Site Unseen

by Dana Cameron

  “Don’t worry about anything,” Neal said. “We’ll get everything in order.”

  I nodded. “Thanks, I’m counting on that. And I’ll let you know as soon as I know anything about the…funeral arrangements. That’s it, I guess. Thanks, again.”

  I went over for another cup of coffee, the bulk of the morning’s unpleasantness almost done. As if I had forgotten something, I said, “And, oh, Alan? Could I have a word for a moment?”

  He didn’t get up from the table and he didn’t meet my eyes. “What is it?”

  I gritted my teeth and thought, Alan, you’re making yourself a very large target today; don’t push me. Concealing my irritation, I said, “I just need your help with something, for a minute.”

  I led him down the hallway, to another, empty common area, well out of earshot. “Have a seat.” I took a deep sip of coffee, wishing I didn’t have this on my plate as well. I just didn’t need it. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing. I was just…sorry.” I could see a lot of his father in him when he pressed his lips together. “What’s this all about?”

  “I’ll be frank with you. You’ve seemed really angry about something for the past week or so and I think it’s getting in the way of your work for me. I wonder if we can sort this out.”

  He said nothing. I sighed and continued, trying my best to be fair to him and focus on the matter at hand. “I’m thinking of Friday, obviously. You showed a lot of temper, you weren’t particularly polite to me, and then you stormed out. You seem to be having some friction with Rob, and a lot with Neal, and this needs to stop. I don’t care if you don’t get on with everyone, but you do need to behave professionally.”

  Alan didn’t say anything and suddenly my anger ebbed, replaced by genuine worry. He was such a mess that I hoped he was getting some kind of counseling.

  Finally he spoke up. “I’m just sick of everyone…running down my work. Running me down.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. “Who’s everyone?”

  “Well, Neal, for one. Neal especially. He’s always on my back, and everyone else follows his lead.”

  “Neal’s job is to keep everyone moving along. And even I’ve had to go over procedure with you, time and again.” I paused, hating to ask the question I knew had to be asked. “Are you sure this is what you really want, Alan? It’s not like there’s a lot of money to be had for all the rigors of this field, not like medicine or the law. It’s a lot of effort to go through for something you’re not completely sure of.”

  “Yeah, of course I’m sure.” He shrugged. “No, I don’t know. I just wish the whole thing would go away, sometimes.”

  “Have you ever thought about taking a semester off, a leave of absence? Just to think things over?”

  He looked up at me. “You’re not going to kick me out, are you?”

  As much as I knew he wouldn’t like the answer, I owed it to him to be honest. “It really seems as if your heart isn’t in it, that’s why I ask. Think about it. But the next time I see a display like last week, I’ll probably reconsider hiring you. It’s not just aptitude but attitude, as well.”

  “Christ, I can’t please anyone, can I?” he muttered. “Can I go?”

  I could tell things were nowhere near to being resolved, but I didn’t have the stomach for it anymore. “Sure. I’ll see you later.”

  I looked at my watch: only seven-fifty. It was far too early to call Brian in California and I couldn’t call Marty yet. I needed to talk to someone who could put this in perspective for me. I called my sister.

  We’re not all that much alike, for sisters. For one thing, there’s a good eight-year age difference between us, not quite a generation, but far apart enough to matter. We didn’t get the usual sibling interaction because she always seemed to be sick after she was born, late in our mother’s life. It was because of that that I’d started spending so much time with Oscar as a kid; Grandpa tried to make things easier on the Maternal Parent. But by the time I reached high school, I noticed that the runt had a will and personality very much her own, and I promoted her from background noise and annoyance to probationary ally.

  That isn’t to say there isn’t the expected competition between us. I had to work hard to get good grades and people called me an overachiever. Bucky’s like Mycroft Holmes, a razor-sharp intellect and constantly accused of not living up to her potential except when she’s interested. We’d both trade for body parts; though Brian says he likes a womanly figure, I’m envious of Bucky’s boyish hips. She bristles every time I stretch and yawn, showing off the fact that I got the bust in the family.

  As different as we are, Bucky and I became friends as adults. I know two things absolutely about my sister, that I can rely on her and that she will always tell me the truth. I think she knows she can expect the same of me. Even if I still haven’t forgotten the incident involving my underwear drawer and a can of chocolate sauce the night before my SATs.

  As I rang up the veterinary clinic where she practiced, I counted the rings like other people tell a rosary, a little prayer with each brrr-ing tone. She was in early so many mornings that when the answering machine picked up instead, I swore and hung up, trying not to get nuts with premature disappointment. What I needed was Bucky’s calm to help me wade through this, I thought. I tried her at home.

  The phone rang just once before a muffled voice said, “Vet.”

  “Bucky, it’s Emma.”

  “Emma who?”

  “Don’t be funny—”

  “I’m not. What the hell time is it?”

  “Almost eight.”

  “Shit. I didn’t get to bed until five. There was an emergency surgery, dog hit by a car. I got it, of course.” I heard a tremendous yawn cut short. “Why are you up? Is something wrong?”

  “Yeah, yeah, there is.” I took a deep breath and told her about the fire, and about Pauline’s death. It surprised me that I could relate yesterday’s events so matter-of-factly.

  “They think that it happened sometime late Sunday night or early Monday morning,” I concluded. “She probably slipped and hit her head on the butcher block island in the middle of her kitchen. The sheriff said that it was probably the smoke and not the fire that did it.”

  “Any idea how it happened?”

  “Near as the Fire Marshal’s Office can tell so far, it was the gas stove that probably started the fire,” I finished.

  “That doesn’t sound like Pauline,” Bucky said after a minute.

  “I know. I’m betting it was bad wiring or something. Not an accident on her part.”

  “Damn it, Em, I’m sorry. What can I do? Do you want me to come up? I can swap some of my appointments around, if you need me for a day or so—” Bucky was the most junior partner at a thriving practice in rural Connecticut; she was still paying her dues in terms of the scut work and very early or very late emergency calls.

  “No, don’t, you’ve got too much going on. I just wanted to talk to you.” A thought occurred to me. “Wait, there is something.”

  “Name it.”

  “Keep Ma out of my hair. She didn’t know Pauline well, but she didn’t like her anyway, not when I talked about her so much. I’ve probably got to tell Ma sometime, but I don’t want her crowding me now. If she hears about the fire on the news, she’ll kill me; if she comes up here, I’ll end up strangling her.”

  “No sweat,” came the immediate answer. “Say, what do you think of this? I’ll take Ma out for dinner tonight, and I’ll mention it in passing, downplay it a lot. That way she’ll know, but she’ll be so busy complaining about the service and what all that it won’t sink in.”

  “I hate being so…so…” I began.

  “The word you’re looking for is sneaky,” Bucky suggested. “Also circuitous, conniving, and conspiratorial. Forget it. Ma’s a pill, and we deal with her whatever way we can. Anything else?”

  “No, this just sucks, is all.”

  “I know. You’ll get through it though,” Bucky said, co
nfident in her prognosis. “And for God’s sake, don’t just wade on with things like nothing happened. Give yourself some time to get over it.”

  “I am, don’t worry.”

  “How’s the dig anyway?”

  “Over now. But we got some really amazing stuff.” I filled her in, briefly.

  “Cool.”

  It surprised me how much that one little syllable meant to me, almost restoring the glitter to my gold. “It really is.”

  “You sure you don’t want me?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “You let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you—I’m serious, now.”

  “I know. You wouldn’t give up a night to Ma otherwise.”

  I heard a short, humorless laugh. “Well, you owe me.”

  “Whatever you want.” I paused awkwardly. “I love you, Bucks.”

  “Yeah, you too. See you, Em.” She hung up.

  Even though Bucky jokes that neither of us is good with people—her working with animals and me focusing on people who had been dead for centuries—I realized how much better talking to her had made me feel.

  I fussed around the dorm lab for a few more hours, then tried to call Brian. He had already left his hotel room, so I left a message to call me right away. I could have used talking to him, especially since I was soon the recipient of another visit from Sheriff Stannard, who knocked discreetly at the door to my room at about one o’clock.

  I wasn’t entirely sure how I was supposed to greet him—I wasn’t being pulled over for speeding, I wasn’t going to him with a complaint, and I didn’t know what he wanted. Surely there were rules, manners for such a thing, but I had no clue what they were.

  “Uh, hi.” I looked around my room in its usual disastrous shape. “Sorry about the mess.”

  The sheriff looked around. “Well,” he said uncertainly, “you’ve probably been preoccupied…for a while. Is there anywhere we can sit down and talk?”

  “Yeah, come on down the hall.”

  After we were settled in the empty lounge, he came straight to the point. “I’ve got some bad news. We’ve got reason to suspect that the fire was not an accident. That fire was burning too hot, too fast, considering all the rain we got.”

  I couldn’t believe he was saying what he was saying. “What? Not an…? No.” I shook my head. “Jesus, no.”

  “The circumstances appear suspicious,” the sheriff said reluctantly. “That’s why I need to verify everyone’s statements, including yours, Dr. Fielding. If we can develop a time frame—”

  “But who would…why? Does that mean that Pauline was…didn’t die by accident?” The horrid idea was impossible to imagine. Oh my dear Pauline.

  “We don’t know if her death was intentional or not, whether the arson was the real goal,” he said gently. “We don’t know what the perpetrator had in mind, but it looks real suspicious at this point.”

  The anthropological part of my brain, over which I have no control, noticed he used the words circumstances, verify, and perpetrator the way someone who has been trained to a particular vocabulary would. In my estimation Dave Stannard would never have chosen them out of uniform. I realized that I was taking refuge in analysis and tried to face what the sheriff was telling me. It came to me out of the blue.

  “Tichnor!” I stood up out the chair, as if I could invoke the man by saying his name. “Have you found him yet? Where was he this weekend?”

  “We have no idea where he was this weekend.” Stannard seemed to be choosing his words very carefully. “Dr. Fielding, weren’t his threats directed at you? Did he even know who Pauline Westlake was?” He flipped back through his notes. “She only saw him leave the site, and that was from a distance. What makes you think that he would try to attack her rather than you? And if he was what you called a pothunter—why this?”

  I was aware that Stannard wasn’t asking me what he appeared to be, but it didn’t matter: I knew what I knew.

  “But why would he need a real reason?” I argued. “The man’s a nut, running around waving that damned gun! This is probably just some way of getting back…” I let that thought die of malnourishment, as it contained a fundamental truth that I was not yet ready to face. The same one that had occurred to me this morning wasn’t going to leave me alone.

  Stannard just waited.

  “Don’t you think he’s the most obvious choice?” I pleaded. “I mean, look at all the stuff that’s been happening, and he’s had his finger in all of it! First Augie Brooks washes up on the beach—”

  “That was an accident, Dr. Fielding.”

  “—and everyone telling me how useless he was out on the water and then Nick down at the Goat and Grapes says that he sometimes hung around with Grahame Tichnor—”

  “A coincidence, Dr. Fielding. I spent time with several criminals last week and it doesn’t mean that I was tangled up in their business.”

  “And then he threatens me, with a gun, no less, and shortly thereafter, Pauline, Pauline is dead and her house burned, and now you’re saying it wasn’t an accident and so why aren’t you looking for him? It can’t be so hard to find him, my God, you can’t let him get away with—”

  “We were looking for him,” Stannard interrupted my tirade. “Straight off, just like I promised you. And we found him.” The sheriff watched me carefully.

  “Well? What’s he said?” A distant part of me marveled that anger freed me to speak so.

  “Nothing. When we went to his house this morning, we did find him, but he was dead. Under suspicious circumstances,” the sheriff answered patiently. “Professor Fielding, I need to ask you, again, where were you last weekend, and particularly the night before last?”

  After that everything was a bit of a haze. I remember having given Stannard Brian’s hotel number and Kam and Marty’s names and addresses, and then he must have gone because suddenly I found myself alone. Like an automaton, I found myself clutching my keys and heading for the parking lot. Unfortunately the Civic was in the shop. I took the college vehicle instead.

  I don’t remember the drive out to the beach. I assume that I had been instinctively heading for Greycliff, and then veered off down the public road at the last moment, remembering suddenly, horribly, that not even the house was there to comfort me. Another gut-wrenching realization in a series of shocks. I couldn’t decide whether I was more desperate for the tight knot in my stomach to ease up and give me a chance to take just one deep breath or to keep the sharp bitterness fresh, as a memorial to Pauline. Either way I lost.

  The beach was deserted; the fog that had driven away the tourists had been followed by rain that was too much for even the most dedicated of beach walkers. I pulled up to the front of the parking lot, where the margin between it and the beach itself was gritty with sand that had blown over the low bumpers. The tide was very high today, and the river seemed rebellious, impatient to reclaim the land that bound it and channeled its progress to the ocean. I couldn’t see the other shore for the fog, and the black water lent a depth and sinister quality to the river that was not imaginable on fine days. There was no comfort in the fact that the summer heat was momentarily stalled; the clammy cold leached directly into my bones.

  I sat idling for a moment, reluctant to switch off the engine and be totally alone with my thoughts, though I finally realized I had come out here for just that purpose. To grapple with “words that would be howl’d out in the desert air, where hearing should not latch them.”

  I put the truck into park and turned the key; the windshield wipers froze in place, diagonal across the glass. Irritated, I turned the key again briefly, just long enough for the wipers to slide obediently beneath the edge of the hood; I wanted symmetry and order. The rain battered against the roof of the truck, echoing my own sense of hollowness.

  I listened for a long while, trying to make sense of the patterns of rain that snaked down the windshield, trying to make sense of everything that the sheriff had told me. Pauline was dead: murdere
d. Possibly killed by a man who had threatened me, who was now dead himself. What the hell could be real anymore, in the face of these things?

  As if in answer, I felt a pain in my side that persisted long after I’d stopped being able to cry. Taking a deep breath, I pulled my wallet out of my slicker pocket. I stared at it for a moment and then began to rifle through it, slowly at first, then more quickly. Brian is always saying that I cram too much into it, but it wasn’t all that cluttered at the moment. I picked out the picture of me with him, the one of us goofing around at the beach down by his parents’ house, where I’m sunburned and laughing, and he’s laughing too, so completely in his element. It felt a million miles away now; worse, since he had yet to call me back.

  I pulled out the rest of the stuff, license, an avalanche of library cards and college ID, a couple of weary credit cards, ATM card, and a bunch of crumpled receipts. I smoothed out the crinkled paper slips and set them aside, then shuffled the cards and set them out carefully on the seat, arranged in a rough array around the creased photograph. I was trying to read my future.

  Suddenly the idea of running away was very appealing. Being nowhere; better, being anonymous. Part of what I love about traveling was the idea of vanishing from the radar for a while, even if it was just for an hour in the airport, the idea being that if I couldn’t be found, then neither could my troubles find me. No one knew who I was, no one could remind me of my responsibilities. It was just a game I played, being incognito in my own life, and it was all I desired now. How much a relief it would be to leave my wallet and all its contents on the front seat of the truck and just vanish. If I walked down the beach and headed into Fordham, and hitched a lift to Portland, I could get a bus ticket for anywhere: With some of the cash I had, I could be lost somewhere in New York state by dinnertime. If I pushed on to Pennsylvania, and then even farther, I would be completely swallowed up, beyond the pale. No one would know me.

  It is very easy to be devoured once you decide to stop resisting. Being devoured sounded very good to me.