Old Bones

TWENTY

What Ben said was, "Hee, hee, hee."

On the surface this was not unreasonable. They had stopped at a Monoprix department store near Dinan to buy sweatshirts (their coats hadn’t dried) and sneakers to replace their lost or sopping shoes. The French are not particularly large people, especially in Brittany, and clothing in sizes to fit John and Gideon was not easy to come by. As a result, the two men emerged from the store in identical lurid violet sweatshirts, each with a plump and smiling escargot on the chest. On their feet they wore loose, slipper-like canvas shoes of a particuarly repulsive yellowish-green, with elastic side bands instead of laces; the sort of thing Quasi-modo might have worn to good effect.

Gideon had also bought a tide schedule, the cover of which was identical to Ben’s. While Ray and Claire shopped he had taken a few minutes to go through it with John. They were not surprised by what they found. The afternoon low tide for March 23 was not shown at 5:15, as

Ben had said, or anywhere near it. It was more than five hours later, at 11:33 p.m. But high tide was clearly shown as 4:43 p.m.-16:43, in the French system-when Ben had had every reason to think they’d still be in the bay. Gideon whistled softly at the height: 13.05 meters, with the previous low at 0.90 meters. A change of nearly fifty feet in a single tidal cycle! He breathed out a long sigh. They really had been lucky.

Every month was on a different page, one day per line. He scanned the entire page for March, seeking without much hope for some source of honest error on Ben’s part. But there weren’t any 5:15 low tides, a.m. or p.m. He thumbed through the rest of the booklet to see if there was a low tide at 5:15 on the twenty-third of any month, just in case Ben had gotten the right line but the wrong page. There wasn’t. There was no tide at precisely 5:15, morning or afternoon, high or low, on any day of the year.

It was impossible to get around it, then; whether it felt right or not, Ben Butts, in his smiling and easygoing way, had deliberately sent them out into a Mont St. Michel flood tide that even at that moment had already been rolling steadily towards them.

All of which made his whicker of laughter when they walked into the salon thoroughly surprising. He had been alone, apparently the first one down to await the call for pre-dinner cocktails, and he had been seated in one of the wingbacked chairs in front of the fire, his back to the door, seemingly absorbed in the sports section of the International Herald Tribune. On John’s firm suggestion, Ray and Claire had gone up to their rooms to change, having stoutly maintained their belief in his innocence during the drive.

"Hello, Ben," Gideon had said quietly from behind him, watching carefully for a giveaway sign when he turned- the sudden pallor of astonishment, perhaps, or the deep flush of rage. Instead, that high-pitched and convincing whinny of pleasure.

"That’s great!" he cried, taking in their violet sweatshirts and green shoes. "All you need are matching beanies. What are you going to do for your first number?"

It was hardly the snarl of a confounded murderer. Gideon’s doubts began to mount again.

As they regarded him silently, Ben’s grin rigidified. "All right, I give up. What are we playing?"

"Ben, you still got that tide table?" John asked, smiling.

"Sure, of course I do." He folded the newspaper neatly, stood up, and began patting his pockets. "At least I think I do. Ah." He produced it from the left hip pocket of his mohair jacket. John took it and handed it to Gideon.

"What’s going on?" Ben asked uncomfortably. "Why do I have the feeling everybody’s mad at me? Did I read the table wrong or something?" Abruptly, his face fell. "You’re kidding. I couldn’t have."

"Let’s just see," Gideon said. He turned quickly to the page for March, found the line for the current day, and moved his finger to the column headed basses mers -low tides. He stared, blinked, and stared again. Then he looked up at the others, thoroughly confused.

"According to this, low tide was at 5:15," he murmured.

"Well, of course," Ben said. "That’s what Isaid, isn’t it?"

Gideon took out the booklet he had bought at Mono-prix and compared it to Ben’s. The covers were the same, all right, and at first glance so were the contents. Sixty-four pages in all, mostly boating data and advertisements, and bound with a single hefty staple through the middle. The tidal information for March was on page 32, which was the left center page in each book, and the dates and days of the week in the two booklets matched. March 1 was shown as a Sunday, and so on. But the contents of the columns-the times and heights of the tides-were entirely different. As were the data, Gideon quickly ascertained, for the months on pages 31, 33, and 34, which were the other pages printed on the same folded sheet. The other pages seemed to be the same in each booklet.

"Ben, where did you get this thing?"

"From the car. It was in the door pocket. I wanted to see if we’d have a chance to watch a flood tide come in."

"The car? What car?"

"I told you; the one we picked up at Mont St. Michel. Guillaume’s car. The Citroen. How about telling me what’s going on?"

"Nothing, Ben," John said. "Just looking up some things."

"Don’t give me that, John. I may not be the brightest person in the world, but I sure know the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad." He laughed softly. "So my Aunt Gussie was wont to say."

They left him staring bemusedly after them and walked out into the hallway.

Gideon looked at John. "Well, I guess that answers that."

"What answers what? What’s the question?"

"The question is: Why did Guillaume go out into the bay without checking a tide table? And the answer is that he didn’t. He had this little gem right in the car with him; a perfectly nice little schedule, except for the small matter of a few pages in the middle. Which day did he die, do you remember? Last Sunday?"

"Monday. That would have been, uh-"

"The sixteenth." Gideon found the relevant row. "He went out in the morning, and with this to guide him, he wouldn’t have been expecting a high tide until early evening. Whereas, actually…" He closed the bogus tide table and opened the one from Monoprix. "…it crested at five minutes after ten. a.m. A nasty little surprise. The same sort of thing happened to us, you may recall."

John nodded grimly. "Okay, Doc, you win. I’m a believer. He was set up. So what do you think, Ben-"

"Not necessarily Ben. Any one of them could have doctored the thing for‘Guillaume’s’ benefit, and then Ben could have done just what he said he did: innocently picked up the table when he saw it in the car. I hope so."

"Me too." He shook his head. "Look, doesn’t it seem a little odd that a murderer would leave evidence like this just sitting around in the car for a week?"

"Not really. Whoever did it probably never dreamed that anyone would get suspicious about Guillaume’s death. I practically had to get us all drowned to convince you. "

"That’s what I like about you. You never rub it in." He took the open booklets from Gideon and looked hard at them. "What did you mean,‘doctored’? You’re talking about a major production here. Look at the paper and the printing on the phony pages. They’re exactly the same as the real ones. That took work. It would have had to be set up way ahead of time, and whoever did it would have had to have a real tide schedule on hand, which means-"

Gideon was shaking his head. "No, I think it was simpler than that. If I could get into Guillaume’s files, I think I could show you."

"Guillaume’s files? They must be right here in his study, where Joly’s been doing most of his interviewing." He walked a few steps to a closed door and turned the handle. The door opened. "What’s stopping us?"

Gideon hesitated. "Don’t you feel a little awkward about snooping around other people’s homes without being invited?"

"Are you kidding me?"

"Well, I do."

"Doc," John said with a sigh, "you got to get over these over-fastidious sensitivities. That is, if you ever hope to operate anything like an honest-to-God detective."

"That’s the last thing I hope to do," Gideon muttered, but in he went behind John. They left the door ajar as a salve to his conscience (it wasn’t really snooping if they did it openly) and flicked on the light.

The study was very different from the other rooms Gideon had seen, its contents reflecting the wintry personality of its dead user: functional, gray metal desk with nothing on it but a marble pen set with the two pens neatly inserted in their holders; two three-drawer file cabinets of matching blue steel (a grudging concession to cosmetic considerations?); a tripartite glass-fronted display case filled with tiny seashells meticulously arranged in long, dull, rows. Everything labeled, efficient, and ruthlessly neat, a private sanctuary of austerity in the lush manoir.

Gideon went to the right-hand file cabinet, to the drawer labeled "M-P." There, in a hanging folder under "Marees," he quickly found what he expected to find: Guillaume’s tide schedules, a set of blue booklets all looking just like the ones he had already seen, except for the years. There were eleven in all, arranged in order (naturally) from 1976 to 1986. The table for 1987 was not in its place. Presumably, that was the one he’d gotten from Ben, which he now put on the desk alongside the one he’d bought at the store.

He sat down and began going through the stack, starting with 1976, opening each one to the page for January, glancing briefly at it, and moving on to the next booklet.

"So what are we looking for?" John asked, leaning over his shoulder.

"We’re looking for a year where the dates-" But he had already found it. "Here," he said, "Nineteen-eighty-one. Look." He pointed to the entry under Jours for January 1. "‘J’," he said, "for jeudi. Thursday."

"Yeah," John said. "So?"

"So in 1981 January started on a Thursday, just the way it did this year, which means-" He flipped a few pages. "-that the days for March also must correspond."

"Unless 1981 was a leap year."

"It wasn’t."

"I bet anything there’s some point to this," John said.

"You better believe it. Look at the afternoon high tide for March 23, 1981." He put his finger on the place.

"Sixteen-forty-three," John said, still not comprehending. "Huh. The same time as it was today. That’s funny."

"It’s more than funny. If we match the rest of the times with the ones on the schedule from Monoprix, I think they’ll match too. But only on pages 31 to 34." He opened the Monoprix booklet to compare, and sighed with satisfaction. "See?"

Even the three-line advertisement at the bottom of page 32 matched. "Le Galle Freres, Opticiens," it proclaimed. "L’ ami de vos yeux." But the advertisement on page 32 of the one Ben had found in the car was for aluminum boats.

"Doc," John said, frowning over the booklets, "I still don’t-"

"John, look at the individual pages. Do you see any indication of the year? There isn’t any. Just "Mars," or "Avril," or whatever. They’re printed up in exactly the same format every year, and the only place you can find the date is on the cover. Just like the schedules we use to go clamming at Sequim Bay. It’d be the easiest thing in the world-"

"-to open up the staple and switch pages from one year to another!" John smacked the table. "Damn! As long as you used a year where the dates fell on the same days of the week you could get away with it!"

"At last, the light."

"Not bad," John said appreciatively. "Somebody hears the old guy say he’s going tidepooling the next morning, sneaks in here during the night, switches a few pages from 1981 to 1987-"

"And vice-versa, so there aren’t any missing pages in the 1981 schedule, just in case Guillaume happens to look."

John nodded slowly. "And goodbye, Guillaume."

"Right. Only of course it wasn’t really Guillaume."

"Oh, yeah." John tapped his temple with a forefinger. "It’s hard to keep these little details straight. Sometimes I start wondering who I am. Hey, we better cut Joly in on this right now, don’t you think? Most of these people aren’t going to be around after tomorrow."

Gideon used the telephone in the study to contact the inspector, reaching him at home. Joly listened without interruption to his account of the altered tide tables. He was impressed enough to dispense with his usual mordant observations on Gideon’s continuing contributions to the case, but not so much that he admitted to having been wrong about "Guillaume’s" murder.

"I thought I asked you to exercise reasonable prudence," was his comment. "I should have thought that would include keeping your distance from Rochebonne."

"I did, Lucien, but, uh, events intervened."

"I’m not sure I like the sound of that. Are there any other developments you should be telling me about?"

"Nothing important." It seemed a poor time to mention that the four of them had almost staged their own recreation of the drowning in the bay.

"Well," Joly said, "I think it would be best if I came there, and you might as well wait for me now, if you don’t mind. Is John there? Stay close to him. I don’t want anything happening to you."

"Right, right," Gideon grumbled.

"And keep the falsified schedules for me. Better yet, give them to John to keep."

"Lucien, it might surprise you, but I’m perfectly capable-"

"And do try not to handle them. There may very well be fingerprints."

"Oh," Gideon said. "Sure." He looked down at the two schedules spread flat on the desk by the pressure of all five fingers of his left hand. "Glad you mentioned it."

While he was putting the other schedules back into the cabinet, Mathilde loomed in the doorway, dowdily imposing in navy blue sweater, pearls, and dark, boxy, pleated skirt.

"Is there something I can help you with, Dr. Oliver?"

"Oh… uh, no," Gideon said, caught with his hands in the till, so to speak. He closed the file drawer sheepishly. "I was just, uh…"

"Yes," she said frostily. "I understand you were kind enough to drive Raymond back. You’ll stay for dinner, I hope? You too, Mr. Lau?"

"Well-"

"Great," John said from his innocent perch on the corner of the desk. "We’d love it."

She looked frigidly at the friendly purple snails smiling from their breasts, at the giant green slipper-shoes on their feet. "You wouldn’t happen to have any…ah, less fantasque clothing with you, I suppose? Well, no matter. Please join us upstairs for aperitifs when you’ve finished here-" She smiled thinly. "-with whatever you’re doing."

"Whew," John said when she’d left. "I bet it feels like hell to get caught snooping around somebody’s house without permission."

"It does," Gideon said. "Sometimes I wonder how I let myself-" An echo from their earlier conversation drifted unexpectedly through his mind. "John, what you said before about wondering who you were sometimes-" He clapped his hands together. "It’s a long shot, but, my God, why didn’t I think of it before?"

"I can’t imagine," John said blandly.

"Shut the door, will you? We need to make another call."

"Dr. Loti, do you remember telling me that when Guillaume du Rocher was found in the rubble in St. Malo he was hallucinating?"

"Yes, certainly." The doctor had been roused from his evening meal; he was still chewing.

"And that he didn’t know who he was?"

"Yes, that’s right."

"Well, can you remember whether he had simple amnesia, so that he had no idea who he was? Or did he imagine he was somebody else?"

"Oh," Dr. Loti said, "I remember very well."

"And?"

"He imagined he was someone else. He claimed it for two days." Continuing to display an unexpected flair for suspense, Dr. Loti continued his leisurely mastication.

"And that was…?"

"He believed he was his cousin Alain."

Bingo. A whole set of puzzle pieces clattered into place.

"Perhaps you’ve heard of him?" Dr. Loti prompted, possibly disappointed in the lack of an overt response.

"I sure have," Gideon breathed. To John he made a raised-fist gesture of success that elicited a mystified frown.

"It was quite a strong delusion," Dr. Loti continued and chuckled at the memory. "He very nearly had me convinced, even though I knew full well that poor Alain du Rocher had been executed by the Germans some years before. And then one morning, suddenly, his memory returned. He was himself, Guillaume du Rocher, just like that."

Just like that. Alain du Rocher, Resistance hero of beloved memory, mourned as dead at the hands of the SS these forty-five years. Only now-just like that-it seemed he had been alive the whole time, until a week ago, living high off the hog as Guillaume du Rocher, lord of the manor… while Guillaume himself lay moldering to dust and bones in the gloomy cellar. Gideon nodded with something like gratification. Not so much because he’d anticipated this (he had, but it hadn’t been much more than a shot in the dark), but because it seemed to satisfy a certain daffy symmetry in the increasingly bizarre twists and contortions in the House of du Rocher.

"Yes, yes, I remember it very well," Dr. Loti said in a settling-down-in-his-chair tone, clearly more inclined to reminisce than to return to his dinner. "An extremely interesting case…"

Gideon headed him off. "It certainly is. You’ve been very helpful, Doctor. Thanks very much."

"ALAIN!" John exploded. "How the hell could it be Alain?"

Gideon, foreseeing this reaction, had taken him outside before telling him what he’d learned. "You’re nuts, you know that?" John raved to the black sky while they strode over the courtyard. "You’re always doing this! You-Ouch!"

He had stubbed his toe on one of the beams for the kitchen garden’s new retaining wall. "Damn it, why don’t they have any lights out here?" he grumbled, and bent to rub his toe through the thin canvas shoe. "Look, how could Alain be alive all these years? The Nazis killed him in 1942; there were witnesses. The SS-"

"-marched him into the mairie early one morning, and he was never seen again. That’s not necessarily the same thing as being killed."

"Okay, so what happened to him, then?" John demanded, straightening up. "How did he get away? Where was he between 1942 and 1944?"

"Who knows? He could have been anywhere."

John snorted and made one of his spasmodic gestures of impatience. "All right, tell me, what’s the theory supposed to be? That while he was in the hospital he suddenly comes up with this plan to kill the real Guillaume and take over his property?"

"I don’t think so," Gideon said. "I’m pretty sure Guillaume was already dead. Remember, he hadn’t been seen in years either. He disappeared in 1942 too."

"Jesus," John said, starting them walking again, "this goddamn case is crawling with disappearing people."

"In fact," Gideon said, thinking aloud, "he disappeared within a day or two of the time Alain did-supposedly to join the Resistance. Only now it looks as if it was Alain who took off somewhere, while Guillaume didn’t make it out of his own cellar. And when Alain came back after the Liberation, he decided that he could live a fuller, more productive, more meaningful life as his missing, rolling-in-money cousin than as himself.

"I suppose," he added ruminatively, "this sounds a little fanciful to you."

"A little? Sheesh." They walked without speaking for a few yards. "So what do you think-that Alain killed the real Guillaume-back in 1942, I mean-buried him in the cellar, and just let everybody think he was off running around with the Resistance?"

"No, I don’t see how we could go that far yet. Possibly-"

"Because," John said, with a subtle change in his voice, "he would have had to kill him, wouldn’t he? Or at least he’d have had to know Guillaume was already dead when everybody else thought he was off fighting the Germans. Otherwise, how could he be sure he wouldn’t come back someday?"

As usual, John had quickly altered course after his first excitable response to an unexpected new hypothesis and settled down to constructive thinking.

"That," Gideon conceded, "is a point."

They had come to the tall stone pillars of the gateway and stood looking out into the darkness. The plane trees lining the road were dimly visible, a dense, pitchy black against the gauzy black of the sky. Gideon shivered as the night cold worked its way through his clothes, and they turned and began to walk back to the manoir.

When they came to the pile of lumber that John had stumbled over, Gideon stopped. Something stirred at the edges of his memory. "You know," he said, "it’s funny…" But whatever it was evaded him, like a speck in the vision that scoots away when you try to focus on it.

"What’s funny?" John asked, then laughed. "Never mind. I don’t think I want to know. I can only stand so much at a time. Hey, who else do you think knows this so-called Guillaume was really Alain? Assuming that he was."

"My guess is that none of them do. Why tell them? The only ones who’d even remember the real Guillaume are Mathilde, Rene, and Sophie, and they were all teenagers or under in 1942. When Alain showed up two years later and claimed he was Guillaume, who could argue with him? He was the right age, he knew the ropes, he looked a lot like Guillaume to begin with, and he was such a patched-up mess that no one could possibly tell the difference-even Mathilde. Even though she’d been engaged to him, she was only a kid when he left, and it wouldn’t be too hard for him to keep his distance." He nodded approvingly at his own logic. "No, I’d bet no one’s ever caught on to him in all these years."

"Yeah?" said John, who had listened without comment to this lengthy exposition. "Well, you’d lose."

Gideon paused with his fingers on the handle of the oak door. "Why?"

"Because somebody was so afraid you’d find out who that skeleton really was they tried to blow your head off. Or did you forget again?"

Gideon frowned, then laughed. "I forgot. Again."

Pre-dinner cocktails were being served in the Louis XV Room, an upstairs sitting room full of musty, handsome eighteenth-century clutter: lush overstuffed bergeres, crystal pendant chandeliers, ormolu clocks, busy Beauvais tapestries after Boucher and Fragonard. Its delicate parquet floors and ornate, gilded wall moldings proclaimed it the centerpiece of Rochebonne but for more than four decades it had been little-used, being too sumptuous and grandiose for its dour owner. But it suited Mathilde just fine, and she was determined to return it to its onetime place of glory.

The knowledge that this was the last evening they would all be together seemed to add a sparkle, almost a conviviality, to the cocktail hour, so that for once they had abandoned their customary groupings to recombine in new permutations.

At the side of the cherrywood-fronted fireplace a dapper and liberally cologned Rene, drink in hand, was playing le seigneur du manoir to a twittery, vibrant Leona Fougeray. Leona, at her striking, brittle best in a neon orange jumpsuit cinched by a patent leather belt, laughed frequently, throwing back her head so that the reflections from the chandelier made her black Italian eyes shimmer.

A few feet away, seated somewhat stiffly in three kingly armchairs of crushed red velvet and gilded wood, Mathilde, Claire, and Sophie chatted quietly, Mathilde frequently raising her eyes to glare without effect at her pink and animated husband. And standing on the other side of the room Ray, Ben, and Jules talked man-talk. Or at least Jules did. With his rump propped against an inlaid gaming table, a martini in one hand and a quickly changing succession of canapes in the other, he prattled to his abstracted and unresponsive audience.

Gliding among them all with a tray of drinks was the granite-faced Marcel, while Beatrice hung about the entrance to a small pantry in her tent-like brown dress, lumbering grumpily out from time to time with fresh hors d’oeuvres.

When Gideon and John entered, Ray separated himself and came worriedly to them.

"Did you talk to Ben?" he asked in a low voice. "You don’t still think…?"

"He didn’t lie about what was in the schedule," Gideon reassured him. "Someone altered the thing."

"Thank heavens." He took a relieved swig of Chablis, then did a double-take. "Altered? You mean… altered? "

"Probably not to get us," John said, looking casually around to make sure no one else was within hearing range. "Someone used it to kill Guillaume."

Ray’s eyes opened wider. "Kill Guillaume?"

"Right. Oh, by the way, Guillaume was Alain."

Gideon thought that John, who had been on the receiving end of something similar a few minutes before, could be forgiven for this. Ray responded with surprising aplomb, swallowing his mouthful of wine without quite choking on it. "Tell me," he said when it was safely down, "have I been leading a particularly sheltered existence? Is this what life is like for other people?"

"Only when the Skeleton Detective’s around," John said.

Ray looked slowly about him. The others were still involved in their conversations or their tasks, but casting uneasy or even hostile looks toward Gideon and John. Almost, it seemed to Gideon, as if they were huddling for mutual support against the newcomers, as if everything were really just fine at the Manoir de Rochebonne-or would be, if not for the intrusion of these two unwelcome meddlers. Well, he thought, in a way they were right.

"It’s so difficult to believe," Ray said softly. "One of these people is actually a murderer. But who? No, whom. No, who. I’m afraid this is really getting to me."

"Monsieur?" Marcel extended the tray of drinks.

"Merci." As Gideon took one of the slender, fluted tumblers of vermouth the telephone rang. Marcel turned, but Mathilde, closer, picked it up. She listened, murmured something, and extended it uncordially to Gideon, her face wooden. "For you."

It was Dr. Loti.

"Yes, hello again, it’s me. I think perhaps we might have been disconnected earlier," he said hopefully.

"Yes, I think we were," Gideon said, repenting for having virtually hung up on the elderly physician before.

"Ah. Well. I didn’t finish what I was telling you. You’ll be quite interested. You see, Guillaume didn’t really regain his memory‘just like that.’ That was a figure of speech. It was Mathilde du Rocher who did it all."

"Mathilde?" Gideon exclaimed inadvertently and glanced at her. She had remained standing a few feet away, edgy and suspicious, watching him, straining every nerve to hear, not bothering to pretend otherwise. An eyebrow flicked at the sound of her name.

He turned away from her and cradled the receiver against his shoulder. "What do you mean?"

"Exactly what I said, young man. Without Mathilde, Guillaume would have died. Certainly he would never have recovered his identity. Ah, Mathilde-Mathilde Sylvestre, as she was then; a strapping, buxom girl with skin like rose petals. She had just become engaged to Rene, and she had volunteered as a nurse at the hospital. She sat with the mutilated hulk that was Guillaume for two whole days and most of two nights, talking to him, crooning to him, keeping his interest focused on this world instead of the next." Dr. Loti heaved a gusty sigh.

"And?"

"And? His memory came back. It never would have happened without her; I’m convinced of it. And from that moment he began to recover. You could see it in him, in the renewed fire in that single fierce eye gleaming through the bandages. He had decided," Dr. Loti pronounced with sentimental relish, "to live."

"I see," Gideon said slowly.

He had decided to live, all right-with Mathilde’s earnest help and counsel-but not his own life. More pieces of the puzzle: As a girl Mathilde had been engaged to Alain; Gideon already knew that. Now it seemed that she had still been in love with him when he returned. For whatever their reasons-his terrible injuries, her engagement to Rene-they had decided not to take up where they had left off. But they had put their heads together long enough to hatch a plot that put Guillaume’s wealth in Alain’s hands instead of Claude’s for forty long years…and finally, a week ago, into Mathilde’s.

"These are not the sentimental imaginings of an old man," Dr. Loti cautioned him. "I tell you as a responsible physician: If not for Mathilde, Guillaume du Rocher would never have returned to this life."

"I believe you," Gideon said. "Sincerely."