More Bitter Than Death (29 page)

“I certainly could. I choose not to.”

He sighed, annoyed. “I have to say, I’m disappointed in you, Em. I expected more imagination from you.”

“You’re not the first person to tell me that,” I conceded, thinking about the site at Penitence Point. I had braced myself, fully expecting to be crushed by his words. He was always good with words, and I’d gotten used to feeling their effect. I even kept myself in the habit, by remembering that effect over the years, and that was my own fault.

But once again, there was nothing, just the lost-tooth feeling. I probed it a little deeper and nodded and smiled.

I could tell Duncan was surprised by that, because even though his face was totally blank, he still had the habit of running his finger along the beard at the bottom of his chin when he didn’t know what to think. Old habits do die hard.

“You can’t be serious. I mean, the job description was practically written with me in mind—”

“Then you probably don’t need my help as much as you think. A point of curiosity, Duncan: Did you ask Garrison to write you a letter? He was your dissertation director, after all, and Connecticut was his first significant position.”

Duncan’s expression was unreadable. “Emma, Garrison’s dead.”

A shiver ran down my spine. “I know, but—”

“And besides,” he continued, “you’ll look silly backing someone else.”

“Possibly. Probably. I can live with it. I think you’d better go now. I handed my glass back to him.”

He stood up. “I’m very sorry about this, Emma. I can’t tell you how disappointed I am.”

“I’m sorry too. Good night.”

I shut the door behind him, reset my alarm system. I think he was waiting out there by the time I was done, but I didn’t bother looking. It didn’t matter.

I was probably already more than half asleep by the time I crawled under the covers, just aware enough to enjoy the dry crisp rasp of the sheets against my feet, and I slept as soon as I laid my head down.

I didn’t dream at all that night.

I
T WAS THE PAIN THAT WOKE ME
S
UNDAY MORNING.
The radio alarm was playing, my watch alarm was beeping doggedly, and I still wouldn’t have heard any of it if I hadn’t rolled over onto my left hand. A sharp pain jarred me awake, and I sat up suddenly, swearing. I hadn’t fallen on a run; I hadn’t wrenched it doing fieldwork—

I’d been attacked.

The memories came rushing back to me, and I realized just how good it had been to be asleep, undreaming, unremembering.

I flexed my wrist, testing it, and the pain came again, just as sharply as it had before. Nothing broken, as far as I could tell, and it would be fine in just a few days. I should have put the ice on it last night, but it wasn’t bothering me then. I hadn’t noticed it through the adrenaline and endorphins.

Not so different from how I often felt after a tough bout with Nolan. Even then, I realized, I had wraps and boxing gloves, and so did he. This was for real, and truth be told, I’d done okay.

I hauled myself out of bed, and stretched; my ankle hurt,
and I realized that I must have aggravated the earlier wrench when I slid on the carpet last night. Apart from that, and my hand, I didn’t feel too bad. My cheek was tender, but I’d blocked a much worse blow, and the ice and sleep had done most of the work of bringing the lump down. The other little scratch was already healing, nothing more to remind me of what had happened. I applied a little concealer, and looked almost normal.

I showered, stretched out, and dressed—now in my dried dress pants and my still-damp boots, as my ankle wasn’t up to heels—then hustled downstairs. It wasn’t until I was actually in the elevator that I understood that I was ridiculously cheerful for the hour and my battered state. I finally identified the sense of accomplishment that buoyed me along.

Not many people were up yet, being as late as it was in the course of the conference, and I myself wouldn’t have been up except for my hand. And I also needed coffee above and beyond what was in that smelly little sachet in the room that had so ineffectually darkened the hot water.

There was Scott, sitting in the lobby with his coffee. I got some from the urn, and he nodded coolly when I sat down with him. He looked like he’d never been to bed at all. He looked worse than he should have, and I thought about the message I’d taken from his wife, and wondered just how much of this he hid on a regular basis, and how okay he really was. Denial could be a good thing, once you were over a rough patch in your life, but not if it kept you from really dealing with what happened.

“I’ve got to talk with you, Em,” he said gruffly. “It’s important.”

“Okay. Shoot.” Please, I thought, don’t let this be what I think it is. Please don’t let this be about—

He stared at the carpet, just a minute, then looked me straight in the eye. “It’s about Duncan.”

“What is it?” Crap, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it…

“You’ve got to leave him alone. One way or the other.”

I felt my mouth drop open with the surprise. “What!”

“Em, I know…I’ve heard…that you probably have reason not to be…Duncan’s best friend. But you’ve got to let the past stay dead. You’ve got to leave him alone.”

“Leave him alone? Scott, I guess you didn’t get the memo, but Duncan’s already spoken to me about everything! He’s trying the suck-up approach, so now I think it would be a good idea for you to back off playing the heavy. And a little advice from a friend? Let him clean up after himself. He’s not worth you taking his part.”

“I didn’t know you could be like this,” Scott said. I’d never seen him really angry before, and it changed his whole face into something unrecognizable. It was dreamlike, the way that someone you know, you think you know, metamorphoses into someone you’ve never seen before. I’d never seen Scott use his size to intimidate me before. “I didn’t know you could be so vindictive,” he said. “So ugly.”

“Whoa, hold on here! Just what is it you think I’m being ugly about?”

He gave me a look of such pure impatience and disgust that I was more convinced than ever that I was dreaming. I pinched the skin on the back of my hand, felt the sharp pain of fingernails.

He took a deep breath, he couldn’t get enough oxygen. He opened his mouth to try, then failed, tried again. “It’s about the Haslett farm material,” he finally said.

“What about it?”

“Leave him alone about it,” Scott said. “It was a long time ago, Emma, it…it doesn’t really matter anymore. Not really. Can’t you just let it be?”

“Scott, spell it out for me: What you are talking about?”

His face was a study in disgust, betrayal, and maybe, a little doubt. “You’re telling me that you weren’t…threatening him about the Josiah Miller report?”

I’d been on the right track, I realized. “Me threaten Duncan? You’re confused, Scott, you’ve got the wrong girl.”

“You didn’t ask him about Josiah Miller and the Haslett farm site the other day? Out of the blue?”

“What? No! I mean, yes, I asked him about Josiah Miller, something that I heard in a paper. It reminded me of something, I thought he could tell me what. It was only later that I figured out he’d actually seen this supposedly recently discovered report.”

“And so you were taunting him with it,” he said doggedly.

“Damn it, Scott, I don’t taunt people. You know me, you know that.”

I wasn’t sure that he believed me yet, but at least now he looked uncertain, which was an improvement over what I’d seen on his face before.

“There must be some mistake,” he finally muttered.

“Damn straight, there is. Now why don’t you tell me exactly what was going on there?”

“I…don’t think that would be a good idea.” He was backing off, retreating physically as well.

“You don’t get to do that! You don’t get to make all sorts of wild-assed accusations to me, and then tell me to buzz off.”

“Emma, it’s not my…it’s up to Duncan. It’s not my business to tell.”

“But it’s your business to say all sorts of hateful things to me? I thought we were friends. Goddamn.”

“We are, but Duncan and I…” He groped for the distinction. “He was there during some hard times, Em. I owe him a lot. You should ask him, if you want to know.”

I stood up, frightening myself with how angry I was now. “How about this? How about I ask everyone
but
Duncan if they know what this is all about. I bet I’ll get some answers that way, one way or another. I’ll contact Kevin Leary, and find out from him.” Scott was willing to do something hard,
awful for Duncan, to throw away our friendship, and then just toss that fact aside? And he thought I’d take it?

He sighed deeply, and wouldn’t look at me. When he began to speak, it was in a monotone, as if the story was coming from somewhere else far away. I sat down again.

“You know the Haslett farm is the site on which Duncan based a lot of his dissertation data. Lately, some other folks—Kevin Leary’s team—have been reexamining the site, going back to compare it with other work that’s been going on in New York. They found a copy of a report by Josiah Miller, who’d done some work on the Haslett site long ago. He actually did a pretty good job, even by our standards, though he died before he was able to bring the work to its full completion. Although he wanted to, he never published the data; it was his first time trying archaeology, and he was doing it on his own. He and a man he hired from the village nearby. They didn’t publicize it, because they were concerned about the site being looted.”

“Go on.” I had the horrid feeling I knew exactly where this was going.

“Duncan found one set of the notes. He talked to the owner of the house of the property now, and there they were, up in the attic. He took them. He used them.”

“He used them as his own,” I said.

“It’s not like that. I mean, it is, but it isn’t. They didn’t dig in the same areas. Duncan, well, he used them, in his dissertation, yes, and he didn’t cite them. But he didn’t falsify the data, he just sort of…think
Cliff’s Notes
. His conclusions were extrapolations of…”

“Of what
Josiah Miller
had written.”

Scott ignored me. “And when you mentioned it to him, and that other work is being done now, he just thought—”

“He thought I was threatening him.” I took it to the worst extent. “He thought I was blackmailing him.”

Scott looked relieved: I hadn’t made him say it. “Well, what does it look like to you?”

“Hey, don’t try to make this my fault! I was asking an honest question, it was his guilty conscience that made it into something else.” I looked at Scott, and to my horror, I could feel my eyes filling. “And you believed him. You…you’re acting as his intermediary.”

He shifted his weight uncomfortably. “Duncan’s my friend. He made a mistake. I was trying to help him.”

“You were trying to help him cover it up. You’re my friend too, Scott. And now, now…you’re treating me like I did something disgusting, and I didn’t and you’re using the excuse of friendship to blame me for something I didn’t do. You’re overlooking an awful lot here, chum.”

“You have reasons to want to hurt Duncan. He told me. You’d be happy to see him go down.”

“I’m so over him it isn’t even funny.” I stood up. “And he even had the gall to come to me and ask fora…I don’t believe this.” I stood up. “You know, that doesn’t surprise me. What really hurts is that you were so willing to believe whatever he told you, even though you say you’re my friend, and take up his part, just like that. Even when you know how…unreliable he can be. No, not just unreliable. Downright dishonest.”

“Duncan’s done a lot of good for the field, Em. It’s not worth throwing all that away, just over something stupid he did when he was young. It wasn’t like he was falsifying data, or anything.”

“He was cheating, Scott, and then he was trying to cover it up. Don’t talk to me anymore. Don’t ever talk to me again.”

“You don’t mean that, Emma. You can’t.”

“Maybe not forever, but I sure as hell mean it right now.”

“Come on.” He was pleading, groping.

I stood up and winced.

Scott noticed. “What the hell happened to you? What’s wrong with your foot?”

“Got into a scuffle last night.”

“Bullshit.” He tried a half-smile, trying to disbelieve me.

“Not a bit.” I didn’t really want to talk about it, not with him. “You should see the other guy.”

“Damn it, Emma, that’s not funny.” Scott ran his hand through his hair.

Almost at the same time that the heavy white restaurant mug hit the scuffed veneer of the table, the realization struck me. “No, it’s not funny. Scott, I’ve got to go.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me what happened?”

“I will when I get back.”

“Like I’ll be sitting here waiting for you.” Tough guy, again.

“I’ll find you; we’re not done talking yet. Not by a long shot.”

I headed for the coffee shop, then stopped myself. The coffee shop didn’t make any sense; if the guy bore any marks from our fight, then he wouldn’t be showing his face so readily. Maybe he was even ordering room service, hiding out.

Think, Emma, think.

I couldn’t very well ask who was ordering room service.

But the police could.

I stood a moment, chewing on a hangnail. There was something else, a thought that was still half formed, but not completely half baked. Duncan came out of the elevator, as I stared blankly. As I’d noticed last night, he didn’t have any marks on his face aside from evidence that he still hadn’t gotten out of the habit of shaving too quickly. He’d nicked himself on his neck, an angry red cut showed up just below his chin.

That was it. I nodded. Okay, I know it wasn’t Duncan who’d attacked me, but he had inadvertently pointed me in
the right direction. Another memory, nothing to do with him, but a high school episode that I never would have remembered otherwise, when my then-boyfriend’s best friend had appealed to me for help with an illicit hickey. You’ve got to help me, Emma, he’d said. Do you have any makeup I can borrow?

I thought of my own scratch, and what I’d done about it. I turned and went into the sundries shop.

I always case the sundries shop, trying to assess what might be there in case of an emergency—whether they’d have candy bars or water, in case of missed meals, or pantyhose.

The clerk looked bored and tired, but carefully put his paper away when I entered. “Can I help you?”

“My husband,” I said, thinking quickly, “I asked him to pick up some more concealer for me. He’s obviously gotten lost on his way back to the room—”

“There’s a breakfast reception at the Manchester ballroom this morning,” the helpful clerk added. Then he got a closer look at my face, and his features darkened with suspicion. “You okay?”

“Oh, I’m fine. I took a header out in the parking lot. My husband probably found a friend and started chin-wagging. Can you tell me whether he actually stopped by, or did he forget?”

“I just got on shift. There’s been no one in here, since I came on. We don’t carry concealer, but we do have a couple of foundations, right over there.” He pointed to the wall.

“Thanks.” I examined the wall of toiletries. The supply of condoms was running low, I noticed, and so was aspirin and Tums, but not much else. There were two colors of foundation, one for dark skin and one for fair. There was a space where someone had taken the first off the rack, for fair skin. That didn’t really tell me anything much, though.

I stood there, about to tell the clerk that I’d seek out my fictional husband and his fictional errands elsewhere, when I got my first nice surprise of the morning.

“Looks like he stopped by, though,” the clerk announced, looking at a computer printed sheet. “Inventory. Vic sold one last night. That’s good for you.”

“Huh?”

“I mean, you don’t want to have to buy two things of foundation. Stuff is expensive.”

“Uh, right.”

“I know it drives my girlfriend crazy when I get the wrong kind, or the wrong color. Beige, taupe, warm peach, pleasant peach, plum peachy, I don’t know how the hell you girls can tell the difference. It’s all light brown to me. And what’s with sanitary pads and things? I mean, I swear she asked me to get her a package of half-caff, double-wide, with wings or some damn thing the other day.”