More Bitter Than Death (16 page)

“Oh, come on,” she persisted. “Everyone does.”

“Where you off to next, Emma?” Jay interrupted. He seemed as frustrated with Lissa’s persistence as I.

“Session on immigration,” I said, grateful for the cover he provided me. “One of my students is presenting.”

“Cool, I’ll go with you.”

“Me too,” said Scott. “But I got to run to my room first. You guys come with me.”

“Fine, as long as I can use your bathroom,” I said.

We went up to Scott’s room on the fourth floor. He was about halfway down the hallway, and when we went in, I was hit with a strong scent of locker room. And it wasn’t a locker room that had been cleaned any time recently.

“Jeez, Scott!” I said. “This place reeks!”

He looked around. “It’s not that bad.”

“Trust me.” I spotted the problem. “You’ve got underwear on the radiator?”

He looked sheepish. “I didn’t think they’d dry fast enough, hanging in the bathroom.”

I realized that he said that he still had no luggage with
him. Based on the implications of this, I decided that the conversation needed to stop right here.

Jay, however, wasn’t so discreet. “So you’re freeballing today?”

“Jay!” Scott turned scarlet, and whipped around to look at me. I shrugged; I’d heard of men’s body parts
and
what happened when all the laundry was in the hamper. “What do you want, man? It was either go commando while these things dry or get a case of the itch. It’s not like you never got into a jam and—”

That was too much reality for me. “Excuse me, I need to be out of here,” I said, heading for the bathroom. “Scott, you could at least get them off the radiator.”

“It’s not the shorts, Em. It’s the rest of my clothes smelling up the place while I’m in bed. The heat doesn’t help, and my deodorant was in my suitcase.”

I shut the door as Jay informed Scott that he should raid the sundries shop in the lobby. I tried not to listen as Scott said he didn’t want to spend the extra money when his stuff might show up at any moment, and when did Jay, borrowing Chris’s money, last I saw, suddenly become so willing to spend money? I sighed, finished up quickly, and returned to the room before their tempers could fray any further.

With as little stuff as Scott had of his own things, the place was a tip. Housekeeping hadn’t been in yet—always a hazard with the irregular schedule of a conference—and there were three trays with leftovers adding to the smell.

“What, did you have a party after the cops were done with you all?” Jay asked, looking around with interest. Then his expression changed to hurt. “You didn’t get another game going and not invite me, did you?”

“No, course not. A couple of us ordered snacks last night. I guess we weren’t as hungry as we thought,” he answered, trying in vain to cover up a half-eaten burger that was not aging well in the warm room.

“You know, you can put this stuff outside, and they’ll come and get it,” I said.

“I meant to, but I got out of bed because of Garrison and had no time.”

“Who’d you have up here, anyway?” Jay asked, interestedly. “We coulda got a game going.”

“Just some guys,” Scott said, coloring. “I gotta go to the head.”

Jay and I looked for places to sit and wait, when Scott yelled, “I’m going to be in here for a while.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Jay muttered. He hollered to Scott, “I’m going to run down the hall to my room. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He left, and I tried not to think about what kind of orgy had been going on here. A couple of guys, let off the leash, come back after partying hard. Order some room service, are too drunk to eat, all the while, Scott’s lingerie was drying into a husk on the radiator. But Scott hadn’t admitted who was up here…and one of the glasses had lipstick on it.

The phone rang. “You want me to get it?” I shouted.

“Yeah, would you?”

“Scott Tomberg’s room,” I said.

“Who the hell is this?” said an irate female voice.

“This is Emma Fielding. Scott can’t come to the phone now.”

She calmed down right away. “Hey, Em, it’s Cathy.”

I knew Scott’s wife from way back. “Hey, Cath. Scott’s going to be a minute. You want to call back?”

“No, I can hang on. How’s it going?”

“Uh…everyone’s a little stir crazy. What with the weather and all.”

“I meant, since they found out about Garrison.”

“Okay, I guess. People are pretty sad, which is kind of a surprise to me.”

Cathy laughed, and it was an ugly sound. “Surprise to me
too. Maybe they’re just sorry that they didn’t get to him first.”

I shrugged, and then realized that she couldn’t see me. “I thought I was in the minority, as far as the disliking Garrison camp is going.”

“Oh, hell, everyone gets ennobled when they’re dead, didn’t you know that? Everyone forgets all the bad stuff and gets all sentimental and all that crap. It’s just like listening to a presidential funeral. Remember Nixon? You’d have thought Watergate never happened. I’m just glad for Scott’s sake that the old bastard’s dead.”

But Scott had seemed as distressed as anyone by Garrison’s death. “I got the impression that Scott had put a lot of his experiences with Garrison behind him. He’s never spoken a word against him.”

“That’s men for you. Trying to make like it never happened, like it wasn’t as bad as it was. Typical. Man, I was just dating him at the time, but he and that other guy he’s friends with—actually, you might know Duncan Thayer—they used to talk up some serious violence. Bad craziness, like what you could do to someone with woodworking tools.” She laughed. “It was like a game, with them, almost. Killing Garrison inventively was like a sport. Get him good and toasted sometime, and ask him about Plan B, the one with the c-clamps and the auger.”

“Uh, maybe I’ll give that a miss.” I heard water running in the bathroom. “Okay, I think he’s coming now. Scott, phone!”

He took the handset. “Hey, hon. Yeah, I was in the can. I’m running late, can I call you later? Greatloveyoubye.” He turned to me. “Let’s go get Jay and get this show on the road.”

We walked down the hall, and Scott began to bang on the door to room four-twelve. “Open up, Jay. Let’s get moving.”

Jay opened the door, looking annoyed as he finished a
phone call: “Yeah, Salt Lake, by sixteen. Gotta go, man.” He glared at Scott. “Like I’m the one who’s been holding us up?”

“What can I say? You gotta go, you gotta go.” Suddenly, Scott pushed his way into the room. “Hey, you got that paper you promised me? Can I get it now, while we’re both sober and thinking of it?”

“We’re running behind,” Jay said.

“Then stop arguing and get moving, asshole.”

“Hang on.” Jay sorted through a bunch of papers, colorful flyers from the book room advertising books that were available at a discount, and the usual collection of coupons for local establishments that we couldn’t visit until the snow had been plowed away.

Jay’s room was better than Scott’s, but only by degree. It wasn’t underwear, but pants and socks on the radiator, and a single tray was on the desk with the papers. A few more personal items—after all, Jay had his suitcase—but most of these were stashed away. One drawer was closed on a pair of underpants, tidy-whiteys. What one did learn from visiting one’s friends’ rooms, I thought. Mostly more than I wanted to know.

“I saw you hit the casinos in Connecticut on your way up,” Scott said, jerking his chin toward a couple of plastic bags with exuberant logos sitting under the desk.

“Oh, sure,” I said before Jay could answer. “There’s a really impressive museum and research center focusing on Native American culture associated with one of them. I stopped by myself, last time I visited my mother. It’s worth the trip.”

Scott laughed at me. “Yeah, that’s why
Jay
stopped at the casino, Em. For the museum.”

“Here.” Jay thrust a stapled sheaf of paper into Scott’s hand. “Now let’s get going, can we?”

The session we walked into was on migration and the effect it might have on the archaeological record. Meg was
tackling it in the broadest sense, examining the politics of the period in which the Chandlers had moved to Massachusetts and comparing it with the situation in Matthew Chandler’s hometown of Woodbroke, near Norwich. She was attempting to build a correlation between a political fracas there, the Chandlers’ hasty marriage and departure, and what appeared to be a slight dip in their fortunes, based on the artifacts from the earliest strata of their house site in Stone Harbor, Massachusetts.

I was interested to see what Meg was going to do with this paper, as I knew she was nervous about it. Meg was developing her professional persona. She’d presented papers before, but in much less formal circumstances, and while there was no other limit I knew to Meg’s confidence and aggression, public speaking was the one thing I knew she was not comfortable with. That would come with time, I thought. Meg had the ability to overcome many things, including herself.

She’d dressed up for this, I was surprised to see; usually there was little difference between Meg in the field and Meg in class and Meg at a prom, for all I knew. But instead of baggy army surplus fatigues, a T-shirt, and boots, she was wearing wool dress pants, a silk shirt, and shoes: flat-heeled lace-ups, to be sure, but shoes nonetheless. It made me wonder what her wedding gown—if any—and the whole ceremony would look like.

Meg was all business from the get-go: curt nod of thanks to the moderator, a brief “lights, please,” and then she was off.

She was discussing an aspect of the Chandler house excavation that had particularly interested her, Justice Matthew Chandler’s reasons for leaving England to come to Massachusetts in the 1720s, a drastic decision for anyone, much less for someone with the means and family connections that he would have had. Meg, as far as I knew, had been corresponding with an archive in England, and they had sent her a copy of a letter that seemed to confirm her hypothesis:
Matthew Chandler had left England because of county political controversies.

I never bought into this theory for several reasons. The first was that, having studied his wife Margaret’s journal, I never saw any indication that this was the case. She was an extraordinarily canny woman, and my brief introduction to her world, two hundred years and more after her death, led me to believe that she would have written something about this. The second was my sense that Margaret wrote about her husband with respect and growing affection. While she wasn’t happy with being forced to live in the Massachusetts wilderness—indeed, she’d come within a hair’s breadth of having been executed for murder—she never blamed Matthew for her situation. My impression was simply that there would have been more blame, or at least some reference to their plight, had they been forced to flee their home for the reasons that Meg was suggesting. Another was that I could find no indication that Matthew had been a part of the tempest in the local teapot. Not solidly conclusive reasons, just instinct.

Meg gave the overview of our two seasons in the field, with some of the gorgeous shots of the brick house that overlooked Stone Harbor itself. She included a couple of good shots of the crew working, and one of them goofing off, which was nice, and then some of the tastier artifacts we’d recovered. She loitered over the chatelaine that we’d found season one, a particular prize of mine because my sister Bucky had found it. And then she wound up her introduction with a description of the politics she believed caused the Chandlers to relocate.

“What I had originally decided was that it had become socially and economically prudent for Matthew Chandler both to marry into the Chase fortune—Margaret’s father was a successful merchant who married into a minor branch of nobility—and to leave London quickly thereafter, as the
news of the corruption scandal from Woodbroke was just reaching Norwich and London at that point. It turns out I was wrong.”

I blinked; I hadn’t heard this part.

She took a deep breath. “I received an email just three days ago, from Professor Merton-Twigg, whose work focuses on the documentary history of Norwich in the early modern period. It turns out, however, that although the name Chandler is prominently mentioned in the city records of the time, it is not our Chandlers. I don’t even know if they are related, but it certainly wasn’t Matthew who was involved. The reason we can confirm this is twofold: The first is that a diarist of the time mentions that Matthew was already in London, having quit Woodbroke for Oxford some years before. The second was that Professor Merton-Twigg realized that the transcription of the document I hoped would prove my point was incomplete. A footnote that had been described as ‘illegible’ was in fact a remark that Matthew had served with good faith his family and their interests at Woodbroke, and that he never would have let this happen.”

Meg took another deep breath and smiled ruefully. “There goes chapter three of my dissertation.”

There was a shocked pause, some “awws,” and some laughter. I sucked my teeth, knowing what a blow it was to Meg.

She finished up smartly enough, discussing where she could go from here, what else remained to be done, and what were the other options for her research.

I ducked out of that session, went to another couple papers on osteology, and then snuck back in for the wrap-up, a rather dreary report on numbers of immigrants to a small town outside of Hartford during the late nineteenth century. After the question period, Meg was collecting her slide tray—she was still unable to afford more impressive computer hardware and display software—and I sidled up behind her. The lights were up, showing the dull gold wallpaper to no good advantage.

“That’s a pain, huh?” I said.

“What are you going to do?” She screwed up her face. “The email came a couple of days ago, and a copy of the letter came right as I was leaving for here. It just nailed down the lid on the coffin.”

“And is it really a whole chapter in your dissertation?”

She shrugged. “It would have been fun and interesting, but it’s really just a smallish part. I can revise it easily enough, make what I’ve got part of the family history, then get to the site itself. No biggie.”