Where There's a Will (10 page)

Lyle and Harvey tethered a small wooden raft to the Cessna and set it on the water loaded with a few pieces of equipment: an oxyacetylene torch and an open toolbox with some simple implements in it-a cold chisel, a hammer, a hand axe, a couple of pry bars, a few pairs of pliers, and some unfamiliar-looking wrenches. Then, not bothering with wet suits, they strapped on their scuba gear and weight belts. “This is gonna be easy,” Harvey said.

“As pie,” Lyle happily agreed. “No pumps, no compressors, no nothing. We’re gonna be home for dinner. Okay, we’ll take a look-see now,” he told Gideon. “Don’t go ’way.”

They hooked on weight belts, slipped their masks over their faces, got their flippers on, climbed clumsily out onto the Cessna’s wing, and slipped backwards into the water, not taking any of the tools with them. As they approached the Grumman, a school of tiny fish darted out of it, flashed silver as they wheeled, and disappeared. A crab or something like it flopped out of the broken window and scuttled its way into the sand under the fuselage. After a few seconds Harvey popped back up, water streaming from his shining hair.

“What did you-” Gideon began.

“Can’t talk now,” Harvey said cheerfully. He grabbed the torch, cleared his mask, said “Glub-glub,” and pushed himself back down. This time they stayed under for a few minutes, first using the torch to cut through the canopy, after which Lyle squeezed inside.

After a few seconds an orange and blue flickering showed through the algae on the front window.

“They’re working on something with the torch,” John said.

“Let’s hope it’s not the skeleton.”

A minute later, they were at the surface again, with Lyle hanging on to the raft with one hand while grasping in the other a white, angular object about the thickness of a human long bone, and shaped like a distorted, square-cornered “U.” Barnacle colonies clung to it here and there, tightly closed against this unexpected depredation.

“Well, here’s your skeleton,” he said, holding it up for inspection. “And there’s another one just like it, if you want it.”

“What is it?” Gideon asked, feeling let down. He had known from long experience that most of the “human” bones found and reported by laymen turned out to be from bears, or rabbits, or deer, or dogs, or sharks, or just about any animal other than humans, but still he’d been hoping. But whatever this was, it had never been part of the structural framework of any living thing.

“It’s the yoke-the steering wheel-from the co-pilot’s side. You want it?”

When Gideon shook his head, Lyle said, “Happy, happy barnacles, this is your lucky day. Go in peace, my friends.” He dropped the yoke and watched it drift slowly down, gently turning over, until it came to rest on the floor of the lagoon.

“Hey, prof, don’t look so blue,” Harvey said. “We could find something yet. We hardly looked in there. Things are all messed up. It’ll take us a while to go through the inside. You guys want to stretch your legs on the island while we work?”

That sounded like a good idea to both of them. At six-two, an inch taller than Gideon, John had been even more cramped during the flight. And inasmuch as the space behind the passenger seats had been crammed with salvage gear, neatly stowed and secured, but taking up every available inch (even the third row of seats had been removed to make room for it), they had been unable to move around the plane.

Ten minutes later they were seated, canvas tennis hats on their heads, sunglasses on their noses, and smeared all over with sunscreen, in a yellow, eight-foot inflatable dinghy that Harvey had pulled from a rack, inflated with an electric pump, and set in the water. Beside them on the seat-slats were a couple of liter-bottles of water and a bag with four thin ham-and-tomato sandwiches from the Cessna’s cooler. John, on the center-slat, had the oars.

Gideon gave the brothers a few brief instructions-they were to extract anything at all that they thought might be bone, they were to handle all such objects with great care, doing nothing more to them than rinsing them in fresh water, and they were to be on the lookout for any personal belongings-clothing, jewelry, credit cards, etc.-that might be useful in confirming the identity of the occupants. And if they found anything, he would appreciate the use of a ruler and a tape measure, and any kind of measuring calipers they might happen to have. Oh, and a magnifying glass “Yeahyeahyeah,” Harvey said, adjusting his mask and regulator preparatory to going back down. “Have a good time, don’t talk to any strangers. See you later.”

Walking on Maravovo was easier said than done. The seemingly inviting beach of smooth white sand was appallingly hot-even John wilted-and the thousands, the many thousands, of grayish land crabs stirring underfoot and scuttling for their holes made walking unpleasant.

The “interior” of the island-the outside of the “C”-was even worse; crammed with palm trees and pandanus, breezeless, stifling, and practically impenetrable. Creeping lantana and morning glory vines grabbed like snakes at their ankles, and gnarly, above-ground roots tripped them up at almost every step. Before they’d gone a hundred yards they were pouring with sweat, and clouds of gnats and biting black flies were hungrily gathering on them, retreating only a few feet when they batted at them, and then even more aggressively buzzing back.

“Talk about carnivores,” Gideon said, swatting away.

Retreating to the beach again-at least there was a sea breeze and no flies-they took off their shirts and shoes, left them in the dinghy, and waded up to their knees in the calm, crabless, blessedly cool water of the lagoon, occasionally sipping from the water bottles, toward where the cruise line had set up its compound about a quarter-of-a-mile ahead. At one point they set the bottles and sandwiches on the shoreline and took a swim, regretting that they hadn’t taken the brothers up on their offer of snorkeling masks and fins. Even without them, paddling around in the five-foot-deep water was like swimming in a giant tropical-fish aquarium, but after fifteen minutes the salt had begun to sting their eyes and they got out, rubbing their eyes but much refreshed.

The compound consisted of two structures other than the pier: a large, unlocked metal storage building (uninhabited islands made locks irrelevant, as John pointed out) with barbecue equipment, boxes of plastic eating utensils, beach chairs, and picnic tables stacked inside; and a small, canopied, thatch-roofed pavilion with a plastic-topped table in the center, a raised wooden floor, open sides, and a sign bolted to one of its four roof-support posts:

SHANDARA MASSAGE. TREAT YOURSELF TO A LOMI-LOMI ON-THE-BEACH SPECIAL. BODY EXFOLIATION, SEAWEED AND KUKUI NUT FACE THERAPY, TROPICAL AROMA SCALP TREATMENT, SEA SALT FOOT SCRUB, ALL FOR $75. LIKI-LIKI VERSION, $35. CHARGE TO YOUR CRUISE ACCOUNT.

They chose the massage hut in which to have their sandwiches, inasmuch as it was the only place that was both protected from the sun and open to the breeze. As they were finishing their first ones-the tomatoes had made the white bread soggy, but they weren’t complaining-they heard the Cessna’s engines start up and saw the plane begin to taxi slowly toward the dinghy they had left on the beach. By waving and calling, they managed to get the plane’s attention, and a minute later the Cessna was bumping gently up against the floating pier. The brothers were both looking down at them and grinning.

They had found something.

“Yes, it’s human,” Gideon said, looking at the bone that Lyle had just placed in his hand. “A mandible.”

“A jawbone,” John explained.

Lyle was delighted. “Oh, that’s why it has teeth!”

“Of course that’s why it has teeth, putzhead,” Harvey said. “Didn’t I tell you that?” If anything, their resemblance to Moe and Curly was becoming more pronounced, and Gideon half-expected Harvey to deliver a two-finger poke into Lyle’s eyes or kick him in the ankle, but all he did was shake his head.

“Where was it?” Gideon asked.

“Under the console, in front of the pilot’s seat. It was snagged around one of the hydraulic brake lines.”

“Ah, that’s probably why it didn’t get carried off.” He took it from Lyle, gently turning it from side to side. “So this is it, then? This one bone?”

“So far. We’re gonna head back now and see what else we can find, but we wanted you to see this first. Everything is shifted and kind of crumpled up. We’ll need to use the torch some more, and we’ll see what we see. I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I was you, though.”

Except for a few dead limpet shells on the inside of the left ramus-the part that rises, behind the teeth, to form the hinge that attaches the jaw to the cranium-the mandible was as whole, as clean, and almost as white, as a specimen from a biological supply house. A right lateral incisor and one of the right premolars were missing, but they had worked their way out after death; the deep, crisp-edged sockets, with no signs of the bone-resorption that would have gone along with eventual healing, made that clear. The other fourteen teeth were still in place and only a little loose, the natural result of the loss of the soft tissue surrounding them. Both first molars and one of the remaining premolars had cheap amalgam fillings in them. The bone itself had a slightly spongy feel-a “give” to it-but so would anything else that had been soaking in a warm lagoon for ten years. It would be solid enough, once dry.

With the Shertz brothers having forgotten to bring him any of the tools he’d asked for, the table wasn’t going to do Gideon any good, so along with John, he sat down at the shady edge of the wooden platform-floor, with his bare feet in the cool, damp sand. He flicked the limpets from the bone with a fingernail and slowly turned it in his hands, running his fingers over the bumps, ridges, grooves, and hollows. After a while he gently set it upright on his knee so it was “facing” him and studied it for another minute. A single drop of sweat rolled from his forehead, down his nose, and onto the leg of his shorts.

“Well, I can tell you who it isn’t,” he said at last. “It isn’t old Magnus.”

“No, it’s female,” John said promptly.

“Right. And the age, too. This came from a young-wait a minute, how’d you know it’s female?”

John had once taken a three-day forensics course for law-enforcement personnel, at which Gideon had been the lecturer for the anthropology segment, and while he had been a willing student, it quickly became apparent that osteology was never going to be his strong suit. Thus, his quick, almost instant, determination of sex came as a surprise. The mandible in Gideon’s hand would have been a good one with which to challenge his graduate students’ abilities at sexing. The overall size and ruggedness suggested a male jaw, he said half-aloud. On the other hand, the sharpness of the anterior edges of the rami and the delicacy of the condyles were more typical of females. The symphyseal height and the gonial angle could probably have gone either way, although, without measuring instruments, it was impossible to say for certain…

As Gideon droned on, detail after detail, John nodded sagely, perspiration dripping from his chin. “True, my good fellow, very true, indeed.”

“So how’d you come up with female?”

By now John was laughing out loud. For once Gideon responded with a frown. “What? What am I missing?”

“How I came up with female,” John said, “was that I figured the odds were pretty damn high that the plane really did go down that night, and if it did, there were two people aboard-Magnus and the pilot, Claudia-and since I knew it wasn’t him, it had to be Claudia. And Claudia was a female. That’s how.”

“But how’d you know it wasn’t Magnus?”

“I knew because you just said it wasn’t, two minutes ago,” John said, breaking out laughing again, and this time Gideon went along. When he sobered, he went back to turning the mandible in his hands and running his fingers over it again.

John, whose interest in forensic anthropology did not extend to sitting around watching Gideon stare at a bone and mumble to himself, stretched, stood up, and announced that he was going off to take another swim.

“Okay, right,” said Gideon, absorbed in the examination.

However he’d arrived at it, John was correct about the mandible being Claudia Albert’s. According to the Torkelssons, she had been a big, sturdily built woman (a lummox, Dagmar had called her) of twenty-five, troubled with bulimia. And the jawbone perched on his knee had almost certainly belonged to a big, sturdily built woman of twenty-five or so, afflicted with an eating disorder, most likely bulimia. Given the context and the circumstances, there wasn’t much room for doubt as to who she was.

Despite some of the ambiguous criteria, determining the sex had been the easy part. (Determining the sex was always the easy part, given that you started with a fifty percent chance of getting it right if you simply flipped a coin.) But beyond that, the classic curvature of the chin (in anthrospeak, the convexity of the mental protuberance), as opposed to the two-cornered squareness (the bilobatedness) of the male chin, was so archetypically female that it overrode everything else, even the ruggedness and size. It was female; he was certain.

But the ruggedness and size were useful in their own right, in that they were what had told him that the mandible’s owner had probably been large and strongly built. When a mandible, or any other bone, was robust and heavily ridged and roughened by muscle attachments, it meant that the muscles that had been attached to it were strong and well-developed. And if the mandibular muscles were well-developed, it was reasonable to assume that the cranial and neck muscles were well-developed, and if that was the case, then it was only reasonable to suppose that the trunk and limb muscles were well-developed, etc., etc. The good old Law of Morphological Consistency.

So it was possible, even from a single bone-the mandible-to make some assessment of overall size and physical condition. Of course, the Law of Morphological Consistency wasn’t exactly a law, it sometimes happened that a person might have a strongly developed jaw and neck coupled with a weak thorax, or thick arms coupled with spindly legs, and when such things occurred, anthropological assessments went awry. But they didn’t happen very often, and unless something turned up to contradict it, Gideon would stick with his reading. He’d rather have had a few more bones to look at, but in this kind of work, fragmentary remains were the rule.