Site Unseen

by Dana Cameron

  “Oh yeah. Marty told me all about that.”

  Kam choked on the inhale and began coughing violently.

  “Just kidding,” I added.

  “Hmmm. Well, I know for a fact that you’ve driven Brian to distraction on more than one occasion with this nagging self-doubt of yours.” Kam had recovered himself for the moment and continued in a jocular tone. “Frankly, I’ve always recommended a good sound beating, but he seemed to think that he could reason with you. Maybe hearing it from someone who doesn’t have his obvious biases will help. Otherwise I’ve got the leg irons and the riding crop in the car,” he said, and stretched indolently. “Nope, no more of this soft, lovey-dovey Western nonsense for you, m’dear. As Brian’s best man, it is my duty to help him through these little ups and downs.” Kam sounded smug and secure in his evaluation of the subject.

  I smirked. I’m sure you think you’re a real terror, you big muffin, I thought, but Marty’d knock you sideways if she ever heard you talk like that.

  Aloud I said, “So what else has Brian told you that he shouldn’t have? You two are the worst gossips.”

  “Well, he never told me about that fellow down by the church,” Kam said lightly. “Emma, you were scaring me. Who was he?”

  I swore inwardly. I had hoped that because I left out any reference to Billy, Kam would have forgotten about him. Looking back on the situation, I marveled at how far out of hand I had let myself get. The problem was that I understood completely why I had welcomed that confrontation. I chose my words carefully, now convinced that Billy’s drives past the site had more to do with his erstwhile friend Augie’s death than anything about me.

  “Billy and I had a…run-in…ages ago,” I said. “He’s mean, he’s stupid, and he’s vindictive, and since then he’s believed—still believes, I guess, if he actually remembers me too—that I wronged him. He’s probably certifiable. After the week I’ve had, when he nearly bashed into me, something just…snapped. The fact that it was him, that he is such a maggot, just made the prospect of…lashing out…so much more tempting.” I shrugged, downplaying the affair as much as I dared. “What can I say? I lost it. Sorry I snarled at you. Like I said, it’s been a rough week.”

  “I see,” he said, nodding. “And once again, someone stepped in and did what you thought you should have been able to do yourself. But my God, Em, he must have had fifty pounds on you, and who knows what kind of previous experience! Unless you’ve had a secret life scrapping in biker bars, you could have been killed! What were you going to do, debate him, barehanded, into submission?”

  “Well, not entirely barehanded.” I went back into my room and brought out the light summer suit jacket I’d worn that morning, drawing forth my “surprise” to show him. It was an antique hat pin I’d been wearing as a stickpin, eight inches of its shaft and razor-sharp point concealed in the lapel of my jacket. I twirled it around so that the deep blue stones, in the shape of a fleur-de-lis, shone in the dull light.

  Funny I should have this today, I thought. I wore it for Pauline.

  I continued out loud. “Don’t forget he was drunk out of his mind too, and I was really wound up. Besides, this is a non-issue. You showed up, my knight in shining armor, and whether I got to bash him, and despite my sarcasm, I am glad to see you.” I kissed him quickly on the cheek, and squeezed his arm.

  Kam received that tribute, as all else in life, with equanimity.

  “Besides,” I said, “what made you think you could take Billy, aside from your insufferable male ego?”

  “Besides the fact that I did? You forget, woman, that I learned—”

  “Yes, yes, I know, from Himalayan lamas…” I laughed, anticipating another line of charming bullshit.

  He leaned back and stretched luxuriously. “No, impudent one. At Oxford, I earned my blue pummeling weak-chinned youths from Cambridge. C’mon, put on some real clothes, and I’ll take you to dinner before Brian gets in.”

  Chapter 14

  “OKAY, HERE’S THE DEAL—” SHERIFF STANNARD BEGAN Friday morning.

  Once again I was sitting in his office, rubbing my head wearily. Brian had come into Boston late Thursday night and after we discussed it, we agreed that he should come up to help me move back to our place for the three weeks or so before school began and I had to move back to my apartment on campus. The students had already packed up everything and left.

  “You with me, Dr. Fielding?” He interrupted my distracted thoughts.

  I nodded.

  Stannard leaned back in his swivel chair and stared at the ceiling. “I’ve got a real problem. On one hand, there’s a bunch of circumstantial evidence pointing to you in Pauline Westlake’s death: the will, your proximity to that death and that of Grahame Tichnor, and the fact that you have access to a couple of unusual sources of information about poisons—”

  My jaw dropped. “I beg your pardon?”

  The sheriff nodded. “It didn’t help your case any when I found out what your husband does for a living—”

  “But Brian works for a pharmaceutical company—” I stopped.

  He looked at me grimly and nodded. “There’s very little difference between what you might call a medicine and what you might call a poison. The other is that one of your students presented you with a thesis last year on Native American plant use.”

  I opened my mouth and then closed it again, trying to think. “Alan’s thesis was really more a caloric study than a focus on medicinal plants, though. Everyone on the faculty read it.”

  “Well, when we had our little talk, he seemed to know quite a bit about the local plant life and what it was used for. I don’t think he’s a bad sort,” he added, “but something’s troubling him, for sure.”

  I threw my hands up in the air.

  “The other thing working against you is that you had a grudge against Grahame Tichnor. Even if you didn’t have anything to do with the Westlake death, you had plenty of reasons to murder him, maybe even revenge, if you really believed that he had killed Ms. Westlake. And there’s also the possibility that you killed her and then killed him and planted evidence to make it appear as though he had done it. If Dr. Moretti’s right and Tichnor died about the same time as the fire was set, you and your students would really be the only ones who would recognize the meaning of that brown clay statuette. I mean, who else would have collected that batch of things? No ordinary house thief did this, that’s clear.”

  “Okay, that’s it. I want a lawyer,” I announced, jumping up. “I’m way out of my depth here—” I remembered Brian’s warning and realized that I was in hotter water than I ever imagined possible.

  Stannard shook his head. “Sit down. You don’t need a lawyer. I said that was one hand, and I’ve got to consider it. There’s a lot that works for you, even in the face of all this circumstantial evidence. For one, you couldn’t have known about the changed will. I called Boston. The lawyer told me that the codicil was dreamed up right then, that day, spur of the moment, they cooked it up to reflect your common interest with Ms. Westlake.”

  I shook my head sadly.

  “And according to the phone company, there were no phone calls from Boston to the dorm you’ve all been staying in. So you wouldn’t have known that she was leaving early or that she had included you in her will, and frankly I can’t see her just calling you up and saying, ‘Hey, look what I just did for you.’”

  I had to nod in agreement.

  “Some people might have done that, but she was one of the old sort, everything all done quietly, discreetly. She might have had you in for tea in a couple of years, and told you then, or wrote you a letter or something. So that motive doesn’t work for me.”

  I had to admit he was good at this. Paying attention to things like that.

  The sheriff continued, pacing the length of his office. “I can’t believe, even if you had known, that you would have been stupid enough to do it while in the middle of your project, with a shovel. That would have been lunacy, and that is
out of your character—”

  How about me killing Pauline being out of character? I thought bitterly.

  “I’ve confirmed that you were at home until late Sunday night, and then the students vouch for you until morning. And besides, Miss Westlake was old; why not just wait?”

  “I’m up for tenure in three years,” I said, committing care to the wind. “What if I didn’t get it before she died?”

  Stannard was adamant. “Nope, I’m not convinced. I’ve been doing some calling around, asking about this work you’ve been doing. I checked with a couple of folks who are experts in this stuff—” He ruffled through a thick file folder and found the names. “There’s a Dr. Fairchild down at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and a Professor Wilson in North Carolina—”

  “You talked with Laurel and Rob?” I asked, astonished. The man was prying into every corner of my life and I was feeling more than a little exposed, despite my innocence.

  He nodded Both confirmed the significance of this project. Both said that someone like you, with your qualifications and skills, would have no problem getting tenure with a discovery of this magnitude. Both also were vehement in protesting your innocence.”

  He carefully closed his file and made a wry little face. “Robert Wilson was quite polite about it. Dr. Fairchild…was not. She’s got quite a mouth on her.”

  I smiled in spite of myself, imagining what she might have said. Good for you, Laurel, I thought.

  Stannard continued. “So I’m not accusing you of anything. I can’t prove that you did it. Motive is what tells us where to look. And if I don’t believe you did it, then I have to examine what other motives are there that might explain why this happened. All I know is that for whatever reason, you are connected with both of these deaths, both of these people. What I need to do is find out if they are connected. Right now, you are my only link in that direction. You are going to be the one who leads me to the answers in all of this.”

  I shivered, remembering my own thoughts on the beach.

  The sheriff stared at me for a few heartbeats, and then, as if resolving something, pushed his seat back resolutely. “Okay, come on.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I want you to see something. It won’t take long.” Stannard got up and quickly left the office. I had to scramble to catch up with him.

  “Why take me?”

  He stopped in the hallway and studied me closely. “I like the way you look at things. Like that figurine. You see things other people wouldn’t think of.”

  We went out to the parking lot, where he unlocked the new Cherokee I remembered he drove out to the site. The interior smelled of Armor All and coffee, with no sign at all that the pine tree–shaped air freshener was contributing anything to the olfactory melange. A plastic travel mug sat in a holder on the dash, and seeing it immediately made me wish for my midmorning cup; I sensed a caffeine-deprivation headache lurking in the wings, waiting to make its debut.

  Stannard took a sip and replaced the cup. We had been in his office for at least an hour. Although I remembered the collection of mugs on my desks at work and home, half filled with coffee-derived biology experiments, I reckoned that if he wasn’t even going to offer to share, I didn’t need to take any moral high ground. “Isn’t that a little old to be drinking?” I asked crabbily, wishing I’d thought to stop at Dunkin Donuts on my way in.

  “Naw, just got it this morning.” He smiled broadly and made a point of taking another big slug. “Now it’s iced coffee. Like some music?”

  Before I could reply, he shoved a CD into the player. Soft, electronic music overlaid with an eerie, drifting voice echoed through the Jeep’s speakers as the truck’s large tires dug into bumpy track.

  “What is this?” The music grated on me, another high note lingering and morphing into further undulating passages. I picked up the jewel case, trying to divert myself from the morning’s events.

  “Enya,” he answered. “I think it’s very relaxing. My kids like it too, they say it reminds them of fairy stories. What do you think?”

  Another cycle of repetitive piano notes droned on. “It’s very nice,” I said, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster.

  Dave Stannard laughed out loud. “You are one rotten liar!”

  I relaxed a bit. It was true, and for once it might be a point in my favor.

  Sheriff Stannard drove with an efficient carelessness that came from familiarity; quickly and with purpose. “I said before I believe that there’s more going on here, and the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced of it. We just don’t know who or why.”

  Finally coming around to my way of thinking, I thought.

  “You are the key to this, even if neither of us knows how just yet.” He peered closely at me. “You don’t happen to know, do you?”

  “No, but I’m damned if I don’t find out.” The choice of words made me shudder. I knew what I had to do.

  The sheriff stopped rather abruptly at an intersection and turned to me. “Now, hang on. Let’s talk about that for a minute. This is not an invitation for you to run around and conduct your own investigation. In fact, the first I hear that you’re bothering people, we’re going to have a little chat, maybe with consequences.”

  I shrugged. “So what kind of invitation is it?”

  “All I’m saying is that you knew Pauline Westlake better than any of us,” he said finally. “Someone seems to have gone to a lot of trouble to make you look like the guilty party. There’s a connection, and by occasionally running things past you, to see how they might fit in, I hope to find out what’s going on here.”

  I nodded quickly. “Put together a sort of contextual framework, to hang the facts on.”

  He nodded, reluctantly. “Remember what I said about taking the bit in your own teeth.”

  We drove in silence. I realized after another ten minutes that we were heading to the site. My heart pounded—it was the first time I had been back to Greycliff since the fire, and I prayed I would be able to control my emotions.

  “We’re here,” Stannard announced. “I’m assuming that you’ll need to do something, to finish up your dig. Let’s have a look and I’ll let you know what I want you to leave be.” We got out and walked down the driveway to the site.

  The light on the site struck me as odd, and it took me a minute to figure out that there was a large empty space in the place where most of the house had been. Certainly there was still a hulking shell of charred rubble that would remain until the probate was worked out, but it was disconcerting to have that extra sunlight where there had been solid wooden walls for longer than my lifetime. I felt a tightening in my throat, but it occurred to me that I would have felt worse if the house had stood intact without Pauline, its genius loci. I couldn’t have borne it if Greycliff had faded into anonymity with another family in it and me never to darken its doorway again.

  The sheriff’s voice dragged me back to the business at hand. “We’ve already been over the lawn, and looked in the pits that you dug, and it’s fine if you want to continue to fill them in, or collect your tarps or what have you.”

  “We haven’t done any backfilling yet,” I said absently. “We’ll probably do some drawings of the walls of the units and then backfill them before the winter,” I said, glancing around at the site. I could barely remember when we had been out here last. “Will it be a problem if we came out over a couple of weekends, to wrap up? The weather hasn’t turned yet, and even with classes starting soon, I’ll be able to get some willing bodies out here. But…” I paused worriedly. “What’s going to become of the site? Will I still be able to work on it until it’s sold, or whatever?”

  Stannard nodded. “I think so. And I think that you won’t have any problem with coming back. The land has been given to the state. I don’t know what the logistics of it are, but my guess is that it will be protected as a historic site. Another part of the codicil.”

  I nodded, marveling again at Pau
line’s forethought. It was positively spooky.

  By this time we had reached the southernmost of the stillopened units, those with the earliest material that had been found so far. I stopped short and lifted back the blue sheet, not realizing that I was pulling back a shroud.

  “What the hell is this?” I sputtered, gesturing at the excavated area. I whipped back the tarp from Meg’s trench.

  Where had once been uniformly excavated trenches with razor-sharp walls was an unholy mess. The excavations had been rudely expanded from the original works, and the backfill thrown into the already open pits, destroying the critical stratigraphic information in the surrounding area.

  Someone had torn up the site. Somebody had been looking for something.

  “Did your people do this? Please, tell me you didn’t do this—” I didn’t wait for an answer. “Do you have any idea how much work was lost here? The whole reason for working so slowly, so bloody carefully, is that we need to record where everything was found! There was a point to all this, you know!” I was practically stomping my feet, but the sheriff just stood there, appraising the wreckage.

  I swore acidly. “I mean, why bother putting the tarp back over it? If you’re going to turn my project, the most important site north of Jamestown, into the freaking mosh pit at Woodstock, why bother trying to keep the rain out? This is the most sensitive, the most critical, the most important area on the whole site! Why not just get a small tactical nuke and clean it off down to the rock ledge! This…this…this…oh hell!”

  It was too much. I was too outraged to form another complete thought. I stomped off downslope to get away from the disaster area, began peeling up the plastic in other areas to check for damage.

  “We didn’t do it.” Stannard called, watching me interestedly. “It was like this when we got here.”

  It took a moment for his words to sink in. “What?” I said impatiently. “Christ, just look at this mess! At least it’s not much further than the top couple…What did you say?” I halted my inspection of the site.