The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK TM(938)

                “She was strangled.”

                I was astonished. “You can tell that?”

                “One of the easiest deaths to spot. See here, damage to the thyroid cartilage and here, this little bone? That’s the hyoid bone. A broken hyoid bone is the defining sign of manual strangulation.”

                “That couldn’t have happened in shipping?”

                Dr. Fuentes gave me a sympathetic look but shook his head. “The bone, maybe,” he said, “but the damage to the cartilage cannot be accidental.”

                “But then the skeleton was surely crushed in transit?

                He shook his head. “The mutilation was post-mortem, thankfully. Most unusual.”

                I felt sick, and to keep down nausea, I kept talking. “When I saw that damage, I thought we had been wrong. I mean, wrong about the bones not belonging.” Thank God we had not put them in the exhibition! Amos, a non-specialist with an eye for publicity, would certainly have been tempted.

                “You were right to wonder, but take a look.”

                He handed me a magnifying glass and directed my attention to the deep and irregular scratches on the split breastbone.



                             “Messy,” I said, but I was thinking of Uncle Petrus and trying to bring the Prince of the Wilderness into some relationship with the mutilation before me.

                “Done with a stone knife. No, no,” he replied to my question, “modern steel knives give quite a different cut. This was an obsidian blade, probably. Obsidian can be made razor sharp, but the flaking leaves it jagged.”

                “Human hearts for the sun god,” I said, half to myself. “The gods were fed on blood; without blood the world would end.”

                “A common belief these days as well.” Dr. Fuentes spoke sadly, and I thought that he had reason to know.

                “She was murdered as a sacrifice? As the price of the city?” And Uncle Petrus, my archeological prince, had perhaps paid…

                “Remember that whoever strangled her may not have made these marks. We cannot go beyond the information of the body. And we have no positive ID for the bones.”

                “If the skeleton really came from the expedition,” I said, “who could it be but Alice Jonken?”

                He had no answer for that.

                “One of the three killed her,” I said. “And Ernesto—” I couldn’t finish and ran to vomit in the laboratory sink.

                “If there is no proof,” Fuentes said carefully when I’d recovered myself, “It is as easy to do harm as good.”

                I agreed that it would be a great scandal—even a century later.

                We did carbon dating on the bones to confirm the age, but neither Dr. Fuentes nor I felt that we were required to go further. I had a quiet word with the provost who found a spot for the bones in an obscure mausoleum owned by the university, and over the strenuous objections of some of my colleagues, I arranged to repatriate the majority of bones in the Jonken Bequest. It didn’t seem right to treat them differently.

                I’ve gone back to my specialty, collections and archives, and constructed a little scenario, entirely without proof except for the photograph. I’ve had it enlarged again, in segments this time. I really think Fuentes is right. Alice did take the picture. At another order of magnification, you can see her long hair, distorted, true, but unmistakable in the cast shadow.