Old Bones

EIGHTEEN

Mont St. Michel. Everyone has seen pictures of the towering, medieval pyramid rising on its rocky island out of the sea, but no one can help being astounded at first sight of the real thing. It’s like the Grand Canyon; you can look at photographs of it all your life, but the first time you stand on the rim looking down into it the words that jump to your lips are, "My God, I didn’t know it looked like that! "

"Jesus H. Christ," John said, "I didn’t know it looked like that!"

They had pulled the car to the side of the road to stare at it from half a mile away at the foot of the long causeway that connects it to the nondescript town of Pontorson. It was a surprise to Gideon too. He’d been prepared for its size, for its stark beauty, for the way it twisted and rambled upwards, moving higgledy-piggledy through time: at the base, crenellated ramparts dating back to the Hundred Years’ War; in the center a colorful jumble of cramped stone houses form the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and finally, at the top, the great abbey itself, its eighth-century core altered and enlarged a hundred times in a thousand years, yet strangely balanced and all of a piece.

What the pictures hadn’t prepared him for was its raw, gray vigor. Despite the stone traceries, the spires, the arches, Mont St. Michel was rudely masculine; hard, plain, virile. The towers didn’t soar, they surged and thrusted; the whole crowded rock was like a living animal, bunched, powerful, restlessly alert.

"So where’s this shrine of French gastronomy?" asked John, who never stayed awed very long. "Even an omelet’s starting to sound good."

But Mere Poularde was closed until the season officially opened on April 1. So were most of the other restaurants on the Grand Rue. They worked their way up the steep, narrow street, growing increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for lunch. "We just can’t come to a place like this and eat in one of these crummy fast-food places," Gideon said, referring to the tiny shops where chilled-looking vendors sold lukewarm pizza slices and stale-looking sandwiches wrapped in plastic.

"I can," John said, then stopped abruptly. "Hey, I just thought of something." He chirped with laughter. "Wow."

"What?"

"Well, Guillaume’s will isn’t worth a damn. Not if you’re right about those bones."

Gideon stared at him. As obvious as it was, it hadn’t occurred to him. "Of course! It wasn’t really Guillaume who made it out, was it? Whoever it was, he didn’t have any right to give Guillaume’s property away."

"That’s the way I see it," John said, starting to walk again. "This gets weirder by the minute. All those people who got something in the will-they’re not entitled to it. Boy, there’s another great reason for murder right there."

"How do you mean? How would they benefit from killing him?"

"Not him, you."

"Oh," Gideon said. "Me."

He shook his head wearily. There were too many motives; that was the problem, just as Joly had said, and they kept coming up with new ones. If the invalid will really was behind everything in some way-and that made considerable sense-then any of the heirs who knew Guillaume hadn’t really been Guillaume might well have wanted Gideon dead. But did any of them know? And even if they did, where did Claude come into it? Why kill him? Not because he’d threatened to challenge the will, certainly; Bonfante had made it clear that he couldn’t have brought it off.

Was is possible that Claude knew about Guillaume’s murder in 1942 and someone killed him to keep him quite? Not very likely. If he’d known he’d have told a long time ago, instead of fuming for forty years over a will he knew to be fraudulent.

And what about the pretend-Guillaume, with only a year to live? Assuming he was murdered (which even Gideon was beginning to have doubts about), who would benefit in any important way by moving up his death a few months?

No, there was something more than the will involved; more than vengeful hatred of Claude too. Something they were all missing, something at the heart of it that would make everything fall into place. That it had to do in some way with the dark affairs in the cellar of Rochebonne in 1942 he had little doubt. But what, exactly?

"Have you noticed," he muttered to John, "that the more we figure out, the less we seem to know?"

At this point, happily, they came upon a sight that warmed them both: an open restaurant, a mellowed sixteenth-century inn with a hanging, filigreed metal sign over the door. Le Mouton Blanc, it said, and underneath, appropriately, was a picture of a contented-looking white sheep. It was the kind of place about which John might have had doubts, but as they approached it, two people came out, and the aroma of pommes frites that wafted out after them was more than enough to convince him.

The combination of smells inside was even better, notwithstanding the usual fug of cigarette smoke: steamed seafood, fried potatoes, roasted meat. It was probably just the way it smelled in 1600, Gideon thought with pleasure, except, of course, for the tobacco, which wouldn’t have arrived from North America for another few decades. It was about half-full, and at a table near the back were Ray and Claire, with Sophie and Ben Butts.

"Come join us!" Ben shouted as soon as they walked in.

They threaded their way between the tables. "I don’t know; you look pretty crowded already," Gideon said with a smile.

"Oh, no, please, we can easily make room," Ray said, looking glad to see them, and Claire murmured something similar.

"Sure," Ben said. "Unless you’re rubbin’ elbows, eatin’s just stokin’."

"And who said that?" Sophie asked.

"I believe it was my cousin Bobby Will."

"I thought your cousin was Billy Rob."

Ben looked thoughtfully at her. "No, Billy Rob’s my uncle on my mother’s side; married to Clara Bea. Bobby Will’s my cousin on my father’s side-Willie Bob’s boy."

Amid general laughter, a couple of chairs were taken from nearby tables and Gideon and John squeezed in. No one had ordered food yet, but they were almost through a bottle of white wine, and a new bottle with two more glasses was brought. Selection de l’Hotel, Vin de Table, the modest label said, but it turned out to be a better-thanordinary Chablis.

Gideon lifted his glass in a salute. "So," he said, "what brings you to Mont St. Michel?"

He felt at ease with these four. Of all the people at Rochebonne they were the ones he trusted most: Ray, sweet-tempered and earnest, and altogether above suspicion; gentle Claire Fougeray, thin and pallid, but with a ruddy heat in her cheeks that he guessed was due less to the wine than to Ray’s proximity; Sophie Butts, frank and solid; Ben, with his easy way of meandering between homespun adages and lawyerly good sense. If one of them turned out to be a murderer, he was going to be awfully annoyed. And surprised.

It was Ben who answered. "We came down to pick up Guillaume’s car and take it back. Seemed like a good excuse for us all to get out of the house for a while, take a train ride, see the Mont before we left." Smiling, he raised his glass to toast the others.

"Are you taking off?" John asked. "I thought Joly wanted you to stay."

"Can’t," Ben said. "There are big things on the menu at Southwest Electroplating. Two-million-dollar comparable-worth suit coming up. Anyway, Joly told us from the start we could go after tomorrow. He knows where to find us if he needs us."

"Ben and I are catching a ten o’clock flight from Paris tomorrow night," Sophie said. "These two will be leaving the next morning, by train from Dinan."

Gideon looked with interest at Ray and Claire. "You’re going together?"

"They certainly are," Sophie said happily.

"Oh," said Ray, and cleared his throat. "Well."

"Raymond is being kind enough to accompany maman and me to Rennes," Claire explained primly, looking down at her glass. "After that he will be our guest for a few days."

"Well, you know, I don’t have to be back at Northern Cal until next week," Ray said, "so I thought…you know." He tugged at the ends of his bowtie and shone with inarticulate happiness.

Sophie took a healthy swallow of wine and put down her glass. "I don’t know about anyone else, but I could eat a horse. Claire, dear, why don’t you order for us? Is that all right with everyone?"

That was fine with everyone, and Claire, who seemed in her retiring way to be pleased with a role in the limelight, consulted at length with the waiter before settling on a three-course meal of traditional Norman cuisine. By the time the ordering was done, most of the new bottle of wine had been drunk and the level of conviviality was high. There was a blaze in the fireplace, and outside a passing rain had left the cobblestones of the Grand Rue gleaming, making it easy for Gideon to enjoy the pleasant illusion of being a sixteenth-century traveler, warmly ensconced in a fine inn among companionable comrades.

"I tell you, kids," Ben said, playfully addressing Ray and Claire, "if you’re not going to ask him, I will."

"Oh, Uncle," Claire murmured with her eyes down, then turned a little rosier. Blushing looked good on her, Gideon decided.

"All right, then, I will," Ben declared. "We have a technical question for you, Professor. Genetically speaking, just how closely related are these kids? The reason they want to know-"

"Ben," Sophie said, "I think Gideon can figure out why they want to know."

"I could make a pretty good guess," Gideon said. "What are you two anyway, cousins?"

"It’s precisely that which we can’t determine," Ray said with donnish perplexity. "We know we’re not first cousins at any rate, but after that it gets extraordinarily confusing."

"I’ll tell you what," Gideon said. "Why don’t you draw up a family tree for a few generations, showing who begat who-"

"Whom," murmured Ray automatically, then winced. "Sorry, force of habit."

"-and I’ll try and work out the genetic relationships from that."

This was well received, and they set to reconstructing the du Rocher genealogy, with Ben drawing it step-by-step on the back of a paper placemat. In the meantime, the first course arrived: fruits de mer varies, carried to the table on three broad metal platters, arranged as identically and as prettily as a set of postcards. Three big crayfish and four prawns alternating in a circle in the center, a neat mound of small, salty sea snails to be poked out of their shells with pins that came embedded in a cork, and a pile of perhaps a hundred tiny gray shrimp that Claire showed them how to eat. One held the head between thumb and forefinger, then briskly snapped off the tail with the other hand, revealing a nubbin of pale meat that had almost no flavor but nevertheless bathed the palate in a faint, luscious essence of the ocean itself.

It was slow eating, what with pins and fingers, so that John and Gideon were able to entertain themselves contentedly while the others haggled good-humoredly over the more obscure corners of the family’s history. Then, as two black kettles of moules mariniere were put on the table, the neatly printed chart was handed to Gideon, who got out a pen of his own and started to work while he ate.

By the time the mussels had been reduced to shining, blue-black heaps of empty shells, and the last of the shallot-flavored broth soaked up with sliced baguettes, he announced his findings. "You’re fifth cousins."

"What does that mean for…for children?" Claire asked, then looked down and blushed again.

Gideon smiled at her. It was nice to know there were still women like Claire left. He liked the idea of Claire and Ray as a team; there weren’t too many Ray Schaefers around either.

"It means," he said, "that you two are separated by eleven degrees of consanguinity-"

"Aren’t you glad you asked?" John said.

"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 Medoc. 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 Marees," 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 rather 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."