Skeleton Dance (3 page)

He nodded, filling their glasses from the bottle of Merlot. "Yeah, the book. I've been stuck on the same section for two days. I can't figure out how to get into it."

"What section is it?"

"You want Lester's title or mine?"

"Yours."

"'The Case of the Neologistically Prolix Hyperboreans.'" He smiled. "What do you think?"

She made a face. "Well, to tell the truth…"

"Julie, it's meant to be amusing, for Christ's sake."

"Oh. And Lester's version?"

"'The Myth of the Eskimos' Two Dozen Words for Snow,'" he said testily. "Something like that." He cut a few more slices from the loaf of French bread, loading them with wedges of Gorgonzola, and arranging them on the plate.

"Well, don't get mad, but I have to admit that I like Lester's version better. " Not," she added quickly, "that it's as amusing as yours, of course, but—hey, wait a minute—the
myth
of the Eskimos' two dozen words for snow? You mean they
don't
have them? Separate words for dry snow, and wet snow, and slushy snow—"

"Not two dozen, not fifty, not nine, not forty-eight, and not two hundred and two—each of which has been reported by 'authorities,' most of whom probably know as much Eskimo as I do."

"But… well, how many
do
they have?"

"Ah, you see, that's the hard part. Maybe two, maybe a hundred, depending on whether you're thinking of Inuit or Yupak, or whether you're counting lexemes, or morphemes, or derived—"

"Careful, you're losing me. To say nothing of the waiting masses."

"Look, the important thing is, it doesn't matter, it doesn't prove anything. However many they have, it's no big deal. Look at it this way: How many words do we have for water?"

"Well, I was going to say one, but now I think I'd better wait and see."

"Good move. What about 'ice?' 'Fog?' 'Mist?' 'Snow,' for that matter?"

"Yes, I guess if you want to stretch a point—"

"But it's not stretching a point. They all stand for water in different forms. And what about 'river,' 'stream,' 'brook,' 'creek,' 'eddy'? They all mean water—water moving at different rates in different conditions."

"And you're saying that's the kind of thing the Eskimos do for snow?"

"Sure. And if some Eskimo linguist studied us, he'd probably say English is amazing: separate, completely independent words for standing-water-in-large quantities, standing-water-in-medium-sized-quantities, standing-water-in-small—quantities—"

She wrinkled her nose. "Hold on now.…"

"'Ocean,' 'lake,' and 'pond,'" he said. "We even have one for standing-water-in-teeny-weeny-quantities."

"Mmm…" Thinking, she stared out the window. "Puddle?"

"Now you're catching on, see?"

"Yes, I'm starting to. It's interesting. Now, what's your problem, exactly?"

"I can't seem to come up with a simple way of starting."

"Why don't you write what you just said? The whole bit, from the beginning?"

He looked at her. "That's a good idea, I will." But his face, which had momentarily cleared, fell. "What did I say?"

"Sorry," she said, "if I'd realized you weren't paying attention I'd have taken notes."

"God help me," he wailed, but he was laughing.

He was laughing more these days, she noted with pleasure. Not that he'd ever been ill-humored; far from it. But over the last year or so she'd begun to sense a lessening of verve, of the essential liveliness and interest in everything that had always been such a big part of him. She'd pondered on the possibilities of midlife crisis (he was 44), of career dissatisfaction (he was a full professor at the University of Washington's Port Angeles campus; where did he go from there?), and even—but only briefly and when she was in one of her own rare periods of insecurity—of boredom with their marriage.

It had taken her a while, but in the end she'd put her finger on it: it was Port Angeles itself, the remote, one-time lumbering town on the far side of the Olympic Peninsula, where the university, in an effort to be ready for the sure-to-come population expansion from Seattle, had built a well-endowed, full-scale campus. The problem was that they had gotten there a bit too early. Port Angeles was a lively, attractive town in a glorious location, but a cultural center—a city—it wasn't; not yet. And Gideon, she had belatedly realized after five years of marriage, was a city person through and through, born and bred in Los Angeles. He had taken the Port Angeles position, an associate professorship at the time, largely for her sake, so that she could continue working with ease at Olympic National Park.

He'd never once complained; indeed, in many ways it was obvious that he loved the place—the clean air, the nearby Olympic Mountains, the startlingly beautiful Alpine lakes tucked into pristine green valleys, the laid-back atmosphere of the university campus. But no opera, no real theater or museums, no fine restaurants, no Mariner games. To get to any of those meant a four-hour round trip by highway, bridge, and ferry boat, and when the weather was bad, a pretty common occurrence in these parts, it meant a night spent in a Seattle hotel and a pre-dawn start home the next day if it happened to be a workday. And so, little by little, they'd pretty much stopped going, except for the occasional university event at the main campus. That had suited her fine; she was a country girl at heart, never at her best in cities. But, she had only recently come to realize, it hadn't suited him.

And so when the opportunity had been offered him to join the faculty at the main campus in Seattle—he'd turned down a similar chance once before—she had encouraged him to accept, and this time he had, and they had moved to Bainbridge Island, still on the Olympic Peninsula side of the Sound but only six miles from downtown Seattle, a comfortable 35-minute ferry ride. She had pushed for the move in an open-hearted spirit of self-sacrifice—it would mean a ninety-minute drive to work for her each way instead of her former ten-minute walk, but she'd found that it was a good thing for her too. Her drive was beautiful and uncrowded, a relaxing, mind-clearing ramble over the Hood Canal bridge, through grand, fragrant forests of Douglas fir, and along the lush flanks of the Olympics all the way to Port Angeles. With a new flex-time arrangement, she went in only four days a week now. And she and Gideon were now getting into the city a couple of times a week for one thing or another—and, except for the one night the ferries had stopped running because of the high seas, they had been getting home the same night regardless of the weather.

Things were good. It had been a smart move.

"Going to have any more wine?" she asked, reaching for the bottle.

"I don't think so, thanks," he said, smiling, just as the telephone in the kitchen rang. "Oh, jeez," he said, "that has to be Lester. Would you mind taking it? Tell him I'm anywhere but here, and you don't know when I'll be back."

"I'll do what I can," she said, getting up, "but you know, you'll have to talk to him sometime."

"Not if I can help it. Tell him I went out for a quart of milk last Monday," he called after her, "and you haven't seen me since."

For over a week his editor had been pestering him about the title page. Lester wanted the author listed as "Gideon Oliver, the Skeleton Detective," making use of the irksome nickname that had been applied to him years before by a reporter and had stuck to him like a blood-sucking leech ever since. Lester thought that it might sell a few extra books. After all, he had pointed out in his straightforward way, a lot of people had heard of the skeleton detective, even if they couldn't say exactly where, but who the hell ever heard of Gideon Oliver

Gideon could hardly argue with that, but he'd put his foot down anyway. His academic colleagues, who were a lot more important to his daily happiness than Lester was, would never have let him live it down.

Julie was back in a few seconds with the telephone. "It's not Lester, unless Lester pronounces your name Geedyong Ohleevaire." She handed him the phone and went back to her chair and her brochures.

"Gideon? This is… ahum…"

"Lucien?"

"Yes, that's right. I'm pleased that you recognize my voice."

"Well, of course I would."

Actually, it wasn't the voice, or even the accent; it was that "ahum." Lucien Joly, a formal type, wasn't all that comfortable referring to himself by his first name. Gideon had considered it a major accomplishment that afternoon in the little French village of Dinan, when the inspector had first done it. At the time, Joly had been been attending a forensic sciences seminar in St. Malo a few miles away, where Gideon had been one of the speakers. Afterward they'd worked together on a case and had become friends of a sort. Later Joly had been transferred to Périgueux, the capital city of the
département
of the Dordogne, and when Gideon had made his current plans to go to nearby Les Eyzies to research the celebrated archaeological hoax known as The Old Man of Tayac, he had telephoned him to suggest that they get together. They had agreed to meet for dinner at the restaurant Au Vieux Moulin in Les Eyzies, one of Joly's favorites, on October 7. That was still five weeks away.

"Is there a problem with the seventh?" Gideon asked. "Need to change our date?"

"Change the date?" Julie said from the sofa. "No way, it's taken me a week to work everything out as it is. Besides, I'm only halfway through my French lessons."

"Not a problem, exactly, no," said Joly. "But do you suppose you might come a little earlier?"

"Could be. When did you have in mind?"

"The sooner the better. I was thinking of next week."

"Next week?"

"Next
week
?" echoed Julie. "Absolutely not! Gideon, I'm warning you, you're in very dangerous territory here."

"Yes," said Joly, "I was hoping you could make France your first stop instead of your last."

"I don't think so, Lucien," Gideon said. "We've been working on our itinerary for weeks—"

"
We've
been working?" said Julie to the ceiling. "I really love that."

"—making reservations, arranging flights, and so forth. We already have room reservations in Les Eyzies next month, at the Hotel Cro-Magnon. That's where I stayed the last time I was there and I really like it. I wouldn't want to lose—"

"I'm sure I would have no trouble changing your reservation for you. The thing is, you see, these rather intriguing bones have just turned up here—"

"But we don't even arrive in France until—" He stopped. "Um… bones, did you say?"

"Yes, it's a curious case. They've been found in what seems to be a Paleolithic cave, oddly enough—by a dog, as it happens—and although I have no doubt that it's a homicide, I can't prove it. I was hoping that if you came earlier you might look them over while they're still there and see what you can turn up. It would be a great service to me, but, of course, if it's impossible…"

"Well, no, I wouldn't say it's
impossible
.…"

Up into the air in a fountain of glossy, colored paper went the brochures. "I knew it," Julie muttered. "The minute I heard that 'um… bones?' I knew it. Les Eyzies, here we come. Honestly—"

"Lucien, it seems to be a little noisy at this end. Could you speak up a bit?"

   Paris may well be the most beautiful city in the world, but its outskirts are nothing to brag about. Leaving the Gare d'Austerlitz by train and rolling south toward the Dordogne one travels first through what seem like tens of miles of railroad yards, empty of people but dotted with grimy, isolated freight cars and passenger coaches that stand like tombstones on spurs that lead nowhere. Then come block on block of drab apartment houses, followed by grubby, gray suburbs that are succeeded in turn by grubby gray villages (relieved by an occasional glorious church), all set in flat, featureless countryside.

"Every time I take a train out of Paris," Gideon mused, "I wonder if the landscape is really this ugly, or does it just look that way after you've had your eyes dazzled by Paris itself?"

"It has to be the former," Julie said. "We didn't see enough of Paris to get dazzled."

"That's a good point," Gideon said, nodding.

"And what we did see wasn't that dazzling."

"Very true."

They had begun the fourteen-hour, eight time-zone flight from Seattle early the day before, arriving jet-lagged and seedy at 6:15 this morning, showered and changed at the airport, taken the Air France bus to the city, had a disappointingly so-so breakfast in a glassed-in streetside
brasserie
, managed to get in a morning walk around the Tuileries and then caught a taxi to the train station, where a two-day old garbage men's strike had left the place looking as if it had been hit by a tornado. All in all, not a wildly successful Paris visit, and their moods reflected it.

After an hour or so on the rails, however, during much of which Julie slept, the land developed some character, the fields becoming more contoured, the villages a little prettier and more individual; about on a par, say, with what you'd see driving through southern New Jersey. But then, as the train moved deeper into the rural heart of France, eventually crossing into the
département
of the Dordogne—or the Périgord, as most Frenchmen still referred to it—there were increasingly frequent glimpses of deep-green forests of chestnut and oak, smooth-flowing rivers, and wonderful outcroppings of limestone, brilliant against the darkness of the green.

Gideon too tried sleeping, but, although he was relaxed and comfortable enough, it came only in drifting patches, and most of the time he simply looked dumbly and contentedly at the scenes sliding by the window, or equally dumbly and contentedly at Julie, sound asleep in the chair opposite in their otherwise empty compartment, a single misplaced tendril of her glossy, curly, black hair quivering back and forth on her cheek with every quiet breath.

"You're not watching me sleep, are you?" she asked with her eyes closed.

"Yeah, you caught me. I can't help it. You're sure pretty. I keep meaning to tell you that."