Unnatural Selection (17 page)

Clapper pondered this, taking a last drag on his cigarette, grinding it out, and then nodding while smoke poured from mouth and nostrils. “But where would the squatting facets come in?”

Gideon shrugged. “Auto mechanics spend a lot of time hunkering down to look at the undersides of cars, and at the wheels and things, don’t they?”

“I really wouldn’t know.”

“I wouldn’t either. Either way, though, they could come from something completely unrelated to what he did for a living.”

“Mm,” said Clapper. “Well, it’s something to look into. I’ll see what can be found out about Mr. Williams’s current existence or lack thereof. And what about this Edgar Villarreal? Where would we be likely to find him?”

“Not in this world, it seems,” Gideon said, and explained.

“Eaten by a bear!” Clapper said with a grimace, but at that point they were interrupted by the laughing entrance of Kyle Robb, who burst in triumphantly cradling two large paper sacks in the crooks of his arms. “Mr. Hicks was much revived by lunch, as was Tess, and they decided to finish up that last quadrant today after all, and look what the good little doggie has turned up!”

“ Two more caches?” Gideon asked. “I wasn’t really expecting any-not from there.”

“Only one,” Robb said, placing the bags on the desk, “but it’s a big one, couldn’t fit in one sack.” He stepped back. “Have a look, why don’t you?”

Gideon tore the sacks down their sides and gently spread out their contents. “These are the bones of the thorax, the upper body. And a lot of it is here, Kyle. Scapulas, clavicles, vertebrae, ribs… the top parts of the humeri, too. There’s plenty to work with. This ought to tell us a lot.”

“I thought you’d be pleased,” Robb said, as proud of himself as if he’d personally nosed them out. “I’ve cleaned them up a bit for you.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll pick up, lad,” Clapper said when the telephone rang, and went into Robb’s cubicle to do it.

Presented with all these unexpected bones, Gideon felt like Silas Marner viewing his hoard; he practically wanted to rub his hands together. “First,” he told an observant Robb, “we’ll want to-”

“It’s for you,” Clapper called, holding out the receiver.

Mumbling something, Gideon wandered abstractedly into the other cubicle and took the phone.

Julie was on the other end. “Hi, it’s me.”

“Umm… hi, sweetheart.”

She laughed. “I see the expedition was successful. You found some bones, didn’t you?”

“What? Yes, how did you know?”

“Well, partly because you’re there in the police station, and you said that’s where you’d be if you found something to work on, but mostly because you sound like your mind’s about a million miles away, and that’s the way you sound when you’re deep in bones.”

“Yes, well, as a matter of fact-”

“Gideon, you didn’t forget about the picnic, did you?”

“Uh… picnic?”

He heard a small sigh. “Madeleine Goodfellow invited us all to a picnic-reception and dinner on Holgate’s Green. You do remember that, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” said Gideon affrontedly. “Jeez, Julie, I’m not that absentminded.” Indeed, he did seem to have a vague memory to that effect.

“Yes,” she said dryly, and he knew that she was smiling, “of course you do. Only it’s not on the green; it’s too foggy. It’s indoors, at the museum. That’s where I’m calling from. It started half an hour ago. You are coming, aren’t you?”

“Well, sure, I am. The time just got a little away from me, that’s all.” He cast a last, long, lingering look at the bones in the cubicle opposite. “See you in fifteen minutes.”

As Clapper had predicted, the fog had continued to thicken, swirling in tendrils of graveyard gray, like mist on a stage set. Walking from the police station to the museum, he could actually see it part in front of him, like water before the prow of a ship, and then close again behind him. “Haven’t seen muck like this in donkey’s years,” he heard one dimly seen passerby complain to another. It was only a little after six, three hours until dark, but the store windows were already lit and the street lights were on, although they did little but contribute an occasional sickly, sulfurous, yellow nimbus to the all-enveloping gray goop. Even the footsteps of others and the occasional whispered snatches of conversation he heard were dulled and muffled by the atmosphere. “This is cool! It really creeps you out,” the distorted voice of an invisible child exulted.

With only six feet or so of visibility, it was easy to imagine oneself back a hundred years, on some gloomy, fog-swirling London street, with cutpurses and body snatchers lurking in the alleys and street girls and fishmongers hawking their goods on the sidewalks. At the thought, he laughed aloud, no doubt startling anyone within range. The thing was, there was surely only one person you could reasonably call a body snatcher in Hugh Town at this moment, and his name was Gideon Oliver. As for fishmongers, there actually was one, or rather a fish-and-chips van, customerless and forlorn, parked near the town hall, barely visible in the blurry glow of its single lightbulb.

As he left the town center, the lights grew fewer and the illusion of Victorian times more pervasive, so much so that when the van, now a block behind him, gave up for the day and banged its shutters closed, he took the noise at first for the clop of horses’ hooves. He pulled his jacket closer around him. Although his collar was turned up, his neck was wet with moisture that ran down from his hair. Absently, he touched the facade of one of the seventeenth-century buildings-he had the unconscious habit of grazing his fingers along ancient buildings as he went by them on old streets; for the anthropologist in him, it was a small, nurturing point of contact with the past-but this time he jerked his hand back. The rough-cut stone blocks were as slimy as eels. He shivered.

I’m getting a little creeped out myself, he thought, looking forward to the dinner now. It was going to be good to talk about something other than homicide and body parts. He would listen without a peep of dissent even to Victor’s twaddle about Western thought-dominated non-relational ways of being.

Alas, it was not to be.

He was only halfway down the stairs to the museum’s lower floor, where the buffet was set up, when he was spotted by the invitees, who were standing around the appetizer table, sipping their drinks, crunching potato chips-crisps, as the English called them-and raw veggies, and engaging in what appeared to be animated conversation. Madeleine, in particular, was nattering cheerfully about something; almost singing, her fluty voice jumped an octave at a time, her bracelets jangling in accompaniment.

Liz was the first to see him. “Speak of the devil, there’s the man now!” she exclaimed, to be followed by an eager swiveling of heads in his direction and a blizzard of questions and comments, all flung at him at more or less the same time.

“Hey Skeleton Detective, how the hell did you figure out it was Williams?” a more than usually outgoing Rudy Walker asked.

“So did Edgar really murder him, then?” Joey Dillard wanted to know. No button tonight, but he was wearing a sweatshirt with PETA: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in big blue letters across the front. There was an easy slur to his speech that made Gideon think he’d been getting steadily into the liquid refreshment for the last half hour or so. By now he’d heard that Joey had a tendency to get a bit pickled when the opportunity arose.

“And cut him up in little pieces?” Victor Waldo added with a happy little shudder.

“How exactly did he do it?” Cheryl Pinckney asked with equal avidity. “Kill him, I mean? Could you tell? With a knife, with a gun, did he poison him, did he cut his throat-”

“What are the police going to do about it?” her husband interrupted, his brow wrinkled. He was wearing a button in apparent reply to Joey’s sweatshirt: Support PETA: People for the Eating of Tasty Animals. “Don’t tell me they’re going to want to come and… and grill us?”

“Of course they are,” Victor contributed. “They’ll have to investigate. They can’t just assume Edgar did it. I assume we’ll all be suspects.” He appeared to be thrilled with the idea. “Am I not right, Gideon?”

In the expectant moment of silence that followed this barrage, Gideon wondered briefly if it was too late to get away with pretending not to have heard any of it, or better yet with snapping his fingers as if he’d forgotten something (like the absentminded professor he was, after all), muttering something to himself, and turning around and heading abstractedly back up the stairs… never to return.

No, he thought, looking at the group of eight avid, upturned faces, and one sympathetic, mildly amused one (Julie’s), there was no way to get out of it now. They certainly had a legitimate interest, and he might as well face them now as later. He just wished they weren’t going at it with such morbid relish.

Still on the stairs, he paused, one hand on the railing, took a breath, and began. “Well, first, the idea that those bones are Pete Williams’s is strictly a guess at this point. I mean, there are thousands of visitors a year here, and no one really knows how many-”

“But it’s your best guess, right?” Liz cut in. Tonight she was decked out in a fringed, open-weave purple afghan over stonewashed bib overalls and a tie-dyed T-shirt. More than one person had suggested that Liz’s wardrobe came largely from the landfills she worked in, and Gideon had to admit that they had a point.

“Well, yes, it’s our best guess because it’s our only one, but-”

“Oh, please, get real. Vistors, schmisitors, who else could it be? I mean, I know Edgar’s innocent until proven guilty and all, but the guy came right out in front of everybody and told us he was going to kill him, we just didn’t believe him.” She gave an incredulous little snort of laughter that had just a touch of nasty satisfaction in it. “God, is this bizarre, or what?”

“Liz-”

Kozlov gave him a little breathing room. “Come, come,” he proclaimed with hearty Russian authority, “man is hungry. Give him chance, let him eat. Plenty time for talk. First, eat.”

“That’s an excellent idea, Vasily,” Madeleine trilled. “Why don’t we all get our dinners and sit down?” She clapped her hands. “Come, everybody, enjoy. Our museum ladies have done a splendid job, as you can see. I particularly want to thank Louise Boger and Myrna Vandermeer for assisting with bringing the food inside, and for their artful arrangement of it under trying conditions.” She led the group in applause, at which the two white-haired ladies who had been hovering behind the buffet table responded with flustered little gestures of diffidence and gratification.

In truth, the buffet looked a bit out of place, as if it didn’t know what it was doing in the slightly fusty, exhibit-crowded museum basement, squeezed in between the main floor display, a thirty-foot, crimson-sailed nineteenth-century gig called the Klondike, and a display of nineteenth-century sail-making tools. Prepared by the museum’s Ladies’ Auxiliary with outdoor eating in mind, it was very much a typical English picnic of the potluck variety. There were bowls of varying sizes and colors heaped with couscous salad, rice salad with diced peppers, and tricolor pasta salad; finger sandwiches filled with cheese and tomato, ham salad, ham and cheese, cucumber and butter, and tuna; carrot and celery sticks; individual bags of potato chips with sour cream and salsa dip; sliced, cold pizza; loads of French bread; soft drinks, beer, and hot tea in an urn (no coffee); and two bottles of Pimm’s No. 1, along with the lemonade with which to turn it into a reasonable facsimile of Pimm’s Cup, a concoction no proper English picnic would be without.

Gideon got himself a bottle of Old Speckled Hen pale ale, which had been sitting in a bed of ice-in sensitivity to the peculiar drinking tastes of Americans (not his)-and stood to one side with it while the others got in line at the buffet. Julie, as he expected, waited with him.

She brushed the back of her hand against his wrist. “So how’s it going, big guy?” she asked, smiling. “You look a little stunned. They kind of blindsided you there, didn’t they?”

“Kind of. I guess I didn’t expect you to tell them about Williams.”

“I didn’t. How could I tell them? I didn’t know myself.”

“You didn’t? I didn’t tell you on the phone?”

“Only that the dog had turned up some more bones. Not that you thought they were Pete’s.”

“Well, who told everybody, then?”

“Madeleine.” She picked up a couple of cardboard plates and handed one to Gideon, along with a plastic knife and fork wrapped in a paper napkin.

“Madeleine? How the heck did Madeleine know?”

Julie shrugged. “It’s a small town. News gets around.” She began working her way down the table, putting a little of almost everything on her plate, in line with her current philosophy of healthy eating: lots of variety, but all in tiny portions. This “French” approach, lately recommended by their nutritionist friend Marti Lau, had recently replaced Julie’s devotion to an Atkins-style low-carb diet. Gideon gave it about a year, which would be about standard.

“I guess so,” Gideon said, shaking his head. “It made it from the police station to here before I did.” He helped himself to two cheese-and-tomato finger sandwiches, two of cucumber, a heaping scoop of couscous salad, and a bag of Brannigans Roast Beef and Mustard Flavor Thick Cut Potato Crisps. He was still able to eat just about whatever he wanted without putting on weight, knock on wood. So was Julie for that matter, but keeping up with the latest diets seemed to entertain her, and that was fine with him, as long as he wasn’t required to join in, which he wasn’t. The way they handled it was that whoever took on the cooking that night called the shots. As to dining out, they were on their own. A reasonable and satisfactory arrangement.

The dining table, made up of two folding tables pushed together end to end, was squeezed into the narrow space on the other side of the Klondike. To reach the remaining two chairs they pretty much had to climb up and over some of the others, but everyone was in good humor, and eventually they got there, Gideon at the “foot” (assuming Madeleine, at the far end, was at the head), with Julie around the corner from him on one side, and Kozlov on the other.