Dead Man's Bones

by Susan Wittig Albert

“But you made it,” I pointed out, over the ruckus. “Were you always interested in anthropology? Was that your undergraduate major?”

  She nodded. She was talking more easily now. I couldn’t decide whether it was the subject or the alcohol—the second double had disappeared while I was still on my first single. “I did a couple of summer field schools while I was an undergraduate. Then I married an American and came to the U.S., to Baton Rouge, where my husband was a professor. I applied to the master’s program in anthropology. When I finished, I went to work in the forensic lab. I was there for over ten years. I got the chance to work with police departments and to serve as an expert witness.” She paused, then added bleakly, “My husband and I divorced. It turned out that he didn’t like the idea of another anthropologist in the family, after all.”

  The spare understatement, rich with significance, told a familiar story of professional competitiveness, complicated by ethnicity. Perhaps Alana had been his student, and he had liked her better when she was clearly his subordinate, his inferior. Perhaps, when she grew to be his professional equal, she became competitive, a personal threat. Perhaps—

  But I was speculating, trespassing where I had no invitation to enter. I pushed my plate away and went back to the subject of Brian’s caveman. “The sheriff said he thought the bones were fairly recent—the late 1970s, maybe. He said he discovered some coins.”

  If she wondered how I had come to discuss the matter with Blackie, she didn’t let on. “The latest, I think, was from 1975. Those coins were a lucky find,” she added. “It’s next to impossible to date a skeleton like this by the bones themselves.”

  “The guy died of a crushed skull?”

  “Well, the skull was certainly crushed,” she said cautiously. “Whether that was the cause of death—it’s too soon to tell. I won’t know until I have time to look more carefully at the interior of the skull.”

  She had only half-finished her taco salad, but she pushed her plate away. There was another silence, a longer one. Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias were crooning to all the girls they’d loved before. I like Willie, but this particular song is so charged with macho bravado and sexual exploitation that it makes me want to go kick the jukebox. In the back room, there was the sharp crack of a pool cue and somebody yelled “Gotcha, you sumbitch!”

  Alana picked up her margarita and took another swallow. “You asked how I got into forensic anthropology. Are you still interested in hearing the story?”

  I nodded.

  “It happened because of a young mother in New Orleans, who was murdered several years before I came to the States. I never knew her, of course, but by the time it was all over, she was like a friend. Her bones told me things about her that even her mother didn’t know.”

  She looked at me, checking to see whether I was listening. I was, so she went on, her words definitely slurry now. There was no doubt about it, Alana was looped.

  “The first year of graduate study, I took a summer job as an intern in the LSU forensics lab. I’d been there a couple of weeks when a woman’s remains were brought in for analysis. Somebody was putting in a new sewer line, and the skeleton had been dug up by a backhoe. As we pieced the bones together, you could see that her skull had been badly fractured, as well as most of her ribs, the bones in both arms, one ankle, even her foot.” Her mouth tightened. “A great many fractures, with various degrees of healing. Obviously, they occurred over quite a few years, some of them shortly before her death. It was the skull fracture that killed her.”

  “Abuse,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

  She nodded. “Yes, years of it. The police didn’t have to look very far for the abuser, either. The woman, a black woman, was identified as a former resident of the house on the property where her remains were found. She had simply disappeared one day, about fifteen years earlier. Her mother reported her missing, and the police questioned her husband, who had a history of domestic violence. But he told them she’d been having an affair with another man and had simply taken off. And without a body . . .” She shrugged, her face impassive now, stony. “Well, you know.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know.” Without a body, it’s sometimes hard to get the police to make a serious investigation—unless of course, the family begins calling press conferences. And even when an investigation leads to an arrest, it may be difficult to get a conviction. Not impossible, but definitely not easy. Not a gamble that most prosecutors want to take.

  “Anyway, the police didn’t push it,” Alana went on, “until the body turned up, that is. Then they arrested the husband—by that time, he was married again—and charged him with his first wife’s murder, citing the extensive evidence of abuse. The evidence of the bones.”

  She took another drink, then fell silent, as if she were engrossed in the story, playing it over in her head. As if she had gone back there, to that time and place.

  After a minute, I nudged. “Go on. What happened, Alana?”

  She focused on me, on the present. “What happened? The guy had a good defense lawyer, that’s what happened. A very aggressive woman, very smart and good with words. She argued that the backhoe broke up the woman’s bones in the process of digging them up.”

  A logical strategy for the defense. “Is that what happened?”

  “Of course—that is, some were damaged during the excavation. But the perimortem fractures could be easily identified by the staining on the older trauma and the way the bones had been broken and displaced. The damage caused by the backhoe was recent and entirely different.” She turned the stem of her glass in her fingers. Her voice was sharp, dry. “Any fool could see it.”

  “Any fool. Except for the jury, that is.”

  “Right. But they had help. The forensics expert—my boss—botched his testimony, and the defense attorney caught him on a couple of inconsistencies.” Her eyes had become dark, her voice fierce. “He’d just gotten back from a long trial in St. Louis, where he was the expert witness. This case seemed like an easy one, so he didn’t bother to do his homework. He made some mistakes, stupid mistakes, and the defense attorney pounced on him. She completely destroyed his credibility. The jury acquitted a guilty man.”

  “It happens,” I murmured. I wanted to say that the defense attorney was only doing the job she was paid to do, the job that the system demanded, but I thought better of it. “So this was the case that made you decide to go into forensics?”

  “Not quite.” Pain etched her face. “The man who had been acquitted—six weeks after he walked out of that courtroom, he beat his wife to death with a baseball bat. He didn’t break every single bone in her body, but he broke quite a few of them. Most of her ribs, all four bones in her forearms, her skull, her jaw.”

  Alana was leaning forward now, but her voice had dropped to a grating whisper, and I had to lean forward, too, to hear her over the music, the sound of Willie crooning those abominable lyrics, “To all the girls I’ve loved before.” Love. Love and exploitation. Love and violence. Love and death.

  I shivered, suddenly chilled to the bone, the image of Ruby rising like a ghost in my mind. Ruby, who was no longer listening to her common sense—or her uncommon sense, either. Ruby, who was joyfully falling in love again, abandoning herself to another wild leap off the precipice. But love didn’t mean living happily ever after. Love could mean betrayal. Love could mean—

  I gave myself a hard shake. This was silly, totally and completely stupid. The story that Alana was telling me, grim as it was, had nothing to do with Ruby. The only danger she faced was another broken heart, and that wouldn’t take more than a month or two to mend.

  Alana was going on, and I tuned back in. “Only this time,” she said grimly, “the bastard didn’t get away with it. This time, there was a witness, the woman’s ten-year-old daughter, his stepdaughter, who watched through the keyhole of a closet door. The prosecution didn’t need a forensics expert. The girl told the jury how her mother had cried and pleaded and screamed, until her stepfat
her finally crushed her skull, and she stopped screaming.”

  She blew out her breath in a shuddery puff. More words came out on that breath, too, propelled by a bitter anger. “I’ll always remember the way that little girl cried, up there on the witness stand. That was what made me decide to stay in the business. If that damn fool of a forensics man had done his job right, the second victim would still be alive, and that little girl would never have had to witness her mother’s murder.” She gave me a penetrating look. “There’s only one consolation.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I felt bad that the forensics man lost the first case.” Her mouth went hard, her look was accusing. “But I’m willing to bet that the murderer’s defense attorney—the woman who convinced the jury to acquit—felt a whole helluva lot worse.”

  I doubted it. When you’re a defense attorney, you disconnect your brain from your heart. You’ve got to, or you won’t survive. You know sometimes that your client is innocent, and if he’s convicted you feel like a failure for not saving him. And sometimes you know that your client is guilty as sin, and when you get him off, you feel like a criminal. To keep from feeling rotten all the time, you have to stop feeling, period. I’d bet that defense attorney just chalked another one up to experience.

  I looked at Alana. “It’s time I called it a night,” I said. I hesitated, balancing the obligation I felt against the risk of offending her yet again. “I wonder—maybe you’d like a ride home.”

  She regarded me blurrily. “Think I can’t drive, do you?” She hiccupped, then giggled.

  “I think,” I said, suppressing my anger, “that you don’t want to risk losing your license. The cops around here keep a close watch.” Sheila takes a very hard line when it comes to drunk drivers.

  “You’re just trying to scare me,” she said. She pushed back her chair and stood, wobbling. “But maybe I’ll take you up on the offer.”

  As we went together out the door, Bob gave me a rueful grin and a high sign, and somebody else laughed. I had the feeling that this wasn’t the first time some good Samaritan had driven Alana home.

  She fell asleep the minute after she gave me directions. I had to wake her up to get her into her apartment—not an easy job, since it was on the second floor, and by this time she was leaning on me, dragging her feet and muttering something incoherent. I steered her to the bedroom, dumped her on the bed, pulled off her shoes, and found a blanket.

  I stood for a moment, watching her face as she slept, letting myself feel the anger I’d kept out of my voice a little earlier. This woman had career recognition, challenging and rewarding work, people who believed in her, a bright future. What was driving her to drink? I thought of my mother, Leatha, who had been an alcoholic until just a few years ago. I’d been angry with her, too, until I began to understand that she suffered from a genetic tendency to addiction, and that her need for drink had been kindled and stoked by an overwhelming sense of inadequacy and imperfection, especially where my father was concerned. Leatha could never meet his expectations, could never measure up to his standards.

  Was it something like this that kindled Alana Montoya’s need for drink? Or was it a failed marriage, or the competitions that came with being a Latina in an Anglo world, a woman in a man’s field?

  But there were no answers to these questions. I watched her a minute more, feeling the anger soften and dissolve into a kind of perplexed pity. Maybe she was drinking out of frustration at the delay in getting her program started. Now that I thought about it, that delay didn’t make any sense, either. CTSU had hired her with fanfare; a Latina added to the faculty is one more politically correct plus in a column that used to be called Affirmative Action. (God only knows what it’s called now.) And the program was needed, too. So why wasn’t the department putting more muscle, more money, behind it? Why were they dragging their feet?

  I made a mental note to ask McQuaid about this. I turned off the lights, locked the door, and left Alana to sleep it off.

  Chapter Six

  Horsetail (Equisetum arvense). This herb has been used in many cultures as an externally applied poultice to stop bleeding and speed the healing of broken bones and wounds. Its effectiveness derives from the plant’s high level of silica and silicic acid, which is absorbed directly into the blood and cells. The herb has also been used internally (usually drunk as a tea) as a source of minerals, especially silica and calcium, in a form that the body can use in the repair of skin, connective tissue, and bone.

  I went home, crawled into bed beside McQuaid, and dreamed of bones.

  In my dream I am lost in a dark labyrinth deep under the earth, have been lost for hours, days, weeks, maybe a century. In the dark, time is meaningless, my breath and the hard pounding of my heart the only measures of moments passing. I have a flashlight in my hand, but it keeps flickering out, the fragile light fading, brightening, dimming, finally dying altogether. I am totally wrapped in the smothering dark, my mouth dry as dust. I am so frightened, I can hardly catch my breath.

  Then, through the utter blackness, I glimpse a phosphorescent glow, faintly, eerily green, far away down the pitch-black, rock-strewn corridor in front of me. As I grope my way forward, the glow becomes brighter, and I realize that it emanates from a heap of broken, splintered bones piled on the dusty floor. On the top of the heap sits a grotesquely grinning skull, vacant-eyed and ghastly, its one gold tooth glinting. Somewhere far beyond, in the deathly silence of the cave, I hear a child’s anguished weeping, the crystal echoes breaking around me like the rising and falling of distant music.

  But there is something more. Beneath the sound of weeping, I realize that the skull is speaking to me, whispering my name, telling me something important, something I need to know. Something about the bones themselves, who they belong to, how they got there. But more, I realize that these bones know the way out of the labyrinth, the way to the entrance, the way to safety, to the light. Desperate to hear, I lean forward, lean close, lean closer, my eyes on the empty-eyed skull, listening, so intent on hearing the words that I don’t realize that someone is creeping up stealthily behind me, until suddenly I feel a hand on my shoulders, shoving me forward, and I am falling into the bones; falling, falling—

  “Hey, China,” McQuaid said urgently, shaking me. I was lying half off the bed. “Wake up. You’re having a bad dream.”

  I sucked in my breath, marooned halfway between the fearful cave of my dreams and the familiar comfort of our bedroom. “Oh,” I breathed, and scooted back on the bed, grabbing for McQuaid’s hand. “Oh, wow.”

  “Yeah. Some dream.” McQuaid squeezed my hand, gave me one last pat, and rolled over, already half-asleep. “Must’ve been Bob’s barbecue,” he said drowsily. “It’s potent stuff.”

  But I didn’t go back to sleep, not right away. I lay on my back, watching the twiggy tree shadows on the ceiling. I was still thinking about bones. Broken bones, buried bones, bones that lay in limbo, waiting to be discovered. Bones that talked. And people who listened.

  “THAT was some dream you had last night,” McQuaid said again, the next morning. “It took a long time to wake you up.”

  Brian had already gulped his cereal and orange juice, grabbed his book bag, and galloped out the door to catch the bus to school. Howard Cosell, his morning duties done, had flopped onto the porch step, where he would wait for the school bus to bring Brian back again. And McQuaid and I were enjoying a quiet cup of coffee together before we separated and went off in different directions.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I was dreaming of bones. A glow-in-the-dark skull. It had something to tell me, but you woke me up before I could find out what it was.” I shuddered, not wanting to remember that vast dark emptiness under the earth, the eerily phosphorescent bones, the whispers I couldn’t quite make out. “It wasn’t the barbecue that brought on that dream, though,” I added. “It was Alana.” Alana, the bone doc.

  “Montoya?” Something in McQuaid’s tone caught my attention, and I looked up
.

  “Right. I ran into her when I went to Bean’s for supper. We had quite a talk.”

  He was studiedly casual. “Personal stuff?”

  “Oh, maybe a little. She said she’s divorced—but I suppose you already know that, since you were on the committee that hired her.” I frowned. “How come the Anthropology Department has been so slow in implementing her program?”

  “Dunno.” He stirred coffee. “Maybe they’ve got other priorities.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense, McQuaid. They hired her to develop the new Forensic Anthropology degree, but they haven’t given her money for lab equipment or pushed her courses through the approval process. What’s going on?” Now that I thought about it, it seemed to me that there was something fishy here. “Is somebody deliberately holding up the process?”

  “I said I don’t know, China.” His voice was sharp, and he made an effort to soften it. He leaned back. “Was that all you talked about? Just the program?”

  I shook my head. “Mostly, we talked about bones. Brian’s caveman.” I summarized what she had said, adding, “She also told me how she decided to go into forensic anthropology.” I shuddered. “Two women, beaten to death by the same man. The first woman was dug up by a backhoe. The second one—her daughter saw it all.” I pulled in my breath. “A ten-year-old girl, McQuaid.”

  “The world’s an ugly place,” he said, but not without sympathy. “That shouldn’t be news to you, after your courtroom career. You specialized in dirt, didn’t you? It didn’t seem to bother you then.”

  McQuaid was right, although that wasn’t exactly the point. I had spent a great many years in a dirty world, full of crime and corruption, and I’d had to grow callouses over my conscience just to do the ordinary stuff that had to be done to defend people who might or might not be guilty of the crimes with which they were charged. Which is maybe why I love what I do now. The shop is sometimes hectic and stressful, especially when it’s not making money, but while I may get my hands dirty, my conscience is clean. I—