Free Unnatural Selection by Aaron Elkins Page A

end had been chewed off by rodent scavengers, but the shaft itself was distinguished by an unnatural bend in the middle, with an ugly, uneven excrescence of bone at the site of the bend.
    Madeleine looked at it and drew back a little, the corners of her mouth turned down. “It’s as if… as if it got broken, then somebody stuck it together again-not all that carefully, either-and then stuck all this…” She gestured at the roughened area. “… all this gunk on it to keep it from coming apart again.”
    Gideon nodded, smiling. “That’s a pretty good description of what happened, Madeleine. The femur was broken, all right, and then it healed on its own. This ‘gunk’ is the protective callus that forms around a break after a couple of months. If the ends of the pieces don’t quite match up, as they don’t here, it temporarily builds up even more to add strength. This is probably what your doctor thought was a sign of disease.”
    “What’s it made of?”
    “Bone. Lamellar bone, stronger than the original.” He fingered it. “I don’t think it happened too long before he died. The callus is still pretty big. Very little resorption. A year, maybe less.”
    Tentatively following his example, she touched it too and was surprised. “It’s jagged. It’s sharp. Wouldn’t that have been painful?”
    “Oh, no doubt about it. The musculature around it would have been inflamed and probably infected. He’d have been in constant pain, and he’d surely have had difficulty walking. This leg would have been a couple of inches shorter than the other. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was on crutches.”
    “And yet here he was off in the Scillies, far from home, wherever home was. A soldier. Marching.” She shook her head. “The poor man.”
    “He had other problems. Look at this.” He proffered another bone.
    She complied. “How interesting. Er, what exactly am I looking at?”
    “This is a right forearm bone, the radius.” He laid his finger on a point halfway down the shaft. “Now look at this.”
    “Oh, I see,” she said, peering at the spot near which he’d laid his finger. “That’s another callus, isn’t it? A smaller one, though. This is a healed fracture too, although it’s not as bad as the other.”
    “The callus isn’t as big, no, but the injury is worse. See how the bone below it has this sort of swollen look? That’s not normal.”
    “I’ll take your word for it.”
    “Okay, see this hole?” He inserted the tip of a ballpoint pen into a small, smoothly rounded opening just below the callus.
    “Isn’t that a natural foramen of some kind? It doesn’t look like a puncture.”
    “No, it’s not, but it’s not exactly natural, either; that is, he wasn’t born with it. It’s a reaction to infection, to serious infection; an opening to let the pus drain from inside it. In other words, the fracture healed fine, yes, but the bone got infected-and stayed infected. I imagine this poor old guy was just one mass of infection and pain. That might well be what killed him.”
    She shivered. “I’m beginning to be sorry I asked you to do this.”
    “Well, you know, war isn’t-” Whatever homily had been on his tongue stopped in mid-sentence. “Oh, Lordy,” he said.
    Madeleine cringed. “What now, or don’t I want to know?”
    He had shifted his attention to the proximal end of the bone, the one near the elbow, and now, using the magnifying glass and holding bone and lens close to his face, he slowly rotated it beneath the magnifying glass.
    “The end of this one hasn’t been completely gnawed off,” he told her. “And it’s not completely ossified.”
    Madeleine frowned. “You’re talking about the, what is it, the epiphery, the diastysis…”
    “The epiphysis.”
    Long bones-arms, legs, ribs, clavicles-grew by depositing material at their ends: the epiphyses. At first this material was cartilaginous, but with time it ossified and fused permanently to the shaft of the bone,