More Bitter Than Death (19 page)

I didn’t do anything, I thought wildly. I didn’t talk to the cops, I didn’t do anything! What does this person mean?

I stared at the paper a moment longer, then dialed in to the answering service. It was Meg’s worried voice I heard. “It’s me. When we got back to our room from dinner, the door was open. I don’t know how it happened, but someone got in
and tore our stuff apart. Jordan’s pissed, Katie’s in hysterics, but other than that, no one was hurt.”

There was a pause before she continued. “There was a message on the mirror, written in lipstick. It said, “Ask Emma.” Emma, what’s going on here?”

T
HERE WAS SO MUCH THAT I REGRETTED IN MY LIFE
that sometimes it felt like I was choking. And this weekend was the catalyst for bringing those regrets all to the surface, not even counting whatever I was getting myself into at the moment.

The students’ room was a mess, but while some toiletries had been spilt and scattered about—mascaras stepped on, lipstick on the mirror, shampoo dumped out and all—very little else was damaged. Whoever had done it, the police said, had been in too much of a hurry to really do any damage.

Any damage was too much, I thought, but at the same time, I couldn’t figure out what it was I was supposed to have done that would bring the note-writer’s wrath down on the students’ heads. If I didn’t know what the rules were, how could I obey them, even if I wanted to?

I handed the note from my room to the uniformed officer who was there. He looked at me, surprised, when he saw that it was in a plastic bag. “Artifact bag,” I said. “I had a bunch of them in my briefcase. I didn’t touch it too much, if you want to check for prints.”

“This doesn’t seem to be the same as the other break-ins,” he said. “Nothing was taken, you say?”

“We don’t have anything
worth
taking,” Meg said. “No, not as far as we can tell. What other break-ins?”

“There’ve been a few thefts, from other guests’ rooms,” he said. “But it was nothing like this. Just what you seem to get with any big convention.”

After explaining to the officer about the last note, and that I didn’t have the faintest idea of what I’d done, we sorted the students out. There were no other rooms for them, but apparently it didn’t matter: Hedia was leaving. The roads were nominally cleared now, and she wasn’t willing to stay any longer.

“Nothing personal, Dr. Fielding, but there’s no way I’m sticking around here.”

“I don’t blame you a bit,” I said. “I’m sorry this happened, and as soon as I know why, I’ll let you know.”

Neither Katie, Dian, nor Meg took me up on my offer to share my room. I decided that Meg was happier squeezing in with her fiancé, and that Dian was always happier when there were wall-to-wall men anyway. And after Katie had calmed down, she found a bed with a friend from another school. Nothing personal.

After the officer departed and the night manager had been up offering apologies, I realized I was just in the way and returned to my room to brood.

I chewed over what the note might have meant, but I couldn’t figure out what I might have done. I had seen Church, or rather, he’d seen me, but that had lasted no more than two minutes and was about as innocuous a conversation as one could imagine. I hadn’t done anything I wouldn’t do at any other conference, I thought.

Unless it had something to do with the strange way Duncan and Scott had been acting toward me. They were right there too, the last time I saw Church. But Duncan had been perversely pleasant, at dinner. Was he covering up the break
in? Was he trying to distract me from it? Was he—or Scott—capable of doing such a thing? Why were such strong threats directed at me? And why involve the students?

I had to give some serious thought to Duncan and my reactions to him. I didn’t want to, but if I did, not only might I come up with a possible motive for his behavior, but maybe I’d banish a few ghosts of my own too.

Where to start? At the beginning, of course: the visit to Penitence Point and Fort Providence on Wednesday. That had brought up a lot of emotional turmoil. Going out to the site was hard. I’d been out there since Pauline’s murder, of course, but not to have her there was particularly hard. Maybe because I would have liked for her to have seen the interest in her site, maybe because I would have liked my friend to see me putting on the show, so grown up…

Knock it off, I told myself. Pauline knew you as an adult, she saw you as a professional.

I missed her. I missed her awfully, still. I knew I wasn’t the reason she died, but I still felt as though I drew the attention to her. And as much as I wanted to remember her, it killed me to see her name painted on the door of my office every day I went into work.

She would have died eventually. The bequest still would have been in place. The name would have still been on my door, somewhere, probably.

Anyway. And as for Oscar…for some reason, he was haunting me this weekend. Or rather, I was haunting him. I knew he wasn’t perfect, I knew that when I was growing up. Petra was right, as much as Oscar might have done for me, he took it out of my hide. I worked like a dog, and I loved every minute of it, of working with him. He drove me, I was happy to be driven, it served us both. Made us both proud.

But he didn’t save me from Duncan.

No, he didn’t. Should he have?

Maybe he could have. He defined the world for me in a lot
of ways and didn’t do a whole lot to show me that his was just one opinion. He didn’t see Duncan for what he was, any more than I did, and he should have been able to. He was older, supposedly wiser.

Maybe he wasn’t paying as much attention as I thought or hoped. Maybe he was as susceptible to praise and flattery as anyone else. Maybe Duncan wasn’t quite as fully formed a demon at the tender age of twenty-three as I seemed to be remembering, and that’s why Oscar didn’t pick up on it. Maybe Oscar wasn’t God.

Yeah, I knew, I got that. I lost out, maybe, in not getting to know Garrison outside of that context.

That’s part of growing up, and everyone’s background affects how they come to see something. And maybe I wouldn’t have liked Garrison much anyway. He wasn’t a nice guy. But he wasn’t the devil either.

What would have happened if I hadn’t had Pauline in my life? Pain and all, at the end?

Unthinkable.

Did I not have the coolest grandfather on the face of the planet? Was he not the world to me?

I did. He was a curmudgeon and a tyrant and a bully and I was a brat and his trophy and the apple of his eye, and I loved him and he loved me. I wouldn’t trade that for anything in the world, not even the hurt I felt when I realized that love didn’t always look like hero worship.

And Duncan?

What about him?

It was just an affair, passionate and selfish, and people are allowed to have entanglements that aren’t the grand passions of their lives and still hold their heads up. It was over ages ago—

And I never let myself get over it, even when I had the emotional tools to deal with it. And then it got buried under the rest of my life. Until now.

So?

I don’t need to feel embarrassed. I can let myself off the hook for being young and maybe a little blind and a whole lot of egotistical. My feelings for him are long gone, but the hurt I felt about the way he did it…it’s like a tooth that’s hurt so long that when it’s finally pulled, you don’t even realize that the pain’s stopped. Just empty. No big deal.

But Duncan was still a tool. Still a climber, still out for himself.

No doubt about that whatsoever. The questions now were: What did he want from me? What was it that he thought I was threatening him with? And could he be responsible for such disturbing and misdirected vandalism?

I realized that I was a bundle of nervous energy, aching for something to do. I had too many questions; I needed too many answers.

It seemed to me, based on the conversations I’d overheard in the farmstead session and what Scott and the cops had said, that the last place that Garrison had been seen alive, by someone other than his murderer, was in the hospitality suite on the second floor. I decided that if the place hadn’t been blocked off by the cops, that I might have a look around there myself. And if the destruction of the girls’ room hadn’t been connected with Duncan, then maybe it was related to the questions the cops had asked me about Garrison.

The kids were squared away, safe, for the moment. As for me, I decided that I might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.

There was no indication that I shouldn’t go into the hospitality suite—no police tapes, no guard, no signage—but the door was locked. It wasn’t a good enough reason to keep me out, and it wasn’t a good enough door to keep me out: Anything that an assistant professor—who is heading into her
late thirties and is a card-carrying nerd—can break into can’t properly be called a lock. And if the card I was carrying—an expired museum membership—was one that I didn’t mind getting dinged up, well, that was just my good luck. So in my book, this closed door didn’t count.

I fiddled with it for less than ten seconds before I figured it out, a combination of pulling the door forward and poking the card just a little harder. I am consistently amazed by how well violent force works. I slipped in and let the door shut quietly, then turned on the light, which turned out to be a single table lamp. The main switch for the overheads was on the other side of the room. I decided that the dim yellowish light of the table lamp, as melancholy as it was, would be enough for me to see by without attracting any undue attention.

There had been nothing particularly hospitable about the hospitality suite during the day, as it had the same collection of tea water and coffee urns that populated the tables outside the ballrooms. There was the addition of bottled water, most of which was usually room temperature, and there were rumors of cookies at one point, but these were long gone by the time the report got around to me. I saw by the pink crumbs that there may well have been Italian cookies. Not my favorites, but, hey, I would try any cookie at a conference.

I looked around and saw absolutely nothing. Less than nothing, for the room was so anonymous a hotel suite that I was willing to bet that it even drained the personality out of those who loitered there too long. The prints were the same Federal-style architectural elements as the ones in the rooms, the couches were a nondescript floral in shades of brown and tan, and the lighting fixtures were nearly colonial revival—make it colonial revile, and you’d be closer to the mark. The only thing that distinguished it from the other guest rooms was the lack of a bed and a slightly wider floor plan. There were two extra windows, both of which were also laced with snow and freez
ing rain that struck the pane like BBs against the glass. It smelled like synthetic fabrics, burnt coffee, and perspiration.

There was nothing on the end tables save for the lamp, and nothing on the folding table but the urns and crumbs. A few napkins, none of which were used, though one had a coffee spot on it. I even shook them out, in case someone had left a note written on one of them, as I often did, but there was no luck there.

The bathroom off to the side was equally bare. It made me depressed to see how blank a space it was. I went back into the main room and sat, in one of the two single chairs, trying to think of what to do next.

I blame what happened next on dressing up. Because I was wearing my grown-up go-to-conference trousers with the acetate lining, instead of my usual jeans or chinos, my good, going-to-meetings pen slid right out of the pocket. It was a recent acquisition, a fancy, jewelry-grade ballpoint Waterman that had been a gift from my father for getting tenure; although it was about the last thing I needed, I was touched that he understood that getting tenure was a big deal and should be marked as such. Most of the time, he either ignored or pretended not to understand the ways of academia, possibly as a reaction to his father, the uber-professorial Oscar. His real estate interests were about as far away from academic life as you could get.

I felt the weight of the pen slide out of my pocket and looked down at the seat beside me: The pen had vanished between the cushion and the side of the chair. I reached in tentatively, just knowing I would find stale crumbs, and instead got the corner of a piece of thin cardboard jammed under my nail. I pulled it out, cursed and sucked my finger, then reached back and retrieved my pen. When I glanced down at the paper, I realized that it was a business card. To my shock, it was printed with Sue Ayer’s name; on the reverse was
cramped writing that, in the dim light in the room, was too difficult to read.

Before finding the card, I had decided I would leave the room as quickly and unobtrusively as I had entered it. Now, instead, I was rooting through all the sofa and chair cushions, looking for other such clues. There was nothing apart from a few buttons, another, cheaper pen that was marked with a technology logo that was all sound and style but gave no clue as to what the company did. More crumbs.

I sagged into a chair and blew a wet, tired raspberry. I was going to try and decode the hieroglyphics on the card when I heard a rattling. I looked over to the door, which was now moving back and forth. Someone was jiggling it. That same someone was using a knife to try and get the lock open.

Suddenly, the knife withdrew. I heard another, very faint, metallic noise that was different from the first. This one sounded less like someone trying to pick a lock and more distinctly like someone slotting a bullet into the chamber of a gun.

I froze for just a second, and then decided that I was not willing to wait and find out whether I was right. My hindbrain was already reacting, reminded of the sounds that it had learned when Meg had taught me about handling firearms, a couple of years ago, after that night at Penitence Point. There really wasn’t much mistake to be made here. I looked for someplace to hide, and unless I thought the shower curtain in the bathroom was going to shield me, I was out of luck. I tried the door that was at the back, the one that presumably joined with the room next door to form a larger suite, but it was locked tighter than the door from the hallway. Shit.

I grabbed my phone and called nine-one-one. I tried to whisper, stopped and realized that the person coming in
should
hear that I was calling the cops. I spoke up.

There was a pause, but then a renewed banging at the doors.

I had to get out of here.

I hung up, stuffed my phone into my pocket, and looked at the first two windows: They were painted solidly shut. As quickly as I could, I went to the one at the end, and the lock was stuck, the window was swollen with moisture, but not painted over. The wind belted another flock of icy pellets against the glass, and I realized…Emma, get used to it: In a moment, you’re going to be on the receiving end of all nature’s fury. Still a better option than a gun.