Make No Bones Read Free

heart-shaped Pepto-Bismol tablets.
    A few hundred miles to the east, in a similar office in a similar building on the campus of the Colorado Institute of Technology, Professor Leland Roach was suffering no such distress. Happily engrossed in his work, his spare and narrow-shouldered form hunched over the laptop computer on his desk, he clicked away at his latest contribution to the
Southwestern Journal of Paleopathology.
His own words, elegant and authoritative, blinked comfortingly into existence on the screen:
     
…these fecal samples were then rehydrated in an aqueous trisodium phosphate solution, resulting in the recovery of four oocysts of a parasitic protozoan identified as belonging to the genus Eimeria; most probably E. piriformis. This provocative burning…
     
    >The steady clicking faltered, then stopped.
Burning?
A tic of annoyance jogged his old-fashioned, pencil-straight mustache. Leland moved the cursor back and hit the
delete
key.
Burning
vanished, to be replaced by
finding
. Leland consulted his notes, flexed his fingers, and hunched forward again. But further words did not appear on the screen. His thought processes had been disrupted.
    He’d read Miranda’s letter when it arrived that morning, clipped a note to it instructing Eloise to make airline and lodging reservations for him, and put it out of his mind. Or so he’d thought. But now, here was burning popping up when he’d meant
finding
. A Freudian slip, he thought with distaste. Leland disapproved of Freudian slips as not being in accord with his notions of the way one’s mind ought to work. To his way of thinking, they represented a sort of mental disloyalty, a sneaky double cross by some perverse corner of one’s own brain. Leland prided himself on how infrequently he made such slips.
    It particularly bothered him that he would make one now. There was no reason for his mind to play tricks on him. He was repressing nothing, hiding nothing from himself. What was there to hide? Terrible things happened to people. Nobody could be blamed.
    Some of the others looked at it differently, of course, but that was their problem, not his. No sackcloth and ashes for Leland Roach, no rending of garments, no chest-beating and mea culpas. Life was difficult enough without taking responsibility for things that had not been under one’s control.
    Calmed by these eminently reasonable reflections, he mentally opened a drawer in an imaginary cabinet, filed away the disturbing thoughts—the metaphor was his own—and slammed the drawer shut. Then he returned more calmly to the intellectual pleasures of the subject on which he had been expounding. The quiet clicking resumed.
     
This provocative finding serves to highlight the potential contribution of feces to a greater understanding of…
     
    “Screw you, buddy!” Les Zenkovich yelled, responding to the curses just hurled at him. For emphasis he brandished his middle finger out of the window of his Porsche.
    The driver of the other car, leaning across his seat, opened a mouth already twisted with rage, but then got his first good look at Les:
Shit, the guy was built like the Incredible Hulk.
With a gulp he clamped his mouth shut, hurriedly braked, and drifted back. If that monster wanted the whole bridge to himself, he could have it, and welcome to it. “What do you give an eight-hundred-pound gorilla?” ran the old joke. Answer: “Anything he goddam well wants.”
    In the Porsche, Les adjusted the volume on the Creedence Clearwater tape and continued threading his way eastward through the ossified traffic on the Oakland Bay Bridge. The exchange had not perturbed him. By the time he got home to Kensington it would be forgotten altogether. People were jumpy these days, that was all, especially on the bridge. It had been that way since the earthquake, and according to the psychologists it was going to be that way for a while yet.
    Not that it had made much of a dent in Les’s psyche. Few things did. Les