More Bitter Than Death (15 page)

When after a few minutes I wasn’t presented with that smiling face and villainous breath, I began to relax and take in a bit of the paper.

There was one thing, however, that gave me a quick jab in the memory, when the reader was talking about work done in northern New York State by an amateur, Josiah Miller, in the nineteenth century. A recently discovered copy of Miller’s work was shedding new light on the material in the area. I usually have a good brain for this sort of thing—references and the like—and kept thinking about it. I got nothing, so then I tried the trick of changing contexts. If you meet someone on the street whose face you remember knowing but whose name isn’t coming, you try envisioning them behind a counter or in running clothes, to see if you know them from the lunch place or from the gym or something like that. It usually works pretty well. With references, it’s a little different. You try and remember if it was a paper you read—and if so, was it in the library, online, or at home? What color was the cover, what was the font?—or was it something that
someone was asking or telling you about? Etcetera.

It vexed me so much that I dropped the slender thread of concentration I had reserved for the paper and devoted it to chasing it down in my mind. I had it narrowed down to something I knew from the distant past of undergraduate rather than graduate school or my present work and eventually gave up, half thinking about the paper as it wandered on and on and on and on…

I felt my head nod again, but snapped it back up as soon as I realized I was falling asleep. For about thirty seconds, I was alert again, determined not to drift off, but then the conversation that was being whispered somewhere behind me was more than enough to keep me awake.

“—and typical of him, he never bothered showing. I mean, if he wasn’t going to bother, he should have called and let me know, right?”

“He wasn’t usually like that about private meetings, he was always happier with them. It’s the more public stuff he was shy of.”

They—two men—were talking about Garrison. I tried to ease myself into a more comfortable position, the better to hear, without drawing attention to myself. I drew out a notebook and began to doodle.

“Shy? Him?”

“Pathologically. Poor guy, he was really troubled by it—”

Maybe they weren’t talking about Garrison after all; shyness never seemed to be one of his many personal shortcomings…

“—I guess I had better luck. He showed up right on time to meet me.”

“What time was that?”

“About ten, in the hospitality suite. What time was yours?”

“Close to midnight. Jules said he didn’t mind, as he didn’t sleep much anymore.”

Jules? Right, Julius Garrison. I kept thinking of him as
being an entity defined by his last name only. So they were talking about him.

“Huh. Figures. Maybe he did fall asleep.”

Now there was hesitation. “Possibly.”

“You’re not going to tell me what happened, are you?”

“I’m just trying to be discreet. You understand.”

“Maybe. I guess I would too, in
your
position. Fortunately, I’m not that hard up.”

“It’s not as bad as people make out” came the curt reply. The voice was familiar, but the strain in it was disguising it from me still.

A few people angrily shushed them. I wished they hadn’t because I wanted to hear more of the two men’s conversation.

Then there was a creak of chair, and someone struggling to get out in a hurry and more protesting shhh’s. I turned around to see who it was, but when I saw Widmark’s shiny suit at the side of the room, I snapped my head around forward again and lost my man.

I waited until the end of the paper and then eased my way out of my seat. Just as I turned around, I realized I was facing Widmark, who was also leaving. Dang.

“Hi, I was wondering whether you had a moment now?”

I hated lying to him, but I couldn’t face his questions just now. “I really don’t. What if we decide that we’ll chat at the reception before the business meeting?”

“Uh, great. If you’re really in a rush now—?”

“I really am.” I craned my neck around, but my quarry, the second whisperer, had gotten away already. “I’ll catch you later.”

Even though I joined the leaving throng as quickly as I could, I lost whoever it was who might have been sitting behind me in the shuffle out the door. I only felt marginally sorry for the next person presenting; I consoled myself that there was an equally steady stream of folks fighting their way into the room as we were leaving.

I ran into Duncan, Jay, and Scott in the hallway.

“Didn’t expect to see you in that session, Emma,” Duncan said. “What was the draw in there?”

I shook my head and looked down the hall as I answered. “Nothing in particular. Why do you ask?”

His voice sharpened, causing me to face him. “What are you being so bitchy about?”

At that point, Jay and Scott exchanged uncomfortable looks, excused themselves hastily, and moved off to the side.

“Me, bitchy?” I hadn’t been really, not this time, so there was something else on his mind.

“Or is it that you resent that I spoke up on your behalf with Mark Church last night?”

There it was, that little half-smile that couldn’t be completely smothered by his serious expression. It always happened, when he was probing someone’s Achilles’ heel.

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Perhaps I missed exactly what you think it was you were doing for me.”

“I guess I think that putting in a good word for you with the cops is significant, like I might have been saving you some trouble.”

That was the word, right there. “Saving. You think you were saving me from them. Just what is it that you think I was doing that meant I needed saving from? I was talking to the cops, but I don’t have anything to hide, so why should I need saving?” Especially by you.

He pressed his lips together, the way that he always did when he was digging in, but didn’t want to look as though he’d been put out by anything. He looked me straight in the eye, and let the corner of his mouth turn up ever so slightly. “Emma, everyone’s got something to hide, haven’t they?”

I flinched, but recovered quickly. It was another old trick, I reminded myself. “Yeah, well. It is a truism, but it doesn’t mean that whatever one wants hidden is illegal or anything
else.” And trust you to pick up on that small bit of universal human frailty and exploit it.

He saw that he’d struck close to the bull’s eye, that time. “You’re right, but to tell the truth, Emma, I think you’ve got more going on with you right now than you’re willing to admit.”

I felt my face fix, the way it had a long time ago when I’d been at Penitence Point and had a gun pointed at me: don’t give him anything to react to, don’t rise to the bait, wait your time. And suddenly it occurred to me that this was just like what Nolan was teaching me about self-defense and game faces and watching your opponent’s moves. Duncan had mastered the art of getting in close to his opponent to make the most of his own power while keeping them off balance, years before I knew such a thing could be applied in purely social situations. I relaxed, let him bring it to me, let him think he still had it over me.

“You’re right, Duncan.” I shrugged a little and nodded. I realized how tight my shoulders were. He wasn’t worth that, he wasn’t worth my anger, not anymore. I took a deep breath and tried to make my face relax; I was rewarded by seeing him narrow his eyes as he did when he was wary or disconcerted. “You’re right.”

If you’re going to make a move, you have to be willing to back it up, so I went out on a limb and tried to make human conversation. “I hadn’t told you that I was sorry to hear about Garrison,” I said. Mostly because it was another one of those polite, humanizing fictions. “I know he meant a lot to you.”

“You were never his biggest fan,” Duncan said uncertainly after a moment. “So thanks.”

We both nodded. A silence ballooned between us and I realized that part of not giving in to my baser instincts and being snappish or storming off meant that I’d again be faced with instances just like this one, the same way they turn up in ordinary conversation.

Damn.

“You know,” he said, rushing in as though he’d read my mind, “I didn’t mean anything back there. With Mark,” he said, and I thought he seemed a little too eager about explaining—what happened to his composure? Or is he just reiterating something because it’s untrue? “I honestly thought I was helping, that it wouldn’t hurt to have a little, uh, you know, backup or support or a kind word in the right ear, or whatever.”

“I get that now, I was just a little flustered back there,” I said. That’s okay: I know how much you like getting those words into those ears, how much both parties appreciate it and think well of you later. “You knew him growing up?”

“Yeah, since grade school. Really nice guy, does a good job. We get together every once in a while, when I’m visiting Mom. Usually hometown friendships don’t make it through college.”

I nodded again. This was better, seemed more neutral. And it didn’t actually hurt me, this gesture, and I might even discover that he had no other ulterior motive in being nice to me, much as I doubted it. Better this way, I decided; I shake it off, he keeps wondering what’s up. I groped about for something to keep this going, just another moment or two, to seal the deal of me being the bigger person.

“Actually, that reminds me of something. I heard a reference to Josiah Miller, and something about it is familiar. I just can’t place it.” I rifled through my bag to retrieve my schedule and find out where I was supposed to be heading next. “It’s nothing too recent, and I figure it was something I ran across back in undergraduate. Does it ring any bells for you?”

I looked up, and saw that Duncan had gone positively ashen under his winter tan. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t mean anything. I’m just asking whether a nineteenth-century amateur named Josiah Miller means any
thing to you.” A little temper resurfaced now that things were suddenly turning weird.

“Okay.” His face was still whiter than white, but he was angry now, like I’d never really seen before; he was always too slick for that. “Okay, what is it you want?”

“Duncan. It was a simple question.” I felt my hackles raising in response, all pretense at politeness gone.

“Well. At least we know where we really stand,” he said at last. Jay and Scott hovered on the periphery of our discussion. “We’ll talk about this later.”

He joined the other two, and they stood together in a tight little knot.

That’s what you get for trying to be adult and letting bygones be bygones, said the snarky little part of me that is usually against these things. Sometimes those immature parts of us aren’t entirely wrong. Sometimes they’re there for a good, self-defensive reason.

“Do you have a minute?”

I turned around, exasperated, wishing Widmark would just go away. But to my surprise, it was Church. “Just wanted to see how you were doing this morning. No more notes, no noises in the night, or anything?”

I took a deep breath, trying to regain my composure after my run-in with Duncan. The guys had moved off down the hallway. “No, nothing strange.”

“Good to hear,” he said. “Just wanted to let you know that I’m keeping an eye on you, that’s all.”

And although his smile was as beguiling as ever, it really sounded like he was less concerned for me than suspicious.

C
HURCH LEFT AS QUICKLY AS HE’D APPEARED, AND
I decided that if I hustled, I could actually see some of the session I’d originally planned to see. Discussions of identifying early earthenware were soothing, and soon I was lost in the discussion of paste, inclusions, glazes, and surface decorations, so much of which you can see with the naked eye. And there’s something about the curve of whole pots that is incredibly sexy. Finding fragments of dull red earthenware—essentially the same material as a plain flowerpot—is exciting because not only can you imagine what vessel it was—and once you know the shape, you know the vessel, and from there you can get into use, trade, the whole world from a potsherd—but sometimes there are marks on the pottery that have nothing to do with its manufacture. Fingerprints are wonderful, and while there have been some attempts to link prints with a particular potter, I’m happy just to make the connection that these were manufactured by hand, that a person was responsible for this coming into being. Paw prints, too, are common enough, and it is so easy to imagine a dog running across a floor
where a milk pan, fresh off the wheel, had been set for a moment. Blades of grass in the bottom of a vessel, burned away by the kiln, also reveal a pause in the potter’s day, the space between finishing work and setting it to dry to leather hardness before its introduction into the kiln. All of these things remind me of the people involved, maybe not named, but individuals who lived in the past. It’s too easy to talk about “back then” and lump everyone all together. It’s more fun to think of someone yelling at some dumb mutt causing chaos outside of the shed where the wheel sits, chickens squawking and hustling out of the way, feathers ruffled, than it is to think of a faceless entity responsible for a kiln site designated with numbers and letters.

So the pottery session was exactly what the doctor ordered, and two hours later, nerves calmed and spirit refreshed, I decided to reward myself with a trip to the book room. I’d actually remembered to make a shopping list and bring it with me this time, and though I seldom needed assistance in buying books, this expedited things nicely. My credit card got whipped through so many readers so fast that I could smell scorched plastic, and in no time at all I was basking in the afterglow, a cross between the warm, secure feeling of having met my legitimate professional needs and the triumph a hunter must feel coming back with the kill.

After I spoke with the publisher’s rep from the press that was handling my artifact book, I was lingering over a gorgeously illustrated volume of late medieval glassware from Venice that I didn’t really need. Someday, I argued with myself, I might be working on a site that was high enough status and early enough to have such a thing and anyway, wouldn’t it be good to brush up on glass-fabricating techniques?

A stray thought occurred to me. I put the yummy volume down, much to the chagrin of the bookseller, who’d been hoping not to have to carry the heavy thing home with him,
and went over to the table that had been the scene of the other thefts.

There was still a display there, and it had been obviously rearranged to accommodate the missing pieces. What was left of the display, which had been a mockup of an underwater site, was some broken pottery and the sand and aquatic weeds that had been arranged to resemble an underwater site.

“Too bad you didn’t see it before,” the guy behind the table said to me. “It was really gorgeous.”

I gestured toward the case. “Are you in charge of this table?”

“No, I’m just watching it while the other dealer takes a break. It’s been nutty here.”

“Yeah?”

“People buying Garrison’s books like crazy, even more than before he died. And plus, everyone’s all, I don’t know, bleh, because the cops won’t tell them anything about what’s going on. Shots fired, dead keynote speakers…people want books to comfort them.” He rubbed his hands together. “You gotta love it.”

I nodded. “What was it like before? The display, I mean.”

“Nice, real nice. It had a couple of replica pots—you know, based on the fragments that were found—and some nice gold coins and a gold chain. I guess it was meant to be a shipwreck that was found off the Carolinas, but I don’t know for sure. Everything was fake, of course, except for a few of the actual sherds themselves, but it’s a shame that someone had to go and ruin all the guy’s hard work, you know?”

“Yeah. When’d it happen?”

“At night, Wednesday night, before everything got started. The cops found the door was forced open, but nothing else was taken. We’re not stupid enough to leave anything valu
able in here, that’s the funny thing. Someone went to a lot of trouble for about ten bucks worth of costume jewelry and some pots they could have found at any tourist shop.”

“Pity. Thanks,” I said, turning to leave.

“Hey, you don’t want to check out my table?” He held his hands out invitingly. “Got some great stuff here…”

I looked over at the table full of display models of metal detectors and catalogues, and shook my head.

“Come on,” he cajoled. “There are plenty of legitimate archaeologists who use these, to good effect.”

I kept shaking my head. “No, thanks. I know, but it’s kind of a personal thing with me. Those things give me the willies. Take it easy.”

I left the dealer with a puzzled look on his face, and went out to the lobby to find my lunch.

After I bought my boxed lunch, I noticed a backlit, built-in display case with a collection of blue-and-white ceramics in the lobby. I slowed down to check it out. Bait for historical archaeologists. There were five shelves of plates, saucers, cups, and service ware, like platters and a teapot; a card said that it had belonged to one of the families who’d owned the tavern. I glanced at it for a moment, and thought about how an archaeologist moves from a tiny sherd of one cup, something that may be part of an entire set, to thinking about how a person incorporated that item into everyday rituals, fraught with meaning. There was more to drinking tea than satisfying thirst, there were political and social and economic realities at play, and we had to get at all that culture from a collection of broken sherds. After another moment, I frowned briefly, and then turned when I heard my name.

“Emma, over here!” Chris was calling me. He, Lissa, Lissa’s friend Gennette Welles, Sue, Carla, and Jay had
snagged chairs around an ottoman near a large planter and were eating their lunches. “Jay’s got a question for you.”

“Shoot.” I squeezed in between Chris and Lissa.

“I just saw you looking at the collection over there,” Jay said. “What’d you notice about it?”

“Uh, not much. Why?”

“Just humor me. What did you see?”

“Well, most of it was pretty ordinary blue-and-white whiteware, Staffordshire, most was a little earlier than mid-nineteenth-century. There was one piece of Chinese export porcelain in there, a cup, which might have been a present or something—it was a lot nicer, higher style than the rest of it and the pattern was different, of course. The Staffordshire material was imitating the Asian export porcelain patterns.”

“Okay, what else?”

I looked at Jay. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re looking for, and maybe that would help.”

“We’ve got a little derby going, seeing how many observations each of our colleagues made walking by there,” he explained.

“Fine, whatever. What else? Um, there was an odd number of cups to saucers, and there were fewer of them than plates. There was one piece where the pattern was messed up—the piece of inked paper that was set down onto the unfired clay must have wrinkled. There was an odd-sized plate in there, looks like a later addition to the collection, or it might have been one left over from a complete set of smaller plates.”

“Nothing else?” Jay was disappointed. “Duncan Thayer got one more.”

I couldn’t tell whether that was just a simple statement of fact or a goad. “One of the cups had a repaired handle.”

“Duncan didn’t get that,” Jay said, “but he did notice that one of the plates was a different pattern.”

“Right, most of them were a pastoral scene—cows, pastures, shepherdesses, whathaveyou—and there was one of a Gothic architecture scene. Later in period. I said there was a later one.”

“But you only mentioned the pattern after I mentioned that Duncan saw it,” Jay said, shaking his head. He turned to Chris. “Sorry, man. Pay up.”

“Hang on a second,” Chris said, smiling. “Emma, why didn’t you mention the pattern?”

“Because that style of ware, well, it belonged to a middle-class family, right? If a piece was broken or lost, they just replaced it. In those days, it didn’t matter that it was a different pattern, it mattered that it was blue.”

“See, Jay?
You
pay up. She saw the difference and added one factoid to the pile.”

“Man.” Jay looked like he was about to protest, caught my eye, and reached for his wallet. “I was set up. It just ain’t fair.”

I stuck out my tongue at him. Serves him right for betting on…against me.

“It would be more fair if you started betting on the sure things, and left the flashy long-shots alone,” Chris said as he pocketed his money. “It’s like taking candy from a baby.” He smiled at me. “I believe I owe you a drink, m’dear.”

“I’ll take you up on that later. I just want my lunch now.”

It was strange to see so many of my friends together again, I thought, as I dug into my boxed lunch. Usually we scattered to the four corners of any conference after the first night.

“Before you got here, we were talking about the latest ‘live like the old days’ reality television,” Lissa said. She bit into her sandwich with gusto.

It was then that I understood why they were all still together. Taking bets and eating and talking about television kept you from thinking about death and gunshots. It had to
do with the same reasons that conversations were muted in the hallways, and other people were moving around in small herds too. Everyone was looking for comfort, for answers, and if they couldn’t get them, then they’d make do with physical closeness.

“What I can’t get is that people think that they’re actually going to live like people in the seventeenth century,” Carla said. “Like they’re suddenly going to be possessed of the historical spirit and fall into ‘thee’s’ and ‘thou’s’ and not notice any difference. No cards either, Jay. No basketball, no Vegas. Wouldn’t that be a pisser?”

“They don’t think, that’s the problem.” Jay ignored Carla. “They just want to be on television.”

“Whatever for?” I asked. “I can’t imagine anything less appealing.”

“People think they’re famous if they’re on television.”

“Um, yum, erm!” Lissa was waving her hand, chewing furiously.

“Lissa, calm the hell down,” Gennette said. She was a willowy dark-skinned woman with close-cropped hair and big brown eyes. “You’re going to choke, and then I’ll laugh.”

Lissa finally swallowed. “That will be the day! You’re too darn serious as it is. I was going to say those guys on TV think they’ll find a simpler life!”

Gennette made a face. “Give me a break. I mean, even without the bland diet, the back-breaking work, the religious restrictions—”

“They’re surprised at having to go to the bathroom outside, or in a bucket,” Chris said, shaking his head. “Talk about forgetting the essentials!”

“Not everyone is into inflicting the past on themselves like you and Nell are,” Carla said. “Reenacting? I don’t get it.”

“I know, and Nell knows, and you all know, that we’re not actually living eighteenth-century military life, any more than those guys on television,” Chris said. “Dental care, diet,
disease—our immune systems probably couldn’t handle a fraction of the parasites that they did two hundred years ago.”

“Excuse me! Eating, here,” Carla said disgustedly.

I looked at my shrimp salad sandwich doubtfully. The bitten ends of the little shrimp were just too suggestive. Ah well, it was just words. I took another big bite. Not bad, for bugs.

“You know what I mean,” Chris said. “The physical differences aside, let’s not forget the fact that culturally speaking, we’re from different worlds. Same language, maybe, but different outlooks altogether.”

“Two cultures separated by a common language,” Sue said.

“Look at the differences between Americans and Canadians,” Carla said.

“Well, Canadians are just funny Americans,” Jay added. Carla kicked at his ankle; he dodged her foot but sloshed his drink all over his lap.

“You know, you’re right,” she said. “That was pretty funny.”

“Nell and I don’t imagine that we’re becoming people from the seventeen sixties,” Chris continued doggedly. “But we are learning about some of the things that make us different, learning how people would have had to think. Gives some insight into what we find in the field.”

“I think those shows are much better as laboratory cases of how twenty-first-century people adapt to adverse conditions,” I said. “But I still don’t get the desire to be on television.”

“Why not?” Lissa said.

“For a start, I don’t like the idea of losing my privacy like that. As much as I really don’t want to see other people having hissy-fits on television, I don’t want my own aired either.”

“The Puritans would have asked you what you have to hide, if you want that much privacy,” Lissa said.

“Sure. If you’re not doing something you shouldn’t, there’s no reason to want to be alone. Fortunately, I live in a time where people are aware that rats, stressed out and overcrowded, will go bonky and eat their young or each other. So I’ll take my locked doors and drawn curtains and no neighbors, thanks all the same.”

“Hey, don’t knock the Puritans. They slept a dozen to a bed, so they weren’t all bad,” Lissa said. “But seriously, Emma, the Puritans were your people. So what have you got to hide behind all those curtains?” There was an edge to the way she spoke, like she was trying to drum up anything that would be a distraction. “And why do you scorn the light of the media?”

I was growing annoyed with her. “They weren’t my people, Lissa. And I haven’t got anything to hide.”