“Quick,” she said, “inside.”
She hopped onto the sagging porch, and I followed just as lightning split a tree downhill from us. I swore and dropped my shovel and screen next to hers on the boards. Water rained down off her straw hat and she smiled.
“Home, sweet home.”
I tried to grin and failed. The inside was dark and smelled of dust. Water dripped from a dozen places, but we found a corner that was dry and sat together with our backs against the wall. Overhead, the rain beat a tattoo on the corrugated roof.
“I wonder who used to live here?” she asked.
So I told her.
“The kids have it all figured out. Oswald’s ghost stays here. Hell, he may even be in here with us right now.”
I was thinking of her comment earlier that someone had been watching. But she surprised me.
“No, I don’t think so,” she said.
I laughed. “Well, it’s just a story.”
“I know. But I’m psychic and I don’t feel a thing.”
“You’re psychic?”
“That’s what some of my friends say.” She stretched her arms out in front of her. “They say I know things nobody else does. That I have intuition. I think that part’s right, but I don’t really think I’m psychic. I think I just tend to see some things other people miss. Anyway, I don’t see anything here but an old shack.”
“That’s good. Because if there is a ghost in here, there’s no place for us to go until the rain quits.”
She pulled a stick of beef jerky out of her shirt pocket and offered me some. I took a pinch, and she nibbled on the rest.
“How did you get into contract archaeology?” she asked. “If I’m not being nosy.”
I told her about Sam MacGregor and how he’d been a substitute father. “Of course, my father didn’t die until a few years ago, but I was still closer to Sam in a lot of ways.”
“You haven’t ever held a teaching job?”
“Once, out west. But I was strung out with personal problems at the time. And besides, they said my teaching was too unorthodox. I didn’t get tenure.”
“Too unorthodox,” she reflected. “Dangerous words.”
“Yeah. Well, not too many of the senior faculty would come to class dressed in a gorilla suit to teach hominid evolution.”
She giggled. “I love it. I can just see old Godfrey in the department here if that happened.” She cocked her head. “So why did you first study archaeology? Was that due to Sam MacGregor, too?”
I shook my head. “He provided a means, but I’d pretty well decided while I was in high school what I wanted to be.”
“The romance of it,” she said.
I tried to think back to that time in my life.
“Actually, I think I just decided the past was a better time to be in than the present.”
“Heavy.” A stray raindrop flew in through one of the broken windows and stung my face. “You keep your house like a museum, except for your own little island in it, and you like the past better than the present. Ever talked to a shrink, Alan?” She giggled, but I cut her off.
“Just a couple of hours ago, as a matter of fact.”
“Are you serious?”
“Perfectly.”
She assessed me with her big brown eyes, and then we started laughing together.
“It sounds like the rain’s about quit,” I said then and forced myself up. I went over to the door in time to see a bedraggled Frank Hill straggle into the clearing, his clothes soaked.
“Jeez,” Frank said. “A nice cozy place to stay and here we were in a damned hurricane.” He gave Meg a mistrusting glance. “Some people have all the luck.”
I smiled, clapped him on the shoulder, and we started back across the valley toward the vehicles. Once on the highway, he and the others pulled into a store to pick up Cokes, but I waved and kept going, eager to get home.
Three hours later, after a hot bath and a toddy, I sat in the living room, leafing through the television guide. No good old film noirs, I noticed, and I threw the booklet down in disgust.
I looked around me. So I kept the place neat and only used the living room to watch TV and to entertain my very infrequent guests. Did that make it a damned museum? The furniture had all been left to me by my parents. There was a Queen Anne desk and a Chippendale chair and some Wedgwood china in a cabinet against one wall. There was a rosewood table, its wings folded so that it fitted just under the window. The brick fireplace harbored an ancient gas contraption of iron with fake briquettes that radiated heat.
These were the artifacts of my childhood, the surroundings that lent me comfort. Other people held estate sales or passed furniture on to covetous relatives. I kept mine in situ, like the archaeologist I was.
Pepper had mentioned it, but I’d shrugged it off. After all, being neat wasn’t against the law.
I got up slowly and went up the stairs to the second story.
The old boards creaked as they took my weight, and I imagined I could hear my mother’s voice calling out to ask who it was. It was real, and yet the last time I had heard it was twenty years ago.
Their bedroom was the first door to the left, across the hall from my own. I seldom went in there, because there was nothing in it I needed. I opened the door slowly now, not sure what I expected to find on the other side.
But it was just the way it had always been: The big four-poster bed with the chintz spread, the mahogany dresser in one corner, the armoire in the other, a small prie-dieu beside the closet door.
My mother had become more devout in her last years and had spent hours on her knees on the prie-dieu, and when I opened the closet door, I saw a church calendar from 1972 with a print of Jesus and his bleeding heart.
Then I looked at the clothes.
His were still there: two summer suits, one linen and one seersucker, and several of synthetic material for the rest of the year. There was also an old Army uniform, with his lieutenant’s bars still in place.
Of course, her clothes had been gone long since, because he had gotten rid of them a year or so after her death.
I didn’t look in the dresser because I knew what I would find: his razors and some cologne and an assortment of silk ties. There was also the wallet he’d had with him the day he died.
My father had installed central air a couple of years before his death, and the room smelled like mothballs, despite the slow breeze that drifted in from the vent. I went to the little bedside table and lifted the photograph with the gold frame. It showed them on their wedding day in 1946, right after the war. They seemed very happy.
I put the photo down and reminded myself to mention to the once-a-week cleaning lady that the room needed dusting. Then I went back down, settled in my chair, and tried the TV again. Halfway through some movie I fell asleep, and when I awoke the phone was ringing.
I looked around, surprised. It was dark already, and the clock on the mantel said ten-thirty. I found the phone and picked it up.
“Yes?”
“Alan …” It was Meg’s voice at the other end. “Alan, you’ve got to come here in a hurry. I’m at the lab … I …” Her voice caught, and then the line went dead.
It took me six minutes to make the drive from my house to the office. When I got there, I saw flashing red lights outside, and my stomach did a flip. I pulled in behind a police cruiser and was halfway up the walk when an arm reached out to stop me.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Graham. This is my office.” That was when I saw the ambulance. The paramedics were trotting across the lawn with their bags.
“You can’t go in there, sir,” the policeman was saying, but I pushed past him into the lab.
Trays of artifacts had been scattered on the floor and chairs had been overturned. But what got my attention was the paramedics, who were bending over something on the floor. I sagged against the door frame.
“My God,” I mumbled.
The policeman was guidi
ng me outside. I was trembling, and I wondered idly if the weather had suddenly turned cold. Two minutes later the medics came out with a stretcher, and I saw an oxygen mask fixed over Meg’s face.
“How is she?” I asked, but nobody said anything.
Ten minutes later a couple of detectives came and took my statement. From what little they told me, Meg had been shot by someone who had forced open the back door. The alarm had been on, and the clerk at ADT had called the police, who had, surprisingly, arrived a couple of minutes before I did.
I went inside and viewed the mess. There was a spot of blood on the floor where she’d fallen, and I cursed myself for agreeing to let her work late.
One of the detectives picked up something from the floor.
“Recognize this?”
It was a brass cartridge casing.
“Yes. It’s one of our artifacts.”
“Artifact?” He gave me a funny look.
“That’s right. See the dirt inside it? My crew probably picked it up on site today. Meg was getting ready to clean it along with the other things.”
“What kind of work do you people do?”
I told him. “Sometimes old artifacts and more recent ones are found together. This looks like stuff they picked up from the surface. There was an Indian site, but there was also probably a hunter out there shooting his gun sometime in the last twenty years or so.”
The detective held the brass tube up to the light.
“Round for a deer gun,” he said. “Probably from a war surplus rifle.”
Something in my brain went on alert.
“War surplus?”
“Right. 6.5 millimeter. Like one of those old Italian rifles.”
TWELVE
I spent the rest of the night at the hospital. I signed papers that committed the firm in ways that would make Marilyn blench, but by midnight, when they decided to put the patient in a private room, I knew at least that the bullet hadn’t hit anything vital and that Meg would pull through.
That was when I called her folks in Maryland. It wasn’t an easy call to make, and I spent most of the time apologizing and promising to take care of all expenses.
What kind of a neighborhood was our business located in, anyway? Well, there were worse … What good was an alarm system if people broke in? A very good point, but it hadn’t ever happened before. What was she doing working by herself at night? Bad judgment on my part …
I went upstairs to her room and sat down in the padded chair beside the bed. They’d taken away the breathing apparatus, and she was sleeping under a heavy dose of sedatives. The bullet had hit her shoulder and glanced off in an odd direction.
My God, what was going on? I didn’t believe that it was a random housebreaking. Somebody had tried to get in, either to silence her or to steal something we had. I thought it was more likely to be the latter. But what could we have discovered?
Then I remembered the cartridge cases.
But they had lain on the ground for years. There could hardly be anything important about them. They had probably been fired by Doug Devlin, who had had that caliber rifle. So it must be something else. Or was it supposed to be a warning? An escalation in a chain that had started with the cutting of my tires?
I drifted off to sleep in the chair, floating somewhere above the bed and looking down on her as she lay there, a child with a pixie face, strangely different in repose …
The last time I’d spent the night in a hospital had been while my father was dying. I’d made a bed downstairs on a couple of chairs in the waiting room of the intensive care unit, afraid to sleep and unable not to. It was a sad, anxious place, with little groups of family members clotted about like blood, waiting to hear. Some read, some played cards, and some stretched out to sleep.
How many nights had I spent there? Two? Three? I could never remember, because afterward all the minutes and hours and days blended together into a single gray image of exhaustion.
It was just turning to light outside when I heard Meg stirring.
“Alan?”
I looked over at her and saw her eyes on me, questioning.
“Where am I?”
I reached out and gave her hand a squeeze.
“You’re okay. You had an accident but everything’s okay. You’re in the hospital.”
“Hospital?”
She tried to move her right arm and groaned.
“What happened?”
“You were working late in the lab. You called me, said for me to come. When I got there, they said you’d been shot.”
“Shot?” She frowned. “I can’t remember. I just remember sitting in that old camp house with you, and the rain falling, but after that …”
“Don’t worry, it’ll come in time.”
An hour later I left her sleeping and went home. My eyes felt like sand, and I moved like a man dragging an anchor. I took a warm bath and went to sleep in the tub. When I awoke the phone was ringing again, and when I reached it I heard Marilyn’s indignant voice.
“Alan, do you have any idea what you did? You let me walk into this mess this morning, and I called the police. They told me what happened last night and said you’d been here. Why in the hell didn’t you call me instead of letting me just stumble into it?”
I apologized for the second time today.
“I meant to be in by now to explain,” I said. “I lost track of the time.”
She harrumphed and hung up.
When I got in, David and a couple of the students had managed to replace the artifacts in the proper trays, although one tray had been hopelessly scrambled. I was still staring down at the disaster when the phone rang and I heard the dreaded words:
“Alan, this is Bertha Bomberg.” My blood turned to ice.
“Yes, Bertha.”
“How did things go yesterday?”
I thought about Meg in the hospital. “All right during the fieldwork.”
“What does that mean?”
“We found a prehistoric site, probably Archaic.”
“And?”
“And somebody broke into the lab last night and tried to kill one of our people.”
“Well, you aren’t located in the best part of town. Is everything okay now?”
“More or less. The employee is in the hospital. They say she’ll be all right. We’ve managed to re-sort most of what was in the trays.”
“Most?”
“One tray was pretty well scrambled. We’ll probably never sort those things out again.”
“Was that from the site?”
“Yes.”
“How to you plan to deal with it?”
“I guess we’ll just have to collect some more artifacts and label these as part of a general collection.”
I heard an intake of breath.
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Bertha, for God’s sake …”
“And what about today? Do you have people in the field?”
“We called it off. This doesn’t happen every day.”
“Alan, I’m not trying to upset you, but it’s only fair to tell you that when the next contracts are bid, this may be a factor. This doesn’t happen at CEI or Pyramid.”
“Anything else, Bertha?”
“Nothing right now. I’m getting my schedule together for the next couple of weeks. I’ll call you when I’m coming up for a site visit.”
“We’ll look forward to it.”
I pressed the receiver back down and took some deep breaths, waiting for my blood pressure to subside.
David came in and put a friendly hand on my shoulder.
“Look, I’ll try to make sense out of that last tray. You go home and get some rest. I’ll call everybody and tell them to show up for the field tomorrow.”
I nodded. “Good idea.”
I stumbled out to the Blazer. The heat was withering, and when I got in, I barely mustered the energy to start the air-conditioning. David was right: I needed to sleep. But first I we
nt by a florist, picked up some flowers, and then drove to the hospital, parking in the lot across Hennessey Boulevard and making the hot, draining trek across the asphalt to the building. When I walked into the room, Meg was sitting up, some of the color back in her face. I put the flowers next to the bed and she smiled.
“From the crew,” I said.
“They’re beautiful.”
“Have the cops been back?”
She nodded. “A detective named Landry. He wanted to know what happened and then he asked me why I was working by myself at night.”
“Because your boss is a jerk,” I said. “I’m sorry. I never thought …”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“So exactly what did happen?” I asked. “Have you been able to remember?”
“Well, it’s still only bits and pieces, but I remember working at the lab table and hearing something at the back door. It sounded like somebody was pulling on it, trying to get it open. I went back there, but I didn’t see anything from the window. So I went back to the lab and then it started again. That’s when I picked up the phone on the lab table and called you. Then something hit me and I woke up here.”
“Tell me, what were you working on when it happened? The stuff we found yesterday?”
She nodded. “That’s right. I’d washed the collection and put it in the trays to dry, and I was putting catalogue numbers on it all. All except the metal, like the cartridge casings, because I wasn’t sure how you wanted to deal with them.”
“Was there anything in the collection—anything at all—that seemed unusual?”
“Not that I could see. Just lithics. A few recent things from the surface collection, old cartridge casings and a couple of fragments of what looks like an old coffee cup. I don’t know why anybody would care about any of that.”
“But somebody does.”
“Maybe it’s me.”
“What?”
She fixed me with those great brown eyes.
“What if it’s not the artifacts at all, but something about me—something I saw, for instance.”
“But what could that be? We were together most of the time. And when we weren’t, you were with the others. Why are they going for you, and not for David or Frank or me?”
Assassin's Blood (The Alan Graham Mysteries) Page 8
