Skeleton dance

Chapter 12

"So tell me, what else is going to be in this book besides the Old Fart of Tayac?" Pru McGinnis asked. "Piltdown, I suppose?"

Her chair creaked under her considerable weight as she leaned back, ran her fingers through her already disordered red hair, clasped her fingernail-chewed hands behind her head, and propped her snakeskin-booted feet on an opened drawer, one over the other, clunk, clunk. After getting her doctorate from Northern California State, she had taught for four years at the University of Missouri, from which she'd emerged with a country-western drawl and a style of dress to match-jeans, boots, belt buckles the size of dinner plates. The accent had soon gone, but the Western garb remained.

"Piltdown, of course," Gideon said. The Abominable Snowman, the yeti, the Tasaday hoax, the Formosan Psalmanzar story-"

"Ah, good old Psalmanzar. Well, I'll give you one I bet you don't have. What do you know about the Lost Hippopotamus of Lake Mendota?"

"I never heard of it."

"Aha. See, that's because we kept it a secret till now. The world was not yet ready. But today… today at last, I break my silence."

Gideon put down his note pad and settled back. If Pru was in the mood to tell one of her fish stories the only thing to do was relax and enjoy it because he didn't know any way to stop her. The Old Man of Tayac would have to wait.

"What are you putting your pen down for, are you crazy?" she asked. "This'll be the best part of your book. This'll make it a best-seller."

"I figure I'll just memorize it. That way I'll get every word."

"Sure, I can see how that makes sense. Okay, this happened when I was an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin. You went there too, didn't you?"

"A long time before you," Gideon said.

"Not that much. Anyway, my roommate, Gloria Kakonis-she was track and field too-had this old umbrella stand that she got somewhere that was made from this humungous, motheaten old hippopotamus foot, you know? Gross. So late one night, in the middle of January, right after a snowstorm, we drop a couple of heavy books inside it, hook up twenty feet of clothesline to either side, and take it outside, up to the campus, right out in front of Bascom Hall. Then Gloria grabs hold of one rope, and I get hold of the other rope, and we start carrying this thing down the hill suspended between us, okay? Only every couple of feet we set it down in the snow so it looks like a footprint. But our footprints are so far away nobody connects them. What? What are you grinning at?"

"It's a funny story, Pru. I'm just imagining it."

"Wait, it gets better. We carried that thing for an hour, till our arms were practically coming out of our sockets and we couldn't feel our toes any more from the cold. Then we go back home and wait for the next morning."

"When everybody discovers to their astonishment that there was a hippopotamus loose on campus the night before," Gideon said.

"Not exactly. Actually, they didn't know what the tracks were, so they brought in a couple of professors from the zoology department. They look at the tracks, they look at each other, and go, like, 'Egad, Farquelhar, damned if it isn't the greater four-toed Hippopotamus amphibius!' And off they trot, following the tracks, and by now there's a whole crowd with them, including some reporters. So. Down the hill they go, through town, and right out onto Lake Mendota, which is frozen, of course, under all the snow-and which also happens to be the water supply for Madison, if you remember. Out they all go on the lake, a hundred yards, two hundred yards… and suddenly the tracks stop."

"Stop?"

"Stop. End. In a big, hippopotamus-sized hole."

Gideon burst out laughing.

Pru threw her head back and cackled along with him. "Nobody wanted to drink the town water for a year-and even then everybody said it tasted like hippopotamus!"

When they finished chortling, Pru wiped her eyes and said: "Are you going to put that in your book?"

"Nope."

"Why, you don't believe me?"

"Not for a minute. Okay, can we get serious now?"

"I'm always serious. When am I not serious?"

"Okay, seriously then, put me in the picture. I know what the Tayac hoax was about and how it turned out and all, but I don't have any feel for the way it was."

"It was crappy."

"Yeah, okay, I understand that, but what happened, exactly? How did it start? You were there; did Ely bring everybody out to the site to see those four bones? Did he come running into the office one day waving them over his head and yelling? What?"

Pru took her hands from behind her head, crossed her arms on her chest and brooded silently for a few moments.

"It was a dark and stormy night," she said.

Gideon sighed.

"No, really. Well, a dark and rainy late afternoon and we were all at the cafe-all of us but Ely-having one of those edifying, useful debates that we love so much over a carafe of vin de la maison. I think at the moment, appropriately enough, the issue of contention was our favorite: Neanderthal artistic behavior or the lack thereof. You know the drill, I think?"

Gideon nodded. "Did the Neanderthals ever produce anything that could reasonably be called 'art'? And by extension, were they therefore capable of understanding and practicing symbolic behavior? Or did true symbolic behavior arise only with the coming of the Cro-Magnons? Or was there a more diffuse-"

"You got it," Pru said. "So there we were, going at each other hot and heavy-we must have been on the second carafe by then-when in comes Ely, dripping wet. He walks up to us without a word and just stands there. He looks at us. We look at him. We all know something's up, but what?" She paused, seeing that Gideon had begun jotting notes.

"Would you rather I didn't write this down?" he asked.

She began to say something but changed her mind. "No, go ahead, I guess. It's not as if it's a secret. So where was I? Right, Ely stands there looking at us. He says exactly five words-this is a quote, not a paraphrase-'I've just come from Tayac.' Then he puts this knotted bandana on the table in front of us and starts untying it, but it was soaked, so he has to get a knife and saw it open, which he does, while in the meantime we're dying of suspense because of this weird look on his face. And then he gets it open and there on the table are those four little bones with the little holes in them." She slowly shook her head, remembering. "Knocked our knee socks off."

"I can imagine," Gideon said, and so he could. "But didn't anyone express any doubts? I mean, you must have wondered-"

"If only," Pru said wistfully. "Maybe things wouldn't have turned out the way they did. But, you know, at the time nobody dreamt-I mean it never crossed our minds-I mean, now it's obvious, of course, but then even the suggestion that they were faked would have been so, so-"

"I know," Gideon said. "I'm doing a whole book on the problem, and I'm not finding any shortage of material." He finished making a notation, taking care to write legibly so that he'd be able to read his notes later, something that wasn't always doable. "So when did the first suspicions arise?"

"Pretty soon, actually, as soon as we got over the shock, but it was that letter that really brought the whole thing tumbling down. You know about the letter, don't you?"

"The anonymous letter to Paris-Match?"

"Yeah." Pru took her feet off the drawer and rolled her chair back a few inches. "It said the bones actually came from this little museum, which was easy enough to check out. They did, all right, and that did it. Everybody in the world had to accept them as a fraud. Except Ely."

"What did he do?"

"At first he wouldn't acknowledge the evidence, just kept defending his find, which really isolated him. And made him look more and more ridiculous, poor guy."

"It must have been really hard on him. From what I've heard, he got a little paranoid."

"More than a little. You know, even after it got through to him that he'd been had, he never really recovered. He got terribly suspicious of everyone- blamed everybody but himself for what'd happened to him. He spent all his time-twelve, fourteen hours a day-digging a couple of sites in the woods, working them all by himself or maybe with a single workman to help. The institute pretty much had to run itself for a while there."

"What was he after?" Gideon asked. "Or was it just a kind of escape for him?"

Pru shook he head. "No, I think he still believed in his own theories and he was determined that if he just kept going he'd come up with something-anything-to confirm them. I guess that makes him obsessive as well as paranoid. Or is it compulsive?"

"Either way," Gideon said with genuine sympathy, "it sounds as if he went over the edge."

"I think that's fair to say, yes. He came up with nothing, of course."

"And even if he had, who would have taken it seriously?"

"You got a point there, partner. And so in the end he pretty much self-destructed and had to resign." Her gaze shifted over Gideon's shoulder to the cubicle's single, small window and for a few seconds she stared through it without speaking. "And then," she said in a faraway voice, "he climbed into his little toy plane, pointed it toward Brittany, took off into the wild blue yonder… and thank you and goodbye, Ely Carpenter."

Gideon looked hard at her. "You make it sound as if… do you think he committed suicide?"

"Do you happen to know what his last words were?" she asked him.

"No, of course not." And then after a moment: "Does anybody?"

"Oh, yes. It was in the papers. He was on the radio to the local air traffic control when he went down, and the very last thing he said was ' Dites-leur que je suis desole.'"

"Tell them I'm sorry," Gideon murmured. "So you think it was suicide?"

"Sort of."

"Sort of? How do you sort of commit suicide?"

"Oh, you know what I mean. He'd radioed for help, so you can't call it suicide in the usual sense, but I think it was a lot closer to self-destruction than to an accident. I think Ely just plain self-destructed."

"' Dites-leur que je suis desole,'" he repeated thoughtfully. "Pru, isn't it possible that was a kind of confession, that he was admitting to having faked those bones himself?"

"No, I don't." she said stiffly.

"So what was he apologizing for?"

"It could have been for a lot of things, Gideon. How much do you know about his life? He had a retarded grown daughter that he left in an institution back in the States, did you know about that? He always felt guilty about her. He had a divorced wife back there too. Who knows what else? But I think he was just saying he was sorry for getting himself and the institute involved in the whole damn mess, that's all."

"That's certainly possible, but isn't it also possible he was admitting-"

"No, it isn't." She straightened up in her chair and squared her shoulders. "It wasn't Ely, Gideon, definitely not Ely."

"Why 'definitely not'?"

"Gideon,' she said, leaning forward, "I am not going to get into it, okay? Don't push me, okay? Just take my word for it, he wouldn't have done it. Ely Carpenter was a really, really neat guy until this happened to him."

"Sorry," Gideon said meekly.

Pru sat back, suddenly sheepish. Her jaw muscles, which had bunched up, relaxed. "Yeah, me too. I didn't mean to come on so strong, but I really had a lot of respect for the man." She faltered, then went on. "In fact there was a time-oh, hell, you'll find this out anyway-when the two of us… when I came that close to marrying Ely, or did you already know that?"

"No, I didn't know it."

Not that he could claim to be bowled over at the news. Pru's cheerful, brawny amiability had always been attractive to men, and it seemed to work the other way around too, but never for very long. Ever since he'd known her she'd been in and out of affairs, uniformly brief, and rarely associated with any visible trauma. "Why didn't you, or am I getting too personal?"

"Oh, I don't know, I don't really remember-oh, wait a minute, yes I do. He was already married at the time, that must have been it. Later, after he got divorced, I guess I just never got around to it again."

"Well, I didn't mean to-"

"Listen, it's not just that I had a thing for him, trust me. He was a first-rate archaeologist too; he really was. I hate the way his reputation's been raked over the coals over that stupid Tayac thing, I hate it. He'd never in a million years have pulled a dumb stunt like that."

"But apparently he did fall for it," Gideon said gently.

Pru puffed her cheeks and blew out a mouthful of air. "Yeah, that he did, he surely did."

"Okay, if not Carpenter, who then?"

She shook her head. "No. Uh-uh. Look, haven't I given you all kinds of goodies? Isn't that enough? Go bug someone else."

"Pru, help me out, will you? I have to start somewhere. If you say it's a guess, that's what I'll treat it as, unless it leads somewhere definitive on its own."

She took her feet off the drawer and leaned forward, looking her one-time professor in the eye, her elbows on the arms of her chair. "Let's say it was the other way around-let's say I was sitting here asking you to rat on one of your colleagues, and all you had to go on was a guess-no proof, no real evidence, just a hunch- would you do it?"

"So it is one of your colleagues?" Gideon said.

"God, are you pushy. Look, don't get tricky with me, just answer the question. Would you do it?"

"Yes."

"Bullshit"

"All right, no," Gideon admitted, "I don't suppose I would." But even with Pru's unwillingness to answer, she'd told him something, or he thought she had. Colleague. Fellow-archaeologist, fellow-scholar at the institute. Pru didn't go along with the Bousquet-as-perpetrator idea. She had somebody else in mind.

"Suppose, my eye. You know you wouldn't." She returned her feet to the drawer and leaned back again. "Okay, then, enough of that. Anything else I can help you with?"

"Yes, do you happen to know what museum those four metapodials were taken from? I'd love to go have a look at them. All I've seen are photos."

"Sure, but you don't have to go to any museum. They're right here."

"The original cave lynx bones? With the holes?"

"Yes, what are you so surprised about? The museum didn't want any more to do with them, so we hung onto them. They're under lock and key-important historical artifacts. Ask Jacques or Michel to show you."

"Will do. I'm off to see Michel next."

"And for your records, the museum they came from is the Musee Thibault. It's just a hole in the wall, run by one of the local antiquarian societies, but it's been around forever. It's in La Quinze, a few kliks north of here, on the way to Perigueux."

"Thanks," Gideon said, writing it down. "Jacques couldn't remember."

"He couldn't remember?" Pru laughed. "Jesus, how does the poor soul make it from one day to the next?"

"What do you mean?"

"Jacques been involved with the Thibault since he was a kid, for God's sake. He's been on the board of trustees for umpteen years. Armand Thibault was his mother's brother. You tell me, how could any normal person not remember its name?"

How, indeed, Gideon wondered. Was it possible that Beaupierre But Pru was wagging a blunt finger in his face. "No, no, no, no, that's not what I meant. I see what you're thinking, I know how your mind works. You're thinking he was hiding something, he was being devious, am I right?"

"Well, I don't see how I can help it."

"Forget it, prof, Jacques wouldn't know 'devious' if it walked up to him and said bonjour."

"Maybe not, but-"

"Come on, pal, don't make a federal case out of it. You know Jacques pretty well-where his brain is at any given time, nobody can say. The man's not accountable. He's a few peas short of a casserole, shall we say. The receiver's off the hook sixty percent of the time, you know? The elevator usually doesn't go all the way to the top floor, or let me put it this way, the sewing machine ran out of thread a while back, the-".

"Okay, enough," Gideon said, laughing. "I think I get your drift."