Ten minutes later, with occasional help from Arlo and Jerry, she’d finished.
“That’s strange, all right,” Gideon said. “But you know, people are always stealing stuff from skeletal collections. They make good souvenirs, I guess.”
“And dumping them in the trash fifty yards away?” she asked.
“Well, that part’s funny,” he agreed. After a moment he said: “Was there anything special about this particular skeleton?”
TJ shrugged. “Not that I could see. I think it’s a male, but that’s about all I could… I don’t suppose you’d like to take a look, would you? You could do it now. It’d only take a minute.” Gideon smiled, more wide awake than he’d been for hours.
“Let’s go.”
“I’ll come too,” Jerry said. “What do you say, Arlo?” Arlo raised his hands. “Spare me,” he said with feeling.
“I’ve done all the looking at bones I care to for some time to come, thank you. They’re all yours.”
Chapter Seven
In roughly anatomical position, under ferociously bright fluorescent lights, on a scarred, rimmed, metal table, they lay where Gideon had placed them: a skull, both femurs, both tibias, one fibula, three vertebrae, four ribs, a right scapula and humerus, and the bones of the pelvic girdle. Some, according to TJ and Jerry, had been attached when discovered, but handling since then had disarticulated them. A handful of smaller bones had been pushed to a corner of the table as being from rodents; all except a couple of metacarpals and the first phalanx of the right index finger, which were anatomically placed with the others.
These, Gideon thought, looking down at them, are my kind of bones: ancient, brown, desiccated. Archaeological, not forensic. Nothing wet, nothing smelly, nothing nasty. And from a man so remote in time that it would have been affectation to talk with sadness or solemnity about his death. But not so remote that the bones didn’t form a link back to him. Gideon ran a hand down the smooth, flat surface of a tibia and thought, with a feeling that would have been hard to describe, although he’d had it often enough: I am touching a man who ate, and walked, and laughed, and made love in the Bronze Age, a thousand years before King Solomon, two thousand years and more before Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ.