Uneasy Relations (22 page)

“You think they noticed?”

“Probably not. They were too into their Ivan stories. Now tell me; what’s going on?”

“Let’s go up. I’ll pick up the bones and show you.”

“Oh, let’s stay out here a while longer, Gideon. It’s so lovely now that everybody’s gone. Mmm, just smell that air.”

“Nice,” he agreed, not that he’d noticed until she mentioned it. Okay,” he said, standing up. “I’ll bring them out here. Get ready. This is going to knock your socks off.”

A minute later he was back with the bag. He gingerly removed the vertebrae, cradling them carefully in both hands, and placed them on the table between them. It was his first chance for anything more than a hurried look, and although the soft, diffuse lighting on the terrace was anything but conducive to a close examination of skeletal remains, that’s what they were going to get. Julie, understanding, left him to it and sat back with her eyes closed, inhaling the velvety air, lush with the perfumes of the night-blooming plants from the gardens below. “Mmm,” she said again.

“Mmm,” he echoed automatically, but for all he knew the air could have smelled like a lion house on a rainy day. All of his concentration was focused on the extraordinary object in front of him as he slowly rotated it on the tabletop.

It was the “vase” that Rosie, the constable at New Mole House, had taken home for her daughter, constructed of two adjacent thoracic vertebrae glued together, with a circle of aluminum foil Scotch-taped to the bottom to close it up. The foil and Scotch tape were quickly removed and discarded to make the examination easier. The vertebral foramens — the central holes that, all taken together, created the long, narrow, bony tube in which the spinal cord resided — provided an opening big enough for a few flower stems or a couple of pencils. The upper of the two bones was creamy white, the usual color of biological-supply-house skeletal casts. The lower one was a more muddy and uneven gray-brown, tinged with red. It was this lower one that had so captured his attention. After a few minutes he surfaced and began to speak.

“These are T9 and T10, the ninth and tenth thoracic vertebrae,” he said slowly. They’re located about . . .” He reached around her to touch the middle of her back. “Here. The top one—”

When she burst out laughing he thought he’d accidentally tickled her, but it wasn’t that. “Oh, it’s
cute
!” she cried.

“Cute?”
He stared wonderingly at her, and then at the vertebrae. “Oh, the face. Yeah, I suppose that’s pretty clever.”

Rosie’s ten-year-old daughter had apparently gotten a head start on her medical illustrator career by “illustrating” the upper vertebra, painting a clever little cartoon face on it. Viewed from the rear, the flat, smooth superior articular processes (where the inferior articular process of the eighth vertebra would have abutted) were now two round, googly eyes, the transverse processes (where the right and left eighth ribs would have attached) were a pair of donkey’s ears, and the long, tapering spinous process (which, with its fellows, would have constituted the knobby, spiky length of the spine) was a tapering snout, with a curlicue mustache and a goofy, big-toothed grin at the bottom.

“Sorry,” Julie said, “I didn’t mean to spoil the big moment.” She suppressed a final giggle. “All right, you have my full and earnest attention. The top one is…?”

“The top one is an exact reproduction of the ninth thoracic vertebra of Gibraltar Woman, as perfect as a cast can get. It’s part of a set of First Family casts made by France Casting in Colorado, the only sets that were authorized to be made from the original bones. I bought one of them myself for the lab.”

“Uh-huh. And it’s special because . . . ?”

“It’s not special at all. It’s the other vertebra, the T10, that’s special. ”

She looked at it, turned the little vase in her hands, tried to determine what was special about the T10. “Sorry,” she said with a shrug, “I don’t—”

“It’s special for two reasons. First, because, unlike the T9, it’s not a cast at all. It’s the real, honest-to-God bone.”

“It is?” she said, running her fingers gently over the rough, splintery surface. She was intrigued now. “This bone that I’m holding is actually from Gibraltar Woman herself?”

“Absolutely. See here, where the end of the transverse process is broken off? That delicate, lacy, sort of filigreed-looking stuff underneath? That’s interior bone, cancellous bone; no mistaking it. You can’t get results that fine with a cast.”

“But I thought all the actual bones went to the British Museum.”

“They did.”

Her eyes widened. “This was stolen from the British Museum?”

“No, ma’am,” he said airily, “it was never
in
the British Museum. ”

“But if the bones all went to—” She put the bones down with an exasperated little cluck and a cautionary glance. “Gideon, if what you’re trying to do is confuse me—”

“I’m sorry, honey,” he said, laughing, “just trying to enhance the narrative tension — you know me. Look, the crux of it is — and this is what’s
really
special about it — Gibraltar Woman didn’t
have
a tenth thoracic vertebra.”

“If that’s supposed to unconfuse me—”

“The remains that were excavated at Europa Point were far from complete; you know that. They included the first, second, fourth, fifth, seventh, and ninth thoracics, and that’s about as far down as Gibraltar Woman goes, really. Below that level, there’s hardly anything left of her, just a fragmentary fifth lumbar and a bit of sacrum. Oh, and a piece of acetabular rim.”

“But no T10? Are you sure?”

“Am I sure? Julie, I ran the damn study, didn’t I? I worked over these things for three weeks. I know every nook and notch and foramen in her body. Well, in every bone in her body. Well, in every bone that was left. And this one wasn’t left.”

“Well, then, it has to be from someone else.” Her forehead puckered. “Doesn’t it?”

“No, it’s from her, all right. The ankylosing spondylitis makes that clear.”

She sighed. “I knew that at some point in this life I was going to have to learn what ankylosing spondylitis is. It might as well be now.”

“It’s not that complicated.
Spondylos
, vertebra;
itis
, inflammation;
ankylose
, to fuse, to grow together into one.” He picked them up to show her. “See here, where they’ve been glued together — this crack that runs between them?”

“Uh-huh. Where the two of them meet.”

“Yes, but normal vertebrae don’t really meet. They’re completely separate bones. In the living body they’re separated by a disk of pulpy soft tissue—”

“Umm . . . the intervertebral disk.”

“Right, and each intervertebral disk has a kind of tough, cartilaginous ring around it — the
annulus fibrosus
— that keeps the soft stuff in the middle from squirting out, like toothpaste squirting out of a tube, when you put pressure on the spine — which you do every time you stand up, and even more when you sit down. Well, sometimes the
annulus fibrosus
calcifies, turns to bone, so that the two vertebrae above and below it become fused together, and the result is—”

“Ankylosing spondylitis.” She took them from him. “Bony bridges that connect one vertebra to another, like these.”

“You got it.”

She made a slight flexing motion of the vertebrae. “You know, they — oh!” To her unmistakable consternation, they came apart with a little
pop
, so that she was left holding one in each hand. She practically flung them away from her, down onto the table, as if they’d burned her. “Oh, my God! I didn’t mean — I don’t know why I—” Even in the dim light, he could see that she’d paled. “Gideon, I’ve broken—”

“Shh,” he said with a smile, “you haven’t broken anything, sweetheart. Come on, relax that wrinkled brow.” He leaned forward to smooth her taut forehead with his hand. “You’ll wear out that sexy little
musculus frontalis
. “Look—” He picked the two pieces up to show her. “They just separated where Rosie glued them, that’s all. No harm done. See? They’d already been broken before.”

“Whew,” she said, melting back into her chair. “Is that ever a relief. I could already see the headlines: ‘Wife of Well-Known Anthropologist Destroys Priceless Scientific Relic.’ ”

“No, no,” he said laughing. “In fact, it makes the point I’m making even better than before. Look at how the edges match up. They hardly needed the glue.” His tongue between his teeth, he put the two segments gingerly together — they virtually clicked into place — and held them up for her to see. “The broken edges of the bridge make a perfect match, even without the glue, even though one is a cast and one is real bone. Which would never happen if they were from two different people.”

“Which is how you can be so sure that they’re both really from Gibraltar Woman?”

“Yes, it’s a real break. Under ordinary circumstances, if I had a T9 and a T10, I might be able to say for sure that they
didn’t
go together — different ages, different sizes — but I wouldn’t be able to say with certainty that they
did
go together. But in this case I can — and they do.”

Thoughtfully, she fingered the vertebrae again —
very
tentatively this time. “It must hurt.”

“Sure, and give you a hunched, miserably stiff back as well. And lung and heart problems go along with it. Eye problems too. Basically, it’s a kind of arthritis, really, very incapacitating when it’s as severe as this.”

“But she was only in her mid-twenties. I would have thought this was an old person’s disease.”

“Well, most kinds of arthritis are, but not this. In fact, her age is one of the things that pointed specifically to ankylosing spondylitis. It’s not wear and tear or anything like that, you see; there’s a strong genetic component to it, and it affects primarily young adults — mostly men, usually, but sometimes . . . well, as you see . . .”

“How awful . . . a young mother . . .”

He nodded his agreement. He was suddenly tired — depleted, depressed — and he could see that Julie was too. No wonder, it was going on midnight, and it had been a very long day; the session at the morgue, which seemed to have been a week ago, had been only this morning. In addition, their predinner drinks and dinner wine had caught up with them. Still, they soldiered on, raising the obvious questions: Where had that T10 come from? Well, from Europa Point, obviously, since that was where the rest of Gibraltar Woman had come from. But how had Sheila gotten it? Had she dug it up long after the dig was formally closed down, when she’d been prowling around the cave with a trowel? Had she found it before the dig was ever started and kept it a secret? Did she find it
during
the dig and surreptitiously make off with it? And for all of those questions — why? And why did she have it in her room at the conference? Did it have something to do with her murder? Well, they were pretty sure they knew the answer to that; it did. But what?

But they had run out of steam and weren’t getting anywhere, and they knew it. Besides, by now it was getting chilly out on the terrace. “It’s late,” he said. “Why don’t we leave this till morning, when we’re fresh? What do you say we call it a day?”

She nodded. “I’m for that. I’m exhausted.”

AT
the reception desk they had the young night clerk, who had come on when George left, put the bag back into the safe and asked for the key to room 205. She went sleepily to the wall of grinning plush monkeys on hooks, reached toward them, and stopped, hand in the air.

“It’s not here.” She turned back to them. “Are you sure you don’t have it?”

“No, I left it right here about seven o’clock, with George.”

The clerk — her name plate said “Kayla” — scanned the rows of monkeys. “I don’t see it. Are you
positive
you didn’t take it with you?”

“Believe me, I’d know about it if I had a monkey in my pocket.”

Kayla was still staring at the wall. “Did you actually
see
him hang it, or—”

“No, I didn’t see him hang it. Look, can we get another one until you find it? We’re pretty bushed.”

Once upstairs (inasmuch as the Rock Hotel used vintage metal room keys, not electronic cards, Kayla had to go up with them to let them in), Julie went yawning to the closet to get her nightie. Gideon, who had meanwhile brushed his teeth, came out of the bathroom to see her standing at the open closet door with a frown on her face.

“Lose something?” he asked.

Instead of answering, she said, “Gideon, have you worn your sport coat since we got here?”

“No, why?”

“You didn’t rehang it after I put it in the closet?”

“No, why are you asking?”

“It’s been hung backward on the hanger.”

He came over to stand beside her. His gray Harris tweed hung neatly from a wooden hanger. It looked fine to him. “What’s wrong with it? I didn’t know you
could
hang a jacket backward on a hanger.”

“Sure, you can. Look at it, it’s hung so that the wooden shoulder supports slant backward instead of forward. I would never in a million years hang a jacket like that.”

“You’re as bad as Audrey with her toilet paper,” he said, laughing. He placed his hand on his heart. “I solemnly swear that I, Gideon Paul Oliver, did not—” He suddenly understood what she was driving at. “Somebody’s been in the room — they took the jacket down and rehung it the wrong way!”

She nodded. “And that explains why the key was missing.”

A hurried search, followed by a more thorough one, found nothing gone, although a few more details seemed to prove the entry of an intruder: a pen that she was certain had been lying on top of a post-card was now beside it; the bed skirt, which had been neatly in place when they’d left for dinner, now had a couple of twisted ruffles, as if someone had lifted it to look under the bed. It was odd, but nothing new, that Gideon, who could be so wonderfully, scrupulously observant when it came to some old bone, spotted none of these homely details but had to take Julie’s word for them.

“They were after the vertebrae,” he said, flopping into an armchair.