Unnatural Selection (18 page)

The group, seemingly realizing that they had more or less ambushed him on the way down, gave him ten or fifteen minutes of respite for eating and chitchat, which he appreciated. But then, one by one, the individual conversations died away and heads began turning politely in his direction, smiling and anticipatory. Time for the gruesome details, please.

Gideon smiled back. The food and drink had done him good, and simply seeing Julie had revived his spirits, as it always did, and he was ready to talk about the day’s developments. He finished the last of the Old Speckled Hen, drinking from the bottle, and began.

“Let me start at the beginning. Working with the dog on the beach where the first bone was found, we turned up three more caches of human skeletal remains, all almost certainly from the same individual: one of bones from the right arm and forearm; one of hand and foot bones from both sides; and finally, one with most of the bones from the torso-ribs, shoulder girdle, and so on.”

“No skull?” Rudy asked. “No teeth?”

They were an anthropologist’s questions. Of all the bones in the body, the skull-which was actually twenty-one bones soldered more or less solidly together, plus one (the mandible) connected by a hinge-offered the greatest likelihood of a positive identification. And excluding DNA, the teeth, with all their irregularities, patterns, and dental work, were the feature that most often led to a definitive identification.

“Unfortunately, no,” said Gideon. “No pelvis either. Altogether, I’d say we recovered, oh, a third of the skeleton.”

“So where’s the rest?” Donald asked.

Gideon shrugged. “Washed away, taken by carnivores, who knows?”

“Couldn’t they be buried on one of the other beaches?”

“Sure, but which one?”

“Almost the whole of St. Mary’s is rimmed with beaches,” Madeleine said. “It would take months to search them all. Besides, for all we know, the rest might be buried inland. Or just taken out in a boat and dropped in the sea.”

“That’s right,” Gideon agreed. “I think we just go with what we have. We’re lucky to have that much.

“But how you know is Pete Williams?” Kozlov asked.

“We don’t know it-”

“But you think, yes?”

“We don’t even think it, Vasily. As Liz said, it’s our best guess, but it’s no more than that. A guess, and only a working guess at that.”

He told them about the supinator crest and the squatting facets. He could see that it was something of a letdown.

“That’s nothing,” Donald said accusingly. “That’s no kind of proof.”

“Which is what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“Maybe he had some other kind of job turning knobs or something,” Cheryl said. “Wouldn’t that give you a supinator thingie too?”

“Yes, probably.”

“So it doesn’t mean anything,” Cheryl said, the first time Gideon had heard her agree with something her husband had said. “It could be anybody.”

“No, that’s not the way you look at it,” Liz said. “You have to consider the probabilities. Pete Williams has disappeared-that is, none of us have heard of him since the last conference,” she added to cut off Gideon’s protest. “The last any of us saw of him was right here on this island, two years ago. Most of us here now were there when Edgar threatened to kill him-”

“Oh, come on, Liz, not again,” Joey said, stumbling over his consonants a little. He was soused, all right. “He didn’t threaten him, it was just, you know-”

“It was just Edgar saying, and I quote: ‘I keel ’eem, dat leedle peepsqueak,’” Liz persisted, unwilling to let go of an appealing hypothesis.

“Yeah, he said it, but he wasn’t really-”

“No, now that I think about it, she’s right,” Victor said. “He was steaming. We had our poker game afterward, and he was so mad he could hardly sit still; punching himself on the knee, talking to himself. Remember? He spoiled it for everybody-our last night together.”

“That’s so,” Rudy agreed.

“Aw, now, look,” Joey said, “he had a short fuse, sure, but that doesn’t-”

“Now then,” Liz cut in. “Think about it. Pete Williams was an auto mechanic. Auto mechanics have well-developed supinator crests. Most other people don’t, even allowing for the occasional knob-twister. So when you put all that together-the death threat, the missing man, the skeleton on the beach, the supinator crests-it’s pretty hard not to come up with Pete Williams as the first person on your list.”

“Is making sense,” said Kozlov.

“As far as that goes, I’d have to agree,” Gideon said. “It’s a long way from proof positive, but it does make sense. Mike thinks so, too. So tomorrow he’ll start tracing Williams, seeing if he’s still alive. If he is, that’s the end of it. If no one’s seen him for two years, then maybe we have something. In the meantime, I’ll get back to the skeleton and start doing some serious analysis. I already have the sex, but I’m hoping to pin down race and age, and to come up with estimates of height, build, old injuries, and so on. If they do match what we find out about Williams’s description-”

“Well, we can help you with that right now,” Joey said with the elaborate precision of a drunk trying to prove he wasn’t drunk. He pushed his glasses, which had slipped down his nose, back up. “We all know what he looked like. Thirty or so, kind of average build, maybe five-ten-”

“Stop, stop!” Gideon yelled, so suddenly that the museum ladies, now in the process of going around pouring tea, froze trembling in their tracks.

“What did I… what did I do?” a startled Joey asked. The tic below his eye was going full blast.

“I don’t want to know what he looked like.”

Donald frowned at him. “You don’t want to know? But how… but how can you-?”

“He means he doesn’t want to know until after he’s examined the bones,” Rudy interjected smoothly. “If you know beforehand, it’s likely to affect your perception. You find what you’re looking for; the infamous principle of expectancy.”

He smiled fleetingly at Gideon. They had both had the principle of expectancy drilled into them at the same time and place, at the feet of their major professor, back at the University of Wisconsin. Gideon smiled back. He was glad to see Rudy looking a little less miserable than he had the other day; not so different, in fact, from the old Rudy, if you ignored the smudged eyes, the gaunt frame, and that gold chain.

Donald nodded, and the others seemed to get the point as well.

Accepting a cup of tea from one of the ladies, who were now in motion again, Gideon continued: “If the rest of my findings do match Williams’s description, and if he really has been missing for the last two years, then the next step would probably be to get some DNA samples from his family, assuming he has a family, and compare them to DNA from the bones. If they match, that settles it. If they don’t, we need some more guesses.”

“From bones in ground for two years, you get DNA?” a surprised Kozlov asked.

“Oh, yes, even from bones much older than that. They’ve retrieved DNA from 350,000-year-old fossils. You see-”

“Of course!” Kozlov smacked himself in the forehead. “Stupid. DNA is chemically inert molecule. Nonreactive. Big, long half-life, not going break down any time soon.”

“That’s right,” Gideon said, chiding himself for the childish explanation he’d been about to give. Kozlov’s music-hall accent made it easy to forget that he was a brilliant man with deep and wide-ranging interests-self-educated or not.

“The business with the supinator crest and the squatting facets is interesting, Gideon,” Rudy said. “Any other occupational indicators?”

Another anthropologist’s question. It was good to see Rudy’s old interests reawakening. Occupational indicators, or behavioral indicators, or skeletal markers of occupational stress were what anthropologists called the features in bones that provided clues to the person’s activities in life: squatting facets, for example.

“That’s all I’ve seen so far. I haven’t had a real chance to look at the shoulder girdle and ribs yet, though. That’ll be tomorrow. Want to help out?” he asked with sudden inspiration.

For a moment Rudy looked pleased, but then he shook his head-a little sadly, it seemed to Gideon. “Nah, I’d only get in the way; I’ve been out of things too long. Besides, I’ve got the consortium.”

“Of course. I wasn’t thinking.”

“But thanks for asking. I appreciate it.”

“What I want to know,” Victor said, “is why we keep saying this skeleton, this person, was murdered. We don’t know that, do we, or am I missing something?”

“We haven’t found any direct proof, no,” Gideon said. “Not yet, anyway, but-”

“But if you can think of another reason for cutting somebody up into little pieces and then burying them in a bunch of different places on a deserted beach, I’d love to hear it,” Liz said.

Victor thought for a moment. “I have to admit, nothing jumps to mind,” he said, straight-faced.

When it came to work, Maude Bewley was not the sort to procrastinate. The more of tomorrow’s work you did today, the less work you’d have to do tomorrow; that was her motto. This was the reason she was still puttering around in the Star Castle kitchen at ten o’clock at night. By doing some of the breakfast preparation now, she’d have that much less to do in the morning. She wouldn’t have to come in until it was time to put on the bacon, which meant she could stay in her warm bed an extra half hour, a welcome treat that her joints would appreciate. Having seen to the juices and milk in the refrigerator, she set out the warming pans in the dining room, making sure there was fuel in the burners; laid out the silverware, dishes, and cups; filled the urn with water and its basket with pre-ground coffee (not a one of these Americans wanted tea, even in the morning!); and stepped back to survey her handiwork. Very nice. Everything looked clean and appetizing.

She went back into the kitchen to put up her feet and have a nice, steaming cuppa and a snack at the corner table. She’d gotten chilled right through to the bone walking up to the castle from her flat in town this morning-this bloody fog!-and never had totally warmed up. She got a fairy cake from the refrigerator, poured the milk and tea into her cup, plunked in two teaspoons of sugar, and sat down with a sigh, pulling up another kitchen chair for her poor feet. As Kozlov’s cook and housekeeper, the work itself wasn’t too hard on her feet, and the additional guests weren’t really a problem because the girl from Bryher was coming in every afternoon for three hours to tidy up their rooms and help with the kitchen work.

But the walking up and down Garrison Hill Road all the way from Buzza Street every day, usually twice-that was killing her. Mr. Kozlov knew it, too, which was why, nice man that he was, he’d been pestering her about moving into one of the rooms in the castle. She’d thought about it. Imagine living in a castle! There would be real advantages, too; not only the ease, but think of the money saved. Only what was she supposed to do about her sister Grace, who lived with her in the flat in town? Grace was getting old now, and she’d never been very independent, even when she was a girl. Timid, easy to intimidate, that was Grace. What would she do on her own, after they’d roomed together for the last twenty years? Oh, she had her job at the bank, so money wasn’t the problem, but she needed someone to look out for her, Grace did. Someone to sort of intercede with the world on her behalf.

Besides, being in this dreary, chilly old place day and night with nobody for company but that bossy, creepy Mr. Moreton and Mr. Kozlov himself? Brr. You could barely get a civil word out of Mr. Moreton, and as for Mr. Kozlov-nice as he was, she was lucky if she understood two words out of every ten.

She wafted the cup gratefully under her nose, sipped, and swallowed. She could have been drinking tea all along, of course, but Maude Bewley preferred to put off pleasure until the labor was out of the way. So it was a reward, as you might say. And so much more enjoyable this way, with the work over and done with. She peeled the paper from the cake, bit through the soft raspberry icing, and washed the mouthful down with tea. She could feel the hot, sweet liquid flow all the way to her stomach, radiating outward, soaking into her body and easing her bones. With the second sip, her head began to nod. With the third, she was asleep.

The dream, like all dreams, began in the middle. She was lying under an enormously high waterfall. Not in the stream of water itself, but behind it, protected by a shelf of rock far above her. She herself was on another rocky shelf, midway down the face of the cliff. The shelf was small, just big enough to hold her, and it was high above the bottom, hundreds of feet, but she wasn’t frightened. It was quite pleasant there, and she dreamed she went to sleep and dreamed again. In her dream’s dream the pleasant waterfall, without changing, somehow became sinister and heart-stoppingly threatening. She fought to wake up and dreamed she did. Looking up, she saw a huge, amorphous, blobby thing poised at the top of the fall, a gigantic, formless presence that filled her with dread. To her dismay it tipped over the edge and came plummeting down on her. Unable to move, she squeezed her eyes shut and stopped breathing. She heard the thing whoosh by her, and she knew she had to wake up-really wake up this time-before it hit the bottom, or she would die when it struck.

She heard it hit, however-a slushy, thunky sound, not the ear-splitting crash she’d expected-and she didn’t die. She did wake up, however.

She found herself on her feet, disoriented, the fragments of the shattered teacup still skittering on the slate floor. No longer cold, she was sweating now. She had the terrible feeling that it had been more than a dream, that, just outside, some thing had plunged by the kitchen’s high casement windows to smash itself on the paving stones of the narrow, moatlike passageway that ran around the castle just inside the inner retaining wall of the ramparts. A few years ago, in fog much like this, a gull, unable to see, had flown smack into the upper part of the castle and done just that. She had been in the kitchen finishing up the lunch dishes at the time, and she had heard it plunge by the window, or perhaps seen it out of the corner of her eye. She had gone out to investigate, almost stumbling over the bloodied, broken, still-living creature lying on its back, and the experience haunted her still.