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“Generally speaking, I’m not a big fan of a formal dining room, but I could definitely do without the centerpiece.” He smirked. “These are real, I’m guessing.” He gestured to the near-complete set of skeletal remains resting in anatomical position on a sheet of thick plastic covering the dining room table.
“Oh! I hadn’t even—that’s just Barry. He’s kind of a pet project.”
“Is your pet a permanent fixture?”
“Sorry. Definitely not. He shouldn’t even be here. I just felt bad for him.”
“You felt bad. For a skeleton?” I couldn’t tell from his crooked grin whether that amused him, or whether he thought I was unstable enough to call off the wedding immediately.
“Well…” I didn’t plan on doing this now, but it was better he knew exactly what he was getting into with me. “Look at this fracture here. All we have of the left femur is the head and a bit of the neck, which makes sense when you look at this.” I switched on the task light and beckoned Gus closer. He bent his head but didn’t step forward.
His body stayed rigidly upright.
I opened my mouth to say something. But when he didn’t follow me, I realized why.
My comfort with death was an occupational hazard. These bones were nothing, hardly any organic matter left clinging to them. I was used to… well,a lotworse. And practically everyone I knew worked in deathcare and felt the same. I’d forgotten there were people who weren’t desensitized to human remains, even remains as old and desiccated as Barry.
I’d forgotten one of those sensitive people was Gus. He may have grown up in a funeral home, gone to mortuary school, and still occasionally lent a hand to transport bodies when his family was desperate for the help, but he wasn’t case-hardened like the rest of us. Even now, standing here among bones that were barely more than dust, he looked green around the gills.
“I’m sorry. We don’t have to—”
“Show me,” he demanded, taking a step closer. His voice had a roughness to it that made my cheeks hot.
I picked up the femur again. “On the distal end of the neck, right at the fracture line... Can you see that spherical impression?
“Bullet?”
“Exactly!” I grinned. “Well, musket ball.”
“Is that cause of death?”
“We can’t really tell if the bullet broke the head off the femur or if that happened in the grave, but if the bullet wasn’t cause of death, it certainly happened around the time of death, since there’s no evidence of bone remodeling.”
He looked at me blankly.
“The body starts healing right away. There’s no evidence of healing here.”
“So he got shot in the leg in the Civil War. Why do you feel bad for him? Do you know what side he fought on?”
My smile fell. “My sympathy only extends to bones, not moral failings. Anyway, he was shot in the hip. You know what blood vessel passes over this exact spot?”
“The femoral?”
“You must pay attention to Soula.”
“Learning anatomy from a textbook wasn’t my problem. The grossness was.”
It would be good to have him around, reminding me that not every life revolved around death. “So we have probable cause of death. Exsanguination. He bled out.”
“Can you make a positive declaration?”
“In anthropology, yes. That’s where we differ from what your sister does. The stakes are a lot lower when the case is nearlytwo-hundred-years old, and no one cares. And besides, we can use the narrative to shape our analysis.”
“The narrative?”
“The objects buried with him. The dating, and so on. Although no one cares about Barry enough to date him.”
“Except you.” The words lingered in the air; his faint smile was entrancing. The longer he looked into my eyes, the harder it was to hold his gaze. It was too penetrative. Like he could look into my soul and know all my secrets.
