what her expression had been. The man was not a student. He was tanned and wiry, nearing forty, with a head so bald that he must have shaved it. He had the sort of brown eyes that can express feelings, and at the moment his were radiating concern for this distraught stranger he’d found in the hallway. He might be one of Alex’s colleagues, Tessa realized. Whoever he was, he was waiting to see Alex, and he would be listening outside while she said whatever she was going to say to her husband.

“You feeling all right?” he asked gently.

She forced herself to meet the man’s eyes. “I—I got an F,” Tessa stammered, and fled.

    Alex Lerche blinked at the visitor who sat on the other side of his desk toying with a Sioux buffalo-jaw
knife. People usually commented on the fur and beadwork on the hilt, but the bald man in the khaki jumpsuit was running his fingers along the iron blade with an expression of cheerful inquiry.

“Wouldn’t be a bad hunting knife, but I’d hate to have to take it into combat.”

“Combat?” Lerche considered it. “I don’t think the Sioux-”

The visitor smiled. “I was talking about Nam. Spent a couple of years there in Special Forces. I was acquainted with a couple of Indians over there, and nary a one of us carried one of these.”

“You’re interested in Indians, Mr. … er …”