Skull Duggery (18 page)

“And this activity you mention, this would be ballet dancing?”

“Right.”

“Ballet dancing and only ballet dancing? Nothing else could account for it?”

“As far as I know, no. Nothing else stresses the second metatarsal and only the second metatarsal; or rather, I should say, nothing that anybody has found so far. That’s what I was checking on the computer to make sure when you saw me there.”

“I see.” He scratched delicately and thoughtfully at his cheek. “From dancing en pointe, I presume.”

“So you’d think-so I thought-but as a matter of fact, no, that isn’t what does it. If it was, only female dancers would be affected, because they’re the only ones who go around on tippy-toe, but male and female dancers get this equally. No, it’s from dancing on what they call half- and three-quarter point, which is what they’re all on most of the time. In that position the metatarsals act like an extension of the leg, and since the second metatarsal is the longest one, it takes most of the punishment. As I’ve just learned, something like sixty percent of professional dancers have second metatarsals like this one.”

“All right, she was a dancer. But why have you changed your mind about her age? What happened to your previous certainty?” He sat himself on the one chair in the cubicle and turned his eyes up toward the stained acoustic-tile ceiling. “Let me see… ‘The epiphyses do not lie,’ ” he said, deepening his voice in imitation of Gideon’s. “Isn’t that the way you put it?”

“Did I say that? Well, then maybe I overstated it a bit,” Gideon admitted. “It’s not that they lie, but sometimes they do hoodwink you a little, and this was one of those times. Young female ballet dancers-gymnasts too, by the way-are notable for having delayed skeletal maturation. Apparently, there’s something about that kind of training that slows it down, or it might be that having slower skeletal maturation gives you an edge of some sort; nobody’s really sure about the cause, but everybody agrees that it’s a fact. According to the study I was reading when you came back, the average delay is about three years. So-”

“So,” said Marmolejo, “your previous estimate of fifteen to sixteen now becomes eighteen to nineteen?”

“That’s it. The emerging wisdom teeth lend some support to that too, by the way.”

Marmolejo stood up and came again to the desk to look down on the bones. “Let me see if I can summarize. What we now believe we have before us is a woman eighteen or nineteen years of age-”

“Give or take a year either way to play it safe.”

“-who had undergone serious ballet training, and whose dentition displays a condition known as congenital…?”

“Congenital hypodontia involving the second premolars. I’ll write it all up for you, Javier. You’ll want to see if you can get some DNA samples from the bones too. If so, you’ll be a long way toward identifying her.”

Marmolejo nodded and looked quizzically up at Gideon. “This is quite a different story from the one you told me with so much certainty not much more than an hour ago. I mean no offense, my friend, but you were quite confident of your ‘facts’ then. How confident are you now?”

Gideon grinned. “Pretty confident,” he said.

Marmolejo just rolled his eyes.

By the time Gideon got back to the Hacienda at a little after seven P.M., dinner was problematic. Tony and Preciosa had gone to a concert in Oaxaca, so there was no obligatory family meal in the Casa del Mayordomo. And, at the request of the women professors, some of whom were also going into the city, Dorotea had served dinner at five thirty and started cleaning up with her nieces at six forty-five.

When Gideon and Julie peeked into the kitchen to see what the situation was, Dorotea, up to her roughened elbows in suds and dirty dishes, glared challengingly up at them. Words were not necessary; the look spoke for itself: Just you dare and ask me to cook up something especially for you.

“What now?” Gideon asked once they had backed apologetically out.

“Well, there are two sit-down restaurants in the village, but they wouldn’t be seating anybody as late as this; they’re mostly there for day-trippers. But Jamie told me about a new place-well not a place, exactly; they set up a bunch of tables on the sidewalk in front of the village market, across from the church. The food’s supposed to be great.”

“Sounds good to me. Can we walk there?”

“Oh, sure, it’s practically at the bottom of the hill, right in the middle of town. It’s called Samburguesas.”

“Hamburguesas?” This was the Spanish word for hamburgers.

“No, Samburguesas. It’s a pun. The guy who does it, his name is Sam, and he serves-”

“Hamburgers, I get it. Okay, let’s go. I guess I’m about ready for a burger.”IF there was anything that passed for night life in Teotitlan, it had to be Samburguesas, which was jammed with laughing, gossiping people happy to have an excuse to be out in the fresh air on a warm December evening. The place was like a cross section of Teotitlan society. There were grizzled, mustachioed, solitary old shepherds or farmers in from the hills, in sombreros and loose white working clothes; trendier young weavers in plaid shirts and designer jeans; and groups of young and old women, almost all in traditional dress, with their hair in long braids down their backs, and wearing huipiles -wraparound, apronlike tunics-over their housedresses, and rebozos -wide, multicolored cotton shawls-draped over their shoulders. Many of the younger ones used their rebozos as little hammocks in which to carry sleeping infants. A little away from the crowd, on the grass of the church plaza across the street, were the teenage boys and girls, mostly (like teenagers anywhere) hanging around and eyeing each other from same-sexed groups, the boys unconvincingly cocky and show-offy, the girls flirty and giggling. A few of the luckier ones had already paired off and were lounging on the grass farther away and out of the light.

Sam (they presumed he was Sam) operated from a stand under an awning on the side of the market building, serving hamburguesas and tacos as fast as he could make them, at five pesos each, about fifty cents. Despite the name of the place, almost everyone at Samburguesas was opting for the tacos al pastor, which smelled and looked heavenly, and Gideon and Julie did the same. Sam would deftly shave marinated pork from the sides of a trompo, a top-shaped vertical spit like the Middle Eastern roasters used to cook gyros meat, lay it over two stacked, warm, freshly made corn tortillas, and neatly top the whole with a slice of grilled pineapple.

With their paper plates of tacos in one hand and warmish cans of Mexico’s most popular soft drink (Coca-Cola) in the other, they managed to snag a newly vacated folding table facing the old church tower, now floodlit as the night grew darker. Gideon cleared the table of the previous diners’ leavings, came back, and sat down.

“Did you see Tony today?” he asked while they used plastic spoons to lay on condiments from the platter on the table: cilantro, lime, salsa, guacamole, chiles. “It seems to me he owes you an apology for last night. I was wondering if he made it.”

“Yes, you said that before. No, I didn’t see him, but if I did, I wouldn’t expect one. He flies off the handle once in a while, but basically he’s a good guy. He just-”

“Takes a little getting used to, yeah. You said that before. I’m sorry, that doesn’t cut it as far as I’m concerned. Here you are, using your vacation time to help out-”

“Oh Gideon, I appreciate your taking offense on my behalf, but I really think you’re overreacting. Some of your academic-type friends take some serious getting-used-to too. Audrey, for one, or Norton, or the huge one with the pince-nez-”

“Well yes, that’s true enough-”

“Or if you want to talk about really creepy, what about Harvey-my God!-or Lyle-!”

“But that’s different. They’re-” He laughed. “Okay, point taken. I’ll take Tony as he is.”

For a while they busied themselves with their seriously overloaded tacos, the eating of which required the use of both hands, all of their focus, and the copious application of paper napkins, which were soon piled in a messy clump in the middle of the table.

“Oh, I have a little bit of news,” Julie said, when they paused to wipe their chins and take a couple of breaths. “Annie’s going to be back tomorrow morning. They settled on the divorce agreement in one day. She said, and I’m quoting, ‘El Schmucko didn’t have enough to make it worth fighting about.’ She also said, ‘He sure doesn’t look like Robert Redford anymore.’ That last was said with a certain amount of satisfaction, I should add.”

“Good for Annie, but what does that mean for us? Are we going to be heading home?”

“Well, they said we were welcome to stay as long as we want, of course, but I think we should stick to our original plan-go home at the end of the week.”

“That’s fine with me. So then are you going to be free for the next few days? Can we do some touring?”

“Not altogether, no. I-Oops.” She leaned quickly forward as a strip of salsa-drenched pork disengaged itself from the taco and plopped onto the table. Another napkin was produced from the dispenser to clean it up. “I promised to help Jamie with the quarterly accounts-I guess Annie is hopeless at that kind of thing, even worse than I am-but he says we can probably wrap it up in a couple of mornings, maybe only one. So I’m hoping to be available, yes, but not until tomorrow afternoon, anyway.”

“That works out perfectly,” said Gideon. “I need to write up a report for Marmolejo in the morning, on those bones I was working on today. I know what: maybe we can drop it off personally-I know he’d like to see you-and then continue on into downtown Oaxaca; have lunch out, maybe. There are supposed to be some first-rate restaurants.”

“Maybe,” said Julie, wiping her chin, “but I bet they won’t be as good as Samburguesas.”

“You’re probably right.” He swigged some Coke from the can and got up. “I’m still hungry. I’m going to get another taco. Want one? My treat. You can buy tomorrow.”AFTER dinner they walked contentedly back up to the Hacienda in the dark, their flashlight throwing weird, flitting shadows on the adobe-brick and concrete-block walls that lined the steep alley.

“What did you think of Preciosa?” Julie asked out of nowhere.

“Preciosa? I don’t know, seemed okay to me. A little strange, maybe. And I can understand why Annie calls her Preciosa the Pretentious.”

“How old would you say she is?”

Julie, Gideon had learned, had a bit of an obsession about women who employed face-lifts, dermabrasion, Botox, and the rest of the anti-aging arsenal in their own obsessive, futile pursuit of staying young forever. The idea of it simply irked her; she didn’t like to see them getting away with it when she herself was honestly taking age as it came. It also irked her that Gideon typically couldn’t spot a face-lift when he saw one. So when she asked him that particular question-“How old would you say she is?”-in that particular tone of voice, it was inevitably with the purpose of setting him straight about some artificially enhanced actress or acquaintance that she thought might have him fooled.

“Preciosa?” he said. “Oh… late fifties, maybe sixty or so.”

She was surprised. “I would have thought you’d have said thirties or forties.”

“Are you kidding? No way,” he said, then added: “The hands. You can always tell from the hands.”

The next morning Gideon sat out on the patio in the feathery shade of the casuarina tree, typing the report into his laptop, with a mug of Dorotea’s delicious, cinnamon-scented coffee on the little table beside him. It had been plunked down without his requesting it, along with what he liked to think was a grumpy apology for sending him off dinnerless the previous evening. (“As long as you’re sitting there, I suppose you expected me to make you some coffee.”) Grumpy or not, he was keenly appreciative.

He also appreciated the music that was drifting up from below; the village marching band, which seemed to play several times a day: all trumpets and brass. The music this morning was slower than he’d heard before, quite funereal, in fact, something like the bands that play for a New Orleans funeral, but even slower, and with a mariachi lilt instead of a jazzy one. This one was a funeral procession too, he supposed; pretty appropriate background music for the work he was doing.

At a little after ten, he hit the save button, copied the report to a flash drive, and went looking for Julie. When he checked the dining room, he saw Tony and Preciosa breakfasting with a few of the women professors. Tony beckoned him affably over, but Gideon refused stiffly. He hadn’t meant to be rude, but he was still irked at the way Tony had jumped all over Julie at dinner the other night, and he couldn’t help showing it.

Julie was with Jamie, at a table on the front terrace, going over a mess of accounts and receipts spread out in front of them. They were in a secluded corner that looked not out at the town, but down on the dusty corral twenty feet or so below, where Carl and Juanito, his Mexican helper, were saddling up horses for a morning ride for the women’s group. Gideon stood near their table for a moment, leaning on the terrace’s low stone wall, watching Carl and Juanito and savoring the smells of salty horseflesh, old leather, and sweetly fragrant alfalfa feed. Carl glanced up at him and waved. “Gonna ride out along one of the arroyos this morning. Just half an hour, forty-five minutes, to get them comfortable with the horses. Want to come? Take no time to saddle one up for you.”

“Thanks, no, not this morning,” Gideon said. There’s room for only one alpha male on a ride like that, he thought with a smile, and it’s not me.

When Julie caught sight of Gideon her face lit up, producing a lovely, melting glow all through his chest. Was there anything sweeter in his life than seeing her uncontrived pleasure on unexpectedly seeing him? If there was, he couldn’t think of it.

“Hi, honey!” she said. “Come join us.”

“Well, you’re obviously working. Why don’t I-”