by Dana Cameron
“Yeah. It’s been a hell of a day. I’ve got a headache, is all.” I sipped at the beer, trying to assimilate what I’d been through in the past twelve hours. Tichnor’s appearance, the potential of the posthole, the decidedly odd scene at the sheriff’s office…And then there was Tony’s visit, replete with its own drama. Really, it was just too much.
“Ah, to hell with it,” I muttered, setting the glass down. I’d handled everything just fine, everything was covered. I looked at Nick, who was drying glasses. “I got better things to worry about.”
He switched his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “You say so. Say, I heard you were the one who found Augie.”
“Yeah. Bit of a shock.” I thought about the disagreement I’d overheard at the sheriff’s department. “Say, Nick, did Augie get into a lot of fights? You know, fistfights?”
“Oh, more’n most people, less than some.” He shrugged. “Get to drinking, get wound up about something. He was more of a weepy drunk, but every so often he’d get scrappy. The other night, night before he died, that was the first time in a while. Why’d you ask?”
“Just wondering,” I said. “He looked pretty beat up to me when I found him. All sorts of fun at the Point. Had some nutcase named Tichnor out there today. Sonofabitch threatened me, can you imagine?” I kept my tone light; it was sort of amusing, well after the fact. Two people facing off over holes in the ground.
Nick’s toothpick stopped dead in its migration. “No shit? Tichnor, you know, he and Augie ran around together sometimes. They were in here the night before last.”
I put my glass down, thinking hard. “Yeah? How’d they get along?”
“Like spoons in a drawer; now Tichnor’s going to have to find someone else to listen to his big talk. The three of them were in here that other night, those two and Billy. Tichnor left early, before the serious drinking got started, but then later on, Augie and Billy started trouble and I had to call the cops.” He pulled out a sawed-off baseball bat from under the bar to show me how the bar’s tranquillity had been restored. “Takes someone as mean as Billy Griggs not to quiet down when I’m trying to get a point across.”
I had just taken another sip and nearly dropped my beer glass at his words. The blood rushed out of my face. “You…you didn’t just say Billy Griggs?”
“Yeah, sure. But you wouldn’t know him, he’s a real bast—”
“About my age, my height, bad skin, ratty hair?” I said. “Serious personality deficiencies?”
Nick nodded incredulously. “Emma, when did you ever run into him?”
I didn’t answer right away. My mind raced. The instant that Nick had said the name, I realized why the driver of the black car that drove by Pauline’s had looked so familiar. My stomach did a flip-flop. There was no way that Billy could remember me—it had been more than ten years ago—or even recognize me from that distance, I thought hurriedly. It had to be a coincidence, but all at once, there were far too many coincidences occurring down at the Point.
“You okay, Emma?” Nick looked worried. “You look a little rough, there.”
Thinking furiously, I said, “Billy Griggs was the one who beat up on Augie?”
“Sure.”
“Does the sheriff’s department know this?”
“Yeah, they were the ones gave Billy a free night’s lodging for drunk and disorderly and then gave Augie a lift home so he wouldn’t get into any more trouble.” Nick stretched and shrugged. “Shoulda baby-sat him too, for all the good that did.”
Okay, I thought, that rules out Billy. He must have been the “best suspect” I heard Sheriff Stannard and Dr. Moretti arguing about. “What about Grahame Tichnor?”
The bartender waved a hand dismissively. “He was gone long before the other two got bored enough to start in on each other. What are you thinking?”
“Just trying to make sense of what’s been going on around me,” I replied.
“Well, the cops know all this.” He looked uneasy. “Not to add to your worries, but I think we had one of your kids in here that night too.”
“Oh?” But my heart sank; I already knew who it must have been.
“Yeah, tall drink of water, puss on him like one of those sad clown pictures. Already pretty sloppy. I refused him.” The bartender swiped at a glass uneasily. “I thought you oughta know…”
Alan, of course. “It’s okay, Nick. I appreciate the heads-up.”
“And if Tichnor shows up here again, I’ll let him know not to bother you.” He nodded at the baseball bat meaningfully. “No call for that kind of crap.”
“Thanks,” I said gratefully. It was like family around here, everyone looking out for everyone else. I drained my glass. It was time to get going myself.
“I’ll see you.” I slid off the stool and left some bills on the counter. “Work to be done.”
“Take it easy, Emma.”
When I got back to the dorm I wandered down the hall to the kitchen to see if there was anything to gnaw. On the way to a little caloric therapy, however, I passed Neal’s room, where I witnessed something that was guaranteed to keep my stomach rumbling and my head aching. I know for certain that if they had seen me coming down the hallway, I might never have seen this little slice of private life.
The door to Neal’s room was open. Someone was standing in the doorway with his back to me.
I heard a vehement, what—denial? “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” That voice was Neal’s but he wasn’t the shadow in the doorway.
“What do you mean by that?” the other voice demanded. I couldn’t make that one out yet.
“Just what I’m saying.” Neal’s voice was low and emphatic. “You have no idea of what’s going on and it’s not fair to Emma to assume you do.”
My ears pricked up.
“You saw what happened out there today! But I know what you think of me—”
“You don’t—” Neal interrupted.
“Oh, I’m not so stupid that I can’t see you making fun of me with the others—”
“God damn, you’re paranoid!”
“—and I’m just saying, you should stay away from her—”
It was at that point that the form outlined in the doorway turned and saw me. I almost didn’t recognize Alan, his face was red and he was breathing through clenched teeth. If it had been anyone else, he might have been able to cover the quality of emotion that possessed him, but Alan was ill-suited to subtlety. Add to that a chronic, misinformed sense of being outclassed and ridiculed and you had a walking time bomb.
“Something wrong, Alan?” I asked as nonchalantly as I could.
Like I said, he’s no good at concealment. When it finally dawned on Alan that he was staring at me, the barely checked emotion—what was it? anger? frustration? jealousy?—shifted immediately into fear.
I figured I would get some explanation at least, but he all but ran past me.
I looked into the room and saw Neal. He was standing and caught in the grips of some violent passion, fists clenched and feet apart. He looked up and caught my eye and swallowed. “Care to clue me in?” I asked. “What’s going on here?” I took an authoritative tone, to startle him into telling me what had just transpired. Maybe it wasn’t fair of me to try and get it out of Neal, but I knew I had a better chance of finding out from him.
“I can’t.” Simple as that. Behind Neal’s eyes, doors slammed shut, shades were pulled down, and the phone was taken off the hook.
“I beg your pardon?” I said in my best arched-eyebrow, skeptical professor voice. “What do you mean you can’t?”
“It wouldn’t do any good,” he said after a moment’s consideration. “Trust me.”
I shifted tack a little, added a little soupçon of guilt. “Neal, I do trust you. I’m sure if I needed to know about it, you’d tell me, right?”
He only nodded, and I knew right then and there that I could ask all night and I still wouldn’t find out what was making him look so miserable and
Alan look so scared. So I went back to my room and tried without luck not to stay up wondering about the reappearance of Billy Griggs at this unfortunate juncture in my life.
Chapter 6
I WAS FACE TO FACE WITH THE DIRT, LYING ON MY BELLY with my legs stretched out behind me, something you only do with the closest of close work, when something begs your attention and you wonder whether that something will suddenly transform itself from the merely curious into the important. It was the Thursday after my discovery of the body on the beach, my run-in with Grahame Tichnor, who was only a shadow hovering at the edge of my thoughts. I occasionally flinched at unexpected noises, but eventually I had to stop simply because I didn’t have the time to pay attention to them all. My drink with Tony, Billy’s appearance, and my interruption of Neal and Alan’s argument, all of these events were banished from memory in the light of our most recent finds.
The smell of the sun-warmed earth and parched grass enveloped me, even down inside the cool of the unit. As I studied the posthole, Meg hovered anxiously behind me. Anxious despite herself, her protective shell of cool cracked and tossed away in the face of what she was working on. This was Meg’s second posthole, bringing the total number to three on the site including her first one. The other two postholes were even better preserved and the really big news was that all three appeared to be in a line, better yet. There’s the old archaeological saw that if you have two postholes, no matter where they are on a site, you can make them line up into anything you want, but if you have three, and they are in a line, well, that is starting to look something like real evidence.
That line could mean a wall of a building, and that would mean that we had a seventeenth-century English building in New England almost fifteen years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, a settlement that was abandoned a year before Jamestown was established in 1607. It hadn’t lasted, so no one knew of it like they knew Plymouth and Jamestown, not the history books, not the scholars, not the specialists. And those who had done work in the area didn’t believe the fort could be found, without a map or better proof, or if it did, it might have eroded into the river or been destroyed, robbed out, built over, or any of the myriad disastrous fates a fragile site can suffer. So what we were in the process of uncovering was going to change those history books, inform those scholars, and make the specialists reconsider their specialty in a whole new way. My heart had been beating so fast for so long since we’d found the first posthole that I was slightly giddy, over-oxygenated, atingle with the possibility of what we’d been revealing.
So I was glad Meg looked anxious. I might have shaken her otherwise.
I used my abdominal muscles to pull my head and torso out of the unit, trying not to touch the edges of it lest I collapse the drying soil of the walls that Meg had worked so hard to keep straight and clean. Looking back into the unit, the hole that had been dug nearly four hundred years ago to accommodate the post had been neatly reexcavated by Meg, who had carefully followed the soil distinctions to reveal the exact shape of the original hole. Imagine a perfectly square hole like a telephone booth cut into the soil—our unit—with a rough circle of mottled earth—the original, filled-in posthole—appearing in the bottom of that. Meg had brought down half of the unit deeper than the other and bisected the posthole, so that for a while we could see a neat profile of the hole itself, with a stain where the post had been and small rocks that had been thrown in to prop up the post while its hole was being refilled. We had drawn that and photographed it to within an inch of its existence. It was perfectly defined and distinct, the sort of thing you never find.
But nothing that good ever comes without complications: The unit was not directly lit by the sun, it was overhung with branches and so was dappled with shadows, making photography difficult. We’d used a white sheet to block out most of the shadows, then tried long exposures and a flash to add an even light, and prayed like mad that some of it would be preserved clearly on film. You never know until you get it back whether your work—now destroyed, excavated, filled in, and gone forever—will show up, so you also do measured drawings and verbal descriptions in notes. Triple, extra, super-redundancy, whatever you can think of, to preserve this vital information.
After we had recorded the excavated half of the bisected posthole in relation to the other stratigraphy, Meg had removed the remaining part of the posthole as well, in the hopes of recovering an artifact—a hand-wrought nail perhaps, or even better, a button or piece of pottery that could be more closely dated—but had come up with nothing. Since we had even found a tiny, precious sliver of the original post, worn down and disintegrating from a huge structural member to a splinter the size of a cigar, another dateable artifact would have been too much to ask for, in light of the perfect preservation of this most recent trace of Fort Providence.
I dusted off my hands and then, out of habit, automatically brushed at my chest. A crew of women doing close, nose-to-the-soil archaeology can end up looking like a Wagnerian chorus, perfectly round, brown-colored breast shields imprinted on T-shirts, pressed into the soil by the flesh beneath the fabric.
“Yeah, that’s it,” I said at last, “but it’s a real pain in the butt to see in this light. Good job, though; I think you got it all out of there.”
“Thanks, Em.” She was pleased with herself and the find and me too, I thought. She knew how big a deal this was.
Something suddenly caught my eye. “There is a little dark stain over there. I thought it was a stain from a disintegrating rock in the subsoil when I was down there.” I gestured with my trowel to the far side of the posthole, now in shadow. “Can you see that dark patch in the very bottom, by the south wall over there?”
Meg squinted, a small frown quickly replacing her smile. “I can’t see.”
I lowered myself down again, balancing so that I could see and still not obscure her view. “The light down here stinks. Just now, I thought it looked different. Probably nothing…”
Letting my eyes adjust to the gloom of the small hole again, I scraped gingerly at the area I wondered about. The disintegrating rock theory seemed to be confirmed when the soft, dry sound of the trowel against loose soil suddenly changed to a metallic rasp. A dark shape fell out of the wall to the bottom of the hole.
I reached for it, and when my fingers closed around a thin flat object instead of a small, spherical one, my breath caught. Holy shit, I thought.
Twenty times a day on a site when you might be getting down to what you’re looking for, you pause, and your heart stops. Then your breath catches because your brain has been tricked into seeing something that might be something, but turns out to be a rock, or a twig, or just another piece of modern brick. That’s always what happens, and you feel silly and a little disappointed and you carry on.
Except this time, even without seeing it, I instinctively knew it was a coin I held in my hand.
I pulled myself out of the unit, heart pounding, trying to keep my cool until I could be absolutely sure, but trying also to prolong the moment in case it was indeed what I thought it was. These moments come seldom in the course of a career, and sometimes they never come. Seating myself by the edge of the unit, I closed my eyes briefly, collecting myself before I turned my closed fist over and opened it. Forget buried treasure, if this was what I thought it was…
This could change everything, I thought. My God. It could be the cover of the book. It could be the front page of the New York Times.
“What is it?” Meg said. She walked around the unit to my side, the better to see.
Carefully I opened my fingers, and there in my palm was a small, gray, flat circle, a crust of dirt discolored with dark, almost purple flecks of corrosion still sticking to it. I brushed at it carefully, so carefully, holding my breath lest even that gentle action destroy some vital evidence. A date, I thought, what is the date? My eyes strained to focus, to read what was on the side of the disc, and I thought I’d burst with anticipation. I couldn’t see a date, couldn’t eve
n remember whether there should be a date on the coin, the one thing that would provide incontrovertible proof of what I’d been working on. But then there in my hand, I thought I saw the faint outline of a minute flower to one side of a face—
“Emma, what is it?”
It was a rose. A Tudor rose.
“Holy shit,” I whispered. I looked up at Meg and held my opened hand for her to see. “Holy—”
“Oh my God,” Meg whispered back. Her voice rose in excitement. “Is that a…is that what I think it is…?”
“Yeah.” I stared at the thing. “My God, it is. I can’t…I don’t believe it!”
“Turn it over, quick!” I wouldn’t have believed that Meg could squeal.
I shook myself, tried to concentrate, turned it over, and again brushed carefully. The other side of the silver coin was worn smooth, but the faint outline of a crown was still visible. The edges were worn as well, and though the lettering had long ago been worn by acts of everyday commerce, changing hand to hand, traveling in a pouch, being hoarded in a wooden casket, I knew from the rest of the imprint that the letters would have spelled out “ELIZABETH D. G. ANG FRA ET HIB REGINA”: “Elizabeth, by the grace of God, Queen of England, France, and Ireland.”
“It’s Elizabeth,” I said, starting to stand. “I can’t remember the issue date of this coin, but it’s—”
“It’s definitely early enough,” Meg finished for me. Her eyes were shining and her voice was getting higher and higher with excitement. “More than early enough, it’s just too perfect. I mean, they draw stuff like this for a textbook, right? Guy comes along, digs a hole to set his post in, ooops! accidentally, conveniently for us, drops in a coin with a date to tell us the date after which the house was built, fills it in, builds the house around the post, leaves it, and voilà! We come along after a couple of centuries and—”
She was really starting to babble. “Yeah, Meg I know,” I said. “I know.” The last word was a little strangled and I realized that I wasn’t breathing evenly. In fact, I found myself having to sit down again; the sky was starting to close in on me.