Ashes and Bones
Authors: Dana Cameron
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #Mystery Fiction, #New England, #Women archaeologists
ASHES AND BONES
AN EMMA FIELDING MYSTERY
To the friends who are always there, through thick and thin, reprints and revising: Beth, Ann, Pam & Pete, Anne &Jonathan, Toni & Steve, Dan, the Buffybuds, the Femmes Fatales, the Teabuds, and particularly, Mr. G.
I SAT ON THE ROCK BY THE EDGE OF THE…
WHAT THE HELL?” I STARTED TO TREMBLE.
TWO DAYS LATER, I LIMPED DOWNSTAIRS AFTER my morning shower,…
DEAR GOD…I STOOD UP. BRIAN NEEDED TO SEE; I…
I WASN’T THERE,” SHE SAID. “I JUST GOT THE CALL…
WITH ARCHAEOLOGY, YOU’D THINK THINGS WOULD be straight forward, but…
I WAS PROBABLY TOO DEEP IN THOUGHT ON MY WAY…
IT WAS WITH A STRANGE MIXTURE OF APPREHENSION, vindication, and…
AFTER MARTY HUNG UP—SLAMMED DOWN—I stood there for a while,…
I SAT IN MY OFFICE, WONDERING ABOUT DORA AND the…
HEY! HEY!” I SHOUTED, LOOKING FOR A WAY TO open…
THE DAY OF MEG’S WEDDING THE SATURDAY BEFORE Labor Day…
NOLAN SHOVED ME HARD, BACKWARD.
I SLEPT WELL THAT NIGHT, AND AFTER CLASS THE next…
IT’S NOT HIM,” I SAID. I COULDN’T STOP STARING AT…
CONCENTRATION CAME A LITTLE EASIER THE NEXT day, Saturday, and…
SAY THAT AGAIN.” I LEANED AGAINST THE CAR, not sure…
I SWALLOWED, TRIED TO KEEP MY KNEES FROM BUCKLING, and…
I SPENT A LOT OF TIME AT THE HOSPITAL AFTER…
I
SAT ON THE ROCK BY THE EDGE OF THE REDDISH
clay path, watching the Aqua Velva water churning on the toothy black rocks below. The sharp salt air was tempered with the heavy freshness of the nearby forest, and that kept the bright sunshine from being excessively hot. Seabirds, not so different from the sandpipers and seagulls I was used to, wheeled and played on the updrafts far beneath me, while still being an easy hundred feet above the water. It would only take a subtle shift of weight, merely straightening my legs at the hip, and I would slide from my narrow perch and finally find out if all those falling nightmares I’d been having lived up to the real thing. Even if I didn’t hit one of those eager rocks, the impact on the water probably would break my back. I wondered if I would crash into one of the seabirds on the way down or if they would flap out of the way. But because I wasn’t really feeling suicidal, I allowed myself the shiver of vertigo for another moment or two, enjoying the thrill and the view, before I very carefully got up and picked my way back down to the picnic spot that Brian had chosen.
Pity about the morbidity, I thought disinterestedly, particularly when things were so perfect.
I’m in what most people would call paradise, which on Earth is known as Kauai, with the man I love. I have everything I’ve always wanted: a tenured position, books with my name on the cover, plenty of students, hot sites to work on, and a livable if unfinished house, a genuine vacation, and I am about as much fun as a cold slate gravestone.
As a polite person, against my will I have developed into something of an adequate liar over the years, so convinced myself that I wasn’t spoiling my husband Brian’s vacation. He has a naturally happy disposition, particularly when the weather is warm; the booze, sex, idleness, and great food were a significant bonus. As far as our first real vacation since our honeymoon—a vacation that wasn’t wrapped around a conference or research trip—it was a smashing success.
The fact that I was miserable, however, was unrelated.
I found my way down the slope and crossed the sand along the water. The beach was nearly empty, not because it was a Thursday but because we’d outlasted the other tourists and the beach wasn’t any good for surfers. We could almost imagine that it was ours alone.
Physically, I felt great. I’d been catching up on my sleep. I had lost a little weight, but chalked it up to a stressful semester. No archaeologist field tan, elbow to fingers, here. I’d been super careful about the sun and could actually boast of having a tan that extended everywhere my bikini didn’t, and Brian claimed the freckles that came automatically with my dark red hair were cute. The bags under my eyes had faded and most of my bruises from my Krav Maga training were gone. I’d had just enough fieldwork before coming out so that my muscles were tolerably toned and I didn’t have the professorial slouch that seemed to settle in from October to May.
About twenty feet away from Brian and our towels, I remembered what was missing. I carefully smiled and waved
at him. His dark brown hair was mussed from the wind and flaking out; his honey skin was glowing from the sun.
“You should have gone up,” I said, sitting down. “The view was great. I could see whales way out there.”
“All the views are great,” he said. “Here, I’ve got warm sand under my butt.”
“To each his own,” I said. I ate the last of the mango in my fruit salad. I then flopped over on my stomach and closed my eyes. There were palm fronds rattling, and small waves endlessly lapping at the beach. The heat from the sand, eggshell white, was lulling.
“Em. You’ve been sleeping an awful lot lately.”
His voice was tight, the sentiment came out of nowhere. Crap. I dodged it. “Since when are you opposed to napping, Lazy Boy?”
“This is something else. I mean, ever since school got out, you’ve either been going full tilt or you’ve been asleep. Here, it’s been worse.”
The sun turned the insides of my eyelids red and it was too bright. I turned my head to the other side, shaded my eyes, and watched the little crabs scuttling sideways just a foot away.
“Em?”
“It’s called a vacation, Bri, or had you forgotten whose idea this was?” I sounded a lot bitchier than I meant to, but he was the one picking a fight.
There was a long sigh, and I thought he was giving it up. Then he said, “Em. The fingerprints weren’t Tony’s.”
“What fingerprints?” I was so nearly asleep, if he could just not raise his voice or anything, I’d be off in a few moments…
“Don’t be like that. The fingerprints on the postcard. The postcard that you got back in January, the one that could have come from your disgruntled student or even a few people who might be upset that you got them arrested. It couldn’t be from Tony Markham. Tony’s dead.”
“Whatever.” I shouldn’t have answered; I was awake now. He’d pushed too many buttons in one go.
“You know, I was fine when there was still a possibility that Tony was alive, that he’d sent that card. But the police—your friend, Detective Bader—said that the prints weren’t his, weren’t a match for any they had in the…whatdoyoucallit.”
“The AFIS database. Automated Fingerprint Identification System.”
“Right. And the handwriting was similar, but not a real match, and there wasn’t even enough to be conclusive. You saw that yourself, right?”
I didn’t answer. Tony Markham was once a colleague of mine at Caldwell College in Maine, an archaeologist like myself. He’d happened onto a couple of petty criminals, people responsible for, among others, the death of my dear friend Pauline Westlake, and found himself intrigued by the possibilities that life outside the law offered. Something about his first murder awakened a diabolical spark in him, and although the authorities believed that Tony was dead—lost at sea during a hurricane—I had never been convinced. Tony was too wily to die so easily.
“But the fingerprints, that
is
conclusive,” Brian continued. “I think we need to just chalk it up to a bad prank. You did everything you could.”
“Everything I could? I went to Detective Bader, asked a favor. What else could I do?”
I could hear him as he sat up now, quite serious. “Worry, apparently. I don’t know why you’re letting this get to you so bad. You’ve been so depressed—”
I sat up, too. “I have not.”
He fished out my sandwich, which I’d only nibbled, and began to tear it up, then threw it to the birds. “Looks pretty textbook to me. I mean, shit, half the guys in the lab down the hall work on developing antidepressants. I’m not entirely thick.”
I ignored him; he wasn’t thick, but neither did being a chemist qualify him as a psychiatrist. “Don’t. You shouldn’t feed them.”
“Fine.” He stuffed the other half of the sandwich back into the bag and dusted the crumbs from his hands. “Okay, maybe some of this is still fallout from last semester, and the plagiarism thing and all. That really wore you out. But I think it’s Tony. It’s like you’ve got some kind of morbid crush on him. It’s kinda freaking me out and I don’t think it’s healthy for you.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I ignored the fact I’d used “morbid” myself ten minutes ago.
“It’s like you
want
him to be back. The way you obsess about it.”
“I do
not
obsess. I just try not to think about it. I mean, after all, Tony’s dead, right?”
“And for some reason, you won’t believe it. It was a postcard, Emma, that’s all. And you’re building some kind of fantasy around it.”
It wasn’t just the postcard that had only my name and the lone word “soon” on it, I thought. It was someone introducing himself to my revolting ex-boyfriend as Billy Griggs and asking after me. I’d watched Billy die, shot by Tony, almost exactly four years ago this month. It was the lack of a body; Tony had sailed off into a hurricane that he couldn’t have survived, yet there was no wreckage. It was the lily-of-the-valley pips anonymously sent to me two years ago: Tony had killed another man using lily of the valley.
I’d looked up the meaning of lily of the valley according to the “language of flowers” and found that it represented sweetness. It also represented humility, which worried me. In a twisted way, I was convinced that Tony held me responsible for interrupting his scheme and that, with these new “messages,” he was coming back for me.
Tony had been brilliantly manipulative—he’d come close to making me believe that I was responsible for my friend Pauline’s death—and the farther he moved away from his old life, the more his deeds escalated in evil and violence.
So I didn’t think it was a fantasy. I just don’t believe in that many coincidences.
Brian sighed, studied the sand that he’d scooped into a pile in front of him. “Look, even if someone else is behind this, fine, it’s important to be careful about that sort of thing. I want you to be careful. And if they’re smart enough to dig around and find out about your…history with Tony and Pauline’s murder out at Penitence Point, and make something of that, then yes, we should be cautious. But we’ve told the police at home in Massachusetts, we’ve warned the Maine cops at Caldwell College, so if it
is
someone on campus, they’ll be aware of it. I just don’t know why you need to keep dwelling on this.”
I shrugged. “First I’m sleeping too much, then I’m dwelling. Make up your mind.” I got the tone just right that time, just the right balance of humor and reconciliation. I wasn’t sold, but I was tired of arguing.
“You know what I mean.” He hesitated, then said, “You know, you could see someone about it.”
I stared out at the water; the sun was heading for the horizon. “About what? I’m fine. You’re the one who seems to be obsessed with something.”
“I mean, maybe it’s some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, reawakened by the postcard. Maybe it’s some old fears that you haven’t quite uprooted, yet. Or maybe it’s last semester.”
I thought about that. If I didn’t entirely believe Brian’s reasoning, it did make a certain kind of sense. I could certainly use it to make the present disagreement go away. “I don’t think it’s that bad, Brian. I mean, I suppose I’ve been feeling a little flaky lately, but I just figured it was unwinding after the end of semester and, you know, working through some stress. It actually takes time to get used to being on vacation, too, and I don’t think jetlag does anyone any favors.”
He reached for my hand. “I’m just asking you to maybe think about what I’m saying. Okay, babe? I don’t want to ruin our vacation, but if something doesn’t seem right with you, I want to deal with it, you know? I’m concerned, that’s all.”
“I know. And I don’t want to be a poop at your parents’, when we get there tomorrow. I’m looking forward to seeing them.”
“Me too. You should hear what Ma said she was going to cook for dinner.” The way to Brian’s heart had always been through his stomach.
I smiled, with genuine warmth this time. His folks are great. “I can’t wait.” I flipped over onto my stomach and picked up my beach reading, a popular autobiography of a noted forensic anthropologist.
The drive back to the hotel, like every drive we’d taken on Kauai, was a revelation. In New England, I was used to turning, twisting roads, but the variation of scenery here, in such relatively short distances, was enough to keep me gaping every minute. Around every turn was another staggering view of sand or trees or water that simply delighted. And amidst it all was the completely recognizable: drugstores, coffee shops, supermarkets, and fast food places that could have been uprooted from anywhere on the mainland and plopped down here. I avoided chains as far as I could at home, trying to support small local businesses, but I always went into at least one while traveling anywhere, because it was fascinating to see the variations even within familiar edifices. Walk into a drugstore and instead of seeing old Van Halen tapes, Red Sox gear, and maple candy, you find “Iz” Kamakawiwo’ole CDs, beach mats, and sunblock right out in front, along with macadamia nuts in every form. A treat at home, around here the nuts were so common you’d almost think they grew on trees, I thought with a grin.
The ride back did exactly what the whole rest of the trip had been designed to do: give me a break, recharge my batteries, make me count my blessings. I’d gotten to a point in my life that I couldn’t have imagined actually happening five or ten years ago, even though I’d been dreaming of it since I was a kid. The holy grail of job security, in archaeology, as a
professor at a well-respected college. Our marriage had survived not only graduate school and our first angst-ridden job searches, but house hunting and, recently, jointly owned cats; despite my earlier mood, Brian and I were still good for each other. I had my health, friends, happiness, and hell, we even had enough money to begin renovating said house with actual professionals.
All of which was great, but it made me really, really nervous.
Striving can be a great way of keeping life in order, but what happens when you get what you’ve been working for all your life? What do you do then? If you are single-minded, or even just determined, this can be quite unnerving.
I could arrange for new excavation and research projects, I could design new classes, take part in other professional duties, but it’s all a little too familiar now; and even if it isn’t familiar, there wouldn’t be the same thrill of anxiety that accompanies fresh endeavors because I know I have the skills to tackle them.
It left me wondering: What was next, existentially speaking?
We pulled up into the crowded hotel parking lot, just in time for mai tai hour, which by mutual agreement, was at least an hour earlier than at home. Usually a bourbon or beer girl myself, I now found myself addicted to a complicated rum drink with a pink orchid floating on top. While I knew that these flowers were nothing out of the ordinary here—they seemed to be like forsythia in the yards here—I still, in my little New England heart, couldn’t believe that people put orchids on drinks. That was the coolest, most decadent thing ever.
The rum didn’t hurt either.
I climbed up the stairs, ready to wash off, and change for dinner. This was a trick for me; even at my most casual, I still hadn’t been able to shed my Connecticut upbringing and decidedly Atlantic attitude. Everywhere I went, even in chinos or a skirt, I felt overdressed. Brian, raised in San
Diego, had a lot easier time finding the right mode: shorts, aloha or polo shirt, sandals. I fiddled, finding my key card, with Brian crowding behind me chanting the gimme-a-mai-tai song, and we burst into the room giggling. I pulled up short when I saw the long white box on the bed.