More Bitter Than Death

by Dana Cameron

  “What’s wrong with you?” Carla demanded. “You choking on something?”

  Lissa tried without much luck to compose herself. “Me? No.”

  “Then why is your face all screwed up like that?”

  “Excuse me,” Lissa said, and bolted from the room. I heard the ladies room door open, and gales of laughter gradually suffocating as it closed.

  “Well, she can talk and run, so she’s not going to choke to death,” Carla said. “Sometimes I think Lissa’s crazier than a shithouse rat.”

  I introduced myself to the only person who was new to me, a middle-aged guy who looked like the caricature of an accountant—receding hairline, on the tall, slightish side, bad suit. The very picture of a pensive, butt-puckered corporate bean-counter.

  “William S. Widmark,” he said, shaking my hand. “I’m not here because I’ve got something, but because my engineering company has just acquired Northeastern Consulting and my colleague is presenting a paper right now. Dr. DuBois was kind enough to let me sit in.”

  “You’ll find it’s a lot of fun, very informative,” I said, trying to think of what I could say that would give him a good impression of archaeologists and what we do. You never could tell what was going to happen to the archaeologists when a bigger company swallowed up theirs. The seats were filling up, so I returned to my chair.

  Michelle came in and slid into the seat next to me. “You’re saving this for me, aren’t you, love?”

  “And no one else,” I replied.

  Brad walked in and overheard us, and gave a startled double take. “You got something you want to tell me, Em? Michelle?”

  “No, Brad,” Michelle replied. “You got something you want to tell me?”

  He shook his head, took his place, and looked around the table, counting to himself. Brad was the de facto moderator because he’d assumed the role the first time, six years ago, and we needed one. He was good enough at it, but certainly did make a big deal out of a small occasion. I had to admit, though, it helped to have someone do the dirty work of keeping us all in order.

  “I think we’re short two,” he said. “I’m expecting Jay Whitaker. And Bea Carter responded to my email and said she was going to join us.” He shrugged, and we all exchanged glances; Bea was perennially late and notorious for being a flake of galactic proportions. “Well, we’ll get started and they can jump in when they get here. As usual, we will start to my left and go clockwise. Chris, what have you got for us?”

  Chris brought out a piece of pottery.

  “Looks like redware, Chris,” Michelle said. “Local? New England?”

  “Yeah, it is, but have a look at the inclusions.” He pointed to the tiny bits of pebble and shell that were incorporated into the paste of the fragment. “My idea is that the inclusions are a little different from the other stuff we’ve found locally, and since I think we might actually have some Native people working in the neighborhood we’re exploring now, I was wondering whether they might be using some Indian techniques and applying them in making the Anglo-American forms that their neighbors would have been used to.”

  “Umm, sounds a little dicey,” Brad said skeptically, “unless you’ve got hard proof they were actually Indians. I mean, you get all kinds of variation of temper and inclusions, depending where you are—”

  “See what they’re doing?” I whispered to Widmark. “They start off with what they know, and try to expand from there, based on other evidence. It’s kind of like how detectives work.”

  He shot me a startled, puzzled look. “Oh. Okay.”

  I turned back to the discussion; if he wasn’t interested, he shouldn’t have bothered coming.

  Then Kelly Booker brought out a small lump of metal; it seemed to be brass to judge from the corrosion: there were still traces of greenish corrosion, though she’d cleaned it up nicely enough. After a moment, it was obvious that it was a button and that there was lettering and a date on it, some of which read: “638” and then “ourable Art.”

  “If we could see it better, it would say sixteen thirty-eight, and ‘Ancient and Honourable Artillery,’” Lissa said promptly.

  “But it’s from a farm that dates to the middle part of the eighteen hundreds,” Kelly said doubtfully. “The context is probably eighteen sixty, but I suppose it could have been an heirloom someone lost.”

  “It was, but it’s a nineteenth-century button,” Lissa explained. “The U.S. Army issued them right at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to commemorate their roots in the seventeenth century.”

  “You could try looking it up in a text, Kelly. Any text,” Noreen said. She was looking out the window. “You would have seen it’s not four hundred years old.”

  Kelly nodded. “Well, yeah, I didn’t think it looked that early—the shape is all wrong—but I was cleaning the bag with this in it right as I was leaving, and it was so cool, I figured I’d bring it with the other stuff Dr. Marlatt sent with me.”

  Noreen pursed her lips, irritated to be troubled with so obvious a problem.

  I couldn’t resist poking at her a little. “The great thing about the roundtable is that it is easy for someone else to identify what you’ve got right away, and then the problem is solved.”

  “Moving on,” Brad said hastily. “Michelle, what have you got for us?”

  Jay came in then, flushed, and apologetic. He grabbed a seat and tried to make himself as unobtrusive as possible, but that just made things worse, and he took a while to catch his breath. Still, it was good seeing him try to make an effort with the professional aspects of the conference, rather than chasing parties the whole weekend.

  Michelle had a textile fragment from a National Park Service site; none of us could identify it, but a couple of people suggested contacts. I had some pottery from Fort Providence that Brad confirmed was French; Carla suggested a book that had illustrations of the forms. And so it went, until everyone had had a turn, everyone a little better informed, a little more enlightened.

  As we packed up, Noreen approached me. “Hell, Emma, why do you have to encourage them with that small stuff? We’re here to get some serious work done.”

  “Kelly seemed pretty serious to me,” I said, my hackles rising. “And it solved her problem, made her happy, and didn’t cost anyone anything. Except maybe a little patience.”

  Noreen remained unconvinced. “Speaking of which, I’m starting to lose mine with that other little noodge of yours. She keeps trying to get me to talk about a project that was over years ago. I keep trying to tell her it’s not something I can remember offhand, but she won’t stop pestering me. And I’m not the only one—Duncan Thayer actually lost his temper with her. Would you speak to her?”

  “Which little noodge are you talking about?” I asked, but I suspected I knew. And I really would kill Duncan if he’d been mean to Katie.

  “Katie something. I just keep thinking of her as Katie Car Alarm, the way she keeps harping and harping on the Pelletier site. Do me a favor, do us all a favor. Tell her to calm down.”

  “Katie Bell. I’ll have a word with her. Don’t worry, I’ve got a copy of the Pelletier report. I’ll lend her my copy, so she won’t bother you anymore.”

  “Good.” She brushed past me, and I had just enough self-restraint left to wait until she was out of the room before I stuck out my tongue.

  “She gives us Canucks a bad name,” Carla muttered. “What’s the hair across her ass?”

  “She and I just hate each other,” I said. “Always have.”

  “Why is that?”

  I thought about it for a minute. “You know, I can’t even remember. But I suspect her warm and obliging personality has something to do with it.” I turned to Lissa, who’d just finished with packing up a piece of creamware with a spectacularly ugly overglaze painted pattern. “And you, thanks a lot for leaving me to the wolves.”

  “There was just one wolf. Is it better to have two of us miserable, instead of one?”

  “I could have use
d a little cover there.”

  “Hey, it’s women and children first, as far as I’m concerned. You see those giant front teeth of hers? They’re used to shear the heads off her peons. I’m not getting anywhere within striking range. You guys want to get a drink?”

  I checked my watch; it was barely one, but what with conference time—brought on by being closed off from the rest of the world, with no natural light and irregular sleeping and eating—it felt much later. “Little early for me. What about some lunch?”

  “We signed up for the boxed lunches. Oh, lord, there’s Bea. And would you look at what she’s wearing? Bless her heart.”

  “Oh, there you all are!”

  Bea Carter was striding toward us, as if she’d finally caught us doing something illicit. Lissa was right; Bea was clad in complicated swaths of blue and green, over billowing trousers of the same material. Imagine a teal and turquoise tornado with red shoes. A walking hangover.

  She stopped in front of us, panting. “I suppose everything is done, is it?”

  “Well, yeah, Bea. The Grope is from twelve to one,” Carla said.

  “I would have been here on time, except that someone stole my artifacts!”

  She said this with such satisfaction, as if convinced of something she’d been claiming all along, that I did a double take.

  “Someone stole your artifacts?” I said. “How could that have happened?”

  “It could have been anyone in the hotel. It could have been any of…us.”

  “Heck, Bea, who’d want your artifacts?” Lissa said. “Who cares about some early twentieth-century kiln furniture anyway?”

  Carla and I scowled at her, but she didn’t back down. “Well? I’m serious. Who’d want broken bits of pottery?”

  “You mean besides archaeologists?” Carla said.

  “You know what I mean,” Lissa retorted.

  “Was anything else stolen?” I asked Bea.

  “What do you mean?” She’d danced around to the side, as if my question was an attack.

  “I mean, was your room broken into? Or was your luggage ripped off at the airport?”

  “No, I mean, not any more than the usual rifling they give your stuff these days. I had them here, with me. I was showing them around last night, Wednesday, after I got in, to other people working on pottery manufactories.” She glared at Lissa. “It was shortly after that.”

  “And your room, nothing else was touched,” I said.

  “No, Emma, nothing else was touched. In my room, that is. I guess you all haven’t heard about the book room.”

  “What about the book room?” Lissa demanded.

  “One of the poster exhibits was broken into. A bunch of the stuff was taken, some of it was broken.” She gave me a significant look. “Also last night.”

  “Which one was it? Was it only one?”

  Again, Bea took the defensive with me. “It was the one on the Florida underwater project.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said, and Lissa nodded. “Why would anyone mess with that? Wasn’t it mostly reproductions? All the stuff that was taken was fake; the only real things—the broken fragments—were left behind.”

  “What do you call the reproductions?” Bea asked. “Everything made by humans is—”

  “I know, everything manufactured or altered is an artifact,” I said, barely able to suppress my annoyance—she had no capacity for sticking to the important points. “I mean old artifacts, things that were made a long time ago, archaeologically recovered.”

  “Well, there was nothing else taken or bothered. Except for my stuff. I’m trying to find Brad to let him know what’s going on.”

  “What’s he going to do about it?” Lissa said.

  “He’s got to help me find them. It’s his fault; I wouldn’t have brought them if he hadn’t organized the roundtable again. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” She bustled off, and Carla and I exchanged glances.

  Lissa made a face. “Ooh, Brad! The great-big-pieces-of-crap thief found me! Oooh!”

  “We seem to be suffering a logic shortage around here,” I agreed.

  “Oh, don’t worry about her. Her rubbish will show up, it always does. She’d lose her head if it wasn’t stitched on by some well-meaning but ill-inspired medical student.”

  “You think so?” I said.

  Lissa shrugged. “She’s got the brains of refrigerator mold and she’s always blaming it on someone else. Her brain only serves to keep her soft little skull from collapsing altogether. Don’t worry about her. She just drives me crazy, latching on to me all the time. I’m too polite to blow her off.”

  “Ha!” Carla said.

  “What about the underwater exhibit?” I asked. “Who’d mess with that?”

  “I saw that exhibit yesterday.” She shook her head and her hair fell back perfectly into place. “Emma, chill out: it’s Bea. There were fragments in there already, so I doubt anything was really broken, or taken, even. Probably they were pulling it to show someone, or something. Maybe it was a practical joke, who knows?”

  I shot her a warning look, but Carla didn’t respond to Lissa’s pointed remark. Worse than that, she had made no mention of the surprise I’d left for her this morning. Worrying.

  “We’ll catch up at the business meeting tonight?” Carla said.

  “Sure,” I said, thinking about the announcement that was going to floor everyone. “What are you going to see before then?”

  “I’ve got to read over my paper. I might stop in to hear the feminist theory papers, if I have time. How about you?”

  “There’s a megasession on battlefield archaeology that I’m catching. And yours of course.”

  “Carla? You’re coming to mine?” I wanted to see whether she thought she could nail me with her practical joke then.

  “Nope, it conflicts with the one I really want to see. On human remains.”

  I nodded. “But if you’re that interested, I’ll send you a copy, but don’t worry about just being polite.”

  “That’s one thing she’s never been worried about,” Lissa announced. “Come on, Carla. Let’s go get our dried-out tuna sandwiches, bruised apples, and warm sodas.”

  I stopped by the message board on my way to lunch and saw there was the usual array of invitations to meet for job interviews at contract companies, the reminders about the various specialty group meetings and cocktail parties, and, now that we were into the first official day of papers, the first crop of notes for my colleagues were thumbtacked to the too-small bulletin board. Pieces of hotel stationery, small pieces of wire-bound notebook paper, their torn edges lacy, and even a few cocktail napkins, their pen marks bleeding through, fluttered festively as I approached. I checked for notes for me—funny how it always made me feel so particularly wanted to see one of these unofficial missives waiting for me—and found two, neither of which were from Scott. One was the one I was expecting, reminding me that I’d promised to meet with a colleague from Rhode Island to talk about doing a guest lecture for his class on colonial artifacts. The other was in an unfamiliar hand—not that that was anything unusual—and I flipped it up to read what it was about. It was from a potential student wanting the chance to talk with me about coming to Caldwell to join my program. But it was the note that was next to mine that really caught my attention. When I pocketed my notes—I was by now immune to the temptation to leave them on the board, to show how very in demand I was—another fell down, having been supported only by virtue of having been wedged behind mine. I couldn’t help reading it as I picked it up: “I’ll see you tonight, after the reception and business meeting. Don’t make me come looking for you again.”

  Wow—strong words. It was unsigned and it was addressed to Dr. Garrison.

  As I replaced it, I noticed that it had been pierced through three times. I did a little analysis of the arrangement of the notes: Okay, say it was posted before mine—that was one. Someone came along and used its tack to hold both mine and his up—or had Garriso
n read it and replaced it for some reason? That would be two. I had no idea why it should be pierced a third time, and tiredly realized that I needed to stop doing taphonomic studies of the bulletin board. When you start attempting to identify just how and in what order the notes were placed on the board, it’s more than time to take a break.

  Just about the moment that I put the note back, a flood of people exited the rooms where the one o’clock sessions were held, all of them heading toward the restaurants and the boxed-lunch concession. Just a few steps ahead of them, I hurried toward the coffee shop, and with a bit of luck that had nothing to do with the affection that Eleni had developed for me at breakfast time, got the last deuce in the corner, an ideal spot for people-watching while still keeping my own back covered. Although I was actually getting to eat earlier than I usually would, I was ravenous and already exhausted. Again, the conference effect came into play, and I was convinced that the low pressure from the storm presumably still raging outside wasn’t doing anything to help it. I ordered a cheeseburger and a chocolate shake, watching Eleni’s enormous sigh of despair as she observed the line, full of impatient, hungry academics forming outside the coffee shop.

  Noreen was at the head of the line, and I kept my head down, hoping she wouldn’t ask to share my table. Not that I was expecting a conciliatory overture, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to invite her. If she wanted the seat, she could do the asking.

  But the gods of restaurant seating smiled on me for once, and a stool at the counter was freed up almost as soon as she started into the coffee shop. I could have sworn that a look of relief crossed her face as she seized it, probably mirroring my own.

  Eleni scuffed over with my shake. “You mind sharing the table with another customer? You don’t have to, but…”

  “I don’t mind,” I said, happy to repay the restaurant gods for not being visited by Noreen.

  The new guy from the artifact roundtable came over. “Thanks for sharing.”

  “No problem…” I searched my memory for his name—we’d just been introduced at the Grope and I still had to resort to his name tag; he was that forgettable. “Mr. Widmark. No one will ever get to eat, otherwise.”