Free Unnatural Selection by Aaron Elkins

been caused by a hammerlike weapon, or perhaps a nearly spent musket ball that hadn’t had the oomph left to penetrate the metal. Either way, it would likely have left a sizeable dent in the skull beneath it too, so it might well be that he was looking at evidence of the cause of death. Directly under that dent, beneath the unfashionably short-cropped hair (which was the reason they were called Roundheads), would have been the coronal suture, separating the frontal and left parietal. Too bad the skull didn’t survive. It would have been interesting-
    “Yes, that’s our man,” Madeleine’s plummy, jolly voice announced, “waiting all these years-all these centuries-for you to come and tell us all about him.”
    Gideon turned, smiling, to greet her. “Nice exhibit. You’ve already shown quite a lot about him.”
    “Why, thank you,” she said, beaming. She wore a skirt-suit of violent green that did nothing to minimize her ample proportions. “Ready to go to work? Or would you care to chat for a while?”
    “How about work first, chat later?”
    “Very good. A true scientist.”
    She unlocked an unmarked door between wall cases and they stepped into a typical museum storeroom, with racks of cheap metal shelving, some holding neatly stacked boxes specifically made for museum storage of specimens and artifacts, others holding cartons specifically made for grocery storage of applesauce or tomato paste. There were also objects large and small-Victorian schoolbooks; a well-worn millstone (how had they gotten that in here?); a cannonball; framed, pressed seaweed specimens-stowed willy-nilly in corners, on chairs and tables, and anyplace else they’d go. One of the two library tables in the room had been cleared, except for a serious-looking one-by-three-foot, lidded cardboard carton at one end, and a smaller Prince’s fish paste carton at the other. In the center, neatly arranged, were the materials and equipment he’d asked for.
    “And here…” With a flourish, she removed the lid from the larger carton. “… lies our fallen hero.”
    Inside the heavy cardboard box were some of the long bones lying loose, all of them brown and exfoliating, and only a few of them whole. When he picked up the left humerus, bits of bone flaked off and floated to the bottom of the carton.
    “Madeleine, you’ll want to stabilize these if you exhibit them. Or even if you don’t. Otherwise they’ll just continue to degrade. Whoever cleaned them did it without preserving them, which didn’t help. Look at all the flakes and crumbs in the bottom.”
    “It does look pretty bad,” she said, concerned. “I should have done something before this. What does one use for human bones? Alvar and acetone?”
    “Sure, something like that. Whatever you’re used to using on pottery would work.” He looked down for a few seconds at the dry, dun-brown remnants that had once given form and strength to arms and legs. “Madeleine, I’m afraid your doctor may pretty much have said it all. He was human and he was male. As for going beyond that, ageing’s going to be difficult because the ends of most of the bones have been gnawed off…”
    She waited for more, and when he didn’t go on, but simply stood gazing at the bones with his hands clasped behind him, she said a bit plaintively: “And that’s all you can tell me?”
    But he was plunged in thought, looking at each bone, registering details, and oddities and anomalies, and visually moving on to the next, so that it took a few seconds for the question to penetrate.
    “Maybe a little more,” he said at last. “For instance, I can tell you he wasn’t a particularly beefy guy. The bones are relatively slender, with no heavy muscle markings.
    “Oh, yes?” she said politely. She’d been hoping for more.
    “I can also tell you that he had a rough life.” Gideon picked up the partial left femur, the thigh bone, and showed it to her. The upper third was gone, and the lower, or distal,