But despite decades of puzzle practice, beginning with my early fieldwork reassembling shattered Arikara Indian skulls, I wondered if I was out of my league this time. It wasn’t just that this was a 3-D puzzle; every skeletal reconstruction required working in 3-D, after all. But thanks to the bear’s mighty, bone-crunching jaws, many of the pieces were badly damaged, which meant that their edges would no longer match up exactly. Last but not least, this puzzle contained many extraneous pieces, from other, smaller bones, adding to the mix and the muddle.
The phone rang. Miranda rolled her chair backward and snagged the handset without even looking. “Osteology lab, this is Miranda,” she said, then listened a moment. From the phone’s handset, I could hear a female voice, rapid and loud. Miranda listened briefly, wincing slightly at the barrage, holding the phone slightly away from her ear. “Well, this is the Body Farm. It’s actually called the Anthropology Research Facility—” I saw the eye roll, an early warning sign. “Yes, ma’am, I do know that everybody calls it the Body Farm. . . . No, ma’am, we’re not trying to confuse people. People are just so . . . easily confused. What can I do for you, ma’am? Did you have a question?” Not surprisingly, I could hear the edge creeping into Miranda’s voice; in fact, I was surprised that the edge wasn’t already razor sharp. “No, I’m sorry, you can’t come take a tour of the Body Farm. . . . Well, because it’s a research facility, not a tourist attraction.”
Miranda’s head was shaking slowly, partly in disbelief, but mainly, I suspected, the way a bull’s head shakes just before he charges. “By ‘tourist,’ I don’t mean outsider, I just mean somebody who wants to take a tour. . . . Well, I didn’t mean it to be offensive, ma’am. . . . Well, yes, there is another reason. We wouldn’t want a tourist—or a lifelong Knoxville resident like yourself—to pick up some deadly disease from one of our corpses. . . . Well, for instance, hepatitis. Or Ebola. Or Zika.” Miranda’s voice was no longer edgy; during the litany of life-threatening diseases, her tone had turned chirpy. “They say there’s a new airborne strain of Zika that doesn’t require mosquitoes. All you have to do is breathe anywhere in the vicinity of the infection. There’s even some speculation that it’s transmissible by telephone—can you believe it?” She paused, her eyes taking on a devilish gleam. “I’m sorry we can’t offer you a tour, ma’am, but we do have a volunteer opening right now. We just lost one of our best volunteers. A most sudden and tragic illness. If you’d like to come in for an interview . . .” She pulled the handset away from her ear and looked at it. “Huh,” she said, a slight smile tugging at her mouth. “We must have gotten cut off.”
“You are so bad,” I scolded. “I can’t believe you scared that poor woman like that. Zika? Ebola? You are going to get us in huge trouble!” But try as I might, I couldn’t keep from grinning. So much for the stern administrator, I thought.
By the third call, my own patience was wearing thin, and when the fourth call came in, I snapped. “I’ll get it,” I grumbled. Snatching up the receiver, I bellowed, “Yes yes yes?!? What do you want?!?”
I heard a faint gasp on the other end, followed by a long silence. Finally, a quavery old voice—the woman must have been at least a hundred—warbled, “Oh, dear, I must have dialed the wrong number. I was trying to reach the Anthropology Department. I . . . well, I was hoping to donate my body to science. But I seem to have made a mistake. I’m so sorry to bother you.”
Stricken, I hastily reviewed my options. I could, of course, confess and grovel and try to mend the fence I’d just mowed down—unburn the bridge I’d just torched—but that seemed like an iffy bet, considering my rudeness. Brockton, you are going to hell, I thought, then I put on my most charming voice. “Don’t you worry, ma’am. I misdial all the time. I bet if you hang up and try again, you’ll get ahold of them, and they’ll be so glad you called.” The woman hung up, and I hung up. “I’ll let you answer if she calls back,” I told Miranda sheepishly. “Do be nice to her.”
“Those quarterly staff trainings you like to grumble about,” Miranda said. “Wasn’t the last one on ‘Leadership by Example’?”
“I’ll take the Fifth on that,” I said. “And I’ll take this little project of mine down to my office. My hideaway office. Clearly I’ll never get a femur put back together if I stay here.”
“Clearly we’ll never get another body donation if you keep scaring off the donors,” she cracked. “But don’t you want to work on that over at the processing facility instead?”
“Why would I want to go clear across the river?”
“Well, last time I checked, that’s where the exhaust hoods are. You’re hoping to glue pieces together, right?”
“Yeah. So?”
“So the fumes are nasty. Not just stinky-nasty. Toxic-nasty.”
I waved a hand dismissively. “You kids today. You’re so . . .”
“Intelligent?” she supplied. “Maybe that’s because we haven’t spent years softening our brains with solvent fumes.”