Ashes and Bones (17 page)

“I see.” But clearly she didn’t. She sniffed and turned to her computer.

“Any messages—?”

She looked up at me. “Justine.”

Of course it was. I was also willing to bet it wasn’t the name on her birth certificate either. “Justine. Any phone messages?”

“I put any messages in your mailbox.”

“Okay. I’ll be in the lab.”

Justine didn’t bother to reply. I didn’t bother trying to make her.

I let myself into the lab, wondering how the bones at the site had been removed from the storage. There were three students in there; two of my undergraduate majors were wielding toothbrushes, carefully washing artifacts, and yammering to beat the band. It was impossible to walk past them without picking through the goodies to see if there was anything new that I hadn’t seen in the field. It’s amazing what can get collected unknowingly, and then, when the dirt washes off, you find you’ve got a little jewel, arti-factually speaking. Archaeologists get excited about odd things.

They glanced up when I came in, of course, but they didn’t quiet down a bit. I must be losing my terribleness for them, I thought. Have to fix that.

But their work was fine—the dirt was coming off the artifacts, everything was being kept with its original artifact bag so that we wouldn’t lose the important associative information, and there were no unpleasant surprises like modern
nails mixed in with nice eighteenth-century pottery, which would mean that our context was not sealed.

I’d let them live.

“We have a question,” John said.

“Shoot.”

“What’s that that Nick’s got?” John pointed to his friend, who had a brownish lump hanging off his tongue, a grin on his ugly face.

“It’s not his best look, whatever it is.” I reached over and pulled it off; Nick made a yuck face. I glanced at the artifact. “Well, if it’s sticking that good, it’s probably earthenware, right?”

“Yeah, we know, but it’s really thin. Delicate. It looks like it could be a teacup or something, but it seemed too nice for earthenware.”

“Refined earthenware,” I said. “Go check Noël Hume, for a start; there was an attempt to reproduce some of the Asian dry-bodied red stoneware. It works for the period.”

“Cool,” Nick said. “John said it came from the privy.”

John was fibbing; we hadn’t excavated a privy at the Chandler house. “So how’d it taste?”

He shrugged. “Oh, fine. No worse than that piece of sewer pipe I tested yesterday.”

Twenty years old, and you still can’t break them of an oral fixation, I thought. “Fine, good. Don’t actually eat anything, will you?”

“Not intentionally. Say, Professor Fielding…we need some more storage boxes.”

I eyed them suspiciously. “Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes. We need them for the stuff we finished processing.”

I glanced down the long table covered with cleaned and labeled artifacts; they’d made good progress, for all their fooling. “Okay, you can make two each.”

“Three,” John said quickly; he caught my eye and backed down.

I glared at them both. “You can make two each. No more. And I’ll count.”

They exchanged sheepish grins. “Okay. Thanks.”

I walked to the back of the lab where a young woman was reading an osteology text. While she read, she took notes, and with her other hand, rolled a tennis ball down the table. She caught it when it hit the wall and gently rolled back. That was one way to keep from chewing fingernails, I thought. Her lowered head was bobbing, as if to music I couldn’t hear. A thin white wire snaking through her thick dark hair told the story; she had earbuds in, listening to her iPod. Made sense, given the racket my two reprobate students were making.

I waved my hand, trying to get her attention. No luck. “Ms. Shepherd? Phoebe?”

She looked up, and pulled her earbuds out as soon as she saw me. She had a foxy, pointed face, and eyes that were so deep, and bewitching that I’d actually caught Brian staring into them when he met Phoebe at the last departmental party. “Sorry, Professor Fielding. I was just trying to—” She waved her hand at the guys.

“I understand. I don’t know how you manage to get any work done. You can tell them to keep it down, you know.”

“Oh, they’re okay. But…you know that they were putting things in their mouths? Won’t they get a disease or something?”

“Probably,” I said. “But not from that. It’s okay, it’s a porosity test. Generally speaking, if it sticks to your tongue, it’s probably earthenware, low fired, porous. If it doesn’t, it’s probably stoneware or porcelain, which are higher fired, harder, less porous.”

“Right, I hoped that was the case, but with them, you never know.” Phoebe was relieved. “And…I don’t want to say anything, but…they’re making boxes again.”

“It’s okay. I gave them permission.”

Phoebe’s concern was well-founded. The acid-free artifact storage boxes came flat, ready to be folded into shape.
They were an elegant design and, well, really fun to make. Nick and John had discovered this one day, and decided to get a head start on the busy field season with a “box-off.” They’d constructed twenty of the boxes before anyone caught them. Twenty boxes for which there was yet no storage space in our increasingly small lab space, most of which had to be unmade later.

I handed her the bag of bones from the site. “I have a puzzle for you.”

She stuck the tennis ball between two books and her eyes lit up. “Cool. Lay it on me.”

“Any idea where these might have come from? And how they might have gotten out to the Point?” I told her the story, and her look of disbelief grew as I finished.

“Wow. Human hand phalanges. Strange.” She shook the bones out of the bag and picked up one of them, searching for the number. “These are from an older collection. Not one of Professor LaBrot’s.”

Professor LaBrot had replaced Tony when he’d vanished. A physical anthropologist, he taught the prehistoric archaeology classes, including the Maya, and science, while I covered the historic ones and theory. Phoebe was his TA.

“Let’s have a look.” She pushed back from the desk. I noticed she wore a black T-shirt with a crude cartoon picture, half dragon, half man on it, labeled
TROGDOR
. I’d have to ask Brian what that was about. Phoebe was rubbing her hands and muttering something in a singsong voice as she turned to the cabinets where the faunal collections were kept.

“I didn’t catch that,” I said.

Phoebe turned and giggled. “Oh, just silliness. I said, ‘bring out your dead.’ You know from Monty Python?”

I nodded; I might not know who Trodgor was, but I wasn’t so irredeemably unhip that I didn’t know
Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

“Over here. The human remains are kept locked up.” She unlocked the first cabinet, pulled out a box, and examined the
contents list on the lid. She dug through the bags, frowned, then pawed through them again. “Okay, well here’s where they should be. And there’s no note to say why they’re not. Damn.”

“Who has the keys to this room? And the cabinet?”

“You and Professor LaBrot. There’s probably a set in the main office, and I suppose someone in the physical plant does, for emergencies. But for students, well, there’s me and a couple of other graduate students. Chuck does—oh, hey, you heard about him, right?”

“What about him?” I saw her serious face and felt my stomach fill with ice.

“He got mugged. Beat up pretty bad. Right here on campus.”

“What!” I sagged against the cabinet. “Are you kidding me?”

“No way. He’s been out of work almost a week.”

“Oh my God. I thought he just…was on vacation or something.”

“Hey, I’m sorry, I thought you knew. What with Wednesday Addams out there, and all.”

I felt light-headed. “Did they catch the guy?”

“No, but campus police are in a tizzy about it.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet. That sort of thing—”

“Doesn’t happen.” Phoebe nodded sadly. “Not here, no.”

I shook myself. “Anything else that you might have noticed missing? Odd, off, anything like that?”

“I haven’t noticed anything, but now I’ll keep my eyes open,” she offered. “I’m sorry I had to tell you about Chuck. The whole thing sucks.”

I nodded. “Yeah. Thanks for your help.”

“Thanks for bringing my bones back.”

“Sure.” I wandered over to the window, hoping to find solace about Chuck, or maybe inspiration, an elegant solution that would neatly tie up all my problems. Whatever else the bones meant—and it seemed as though they were just the nearest thing to hand—whoever put them on the site wanted
to let me know he had access to my world. Knew how I felt about the museum, and what the thought of the violence there would do to me. The assault on Chuck—and I was convinced that was also connected—sealed that as fact for me. I rested my head against the pane of glass…

…and saw Tony Markham looking up at me.

H
EY! HEY!”
I
SHOUTED, LOOKING FOR A WAY TO
open the windows…didn’t they open? Ventilation was all through hoods and air-conditioning, the better to keep the artifacts in a stable environment. I banged on the window, trying to get the attention of someone, anyone, who could stop him.

“Uh, you okay, Professor Fielding?” All three students were watching me, shocked.

“—right back,” I muttered, and tore out of the lab.

There were already people waiting for the perennially slow elevator. I opted for the stairs, taking them two and three at a time. I hit the front doors at a run, knocking into a student as I crashed through.

Tony was already gone by the time I got to where he had been.

I looked around wildly, but there was no sign of him. Where could he have gone? There were too many buildings that someone—Oh God, with
keys
—could get into.

Think.

Can’t find him by running around, so find him by walking.

I went to the maintenance office. They knew me well enough there, having had my share of climate-control emergencies in the lab and more than my share of encounters with them on the weekends, when it seemed that we were the only people on campus. I was also known for keeping the coffee maker running while I was in the lab, and didn’t care if they had a cup or two, so I actually knew most of the guys by name, and knew a bunch more by sight. Once or twice, they’d given me a break, letting me park in spots that were usually off limits so I could move equipment or finds. More than once they’d held the door for me, using their own security passcards to let me out, joking that they hoped I wasn’t stealing any valuable artifacts. It wasn’t that I was stealing them—I always brought them straight back—but sometimes it was easier to work on the goodies at home. And they weren’t all that valuable, anyway, unless you count the information that they represented. And I always brought them back.

“Hey, there…missy.” Everyone was “missy” or “mister” to Duffy, who was bad with names but good with furnaces. “What can I do for you? You been running or something, or are you just glad to see me?”

I smiled as best I could, but it was weak. “Oh, I’ve been running, Duffy. Trying to catch up with someone from maintenance. I hope you can help me.”

“Sure, I bet I can. What do you need?”

“I’m trying to find someone. Might be a new guy, the last year or so, maybe. He’s about this tall, darkish hair, maybe in his late fifties or sixties.”

“That could be most of us, you know.”

“I know, and here’s the problem. I can’t remember his name. There were two guys I met at the same time. My building. One of them might have been a vendor or outside contract, or something. Ring any bells?”

“Not really. You got a name?”

“Tony Markham? Billy Griggs?” It was worth a shot.

“I can tell you right now, we got no one named Markham. Griggs, neither.”

“Is there any way I could look…are there photos in the personnel files?” I said, a little too quickly.

Duffy’s eyes narrowed and he pulled back; and I knew that I’d gone too far. “That’s not something I could…say, there’s no trouble is there? Because I’ll tell you missy, I can’t go giving out information like that. We got rules.”

“I know, I just…he was asking me about something…to do with the local history, and I thought I saw him coming in here, and I figured I’d tell him what I remembered, but he wasn’t here, so…”

Duffy still wasn’t happy. “Oh, I couldn’t go showing you that sort of thing. You’re sure there’s not some problem? I’d have to do it official, but we can sort out problems, you know. Thefts, breakage, it happens, and we take care of it. But we do it official.”

“No, I promise, nothing like that. I just thought I’d, you know, tell him. But it’s not that big a deal.”

He nodded, still disturbed by my incursions beyond regular bounds, but then the door opened behind me and a smile crossed his face. “Well, hang on now. What about this young fella, Ernie, behind you?”

I turned to see what he was talking about. The “young fella” was right behind me—I gasped. There was a superficial resemblance to Tony—same height, weight, general build, coloring, and age—but not more than that. Just enough to make the mistake from several floors up.

“Can I help you?” The guy’s name tag said ‘Fishbeck.’” He looked between me and Duffy, wiping his hands on a dirty rag.

I looked at him and shook my head. “No, sorry. Sorry to be such a pain.”

“And here you were, trying to do something nice.” Duffy clucked. “Well, you let me know if you find the guy, okay?”

“Something wrong?” Ernie asked.

“Nah. Missy…Fielding here was trying to find a guy who’d asked her a question, that’s all.”

“Oh.” He shrugged. “Not me. Sorry.”

“Thanks anyway.”

I left the maintenance office shaken. I couldn’t have been wrong, in the airport, could I?

Ernie looked like Tony, who looked like any number of men. And if he was in any kind of disguise…

But everything else? Surely it all couldn’t be coincidence?

Why was I seeing Tony everywhere? Maybe it was exactly as Brian had said, like seeing Oscar after he died and I was in a state of distress. We live on a small planet with a very shallow gene pool. There was bound to be a lot of overlapping resemblance in a given population.

I know what I saw. I know what’s been happening to me. I can’t be imagining all of this, I just know I can’t.

And yet here I am, with a double handful of nothing to prove it.

I’m starting to be scared for reasons that have nothing to do with Tony. What does it look like when you’re going out of your mind?

Maybe being a little depressed isn’t going out of your mind. And there’s something else at the root of this.

It doesn’t explain seeing things that aren’t there. It doesn’t explain conjuring nightmares in midday.

I went back up to the office and the mysterious Justine. “Can you tell me if there are any keys missing? From the office collection?”

She glanced up at me, smirked, and put down her nail file. “How would I know?”

“You wouldn’t. But you and I will look at the cupboard together. I’ll see if there’s anything missing.”

Justine got out her key; I held out my hand, which she studiously ignored, then she went to the cupboard where the departmental keys were kept. Everyone of them was accounted for, or had been appropriately signed out. No luck there.

“Done?” Justine stood waiting for me, not quite tapping her foot.

“Not by a long shot. But I’m through here.” She locked up, and without a word returned to her desk.

Okay, I thought as I returned to my office. But Tony doesn’t need a key, if he’s got a job with the physical plant…he might be using another name.

After I finished with my email, I stopped by campus police and asked if I could talk to the officer who’d handled Chuck’s mugging. I gave him my staff ID and tried to seem as little like a thrill seeker as possible.

He looked at the plastic card, grunted, and shoved it back to me. “Why are you so interested?”

“Because there’ve been several other incidents connected to the archaeology department,” I said. “And that theft at the museum might well be connected. I might be able to identify the guy.”

The campus police officer looked up sharply. “We’d love to get this guy. Jim was a friend of all of ours. There’s been way too much trouble around here lately.”

I nodded. When I’d seen the confirmation of Jim’s death in the campus paper, I’d felt the world tilt away, couldn’t feel my feet beneath me. One more thing to nail Tony for.

The officer’s face was taut, the muscles of his jaw flexed. “He was declared DOA when he got to the hospital.” The officer watched me a moment, then seemed to decide. He made a quick phone call, speaking in phrases so clipped that I could barely tell that the officer was available. He hung up. “Come with me.”

I followed him down another hallway to a back office, and he told my story to another uniformed guard. “We’re working with the Caldwell Police on this,” the second guy said. “Nasty thing, but if you think you can help, I’ll send you to them. Take a seat.”

They sat me down and set a file in front of me. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but nothing they might have told me would have prepared me for what I saw.

The file held a series of indistinct photographic images, obviously taken over time by some security camera. Then,
as I understood what each successive image meant, saw what was happening, I wished that it was video, so it would be over that much faster. Even the illusion of speed would have been better than this.

And the pauses between the pictures only left that much more to my imagination.

Chuck was immediately recognizable, even in a bad image. Not just his dreads, not just his recycled basmati rice bag book tote, there was something upward in his gait that wouldn’t be confined, even by a still, two-dimensional picture. There was a little flash, and I knew he’d turned his head, toward a light that he couldn’t see. He was turning because someone had called him and a streetlight reflected off his glasses. That someone came out from an alley between two buildings. A man, large and powerfully built, face and hair covered with the hood of his sweatshirt, for which it was far too warm this time of year. Loose fitting pants, sweats, maybe. Running shoes.

In one frame, Chuck looked down at his watch: He’d been asked the time. In the next, the man was swinging, his legs a blur as he dove into Chuck.

Do something, Chuck, I whispered to myself, don’t let him hurt you! Scream, run, kick him…do anything.

But it was already done. Already too late.

Three more shots, like a slide show. One: Chuck was down, the man on top of him, arms raised and blurred with motion. Two: Chuck’s hands were over his face, but it did him little good, and the attack continued, a brutal pantomime. Three: Chuck’s hands were limp, on the ground beside him and there were dark patches on his face and shirt. I realized it was blood.

I tried not to, but I found myself doing the math: one picture every thirty seconds. Two minutes of a beating is a very long time. Most people would be exhausted, fighting back after thirty seconds, even if nearly none of the punches landed.

Chuck didn’t fight back. He never had the chance, even if he wanted to.

It wasn’t over.

The next picture there was another blur, another flash, and I saw—or at least imagined that I now saw—a knife. The man pulled something from Chuck’s trouser pockets.

Leave now, I thought. You’ve got whatever it is you wanted, not that Chuck had anything much to begin with. If you’d asked him, he would have given it to you. All you had to do was ask: Chuck would have done it and been happy about it. There was no need for any of this, not ever, but especially not Chuck….

It wasn’t over yet. And it had nothing to do with Chuck, I knew it in my bones.

In the next picture the man was back, leaning over Chuck’s torso. The knife was clearer now, and in the next shot, I could see what was going to happen…

He was leaning on Chuck’s arm. Going to slice into it.

I heard noises, off in the distance. A split second passed before I realized that I’d shoved my chair back, and was moaning.

“There’s more,” the officer said quietly.

The spell was broken, though, and I came back to the small office where I’d been sitting all along. Now I felt more like the distant observer I was rather than being there, helpless, while it happened. I forced myself to finish looking at the pictures.

The attacker suddenly was up—there was no interval between whatever had moved him and his standing upright. Then he was a blur as he ran away, and a young woman entered the frame. The next few images were of her kneeling by Chuck, looking around for help, then reaching, God bless her, into her bag for a cell phone.

“That’s about it,” the officer said. He leaned over and closed the file. “She called an ambulance, stayed with Charles—”

“It’s Chuck,” I said, a little louder than I meant. Somehow, that was very important.

He nodded. “She stayed with him, Chuck, until it arrived. Even went to the hospital with him.”

I pushed back from the table, feeling the pain in my shoulders slowly subside. My fingers ached from gripping the arms of my chair, and when I looked, I saw I was bleeding from where a fingernail dug into the soft flesh of my palm. I’d been wrong when I imagined the worst was over. I still had to go see Chuck.

“Can you tell us about that man? Do you recognize him?” He slid an enlarged print of the man across the table to me. It was only good as a reminder of how large the attacker was; his face was a blur.

I stared at the picture, but it only seemed to become more abstract and pixilated the longer I looked at it. Tears filled my eyes, and it blurred away altogether. I brushed at my face impatiently, and shook my head.

The officer handed a box of tissues to me, and I blew my nose. I tried to memorize the attacker’s build, his sweatshirt, something. Because if I ever found this guy…

“Can I have a copy of this?” I asked on impulse. “Maybe someone at the department will recognize him.”

“I suppose we could do that,” he said slowly. “But you have to tell me, why do you think this is connected with you?”

“I believe Chuck was attacked because of me, or if not specifically to scare me, possibly to get his keys to the lab.” I told him about what had happened at the site, about the bones in the bottom of the pit from the Caldwell collections. I told him about the other incidents. Finally, I told him my suspicions about Tony Markham.

The man was silent for a moment. “That’s quite a story you’ve put together, there.”

“I’m not putting anything together,” I said. I swallowed and tried to relax my jaw muscles. “I’m telling you what’s happened to me, and what I think is going on. You can contact the police officers in Lawton or Sheriff Stannard, if you like.”

“Uh-huh. I wasn’t implying anything. It’s just…quite a story.”

I couldn’t be bothered to rise to the bait. “What can I do? Is there anything else I can do to help?” Not that I’d been all that helpful to begin with. “Is Chuck all right?”