Bones to Ashes by Kathy Reichs Page B

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.
     
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    T HE APERTURE RESEMBLED AN UPSIDE-DOWN HEART, NARROW AT the top, bulging at the bottom. Nothing spiked from the dimple on the heart’s lower edge.
    OK. I’d been right about the wide nasal opening and reduced nasal spine. But the nasal bridge was narrow with the two bones steepling toward the midline. And I could now see that the periphery of the orifice looked spongy, indicating resorption of the surrounding maxilla.
    The girl’s nasal pattern didn’t mean she was Indian or African. The spike had been reduced, the shape modified by disease.
    What disease?
    Defects on the hands, feet, orbits, nose.
    Had I missed something on the skull?
    I examined every millimeter, inside and out.
    The cranial vault was normal. Ditto for the base. What remained of the hard palate was intact. I was unable to observe the premaxillary, or most forward part of the roof of the mouth. That portion was missing, along with the incisors.
    I rechecked the postcranial skeleton and found nothing beyond what I’d already spotted.
    Hands. Feet. Orbits. Nose. What disease process would lead to that kind of dispersed bone damage?
    Again, I considered possibilities.
    Syphilis? Lupus vulgaris? Thalassemia? Gaucher’s disease? Osteomyelitis? Septic or rheumatoid arthritis? Blood-borne parasite? Infection due to direct extension from the overlying skin?
    Diagnosis would take research. And with so much bone missing or