Old Bones

by Aaron Elkins

  "Which means that the probability of your sharing any particular gene, nasty or otherwise, is .00049. And even if you did, the chance of any of your children getting a double dose of a recessive is only a quarter of that."

  Understandably enough, Claire still looked confused, and on impulse Gideon reached out to put his hand on the back of hers. It was cool and dry. He could feel her fragile tendons through the thin skin. "For all practical purposes," he said, "you aren’t related at all. There isn’t anything to worry about."

  Her brow finally relaxed. "Thank you, Professor Oliver," she said with a smile and took her hand back.

  "Gideon." He noticed that her hand slipped under the table and Ray’s moved stealthily towards it. One more glass of wine and he’d probably have said: "Bless you, my children."

  The main course of leg of lamb—famous, Claire told them, for its delicate, spicy flavor that came from having been raised in the nearby coastal salt pastures—and white beans and fried potatoes was consumed in an atmosphere of increasing camaraderie that was enhanced by the fresh bottle of Médoc. Once Ben began to ask about the murder investigation, but Claire’s sudden, visible shrinking (or more likely a crisp kick in the shins from Sophie) quieted him. Mostly, they talked about the history and architecture of the Mont, about which Claire was shyly knowledgeable.

  "I know what," Ray said, flushed with wine and enthusiasm, and looking very boyish with his freckles and his bowtie. "Let’s walk out into the bay and have a look at the Mont from there. Assuming," he added quickly, "that the tide is still out, of course."

  Sophie put down her coffee. "Are you out of your mind, Raymond?"

  "Why?" he responded with a startled blink. "Oh, I see. But what happened to Guillaume was a freak accident;

  everyone knows that. It’s just that I’ve always wanted to walk out into Mont St. Michel Bay and see the abbey soaring behind me in the mist, like a prow of a ship, the way Henry Adams described it."

  "Oh, I think it’s a wonderful idea, Raymond," Claire said warmly.

  "But isn’t it dangerous?" asked Sophie. "After all—"

  "No, no, Aunt Sophie, when I was a little girl in Avranches my friend and I used to play in the sands all day. If you simply pay attention to the tide, and know what the quicksands look like, and keep an eye out for the mist, and don’t go off by yourself, it’s perfectly safe."

  "Those are a great many qualifications," Sophie said severely.

  "No," Ben laughed, "I think Claire’s right. It’s no secret Guillaume was getting a little, well, forgetful, and the fact is, he never should have been out there alone. Not that I know who was going to stop him." He drained his coffee with a smile. "But in any case, I’m afraid it’s all moot, kids. Sorry to be a spoilsport, but I’m afraid we ought to be driving back. Sophie’s coming down with a cold, and I want her to put her feet up and have a good long nap this afternoon."

  "I have an idea," Gideon said. "Why don’t you two go ahead and take Guillaume’s car back? We can drop off Claire and Ray later on. To tell you the truth, I’d enjoy wandering around the bay myself, especially with a guide who knows something about it."

  Beside him, John stirred restlessly. Gideon half-expected a thud against his own shin, but none came; merely a grumbled "I thought you wanted to tour the abbey," just to let Gideon know he wasn’t getting by with anything.

  "That’s a wonderful idea, Gideon," Ray said. "Claire, how can we find out about the tide?"

  "There’s a tourist office in the Old Guard Room near the entrance down below. They have tidetables there."

  "You don’t have to go all the way down there," Ben said. "I’ve got one here somewhere…" He tapped the pockets of his jacket and trousers unsuccessfully, and finally located it in a coat he’d left on the rack near the door. He came back to the table thumbing through a small booklet. "Annuaire des Marées," Gideon read on the blue cover, "des Baies de Saint-Malo et Mont Saint-Michel. 1987."

  "Let’s see," Ben said. "March, um, twenty-third, right?" He ran his finger carefully along a line. "Right, here it is. High tide was at 10:21 this morning, and low tide isn’t until… 5:15." He closed the booklet and looked at his watch. "You’re in good shape. It’s only a little after two, so you have three hours before it even begins to rise."

  "More than that," Claire said. "It will be—What do you call it, dead water?—for a least an hour after low tide." She smiled at Sophie. "But I promise we won’t stay out anywhere near so long."

  "Good," Sophie said querulously. "But I still think it’s a rotten idea."

  TO go down they had to go up. The path to the sands began at the Abbey Gardens on a shelf near the top of the rock, and there they stood for a few minutes looking out over the misty enormity of the Bay of Saint-Michael-inPeril-from-the-Sea. The low rain clouds that had been hovering over the Mont had moved westward so that to their left the wooded coastline was shrouded in fog. To their right they could see a wide expanse of what looked like desert scrub brush—the famous salt pastures, Claire explained, originally planted centuries ago in a futile effort to stabilize the sands—and beyond them the distant low roofs of Avranches.

  In front of them was the bay itself, featureless except for a few narrow streams that wandered through it in great, lazy curves. Everything was veiled in a thin mist shot through with watery, pink-tinged sunlight, so that sand and sky blended into a bland, disorienting world of pale, diffused mauve. No, not quite blended. There, on the horizon, ten miles off or more, Gideon could just make out the gray, gleaming ribbon that was the receding tide. He watched it for a while, trying to tell if he could see it change—it was, after all, the fastest-moving tide in Europe—but it remained the same: a flat pewter strip separating a smooth and formless earth from a smooth and formless sky.

  "What do you call that dog," John asked dreamily, "with the gray fur? Big dog, short hair—"

  "A Weimaraner?"

  "Right. That’s what this sand reminds me of; what a Weimaraner must look like to a flea coming in for a landing."

  Gideon laughed. "Amazing. I’ve never known you to be moved to poetic fancy before."

  "No kidding, Doc, is that what that was?"

  "You’re in good company, John," Ray said. "You’ll be happy to know that du Guesclin himself used the same metaphor in—1390, I believe it was. Well, not quite the same, but close enough."

  "That would have been difficult," Claire said. "Du Guesclin died in 1380."

  Her eyes darted hesitantly at each of the men. She wasn’t used to making jokes, Gideon could see, and she was trying to gauge whether she’d gone too far.

  Ray’s burst of laughter set her at ease. "Is this," he said with mock austerity, "what I have to look forward to? A lifetime of caviling fault-finding over trivial arcana?"

  "Yes!" she said, bubbling over with too much intensity, like a child learning to play. "Oh, yes!" Then she giggled; a girlish, appealing tinkle of pleasure that made her look almost pretty. "Whatever it means—what you said." She was certainly coming out of her shell.

  Ray squeezed her hand, looking flustered and pleased. "Perhaps we ought to go down now," he said primly. "We want to be sure to be back within three hours."

  At the base of the Mont they had to clamber over algae-slimed granite boulders, then slog through fifty feet of black mud. Claire, wearing tennis shoes she’d carried with her for walking, led the way, moving with confidence. When they reached the sand she said: "Before we go any further, I think it would be good for you to know what quicksand looks like. Would you like me to show you?"

  She went to the top of a hummock—the tidal plain, seemingly so featureless and smooth from above, was actually full of furrows, humps, and depressions—and looked around her, leaning into the misty glare and shielding her eyes with her hand like a Gilbert and Sullivan sailor. "There!" she said. "Come!"

  They went to a roughly circular patch of sand perhaps ten feet in diameter. Unlike the flat-toned, uneven surface everywhere else it was glossy and smooth, brown ra
ther than mauve. And not in the least dangerous-looking.

  She pointed to smaller patches nearby. "As you see, there’s a fair amount of it. In the summer, when the tourists come, the sands are more stable, thank God. But in winter you must watch where you go. Gideon, is something wrong?"

  "Claire, if it’s this obvious, how could Guillaume not have seen it?"

  "Yes, that’s a good question," Ray said.

  "But how could he see it?" Claire asked. "Under even an inch of water it’s invisible. The tide was rising, and he must have stepped into it through the water—" She frowned curiously at him. "Isn’t that what happened?"

  "I suppose it is," Gideon said, and he supposed it was. Wherever he looked there was a logical explanation for the accidental drowning of the man he’d known as Guillaume. Reasonable explanations all; doubted by no one, even John. And still…

  They walked out into the bay for about twenty minutes, never looking back. (This was Ray’s suggestion for heightening the dramatic impact when they finally did turn.) When they came to a sand dune six or seven feet high they climbed it and found a craterlike top in which they could all sprawl comfortably, leaning against the sides of the hollow, looking back at the Mont.

  From there the abbey was indeed like the prow of a tremendous ship bearing down on them over a sea of sand. For a while they lay back in the pallid sunshine, peacefully taking it in, wrapped in their own thoughts. Then, prompted by questions from Ray, Claire began to tell them the history of the rock from the time when it was not Mont St. Michel but Mont Tombe, and it reared up not from the floor of the sea but from the green forest known as Scissy. Then the terrible tide of A.D. 709 had annihilated the population and transformed the landscape, so that when the archangel Michael made his appearance there a little later, it was on today’s lonely monolith, almost a mile from the shore.

  Before long Gideon heard a long, contented sigh from John, followed by the immediate commencement of slowed-down, rhythmic breathing. If John were ever to suffer from insomnia (a laughable premise) he wouldn’t have to resort to pills; all he’d need to do was sit himself down at anything resembling a lecture. But this time Gideon sympathized. Claire’s voice was melodic and soft, and the sand beneath them radiated the warmth it had somehow managed to soak up from the wispy sunshine.

  He stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankles, luxuriating in Claire’s lulling story and in the spired abbey floating above them. He would bring Julie here someday, to this very spot, to see this with him. First they would lunch at the Mouton Blanc; that was essential. It wouldn’t

  be the same without that lovely lamb sending out its own warmth from within.

  He didn’t realize he was dozing until his eyelids jumped suddenly open, leaving him tense and alert. He couldn’t have been drifting for long. Claire was still in the tenth century. John was still asleep.

  "Listen!" he said urgently. What for, he wasn’t sure. Only that there was something…

  Claire stopped in the middle of a word. John awakened instantly. All of them sat straining to hear for a moment, then leaped to their feet and looked around them.

  "It’s not possible!" Ray cried. The others simply stared, struck dumb.

  The raised hollow in which they’d been sitting had made it impossible to see the floor of the bay or even the lower fortifications of the abbey. Now they saw that their hump of sand had become a miniature Mont St. Michel, a six-foot-high island surrounded by a great tissue-thin sheet of water broken by dry patches wherever the land rose a little. Behind them the sheet thickened and extended to the horizon. In front, they could see the advancing edge of it about a thousand yards ahead, creeping unevenly towards the Mont like a film of quicksilver.

  "The tide!" Claire said, still staring. "How can it be?" She looked at her watch. "It’s only 3:40."

  "Can—can a tidetable be wrong?" Ray murmured.

  "No, no," Claire said. "I don’t think so. I’ve never heard of such a thing."

  Gideon and John exchanged a brief glance. Maybe tide tables couldn’t lie, but Ben Butts sure as hell could. Gideon clenched his teeth; dammit, he had felt a faint stirring of—what? Wariness? Suspicion?—when Ben had read from the tide table, but he had dismissed it as so much paranoia. And he hadn’t been able to think of a civil way of asking to see the table for himself.

  But there was no time to pursue the thought now. And unless they got out of there in a hurry, there wouldn’t ever be time to pursue anything else. Even in the few seconds they’d been watching, the water level around the dune had risen smoothly, like liquid seeping into a pool from the bottom, and some of the dry areas had already been swallowed up. The sound that had awakened Gideon, he realized, was the buzzing hum of millions of bubbles bursting on the sand as the water percolated through it. And now there was a louder sound, farther off but more ominous; a steady booming, like a colossal waterfall deep inside a cavern. Even as they turned automatically towards it, a cold wind full of the rank, wet odor of sea bottom tugged at their hair and slapped against their faces.

  "That’s the main body of the tide," Claire said without expression. "It will be here in a few minutes. We’ll have to run for the Mont."

  "But how will we see the quicksand?" Ray asked, sounding more curious than frightened. "Won’t we step into it?"

  "If we do, it won’t hurt us so long as we keep our heads and stay together. It won’t suck you under the way it does in the movies, but it grabs at you and holds you for the tide. But if you don’t struggle, if you throw yourself flat when you feel yourself caught, someone else can pull you out." She made an effort to smile. "Most of the time. I think now we’d better try to get back."

  "Forget that‘try’ business," John said. "Let’s just do it."

  They scrambled down the dune and sloshed forward at a steady jog through calm, ankle-deep water, trying to catch up with the advancing rim of the tide and get to dry sand, but by the time they got to where the rim had been, it had rolled another five hundred feet forward, and the water was up to their calves. Behind them, the roaring was wilder, the wind stronger, the sky a scowling, turbid gray. John and Gideon were breathing hard, Claire and Ray panting. Their shoes, filled with water, were like weights, but impossible to do without on account of the pebbles and shells. The lamb in Gideon’s stomach was no longer so delightful.

  All the same, things were better than they might have been. No one had stepped in quicksand, and they were already over halfway to the Mont. Unless the speed of the tide increased, they were likely to make it all the way, encountering nothing worse than a soaking.

  They pushed on, and in five more minutes they had reached the area of sloping sand that leads up to the base of the Mont. Exhilarated and laughing, they made a show of stepping over the crawling, inch-high verge of water onto dry land. On the North Tower a few watchers were shouting and waving. John grinned and clasped his hands over his head, boxer-style, which seemed to confuse them.

  "Now that," Raymond said as they moved on up the slope in shoes that squished water at each step, "is what I call adventure. Outracing the tide of Mont St. Michel! Just as in Vercel! I never imagined it would happen to me." He grinned happily, clear-eyed and breathless. "Not that I’m sorry it’s over."

  NINETEEN

  IT was a long way from over. Instead of continuing to slope smoothly upward the sandy floor dipped, and in a few more moments they found themselves on the edge of a six-foot-high bank, looking down into a shallow, brown, fast-moving stream. They were no more than a hundred yards from the rocky base of the Mont.

  "Where the hell did that come from?" John said, his brows pulled together. "We didn’t cross that when we came out."

  "It was dry before," Claire said bleakly. "This isn’t a river, it’s the tide. It flows in over the lowest ground first, then spreads. There are new channels every day. We’d better get across quickly."

  Ray seemed puzzled by her gravity. "It doesn’t really look too difficult. It can’t be more than a dozen feet w
ide, and I think it’s only about two feet d—"

  He was cut off by a new sound, different from the cataract-roar behind them; a strange, sibilant grumble that was coming unmistakably and rapidly closer. They looked anxiously towards it, and in a few seconds a thick surge of dark water, almost as high as the banks of the stream, rolled heavily down it at their feet, pushing an edging of dirty yellow foam and bits of driftwood and plastic before it. When it had passed, hissing, the water in the stream rocked back and forth and then subsided restlessly, like water in a bathtub. But it didn’t subside all the way.

  "It’s gone up almost a foot," Gideon said grimly, telling them what he knew they knew. It was also flowing faster, with little swells and eddies where there had been none before.

  "We are going to get wet, aren’t we?" a subdued but undaunted Ray murmured. "Well, the first thing we need is a sensible tactical plan—"

  But John, as Gideon well knew, was not big on tactical plans. "We’ll make a chain," he said tersely. "I go in first. Then Claire gives me her hand, then you grab hers, Doc, then Ray grabs yours." He moved to the edge of the bank.

  "John, wait—" Claire said.

  But he was already sliding feet-first into the stream, riding down the crumbling bank on the seat of his pants. "Well, it’s not too cold, anyway." He rocked slightly as his feet hit bottom. The water level was up to his hips. "But watch out; the current’s stronger than it looks." He held a hand up to them. "Let’s go. Doc, can you sort of pass Claire down to me?"

  In not much more than a minute they had worked their way across without mishap. John, who tended to see himself as captain of the ship at times like this, stayed in the water until he had handed everyone out.

  Then, as Gideon knelt to give him a hand up, there was another hissing, grumbling prelude, and another dark tidal surge, much larger this time, like a ship’s wake, boiled angrily down the stream. It slammed into John as he tried to clamber up, ripping his hand out of Gideon’s and carrying him on its crest for twenty feet, like so much Styrofoam, before flinging him carelessly aside, leaving him to claw himself to a stop against the opposite bank, the one from which they had come.