Carbon Dating

by Jerusha Jones

  Standing to the side so I didn’t cast a shadow on my work, I began lifting and stacking piles, ignoring anything that wasn’t paper. But there was a lot of paper—children’s books from long-ago eras, Good Housekeeping magazines from the 1950s, paper sleeves that were missing the vinyl records that had been inside them, a voter’s pamphlet from 1932 with grainy photos of Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt, numerous hand-assembled recipe booklets—a treasure trove of family history in the form of food (which I set aside, because if Denby didn’t want them, then I did), newspaper clippings. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

  I found the first one between the Plastics-Razin and Razor-Schurz volumes of an Encyclopaedia Britannica. An Encyclopaedia Britannica that was copyrighted in 1968, their 200th anniversary edition. Which meant someone other than Denby’s great-grandmother had thought separating the diaries and hiding them was a good idea. Whatever they contained, someone else had read them and known about it.

  The diary was so skinny, I found it only because I’d begun removing volumes from the shelf and Razor-Schurz through The Index and Atlas constituted a hefty armload. I made a small squeak of surprise when the diary slipped to the floor, catching enough light for me to see 1920 inked in bold numbers on the front.

  Denby came clattering toward me over the intervening piles, and we quickly removed all the other encyclopedia volumes. The other three missing diaries—1918, 1919, 1921—were all there, wedged carefully and discretely between the much larger hardbound encyclopedia volumes.

  Denby pressed them against her chest, breathing harshly.

  “You should read them first,” I started to say, and found that my breathing was just as ragged as hers. I cleared my throat. “Before…” Was it collusion? Aiding and abetting? The diaries were Denby’s property, but I still hesitated to suggest audibly that she withhold them as evidence, at least until she’d seen for herself what the evidence was.

  I needn’t have worried. Denby was nodding fiercely. She knew what I meant and agreed wholeheartedly.

  oOo

  The wall phone was ringing when we returned to the kitchen. Since Denby was already flipping through diary pages—she’d stumbled on the stairs twice, trying to read them in the gloom—I answered.

  “Where’ve you been?” Vaughn barked. I only had time to lift my eyebrows in surprise at his rough tone before he continued. “Never mind. An ambulance should be arriving any minute. I need you to hop onboard and show them the way out to the field.” He hung up before I could ask questions.

  Not that the fits and spurts of thoughts zinging through my brain were in any way coherent. I snaked my way inside my new svelte raincoat and snatched my phone from my tote bag. The message and missed-call icons were flashing insistently.

  Denby was already lost in the early twentieth century, slouched at the kitchen table with her forearms straddling an open diary, her head bent over the fine, spidery handwriting.

  I squeezed her shoulder on the way by. “Medical emergency,” I murmured, but got only a soft, absentminded grunt in reply. I figured if the emergency was Nash, then Vaughn would’ve told me to break the news gently to Denby. Without that critical piece of information about who was injured, then I was going to leave her to her research. She had enough worries as it was.

  The sound of a siren was faint but increasing as I stepped outside. I could already see the strobing white and red lights bouncing off the wet pavement out on the county road. My waving arms in the black raincoat weren’t going to show up well against the darkening shadows, so I turned on my phone and held its bright, bluish-white light out in front of me, just like a groupie at a rock concert. The ways of modern woman. I supposed Denby’s great-grandmother would have swung a kerosene lantern to signal an arriving buggy.

  The ambulance splashed up beside me, and the driver already had his window down.

  “I’m your guide,” I shouted to him.

  He waved me around to the passenger side, where I climbed in and basically sat on the lap of the fellow riding shotgun. He tried to help me up without touching me in ways that would be considered too fresh, but I also got the impression he wasn’t minding one bit. He chuckled a little under his breath, and he smelled rather nice.

  “Eva,” I huffed.

  “Fergus,” replied the man I was sitting on. He was built like a weightlifter, so I wasn’t feeling terribly bad about squashing him.

  “Ernie,” said the driver as he pulled back onto the mud track running deeper into the farm’s acreage.

  “Just keep going straight. I’ll show you where to turn.”

  “Got it,” Ernie gritted through clenched teeth as the ambulance fishtailed in the sludge. The engine strained, and a wheel spun briefly before the heavy rig gained traction again.

  “Sorry about this,” I said. “I guess these kinds of emergencies are never convenient.”

  “Nope. Nature of the job,” Fergus answered in my ear. I was willing to bet I had at least six inches in height on him. He more than made up the difference in sheer muscle mass, though, and wasn’t exactly soft and springy when I jounced against him. I was having trouble not getting my breath knocked out of me.

  “Do you know who—I mean can you tell me what kind of call this is?” I wheezed. Might as well ask while I had a captive audience. I was thinking of all the ways one of the volunteers could have slipped and wrenched a joint, twisted a knee, sprained an ankle. I didn’t think they had sharp instruments other than perhaps shovels and trowels out at the gravesite, but my brain was sure trying to figure out a way someone might be bleeding to death. Since it’s always a terrific idea to get a jump on the worrying, as though if I worried enough I might somehow be able to retroactively prevent the problem.

  “Shock, maybe. Or hypothermia. The call was for an unconscious male in his mid-fifties,” Ernie said, proving that I wasn’t the only one who could speculate.

  “Oh.” I gulped. I’d had a good look around at the volunteers during the taquito break, and while most had been women and everyone had been swaddled in rain gear, the few men in the bunch had appeared either much older or much younger than mid-fifties. That left only one possibility. “Did they tell you his name?” I croaked.

  “Nope. They don’t give out that info over the radio,” Fergus replied. “To maintain confidentiality.”

  “Of course,” I whispered.

  But my grip on Fergus’s arm must have increased to the point of pain, because he shifted under me. “Sorry, sweetheart,” he murmured.

  “No problem. I’m sorry too.” I tried to give him as much personal space as possible in the extremely close quarters while still bouncing on his lap. I hunched awkwardly toward the windshield, my quadriceps burning with the effort of bearing at least some of my own weight.

  His arm curled around my hip. “It’s okay,” he said quietly. “Best part of my day, right here.”

  I grimaced but relaxed. There was no point in fighting the situation.

  Ernie was also canted toward the windshield, wrestling the steering wheel as the ambulance continued to alternately surf and wallow on the mud track that was now almost impossible to see, in spite of the ambulance’s high-beam headlamps. I hadn’t realized just how important the reflective paint used for lane lines was until there wasn’t any.

  “There.” I pointed to the left.

  Ernie demonstrated remarkable skill in hitting the skidding turn at the corner between the potato patch and a field planted with a nitrogen-fixing legume crop, and we entered the home stretch.

  Their yellow rain slickers standing out like beacons, several volunteers lined the track and waved us onward. Vaughn had organized an efficient rescue effort.

  As soon as the ambulance came to a stop, the EMTs switched into full-on business mode. I was deposited on my feet several strides from the passenger door by Fergus—he pretty much carried me out of the way and set me down. It’s not something that happens usually—in my normal life, I’m such a tangle of arms and legs—we
ll, it had never happened before, actually. So it took me a stunned moment to get my bearings and realize just how I’d been transported to the edge of the hectic scene before me.

  Fergus went around to the back of the ambulance and flung open the rear door. A gurney appeared as if by magic. I was thinking the manufacturer needed to offer an off-road wheel option for gurneys in the Pacific Northwest, because the little rubber numbers that dropped into place as the metal frame ratcheted down didn’t appear up to the task of nimble mobility through ankle-deep, sticky mud.

  Ernie and his duffel bag were already huddled at the side of a rotund form wrapped in tarps. Vaughn and the volunteers had saved the ambulance crew the time-consuming slog of hauling the portly doctor across the field.

  But it was clear by Ernie’s concentrated and efficient movements with tubes and IV bags and monitoring equipment that Dr. Zales was in desperate need of assistance. Within minutes, Fergus and Ernie were shoving him into the back of the ambulance, his flaccid white face obscured by an oxygen mask.

  CHAPTER 10

  The volunteers were packing up—quickly, efficiently, and soberly. No banter or ribbing, or even complaining. I wasn’t much use to anyone, so I slid inside Vaughn’s pickup which happened to be unlocked. Lucky me. And reviewed the messages blinking on my phone.

  They were all from Vaughn, and had started a good twenty minutes before I’d answered the ringing phone in the farmhouse kitchen. Dr. Zales must’ve had his attack, or episode, or whatever it was shortly after Denby, spurred on by his implied threats, had hurried up to the house. I wondered if he’d popped an aorta. He seemed like the type who could easily do such a thing.

  The messages were all variations on a theme—mainly Vaughn wanting me to do what I’d done, provide directions for the ambulance. But he’d included other bits of information in his hurried pleas that helped set the stage for the emergency management arrangements I’d just witnessed and was still witnessing—details about coordinating the volunteers, about cordoning off the gravesite for the night, about transferring the evidence.

  Through the rain-streaked windshield, I could see Vaughn, Nash, and Heath carefully loading large plastic tubs covered with locking lids into the back of the archaeologists’ Suburban. Chloe seemed to be creating a paperwork trail on the fly, with a clipboard wrapped in a clear plastic sheath clutched against her chest. She occasionally propped the clipboard on her hip and stuck her hand underneath the plastic to make notations. Twenty-some skeletons took up surprisingly little space when they were disassembled.

  Slowly, vehicles began to rumble to life, and clouds of exhaust rose white and gauzy around red taillights. A long caravan formed as the carpooling volunteers began winding along the farm’s muddy road in the dark. Heath, driving the archaeologists’ Suburban, pulled into line behind them. Chloe, her sweet face somber, waved to me from the passenger’s seat.

  It seemed like everyone was numb. The group’s atmosphere at lunch hadn’t exactly been festive, but their departure was far more dreary. I suspected that under normal conditions the volunteers would head out to a bar or restaurant together to celebrate a good day of digging and the camaraderie of their chosen hobbyist pursuit, but this day’s outcome hadn’t been worth celebrating—in a multitude of ways.

  The driver’s door opened, and Vaughn slid onto the seat along with a blast of frigid air. He thumped the door closed and exhaled. And just sat there, utterly spent.

  I slid up next to him, took the keys from his hand and stuck them in the ignition. Once I had the heater going, I leaned into him and wrapped my arms around his waist. “What do you need?” I asked softly.

  “This. This right here.” His voice was raspy, as though he’d been yelling for hours, but it was probably just from the strain of a really long, really bad day.

  “Maybe a long, hot shower. Maybe a warm, soft bed,” I murmured, taking a much more pragmatic approach.

  “Maybe I gotta go write up reports at the police station.” But his voice held a hint of a smile.

  I groaned on his behalf.

  He buried his nose in my hair. “I’m sorry I snapped at you on the phone,” he sighed.

  “I was in the attic, helping Denby. I should’ve taken my phone up there with me, but I didn’t expect—I guess none of us expected…is he going to be okay?” I asked.

  “The medic was having trouble finding a pulse,” Vaughn rumbled.

  I love his deep baritone, but that information made me stiffen. And it explained Ernie’s urgency. “Heart attack?” I whispered.

  I felt Vaughn shake his head, his lips brushing across my hair. “When he first started showing signs of being flushed and irritable, he was ranting about food poisoning.”

  I gasped and straightened to stare at Vaughn, my eyes narrowed. “How was that behavior any different? I’ve known him only one day, but he seemed flushed and irritated and generally obnoxious most of the time. Besides, did you see how much he ate?” I spluttered.

  Vaughn chuckled softly and patted me as though I were a fussy child. Then he drew me back tightly against his side. “The whole time I was out there, loading him onto the litter and carrying him across the field with Heath and Nash, I kept thinking, This man’s bitterness has tainted his whole life. I feel sorry for him.”

  I sighed. “You’re a better person than me. I just wanted to punch him in the face. And now he’s in the hospital.”

  “I don’t think pitying someone and punching him in the face are mutually exclusive responses.” Vaughn nudged me over so I could fasten my seatbelt, but his hand lingered on my thigh. “I’ve done that, in fact—punched a guy I felt sorry for.”

  “Oh really?” I perked up, more than ready for a revealing tale about Vaughn’s mysterious inner workings.

  “Another time, Eva.” But his tone was much lighter as he released the parking brake and cranked the wheel for a many-pointed turn in the churned-up parking area.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked, trying to keep from sounding suspicious, because I was still stuck in a rut of righteous indignation.

  “Fine,” he answered warily.

  But I could feel him eyeing my profile while I gazed straight out the windshield. “Anyone else throw up?”

  “No one vomited. Not even Zales.”

  Ah, police-speak. I should have used the word puke—or hurl or retch—to see if I could provoke him.

  But, smart man that he is, Vaughn knew exactly where this conversation was headed. His hand clamped warmly on my knee even though he really needed it for driving. “No one’s blaming you. Or Manny.”

  I slumped against the seat and let it go. There was no value in pursuing an argument. Until we heard from his medical team, I’d have to allow Dr. Zales’ diagnosis to fester in ambiguity. I scrunched my eyes shut against the realization that I had several more interim press releases to prepare if I wanted to cover all the bases. The only good news in this unanticipated scenario was that the media weren’t clamoring for information—yet.

  Vaughn dropped me off at the farmhouse. I entered the kitchen long enough to warn Nash to screen their calls so they didn’t get an unpleasant surprise from a nosy reporter and to collect the scattered detritus of my work and one blue-haired teenager. Denby was still engrossed, almost catatonic in her hunched state over the diaries.

  Nash had the look of a man torn between overwhelming options, all of which were terrible. I squeezed his shoulder. “I’ll check in with you tomorrow. Get some sleep.”

  Willow is not one to let a little catastrophe deter her ebullience. I got a play-by-play recounting of her afternoon and evening on the drive back to the marina. It would be safe to say that, despite the miry conditions, the general surliness of the person in charge, and the morbid task, she’d enjoyed herself.

  “What’s your take on Dr. Zales’ medical condition?” I asked because I couldn’t help myself. Those needing-to-be-revised press releases were looming large in my mind.

  “Weird,” was Willow’s brief
synopsis.

  I waited a beat, but no more details were forthcoming. “Can you be more specific?” I finally asked.

  “You know how it’s the people who most know better who don’t take care of themselves?” she mused. “The smart people who put themselves at the mercy of some insidious coping mechanism?”

  I cast a sidelong glance at her in the wavering glow cast by the dashboard lights. But she wasn’t being snarky, so I waited it out. She’d say what was on her mind, that was for sure. Pressing the timing wouldn’t be beneficial, for either of us.

  She sighed deeply and wriggled in her seat. “Take Gran, for instance,” she started slowly. “Smokes like an emissions-control disaster even though we’ve talked at length—well, I’ve talked at length, anyway, and in her hearing—about the consequences. She knows I don’t want to lose her to a stupid disease like lung cancer, and I know that nicotine is the most addictive substance known to man. But quitting’s just not on her radar. I think Dr. Zales has the same problem.”

  I had to blink for a minute to let that logic sink in. Clearly Willow knew something about the bitter archaeologist that I didn’t.

  She propped her elbow on the window ledge and angled her body toward me—a good sign. “Did you know he’s diabetic?”

  My mouth dropped open, and I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice. “But,” I spluttered, “but…all that food. His caloric intake and the quantity of carbohydrates…” I couldn’t finish. The Dr. Zales I’d observed had been actively inviting a metabolic coma.

  “Exactly.” Willow nodded. “Knows better but eats it all anyway. Because there’s the temporary cure-all of an insulin injection. Do you think a guy like him knows how to manipulate the chemical factors just right, playing at the edge of the pleasures versus the costs?”