Free Entombed by Linda Fairstein Page B

history and
general trivia.
    "Not a prayer. Twenty
is max. Don't get too cocky, kid. You in, Andy?"
    "Nope," he said,
dipping a toothbrush in a bowl of cloudy water and gently scrubbing
against the bones.
    "He hasn't stopped
working since we left him last night," Mike said. "A little toothpaste,
a little soap-our girl will be cleaned up in no time."
    "Writer who lost an
arm at the Battle of Lepanto," Trebek read aloud from the answer board
to the three finalists, each of whom looked as pained as I did by the
question.
    "That category's a
mischaracterization," I said. "You just got lucky. It's war in the
guise of literature."
    Mike lifted a Polaroid
of the skull from the top of a pile in front of him and scribbled
something on the back. "You first, Coop."
    "Who was…? Give me a
hint, will you?" I knew Lepanto was in Greece, but couldn't begin to
figure whether the battle was an ancient or modern one.
    "No, I'm sorry,"
Trebek said to the three-time champion, a waiter from Oregon who was
trailing the other two players. "It was not Alexandre Dumas."
    "Time's up," Mike
said, tapping the photo on which he'd written the question on the
tabletop while he twirled Andy's calipers in the other hand.
    "Who was Sophocles?"
    "Very lame. Bad
answer."
    "He was a playwright
and a general, wasn't he?"
    "Yeah, but he never
lost a body part," Mike said. None of the contestants answered the
question correctly. "Who is Miguel Cervantes? You didn't know he was
called El Manco, the one-armed man? Lepanto was the first defeat of the
Ottomans by the Christians- Spanish and Venetian mostly. Fifteen
seventy-one. Jane Austen and those brooding Englishmen you like to read
never left the sheep farm, Coop. I would have won the bundle tonight."
    He held out his hand
for the twenty.
    "I'll buy dinner. Put
it towards that."
    "No can do, Miss
Lonelyhearts. Valerie leaves for California tomorrow. Family ski trip
for her parents' fortieth anniversary. Going to her place for a
home-cooked meal. You know what that is, home cooking?"
    "I have a vague
childhood recollection." I had grown up in a close-knit family. My
grandmother, who emigrated from Finland as an adolescent, lived with us
for many years. Both she and my mother were superb cooks who prepared
complicated meals every day of the week and made it seem effortless.
We'd spend less than an hour at the dinner table when my father
returned home from his surgical rounds, and then the women had to deal
with the mounds of plates and pots that had been used in the process.
Somehow I never inherited the love for standing over a hot stove that
had run through my maternal line.
    "Andy's making great
progress," Mike said. "Scotty and I got up here at five. He's already
running with it."
    "With what?" I asked,
glancing around the shelves that were lined with fragments of bone and
assorted animal skeletons- snakes, an armadillo, and an elegantly
horned antelope head among them.
    "Basic 'scrip. Enough
for Scotty to start looking at old police records and calling other
agencies. Explain it to her."
    Andy kept rubbing the
surface of the leg bones with his toothbrush. "We've got a woman-and
I'd say a young one, in her early twenties."
    "How can you tell
that?"
    "Get used to it, Andy.
Coop's gonna keep interrupting. All she knows how to do is
cross-examine."
    "First thing is
getting the bones clean, laying her out in a proper anatomical
position. That was easy here. Usually when we find them so many years
later, the skeletal pieces are scattered around the scene, or they've
been moved by animals. This one had nowhere to go in that brick coffin."
    "But age, how can you
tell that?"
    "Bones stop growing
basically by the time we're twenty-five years old. Up until then they
keep changing and fusing together. After that, you begin to see
deterioration, which helps us make estimates. They sort of break down,
with everything from signs of arthritis to osteoporosis."
    "And here?"
    "She's in her early
twenties, most probably. It's the