“The idea was that the low cultural level of more primitive people was a factor in their receding foreheads. Not enough room for mental development. Just part of the racism intrinsic to the anthropological theories of the day.”

“So what’s to study?” Chapman asked.

“I hesitate to call the scientists bigots. After all, those were the Euro-American tenets of the nineteenth century. They were intrigued by the Eskimos, Mike. How did this nomadic, uneducated little tribe thrive in one of the earth’s most inhospitable climates? It was worthy of scientific study, don’t you think?”

Clem looked at Mercer, knowing he didn’t need this lecture on the narrow-mindedness that had been pervasive not just in society, but within the well-educated scientific community. “The world’s fair in St. Louis, 1904. Ever hear of it?”

“Judy Garland, Leon Ames, Mary Astor, Margaret O’Brien,” Mike snapped back. “Meet me in St. Louis, Louis. Zing, zing, zing went my heartstrings.”

“That’s the charming side. While Judy was finding romance on the trolley, Qisuk’s brain was one of the freakier exhibits. On loan from the museum.”

“And all this went on while Mene was growing up, but he knew nothing about it? That his father’s pickled brain was carted off to a world’s fair? Is it possible that Wallace participated in this cruel charade while the boy was living in his home?”

“You’ll never guess what Mene’s adoptive father was doing as a side business, at his farm upstate.”

“You’re way ahead of us.”

Clem sat on the arm of the sofa, flipping through yellowed clippings as she talked, showing me pictures of the young Mene with his adoptive family on the farm in Cold Spring.

“Have you ever heard of a macerating plant?”

None of us answered.

“It’s a bone bleacher.”

I shivered instinctively, thinking of what Zimm had described to us last week-one hundred years later-as the museum’s new degreasing machine.

“Back of the house was a running stream, so Mr. Wallace convinced the museum to let him set up his own operation there. A cheap way to clean the animal specimens. He just parked the dead carcasses in the running springwater until they were naturally washed and bleached.”

“And Qisuk?”

“Mr. Wallace was personally responsible for bleaching the Eskimo’s bones, so that the anthropologists could get on with mounting the skeleton. He did it in his own backyard, while Mene was living in the house and playing on the grounds of the old farm.”

“It’s unthinkable.”

“On top of that, William Wallace lost his job at the museum-nothing having to do with Qisuk’s phony funeral, which all the officials thought was fine-but because of financial irregularities. An early scam in which he was charging the museum for animal work he was doing for circuses and zoos. Billed the trustees for an elephant he had bleached for some circus troupe performing in the old Madison Square Garden.”

“So who supported Mene? The museum president? Or Robert Peary?”

Clem laughed. “Peary had long before given up his interest in his Eskimo specimens.”

“But the president of the museum, did he just abandon the child, too?”

“Pretty much so. Morris Jesup. He didn’t put his money where his mouth was either. When Jesup died, in 1908, his estate was valued at thirteen million dollars. He didn’t leave the child a nickel in his will.”

“What did the kid do?”

“Mene? He was still just a teenager, but he began the battle that would last him a lifetime.”

“Who did he fight?”

“The museum, its administration, its trustees.” Clem licked her finger and scanned through the plastic-covered sleeves in her notebook. When she found the newspaper article she had been searching for, she turned the book around so that the headline was facing me.

I read aloud from the January 6, 1907, edition ofThe World, which pictured an imploring Mene on his knees, in front of a sketch of the massive museum facade. Above the entrance was the bold black print that shouted his plea:GIVE ME MY FATHER’s BODY!

“All the boy wanted,” Clem said, “was to take his father’s remains home to Greenland for a proper funeral. To be given his kayak and hunting weapons to bury with him there.”

“What did the museum do?”

“Not what you might think. They gave him nothing. But it didn’t take very much media heat, even in those days, to cause them to dismantle the display case.”

“And do what with it?”

“Put it in a coffin, if you can call it that. A large wooden box with a piece of glass on top, so the skeleton was still visible within it. Moved it upstairs to the workroom where other skeletal models were assembled.”

“But did they return it to Mene?”

“There was a new president by this time, a zoologist named Carey Bumpus. His view? We’ve got hundreds of skeletons here. How the hell do I know which of these bones is your father?”

“And Mene?”

“A very difficult life, never quite comfortable in America. When he was almost twenty, he finally got some of the Arctic explorers to take him back home.”

“Did anyone know him there?”

Clem smiled at me. “A tiny place like that, a dozen years after the white men took six of the tribesmen away? Certainly. These people have no written language, only oral history. But the story of Qisuk and Mene had been told many times. And he still had aunts and cousins there. In a sense it got worse.”

“But why?”

“Like a man without a country. Now he could no longer speak the Eskimo language.”

“Did he stay?”

“Not for long. The loneliness there was as profound for him as it had been in New York City. He came back to America, wandering around New England until he finally settled in a town in New Hampshire, where he found a job in a lumber mill. But it was all shortlived. Mene died in the Spanish influenza epidemic that swept the country, before he was even thirty.”

I turned the pages of Clem’s book of documents, looking at photos of this young outsider throughout his life. There were images in which his velvety brown eyes seemed to express all the joyous promise of every childhood, but far many more in which the pain of his isolation dimmed the gaze as he grew into an adolescent and young adult.

“Before he died, though, was he able to arrange for his father’s body to go home with him?”

“Never. It was one more broken promise.”

I hesitated to ask. “To this day, has Qisuk’s-?” I stopped, not knowing how to refer to the remains. It certainly wasn’t an intact body.

“Natural History accession number 99/3610? That’s all Qisuk was to the museum leaders.”

The dead man bore the same kind of identification tag as a stuffed moose or prehistoric fish.

Clem went on. “Yes, in 1993, more than a century after the six Eskimos left their homes, their bones were returned to Greenland for burial. I told you, didn’t I, that my father was born in the same village? It’s called Qaanaaq.”

“Yes, you did.”

“My family was there at the time, in the beginning of August, when the funerals were held. I was at university in London, back for a visit, and we had gone north to see my grandfather. I’d been studying to be a librarian until then. It was learning the story of these ancestors, and the journey of Qisuk’s bones, that changed my path. That’s when I decided what I wanted to do was be an anthropologist.”

“Did you go to the ceremony?”

“Oh, yes. A very traditional one. Quite moving, actually. They were buried on a hilltop near the water, with a pile of stones on top of the grave. And a marker with a simple inscription:THEY HAVE COME HOME.”

She paused with her eyes closed, as if remembering the scene.

“And this story you’ve told us,” Mike asked, “you think this has something to do with the murder of Katrina Grooten?”

“Most definitely.”

“Why?”

It all seemed so obvious to Clementine. “When Katrina started coming to the Natural History Museum to work on the joint show, she was amazed at all the skeletons that were there. She’d never given any thought to where they came from.”