“Which is my point.”

Gideon shrugged and nodded. “You’re right,” he said, returning with only slightly diminished appetite to his cream cheese-chives-and-egg bagel, a specialty of the Port Angeles Olympic Bagel Company, where they breakfasted once or twice a week. “But this guy was an Associated Press reporter!” he suddenly blurted. “You’d think I could trust him!”

“Look again,” Julie said, turning the paper around so he could read the byline.

“ ‘Mike Fender,’ ” Gideon read aloud. “ ‘Affiliated Press.’ ” He looked up. “What the heck is Affiliated Press?”

“I’m not sure,” Julie said, “but on a guess, I’d say it’s the agency that supplies the checkout magazines with all those snazzy news items: ‘Monkey Woman Gives Birth to Twin Lobsters’, ‘Talking Gorilla With I.Q. of 250 Seeks “Significant Relationship” with “Large” Woman’. …”

“ ‘Noted Anthropologist Stands Scientific World on Its Head,’ ” Gideon said, smiling at last. “Oh, boy, I’m going to take a lot of flak about this. I guess I’d just better resign myself.”

“I’m afraid so. So this talk you’ll be giving in Gibraltar – it’s open to the public? Not part of the society meetings?”

“Right. I’m not giving a paper at the meetings. But apparently there’s a very active cultural association down there, and they hold these monthly noontime Heritage Lectures on everything under the sun. So they’ve asked me if I’d be willing to do the June one; something that would be interesting to the general public.”

“Why you, do you think?”

“Probably because I’m the only one they’ve ever heard of. The Skeleton Detective, you know? But it’s fine, I’m glad to do it. It sounds like fun, actually. They hold them in someplace called St. Michael’s Cave, which I gather has a natural underground amphitheater they use for this kind of thing, and for concerts and such.”