Ingested improperly, tincture of opium will just as soon kill you as cure you.

—Galen’s Anatomy

Chapter 4

When you live in the mountains, dawn has a quality all its own. The air is thin and spare. Strangers become giddy. Old men grow young.

On Saturday morning, Jenny got up an hour before sunrise and dressed in the dark. Miles to the east, light was pouring over the beaches and drowning the shells. But in the hills, the sky was a sheer layer of gray. It would be quite a while before the blue settled in.

As any kid can tell you, it’s easy enough to avoid men at that time of morning. Those who could manage it were still in bed, snoring off a hard night. Those who weren’t were out in the paddocks, tending to stock. Jenny walked the three miles to Poplar Street with birdsong as her sole company.

It was an uneasy walk, for Jenny was fretting about seeing Pandora. On the surface, her best friend was seldom one to show emotions. But inside, Jenny knew, Pandora must be feeling as vulnerable as spring earth. Nobody in the territory deserved that shame.

The thing was, Jenny was feeling a mite shameful herself. Instead of racing forward to destroy the slate, she had let the sight of the switch intimidate her. Instead of risking her neck like Still Hope and saving Pandora from drowning in embarrassment, she had simply ducked out at lunchtime and headed for the river. She had wanted to help, but she had failed to act. So it was with a hitch in her step that she turned the corner into Poplar Street.

Mad Doc Magee’s office was a strange, knockabout cottage, more miner than medical. The walls were whitewashed cobbles and the roof was rippled iron. It appeared to have paused under the shade of a scraggly pine and never had the energy to get back up.

“Hi, Pandora.”

“Hi, Jenny.”

Pandora was standing on the doorstep, staring at the Wise Women. Avoiding the eyes of another was one way she had of avoiding a fight.

“I brought lots of tools,” said Jenny, unpacking her school satchel in haste. “Chisel, knife, hammer, pick. And if the window doesn’t work, we can try the chimney.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Pandora.

“Break into the building.”

“The front door is unlocked.”

Jenny paused. You may recall that she’d found her father firmly lodged in a window because he’d neglected to think of the door. It struck her that someone above was having a good joke at her expense. “Oh.”

“I checked it as soon as I got here. But I decided to wait for you before I went in,” said Pandora.

“Thanks.”

Pandora waited. And waited some more. “Do you want to go in?”

“Okay,” said Jenny as Pandora turned the handle.

Jenny yelped. Pandora frowned.

Mad Doc Magee’s famous skeleton was reclining, comfy as sin, in an old doctor’s chair. His left hand was tucked under his head, his right hand was resting on his heart, and his feet were planted on the floor. He was sitting as natural as a wired pile of bones could sit.

“He looks like he’s laughing, doesn’t he? As if someone’s been tickling his spine?” asked Jenny, trying to quell her fear with silliness. Her best friend was silent. “Pandora?”

“The skeleton came in a crate, right?”

“That’s what Dad said.”

“Then where’s the crate? And who put him in the chair?”

No sooner were the words spoken than the sun rose far enough above the ridge to strike the side of the cottage. A shaft of light bored through the window and hit the glass of the framed diploma on the opposite wall. From there, it pinged off the brown leather textbooks and the blue ointment jars and the brass spittoon on the floor. In the split of a second, the room was dancing with gold dust.

“Maybe the postman did?” hazarded Jenny, uneasy as sin.

“That makes no sense,” said Pandora. “It would take forever. Plus there’s a bone missing,” she said, pointing to the skeleton’s right shoulder.

“How do you know?”

“Because it doesn’t match the other side.”

Jenny studied the skeleton. She’d seen a lot of calcium in her time—the remnants of rabbits and sheep were rife on the station—but she was taken anew by the beauty of creation.

A line of symmetry ran clear and clean from the tip of the skull down to the spaces between the toes. The whole of it, from the balls of the feet to the ends of the fingers, was balanced for use. And Pandora was correct. There was a bone missing.

“Jenny, look.”

On the wall above Magee’s desk was the faded drawing of a man. The artist had sketched him two ways. In the first pose, he was stuck inside a square, standing with his arms stretched parallel to the floor and his feet turned slightly to the side. Lop his head off his body, and you’d be viewing a T.

On top of that drawing, the artist had made another sketch, putting the man inside a globe of the earth. Now his arms and legs were stretched into Vs, straining to touch the edges of the planet. Lop his head off the same, and you’d be viewing an X.

At the edge of the drawing was a fine piece of print:

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws; she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

“This place is very odd,” said Pandora.

Jenny was inclined to agree. Perhaps it was the staleness of the air, but creeps and jitters seemed to be multiplying faster than lice. She was reminded of her talk with Hapless. It’s much easier to chat about murdered men in the dark than shake hands with them in the light of day.

“Pandora, do you think this dead bloke could be Doc Magee?”

Bless Pandora, she refused to be worried. “How do you mean?”

“If Magee was stabbed or shot for his gold, then the killer would have to get rid of the body. Maybe he fled the territory and shipped the Doc back as bones.” Jenny had a vision of what it might take to strip the flesh from a corpse and shuddered.

“It could be a she,” noted Pandora.

“Who? The skeleton?”

“The murderer,” retorted Pandora. “But it would be a funny thing to do, to ship a man back to the place where you killed him. Anyway, we don’t know enough about Magee to tell.” She returned her gaze to the room. “You keep asking questions. I thought we were going to search for the letter that came with the crate.”

Here was Jenny’s salvation. Perhaps an hour or so of riffling could distract her from fancies. “Okay. You look through the desk and I’ll investigate the shelves. See if you can find anything that seems suspicious. Then we’ll try the books. Blackwell, Gray, Doyle . . . ,” she said, running her glance over the names in the bookcase. “Lordy, lordy, this is going to be duller than dull.”

As expected, the search went slower than Jenny would have liked. It was the first time she had set foot in a doctor’s office, and it was tricky to tell if the items on the shelves were normal for a medical man to own.

For instance, she might have guessed that Mad Doc Magee would need a magnifying glass and a spirit lamp, but she wasn’t sure what the accordion of sharp metal files was for, or the curved silver picks. Neither seemed crafted for comfort.

On the second shelf she came upon a hollow ebony stand, like something you might use for flowers. It was nestled beside a tray of glass eyeballs in twelve different hues. These eyes were made truer than life, and they seemed to follow Jenny wherever she twisted.

A scrape of old wood told her that Pandora had finished clearing the first drawer.

“Anything?” asked Jenny.

“A lot of receipts.”

Most folks find that contrition takes the better part of a day to come to maturity. Jenny had been so surprised by the skeleton that she had neglected to acknowledge that her best friend was still refusing to look her square in the eye. It was high time for repentance.

“Pandora?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry I left you lonely yesterday.”

Pandora fixed her sights on the drawer. “Okay.”

“No, it’s not,” said Jenny.

“You couldn’t help me. You would have been switched.”

“I could have at least stuck around,” insisted Jenny. “Sat in the front row.”

“I don’t like people staring at me,” said Pandora.

And that was the end of that. When you’ve tried an apology and haven’t heard what you wanted, the best you can do is wait. Resigning herself to the present, Jenny resumed her attack on the shelves. From eyeballs and picks, she moved to vials and jars, running her fingers down a row of bottles covered in symbols.

“Ewww! This one has a real frog in it.” She turned to Pandora, holding the jar up for inspection. “I think it’s in brine.”

“Frogs soak up water through their skin,” said Pandora.

“How do you know that?”

“Mum told me.”

This was a surprise. Whenever Jenny thought of Mrs. Quinn, the words “nervy” and “ailing” were foremost in her mind. It was hard to picture a fussbudget like that at home with amphibians.

“I wonder where—” But Jenny didn’t get around to finishing her wondering. “Holy cow!”

“What cow?” asked Pandora.

“I think I found the envelope that came with the crate.”

“How do you know it’s the right one?”

“It was sent from a hospital. It’s addressed to Dr. Magee!”

Pandora stumbled out from the drawers and Jenny ran in from the shelves and they knocked heads in the middle.

“It was wedged under that bottle,” Jenny continued excitedly. “The one with the skull and crossbones on it, next to where the frog was sitting. Maybe it’s a poison bottle. Maybe that’s the way the murderer killed Mad Doc Magee!”

“If he was murdered,” corrected Pandora. “Is there a letter inside?”

Jenny unfolded the paper and spread it on the edge of the desk.

Dear Dr. Magee,

Please accept, with my regards, your order of the third, lot #129: a complete skeleton displaying key natural features. I’d like to draw your attention to the particularly fine quality of the hands—I believe the specimen was a scholar.

It has been a long time since we discovered the secrets of bones at our university. Do you remember the trouble we had deciphering the names and assigning them to their earthly places? And what pains we had determining where to start? Life would have been much simpler if anatomists had stuck with words like “wishbone.”

Regarding your proposal, it’s kind of you to invite me to roam the rocks and ridges of Eden with you, but I don’t believe that fortunes can be found so easily. Are you still brewing your soporific poppy concoctions in Moonlight Creek? Might I recommend a strong pot of coffee instead?

Sincerely,

Dr. Galen

In the annals of letter writing, this was hardly going to win the prize for composition. Jenny was reminded of Kam, and his unhappiness when a new seed failed to sprout. It might seem a little thing now, he often told Jenny, but every seed holds a promise. Staring at those dull lines of text, Jenny was beginning to understand what he meant.

“It doesn’t say much, does it? Maybe it has nothing to do with the nugget.”

Pandora was tugging on the end of her plait. “This place is very odd.”

“You said that already,” replied Jenny.

“No, it’s not right. It’s fake. The skeleton and the drawing and the tools being tidy. Your dad said that the place was ransacked by miners before the crate was delivered. So why is it all organized now?

“And the letter,” she continued. “It makes no sense. It’s not a complete skeleton. You don’t drink poppies. And you write the month with the day. You don’t just say ‘the third.’” Pandora stuck her thumb on the signature. “He says they were friends at university. Why doesn’t he use his first name?”

Jenny squinted at the paper. “Maybe he was trying to be polite?”

Pandora had begun to pace. It was a precise kind of pacing, two steps forward and two steps back. It was her usual routine when burrowing into a difficult problem.

“I’ve seen something in this office. Something I read . . .”

Jenny stood to the side. As Mr. Grimsby had yet to learn, when an active mind is working, it’s sensible to keep your mouth shut.

“Holy cows . . . wishbones . . . the third . . .” Pandora stopped and raised her head. “Gold.”

Without a word to Jenny, she walked over to the bookcase and took out a massive textbook embossed in gold lettering. Then she twirled it around:

GALEN’S ANATOMY

VOLUME 3

Jenny’s heart missed a thump.

“It’s the only book on the shelf with his name,” said Pandora.

“Order of the third,” said Jenny. “Volume Three.”

“Lot 129,” said Pandora, turning to page 129.

As she did, a scrap of an object floated out from the seam and slipped to the floor. Jenny bent down to pick it up.

“What is it?” asked Pandora.

“A dried red poppy.”

Jenny had seen Pandora smile three times in her life. The first was when she had observed lightning fork. The second was when Jenny had told Mrs. Quinn that Pandora was her best friend.

And now.

“Look,” said Pandora.

Page 129 of Galen’s Anatomy was a detailed diagram of a skeleton, drawn with meticulous care. Yet it appeared that someone had been messing with the page. Every major bone had been labeled in a handwritten script, from shoulder to toe and back again.

“Pandora, remember what the letter said?” Jenny ran her eyes over the paper. “‘Key natural features’ . . . ‘secrets of bones’ . . . ‘deciphering the names’ . . . ‘fortunes can be found’ . . . The words on the skeleton have got to be connected to the gold nugget!”

“And here’s the bone that’s missing,” said Pandora, pointing to the diagram. “It’s called the clavicle.”

“But what does that mean? Do you think it’s a clue?”

“Dunno,” said Pandora.

“Breaking and entering is against the law, kiddywinks,” said a voice from behind them.