“LAURETTE PHILOMÈNE SAULNIER LANDRY. DOB MAY 22, 1938. DOD June 17, 1972.”

Death at age thirty-four? How sad.

I pictured Laurette in Euphémie’s Pawleys Island kitchen. My child’s mind had never slotted her age. She was simply adult, younger than Gran, more wrinkled than Mama.

“She died so young. From what?”

“Death certificate lists natural causes, but doesn’t elaborate.”

“You’re sure it’s the right Laurette Landry?”

“Laurette Philomène Saulnier married Philippe Grégoire Landry on November 20, 1955. Union produced two kids. Évangéline Anastasie, DOB August 12, 1956. Obéline Flavie, DOB February 16, 1964.”

“Jesus. I can’t believe you found this so fast.” In addition to my early telephone probes, I’d periodically tried the New Brunswick Bureau of Vital Statistics. Never had a hit.

“Used my Acadian charm.”

Hippo’s charm and a token would get him on the subway. I waited.

“Back in the sixties, the church handled most of the vital stats record keeping. Some parts of New Brunswick, babies were still being birthed at home, especially in rural areas and smaller towns. Lot of Acadians had no time for government or its institutions. Still don’t.”

I heard a soft whop, pictured Hippo downing several Tums.

“Got a church-lady niece at St. John the Baptist in Tracadie. Knows the archives like I know the size of my dick.”

I definitely did not want to hear about that.

“You found baptismal and marriage certificates through your niece?” I guessed.

“Bingo. Since I’m a homeboy, I started dialing for dollars. We Acadians identify ourselves by ancestral names. Take me, for example. I’m Hippolyte à Hervé à Isaïe à Calixte—”

“What did you learn?”

“Like I warned you, forty years is a long time. But the Acadian National Memory Bank’s got a whopper of a vault. Found a few locals remembered Laurette and her kids. No one would talk much, respecting privacy and all. But I got the drift.

“When Laurette got too sick to work, hubby’s kin took her in. The Landrys lived outside of town. Kept mostly to themselves. One old-timer called them morpions. Trailer trash. Said they were mostly illiterate.”

“Laurette had a driver’s license.”

“No. Laurette had a car.”

“She must have been licensed. She drove across the border.”

“OK. Maybe someone got paid off. Or maybe she was smart enough to read a little and to memorize road signs. Anyway, Philippe took off while Laurette was pregnant with Obéline, leaving her to support the two little girls. She managed for five or six years, then had to quit working. Eventually died of some sort of chronic condition. Sounded like TB to me. This guy thought she’d moved out toward Saint-Isidore sometime in the mid-sixties. Might have had family living that way.”

“What about Philippe?”

“Nothing. May have left the country. Probably dead somewhere.”

“And the girls?” My heart was thumping my rib cage.

“Obéline Landry married a guy named David Bastarache in eighty. I’m running him now. And following the Saint-Isidore lead.”

“What about Évangéline?”

“I’ll be straight. I ask about Laurette or Obéline, I get cooperation. Or at least what sounds like cooperation. I ask about the older sister, people go iceberg.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I’ve been at this awhile. I got antennae. I ask about this kid, the answers come too quick, too consistent.”

I waited.

“No one knows shit.”

“Hiding something?” My grip on the handset was raising the cords in my wrist.

“I’d bet money on it.”

I told Hippo what I’d learned from Trick Whalen. The Miramichi pawnshop. The mojo sculpture. The Indian cemetery.

“You want I should call this guy O’Driscoll?”

“No. If you can get contact information, I’ll follow the bone trail while you chase the leads in Tracadie.”

“Don’t go ’way.”

Hippo put me on hold for a good ten minutes.

“Place is called Oh O! Pawn. Catchy name. Says we care.” He supplied a phone number and an address on the King George Highway.

Cellophane crinkled. Then, “You said you found something wrong with the kid’s skeleton.”

“Yes.”

“You figure that out?”

“Not yet.”

“You willing to work on Saturday?”

The 82nd Airborne couldn’t have kept me from those bones.

By eight-thirty I was at Wilfrid-Derome. Contrary to reports, there’d been no rain and the weather hadn’t cooled. Already the mercury was pushing eighty.

I rode the elevator alone, passed no one in the LSJML lobby or corridors. I was pleased that I’d have no disruptions.

I was wrong. One of several misjudgments I’d make that day.

First off, I dialed O’Driscoll. The phone went unanswered.

Disappointed, I turned to the skeleton. Hippo’s girl. Before being interrupted by the Iqaluit skull and the dog exhumation in Blainville, I’d cleaned what remained of her trunk and limb bones.

Going directly to her skull, I cleared the foramen magnum and emptied soil and small pebbles from the cranial base.

At nine-thirty, I tried O’Driscoll again. Still no luck.

Back to teasing dirt. Right auditory canal. Left. Posterior palate. The lab thundered with that stillness possible only on weekends in government facilities.

At ten, I lay down my probe and dialed Miramichi a third time. This time a man answered.

“Oh O! Pawn.”

“Jerry O’Driscoll?”

“Speaking.”

I gave my name and LSJML affiliation. Either O’Driscoll didn’t hear or didn’t care.

“You interested in antique watches, young lady?” English, with a whisper of brogue.

“I’m afraid not.”

“Two beauties just come in. You like jewelry?”

“Sure.”

“Got some Navajo turquoise that’ll knock your socks off.”

Navajo jewelry in a New Brunswick pawnshop? Must be a story there.

“Mr. O’Driscoll, I’m calling about human remains you sold to Trick and Archie Whalen several years back.”

I expected caginess. Or lack of recollection. O’Driscoll was polite, expansive, even. And had recall like a credit card agency computer.

“Spring of 2000. Kids said they wanted it for a college art project. Said they were constructing some kind of homage-to-the-dead display. Sold it to them for sixty-five bucks.”

“You have an excellent memory.”

“Truth is, that was the first and last skeleton I ever traded. Thing was older than all the angels and saints. Lots of broken bones. Face smashed in and caked with dirt. Still, the idea of selling dead souls didn’t sit well. Didn’t matter if the poor devil was Christian or Indian or Bantu. That’s why I remember.”

“Where did you get the skeleton?”

“Fella used to come in every couple months. Claimed he was an archaeologist before the war. Didn’t mention which war. Always had this mangy terrier trailing him. Called the thing Bisou. Kiss. No way I’d have put my lips anywhere near that hound. Guy spent his time searching for stuff to pawn. Poked through Dumpsters. Had a metal detector he’d run along the riverbank. That sort of thing. Brought in a brooch once was pretty nice. I sold it to a lady lives up in Neguac. Most of his finds were junk, though.”

“The skeleton?”

“Guy said he found it when he went out to the woods to bury Bisou. I wasn’t surprised. Dog acted a hundred years old. Old geezer looked like he could really use a lift that day. Figured I’d take a loss, but I gave him fifty bucks. Didn’t see any harm in it.”

“Did the man say where he’d buried his dog?”

“Some island. Said there was an old Indian cemetery there. Could have been hooey. I hear a lot of that. People think a good tale ups the value of what they’re offering. It doesn’t. An item’s worth what it’s worth.”

“Do you know the man’s name?”

O’Driscoll’s chuckle sounded like popcorn popping. “Said he was Tom ‘Jones.’ I’d bet my aunt Rosey’s bloomers he made that up.”

“Why is that?”

“Guy was French. Pronounced the name Jones. Spelled it Jouns.”

“Do you know what happened to him?”

“Stopped coming about three years back. Old duffer was frail and blind in one eye. Probably dead by now.”

After the call, I returned to the bones. Was there truth to Tom Joun’s Indian burial ground story? Could Hippo’s girl be a pre-Columbian aboriginal?

Cranial shape was distorted by breakage and warping. No help there. I rotated the skull and looked at the remnants of the face. The nasal spine was almost nonexistent. A nonwhite trait. Though dirt packed the opening, the orifice seemed wider than is typical of Europeans.

I went back to teasing dirt. Time passed, the only sounds in my lab the competing hums of the refrigerator and the overhead fluorescents.

The eyeballs are separated from the frontal lobe by the paper-thin bone forming the floor of the anterior cranial fossa. Clearing the right socket, I found jagged breaches in that floor. I moved on.

I’d emptied the left orbit when something caught my attention. Laying aside my pick, I dampened a cloth and swiped a fingertip over the orbital roof. Dirt came away, revealing pitted, porous bone in the upper, outer corner of the socket.

Cribra orbitalia.

Now we were getting somewhere. Or were we? While cribra orbitalia has a fancy scientific name, and the lesions are known to occur most commonly in kids, their cause has yet to be satisfactorily explained.

I did one of my mental rundowns. Iron deficiency anemia? Vitamin C inadequacy? Infection? Pathogenic stress?

All of the above? None of the above? A and B only?

I was as puzzled as ever.

Findings to this point included modification of toe bones, enlargement of nutrient foramina in the hands and feet, cortical destruction on at least one metacarpal, and now cribra orbitalia. Abnormally pitted orbits.

I had plenty of dots. I just had to connect them.

One thing was becoming clear. This girl had been sick. But with what? Had the ailment killed her? Then why the caved-in face? Postmortem damage?

Using warm water, I cleaned the entire left orbit. Then I picked up a magnifying lens.

And got my second surprise of the morning.

A black squiggle crawled the underside of the supraorbital ridge, just inside the thickened upper border of the socket.

A root impression? Writing?

I hurried to the scope and balanced the skull face-up on the cork ring. Eyes on the screen, I jacked the magnification.

Tiny hand-lettered characters leaped into focus.

It took several minutes, and several adjustments, but I finally managed to decipher the inscription.

L’Île-aux-Becs-Scies.

The quiet of the empty building enveloped me.

Had Jouns marked his skeleton with the name of the island on which he’d found it? Archaeologists did exactly that. He’d claimed to have been one in his youth.

I flew from my lab, down the corridor, and into the LSJML library. Locating an atlas, I flipped to a map of Miramichi.

Fox Island. Portage. Sheldrake. Though I pored over the map portions depicting the rivers and the bay, I found no Île-aux-Becs-Scies.

Hippo.

Back in my lab, I dialed his cell. He didn’t pick up.

Fine. I’d ask him later. He’d know.

Returning the skull to my worktable, I began freeing dirt from the nasal orifice with a long, sharp probe.

And encountered my third surprise of the morning.