Burial Ground (16 page)

“Well…” I smirked as she fumbled for words.
Pepper. Her name was Pepper
.

“Tell me, how did you ever get such a wonderful name?” Sam demanded, herding us toward the living room. “Your father’s idea, I’ll bet.”

“Why, yes.”

“I know he’s a man I’d get along with.” He shuffled toward his easy chair and fell into it with a sigh. “My God, am I dry. And I haven’t come all the way from Baton Rouge!”

I handed over the bottle and he cocked his head toward his wife. “I’ll take Dant and water. What will you good people have?”

“Sam …” Libby began.

“Three fingers,” he instructed and turned back toward us as a defeated Libby disappeared into the kitchen. “Thank God you came,” he said
sotto voce
. “She won’t make a scene in front of company.”

“So what does the doctor say?” I asked, assessing his pallor. “Are you taking your medicine?”

“What doctor? What medicine?” he shot back. “You think I need those quacks? They’ll do for you faster than a poor little virus. Besides …” He drew his robe closer about him. “Pneumonia is the old man’s friend. Hits quick and takes you in a couple of days.”

“
No
,” Pepper breathed.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “You
haven’t
been to the doctor?”

“What did I say? And that woman hid all my whiskey.”

On cue,
that woman
returned then with three glasses on a tray. She served us and then turned stiffly toward Sam.

“Thank you, my dear.” He whisked his glass off like a conjurer and held it up critically to the light. “Ummmm. A little on the light side, but … Will you join us, dearest?”

Libby gave him a strained smile and took a seat across the room. I saw Pepper glancing around her, at the shelves full of books on archaeology, history, and ancient languages.

“Well, cheers.” Sam raised his glass and drained half of it. “Ahhh. I’m feeling better already.”

Libby folded her arms. I knew she wasn’t really angry; it was a little game they played, one they were both good at.

“Now…” Sam turned toward P. E., whom I was having trouble visualizing by her given name. “Tell me, Pepper, what brings you down here? You’re in graduate school or you’ve completed it?”

“I got my doctorate last year,” she explained in a subdued voice. “I came here because—”

Sam’s eyes sparkled. “Did you study under Paul Oldham, by any chance?”

I watched her squirm. “He was my major professor when I started,” she said. “But—”

“Incredible archaeologist,” Sam began, cutting her off again. “I worked with him in Tennessee, in the late forties, you know. A fanatic for details. He had a mind like a trap. He could remember all kinds of things. And his interpretation of the Walters site was outstanding.”

I noticed he was giving her a hard stare and she dropped her eyes.

“Of course you’ve read that report,” he said genially.

“Yes.” She reached for her drink in desperation.

“Paul and I had some times,” Sam meandered. “Those were the days.” He leaned toward her: “Not many women in archaeology back then. Florence Hawley, a handful of others. It was a man’s world.”

I watched to see if she’d bite but she mercifully kept her mouth shut.

“ ’Course, not all the men were up to the job,” Sam reminisced. “Hard business, being in the field so much. Some wives got tired and ran away. And some men got tired of their wives …” He chuckled. “A girl in every lab, if you know what I mean.”

Pepper Courtney put her glass down hard on the coffee table.

“Paul Oldham wasn’t one of those, though,” Sam drawled, taking another sip. He smacked his lips and held his glass out toward Libby. “Another drop or two, pet, eh? Less water this time, please?”

Libby pulled herself up and addressed us:

“Can I get a refill for you two?”

“Not yet,” I said and Pepper shook her head. Sam handed his glass to Libby.

“Yes, Paul loved his wife. It was a hell of a thing the way she died.” He shook his head. “Just withered away. Lou Gehrig’s disease. Some linger for years, others go in a year or two. It took her seven years. It was no wonder the poor man starting drinking too much.”

Libby returned and handed him his drink. He murmured thanks and sighed with pleasure as he tasted it.

“Better. A whole lot better, dear. Did you know Phyllis Oldham, Pepper?”

She shook her head quickly. “No.”

“Beautiful woman. He was so dependent on her. Well … It was all tragic.” He set his glass down and got up. I thought some of his usual color was back and he moved with more energy than when we’d first seen him. He strode over to the bookcase for one of the volumes and I realized with a surprise that it was the Peabody monograph on the Polhugh site.

“He sent this to me.” Sam weighed the book in his hand and I watched Pepper redden. “Has an inscription and all. Let’s see here, what did he say?” He opened the cover and leafed through the first few pages. “Oh, yes.
To my friend Sam MacGregor with best wishes, Paul Oldham
.” He handed the book to Pepper, who looked frantically for a way to avoid taking it, failed, and accepted it like a hot brick from the oven. Suddenly he was handing her a pen as well.

“I wonder, my dear, would you be kind enough to enter another inscription? Whatever you like, but just spell my name right.” He cackled. “And add
from the author
. I think that’ll give it more value.”

I watched her mouth fall open.

“You … all along …”

“I
do
try to read the literature of my profession,” Sam said modestly, “and ever since I took a one-year visiting appointment at Harvard twenty years ago, I’ve more or less kept up with the scuttlebutt.”

Slick
, I thought,
very slick
…

“Of course, I didn’t need scuttlebutt to tell me Paul hadn’t done that report. The statistics were beyond him.” He shrugged. “I’ve never seen a better analysis. I’m not running Paul down, of course: He was from the old school, before they taught archaeologists statistics. Why, I can’t remember but one dissertation from our era that had any statistical analysis at all.”

“I know,” Pepper said quietly. “That was a comparative analysis of cervidae bones from twenty sites in the South-east.
You
did it.”

It was Sam’s turn to look surprised.

“Alan, this young lady’s a real prize. By God, she’s right, too. It
was
a milestone, if I can blow my own horn. But so was hers.”

Pepper was glowing now and I wanted to interrupt the love fest and tell him to cut the shit, but I knew better.

“I thought the multivariate analysis brought out some interesting correlations,” she said primly. “The wear patterns on the chert knives suggested heavy usage as flaying implements used in the preparation of game.”

“Considering all the deer bones around them,” I said. “I’d have thought that was obvious.”

“It was obvious the speed of light depended on the speed of the object from which it was emitted,” she shot back. “Until Einstein, that is.”

My turn to arch my brows. “Ever hear about the statistician who drowned in the creek with the average depth of three feet?” I asked blandly.

A gleeful Sam rubbed his hands together.

“Wonderful. I haven’t had this much fun since I attended my last doctoral defense.”

I looked over at Pepper: The woman was laughing.

“Oh, Dr. MacGregor …”

“Sam, please …”

I cleared my throat. “Well, we were just passing. I don’t want to tire you too much.” I set my nearly empty glass on the tray.

“Don’t go,” Libby begged. “Sam’s having fun. If you leave I’ll have to listen to him moaning and complaining again.”

“Me, complain?” Sam demanded. “Who lived a whole summer in a tent in the heat of the Louisiana rain forest? Who spent months as a castaway on a Caribbean island?”

“On your sabbatical,” Libby said quietly. “On an island with seventy-two rum distilleries.”

“It was an anthropological investigation.”

Pepper spoke then:

“Tell us, Sam, what do you know about the last Tunica village on the east bank of the Mississippi? There’s a rumor it’s been rediscovered.”

Sam stroked his white beard. “I’ve heard those stories. Once, Stu Neitzel and I even went beating around up there trying to find it, but we didn’t have any luck. We finally figured it’d fallen in the river.”

“We think so, too,” I said quickly. “We’re doing a survey on some land over on the east bank, just south of St. Francisville. I doubt there’s anything there that’s
in situ
.”

“But, you know,” Sam suggested, “we could all be wrong. Hell, archaeologists make a habit of being wrong. Sometimes I think we’re lucky when things turn out
right
. We start with little fragments of pottery and pieces of bone and we try to make whole cultures come alive again. That’s asking a hell of a lot.” He held up his now empty glass, evinced surprise, and thrust it in Libby’s direction. His long-suffering wife came forward to whisk it away to the kitchen.

“You watch,” Sam whispered. “There won’t be enough whiskey in there to taste. By the fourth drink I usually end up with tap water.”

“When you get better,” P. E. offered, “you’ll have to come out with us.”

Sam’s face lit up. “I wouldn’t miss it. Alan can make a gumbo. Did you know he’s quite an accomplished chef? He did a whole
cochon d’lait
out here once for the annual Christmas party.”

“Really,” Pepper said, arching her brows at me. “I didn’t know.”

Sam cackled again: “Alan, have you been holding out on Pepper?”

“Right,” I said woodenly.

Libby returned with a glass of what appeared, indeed, to be water. Sam held it to the light, sneered, and set it down on the tray. “There’s probably a fish in it,” he mumbled.

“But Alan’s right,” his new friend commented. “We really ought to leave. We’ve scheduled some fieldwork tomorrow and I have to get my things packed.”

“Going back to the survey area?” Sam asked.

“I thought so,” she said. “But maybe we’ll try the riverside this time.” She gave me an innocent look. “What do
you
think?”

“The riverside?” I managed.

“You know, by boat.”

“Well …”

“We can rent one somewhere,” she said, but Sam waved a hand.

“Alan, you’ve still got that john boat, don’t you?”

I exhaled. “Yes, but it’s for bayous. You don’t want to put it in the river, for God’s sake.”

Sam blinked. “We did when we had that survey over at Hog Point, in, when was it? Eighty-five? You remember
that
.”

“That was different. We kept close to the bank and—”

“That’s what we plan to do,” Pepper said, then turned to me. “Don’t we?”

I felt my face go hot. “The motor’s only a thirty-five. In a river like the Mississippi …”

“Oh, baloney,” Sam snorted. “Fred Quimby and I went across the damn thing in a canoe, in ’38.”

“We really do have to go,” I said, getting up. I turned to give Libby a hug. “Thanks for having us.”

“Thank
you
,” she whispered. “I can tell he’s better already.”

“Yes,” I said. “It looks like it.”

Sam took Pepper Courtney’s hands in both of his.

“My dear, I hope you’ll be back. But make it soon. I’m not getting any younger.” He gave a loud sigh. “You may just keep an old man alive.”

The recipient of this jollity laughed and hugged him. “You’ll outlive us all.”

I was beginning to be afraid he would.

“Well, Alan…” She turned to me. But Sam put a hand on my shoulder.

“Before you go, there’s something I’ve been meaning to show you.” He drew me after him, through the parlor and the living room, to the kitchen.

“So what is it?” I asked. “Is the drain stuck?”

“No,” he hissed. “That was just an excuse. I only wanted to tell you I think you’ve finally done it.”

I stared back, blankly.

“Done what?”

“Found the right one, of course. My God, Alan, after some of the women I’ve seen you with. That red-haired harridan who wanted to run your life, the fat one with piano legs …”

“Marguerite was short, but piano legs …”

“And then the few nice ones, you ran off. That’s why I wanted to tell you you’d better not do that this time, or I’ll rise from my grave to make your life miserable.”

“You’re not
in
your grave,” I protested. “And as far as there being anything between this Courtney woman and myself …”

“I know.” He patted my shoulder as you would a child. “But I’m telling you Alan, she’s the best one yet. Quality. Intelligence. A sense of humor. Beauty.”

“Are we talking about the same person? Oh, she’s bright enough, and I guess if she dressed a little bit more like a, well, a
woman
, but her personality—”