Ashes and Bones (6 page)

“Oh, they’re fine,” she said. “Got a new picture. Wanna see?”

I nodded and she pulled out her wallet. The picture was of her three pugs: Liam, Casey, and Wee Mikey. Bulging marble black eyes and panting tongues strained to reach the camera lens. I could swear they were smiling, all linked up with their little green harnesses.

“Nice,” I said. “Wee Mikey isn’t so wee anymore.”

“No, but that’s not why we called him that, anyway.”

“Oh?”

“Well, it’s kinda gross, but when we’ve got them all harnessed up together? Everyone runs to have a pee? Mikey’s aim is pretty bad. Pees all over the other guys, pees all over himself. It’s a mess.”

“Oh,” was all I could manage.

“Charming,” Tina said. She handed me my double cappuccino with an extra shot, and grinned as she measured out the bag of Columbian beans.

I handed her my card, which she stamped, and the money for the coffee; I tossed the change into the jar.

Tina looked at me a little more closely. “Here,” she said, reaching under the counter and pulling out a small stick of chocolate.

“I didn’t order a mocha,” I said.

“No, but you look like you could use the fix.”

“Hey, thanks; you’re not wrong about that. See you, Isabel. Take it easy, Ms. Willner.”

She picked up the counter cloth as she completed our ritual. “You too, Ms. Fielding.”

Back home, I fled immediately upstairs to my office. Odd, I thought as the door knocked over an unseen obstacle, the room should be clean. I thought I’d cleaned it earlier this summer. Once I fought my way in, I realized that I had, and I could see that the rug was recently vacuumed. But between the notes and crates of artifacts dumped after the fieldwork, and the piles of books pulled for lecture writing, on top of the rush at the beginning of a new academic year, you were bound to lose a little surface area.

I saw a note stuck to my computer, reminding me that I’d promised to bring some books on introductory archaeology to Raylene Reynolds. She and her husband Erik ran the Lawton Yacht Club and Tiki Bar, one of my favorite haunts. Raylene homeschooled her kids. I had piled the books up and left them by the door, so I’d remember to get them to her.

After I got the fans started up and the place began to cool down, I pulled out my collection of near-completed syllabi. Four courses this semester, one of them brand new. Yuck. While it was indeed better to burn out than rust out, I could have done with a little more rest and oxidation.

I worked out the updates for the first three classes, and then tackled the new one. Inspiration hit me, and I thought of a topic for a lecture that would round things out nicely and get me the basis for a paper that I promised to present later in the fall. I got a tingly feeling at this bit of deluxe recycling. No, not recycling. Multiple use and good planning. Yay, me.

The lights went out. The fan blades became visible as they slowed to a halt. The CD player died.

“Seven variations on six filthy words!” Deep breath; no problem, I’d prepared for this. I turned off the lights and the fans and the radio. My computer was running on its battery, and I’d squirreled away some bottles of water to keep me going a little longer.

I kept at it for another two hours and made some good progress, but it was getting hot up there. Moving downstairs was not an option—I’d be way too distracted by the work that I hoped was going on—but outside…I was never good at working outside, and besides my battery was running low now. I backed up my work and then the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Em, it’s Meg. Are you going to be on campus any time soon?”

“Um, not sure. Anything wrong? You sound anxious.”

“I am, I guess. I wanted your opinion on something.”

“Can’t do it over the phone?”

“Not really. It’s not…about anything…you know. It’s the wedding.”

“Okay. But I’m not sure what I can do about that.” I glanced over at my clock, a battered and battery-run near antique that had also seen use in the basement and barn. “Actually, I could use someplace with power; we’re out here. I’ll see you in my office in an hour?”

“That would be great!” The relief in Meg’s voice made me wonder whether my student had been telling me the whole truth. “See you then.”

I gathered up my stuff, told Artie that I’d be about three hours, and called the alarm company to let them know that our power would be out for the day and they shouldn’t call in.

The trip took less time than usual, in part because the traffic was long gone, and partly because I was indulging in my latest bad habit of driving too fast. My first new-new car, a sound and eager engine that didn’t shudder over sixty-five, and suddenly, I had discovered my inner speed-demon. Okay, maybe it wasn’t so much as a walk on the wild side as edging one toe over the line, but it was a small escape.

I got there early enough to dodge into the library and find one of the books I needed to check for my class. Ha! Another week and it would have been on reserve or out. As much as I love teaching, I get so much more work done when there aren’t any students around. Now was a great time to be on campus, as everyone there was trying to prepare for the mob scene that was freshman orientation.

A woman hurried from the library to the Fine Arts building; something about her long black hair was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I craned to get another look at her, but a pack of male students heading down Maple Walk erupted with bawdy laughter, and I scurried up the stairs to the department to avoid them.

I was on my way to my office when I heard a raised voice down the hall by the main office. Veering down the other corridor, I was confronted by the unlikely spectacle of our department administrator, Chuck, exchanging words with my colleague from the Art History Department, Dora Sarkes-Robinson. It was her voice I’d heard. The contrast between the two couldn’t have been more marked: Chuck was a white, five foot hippy in granny glasses, and Dora was black and she towered over him, an imposing figure of a queen crowned with a lattice of intricately woven braids. Chuck was wearing a hemp shirt and a pair of army surplus pants. His hair was in dreads, possibly last combed shortly after his birth, which had to have been just after the Bicentennial. Dora was dressed in something impeccable and Italian; Cerruti, I was willing to bet, only because she told me so repeatedly, and it was something the gods themselves would have envied.

“Huh, so your paper’s on Raphael Santi, then?” Chuck, whose pronunciation usually reminded me more of West Coast surfers than his actual Maine upbringing, spoke the Italian carefully.

“Yes.” Dora seemed amused, which in itself was reason for curiosity. And reason for caution. She highjacked other people’s lives when it suited her, and generally carried on
her own affairs with the noble disregard of a Medici pope. I had reason to know this for a fact: Dora’s insinuation of herself into my affairs several years ago had involved me in a criminal investigation and led me in the right direction to identifying a killer. Two killers, to be exact.

“And you think that it was him, and not that other guy—”

“Perugino, an influence in his early years,” she corrected, a slight trace of irritation barely concealed. Raphael was Dora’s specialty, kind of the way architecture was Frank Lloyd Wright’s. And she was used to getting her own way.

“—who was responsible for the painting? Neat!” Chuck’s enthusiasm was as genuine as it was all encompassing. I think that part of the reason he was a sixth-year senior was that the classes at Caldwell College provided Chuck with an endless kaleidoscope of neat experiences. For my part, I thought Caldwell was probably the safest place for him: The world wasn’t ready for Chuck, and he wasn’t ready for it. Plus, on a more selfish note, despite his occasional trips to the outer rings of Saturn, he kept things going remarkably smoothly at the Anthropology Department.

“Yes.” Again, it was more of a cat watching a particularly playful mouse that characterized Dora’s response. “And now, may I have the slides?”

If Dora was at this stage, they’d been going at it for some time. Her patience—never Olympian—was wearing out, but interestingly, Chuck was immune to the signals that would have had the rest of us scurrying.

“Oh. No, sorry. I can’t let anyone who isn’t in the department take slides. Sorry.”

I watched as Dora drew herself up ever so slightly—this wouldn’t call for all her formidable force of personality—to respond. “Ah, I understand completely. But I need those slides. Surely you can make an exception.”

“Nope.” He shrugged and smiled. “Sorry. Rules.”

“Of course, naturally. But I’m sure the rules are more to keep the undergraduates from running amuck”—Dora wrinkled
her nose—“and getting their jammy fingerprints all over the slides. I’m certain that it doesn’t apply to the faculty.”

“Oh, especially to the faculty,” Chuck said, nodding emphatically. “You wouldn’t believe what some of them will do, given the chance. It’s like they didn’t learn how to share in kindergarten or something. They’ll hide things they think belong only to them, they’ll lie, they’ll sneak. Just like the sandbox.”

I watched the amusement leaching out of Dora like water out of a rusted-through bucket, and decided that maybe I could help. “Hey, Chuck. How’s it going? And, hello, Dora—how’s your summer been? Productive so far?”

“Emma!” Dora was pleased to see me, though probably more to do with the slides than anything else. “Perhaps you could help me. This—Chuck, is it?—won’t allow me to take a couple of slides from your slide collection. Now, it’s only a nice detail, but the ruins in the landscape are exactly the sort of thing I need to make my point about the influence of the Urbino countryside where Raphael grew up. A small thing, but just the touch I need to—”

I nodded soberly. “Chuck’s right. It’s not department policy to lend the slides.”

Chuck beamed at me. I beamed back. Then I saw Dora pulling herself together for a really good blast, and decided I would back off. I was too close to ground zero.

“But what if I checked them out, Chuck, took responsibility for them?” I said in a hurry.

“Well, I can’t really…but then…I have no way of knowing what you do with a slide once you check it out, do I, Professor Fielding?” Chuck gave me a big, theatrical wink. “And since you’re so good about turning your slides in when you’re done with them…I suppose it will be okay.”

He slid the key across his desk to me. I resisted sticking my tongue out at Dora, and she successfully held her own tongue, now that she was getting what she wanted. I tilted my head toward the slide library and she followed me.

“I suppose he took pleasure in that,” she said to me, when we were just out of earshot.

“Of course he did. Chuck likes being able to solve problems, especially when he can do it by the book.” I let us into the library, which was warm and stale and smelled of sunlight and undisturbed dust.

“No, I mean…” She frowned, even as she reached for the index I handed her.

“I know what you mean.”

“Or perhaps he was just being mulishly dense? Chuck—that’s not a name. It’s a cut of beef.”

I figured it mattered not a whit to her that his name was actually Charles Carlton Huxley III. “Chuck’s not dense, he just has a way of looking at things that isn’t always clear to the rest of us. He would have let you have the slides if you were affiliated with the department, but otherwise it wouldn’t have been fair to the rest of us, not with the start of semester around the corner.”

“He knew you were going to lend the slides to me. That doesn’t seem commensurate with his ‘fairness.’”

“You have to earn that brand of fairness with Chuck first.”

We found the slides and I extracted a promise from her to return them as soon as she had copies made. “Of course. I’ll catch our slide tech before he leaves tonight.”

And make him work late, I finished. But that was Dora’s domain and her people knew what to expect of her, and it was none of my business. We made our goodbyes, Dora promising to email me to meet her for coffee, then she swept off.

Ten minutes later, in my office, I was trying to make sense of two conflicting entries in a field log. Meg was there too, having a fit.

“I look like a human sacrifice waiting for the volcano,” the short, spiky-haired platinum blonde announced.

“I’ve already told you. You look gorgeous, the dress is beautiful,” I said, not looking up from the smudged papers I was trying to decipher.

“Don’t you think it looks a little too
ritualistic
?” she asked, standing on her toes, trying to see her backside in the tiny mirror hanging from the back of my office door.

I sighed. At first I was pleased to have the distraction of Meg showing off her wedding gown—the field notes seemed more than usually screwed up—but when after ten minutes she’d neither budged from my office nor stopped agonizing about the upcoming event, I decided she wasn’t listening to me anyway and went back to work. The problem with graduate students is that they overanalyze everything.

“Do you think the white is too…virginal?” she asked.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Meg!” I said, tossing my pen aside. “You’re supposed to look virginal! You’re supposed to look ritualistic! Unless you don’t want to—no one says you have to wear white these days!”

Meg gave me the wide Bambi eyes and I knew I’d gone over a line moved a little closer by her wedding nerves.

I sighed and tried again. “Look, that dress is fabulous on you: It’s short enough to be hip, the flapper cut and the lace are extremely elegant, and the fact that it was your great-grandmother’s is extremely good family karma. It doesn’t make your butt look big, it hints at cleavage, and Neal will be blown away. You can’t lose.”

“My butt looks big?” Meg asked apprehensively.

“I think you’d better change now,” I said, with all the patience I could muster through clenched teeth.

“I’m sorry, Emma. It’s not the dress,” she said, taking the overdress off.

No shit, I thought.

Whoever restored the dress did a great job, but Meg was pulling the underslip off at the same time, and I rushed over to help her before she ripped it.