Site Unseen

by Dana Cameron

  Rob, then, I guessed, chimed in. “Yeah, but no complex sentences until the second cup, and no problems till the pot’s rinsed out.”

  Huh, the smartass! I never thought of it that way, but then I wasn’t objective enough an observer at the critical times. I could have gotten away with the coffee-stained shirt—it was only going to get dirtier, after all—but seeing my trowel on my boots reminded me: I had senior faculty visiting today and needed to be as presentable as work would allow. My shoulders slumped as I realized I also needed to get going a little earlier so I could get the things organized for Tony’s visit that I hadn’t managed last night. I quickly unbuttoned my shirt and donned a clean one.

  I laced up my boots and gathered up my notebooks and maps, then threw a couple more books on the pile. I’d need pictures to show Tony Markham the sort of things we were looking for, as we hadn’t uncovered anything from the seventeenth century yet. With any luck, since we were so close to hitting the early surfaces, we might actually uncover some finds in time to really impress him. No sparing the lash today.

  But I decided that I’d better make time to have another cup of coffee. Just in case. Gear and notes ready in a pile to leave with me, I put my trowel on top of them and went back to the kitchen. As I sucked down that cup of coffee even quicker than the first, I wondered for the eleventy-seventh time who it was I should be nominating for beatification, the CEO of Starbucks or Juan Valdez himself.

  The students were making their lunches, and I slapped a sandwich together, thinking wistfully of Brian’s cooking. I’d been eating too many sandwiches lately. Then I watched as Alan scraped a microscopically thin layer of peanut butter across a slice of bread and put that into a Baggie. I’d suggested before that he needed more lunch, but he always said it was too hot to eat. I worried about the pinched look of his face. I said nothing, but shook my head and emptied the rest of the pot into my travel mug.

  “Let’s go, let’s go, guys,” I called out. “Lots of work today.”

  “You say that every day,” Dian said, reaching across the table for the pastrami.

  “And it’s true every day,” I agreed. I put my sandwich in the cooler, and noticed that there was more than lunch construction going on. I stifled a groan: It was way too early for sexual displays.

  Having leaned right across Rob to get the ingredients for her sandwich, Dian stretched to grab a new loaf of bread from on top of the fridge and then dropped the box of sandwich bags and bent over to retrieve them. Since Dian is built like a Hindu temple goddess, mostly luscious curves and brown curls, and since her cropped sweatshirt alternately rode up over her navel or gaped to reveal copious cleavage, she was guaranteed an audience. She looked up from her task, as if all innocence, and caught Rob staring. Looking straight at him, she licked the mustard off her knife. He dropped the apple he’d been holding, and it rolled away on the floor almost unnoticed.

  I shook my head in disbelief, but then resigned myself to the fact that most field crews are just simmering cauldrons of lust. Brian was right, though. I had no business interfering.

  “Fifteen minutes!” Neal yelled. “And keys! Who’s got the keys to the big truck?”

  “I do,” Alan said, tossing them to him. Neal threw them to me, and to my surprise, I snagged them one-handed. I just as quickly pitched them back to him.

  “I have to bring my car today,” I explained. “In case Professor Markham comes late, I don’t want to keep you guys. And I’m heading up early, to get a few things set up for him.”

  I also had an ulterior motive. Generally speaking, if I get a few more minutes of semiconscious decompression, I’m not so likely to get the cognitive bends. Today I could get a little more thinking done if I was driving on my own.

  “I’ll come with you, Emma,” Meg said unexpectedly. She already had her gear and lunch put together.

  I didn’t have time to argue. Shrugging, I said, “As long as you don’t mind classical music and a contemplative driver, because it is a nice day for a drive-by—”

  Meg flushed violently, and I continued as innocently as I could “—a nice drive by the river with Herr Beethoven. If you’re ready, then let’s get going.”

  I gave myself until we’d pulled off College Drive before I decided to examine last night’s reflections in the cold light of morning. Literally cold, I shivered and turned on the battered old Civic’s heat. Mornings are often chilly in Maine, no matter how warm the day shapes up to be, even in July.

  I turned up my sonatas, let muscle memory guide me toward the site, and settled back to think. Last night I’d realized that there were two things that still particularly bothered me about my unfortunate discovery of Augie Brooks. The first was the awful sensation of actually, literally stumbling over his body. I’d been walking along the beach below the site, looking up at the eroding bank for any sign of the seventeenth-century English habitation, when my foot struck something soft but solid. I instantly thought of a life preserver lost on the beach, but it was far too heavy for that. I looked down slowly, hoping that it wasn’t a dead seal—they usually were farther down the river, closer to its mouth and the ocean—and was grateful to see a dark red sweatshirt, half buried in the sand and tangled with seaweed. I thought it was something lost from one of the hundreds of sailboats and motorboats that travel the river until I saw how the flies swarmed around the bundle when I’d disturbed it. When I pulled my foot back, the body shifted and the sickly sweet smell of deteriorating flesh assailed me all at once. I gagged and stepped back. Please be a dead seal, please be a dead seal, I repeated to myself in the eternity it took for me to look closer. But I had already known the truth in an instant. I was just not willing to believe that I had found a human body.

  The odd thing was that, after I convinced my breakfast to stay put, I’d mostly been curious, rather than horrified or nauseated. The fact is that, in our sanitized twenty-first-century lives, most of us seldom encounter a corpse outside of a hospital or a funeral parlor. The man, for male the body was, looked strangely out of place, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why he didn’t wake up, prodded by my heavy boot, or at least complain about me disturbing him. I stood staring at him for I don’t know how many moments, not touching, but rather cataloguing what I saw, as if by analyzing what I observed I could make some sense of it.

  The figure was facedown, left at the high-tide line. He was a short, stoutish, older man, say about sixty, based on the age spots, wearing a red sweatshirt and dark blue work trousers, the sort my mother calls “janitor pants.” His dingy sweat socks and tennis shoes had seen better days. An overgrown fringe of thinning gray was all that was left of his hair, and I was grateful that his poor face was turned and half buried in the sand, for apart from some scary-looking bruises, when I noticed his shriveled white hand, I saw that the seagulls had been trying to make a meal of them. The mere thought of what the birds might have done to the soft tissue of his eyes and lips caused me to stumble back, and I decided suddenly that I should be initiating the modern rituals of death. I had hastened back up to the site, as calmly as I could, past the students, and went into the big gray house to call the authorities. Later I’d been told his name: Augie Brooks.

  “Uh, Emma—”

  Meg’s warning woke me up to the present; I had been idling at a green light. I hurried through the intersection and picked up the thread of my thoughts a little more cautiously as I hit the highway.

  I suppose that in a way I am constantly prepared to find bodies, although I expect that they will have been dead for a much longer time and be nicely, cleanly fleshless. I’ve worked on human remains in the field on many occasions, and I believe that I’ve become pretty good at remembering that the bones were once people, with all their attendant worries and hopes, good qualities and bad. I try to remember that their probate inventories, letters, diaries, and bills were not created just to be fodder for my research, but were real parts of many lives. Folks consider me pretty sensitive when it comes to dealing wi
th the dead, but I have to admit, it is the immediacy of flesh on bone that brings that humanity much more forcefully to mind. Knowing a name doesn’t hurt either.

  Signaling to turn off to a secondary road, I mentally shook my head. After all, I’d just been walking, trying to sort out some site questions, and happened upon this quiet, almost private scene, purely by chance. A decision to walk down the dirt road instead of the pebbly beach and I would have never seen it. There was the second thing that bothered me: Why did Augie prey on my mind so? I didn’t know him and, really, hadn’t been terribly upset by the mere fact of my discovery.

  Finally I decided that I resented his proximity to Greycliff, a place that meant so much to me all through my life and was now the focus of my professional scrutiny as well. You get protective about any site you’ve worked on, no matter how scrubby-looking it is or uninformative it turns out to be. Never mind that this had occurred practically at the front doorstep of my friend Pauline Westlake, who happened to own the site.

  That rational explanation didn’t sit quite right, however. There was a pricking in my thumbs that persisted in the face of all that good sense. Forget it, Emma, I scolded myself, there’s work to do. As I pulled down the last, pine tree–lined road that led to the site, I reached the conclusion, not for the first time, that I think too much for my own good.

  “So, what’s up?” I said, finally addressing Meg. “Any particular reason you wanted to join me?”

  “Nothing much,” she answered. “Just wanted to get out a little early. I think I’m changing levels, and I wanted to get a look at the dirt in the direct sunlight, before we get the shadows.”

  “Good enough. You’re close to Dian’s depth, so keep a sharp eye out.”

  “I always keep a sharp eye out,” came the prompt reply. Not shirty, but a little too self-assured, perhaps.

  I raised an eyebrow but kept my response mild. “It’s just an expression, but we are getting close to the seventeenth-century levels, and one careless swipe of the trowel could do a lot of damage.”

  “Right.”

  “You can get right to it. I’ll check in with Pauline and then get my stuff sorted out for Tony, er, Professor Markham.”

  We pulled into the drive and got out. As trite as it sounds, the smell of salt air and fresh dirt really has a powerful effect on me, like a call to battle. If a shower strips you down emotionally at the end of the day, when you can only see the huge amount of work that still remains to be done and the problems you still haven’t solved, then the arrival on a site equally brings the sense of new beginnings, the opportunity to figure it all out, another chance to solve all the mysteries.

  I’d just grabbed my notebook when I noticed a black car, some sort of Camaro or Corvette or something, drive slowly up to the house. It almost came to a stop, but then suddenly speeded up and tore off up the road. I frowned: This end of the road was well away from the beach that attracted so many tourists, and the locals were usually much more cautious about speeding around the twists and turns. Guy must be lost, I thought.

  As I walked down the driveway I could see that Pauline was already on the porch of the large gray house that was built before the turn of the century, and named Greycliff for the gray granite outcropping behind it. Pauline professed to hate the name, bestowed by the sentimental, Scot-loving Victorians who’d built the place, but unless she wanted to take a hacksaw to the fancy wrought-iron fence plate that spelled out the name, she was stuck with it. No one could have had the heart to undo that beautiful ironwork, though, no matter how good the cause.

  Even from a distance one could see that Pauline Westlake was tall and slender and indomitable. Her erect posture had, in the past, occasionally been echoed by a silent armada of lanky Siamese cats, who periodically aligned themselves around their mistress, as if subjecting her guests to the same sharp scrutiny that she was too polite to make obvious. They were gone now. When the last one, the patriarch, had been carried off by one of the eagles that soared over the river, she hadn’t had the heart to replace him.

  I had first met Pauline when I was eight, the age at which my grandfather believed that children ought to start being introduced into the adult world. She was already nearly sixty then and she’d scared the hell out of me. My mistake had been in assuming that she was not kind simply because she’d not spoken down to me, a child. I eventually learned over the years that although Pauline did not tolerate silliness, she had a great capacity for good humor and, on occasion, an impulsive sense of daring that took my breath away.

  The passage of time had little altered my friend (surely too pallid a term for our relationship, but we had negotiated our relationship carefully over the years and earned the finer connotations of the word). The years only appeared to have distilled her to an even more essential form of herself. Pauline’s hair was whiter, and still carefully bobbed to just above her chin, her posture not a whit relaxed from its military bearing. She still dressed with crisp orderliness in the jeans and men’s shirts she’d worn since time immemorial. Pauline had always been a remarkable woman, and even now seemed to possess the secret, if not to eternal youth, then to eternal vitality. She’d done nearly as much as Grandpa had in making me the adult I am today, by sharing her tales of travel in far-off lands and her love of the objects she brought back from those solitary journeys.

  “Morning,” Pauline greeted me. She held up the mug that I’d come to think of as my own. “Coffee?”

  “No, thanks,” I said as I took the mug. “I hear caffeine is bad for you.” I sat down on the swing next to her and drank deeply. “Oooh, plasma.”

  “Close. Jamaican Blue Mountain,” Pauline said. Her words were Beacon Hill Yankee, with the patina of antique family money. I loved listening to her speak.

  We rocked back and forth for a moment, enjoying the morning sounds of birds and wind on the river, which we could see in an unparalleled view from the porch. We could see Meg beginning to work below us, but were too far away to hear the sound of her trowel on the soil. On the far bank, a few scattered houses peeped through a dense, dark green wall of trees. On the river, moored sailboats bobbed lazily on the wake of two lobster boats chugging past. The sun was rising quickly now, burning the mist off the river.

  “What’s the plan for today?” Her words were the same every morning, and if they had not been, I would have worried.

  “We’re getting down through the eighteenth century, I think. If we get through that burn layer I’ve been seeing—you remember?—we may be close to Fort Providence. Today could be the day,” I said carefully, with no other emphasis.

  “That’s something, isn’t it?” Pauline said, staring out at the water. “An English site that was settled before Jamestown? That predates the Pilgrims at Plymouth by almost two decades? And I have a front-row seat to it all.”

  That thought jarred my memory and my worries of the morning. “Paul? Weren’t you bothered by…what happened yesterday?”

  “What happened yesterday?”

  At first I thought she was teasing me, but then I realized Pauline would never joke like that. “The body? Down by the shore?”

  “Oh no.” Pauline shook her head. “No. Dear me, Emma, from what you told me of it, I’ve seen much worse, and they had him all neatly covered up by the time the ambulance came, so I didn’t even see that. And Augie Brooks? It’s a sad thing, certainly, but anyone who knew him would have bet that he would have come to just this sort of end. Really, we were prepared for it after they found his motorboat without him in it. The man wasted every chance everyone, including God, ever gave him.” She looked at me. “You are bothered, though, aren’t you?”

  I shrugged. “I guess I was wondering: Why here?”

  Pauline laughed. “Well, why not here? They say if you stay in one place long enough, the entire world comes to your door, and if I’m lucky enough to have Fort Providence, then surely one drunken old fool should come as no surprise. Augie Brooks was never handy on the water; too nervous.” She s
ighed. “He must have been on quite a bender.”

  “I couldn’t see everything,” I said hesitantly. The deputies had said it was an accident, but it looked worse than that to me. I couldn’t shake off the memory of those bruises. “But from what I could see, his face was…” I decided there was no point in finishing.

  Pauline patted my arm. “I’m sorry you had to be the one, but the way I see it, better Augie should land here than downriver, on the public beach, for some poor tourist to find. This way we can take care of our own.”

  “That’s what the officer said.” I watched the fair-weather clouds glide over the Point and realized that I needed to get to work.

  Pauline nodded her approval. “That Dave Stannard’s the best kind of man. Not too pleased with his badge and his title, like some sheriffs we’ve had. Sensible, fair. And his wife’s a dear, one of the best cooks I’ve ever met.”

  It was my turn to laugh as I got off the swing. “And that’s got exactly what to do with his qualities as a cop?”

  “Sheriff. Nothing, only it’s nice to see good people with good people every once in a while. Speaking of which, when will Brian be by for a visit?”

  “I hope in a week or two. He’s pretty busy right now, something big’s happening at the lab, I guess.” That reminded me. “Oh, I wanted to give you the heads-up. I’ve got a visitor stopping by today, a sahib from the department, Dr. Tony Markham. So if you see anyone wandering around…”

  Pauline nodded. “I’ll send him your way. As if anyone would mistake what’s happening down there for a polo match. I’ll be down later.” She reached out her hand for my mug, and I reluctantly gave it to her.

  I stood watching Meg and chewing my lip. Pauline gave me a gentle push in the small of the back.

  “Go on. No more brooding over Augie. Go find my fort.”

  On the scrubby lawn below the house and toward the river was The Site. My site. Even though I had visited a thousand times as a kid, it was now mine eternally, because I had put spade to earth there. All my history in the house, and all that history waiting for me under the lawn—it made me dizzy to think about it.