Free Old Bones by Aaron Elkins

members of my family. My wife—"
    Joly cut him off unceremoniously. "Perhaps first you would be good enough to show us the remains, monsieur."
    "Of course, Inspector. Certainly." He led them briskly through the room. One of the men, vaguely familiar, smiled at Gideon in a particularly friendly way. Stoop-shouldered and slight, there was something about him that reminded Gideon of Ray Schaefer, so perhaps it was a relative he’d met when he’d visited Rochebonne before. If so, he’d forgotten completely. A little self-consciously, he returned the smile in passing.
    The big cellar was damp-smelling and gloomy, lit by four plain bulbs dangling from a wire stapled to the disquietingly sagging ceiling. Against one of the rough stone walls was an ancient, rickety worktable on which was an untidy package of what looked like rotted white butcher paper, much soiled by blood, or earth, or both. The package had been opened and spread out under a table lamp to show a jumble of brownish-yellow bones.
    At the near end of the room some of the big rectangular paving stones had been raised and tossed haphazardly into a pile, uncovering a bed of earth about twelve feet by three. Into this a two-foot-wide trench had been cut, but it had come to a halt after only a yard. A pick and two spades still lay where they had been dropped onto the mounded dirt. Around the brief trench a chalk line had been drawn.
    "A body outline for a skeleton wrapped in a package?" John said. "You guys are
thorough.
"
    Joly looked at him for a moment, his bare upper lip growing longer than ever, but decided not to reply.
    "Good afternoon, Fleury," he said to a small, heavy-lidded man in a buttoned-up suit and a red scarf wrapped several times around his throat. "Nothing’s been disturbed?"
    "Not if you don’t count the crew from the lab," said Fleury, who gave the appearance of treating his chief with sleepy, skeptical amusement, until it became apparent that the sardonic V’s of his eyebrows were permanently set that way. "They were here for an hour."
    "And?"
    "The usual. They crawled around on their stomachs picking up invisible things with tweezers and putting them in their little plastic bags, but I don’t think they found anything. Aubin said he thought it was something from the war, maybe even before."
    Joly nodded. He went to the empty trench and squatted on his haunches, first carefully hiking up his trousers. He wore stocking suspenders, a fact that struck Gideon as being in keeping with what he surmised of the inspector’s approach to life. After a few moments of peering at the empty hole—if there was anything to see, it escaped Gideon—he got up and dusted off spotless, gray-clad knees that hadn’t come within ten inches of the soil.
    "Shall we have a look at the remains?" he said. "Perhaps we’d better establish at once that we’re not dealing with a polydactylous pig."
    "We’re not," Gideon said. "I can see that from here."
    "From thirty feet away? All I can see are some ribs." They began to walk towards the table.
    "Those are enough to show it’s what’s left of a two-footed animal." As always, Gideon slipped with ease into his teaching mode. "Four-footed animals have ribcages shaped more or less like buckets to support the internal organs. But in bipedal animals, naturally, the insides don’t weigh against the ribs; it’s the pelvis that supports them, so the ribs have wider arcs to give the organs more room."
    "Ah," Joly said. "Yes, I see."
    "Those—" Gideon nodded at the bones. "—have rounded arcs, so it has to be two-legged. And since there isn’t any other large two-footed animal—apes are basically quadrupeds and built that way—it has to be a human being."
    "How about an ostrich?" John said.
    Joly frowned at him, but Gideon laughed. "Or an ostrich," he allowed.
    At the table, John grasped a corner of the crumpled paper between two fingers. It broke off. "Pretty old, all right."
    "Mm," Joly said, "yes. It’s hard to tell if