Bones to Ashes

by Kathy Reichs

  “When Laurette got too sick to work, hubby’s kin took her in. The Landrys lived outside of town. Kept mostly to themselves. One old-timer called them morpions. Trailer trash. Said they were mostly illiterate.”

  “Laurette had a driver’s license.”

  “No. Laurette had a car.”

  “She must have been licensed. She drove across the border.”

  “OK. Maybe someone got paid off. Or maybe she was smart enough to read a little and to memorize road signs. Anyway, Philippe took off while Laurette was pregnant with Obéline, leaving her to support the two little girls. She managed for five or six years, then had to quit working. Eventually died of some sort of chronic condition. Sounded like TB to me. This guy thought she’d moved out toward Saint-Isidore sometime in the mid-sixties. Might have had family living that way.”

  “What about Philippe?”

  “Nothing. May have left the country. Probably dead somewhere.”

  “And the girls?” My heart was thumping my rib cage.

  “Obéline Landry married a guy named David Bastarache in eighty. I’m running him now. And following the Saint-Isidore lead.”

  “What about Évangéline?”

  “I’ll be straight. I ask about Laurette or Obéline, I get cooperation. Or at least what sounds like cooperation. I ask about the older sister, people go iceberg.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I’ve been at this awhile. I got antennae. I ask about this kid, the answers come too quick, too consistent.”

  I waited.

  “No one knows shit.”

  “Hiding something?” My grip on the handset was raising the cords in my wrist.

  “I’d bet money on it.”

  I told Hippo what I’d learned from Trick Whalen. The Miramichi pawnshop. The mojo sculpture. The Indian cemetery.

  “You want I should call this guy O’Driscoll?”

  “No. If you can get contact information, I’ll follow the bone trail while you chase the leads in Tracadie.”

  “Don’t go ’way.”

  Hippo put me on hold for a good ten minutes.

  “Place is called Oh O! Pawn. Catchy name. Says we care.” He supplied a phone number and an address on the King George Highway.

  Cellophane crinkled. Then, “You said you found something wrong with the kid’s skeleton.”

  “Yes.”

  “You figure that out?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You willing to work on Saturday?”

  The 82nd Airborne couldn’t have kept me from those bones.

  By eight-thirty I was at Wilfrid-Derome. Contrary to reports, there’d been no rain and the weather hadn’t cooled. Already the mercury was pushing eighty.

  I rode the elevator alone, passed no one in the LSJML lobby or corridors. I was pleased that I’d have no disruptions.

  I was wrong. One of several misjudgments I’d make that day.

  First off, I dialed O’Driscoll. The phone went unanswered.

  Disappointed, I turned to the skeleton. Hippo’s girl. Before being interrupted by the Iqaluit skull and the dog exhumation in Blainville, I’d cleaned what remained of her trunk and limb bones.

  Going directly to her skull, I cleared the foramen magnum and emptied soil and small pebbles from the cranial base.

  At nine-thirty, I tried O’Driscoll again. Still no luck.

  Back to teasing dirt. Right auditory canal. Left. Posterior palate. The lab thundered with that stillness possible only on weekends in government facilities.

  At ten, I lay down my probe and dialed Miramichi a third time. This time a man answered.

  “Oh O! Pawn.”

  “Jerry O’Driscoll?”

  “Speaking.”

  I gave my name and LSJML affiliation. Either O’Driscoll didn’t hear or didn’t care.

  “You interested in antique watches, young lady?” English, with a whisper of brogue.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Two beauties just come in. You like jewelry?”

  “Sure.”

  “Got some Navajo turquoise that’ll knock your socks off.”

  Navajo jewelry in a New Brunswick pawnshop? Must be a story there.

  “Mr. O’Driscoll, I’m calling about human remains you sold to Trick and Archie Whalen several years back.”

  I expected caginess. Or lack of recollection. O’Driscoll was polite, expansive, even. And had recall like a credit card agency computer.

  “Spring of 2000. Kids said they wanted it for a college art project. Said they were constructing some kind of homage-to-the-dead display. Sold it to them for sixty-five bucks.”

  “You have an excellent memory.”

  “Truth is, that was the first and last skeleton I ever traded. Thing was older than all the angels and saints. Lots of broken bones. Face smashed in and caked with dirt. Still, the idea of selling dead souls didn’t sit well. Didn’t matter if the poor devil was Christian or Indian or Bantu. That’s why I remember.”

  “Where did you get the skeleton?”

  “Fella used to come in every couple months. Claimed he was an archaeologist before the war. Didn’t mention which war. Always had this mangy terrier trailing him. Called the thing Bisou. Kiss. No way I’d have put my lips anywhere near that hound. Guy spent his time searching for stuff to pawn. Poked through Dumpsters. Had a metal detector he’d run along the riverbank. That sort of thing. Brought in a brooch once was pretty nice. I sold it to a lady lives up in Neguac. Most of his finds were junk, though.”

  “The skeleton?”

  “Guy said he found it when he went out to the woods to bury Bisou. I wasn’t surprised. Dog acted a hundred years old. Old geezer looked like he could really use a lift that day. Figured I’d take a loss, but I gave him fifty bucks. Didn’t see any harm in it.”

  “Did the man say where he’d buried his dog?”

  “Some island. Said there was an old Indian cemetery there. Could have been hooey. I hear a lot of that. People think a good tale ups the value of what they’re offering. It doesn’t. An item’s worth what it’s worth.”

  “Do you know the man’s name?”

  O’Driscoll’s chuckle sounded like popcorn popping. “Said he was Tom ‘Jones.’ I’d bet my aunt Rosey’s bloomers he made that up.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Guy was French. Pronounced the name Jones. Spelled it Jouns.”

  “Do you know what happened to him?”

  “Stopped coming about three years back. Old duffer was frail and blind in one eye. Probably dead by now.”

  After the call, I returned to the bones. Was there truth to Tom Joun’s Indian burial ground story? Could Hippo’s girl be a pre-Columbian aboriginal?

  Cranial shape was distorted by breakage and warping. No help there. I rotated the skull and looked at the remnants of the face. The nasal spine was almost nonexistent. A nonwhite trait. Though dirt packed the opening, the orifice seemed wider than is typical of Europeans.

  I went back to teasing dirt. Time passed, the only sounds in my lab the competing hums of the refrigerator and the overhead fluorescents.

  The eyeballs are separated from the frontal lobe by the paper-thin bone forming the floor of the anterior cranial fossa. Clearing the right socket, I found jagged breaches in that floor. I moved on.

  I’d emptied the left orbit when something caught my attention. Laying aside my pick, I dampened a cloth and swiped a fingertip over the orbital roof. Dirt came away, revealing pitted, porous bone in the upper, outer corner of the socket.

  Cribra orbitalia.

  Now we were getting somewhere. Or were we? While cribra orbitalia has a fancy scientific name, and the lesions are known to occur most commonly in kids, their cause has yet to be satisfactorily explained.

  I did one of my mental rundowns. Iron deficiency anemia? Vitamin C inadequacy? Infection? Pathogenic stress?

  All of the above? None of the above? A and B only?

  I was as puzzled as ever.


  Findings to this point included modification of toe bones, enlargement of nutrient foramina in the hands and feet, cortical destruction on at least one metacarpal, and now cribra orbitalia. Abnormally pitted orbits.

  I had plenty of dots. I just had to connect them.

  One thing was becoming clear. This girl had been sick. But with what? Had the ailment killed her? Then why the caved-in face? Postmortem damage?

  Using warm water, I cleaned the entire left orbit. Then I picked up a magnifying lens.

  And got my second surprise of the morning.

  A black squiggle crawled the underside of the supraorbital ridge, just inside the thickened upper border of the socket.

  A root impression? Writing?

  I hurried to the scope and balanced the skull face-up on the cork ring. Eyes on the screen, I jacked the magnification.

  Tiny hand-lettered characters leaped into focus.

  It took several minutes, and several adjustments, but I finally managed to decipher the inscription.

  L’Île-aux-Becs-Scies.

  The quiet of the empty building enveloped me.

  Had Jouns marked his skeleton with the name of the island on which he’d found it? Archaeologists did exactly that. He’d claimed to have been one in his youth.

  I flew from my lab, down the corridor, and into the LSJML library. Locating an atlas, I flipped to a map of Miramichi.

  Fox Island. Portage. Sheldrake. Though I pored over the map portions depicting the rivers and the bay, I found no Île-aux-Becs-Scies.

  Hippo.

  Back in my lab, I dialed his cell. He didn’t pick up.

  Fine. I’d ask him later. He’d know.

  Returning the skull to my worktable, I began freeing dirt from the nasal orifice with a long, sharp probe.

  And encountered my third surprise of the morning.

  13

  T HE APERTURE RESEMBLED AN UPSIDE-DOWN HEART, NARROW AT the top, bulging at the bottom. Nothing spiked from the dimple on the heart’s lower edge.

  OK. I’d been right about the wide nasal opening and reduced nasal spine. But the nasal bridge was narrow with the two bones steepling toward the midline. And I could now see that the periphery of the orifice looked spongy, indicating resorption of the surrounding maxilla.

  The girl’s nasal pattern didn’t mean she was Indian or African. The spike had been reduced, the shape modified by disease.

  What disease?

  Defects on the hands, feet, orbits, nose.

  Had I missed something on the skull?

  I examined every millimeter, inside and out.

  The cranial vault was normal. Ditto for the base. What remained of the hard palate was intact. I was unable to observe the premaxillary, or most forward part of the roof of the mouth. That portion was missing, along with the incisors.

  I rechecked the postcranial skeleton and found nothing beyond what I’d already spotted.

  Hands. Feet. Orbits. Nose. What disease process would lead to that kind of dispersed bone damage?

  Again, I considered possibilities.

  Syphilis? Lupus vulgaris? Thalassemia? Gaucher’s disease? Osteomyelitis? Septic or rheumatoid arthritis? Blood-borne parasite? Infection due to direct extension from the overlying skin?

  Diagnosis would take research. And with so much bone missing or damaged, I wasn’t optimistic.

  I was pulling out Bullough’s Orthopaedic Pathology when Hippo came through the door. He was wearing a shirt festooned with bananas and red palm trees, gray pants, and a hat that would have made a drug lord proud.

  Despite the “don’t worry, be happy” attire, Hippo did not appear to be having a good day. The bags under his eyes were heavier than usual, and he was frowning.

  Hippo took a seat on the opposite side of the table. He smelled of bacon and stale deodorant.

  “Saturday casual?” I asked, smiling.

  Hippo didn’t smile back.

  “I found the kid sister.”

  “Where?” Suddenly Hippo had all my attention.

  “I want you to hear me out.”

  I settled back, elated, yet anxious at the same time.

  “I did some poking into the husband.”

  “David Bastarache.”

  “Bastard would be more fitting. Your pal’s little sis married into a family of smugglers and bootleggers.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “David’s granddaddy, Siméon, made a nice chunk of change running rum in the twenties, invested in real estate. Bars in Tracadie and Lamèque. A rooming house in Caraquet. David’s daddy, Hilaire, put his inheritance to good use. Turned some of the old man’s properties into ‘hides,’ safe havens for illegal booze and contraband.”

  “Wait. Rumrunners?”

  “Remember that proud moment in American history brought to you by the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act?”

  “Prohibition.”

  “Nineteen twenty to 1933. Republican and Prohibition parties jumped in bed with the Temperance Movement.” Hippo gave a half grin. “That where you got your name?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re a Pepsi hugger, right?”

  “Diet Coke. Back to Bastarache.”

  “As you will recall from your history lessons, some politicos and Bible thumpers may have taken the pledge, but a great many Americans did not. Familiar with Saint-Pierre et Miquelon?”

  Lying south of Newfoundland, the little island cluster is the last remnant of the former colonial territory of New France. Essentially under French control since 1763, a 2003 constitutional reform changed its status from territorial collective to oversees region, like Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean, French Guiana in South America, and Réunion in the Indian Ocean. With its own postal stamps, flag, coat of arms, and sixty-three hundred fiercely Francophile souls, Saint-Pierre et Miquelon is the Frenchest of French outposts in North America.

  I nodded.

  “Americans still wanted their cocktails, and the French didn’t give a rat’s ass about Prohibition, so Saint-Pierre et Miquelon stepped up to the plate. In the twenties, the place was awash with booze. I ain’t just talking Canadian whiskey. Champagne from France. West Indian rum. British gin. And all that hooch needed distribution. That meant good times for many small villages in Atlantic Canada.”

  Hippo misread my impatience for disapproval.

  “A man could make more running one load of booze than he could freezing his ass all year in a fishing boat. What would you choose? Anyway, right or wrong, booze flowed down the eastern seaboard and into Rum Row.”

  Hippo gave me a questioning look. I nodded again. I’d also heard of Rum Row, the flotilla of ships anchored beyond the three-mile limit off the U.S. East Coast, waiting to offload liquor for entrepreneurs such as Al Capone and Bill McCoy.

  “You know the outcome. Twenty-first Amendment pulled the plug on Prohibition, but Uncle Sam taxed booze up the wazoo. So smuggling continued. Eventually, the States and Canada independently declared war on the Atlantic rumrunners. Ever hear the Lennie Gallant song about the Nellie J. Banks?”

  “Maybe at Hurley’s.”

  “The Nellie J. Banks was Prince Edward Island’s most notorious rumrunner. Also her last. Boat was seized in thirty-eight. Ballad tells the story.”

  Hippo’s eyes wandered to a spot over my shoulder. For one awful moment I thought he was going to sing. Mercifully, he continued talking.

  “The RCMP and Canada Customs still got their hands full. But it’s not like the old days. The slimeballs working the coast now mostly deal in drugs and illegal immigrants.”

  “Your knowledge is impressive.”

  Hippo shrugged. “Rumrunners are kind of a hobby. I’ve read up.”

  “This has something to do with Obéline’s husband?”

  “Yes. I’m getting to that. Hilaire Bastarache was second in line. Wanting to up the profits, after World War II, he added a new wrinkle.”

  “Not smuggling.”

  Hi
ppo shook his head. “The skin trade. Titty bars. Whorehouses. Massage parlors. Proved very lucrative.

  “David, the third in line, is a strange duck, kind of a cross between Howard Hughes and some sort of urban militiaman. Keeps to himself. Distrusts anything having to do with government or its institutions. Schools. Military. Health care. Guy’s never registered for social security, Medicare, voting. Was hit by a truck once. Refused to be taken to the hospital. And, of course, cops. Bastarache especially hates cops.”

  “I can see why someone in vice would be wary of the police, but why the paranoia about authority in general?”

  “Part of the blame goes to Daddy. Little David was homeschooled, kept on a very short leash for a very long time. Hilaire Bastarache wasn’t what you’d call gregarious. But it goes deeper than that. When the kid was ten he saw his mother gunned down in a botched raid on one of the old man’s warehouses.”

  “Was she armed?”

  Hippo shook his head. “Wrong place wrong time. Ruby Ridge kind of thing.”

  Hippo referred to the 1992 siege of an Idaho cabin by U.S. Marshals. During the incident, an FBI sniper shot and killed a woman while she was holding her ten-month-old son.

  “Despite his hang-ups, Bastarache manages to take care of business. Keeps himself insulated with layers of hired muscle. Granddaddy’s establishment in Caraquet got busted several years back. The current Bastarache hadn’t a clue the place was being used as a cathouse. Thought he was renting rooms to upstanding young women.” Hippo snorted derisively. “The court bought it. Prossie named Estelle Faget took the fall.

  “Bastarache owns a strip club in Moncton off Highway 106. Le Chat Rouge. Shifted his base there in 2001. But I understand he’s spending a lot of time in Quebec City these days. Has a bar there called Le Passage Noir.”

  “Why the relocation?”

  “Got caught nailing a stripper. Turned out the kid was sixteen. Bastarache decided it was in his interest to leave Tracadie.”

  “Christ.” My voice dripped with disgust.

  Hippo pulled a folded paper from his pocket. When I reached out, he pressed it to the tabletop.

  “My sources say Bastarache doesn’t payroll choirboys.” Hippo’s eyes locked onto mine. “Word on the street is his enforcers play very rough.”