Uneasy Relations

by Aaron Elkins

  “But no T10? Are you sure?”

  “Am I sure? Julie, I ran the damn study, didn’t I? I worked over these things for three weeks. I know every nook and notch and foramen in her body. Well, in every bone in her body. Well, in every bone that was left. And this one wasn’t left.”

  “Well, then, it has to be from someone else.” Her forehead puckered. “Doesn’t it?”

  “No, it’s from her, all right. The ankylosing spondylitis makes that clear.”

  She sighed. “I knew that at some point in this life I was going to have to learn what ankylosing spondylitis is. It might as well be now.”

  “It’s not that complicated. Spondylos, vertebra; itis, inflammation; ankylose, to fuse, to grow together into one.” He picked them up to show her. “See here, where they’ve been glued together—this crack that runs between them?”

  “Uh-huh. Where the two of them meet.”

  “Yes, but normal vertebrae don’t really meet. They’re completely separate bones. In the living body they’re separated by a disk of pulpy soft tissue—”

  “Umm . . . the intervertebral disk.”

  “Right, and each intervertebral disk has a kind of tough, cartilaginous ring around it—the annulus fibrosus—that keeps the soft stuff in the middle from squirting out, like toothpaste squirting out of a tube, when you put pressure on the spine—which you do every time you stand up, and even more when you sit down. Well, sometimes the annulus fibrosus calcifies, turns to bone, so that the two vertebrae above and below it become fused together, and the result is—”

  “Ankylosing spondylitis.” She took them from him. “Bony bridges that connect one vertebra to another, like these.”

  “You got it.”

  She made a slight flexing motion of the vertebrae. “You know, they—oh!” To her unmistakable consternation, they came apart with a little pop, so that she was left holding one in each hand. She practically flung them away from her, down onto the table, as if they’d burned her. “Oh, my God! I didn’t mean—I don’t know why I—” Even in the dim light, he could see that she’d paled. “Gideon, I’ve broken—”

  “Shh,” he said with a smile, “you haven’t broken anything, sweetheart. Come on, relax that wrinkled brow.” He leaned forward to smooth her taut forehead with his hand. “You’ll wear out that sexy little musculus frontalis. “Look—” He picked the two pieces up to show her. “They just separated where Rosie glued them, that’s all. No harm done. See? They’d already been broken before.”

  “Whew,” she said, melting back into her chair. “Is that ever a relief. I could already see the headlines: ‘Wife of Well-Known Anthropologist Destroys Priceless Scientific Relic.’ ”

  “No, no,” he said laughing. “In fact, it makes the point I’m making even better than before. Look at how the edges match up. They hardly needed the glue.” His tongue between his teeth, he put the two segments gingerly together—they virtually clicked into place—and held them up for her to see. “The broken edges of the bridge make a perfect match, even without the glue, even though one is a cast and one is real bone. Which would never happen if they were from two different people.”

  “Which is how you can be so sure that they’re both really from Gibraltar Woman?”

  “Yes, it’s a real break. Under ordinary circumstances, if I had a T9 and a T10, I might be able to say for sure that they didn’t go together—different ages, different sizes—but I wouldn’t be able to say with certainty that they did go together. But in this case I can— and they do.”

  Thoughtfully, she fingered the vertebrae again—very tentatively this time. “It must hurt.”

  “Sure, and give you a hunched, miserably stiff back as well. And lung and heart problems go along with it. Eye problems too. Basically, it’s a kind of arthritis, really, very incapacitating when it’s as severe as this.”

  “But she was only in her mid-twenties. I would have thought this was an old person’s disease.”

  “Well, most kinds of arthritis are, but not this. In fact, her age is one of the things that pointed specifically to ankylosing spondylitis. It’s not wear and tear or anything like that, you see; there’s a strong genetic component to it, and it affects primarily young adults— mostly men, usually, but sometimes . . . well, as you see . . .”

  “How awful . . . a young mother . . .”

  He nodded his agreement. He was suddenly tired—depleted, depressed—and he could see that Julie was too. No wonder, it was going on midnight, and it had been a very long day; the session at the morgue, which seemed to have been a week ago, had been only this morning. In addition, their predinner drinks and dinner wine had caught up with them. Still, they soldiered on, raising the obvious questions: Where had that T10 come from? Well, from Europa Point, obviously, since that was where the rest of Gibraltar Woman had come from. But how had Sheila gotten it? Had she dug it up long after the dig was formally closed down, when she’d been prowling around the cave with a trowel? Had she found it before the dig was ever started and kept it a secret? Did she find it during the dig and surreptitiously make off with it? And for all of those questions— why? And why did she have it in her room at the conference? Did it have something to do with her murder? Well, they were pretty sure they knew the answer to that; it did. But what?

  But they had run out of steam and weren’t getting anywhere, and they knew it. Besides, by now it was getting chilly out on the terrace. “It’s late,” he said. “Why don’t we leave this till morning, when we’re fresh? What do you say we call it a day?”

  She nodded. “I’m for that. I’m exhausted.”

  AT the reception desk they had the young night clerk, who had come on when George left, put the bag back into the safe and asked for the key to room 205. She went sleepily to the wall of grinning plush monkeys on hooks, reached toward them, and stopped, hand in the air.

  “It’s not here.” She turned back to them. “Are you sure you don’t have it?”

  “No, I left it right here about seven o’clock, with George.”

  The clerk—her name plate said “Kayla”—scanned the rows of monkeys. “I don’t see it. Are you positive you didn’t take it with you?”

  “Believe me, I’d know about it if I had a monkey in my pocket.”

  Kayla was still staring at the wall. “Did you actually see him hang it, or—”

  “No, I didn’t see him hang it. Look, can we get another one until you find it? We’re pretty bushed.”

  Once upstairs (inasmuch as the Rock Hotel used vintage metal room keys, not electronic cards, Kayla had to go up with them to let them in), Julie went yawning to the closet to get her nightie. Gideon, who had meanwhile brushed his teeth, came out of the bathroom to see her standing at the open closet door with a frown on her face.

  “Lose something?” he asked.

  Instead of answering, she said, “Gideon, have you worn your sport coat since we got here?”

  “No, why?”

  “You didn’t rehang it after I put it in the closet?”

  “No, why are you asking?”

  “It’s been hung backward on the hanger.”

  He came over to stand beside her. His gray Harris tweed hung neatly from a wooden hanger. It looked fine to him. “What’s wrong with it? I didn’t know you could hang a jacket backward on a hanger.”

  “Sure, you can. Look at it, it’s hung so that the wooden shoulder supports slant backward instead of forward. I would never in a million years hang a jacket like that.”

  “You’re as bad as Audrey with her toilet paper,” he said, laughing. He placed his hand on his heart. “I solemnly swear that I, Gideon Paul Oliver, did not—” He suddenly understood what she was driving at. “Somebody’s been in the room—they took the jacket down and rehung it the wrong way!”

  She nodded. “And that explains why the key was missing.”

  A hurried search, followed by a more thorough one, found nothing gone, although a few more details seemed to prove the entry of an int
ruder: a pen that she was certain had been lying on top of a post-card was now beside it; the bed skirt, which had been neatly in place when they’d left for dinner, now had a couple of twisted ruffles, as if someone had lifted it to look under the bed. It was odd, but nothing new, that Gideon, who could be so wonderfully, scrupulously observant when it came to some old bone, spotted none of these homely details but had to take Julie’s word for them.

  “They were after the vertebrae,” he said, flopping into an armchair.

  “But they were in the safe, not here.”

  “Yes, but when I left with them after dinner I was going to leave them here. I announced I was going to leave them here.”

  Thoughtfully, she took the chair beside him. “So, one more time, it has to be somebody from the group who did it. They’re the only ones who would have heard you say it.”

  “Of course. They’re the only ones who know about the vertebrae at all.”

  “Well . . . George knows . . . at reception?”

  “Sure, but he’s the guy that put them in the safe for me.”

  “Right,” she said, nodding. “I didn’t really think it was George anyway. I just . . . I don’t know.”

  “You just keep wanting whoever is doing all these things not to be one of these people—one of our friends. I feel the same way. But it’s one of them, all right. There’s no way around it anymore.” He leaned back, hands behind his head, and tried to twist the kinks out of his neck. “And now the vertebrae: How do they fit in? And where the heck did that T10 come from?”

  There was a discreet tap on the door. When Gideon went to answer it he found a smiling Kayla there, holding out a plush monkey with the key to 205 dangling from it.

  Gideon took it. “Thanks, where did you find it?”

  “On the floor, in the Barbary Bar. It looks as if you must have dropped it there after all.”

  “No, I didn’t have it there.”

  “Well, then, you must—”

  “Let me ask you something, Kayla. What time did you come on tonight?”

  “When I always do. Ten o’clock.”

  Ten o’clock. Everybody would still have been out on the Wisteria Terrace at that time.

  “And were you away from reception at all?” He said it with a pleasant smile, so she wouldn’t feel threatened.

  His pleasant smile failed him. Kayla immediately turned defensive. “No! I stay there the whole time.”

  “You’re up here now. You came up with us a little while ago.”

  “Yes, but only for a moment. It’s my job to—”

  “Kayla, relax. You’re not in any trouble. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “You think someone took the key when I wasn’t looking? You think someone was in your room when you were downstairs? Has something been taken?”

  “No, nothing’s been taken, but someone’s been in here. And yes, I think he did get the key when you weren’t looking. Think now. You never left the desk?”

  “Well, I did go to the loo once, but other than that, I never . . . oh, there was one other time—someone telephoned to say that there was a lorry blocking the driveway, but when I went out it was already gone.”

  “Ah.”

  “But I couldn’t have been away for more than thirty seconds.”

  Time enough to snatch a monkey, Gideon thought. “What time would that have been?”

  “Oh . . . ten forty-five, or maybe a little after.”

  Ten forty-five. Just after the session on the terrace broke up and the others were all on their own. “Okay, thanks a lot, Kayla.”

  She hesitated. “Did you want me . . . shall I call the police?”

  “No, don’t worry about it; I’ll take care of it.”

  She looked much relieved; police calls at the Rock Hotel were obviously infrequent and best kept that way, especially on her watch.

  “You are going to call the police, aren’t you?” Julie asked as the door closed. She had changed into her nightie and returned to the armchair.

  “I don’t think so,” Gideon said, returning to sprawl in his chair again. “Not much point to it. It’s after midnight. I’ll tell Fausto about it in the morning. It can wait till then.”

  “Are you sure that’s wise? Isn’t it better to check for fingerprints and things as soon as possible, before we muck them up?”

  “Yes, but what good would fingerprints do, or DNA, for that matter? Everybody who could possibly have done it has already been in the room.”

  “They have?”

  “Yes, the first night, remember? Everybody came by and sat around for a while before the testimonial, schmoozing and knocking back their drinks.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” she said, barely managing to cover a yawn. “Well, I still think we ought to report it.”

  “Report what? That somebody broke into our room and hung my sport coat backward?”

  But she had dozed off in the chair, bare dimpled knees drawn up, chin resting on her hand, dark curls falling over her face. For a long while, he sat there and took her in.

  “You’re sure pretty,” he murmured. “Too bad you’re asleep.”

  “I can be awakened,” she said without opening her eyes. “If there’s a good enough reason.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  JUST as unpacking their clothes on arrival was Julie’s job, as called for by their informal but not-to-be-messed-with division-of-labor agreement, the provision of morning coffee was Gideon’s task. Up a little before seven, he brewed a heavenly smelling pot in their room and carried two mugs of it back to bed, where the upturned corners of Julie’s mouth and her gently quivering nostrils, if not her tightly shut eyes, showed her appreciation and receptivity. (Julie was one of those people who had a hard time speaking in complete sentences, or any sentences at all, until she’d downed a few swallows of good, rich, hot Arabica.)

  Sitting up in bed with their backs against the headboard, swathed in terry cloth Rock Hotel robes, they sipped away and talked some more about the vertebrae, but couldn’t come any closer to a plausible explanation for the attempted theft, or even for the very existence of that mystifying T10, than they had the previous night.

  “Why don’t we join the others at breakfast and ask them about it?” Julie suggested as he was refilling their cups. (By her second cup she was not only able to speak intelligibly, but to make a certain amount of sense.) “You can show them the vertebrae, tell them you know they’re from Gibraltar Woman, and see what they come up with.”

  He frowned. “What would be the point of that? One of them damn well knows how it figures in, but he’s not about to elucidate. Or she.”

  “There are several points. First, maybe one of the others can cast some light. Second, it gives us a chance to watch how they react, which might be helpful. Third, it will make me happier because you’ll be safer.”

  “Come again? How will I be safer?”

  “Well, think about it a minute. Whoever was after the vertebrae must have been after them to keep you from figuring out what they are.”

  “For which he’s too late.”

  “But he doesn’t know that. Well, after everybody knows what they are, there wouldn’t be any point to throwing you off another cliff or zapping you to keep you from finding out.”

  He sipped and nodded, sipped and nodded. “I like it,” he said.

  "ANYBODY else happen to recognize what these are?” Gideon asked, nonchalantly placing the vertebrae in the middle of the table just as the plates were removed and the diners were settling down with their third or fourth cups of coffee or tea. “Because I sure do. And it’s pretty interesting.”

  They were all there, Adrian, Corbin, Pru, Buck, and Audrey. Everybody but Rowley. While their eyes were on the bones, he took the opportunity to do what Julie had suggested and watch their reactions. She was doing the same thing, he could tell. Alas, nobody’s eyes bugged out, nobody’s jaw dropped, nobody appeared to swoon with apprehension. They just looked at the glued-together bones with mild, s
cholarly curiosity.

  “It’s those neck bones that were in the bag,” said Buck.

  “Actually, they would appear to be thoracic,” Adrian corrected. “Lower thoracic, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Correct, as always, Adrian,” Gideon said. “T9 and T10.”

  “And they would appear to have that pathology, what was it, that you found on Gibraltar Woman,” observed Audrey. “Ankylitis spondylosis . . .”

  “It’s ankylosing spondylitis, Audrey, dear,” Adrian said with a tolerant chuckle.

  “Right again,” said Gideon. “Anybody notice anything else significant about them?”

  “Wait just a minute . . .” Corbin said. He picked them up, turned them around, fingered them. “This one’s a cast. But this other one is real.”

  “Right again.”

  “But they go together perfectly, see?” Corbin said, demonstrating, and then setting them back down on the table, one atop the other. “They have to be from the same person. You know, they almost look . . . I don’t understand . . . they almost look . . .”

  “Holy cow!” Pru blurted. “Hey, let me see those things!” Her muscular arm shot forth for it. Corbin flinched away and gave it up without a fight. It was the T9 she was interested in. “You know what this is a cast of?” she exclaimed when she had it in hand. “You know what this is?”

  “I know what it is,” Gideon said quietly.

  “This is a cast of Gibraltar Woman’s ninth thoracic vertebra!” She brandished it for everyone to see. “I should know, I spent all day digging it out with a couple of chopsticks and a damn toothbrush. But . . . this is incredible . . . this tenth . . . this tenth . . .”

  “Did she even have a tenth?” Audrey asked with a scowl. “As I recall—”

  “No!” Pru practically shouted. “That’s what I’m trying to say! She didn’t! She doesn’t!” She turned incredulous eyes in Gideon’s direction. “Where did you get this, Gideon?”