Page 188 of The Bone Code

Snap!

“Resusci Annie!” I exclaimed.

“Aka Rescue Annie.” Anne beamed. “More folks have locked lips with this lady than have kissed the Blarney Stone.”

Ryan and Vislosky looked lost.

“It’s a CPR doll,” I explained. “But what—?”

Anne cut me off. “We all know about L’Inconnue, right?”

“The unknown subject dragged from the Seine a century ago,” Vislosky said.

“Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to score a name or determine the woman’s manner of death, but I did learn an interesting factoid about her death mask.”

No one interrupted.

“About sixty years ago, an Austrian doctor named Peter Safar developed the basics of CPR. Long story short, Safar asked a Norwegian toymaker named Asmund Laerdal to design a life-size mannequin for use as a training tool. Figuring men would be grossed out doing mouth-to-mouth on a male dummy, Laerdal decided the doll should be female. As the story goes, he saw a L’Inconnue on a wall, thought her face was beautiful, and used the mask as his model.”

Anne patted the mannequin’s head.

“Since then, millions have learned CPR on this little gal.”

“I was one of them.” I now realized why Polly and her relatives had looked vaguely familiar. “Where did you get her?”

“As you know, I went to Savannah last week to see Josh filming.” To the others, “Josh is my son. He’s an actor and was playing a doc in a soap. The scene was taking place in an ER, and there was a CPR dummy tucked into one corner. I’d just learned about Resusci Annie, so when the crew broke set, I asked if I could have her. They said hell yes. One less prop to deal with.”

Anne circled to her place for a sip of wine.

“I’m not giving up, mind you. But for now, I hope Polly will be pleased to know that her maybe ancestor has helped save the lives of beaucoup people.”

“I’m sure she will,” I said.

We all pitched in clearing dishes and wrapping leftovers. Then Anne served pumpkin pie, and we poured coffee and moved out onto the deck.

The shattered planter was gone, the furniture back in properalignment. Not a single sign remained of the life-and-death struggle that had taken place there just five days earlier.

Except for my Anakin Skywalker face.

I settled into one of the Pawleys Island rockers. Ryan took the one next to mine.

The moon hung low and full and was the same orange hue as Anne’s designer pumpkins. An amber triangle sparked the water’s surface from its lower border at the horizon all the way to the shore.

Inevitably, the conversation drifted back to Huger’s scheme to profit off the misery of others. To the monstrous misuse of his knowledge of human genomics.

We discussed the wonder and the power of the double-helix molecule.

We marveled at how a shared sequencing of base pairs had given Polly and Harriet and their great-aunt and grandmother identical features.

At how a malevolent chromosome had saddled Tereza Deacon with Silver-Russell syndrome, a condition that had altered her body and shaped her short life.

At the irony of the single biggest breakthrough in the container-case investigations.

Genetic genealogy had linked Aubrey Sullivan Huger to his youngest victim, Harmony Boatwright.

The man’s own DNA had brought him down.

Epilogue