More Bitter Than Death (17 page)

“I have to say, you’re taking this remarkably well. I know you thought you had a hot lead there, that it would have been a nice, juicy scandal to work with. But you might be able to work it into an essay on historiography, or something.”

Meg frowned, darting a sideways glance at me, as she worked her carousel box into her backpack. “Well, what am I supposed to do? I’m not about to sit down and cry just because history didn’t go the way I wanted. It would be nice to shape the past anyway I want, but I’m not going to screw with the data we do have to suit my own prurient interests.”

Neal came up then. “So, how’d it go?”

“Good. Got it over with. Onward and upward. Or downward, as the case may be.”

“I’m taking it worse than she is,” I added. “Bummer.”

“Oh, well, there was some serious pissing and moaning at home, and on the ride up here, and for a while as she was rewriting,” Neal offered.

“Thanks, chum,” Meg said to her fiancé. “Way to get my back.”

“Oh, come on.” Neal squished her in a big overblown hug, guaranteed to wrinkle her shirt and rumple her serious demeanor. Meg was smiling by the time she wriggled free. “You’re fine now. Emma understands.”

“Do I ever,” I said.

“Sympathy just makes it worse,” Meg said. “Direction and goading, that’s what I need.”

“Okay, how about this?” I said. “You get me your revised outline in two weeks.”

“Yeah, that’s more like it,” she said, slinging her backpack over her shoulder. It rutched up her shirt so that her bra showed through straining fabric. A little more adventurous than I would have expected. Meg might have mastered lingerie, but she still hadn’t come to grips with what wearing dress clothes—however casual—might require.

Then she turned and saw my face. “You’re serious.”

“Like a lightning strike. You’re ready for it. You said you wanted direction.”

“Well.” She looked surprised by this, but undaunted. “Shit. Okay.”

“You can always tell the Caldwell crowd,” a voice said from behind us. “It’s like pets and their owners. The students and professors start to look alike.”

We turned around. “Oh? Hey, Scott.”

“Short hair, neatly dressed but not too formal—no suits here—”

“And just last year my hair was long and I was wearing suits,” I retorted. “What do you make of that?”

“That’s right, and didn’t I see you decked out in pearl earrings and stilettos last year?” he asked Neal.

Neal gave Scott a questioning look. “Emma, I’ve got to run. Excuse me.”

He and Meg took off, and I turned to Scott, whose humor had utterly vanished.

“What’s up? News about Garrison? People are really wigging out about the cops here. But I guess they have to treat the investigation as a potential homicide because Garrison’s death was sudden and suspicious and possibly violent.”

Scott shook his head, surprised that I should have these
facts at my fingertips. “Uh, no. Emma, I need to talk to you about what you said to Duncan earlier.”

My shoulders slumped. “What
did
I say to Duncan? I try to say as little as possible to him.”

“But what you do say is
choice
. What is it you’re after?”

His words were cold, like nothing I’d ever heard from him, and I looked at him in shock.

“I have
no
idea of what you are talking about.”

“Let’s cut the shit, shall we? You were asking about Josiah Miller. Why’s that?”

“Because I heard it in a paper and it rang a bell with me, and for some reason I thought it was something that he might remember.” I tried not to think of how scary Scott suddenly seemed to me, as big and angry as he was.

“I don’t like you playing Dunk for a fool.” He was disgusted now. “If you’ve got something to say to him, you should just get it out in the open. I thought better of you, Emma.”

Now I was really pissed. “Look, for the hundredth time, I have no idea of what you’re talking about. And if Duncan is worried that I’m saying something to him—about what, I can’t for the life of me guess—then you tell
him
to get
his
cowardly and overimaginative ass out here and ask
me
in person. I don’t do threats and hints. Got it?”

I didn’t wait to hear what he had to say to that, I didn’t care. I was so mad, I could have hit him. He was my friend, and now, for some reason, he could barely look at me. And apparently I had Duncan Thayer to thank for it.

A
S I STORMED OFF AWAY FROM THE BALLROOMS
, I saw Petra sitting with some of the older folks, people who’d been doing historical archaeology before there was such a thing. I hadn’t been over to see them yet, but I knew I would have to eventually. I usually had to juggle finding as many of them together as possible, avoiding Garrison, and my own schedule. Plus, there was a whole pile of inert reluctance that I had to overcome in order to do it, and it weighed on me like an anchor. Overcoming yourself in order to do the right thing seems doubly hard.

“Evening, folks,” I said to the table in general.

“Evening, Emma.”

“How are you, Emma?”

“Well, now, Dr. Fielding.”

Rob Wilson was sitting over there with them, and I thought that might make it easier. “Hey, Emma!”

“Hey, Rob.” He got up and I gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Missed you at the card game.”

“Sorry, I got hung up. You know how it is.”

“Sure.”

A good friend to me years ago, and once a more active member of our set, Rob had only ever played two or three years with us. Ever since then, he “got hung up.” It was a yearly exchange on both our parts, and it saddened me.

“Don’t I get a kiss?” Roche said.

Exactly what I’d been hoping to avoid, especially after his egregious sucking-up to Garrison during the plenary session. “Didn’t know you’d want one,” I said, smiling as best I could. I leaned over and bussed him on the cheek and felt a rasp of stiff whiskers against my face. Thomas had missed a couple of places.

“Known her all these years and I still have to ask for a kiss,” he groused to the rest of the table.

“Oh, well…” I began tentatively. There was no good response.

“I knew her back before she was in high school. Knew her before she got too big for her britches—”

“You’ve known your wife even longer, and she still waits for you to ask her for a kiss too,” Dr. Lawrence said. There was some laughter, and then someone came up to ask Roche a question. I felt a surge of relief.

Petra was still talking with someone and Rob had turned away to speak to someone else, but Lawrence—Larry, as I knew him—turned to me, offering a hand.

“How’ve you been, Emma?”

I shook his hand and leaned in to kiss him. “Pretty well, Larry. Busy, you know.”

“I do know. You’d think emeritus would be a break, but now I’m only doing everything I didn’t have time for when I was working full-time. Congratulations on your tenure, by the way. I was very pleased to hear about that. No one deserves it more.”

“Thanks. I thought things would ease up a little, but I feel busier than ever.”

Larry laughed. “And how is Brian?”

We chatted for a few minutes, until I saw that Petra was getting up to leave. I excused myself from Larry and followed her.

“Thomas Roche is an ass,” she said, when she noticed me. “He’s been an ass for years.”

“He’s not my favorite person. But I have known him a long time.”

“It doesn’t give him the right to presume. Your relationship with Oscar saddled you with a lot you didn’t ask for.”

I looked at Petra quickly, then just nodded.

“You shouldn’t be so surprised,” she continued. “I know something about it.”

“Oh?”

“Think about my name. Not a lot of seventy-year-old women wandering around called Petra, are there?”

“No.”

“Not a lot of seventy-year-old women historical archaeologists either, are there?”

“Nope. Not as many as there will be, soon enough.”

“My father was a biblical scholar. We traveled a lot. I got my interest in archaeology from those trips with him. My mother hated it, she hated being out of the country, but what could she do? The one place she really liked was Petra, in Jordan. Maybe because it was fixed in one place.”

I was struggling, not understanding what she was getting at. “I always thought it was a gorgeous name.”

“Imagine explaining what it meant in the nineteen-forties. I didn’t just get a passion for the past from him, I got a damned odd name. I also got an entrée into the field through his colleagues, which made things a little easier for me, I’m sure, in those days.” She glanced at me. “And a little tougher too.”

I nodded again, saving this all for later to think about. Working with Oscar had been lots of fun, but at the same time…“I was wondering whether I could talk to you about Garrison.”

Suddenly, Petra’s sympathy evaporated. “What about Garrison?” she asked sharply.

“How he was, before he died.”

“He was a cantankerous old bastard before he died,” she said evenly, after a pause. “Much the same as he’d been for decades before that event.”

“No, I mean…had he been having trouble with people, getting into altercations? Trouble with drinking, with his medications? I’m only asking because I’ve heard conflicting stories,” I said, rushing along before she could protest. “And I thought that if I just came out and asked you, it might simplify things.”

“Hmmm.” She glanced at me. “What have you heard?”

At least she hadn’t just told me to take a hike, I thought. “That he was drinking, and he shouldn’t have been, with whatever he was taking. That he was suffering mood swings.”

“More mood swings than usual?” she asked lightly, but it was an act. “How could anyone tell?”

I shrugged. “You could. You were married to him.”

“Yes, I was married to him. We’ve remained close, so I can tell you unequivocally, not that it’s any of your business: Garrison was taking his medications—nothing fancy, just anticoagulants—and he was not drinking, not as far as I knew.”

Was there just a tinge of defensiveness in her voice? I wondered.

“And he was no more moody than usual. Garrison died by accident, because he was a stubborn old ass and wanted his walk. He died from sulking, if you want to find a reason for it.”

“But…what about the—?”

“Emma, Garrison died by accident.” Her words became louder, more insistent. “He went outside, he fell, he cracked his head. Let’s not make anything more of it than that. It was an accident. Excuse me.”

She swept past me toward the elevator banks. Had she
been squashing me with practical truths, or had she been denying something? I could not tell, and I was still left with the unease of having been pressing her beyond decent limits in her grief.

“Hey, Emma, come over here!”

I turned around and saw Lissa and Sue. Lissa was waving excitedly; Sue had her hand on Lissa’s arm, like she had been trying to keep Lissa from calling me.

“I saw the ghost! The hotel’s ghost!”

“Bull,” I said.

“I’m telling you, I did.” Lissa was so excited that she could barely keep her feet on the ground. She hooked her blond hair over one ear. “And get this, she was wandering by Garrison’s room.”

“Well, if she was, she was lost,” I said. “Isn’t Garrison’s room in the new wing?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Then why would the ghost have been there? Shouldn’t she be waiting for her husband in the old part of the hotel?”

“Why should she be tied down?” Lissa asked happily. “By this time, she should have the run of the whole place. I tell you, I saw her.”

“Lissa, just how faced were you?”

She shrugged, and waved her hand airily. “No worse than usual.”

“Which is to say, you were pretty well hammered. And your contacts?”

“I’d taken them out, but I was wearing my glasses.”

“Same glasses that are around your neck now?” I picked them up, and we could all see the heavy layer of greasy smudges over both lenses.

“So I need to clean them. Ask Sue, she was with me. She saw.”

I turned to Sue, who looked as if she would have happily melted through the floor to get away from me, if she could have. “I was walking Lissa back to her room. I didn’t see a ghost. I saw a woman in a bathrobe. She was trying to get into her room. She had the wrong one, at first, I guess, because she had to try a couple of doors, a couple of times.”

Lissa would not be put off. “She vanished when you turned around. Besides, you can ask Laurel Fairchild. She was there too!”

“When I found your room key, I turned around, yes, and she was gone. And yes, she was near Garrison’s room, but I’m assuming she finally got into her room. And Laurel was gone just as quickly, and she’s not a ghost.”

“I’m so excited,” Lissa said. “I’ve always wanted to start a rumor or a path, and now I’ll get my chance! Come on, Sue, we need to go to the bar and tell people!”

Sue was all too happy to go. I turned, and almost bumped into Laurel.

“You’ve been hearing about the ‘ghost,’ huh?” she said.

“Oh, yeah. Made Lissa’s year, near as I can tell.”

“Well, don’t get too excited about it. I saw the ghost and it wasn’t one at all. It was Petra Williams.”

“What!”

“She went into Garrison’s room that night. I saw her.” She paused significantly. “In her nightgown.”

“But he…when was this?”

“About midnight, half past.”

“Shoot.” So did that mean she’d gone into his room, and he was there, or that she went into his room when he wasn’t there? I chewed my bottom lip. So that makes Petra and whoever was sitting behind me at the session earlier, at least, who saw Garrison after he was supposed to be in bed. The man seems to have done more business after bedtime than most hookers. And while Petra might like to insist that he died by accident, the cops are certainly treating it as a suspi
cious death, and I would be willing to bet that there were no hunters out there when those gunshots were fired.

My head was already spinning, and that was before you added ghosts and the thefts of Bea’s artifacts and the replicas from the book room.

The door to one of the offices opened, and I saw Widmark, the one person who absolutely did not belong here, ashen-faced, being led out by Church, whose face was grim.

“Laurel, will you excuse…?” I didn’t wait for her answer, but was already walking away.

Widmark looked around, dodged over to the elevators, and was away before I could blink. Then Church signaled to me.

“We’ve been looking for a friend of yours,” he said.

“Oh?”

“A Professor…Bradford DuBois. You wouldn’t happen to know—?”

It took me a minute to realize that he was talking about Brad the Boy. “Actually, I haven’t seen him since last night,” I said. “He was feeling poorly, and went to bed early.”

“We’ll contact him there, then.” He paused. “So. You’re not in any records we’ve got in New Hampshire. You don’t show up on the radar as a crazy or a criminal. And one of our guys talked to the state police crime guys, and they’ve actually heard of Stuart Feldman down in Massachusetts. We haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet, but you know, it’s interesting that you know his name.”

I looked at him hopefully. “What does that mean?”

“It means we haven’t found that you’ve been lying to us. Yet.”

“I haven’t been lying. And I think that the fact that you were talking to me when the shots were fired outside might indicate that I’m not any more involved in this than I’ve said.”

“But people we’ve been talking to say that you have an
unusual degree of interest in what’s been going on. That you’ve been asking a lot of questions—”

“I would be willing to bet that everyone’s been asking a lot of questions: You haven’t told us anything. People get upset and worried when they think something dangerous is going on and they can’t put a name to it.”

“Fair enough. So, what have you been finding out?”

I looked at him, and knew that he wasn’t offering to trade me what he knew for what I knew. But if I really did think that my curiosity would help, then I owed it to him to tell him about the late-night visits that so many people had had with Garrison. So I did, and his face remained impassive the entire time.

But I noticed that he wrote everything down.

“Have you found out what was going on with the gunshots?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“But it wasn’t hunters, was it?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Is there any news about Garrison’s death? Was it murder?”

“We’re still waiting for the autopsy, it’s not as quick as you see on television. We have to treat it as a suspicious death. I will say that all of the wounds were on the back of his head—a pretty nasty laceration—and it didn’t look as if he walked out onto the ice only to fall over backward.”

That was news. “And what about—?”

His patience finally wore out. “Look, Dr. Fielding, there’s a lot going on here that you don’t know about—”

“And so if you would just tell me—”

“—and it’s better to keep it that way. There’s the safety of my officers to be considered.”

“What were you talking to Widmark about? He’s someone I’ve never seen before, and I don’t really like his story, he doesn’t feel right to me—”

“We’ll do the asking, thanks.” He leaned in closer. “And if you do interfere, it will go on your permanent record.” He was acting as if he was teasing, but I could feel it to my bones that he meant it. “Good evening, Dr. Fielding.”

I almost went after him, but my fatigue was not bad enough to keep me from doing something so terribly silly. Casting about for something I could do, I realized that I was grinding my teeth. I couldn’t make him tell me anything to do with Garrison’s death, I couldn’t make Scott say what he was after, I couldn’t do anything.

I spied Meg. She looked like hell. If nothing else, I was willing to bet I could fix that.

After she greeted me, I asked, “When was the last time you ate?”

“Oh, about an hour ago. I grabbed a Pop-Tart up in the room.”

“Uh-huh. And when before that?”

“Umm, I dunno. Breakfast, maybe.”

“Okay, we’re getting dinner now. Bring your friends, if you want, but be warned: If they come, they’ll all get an earful of my conference survival strategies.”

It wasn’t hard to round up enough to get a table to ourselves. Meg was popular and there were others from Caldwell there—Neal and Katie, for example, though one of my other students, Dian Kosnick, had said hello to me yesterday and I hadn’t seen her since—so there were eight of us squeezed in around the table in the big restaurant.