“It’s not that complicated. Spondylos, vertebra; itis, inflammation; ankylose, to fuse, to grow together into one.” He picked them up to show her. “See here, where they’ve been glued together – this crack that runs between them?”
“Uh-huh. Where the two of them meet.”
“Yes, but normal vertebrae don’t really meet. They’re completely separate bones. In the living body they’re separated by a disk of pulpy soft tissue-”
“Umm… the intervertebral disk.”
“Right, and each intervertebral disk has a kind of tough, cartilaginous ring around it – the annulus fibrosus – that keeps the soft stuff in the middle from squirting out, like toothpaste squirting out of a tube, when you put pressure on the spine – which you do every time you stand up, and even more when you sit down. Well, sometimes the annulus fibrosus calcifies, turns to bone, so that the two vertebrae above and below it become fused together, and the result is-”
“Ankylosing spondylitis.” She took them from him. “Bony bridges that connect one vertebra to another, like these.”
“You got it.”
She made a slight flexing motion of the vertebrae. “You know, they – oh!” To her unmistakable consternation, they came apart with a little pop, so that she was left holding one in each hand. She practically flung them away from her, down onto the table, as if they’d burned her. “Oh, my God! I didn’t mean – I don’t know why I-” Even in the dim light, he could see that she’d paled. “Gideon, I’ve broken-”
“Shh,” he said with a smile, “you haven’t broken anything, sweetheart. Come on, relax that wrinkled brow.” He leaned forward to smooth her taut forehead with his hand. “You’ll wear out that sexy little musculus frontalis. “Look-” He picked the two pieces up to show her. “They just separated where Rosie glued them, that’s all. No harm done. See? They’d already been broken before.”
“Whew,” she said, melting back into her chair. “Is that ever a relief. I could already see the headlines: ‘Wife of Well-Known Anthropologist Destroys Priceless Scientific Relic.’ ”
“No, no,” he said laughing. “In fact, it makes the point I’m making even better than before. Look at how the edges match up. They hardly needed the glue.” His tongue between his teeth, he put the two segments gingerly together – they virtually clicked into place – and held them up for her to see. “The broken edges of the bridge make a perfect match, even without the glue, even though one is a cast and one is real bone. Which would never happen if they were from two different people.”
“Which is how you can be so sure that they’re both really from Gibraltar Woman?”
“Yes, it’s a real break. Under ordinary circumstances, if I had a T9 and a T10, I might be able to say for sure that they didn’t go together – different ages, different sizes – but I wouldn’t be able to say with certainty that they did go together. But in this case I can – and they do.”
Thoughtfully, she fingered the vertebrae again – very tentatively this time. “It must hurt.”
“Sure, and give you a hunched, miserably stiff back as well. And lung and heart problems go along with it. Eye problems too. Basically, it’s a kind of arthritis, really, very incapacitating when it’s as severe as this.”
“But she was only in her mid-twenties. I would have thought this was an old person’s disease.”
“Well, most kinds of arthritis are, but not this. In fact, her age is one of the things that pointed specifically to ankylosing spondylitis. It’s not wear and tear or anything like that, you see; there’s a strong genetic component to it, and it affects primarily young adults – mostly men, usually, but sometimes… well, as you see…”
“How awful… a young mother…”
He nodded his agreement. He was suddenly tired – depleted, depressed – and he could see that Julie was too. No wonder, it was going on midnight, and it had been a very long day; the session at the morgue, which seemed to have been a week ago, had been only this morning. In addition, their predinner drinks and dinner wine had caught up with them. Still, they soldiered on, raising the obvious questions: Where had that T10 come from? Well, from Europa Point, obviously, since that was where the rest of Gibraltar Woman had come from. But how had Sheila gotten it? Had she dug it up long after the dig was formally closed down, when she’d been prowling around the cave with a trowel? Had she found it before the dig was ever started and kept it a secret? Did she find it during the dig and surreptitiously make off with it? And for all of those questions – why? And why did she have it in her room at the conference? Did it have something to do with her murder? Well, they were pretty sure they knew the answer to that; it did. But what?
But they had run out of steam and weren’t getting anywhere, and they knew it. Besides, by now it was getting chilly out on the terrace. “It’s late,” he said. “Why don’t we leave this till morning, when we’re fresh? What do you say we call it a day?”
She nodded. “I’m for that. I’m exhausted.”
At the reception desk they had the young night clerk, who had come on when George left, put the bag back into the safe and asked for the key to room 205. She went sleepily to the wall of grinning plush monkeys on hooks, reached toward them, and stopped, hand in the air.
“It’s not here.” She turned back to them. “Are you sure you don’t have it?”
“No, I left it right here about seven o’clock, with George.”
The clerk – her name plate said “Kayla” – scanned the rows of monkeys. “I don’t see it. Are you positive you didn’t take it with you?”
“Believe me, I’d know about it if I had a monkey in my pocket.”
Kayla was still staring at the wall. “Did you actually see him hang it, or-”
“No, I didn’t see him hang it. Look, can we get another one until you find it? We’re pretty bushed.”
Once upstairs (inasmuch as the Rock Hotel used vintage metal room keys, not electronic cards, Kayla had to go up with them to let them in), Julie went yawning to the closet to get her nightie. Gideon, who had meanwhile brushed his teeth, came out of the bathroom to see her standing at the open closet door with a frown on her face.
“Lose something?” he asked.
Instead of answering, she said, “Gideon, have you worn your sport coat since we got here?”
“No, why?”
“You didn’t rehang it after I put it in the closet?”
“No, why are you asking?”
“It’s been hung backward on the hanger.”
He came over to stand beside her. His gray Harris tweed hung neatly from a wooden hanger. It looked fine to him. “What’s wrong with it? I didn’t know you could hang a jacket backward on a hanger.”
“Sure, you can. Look at it, it’s hung so that the wooden shoulder supports slant backward instead of forward. I would never in a million years hang a jacket like that.”
“You’re as bad as Audrey with her toilet paper,” he said, laughing. He placed his hand on his heart. “I solemnly swear that I, Gideon Paul Oliver, did not-” He suddenly understood what she was driving at. “Somebody’s been in the room – they took the jacket down and rehung it the wrong way!”
She nodded. “And that explains why the key was missing.”
A hurried search, followed by a more thorough one, found nothing gone, although a few more details seemed to prove the entry of an intruder: a pen that she was certain had been lying on top of a post-card was now beside it; the bed skirt, which had been neatly in place when they’d left for dinner, now had a couple of twisted ruffles, as if someone had lifted it to look under the bed. It was odd, but nothing new, that Gideon, who could be so wonderfully, scrupulously observant when it came to some old bone, spotted none of these homely details but had to take Julie’s word for them.
“They were after the vertebrae,” he said, flopping into an armchair.
“But they were in the safe, not here.”
“Yes, but when I left with them after dinner I was going to leave them here. I announced I was going to leave them here.”