More Bitter Than Death (9 page)

Meg snorted; apparently Katie was beyond hope of salvation. “If you’re lucky. Where are you off to now?”

“Artifact Comparison Roundtable.”

“Ah, well, maybe you’ll let me go next year? With the stuff from the second season at the Chandler house? Once we get it cleaned up.”

“Sure, if you want to. I didn’t know you were so inclined.”

“Can’t hurt.”

Her career, she meant. “Okay, well just list anything we come across that is particularly nice or unidentifiable, and we’ll pull it for you next year.”

“Good enough. See you later?”

“Absolutely.”

And my second student flew off. I found my way up to the room reserved for those of us who made it a point of getting together every year to show off our best stuff and try to identify the things that were seemingly unidentifiable. It eventually was formalized into the roundtable, limited to a dozen people or so, but we just always called it the Goody Grope. It was porn for archaeologists, a chance to touch the stuff, grok it in fullness, and maybe learn a little something new. The great thing was that, no matter what period you were interested in and no matter what artifacts were actually present, you ended up building up a pretty good awareness of who had what, and from what site.

I glanced in the room before I got in there, and the good news was that for once, it was a good-sized space. I mean,
you can sit there in the lobby or the bar and look at artifacts, but what you really want is a nice big table, plenty of chairs, light, and a bit of elbow room to pass the stuff around. The bad news was that Noreen McAllister was first in there, and she’d already seen me. Crapshitpoop.

I raised a hand, not quite a wave, and walked in, grabbing the chair that was nearest the door and farthest from Noreen, who immediately pulled out a notebook and became engrossed in it. My watch told me that I was just a few minutes early, but other folks should have been here by now, shouldn’t they?

“Pretty good papers so far,” I hazarded.

“I thought they were better in Chicago,” she said, not looking up; her dark hair made a curtain between her face and sight of me.

“Oh.” I pulled up my briefcase and rummaged around inside until I found the small box of goodies that I’d brought. “How was your summer?”

“Rotten. Never made near the numbers for our field school, so we had to cancel it. Didn’t get a tenth of the work done I wanted to.”

Little Miss Mary Sunshine. “Bad luck.”

She grunted, and flipped a page of her notebook.

I heard a rustling in the hall and looked up just in time to see Lissa look in and see that it was just the two of us. A look of horror crossed her face, and despite my pleading glance, she scurried right past the door and down the hallway. Thanks a lot, Lissa; see if I ever talk to you again, you wretch.

Carla came in right after, and she was followed by Chris.

“Hey, Carla, Chris,” I said, not about to let them get away. Carla hesitated by the door, but, God bless her, came through and sat down next to me. Chris, oblivious to it all, came in, said hi to me, and sat down heavily at the middle of the table.

“How you doing, Noreen?” he said.

“Hi, Chris!” She gave him the first smile I’d seen out of
her, and she called him over to her end of the table. “I got something you might be interested in.”

Fat chance, I thought. Slut.

“Glad I got here when I did,” Carla whispered while she settled in. “I can call the trauma team ahead of time so that they can come in and clean up the gore before it hardens and sticks to the walls.”

Carla rummaged through her bag and pulled out a couple of small, brown, acid-free boxes. “That’s disgusting,” I whispered back. “It’s not that bad.”

“What channel are you watching? I’m just glad Chris was here to throw himself on the grenade.”

“Chris is too nice a guy to realize he’s a diversion.”

By this point, several others had come in, including Lissa, who strode in and took a neutral seat, smirking, her eyes bright with concealed merriment. I mouthed the word “bitch” to her, and she put her hand up to her throat in feigned surprise. She could barely conceal her giggling.

“What’s wrong with you?” Carla demanded. “You choking on something?”

Lissa tried without much luck to compose herself. “Me? No.”

“Then why is your face all screwed up like that?”

“Excuse me,” Lissa said, and bolted from the room. I heard the ladies room door open, and gales of laughter gradually suffocating as it closed.

“Well, she can talk and run, so she’s not going to choke to death,” Carla said. “Sometimes I think Lissa’s crazier than a shithouse rat.”

I introduced myself to the only person who was new to me, a middle-aged guy who looked like the caricature of an accountant—receding hairline, on the tall, slightish side, bad suit. The very picture of a pensive, butt-puckered corporate bean-counter.

“William S. Widmark,” he said, shaking my hand. “I’m
not here because I’ve got something, but because my engineering company has just acquired Northeastern Consulting and my colleague is presenting a paper right now. Dr. DuBois was kind enough to let me sit in.”

“You’ll find it’s a lot of fun, very informative,” I said, trying to think of what I could say that would give him a good impression of archaeologists and what we do. You never could tell what was going to happen to the archaeologists when a bigger company swallowed up theirs. The seats were filling up, so I returned to my chair.

Michelle came in and slid into the seat next to me. “You’re saving this for me, aren’t you, love?”

“And no one else,” I replied.

Brad walked in and overheard us, and gave a startled double take. “You got something you want to tell me, Em? Michelle?”

“No, Brad,” Michelle replied. “You got something you want to tell me?”

He shook his head, took his place, and looked around the table, counting to himself. Brad was the de facto moderator because he’d assumed the role the first time, six years ago, and we needed one. He was good enough at it, but certainly did make a big deal out of a small occasion. I had to admit, though, it helped to have someone do the dirty work of keeping us all in order.

“I think we’re short two,” he said. “I’m expecting Jay Whitaker. And Bea Carter responded to my email and said she was going to join us.” He shrugged, and we all exchanged glances; Bea was perennially late and notorious for being a flake of galactic proportions. “Well, we’ll get started and they can jump in when they get here. As usual, we will start to my left and go clockwise. Chris, what have you got for us?”

Chris brought out a piece of pottery.

“Looks like redware, Chris,” Michelle said. “Local? New England?”

“Yeah, it is, but have a look at the inclusions.” He pointed to the tiny bits of pebble and shell that were incorporated into the paste of the fragment. “My idea is that the inclusions are a little different from the other stuff we’ve found locally, and since I think we might actually have some Native people working in the neighborhood we’re exploring now, I was wondering whether they might be using some Indian techniques and applying them in making the Anglo-American forms that their neighbors would have been used to.”

“Umm, sounds a little dicey,” Brad said skeptically, “unless you’ve got hard proof they were actually Indians. I mean, you get all kinds of variation of temper and inclusions, depending where you are—”

“See what they’re doing?” I whispered to Widmark. “They start off with what they know, and try to expand from there, based on other evidence. It’s kind of like how detectives work.”

He shot me a startled, puzzled look. “Oh. Okay.”

I turned back to the discussion; if he wasn’t interested, he shouldn’t have bothered coming.

Then Kelly Booker brought out a small lump of metal; it seemed to be brass to judge from the corrosion: there were still traces of greenish corrosion, though she’d cleaned it up nicely enough. After a moment, it was obvious that it was a button and that there was lettering and a date on it, some of which read: “638” and then “ourable Art.”

“If we could see it better, it would say sixteen thirty-eight, and ‘Ancient and Honourable Artillery,’” Lissa said promptly.

“But it’s from a farm that dates to the middle part of the eighteen hundreds,” Kelly said doubtfully. “The context is probably eighteen sixty, but I suppose it could have been an heirloom someone lost.”

“It was, but it’s a nineteenth-century button,” Lissa explained. “The U.S. Army issued them right at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, to commemorate their roots in the seventeenth century.”

“You could try looking it up in a text, Kelly. Any text,” Noreen said. She was looking out the window. “You would have seen it’s not four hundred years old.”

Kelly nodded. “Well, yeah, I didn’t think it looked that early—the shape is all wrong—but I was cleaning the bag with this in it right as I was leaving, and it was so cool, I figured I’d bring it with the other stuff Dr. Marlatt sent with me.”

Noreen pursed her lips, irritated to be troubled with so obvious a problem.

I couldn’t resist poking at her a little. “The great thing about the roundtable is that it is easy for someone else to identify what you’ve got right away, and then the problem is solved.”

“Moving on,” Brad said hastily. “Michelle, what have you got for us?”

Jay came in then, flushed, and apologetic. He grabbed a seat and tried to make himself as unobtrusive as possible, but that just made things worse, and he took a while to catch his breath. Still, it was good seeing him try to make an effort with the professional aspects of the conference, rather than chasing parties the whole weekend.

Michelle had a textile fragment from a National Park Service site; none of us could identify it, but a couple of people suggested contacts. I had some pottery from Fort Providence that Brad confirmed was French; Carla suggested a book that had illustrations of the forms. And so it went, until everyone had had a turn, everyone a little better informed, a little more enlightened.

As we packed up, Noreen approached me. “Hell, Emma, why do you have to encourage them with that small stuff? We’re here to get some serious work done.”

“Kelly seemed pretty serious to me,” I said, my hackles rising. “And it solved her problem, made her happy, and
didn’t cost anyone anything. Except maybe a little patience.”

Noreen remained unconvinced. “Speaking of which, I’m starting to lose mine with that other little
noodge
of yours. She keeps trying to get me to talk about a project that was over years ago. I keep trying to tell her it’s not something I can remember offhand, but she won’t stop pestering me. And I’m not the only one—Duncan Thayer actually lost his temper with her. Would you speak to her?”

“Which little
noodge
are you talking about?” I asked, but I suspected I knew. And I really would kill Duncan if he’d been mean to Katie.

“Katie something. I just keep thinking of her as Katie Car Alarm, the way she keeps harping and harping on the Pelletier site. Do me a favor, do us all a favor. Tell her to calm down.”

“Katie Bell. I’ll have a word with her. Don’t worry, I’ve got a copy of the Pelletier report. I’ll lend her my copy, so she won’t bother you anymore.”

“Good.” She brushed past me, and I had just enough self-restraint left to wait until she was out of the room before I stuck out my tongue.

“She gives us Canucks a bad name,” Carla muttered. “What’s the hair across her ass?”

“She and I just hate each other,” I said. “Always have.”

“Why is that?”

I thought about it for a minute. “You know, I can’t even remember. But I suspect her warm and obliging personality has something to do with it.” I turned to Lissa, who’d just finished with packing up a piece of creamware with a spectacularly ugly overglaze painted pattern. “And you, thanks a lot for leaving me to the wolves.”

“There was just one wolf. Is it better to have two of us miserable, instead of one?”

“I could have used a little cover there.”

“Hey, it’s women and children first, as far as I’m con
cerned. You see those giant front teeth of hers? They’re used to shear the heads off her peons. I’m not getting anywhere within striking range. You guys want to get a drink?”

I checked my watch; it was barely one, but what with conference time—brought on by being closed off from the rest of the world, with no natural light and irregular sleeping and eating—it felt much later. “Little early for me. What about some lunch?”

“We signed up for the boxed lunches. Oh, lord, there’s Bea. And would you look at what she’s wearing? Bless her heart.”

“Oh, there you all are!”

Bea Carter was striding toward us, as if she’d finally caught us doing something illicit. Lissa was right; Bea was clad in complicated swaths of blue and green, over billowing trousers of the same material. Imagine a teal and turquoise tornado with red shoes. A walking hangover.

She stopped in front of us, panting. “I suppose everything is done, is it?”

“Well, yeah, Bea. The Grope is from twelve to one,” Carla said.

“I would have been here on time, except that someone stole my artifacts!”

She said this with such satisfaction, as if convinced of something she’d been claiming all along, that I did a double take.

“Someone stole your artifacts?” I said. “How could that have happened?”

“It could have been anyone in the hotel. It could have been any of…us.”

“Heck, Bea, who’d want
your
artifacts?” Lissa said. “Who cares about some early twentieth-century kiln furniture anyway?”

Carla and I scowled at her, but she didn’t back down. “Well? I’m serious. Who’d want broken bits of pottery?”

“You mean besides archaeologists?” Carla said.

“You know what I mean,” Lissa retorted.

“Was anything else stolen?” I asked Bea.

“What do you mean?” She’d danced around to the side, as if my question was an attack.

“I mean, was your room broken into? Or was your luggage ripped off at the airport?”

“No, I mean, not any more than the usual rifling they give your stuff these days. I had them here, with me. I was showing them around last night, Wednesday, after I got in, to other people working on pottery manufactories.” She glared at Lissa. “It was shortly after that.”