More Bitter Than Death (22 page)

I tried to sneak off with a sandwich around lunchtime—I knew a donut wasn’t going to keep me—but Lissa and Jay found me. I was getting a little tired of seeing her bouncing all over the place, and although I knew it was just a matter of too much stress in too close quarters, I wished the snow would let up so Lissa could go hit the outlet malls.

“I hate being inside. This weather is for the birds. And why do Yankees leave their Christmas lights up to rot on their houses? I swear, we take ours down on New Year’s Day, and that’s that.”

“Maybe we need the extra light to get us through the long, dark winter,” I said. I knew for a fact our department administrator left his on his rented house all year long. He lit them every day too. Chuck liked the pretty colored lights and saw no reason that they should be restricted to Halloween or Christmas.

“Let’s tell secrets,” Lissa said. “Emma? Come on, spill it. What dirty dark secrets are you hiding?”

I looked at her. “Jesus. I’m not hiding anything. And I’m not in the mood for sleep-over party games. Piss off.”

“Oh, come on, Em. Everyone’s got something to hide,” she said.

“Except you; everyone knows all your dirty laundry,” I shot back.

“You’d be surprised at what you don’t know about me,” she said coyly. “You’ve been acting strange all weekend, confess, confess.”

“Lissa, cut it out. You’re being infantile.”

“Am not. Jay, you’ll play, won’t you? Tell us what dark secrets lurk in your past.”

“Lissa, for Christ’s sake, just grow up. Leave Emma alone!”

We watched with open mouths as Jay stood up and stormed off.

I looked at Lissa, and her eyes were brimming. Maybe it was something about her persistence, but it suddenly occurred to me that someone keeps asking you about something because they probably want you to ask them about it too. “Oh, don’t worry about him. Everyone is all screwed up this weekend. What’s your secret, Lissa?”

She took a minute to catch her breath and then she smiled. “I’m gonna be a mama.”

Of all the things I thought she was going to say, that was about the last. “Holy snappers! Congratulations!”

“Thank you! About a month or two now, I think.”

I didn’t bother trying to hide my glance at her stomach, which was nowhere near third trimester.

“Matt and I are adopting. We’re just really excited.”

“That’s wonderful! So tell me everything.”

And so I got all the details—girl, from China, they’d been trying for a while—and then I had to ask. “So, Lissa. Why couldn’t you just come out and say it?”

She shrugged and looked away. “Oh, you know.”

“I guess I don’t.”

“You know how people can be. They all still think of me as the same horny kid I was when we were all just starting out. Matt and I have been married for four years now.”

It was my turn to shrug. “You still talk a pretty good game. And you don’t mention him all that often.”

She ran a hand through her hair. “Hey, I might be on a strict diet, but that doesn’t mean I ain’t gonna at least look at the menu. And if I don’t mention him, it’s because none of you know him, and I’m out having fun and catching up with you guys. Shoot, no one but you and Chris ever ask after him. Sometimes Sue. But I’m here at the conference for me, I get to have a break too.” She threw her hands up. “Oh, I don’t know. I guess I’m still sneaking up on the idea of being a mother myself. Scary, you know? But we’re real happy. I just didn’t know how to bring it up, not with it happening all of a sudden and everything.”

Again I found myself about to open my mouth and let out all sorts of platitudes, but I caught myself. “I know what you mean. My life’s…been changing lately too. I’m feeling a million miles away from where we started out.”

She held up her hand, as if she was testifying in church. “That’s the understatement of the year.”

I shot a glance at her. “What do you mean?”

“Well, darn it, Emma. Everyone knows there was an “incident” with the window of the hospitality suite last night. Everyone knows, or thinks they know, that you’ve had some weird damn things happening to you recently—or did you not know that stories were getting around?”

“I guess…I figured that if I wasn’t saying anything much, the cops—”

“I’m not talking about this weekend, though you should hear what that witch with a “b” Noreen is saying about you.” I was surprised to hear Lissa so angry. “I’m talking the past couple of years. You figure that no one would read the papers or hear what the field crews were saying or anything?”

“Well, you know.” I looked around at the subdued group around me. “One lives in hope.”

“One lives in fairyland, more likely. Sounds like you’re avoiding something.”

“Not anymore. Not really.” I took a drink of my soda. “Just figuring out how to spring the news, now that I’m dealing with it myself. You know how it is.”

“I guess I do at that.” Lissa smiled. “We get kinda caught up in other people’s perceptions of ourselves. Me, the boozing party-girl, you the uptight Yankee—”

“Hey!”

“Okay, how about ‘serious scholar from a tony northeastern school’?”

I shuddered. “You make it sound so…dire.”

“Nah, just a convenient pigeonhole. People are comfortable with them, gets hard to shake them, even when you want to.” She looked guilty for a minute, then shrugged it off. “Okay, so spring it on me. Your secret, that is.”

“I’m thinking about branching out. Maybe forensics.”

“Shoot, is that all?” She looked relieved. “Hey, I can help you with that.”

I looked up. “How’s that?”

“Emma, my dear idiot, I work on battlefield sites. My Rolodex is absolutely
crawling
with people who would be delighted to talk your ear off.” Lissa gave me a look full of guile and innocence. “And, hey, you should talk to Carla. Our very own Bone Lady.”

I nodded, but my heart wasn’t in it. “I don’t know, I’m still kinda shy about it. Wouldn’t she think I was moving in on her—oh, shit.”

Petra Williams had gone into the bar and was sitting by herself. I wanted to talk with her before anyone else took a seat. And if I brought Lissa, maybe she wouldn’t just take off on me.

“What?”

“There’s Petra, I need to talk to her. Come with me, just for a second?”

“Sure.”

Neither of us was really eating anyway. We bolted over to the bar.

“Hey, Petra, I was wondering if we could join you for a moment?”

She looked past my shoulder, then coldly at me. “What we?”

I looked left, whipped my head to the right: Lissa was nowhere to be seen. I turned to see if she was still behind me, but the crowd was thin enough for me to see her retreating back. “I guess Lissa had to go to the ladies’ room.” Again. I just couldn’t get past the fact that she always baled out on a situation when she was nervous. “May I?”

As much as I didn’t like talking to Petra again, I knew I would have to. I had too much I wanted to know.

“I got shot at last night. I’m convinced that Garrison’s
death…wasn’t…” I knew as soon as I said the words out loud that it sounded far worse than I ever imagined. “…an accident.”

She looked at me sharply. “On what do you base this?”

“It’s not fair, I know, but until I know for sure, I don’t want to tell you, exactly. Too many people might get hurt if I’m wrong.”

Her face creased with distaste. “You don’t ask much, do you? Why do you keep at me, like this?”

“No, I’m just trying to…you knew him better than anyone here, I guess.”

“Yes.”

“And…someone said that they saw you going into his room Wednesday night. Late.”

“Yes, of course. I told you I walked him up—”

“No, not then. Really late. In your robe. And you had a key to his room. Were you still friends? I mean, after the divorce? Did you, you know, talk?”

“Yes, of course, we, ‘you know,’ talked,” she snapped back. “We were divorced, and it was painful, but we were better as friends. And, since it’s making the rounds, we were still occasionally involved. Not that it’s any of your business.”

She looked at me, past me, to something behind me. “Or perhaps it is. Are you interested in the Connecticut job too?”

I gaped. What? “No, I—”

“Like so many of your fellows, maybe you wanted Garrison’s imprimatur for it? I know Bradford DuBois did. Wouldn’t leave poor Julius alone, not even when he told him he couldn’t stand him and wouldn’t support him if he was the last candidate on earth. I mean, we all know Julius was outspoken, but it took an awful lot for him to explode at Dr. DuBois like that.”

Just then, Duncan pulled up to the table, but it didn’t stop Petra. “Or perhaps it wasn’t the job. Maybe it was something more personal.” She darted a glance over at Duncan,
whose face was a study in nonchalance; maybe he hadn’t heard what she’d said. “How would you like it if someone went poking around in your personal life? Into your past? Or was it one of your reports that Julius was reviewing? He’d been wearing himself out, reading a stack of site reports three feet high; even though he was retired, people still valued his opinions. Maybe you were concerned that he’d have something to say about your work. It wouldn’t be the first time that Julius had something to say about work done by a Fielding.”

Garrison reviewing site reports? An alarm went off somewhere in memory, but I had to stick to the topic at hand. “You know I’m not doing this for the fun of it, Petra. I was shot at. I want to know why.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

I looked her straight in the eye. “I believe I could stand his scrutiny or anyone else’s, into my work or my past. If it was as important as I think this is.”

The same smile I saw on Thursday, when she was needling me about Duncan, was back. “But with all your hints, Dr. Fielding, you’re not just asking me whether I was still seeing Julius. You’re asking if I might know some reason that he might not have had an accident, as you’ve so eloquently put it?”

“Uh, yes.”

“You’re unbelievable. He took too much of his medicine. He’d been drinking. He was a selfish, stubborn idiot who went outside when he shouldn’t have, and he had an accident.” She swiped at the sudden tears that I was horrified to see running down her cheeks.

Petra had said before that Garrison had not been drinking. Was this denial or a slip-up on her part? “I’m sorry, it’s just that you had been speaking so angrily to him before the panel—”

“He was an easy man to get angry at! This isn’t your busi
ness, and if it is something the police should look into, then leave it to them.” She brushed at the last of the tears. “I might ask these same sorts of questions of you.”

“What do you mean?” I glanced around.

“Well, there was obviously no love lost between the two of you. Your paper was a marvel of unspoken antagonism paneled over with some factual, occasionally lauding, remarks.”

“Huh?”

“You seem to have had some problem with Garrison that you weren’t saying—”

“Well, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?” Once again, I was reduced to a petulant teenager’s response.

“I beg your pardon?” she said. “I know nothing of the sort.”

“Clearly that’s some of the reason that you’ve disliked me so much over the years.” I wished the words away as soon as I said them, cringing inside.

“You might find this hard to believe, but I haven’t given you a thought one way or the other. Why should I?”

“I don’t know. You were always so distant with me. Curt.”

She gave a short barking laugh. “We had nothing to talk about. How should I have been? No, never mind. I think this interview is long past over.” She turned to Duncan. “Dr. Thayer? Would you mind?”

He offered her his arm, and she left the room like a queen dismissing an impertinent commoner, which I guess was pretty close to the truth.

I sat back in my seat, free to consider what had triggered the mental alarms while Petra was chewing me out. Duncan. Laurel had said something about someone reviewing Duncan’s work; we had both assumed or guessed that it had been Kevin Leary, whose paper was on the amateur Josiah Miller and early research in New York in the session on farmsteads.

What if it hadn’t been Leary reviewing Duncan’s work? What if it had been Julius Garrison? What if Garrison had
made the same connection between a supposedly recently discovered research report and Duncan’s dissertation work?

How far would Duncan go to cover up some professional misconduct? Was it possible that he had—

Laurel came in just then and immediately took Petra’s empty seat.

“How’s it going, Em? You look like you’re a million miles away.”

“Uh…I get the thousand-yard stare about this time every conference.” I shook myself; I had to think more about this before I got much older, but not in public and especially not in front of someone as perceptive as Laurel. I now had more suspects than I knew what to do with.

“Can I ask you something?” I said, thinking of Petra’s ramrod straight back as she left with Duncan.

Laurel nodded. “You can even ask me something else.”

“What did you think of my presentation on Garrison? The one at the plenary.”

She thought about it for a moment. “Careful. Hit all the right notes, but very careful.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like you were trying very hard to keep your own feelings out of it. I counted the number of times you said ‘I’ and it was only about a dozen, tops. Everyone else was closer to hundreds, going for the personal connection with Garrison, naturally enough.”

“Huh. I expected to have a hard time writing the paper, but it was a whole lot easier than I thought. I was thinking of it as a nice historical piece, is all.”

“Hmm. How much personal stuff could you have put in?”

“A bit,” I admitted. “I tried to, tried to keep it light. It just didn’t work, so I took it out.”

“Like what?”

That was Laurel for you; not only did she pay attention to things like word counts in paper presentations for fun, but
she always asked the question you hoped she wouldn’t. “Like a photo in the office. You know that riff that Roche went on about? How Garrison’s office should be sent to the Smithsonian as a capsule summary of historical archaeology in twentieth-century America?”