Grave Consequences

by Dana Cameron

  I could hear the rain echoing off the pavement below us outside. A cold wind picked up and blew the light curtains out into the room, refreshingly clean after the musk of the cologne.

  I wet my lips and swallowed. “Did you kill Julia, Andrew?”

  He closed his eyes. “No. I hurt her badly. I should have been—”

  Suddenly, as though he was again aware that I shouldn’t be in his room at all, Andrew seemed to snap out of it. He reached for the bag. “I’ll just take that, thank you.”

  “Don’t you think the police ought to see it?”

  The osteologist glared at me. “Where do you think I’m taking it? Don’t you think I want the murderer found?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  He seemed to consider that for an instant. “I suppose you shouldn’t. I’m taking it to the police. You do recall the fact that I actually occasionally work for the police, don’t you, Professor Fielding?”

  “Yeah, when you don’t go missing for days on end—”

  “I have other work to do, you know, but those days after I found out…well, you can rest assured that I couldn’t bear to be near…the site. And that at least two of those days were spent answering questions down the cop shop. And don’t look at me like that—don’t you think I know you’ll go running straight to them if I don’t take the bag to them?”

  I shrugged. It was out of my hands, unless I wanted to try and wrest the bag away from him.

  Andrew seemed to summon some reserve and he tried very hard to win me over to his side by turning on the charm. “Look, they do know about me and Julia, but the rest of the world does not and I would truly appreciate your discretion in this. Nothing good can come of publicizing our…relationship.”

  I recalled that his last absence had also coincided with Trevor’s. “Does Trevor have anything to do with this?”

  “Yes.” He didn’t look as though he was going to say any more.

  I sighed. “Let me rephrase that. Tell me what Trevor has to do with this. What happened to his nose?”

  “I did.” He grinned unkindly. “Little pillock saw us one evening and tried to blackmail me. The night I understand she…Julia…her body was found.” Andrew hesitated, then continued fiercely. “He announced that I would keep him on the site, in Jane’s good graces, or he’d tell. He folded as soon as my fist touched his nose. That put an end to it. Should have done it long ago, on general principles.”

  “How come you didn’t tell Jane or Greg where you were going to be?”

  “They didn’t know about Julia and, excuse me, I don’t answer to either of them—”

  “They’re your friends! You live with them!”

  He stared and seemed to debate how to respond to me. “We have a long association, but they don’t pry into my business and I do my best not to intrude into theirs. I don’t answer to them, and I don’t reckon that I answer to you either. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to leave, and I guess I need to keep my door locked. So if you please…”

  I scooted past him and stopped outside my doorway.

  “If you’re so concerned, you might as well give Jane and Greg the message that I’m going down to the Hewett Street police station.” He paused. “You might cross me off your list of suspects. Detective Chief Inspector Rhodes has crossed me off his.” He locked his doors and brushed past me; a moment later, I heard the front door slam.

  I fingered the tape cassette in my pocket. Detective Rhodes had crossed him off his list? That’s exactly what I was afraid of.

  Chapter 16

  A COUPLE OF HOURS AFTER ANDREW LEFT, JANE, Greg, and I sat down to dinner. While the food was great—I ate with the appetite that comes with having eaten too many nonmeals too recently—the conversation was stilted. Every time we tried one topic, it was curtailed with bad news. I asked after Auntie Mads, only to find that she was very sick and Greg was increasingly anxious that it was her heart. She wasn’t even trying to go to the cafe anymore. I asked how Jane’s work had gone and learned that she’d spent the whole day frustrated; some of the measurements from the site maps weren’t adding up. Greg asked me how I’d occupied myself. I couldn’t very well say that I’d been out following in a dead girl’s footsteps and watching her parents struggling with their sorrow in public. I’d looked around the house for a cassette player, but by the time I’d found out how their stereo worked, both of them were home and I surely didn’t want to play that tape from Julia’s bag in front of them. Not until I knew what it contained.

  Monday morning came around and I realized that I’d woken up from my fifth morning nightmare in a row. Again, it was nothing more than momentary glimpses of alarming and peculiar images incoherently strung together. I was simultaneously observing and being a dark-haired woman, whose face alternately shifted from Jane’s to the grainy black and white image of Julia’s face as I knew it, moving about a gray landscape, looking for something, while all the while the faceless masses crowded around her, pressing closer and closer until I felt that I was being crushed under them.

  I woke up in a sweat, swung my legs over the side of the bed, and waited until my breathing slowed down. Vivid dreams aren’t all that common to me; usually I sleep like a log and have vague, uninteresting memories of climbing up hills or eating ice cream or sweeping. Really mundane stuff that makes me jealous when Brian tells me about all the surround-sound, 360-degree movies his brain stem plays for him. So when I do dream, I try to pay attention to it because I figure my subconscious is working extra hard, tugging at my shirt tail, trying to get my attention.

  This time it wasn’t too hard to see what was going on. I felt the pressures of being in the middle of Jane’s troubles, overwhelmed by the possibilities I saw for suspects, and perhaps a little angry with the hostility that I felt from people who either were my friends, and should have known better, or were strangers, who ranged from the ambivalent to the downright threatening, and who really ought to have been more polite to me, in my humble opinion. No wonder that the REM sleep was coming thick and fast and in Technicolor.

  The weather had finally cleared up, and although the rest of the site was very muddy, the tarps largely had protected the excavated areas. The crew seemed quite used to the wet, and so it was with a very little extra effort that work got started.

  About ten o’clock and the tea-break, I looked up to see Morag walking toward the gate. I looked around quickly; Jane was still at Hewett Street and Greg was absorbed in his notes. I caught her eye and gestured emphatically that I would meet her on the other side of the fence. I dug her file out of my case, and heart sinking, remembering that she wouldn’t be very happy with my opinion of her research, picked my way through the site. Although she was in the same style of long skirt and peasant blouse, she was in dark purple today, with none of the trim that had enhanced her dress before. Her sleeve rode up and I could see the green vine tattoo clearly; it was a lovely, complicated thing.

  “You’re getting close, aren’t you?” she said. “I can tell, I feel Beatrice’s presence much more strongly today.”

  “Well, I’m moving down at a good rate,” I replied. “Nothing yet, though.”

  “But even you must be able to feel her, now. You don’t feel a warmth, a tingling, anything?”

  I sighed listlessly; this would go nowhere. “Not the way you mean.”

  “No change in your vision?” Morag seemed surprised. “A sense of movement where there seems there should be none? No strange dreams—?”

  I really was not interested in being probed so. “Look, I’ve got your file.” I handed it to her. “Thanks for letting me look at it.”

  “Now do you see what I mean?” Morag was eager for my support.

  Here we go. “I’m afraid I don’t. This is a start, but it doesn’t really support your notion. You need more proof.”

  “Well, what’s this then?” She waved the folder.

  “We don’t know the sources of all these. You need primary sources. All of these are
secondary, so we don’t know what these writers were using for data.”

  She furrowed her brow. “Primary?”

  “Primary data, primary sources are sources that were directly connected to the event you are interested in. A diary, someone recording what they saw, what they heard. A tax record or court record or some other kind of legal document. Even a painting can give you that kind of information, though as with anything, you have to be careful that the painter wasn’t prettifying things or trying to get some other message across. Folk songs can be useful, photographs are great.”

  “And so what I’ve got is…?”

  “Secondary data, something that someone who wasn’t alive at the time, maybe a historian, has put together. Secondary sources are interpretations of primary data, and in order to evaluate them, you need to know what was used as source material. Secondary sources are good when you are trying to learn some information—it’s been organized and interpreted and digested for you—but in order to learn how we know something, why it is true, you need the contemporary data.”

  Morag threw her hands up in the air, as though she thought I was deliberately trying to frustrate her. “What more do you want? In school they told us you needed five sources to back up your thesis statement—if I get one more, will you believe me then?”

  “Look, it’s not a matter of quantity here,” I explained. “These writers you’re using, they need to support the same idea, here, if they listed what evidence they’d used, for example, to come to these conclusions…”

  “Oh, I know what Rowan Blessingtree used. I called her and asked.”

  “Oh, good,” I said, though I was thinking just the opposite. I didn’t want to get mired in this. “What did she use?”

  “She has her information through her medium.”

  I blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

  Morag warmed up to her subject excitedly. “Mother Beatrice is one of her contacts on the other side. She came to Rowan and told her of her history, told her of her persecution, told how the abbey was burned down to punish her for worshiping the Goddess—”

  “Morag, for one thing, the church was burnt down in 1504, twenty-two years after Mother Beatrice—”

  “It could have burned more than once—” she suggested.

  “But not without leaving some much more concrete data. An event like that, a building as important as something like the abbey being destroyed, not only leaves evidence in the documentary record—think about what that would have meant to the people here—”

  “There could have been a cover-up.”

  Frustrated, I tossed my braid over my shoulder. “But not in the archaeological record, where it would take one hell of a lot of effort to expunge such an event, and honestly, all of that work would be visible too. I don’t think there was a cover-up for anything.” Especially not something as illusory as Morag’s theory.

  Morag was getting more and more excited. “But it is coming straight from the source! That’s exactly what you were telling me about! What more could you want? It is communication directly with the woman herself—”

  “Morag, I said it might be evidence if more than one person could share this vision, if we could all have a look at it and evaluate it with the same thing on the table, but visions…just don’t work as evidence.” I looked away, across the site.

  She clasped her hands. “It’s evidence to me, even if it isn’t to you…I know, I know in my heart, I’ve had a vision that tells me it’s true, and you’ll see I’m right too.”

  “But…” I tried another tack. “Look, I don’t think that archaeology is a science in the same way that physics or chemistry is. You can’t repeat the experiment of excavation, for example. No one’s going to be able to re-dig your site and confirm what you’ve found, so that’s why we publish everything and try to be as clear as possible about how we’ve established our theories. But I do believe that certain scientific principles do hold, and one of them is that you need lots of different types of evidence to confirm something. From different sources, from different ways of looking at things.”

  “But this is my different way of looking at things,” she insisted.

  “Yes, exactly. But it’s only one way. So if you found other corroborative evidence to suggest it, for example, in church records or town court documents or in a diary or something, then I’d be more inclined to accept what you’re saying.” I felt like Wallace Shawn arguing for the slight advantages of Western science over mysticism in My Dinner With Andre.

  Morag continued on, convinced she had me now. “But I also remember from school that you can’t ever prove something, you can only disprove it. By finding the ways it couldn’t have happened.”

  “Well, yes. But—”

  “So you can’t conclusively prove my theories are wrong, can you?”

  I hated this sort of argument: I was constrained by what I knew had been the best model so far for humans learning anything, about the past, the microscopic world and the stellar: the scientific method. I was forced, by my own beliefs, to admit their shortcomings. Morag, unfettered by her beliefs, could use that constraint against me, while never applying it to her own arguments.

  “No I can’t,” I said with a sigh. “But none of the evidence I’ve seen so far—besides Rowan’s article—suggests that I ought to consider that an option in the first place. Look,” I said hurriedly, “why don’t you look at the documents that Jane’s been studying? Most of them are available at the library or in the public archives. See if you can’t find out some other reason that might suggest what you say. That’s only fair, isn’t it? I looked at your data, now you look at mine.”

  She sniffed. “I don’t know why I need to, but if they’ll let me, I see no harm. I’ll prove I’m right, someday, Emma. Even by your narrow standards.”

  I could tell she was disappointed in me, but hardly discouraged. “Good luck to you. I’ve got to get back to work. Let me know what you find.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ll never be far away.”

  Maybe it was because I had the distraction of my meeting with Morag, and I wasn’t working against myself in my head, but I found the groove that had so carefully hidden itself from me on Friday. The tedium of fieldwork is necessary if you are going to have the joy of discovery, but when you can’t get the rhythm going, it’s more than misery. On the other hand, on the days when it works, it’s beautiful. Friday, I’d been chasing the level down in a spiral, always trying to bring the next corner down to the right level but only by the end of the day somehow managing to get all four at the same depth at the same time. Today, it was as though I had a built-in laser sight, the hand of a jeweler, and the concentration that a surgeon had jolly well better have. It was just before lunch when the stain that I’d been following began to change, ever so slightly, and darker stains began to show up.

  Then I hit bone.

  I swallowed and took a deep breath. I scraped away, every so gently, trying to follow where the lighter stain led, trying not to increase the damage to the bone that had been assaulted by time, soil chemistry, and the elements for over five hundred years.

  At one edge, the bone ran out, the soil returned, but by moving again from where I saw the bone, in the opposite direction, I picked up the trail again and exposed a section of bone that broadened and seemed to be denser than the edge that I’d initially discovered. It curved away again, but this time with a line that was distinct, that suggested if not an intentional, manufactured form, then at least a true structure, created by nature and not some trick of the soil.

  A little more cautious work, now bringing out a piece of bamboo, next a brush. I put my tools aside, and stood up and looked at my work from several feet up. What I saw was an arc of bone that surrounded the cavity where this person’s left eye would have been. It gave me the impression that whoever it was—and I had my fingers crossed that it was Beatrice—was regarding me with the same unblinking interest with which I inspected her.

  I sus
pect that even if I had been on one of my own sites, I wouldn’t have hollered the traditional triumphant call of “Look what I’ve got!” With bone, in my experience, you’re just always that little bit more cautious, both out of respect for the dead and out of a need for security. Nothing like the announcement that you’ve got human remains to start the storm, where you have people protesting on the basis of everything from respect to the irrational fear that the bones will automatically be contaminated somehow and you have to start worrying about the crazies who think that having a real human skull on their mantelpiece would be a cool thing. So it wasn’t strange that I didn’t holler, and I’m glad that my instinct saved me there, because when I finally found Jane, back from her trip to the police, I saw that she was talking to a reporter.

  She wrapped up then, and he went over to the gate to finish scribbling in his little notebook. I called her over; she cocked her head. I raised my eyebrows. She picked up her pace.

  Jane had almost made it over to my units when Morag’s words preceded her: “You’ve found her, haven’t you? You’ve uncovered the remains of Mother Beatrice! Let me see!”

  Not only did every head on the site, including the reporter’s, swivel around to see what was the matter, but Morag, heedless of her own safety and our previous warnings to her, was running through the gate and across the site. Not a wise thing to do, tearing through an area pocked with deep holes and covered with loose dirt, piles of stones, and tools; nigh on suicidal, given the immediate tattered state of Jane’s self-control.

  “I want to see—” Morag said, huffing and puffing a few meters short of where we were; I was surprised at how well she could move in her skirts and little boots.

  “Morag, get your lardy backside off my site and behind the barrier!” Jane roared as she stomped right past me. “Go, get, you stupid cow, before I—”

  The other woman put her hands on her hips. “Before you what? What are you going to do, go to the police? That’s a laugh, considering how much time you’ve been spending down there recently!”