Make No Bones

CHAPTER 3

The conference began much like any other. The attendees reported to the conference registration desk, where they picked up their badges (Gideon’s said: “HELLO! My name is OLIVER GIDEON”), milled about with the other early arrivals, and renewed old acquaintances.

Among these cronies, there were predictable exclamations of wonderment at the number of new faces to be seen this year, along with fond talk of the old days when forensic anthropology was new and all of its practitioners could have fit-indeed, had fit-around a single medium-sized table in a Shakey’s Pizza Parlor in Los Angeles. Now you had a hard time finding a familiar face in the mob. Who, went the refrain, were all these people?

In Gideon’s case, as in many of the others’, it was more than talk. For Gideon, forensic anthropology-the application of knowledge of the human skeleton to situations, homicidal and other, in which bones were all there was to go on-was a sideline; interesting enough on its own merits, but definitely secondary to his interest in hominid evolution, which alone took him to five or six meetings a year. As a result, he’d managed to make only two of the biennial WAFA conferences: the second, with twelve participants, and the third, with twenty. There had been no graduate students attending, and no family members.

This year, sixty-two had signed up, including twenty-one students, and at least a third had brought spouses/ lovers/friends/whatever. They had filled most of the aging lodge.

When Gideon came back with his registration packet the cottage was empty. He found Julie outside, sitting peacefully under a couple of pine trees beside the pond. She was in a bulky wooden lawn chair, her feet up on a second chair and crossed at the ankles, with a paperback Anne Tyler novel on her lap. Swaying branches broke the light that fell on her into shifting, watery shards, as it, an artfully out-of-focus Victorian photograph-all glowing, indistinct highlights and soft outlines; a sweet, sad memory of something loved and lost. His throat suddenly constricted.

She closed the book and looked lazily up at him. “Boy, do I feel relaxed.”

He cleared his throat. “Boy, do you look pretty.” She smiled. “Kiss,” she said, “please.”

He knelt and kissed her gently on the mouth. When he moved back, she tipped his head to her again, kissed him again, softly nibbled his lip. “I love you.”

“You know,” he said huskily, “we have time to-”

“No, we don’t. We have to be at a museum reception at five.”

“We have time if we hurry.”

“Who wants to hurry? I’m free this evening after the reception. How about you?”

“Well, I’m pretty busy, but I’ll try and work you in.” He kissed her once more, stood up, and took the remaining chair. “Good book?”

“Uh-huh.” She stretched, put the book on the table, and pointed at the registration packet. “Anything interesting in there?”

“I doubt it.”

But the topmost item proved him wrong: a letter from Nelson Hobert, anthropology chairman at Northern New Mexico and president of the National Society of Forensic Anthropology, WAFA’s parent organization. He scanned it silently.

Dear Colleague:

As many of you know, Albert Evan Jasper’s prodigious contributions to our field did not end with his death. Dr. Jasper’s will provided for the donation of his remains to NSFA, the organization over which he presided for so many years, with the provision that they be used “for the furtherance of knowledge and/or education in the science of human skeletal identification.”

Ironically, the particulars of his tragic death made such application problematical, and for ten years his remains were stored while awaiting appropriate disposition. Recently, however, an opportunity to fulfill his wishes presented itself, viz, the installation of a major forensic anthropology exhibit by the Central Oregon Museum of Natural History in Bend.

Contacts with Miranda Glass determined that the exhibit included no material on identification from burned skeletal remains, and that she would welcome those of Dr. Jasper for that purpose. While this would appear to have happily resolved the matter, you will understand that it raised issues of delicacy and taste, particularly in regard to Dr. Jasper’s family. Therefore, family approval was requested before taking the matter further.

I am pleased to report that Dr. Jasper’s son and executor, Dr. Casper Jasper, has wholeheartedly approved the disposition of his father’s remains in this manner, and they were transferred to Bend some two weeks ago. Miranda assures me that they will be permanently installed in time for Sunday’s preview reception for WAFA members. As a longtime associate of Albert Evan Jasper, I can assure you that this final outcome of his bequest is fully in line with his wishes.

On behalf of NSFA, welcome to the fifth biennial WAFA conference. I regret that personal business will prevent my arriving until Monday evening, but I look forward to greeting you all then.

“Well, I guess you’d have to say this is pretty interesting,” Gideon said, handing it to her.

She had hardly begun to read it when she looked up, frowning. “’Ironically, the particulars of his tragic death made such application problematical…’ What does that mean? Didn’t you tell me he was killed in a bus crash down here?”

“It means there wasn’t much of him left, and what there was was in pretty bad shape. Burned to a crisp, in fact. Him and thirty or forty other people. The bus ran into some kind of fuel truck and pretty much exploded into flames. It was really horrible, I understand. There wasn’t much left of anybody.”

“How do they know which one was Jasper, then?”

“It wasn’t easy. Nellie and the others worked on the victims for days, and they never did positively identify everyone. In Jasper’s case, the jawbone and some of the teeth were still left, and they were able to match them up with his old dental charts.”

The sounds of cars starting up drifted to them from the parking area in front of the main building. Gideon looked at his watch. “We probably ought to get going ourselves. Reception starts at five.” He smiled. “You’re right, we wouldn’t have had time.”

Julie glanced at the letter again without getting up. “Nellie Hobert? The man who wrote this letter actually worked on the body?”

“They all did. Nellie was one of Jasper’s ex-students too; the very first, I think. He was here at the lodge for the meeting. As I understand it, they had no idea Jasper was even on that bus. They didn’t know he’d left. In the morning they got a call from the state police saying there’d been this awful traffic accident, and could they possibly help identify the dead? Everybody pitched in, of course, and it was only after they got down to work that they realized he was probably one of the victims.” He stood up. “The dental records made it definite.”

“Yuck.”

Gideon shrugged. “It’s what forensic anthropologists do.”

“I know, but the idea of his own students, people who were celebrating his retirement with him the day before-handling his teeth, poking at his bones…” She shivered. “I repeat: yuck.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. I’ve always thought there was something highly appropriate about a forensic anthropologist winding up as the subject of a forensic analysis.”

“Maybe, but it’s highly creepy too. If you ask me, you should be glad you weren’t there.”

Gideon couldn’t argue with that. Jasper’s remains aside, being up to his elbows in a morgue room full of the ghastly remnants of people who had been crushed and burned to death a little while before was an experience he was glad to have missed. He’d had his share of similar ones, but it wasn’t something you got used to. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy working with bones-nothing fascinated him more-but the older they were the better he liked it, with ten thousand years being just about right.

He held out his hand. “Come on, let’s get going. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to miss the unveiling. You can read the rest of the letter in the car.”

“I don’t know…” she began doubtfully.

“Believe me, with Miranda MC’ing things, there won’t be anything morbid about it.”

He was turning their car out of the lodge in the wake of a bus hired for those who didn’t have cars, when Julie looked up from the letter with a spluttering laugh. “He named his son Casper Jasper?”

“I told you, he was a bit of an oddball.”

“Well, I guess he was. Dr. Casper Jasper. Is his son an anthropologist too?”

“I think he’s an internist.”

“Oh, a real doctor.”

“Ha,” Gideon said, “most amusing. I met him once, you know.”

“Casper?”

“Uh-huh. He was still in medical school-I was just out of grad school myself-and his father brought him along to a conference. A big lanky guy, about six-seven; nice enough but a little, well, spacey. Some of us were walking along a street-I think it was in Tucson-and Casper, being as tall as he is, ran smack into one of those metal awning rods in front of a store. Caught him right across the forehead. Very disconcerting.”

“I should think so.”

“I mean for the rest of us. One second he was talking along with us, chattering away, and the next he was out cold and flat on his back. At first nobody could figure out what happened. The rod was way above everybody else’s head.”

“What did you do?”

“His father took over, and very efficiently too. Wouldn’t let anybody move him until we got an ambulance there to run him in for x-rays. And he was fine. They didn’t even keep him overnight.” He shook his head. “You should have seen that rod, though.”

For most of the short trip to Bend they followed the bus in silence, content to take in the immense views. They were in what Oregonians called the High Country, but dominating the sky to their right was the even higher country of the eastern Cascades: Mount Faith, Mount Hope, and Mount Charity-the wind-scoured, volcanic peaks better known as the Three Sisters, from which the town of Sisters to the north had taken its name. Below and on their left, at the base of the shoulder along which the road traveled, was a totally different landscape: the wheat-gray desert country of central Oregon, seeming to spread out forever, flat and featureless except for dusty, cinder-cone volcanoes and the strange, black, fan-shaped forms that Julie told him were ancient lava flows.

The highway itself traveled through a kind of buffer zone, a pleasing countryside of gnarled junipers, gently rolling rangeland, healthy-looking cows, and occasional ranch houses. Bend itself arrived with a bang. One moment they were in open, unspoiled country, and the next moment Mountain View Mall, an honest-to-God suburban shopping mall, popped up in front of them, right out of the sagebrush, and they were in the city. Highway 20 became Third Street, an undistinguished, trafficky thoroughfare of malls, motels, and all-you-can-eat buffets, varied by an occasional body shop or auto-parts store.

They had lost the bus by now, but Julie had the directions. “Right on Greenwood,” she told him. “Follow the signs to the college. Tell me some more about Dr. Jasper-the father, I mean.”

“Let’s see…I guess the first time I ever saw Albert Evan Jasper was at the AAA meeting in Boston. This was maybe sixteen or seventeen years ago. There was a banquet in one of the hotels, and Jasper was sitting up at the head table with the bigwigs. I was way in the back with the other graduate students. Well, a waiter asked us what kind of a conference it was, and one of the guys at our table said we were phrenologists-we told people’s personalities by the bumps on their heads.”

“Not that far from the truth,” Julie observed.

Gideon lifted an eyebrow in her direction but otherwise ignored this. “Well, the waiter said how about a reading, and my friend told him we were mere students, but if he wanted one from the world’s greatest living practitioner, just go up and ask Jasper. So up he marches to the head table. We couldn’t hear anything of course, but we could see the waiter talking and Jasper listening with a funny look on his face, just blinking slowly back at him.”

Once off Third Street they were back in rural Oregon. They passed the Elks Lodge, complete with a bronze elk on the roof, crossed over the Deschutes River, and went by a little white church that would have been right at home in Vermont. At College Way they turned right to head uphill toward Central Oregon College, where the museum was located.

“And?” Julie prompted.

“And,” Gideon said, laughing as he remembered the long-ago scene, “Jasper motions him to bend down, feels his head all over, and gives him a reading, a five-minute one. The waiter was absolutely delighted.”

Julie laughed too. “He sounds nice.”

“Well…”

“But definitely a character.”

“That for sure.”

Julie folded the letter, meditatively brushing it against her lips. “I suppose I’m not looking at this the right way, but doesn’t this thing tonight strike you as rather…well, macabre? I mean, there’s Jasper, identified after his death by his own friends and colleagues-”

“Colleagues,” Gideon said. “I don’t know about friends. From all I’ve heard, he really was a hard guy to like.”

“All the same, it’s pretty grisly. And then ten years later, what’s left of him ends up in a glass case right back where he got killed, with the-the exhibit being unveiled right in front of those same colleagues. Brr. That doesn’t seem downright gruesome to you?”

Gideon thought it over while he turned into the parking lot beside the low, modern, stained-wood museum building.

“No,” he said. “Creepy, yes. Gruesome, no.”

For almost an hour the fifty-odd people had attentively followed a cheerful and outgoing Miranda Glass through the Lucie Kirman Burke wing of the Central Oregon Museum of Natural History, beneath murals of bears and cougars. They had trooped slowly by glass cases illustrating the principles, problems, and oddities of forensic anthropology: skulls punctured with bullet holes, or with axes or arrows still embedded in them; skeletons twisted by rickets or achondroplasia; trephinations, scalpings, beheadings; fractured bones, split bones, crushed bones, cannibalized bones; murder victims from two thousand years ago and from two years ago; pelves, mandibles, vertebrae, and long bones that demonstrated the criteria of aging, sexing, and racing skeletal material.

It was all very well done; eye-catching and grisly enough to grab anyone’s attention, but thorough enough to teach something to those who had the patience to look and to read.

But it was in front of one of the least spectacular cases that the group gathered for the longest time: a sparse, gray-black assemblage consisting of half a mandible, the base of a cranium, a few vertebral fragments, and three or four cracked, misshapen long-bone segments, all of them embedded in an irregular mud-colored mass, like a set of fossil relics from the La Brea tar pits. In this case, however, the mass was known to be the melted-down plastic cushioning material from Seat Number 34 of Bus Number 103 of Cascade Transport Lines.

On the wall beside it was a placard coolly detailing the effects of heat on bone and explaining how anthropologists analyzed burnt skeletal material. In small upper-case letters at the bottom were the words, “Bequest of A. E. Jasper.”

Gideon had wondered how he would react to the display. He hadn’t known Jasper very well, and their limited acquaintance hadn’t done much to make him like the older man. A top-notch scientist, certainly, and a legendary wit and iconoclast; but to Gideon the jokes had seemed contrived, the personality beneath them mean and self-centered. Gideon had seen him publicly cut a hapless student to shreds-wittily, to be sure, but the student hadn’t looked any happier for that.

Still, how often did you look into a glass case in a museum and see someone you’d shared a pepperoni pizza with? To his great surprise, sudden laughter bubbled up in his throat. He covered his mouth and converted it-unconvincingly, he was sure-to a cough. At the sound, there was a sudden splatter of similarly unpersuasive snuffles and throat clearings. Was it tension relief, the same nervous reaction one saw at funerals? Or simply the freakishness of the situation? Some of these people had known Jasper a lot better than he had. Some of them, as Julie had said, had actually handled and pored over these remains immediately after the bus crash.

Miranda Glass was one of them. He looked up and accidentally caught her eye. She stared fixedly back at him, eyes very wide and on the edge of fluttering, mouth pursed, soft chin tucked in, while her hand went to the nape of her neck to wrap a strand of hair around her index finger. You bastard, don’t make me laugh. She couldn’t have said it more clearly if she’d spoken.

An entertainingly freewheeling woman about fifteen years older than Gideon, with a round, deceptively cherubic face, she’d been a student of Jasper’s once, but had never finished her doctorate and never gone on to teach. Instead, she’d drifted into museum work, where she’d established a solid and well-deserved reputation. Although she still served the local police as a forensic consultant, her paramount interest was the museum, and all but the simplest and most unambiguous cases were forwarded to the state medical examiner in Portland for analysis.

An unsettling tendency to say whatever came into her head made some people uncomfortable in her presence. Others, Gideon among them, found Miranda a bracing change of pace; something like being slapped in the face with a paImful of Aqua Velva.

She had successfully fought down her own urge to laugh and was now soberly finishing her reading of the official letter of transmittal from Nellie Hobert. “‘…given his very bones to continue in the service of education, to which he so selflessly devoted his life. Surely Albert Evan Jasper would be pleased.’”

There was a spatter of polite applause, after which Miranda added some comments of her own.

“As most of us know. Dr. Jasper was also quite a showman; some might say an exhibitionist.” She paused, pushing oversized octagonal glasses up on her nose and managing to look droll doing it. “If you ask me, the man would have died for an opportunity like this.”

Those who didn’t know Miranda glanced around them for cues on how to respond. Those who knew her laughed, or groaned, or shook their heads.

“In conclusion, folks, you have to admit that this is a pretty appropriate windup for a teacher of anthropology. So, when you get back home, remember us in your wills. There’ll always be a place for you in the Central Oregon Museum of Natural History.”

The laughter now was more general. “Don’t get any ideas,” Julie said to Gideon. “I’m not about to be the widow of a museum case, no matter how beautifully laid out.”

“Ali, but there are advantages,” said the spare, fiftyish man on Julie’s other side. “I had a woman once-I speak figuratively, you understand-who donated her husband’s skeleton-he’d died under somewhat ambiguous circumstances-to our lab on the condition that she be allowed to visit him monthly. She did, too. We’d pull out the drawer for her and she’d sit down and look at him for a while. We always made sure he was quite attractively displayed. After half an hour she’d leave, always with a sad, thoughtful smile.”

Julie’s mouth curled downward just a little.

“Personally,” the man went on, “I’ve always been convinced she poisoned him. I suppose she needed the periodic reassurance that he was really dead.”

“That’s really touching, Leland,” Gideon said. “That’s a wonderful story.”

“But seriously now,” the man said, wide-eyed behind heavy, plastic-rimmed glasses. “Surely you wouldn’t deny the world the bones of America’s Skeleton Detective, the ‘Quincy’ of the bone labs, the darling of the media?”

Gideon laughed. Leland was Leland. It was the way he was made, and you couldn’t take what he said personally.

The pale-eyed, amber-mustached Leland Vernon Roach was another of Jasper’s students. Unlike Miranda he’d managed to complete his doctorate, but like her his main interests had strayed from the forensic. In Leland’s case they were in the direction of the relatively new science of coprolite analysis-the study of fossilized excrement to determine food content and eating habits.

Once, when Gideon had asked him how it was that he’d gotten into so arcane a subfield, Leland had shrugged. “You happen to like bones,” he’d said with his prissy, exquisite diction. “ I happen to like shit.” Gideon still didn’t know if he’d meant it to be funny.

Now he clapped the smaller man lightly on the shoulder. “I’ll give it some serious thought, Leland,” he said. “Assuming I can talk Julie into it.”

Julie muttered something as they moved on to the next exhibit with the others.

“What?”

She arranged her mouth to speak with Lelandlike precision.

“Fat,” she said, “chance.”