Carved in Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  Threading my way among the gray metal shelves stacked with oblong boxes, I felt like a bookworm browsing in the Library of Congress. There were hundreds of stories recorded in these skeletons—tales of childhood bicycle wrecks, skull-bashing barroom brawls, years of secret domestic violence, decades of gradual decline. To hear a particular story, all I had to do was slide the cardboard box off the shelf, take it to a table, flip open the top, and lift out the bones. Some tales were written in the lurid detail of fractured limbs, cut ribs, and bludgeoned or bullet-shattered skulls. Others were understated, like the sturdy bones of the nineteenth-century black man whose arms and legs and massive muscle attachment points bespoke a life of heavy labor.

  I pulled two boxes from the shelves—old friends, in a way, who had helped me teach thousands of students over the years—and removed a few of their bones. Their broad surfaces were smooth as ivory from the touch of countless hands; as I grasped them, they felt familiar and comforting, these pieces of the dead.

  Unlatching the battered briefcase I kept in the collection room, I laid the bones on the gray foam padding inside and closed the lid. Then I ducked down the back stairs, emerging beside the tunnel that led to the end zone. Threading my way up a maze of concrete ramps and stairs, I emerged near the rear of McClung Museum, a blocky 1960s building that housed the university’s modest assortment of Native American artifacts.

  Two hundred seventy faces turned my way when I strode through the door at one side of the lecture hall in McClung. My introductory class—Anthropology 101: Human Origins—was the only course in the department’s curriculum not taught in the warren of rooms beneath Neyland Stadium; there simply wasn’t room for it anywhere beneath the stands. The museum, whose handful of offices had housed the entire department back when there were only three anthropology professors, now held only the museum’s staff. McClung was quiet most of the time, attracting only a smattering of visitors, but three mornings a week, it bustled with the chatter and laughter of freshman and sophomore undergraduates.

  Most intro courses were taught by junior faculty or even teaching assistants; in fact, I was the only department chairman I knew who still taught a 101 course. I told colleagues that I thought it was important for an administrator not to lose sight of day-to-day teaching, and that was true. Also true, though, was the fact that I loved being around students as they began falling in love with a new subject. With my subject. And—maybe, by extension, just a bit—with me.

  Not romantically or sexually, of course. I’d never gotten involved with a student, though occasionally it had taken considerable willpower to resist the urge. During one unforgettable class, during a revival of the miniskirt, I had meandered over to the left side of the lecture hall to make some point or other about the structure of the pelvis. For the first time in my teaching career, I found myself rendered momentarily speechless on the topic. An attractive young coed in the front row, directly in front of me, chose that exact moment to uncross her legs and languidly drape one leg over the arm of her desk. As her skirt slid up her taut thighs and her flawless pelvic structure, it became clear that underneath, she was wearing nothing at all. Astonished, I looked up at her face; she cocked her head, raised an eyebrow, and smiled sweetly. Beating a hasty retreat to the other side of the auditorium, I struggled manfully to salvage my sentence, my lecture, and my composure. This same student appeared in my office a few days later—I’d just handed out midterm grades, and hers was an F. Her lower lip quivered as she leaned toward me across the desk in a low-cut blouse. “Oh, Dr. Brockton, I’ll do anything to pull up my grade,” she breathed.

  “Then study,” I snapped. She dropped the class three days later, but not before turning in a quiz on the bones of the hand and arm, in which she defined humerus as “something that, like, makes you laugh.”

  Today’s class—like the day of the migrating miniskirt—also happened to focus on pelvic structure. That seemed fitting, since I’d just been examining the pelvis of the body—the woman—found in the cave in Cooke County. As a teaching aid, I’d brought to class two sets of pelvic bones, one male and the other female, from the skeletal collection I’d been building over the years. Using red dental wax as a temporary adhesive, I reattached the pubic bones to the innominates, or hip bones, and then held them up, first the male, then the female. “Okay, I’ve noticed some of you carefully studying the pelvises of your classmates. So I’m sure you’ll have no trouble identifying the differences between the male and female.”

  A laugh rippled across the room—a good beginning. “Which is the female, number one or number two?”

  “Number two,” chorused a handful of voices.

  “Very good. How can you tell?”

  “It’s wider,” chirped one girl.

  “Cuter, too,” added a boy.

  “The bones in front come out farther,” said someone.

  “That’s right, the pubic bones project more,” I said. “Why is that?”

  “Pregnancy?”

  “Right, to make room for the baby,” I said, “not just during pregnancy, but also—especially—during childbirth.” I rotated the pelvis backward by 90 degrees, giving them an obstetrician’s-eye view of the bones that frame the birth canal. “You see the size of that opening? That’s what a baby’s head has to fit through during childbirth. Now compare it to the male’s.” I held up the narrower pelvis in the same position. “Any of you fellows think you could pop a baby out through there? You better hope you never have to try!” I heard a few murmurs along the lines of “Ouch, man.”

  Next I showed them the female’s sciatic notch—the notch just behind the hip joint where the sciatic nerve emerges from the spinal column and runs down the leg. “See any difference here?”

  “Wider.” “Bigger.”

  “Correct. That’s another result of the geometry of childbearing: as the female’s innominates flare out at puberty, this notch gets wider. Notice that I can easily fit two fingers into the base of this notch, but only one in the sciatic notch of the male? So ten years from now, when you’re working a forensic case, and a hunter or a police officer brings you nothing but a single innominate bone, you can tell immediately whether it came from a man or a woman.”

  One of the girls near the front—Sarah Carmichael, according to the seating chart; she wore sensible clothes and asked sensible questions—said, “But if those changes don’t happen until puberty, how can you tell the sex of a child’s skeleton?”

  “Good question, Miss Carmichael. The answer is, you can’t. Before puberty, there’s no reliable way to distinguish between the bones of males and those of females. All you can do is tell whether the bones you have are the right size for a boy or a girl of a given age.”

  Most of them looked puzzled, so I trotted out an example. “When I looked at the child’s bones that were recovered in the Lindbergh kidnapping case”—a few heads nodded, but there were blank looks on a lot of faces—“I couldn’t say for certain whether they were the bones of a boy or a girl. All I could say was that they were consistent with the bones of a twenty-month-old male—which is how old Charles Lindbergh Junior was at the time he was kidnapped and killed. But the bones would also have been consistent with a twenty-four-month-old female.”

  Sarah raised her hand again. “In that case, couldn’t you do a DNA test on the bones and compare it to the parents?” Sarah’s quickness and interest actually made her far more appealing than any temptress in a slithering skirt.

  “You couldn’t back then, of course—the crime occurred about sixty years before DNA testing became common—but you could now,” I said. “The bones have been kept in glass vials; there’s even a little bit of soft tissue on some of them still, so there’s probably plenty of DNA for a test. But the authorities and the Lindbergh family seem confident of the identification: the clothing matched what the boy was wearing, and one of the feet had crossed toes, a genetic anomaly that was pretty distinctive. So there’s really no good reason to put the family through mo
re anxiety this long after the case has been closed.” Sarah nodded thoughtfully.

  “Let’s get back to the pelvis,” I said. “I’m going to pass these around. Be careful. I know most of you fellows have never handled a female pelvis before, so this is a good time to practice a gentle touch.” That was an old joke; it used to get laughs throughout the room, but something had shifted over the past few years, I’d noticed. The boys would still laugh, but the girls tended to frown now instead. I made a mental note to drop that line from the lecture next year.

  As the pelvises made the rounds of the class, I explained how the face of the pubic symphysis—the joint where the two pubic bones meet at the midline of the abdomen—changes with age, and how those changes could reveal a person’s age at death. I passed around two additional pubic bones—one from an eighteen-year-old female, the other from a forty-four-year-old—so they could see for themselves the erosion that occurs during a quarter-century of wear and tear.

  As the female pelvis reached Sarah, I noticed her rotating it, scrutinizing it from every angle. She furrowed her brow and chewed on her lower lip, concentrating intently. I walked toward her row. “Did you have another question?”

  She looked up. “Can you tell just from the bones whether this female—whether any female—has given birth?”

  It was a simple, logical, and innocent question, and it blindsided me completely. Visions of Kathleen—in the throes of labor, and then in the throes of death—writhed in my head, mingling with images of the strangled young woman and her sad little fetus. After what could have been either half a minute or half an hour, I became aware of the students’ stares.

  “Yes,” I finally murmured. “Yes. You can.”

  I stumbled toward the door.

  “Class dismissed.”

  CHAPTER 10

  BY THE TIME I THREADED my way back to the hallway beneath the stadium, my runaway pulse had slowed to a trot and the ragged edge had left my breathing.

  The hallways in the Anthropology Department echo the shape of the stadium above, so where the stands wrap around the end zones, the hallways bend as well. Walking along a dim, curving tunnel that continuously unspools ahead, you get the sensation that you’re in some miraculously preserved Minoan labyrinth or some prodigiously dilapidated space station. As I banked toward my office, Deputy Leon Williams came into view, studying a posterboard presentation on nineteenth-century Navajo skulls.

  “We’re going to make an anthropologist out of you yet,” I said.

  “Well, it might not be too bad if I could stick to bones like these. I don’t have any trouble with ’em when they’re clean and dry.”

  “Yeah, but it’s a whole lot more work to dig those up. There are always tradeoffs and compromises, Deputy, even in science.”

  He waited for me to open my door, but I didn’t. “Don’t you need anything, Doc—notes or bones or something?”

  “No, I’m not quite finished defleshing the skeleton—the skull and pelvis are still simmering in the crock pot. It’s pretty easy to remember what I’ve found so far.” He looked eager to hear more, but I wasn’t feeling chatty. “Sounds like your boss is in a hurry. Reckon we better get going?”

  “Sure thing.” He spun on his heel, and I followed him out to the Cherokee, which was tucked between two of the diagonal steel girders supporting the stadium’s grandstands. A one-lane strip of asphalt encircled—or would it be “en-ovaled”?—the base of the stadium, threading between the rows of massive girders and branching, in places, into short, dark spurs of pavement that led into catacombs where I imagined the high priests of the religion of Southeastern Conference football must be entombed.

  Williams and I talked UT football for a while, but I could tell he was itching to ask other questions. Finally, as we merged onto the interstate, he broke. “I bet you’ve had some interesting cases, huh, Doc?”

  “Well, they’re all interesting to me.”

  “But what’s the most interesting? Or the most unusual?”

  “Hard to say.” I thought for a minute. “One of the most unusual, I suppose, was the woman in Connecticut whose husband—a former police officer, by the way—killed her and cut her up and burned her body in the front yard.”

  He whistled. “Sounds like a TV show—When Good Cops Go Bad.”

  “I’m not sure he was ever a good cop; he may have just gone from bad to worse. There were several odd things about that case. One is that we were never able to figure out what he used to cut her up. Another is that he went to the fire department and got an open-burning permit the day he cremated her.”

  He hooted, then turned to face me for an unnervingly long time, considering that he was now driving at seventy-five miles an hour. “A permit? Are you shittin’ me, Doc?”

  “No, I’m not, Deputy. I guess he didn’t want to break any really important laws in the course of murdering and dismembering his wife.”

  Mercifully, Williams refocused his gaze on the road ahead. His voice got conspicuously casual. “Anything weird showing up in our case?”

  I paused, searching for the right way to do this. “You know, Deputy, Sheriff Kitchings said this is likely to be a pretty sensitive case, and he seemed worried that the phone line might be tapped. If somebody’s tapping your phone, they might have your vehicle bugged, too.” Williams looked simultaneously startled and suspicious, though I couldn’t tell whether the suspicion was directed in my direction or elsewhere. “I think we better wait till we’re someplace the sheriff knows it’s safe to talk.”

  “Good idea.” He nodded and smiled. Underneath the smile, though, I noticed his jaw muscles working.

  When we left the interstate to snake along the river road, he kept his speed down and his turns gentle. I thanked him for taking good care of me. This time, he smiled in earnest.

  “So how’d you end up in law enforcement, Deputy?” It was a question I always like asking officers, because the range of answers—of motivations, of pathways—seemed nearly infinite, and usually fascinating: a family tradition for three generations; a brother who was murdered; an overdose of Dragnet reruns; a genuine desire to make the world a better, safer place.

  Williams was quick with his answer. “You remember I told you about my granddaddy?” I nodded: the man unjustly jailed, then shot and burned to death. “I wanted to make sure that kind of thing never happened to any of us again. Only way to do that is to be the guy with the badge and the keys.” It wasn’t the most noble reason I’d ever heard, but I could see the logic of it up here in Cooke County.

  We had reached the most tortuous section of the road when Williams slowed and began edging onto the right-hand shoulder of the road, such as it was. “Doc, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to stop and take a leak.”

  “We’re pretty close to town—you can’t wait?”

  “No, sir, I don’t think so. I drank a lot of sweet tea in the cafeteria while you were in class; too much, I reckon. I do apologize. You just sit tight and I’ll be back in one minute.”

  And with that, he was gone.

  He didn’t come back in one minute, or two, or even three. To pass the time, I pulled a notepad out of my pocket and began drafting a job recommendation a former student had asked me to write. At last the door swung open. “I was about to send out a search party,” I said, my eyes still on my notes. “You must have had a couple quarts of tea with your lunch, Deputy.” But it was not the deputy who leaned down and peered at me through the open door. It was a bear of a man, dressed in a camouflage jumpsuit, the tree-bark pattern worn by deer hunters, complete with a camouflage cap.

  “Dr. Brockton, I’m real sorry about this, but we got a little change of plans. My name’s Waylon. Now, I ain’t gonna hurt you. How about sliding over behind the wheel and pulling back onto the road? You’re gonna head toward town a piece, then make a turn where I tell you.”

  “Where’s Deputy Williams?”

  “Leon? He’s all right, don’t you worry none about him. He’s just kindly…tied up
at the moment, you might say.” The big man flashed either a grin or a grimace at me.

  I sat. “Would you mind telling me what’s going on?”

  “Somebody needs to talk to you. In private. Prob’ly won’t take a half a hour, then we’ll get you back to town so you can go on about your business with the sheriff.”

  I studied Waylon. He outweighed me by at least a hundred pounds, and I was guessing there was a pistol tucked somewhere in that camo suit. Maybe a skinning knife, too. “What if I say no?”

  He sighed. “Look, Doc, ain’t no reason we got to have trouble between us. I told you, I ain’t gonna hurt you, but I will hogtie you if I have to. Besides, you’ll want to talk to this fellow I’m taking you to. I bet he can help you figure out who you pulled out of that cave the other day.”

  News travels fast in a small town. I cranked the engine and shifted into gear. “You tell me where to go.”

  He grinned, flashing a smile of scattered teeth, pitted with cavities and flecked with chewing tobacco. “Now you’re talking. Once you cross that next bridge, take your first right. It’s gravel.” We wound along for maybe a mile; during that time, I considered half a dozen escape plans and rejected them all—not because I was hopelessly outmatched, though plainly I was. I rejected them because this homespun mountain man had shrewdly punched the one button—short of threatening my family—that was guaranteed to ensure my complete cooperation: he dangled before me the prospect of a forensic revelation.

  We thunked onto a new concrete bridge—obviously a replacement for some predecessor that had washed away in one of the floods that frequently scoured the mountain valleys—and off the other side. “Best slow down a bit—it’ll sneak up on you. Right yonder—you see it?”