Joe snorted. “I told him, you want to know where you come from, kid, look in the mirror. Wasn’t the Mayflower, huh?”
He picked up the card again, a reluctant grin on his face.
“So he says, if he’s taking back his heritage, why not take it back all the way? If his grandaddy wouldn’t give him a name, he’ll give his grandaddy one. And the only trouble with that,” he said, looking up at me under a cocked brow, “is that it kind of leaves me man in the middle. Now I have to be Muhammad Ishmael Shabazz, Junior, so Lenny can be a ‘proud African-American’。” He thrust himself back from the desk, chin on his chest, staring balefully at the pale gray card.
“You’re lucky, L.J.,” he said. “At least Bree isn’t giving you grief about who her granddaddy was. All you have to worry about is will she be doing dope and getting pregnant by some draft dodger who takes off for Canada.”
I laughed, with more than a touch of irony. “That’s what you think,” I told him.
“Yeah?” He cocked an interested eyebrow at me, then took off his gold-rimmed glasses and wiped them on the end of his tie. “So how was Scotland?” he asked, eyeing me. “Bree like it?”
“She’s still there,” I said. “Looking for her history.”
Joe was opening his mouth to say something when a tentative knock on the door interrupted him.
“Dr. Abernathy?” A plump young man in a polo shirt peered doubtfully into the office, leaning over the top of a large cardboard box he held clutched to his substantial abdomen.
“Call me Ishmael,” Joe said genially.
“What?” The young man’s mouth hung slightly open, and he glanced at me in bewilderment, mingled with hope. “Are you Dr. Abernathy?”
“No,” I said, “he is, when he puts his mind to it.” I rose from the desk, brushing down my skirts. “I’ll leave you to your appointment, Joe, but if you have time later—”
“No, stay a minute, L. J.,” he interrupted, rising. He took the box from the young man, then shook his hand formally. “You’d be Mr. Thompson? John Wicklow called to tell me you’d be coming. Pleased to meet you.”
“Horace Thompson, yes,” the young man said, blinking slightly. “I brought, er, a specimen…” He waved vaguely at the cardboard box.
“Yes, that’s right. I’d be happy to look at it for you, but I think Dr. Randall here might be of assistance, too.” He glanced at me, the glint of mischief in his eyes. “I just want to see can you do it to a dead person, L. J.”
“Do what to a dead—” I began, when he reached into the opened box and carefully lifted out a skull.
“Oh, pretty,” he said in delight, turning the object gently to and fro.
“Pretty” was not the first adjective that struck me; the skull was stained and greatly discolored, the bone gone a deep streaky brown. Joe carried it to the window and held it in the light, his thumbs gently stroking the small bony ridges over the eye sockets.
“Pretty lady,” he said softly, talking as much to the skull as to me or Horace Thompson. “Full-grown, mature. Maybe late forties, middle fifties. Do you have the legs?” he asked, turning abruptly to the plump young man.
“Yeah, right here,” Horace Thompson assured him, reaching into the box. “We have the whole body, in fact.”
Horace Thompson was probably someone from the coroner’s office, I thought. Sometimes they brought bodies to Joe that had been found in the countryside, badly deteriorated, for an expert opinion as to the cause of death. This one looked considerably deteriorated.
“Here, Dr. Randall.” Joe leaned over and carefully placed the skull in my hands. “Tell me whether this lady was in good health, while I check her legs.”
“Me? I’m not a forensic scientist.” Still, I glanced automatically down. It was either an old specimen, or had been weathered extensively; the bone was smooth, with a gloss that fresh specimens never had, stained and discolored by the leaching of pigments from the earth.
“Oh, all right.” I turned the skull slowly in my hands, watching the bones, naming them each in my mind as I saw them. The smooth arch of the parietals, fused to the declivity of the temporal, with the small ridge where the jaw muscle originated, the jutting projection that meshed itself with the maxillary into the graceful curve of the squamosal arch. She had had lovely cheekbones, high and broad. The upper jaw had most of its teeth—straight and white.
Deep eyes. The scooped bone at the back of the orbits was dark with shadow; even by tilting the skull to the side, I couldn’t get light to illuminate the whole cavity. The skull felt light in my hands, the bone fragile. I stroked her brow and my hand ran upward, and down behind the occiput, my fingers seeking the dark hole at the base, the foremen magnum, where all the messages of the nervous system pass to and from the busy brain.
Then I held it close against my stomach, eyes closed, and felt the shifting sadness, filling the cavity of the skull like running water. And an odd faint sense—of surprise?
“Someone killed her,” I said. “She didn’t want to die.” I opened my eyes to find Horace Thompson staring at me, his own eyes wide in his round, pale face. I handed him the skull, very gingerly. “Where did you find her?” I asked.
Mr. Thompson exchanged glances with Joe, then looked back at me, both eyebrows still high.
“She’s from a cave in the Caribbean,” he said. “There were a lot of artifacts with her. We think she’s maybe between a hundred-fifty and two hundred years old.”
“She’s what?”
Joe was grinning broadly, enjoying his joke.
“Our friend Mr. Thompson here is from the anthropology department at Harvard,” he said. “His friend Wicklow knows me; asked me would I have a look at this skeleton, to tell them what I could about it.”
“The nerve of you!” I said indignantly. “I thought she was some unidentified body the coroner’s office dragged in.”
“Well, she’s unidentified,” Joe pointed out. “And certainly liable to stay that way.” He rooted about in the cardboard box like a terrier. The end flap said PICT-SWEET CORN.
“Now what have we got here?” he said, and very carefully drew out a plastic sack containing a jumble of vertebrae.
“She was in pieces when we got her,” Horace explained.
“Oh, de headbone connected to de…neckbone,” Joe sang softly, laying out the vertebrae along the edge of the desk. His stubby fingers darted skillfully among the bones, nudging them into alignment. “De neckbone connected to de…backbone…”
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” I told Horace. “You’ll just encourage him.”
“Now hear…de word…of de Lawd!” he finished triumphantly. “Jesus Christ, L. J., you’re somethin’ else! Look here.” Horace Thompson and I bent obediently over the line of spiky vertebral bones. The wide body of the axis had a deep gouge; the posterior zygapophysis had broken clean off, and the fracture plane went completely through the centrum of the bone.
“A broken neck?” Thompson asked, peering interestedly.