Site Unseen

by Dana Cameron

  She looked over to see how I was taking this so far. I just stared out the windshield and nodded that I’d heard, keeping my face blank. I thought that he was having problems, but knew nothing about this. What was he telling people?

  Meg continued. “So I tell him he’s mental, of course. And then he says that his dad’s been finding out that you were talking Pauline into changing her will and maybe you knew something about that guy Tichnor with the gun and maybe you and he were planning to kill her and it was just a matter of time before everyone found out about it and he didn’t want me getting dragged down if he could help it. So I told him he was out of his mind and he should get his head out of his ass and deal with his parental issues in therapy and not take them out on you, or words to that effect. I guess I was getting pretty pissed off. I’ve been told I have a temper. Well, Alan announced that he was sick of us all laughing at him—which by the way, has been sort of a running refrain for him and is just number one pure horseshit—and then he stormed out after that.” She began to run the zipper on her jacket up and down along its track, creating a little counterpoint to her narrative.

  “And then Neal, Neal gets all quiet and serious and everything and says why did I have to go and get Alan riled, when he just managed to get him calmed down for the first time this semester and didn’t I ever hear of agreeing to disagree and I didn’t have to live with Alan anyway, and I’ve just undone about three months’ worth of compromise? And I said, haven’t you ever heard of standing up for what you think is right or standing up for your friends, even, and where was his spine, or words to that effect, and then I sorta decided to leave before I said worse.”

  She took a deep breath, and I found that I needed one too, having held mine through her whole long monologue. But Meg spoke again first.

  “I mean, I suppose you didn’t need to know all of that, but I think it kind of shows just how crazy people are starting to get, and you really ought to know that much,” she ended suddenly and left us both feeling tremendously uncomfortable.

  I tried to figure out where I should begin. “For one thing, to start with, if you have any doubts about me in this, you are under no obligation to defend me, or even be near me, out of some sense of loyalty.”

  “What other sense is there?” she demanded. “Besides, I know you had nothing to do with any of this.”

  No, you don’t kiddo, I thought. We’ve known each other less than three months. Out loud I said, “Well, thanks. And Alan, Alan’s got a lot going on right now, so it’s not real important to me whether he believes me, that’s the least of his problems—”

  “But he’s wrong—” she protested.

  “He’s allowed to be wrong,” I said, and could practically hear Brian snickering, asking me why I didn’t always take my own good advice. Other people were allowed to be wrong, to ask for help, he’d say to me, so why aren’t you?

  “And I’m not running for a popularity contest or anything, I don’t need everyone to like me.” Again I heard Brian’s imaginary hoots.

  “Meg,” I said slowly. “Is that why you hesitated about coming out here today? Alan’s suspicions?” I was careful not to say Rick’s suspicions.

  “Hesitated?”

  “Back when I asked you, after class, you didn’t seem too keen at first.”

  Her face cleared. “No, nothing like that.” Then Meg looked guilty and stammered a bit. “No, I just wasn’t certain how you’d be, being on the site and all, after, you know…” She turned to me and said, with more than a trace of defiance. “So now you know.”

  I bit my lip and looked out the window, trying not to smile. Meg was funny; not the least problem in the world with revealing the details of her private life, but start dipping into someone else’s emotions, and she turned as shy as a rabbit.

  “I’ll be fine. Here we are,” was all I said, as we pulled down the driveway.

  “Do you, you know, want a moment alone first?” she asked a little too offhandedly. “Before we get started?”

  I wouldn’t have thought that she would have dared to suggest such a thing, but she looked a little edgy herself, and I thought that I’d give her a moment to collect herself. She was pretty ruthless with herself. “Thanks. I’ll just be a minute.”

  It was harder than I thought to go over to the ruined part of the foundation and look around. “I’m still looking, Pauline. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ll find out.”

  A little breeze moved the pines that stood behind where the house had been, but nothing more. I noticed that the roses had been trampled by the emergency vehicles, but one was still hanging on, blooms persisting on broken stems. I pulled a piece of string out of my pocket and tried to prop up the stalk against a stake, and a thorn raked the back of my hand for all my good intentions. I returned, feeling calm, and got Meg.

  The site, as it turned out, had been very thoroughly picked over; there was virtually nothing for us to salvage from the vandalized units, and we spent most of the morning mapping and making notes where we could about the ruined contexts, and making lists of tasks for backfilling day, when all of our hard work would be carefully buried until the next season. We finished shortly after lunch, when I remembered the dive shop and asked Meg if she could spare the time for a side trip before we headed back.

  “I’ve got nothing waiting for me now,” Meg said. That sounded suggestive, but I didn’t pry further. Presumably getting ready for the date she’d had was no longer an issue.

  “I won’t take long,” I promised, “and you’re on the clock until we get back.” I figured nosing around the dive shop wouldn’t give me anything, and the sheriff would probably be too busy to see me again. “I’m thirsty, how about you?”

  We pulled up outside a convenience store for a couple of Cokes, when an impulse seized me. Noticing that we were right across the street from one of the longer-lived antiques stores on the road to the Point, I decided to find out if Tichnor had been stupid enough to try selling the materials recovered through his looting activities, maybe even something of Pauline’s, if he’d been the one in her house.

  The store was set up by a pro; there were a few good pieces placed strategically in the window and in the case by the cash register. The rest of the shop was full of stuff that would have been better suited to the last garage sale of the summer, ratty but not priced to move. All carefully designed to lure the unsuspecting, unschooled vacation antiquer into thinking that there would be treasures hidden behind that pile of tiled ashtrays.

  I glanced around as I navigated the jumble of rusting fire irons and umbrella stands, wondering what the owner would be like. He was obviously skillful in business because the place had survived a dozen other similar shops over the past ten years; he possibly had a love for the past or at least a love for the idealized image of the past that could be constructed from the nostalgic geegaws that lined the shelves.

  The owner appeared to be the woman who walked with her hand outstretched from behind the beaded curtain that separated the shop front from a back room. Stunned, I watched as she marched up and removed the can of soda from my hand, placing it carefully in the wastebasket next to the till.

  “I’m afraid that soda is not allowed in the store. We can’t have you spilling on any of our items.” The owner’s voice snapped out briskly, a voice that plainly traced its lineage across generations of schoolmarms who had no other source of pleasure but the authority they wielded over other people.

  “Frannie Maggers. Are you looking for something special, or just browsing today?” Her querulous voice suggested a suspicion that I had already pocketed the best of the shop’s wares.

  “I suppose I am just looking around. I’m really trying to get a feel for the folks at Penitence Point…” I trailed off, not quite sure what form my tale should take.

  Mrs. Maggers supplied the rest of my story for me. “Oh, a writer. We get a lot of them,” She made it sound as though that corner of Maine had to be sprayed for the infestation of writers ever
y year. “Well, we’re good people here, most of us, that is. Not that you could tell from this summer, but there you are. Perhaps you might find a little piece of the past here to inspire you with your writing. Take this for example.”

  She held up a small brass object. “I don’t like to part with any of Grandfather’s belongings, but times being what they are, well, you can’t eat sentiment. This was his grandfather’s pipe tamper, very rare. It dates back to the early nineteenth century. When gentlemen smoked pipes—”

  “Oh, I know what a tamper is—” I nodded, confident that this is where I could connect with her. We had artifacts in common.

  Frannie continued on, like a steamroller barreling through a Monet landscape. “They needed to tamp down the tobacco before lighting. It was a present from his pretty young bride, who died in childbirth, very sad, and he was never the same person again. I’d be willing to sell it to you for fifty dollars. Cash.”

  I looked at the object, immediately deciding that great-great grandfather probably wouldn’t have tamped anything with a lamp finial from about 1940, and his descendant knew it full well. I said nothing about this, figuring that some folks would be happy to pay for the object just for the story that went along with it. She continued on through the store.

  I decided that the other woman’s skinniness was not from financial hardship. Where anyone else would have been plump from the pickings of unwary tourists that she was obviously raking in, Fran was all knobby bones and parsimony. And by the end of Fran’s tour through the rest of the shop, I had counted ten great-grandmothers, five grandfathers, and far more than the usual complement of great-aunts and uncles. High mortality, bigamy, or divorce must have run rampant in her pedigree for such a collection of relatives to have truly existed.

  Fran, sensing that none of her engaging and entirely fictitious anecdotes was likely to bring her a sale, made as if to take up her position on a stool behind the counter, but I stopped her, mindful that Meg was waiting outside.

  “I’ve heard that you occasionally buy antiques too…?” I left the question hanging, and let Fran’s fancy fill in the gap.

  “That’s true, but they have to be very special pieces. My customers have learned to expect nothing but the very best from me.” She busied herself turning china teacups so that the cracks were less visible.

  “Have you ever purchased any eighteenth-century things, maybe military artifacts, from a fellow named Tichnor? I’m wondering—”

  “Get out! Get out of here right now!” Gone was the smooth patter and the confident authoritarian; the woman’s voice was sleeted over with fear. “I don’t want anything to do with him, or any of his friends neither. Get going, before I call the sheriff!” Mrs. Maggers practically dragged me to the doorway, her voice rising with every step.

  “I’m no friend of his!” I insisted, gently trying to detach her hand from my elbow. “And he’s not in a position to hurt anyone—he was killed a couple of months ago.”

  “Oh, I know all about that, and good riddance I say! It’s not him I’m worried about, though God knows, if there was ever anyone wicked enough to come back from the grave, it was him. I know he’s got friends and I don’t want any part of them neither. I didn’t want his bits of rocks and rubbish—”

  Gotcha!

  “—but he kept coming back and bothering me about it. And the last time he got riled up, stomping around, and damned near smashed the place, ranting about ancient treasures—” She stopped shy of the door, torn between the urge to get rid of any connection with Tichnor and the burning curiosity to know why I was asking about him.

  “What happened the last time? I need to know because—” Here I stopped. I certainly didn’t want to mention my suspicions about Tony. On the other hand, I needed to give something to keep this greedy woman interested. “Because I’m trying to get all the details I can for the research I’m doing about all the excitement here this summer.” Not entirely untrue, I figured.

  “Oh.” Again Fran was caught between her desire to be shed of anything to do with Tichnor and her intense desire to get a little free publicity. “I told you before, he kept pestering me about his broken bits of things. No collectors around here for that sort of thing, most people are more interested in more refined stuff, genuine heirlooms. The last time he came in here, he was drunk as a skunk, you could smell it on him a mile away. Kept bothering me to buy some of his stuff. He got madder and madder, because this time he had gone out of his way, he’d said, to get some things that I would like.”

  “When was this?” I asked, wondering if it was part of the collection of objects stolen from Pauline’s house. “Do you remember what he had?” I tried to keep the excitement out of my voice.

  “Oh, ages ago, last June?”

  June was too early for it to have come from my site or Pauline’s house.

  Frannie continued. “It wasn’t much he had, that’s for sure. A couple of brass buttons, a china cup or bowl, not Indian this time, and some flintlock parts. He said it was from his attic, but they were so dirty and nasty that I asked him if they hadn’t really come from a garbage heap.”

  Eighteenth-century stuff, it sounded like. My own thoughts turned immediately to Tichnor’s metal detector and his collection of things stolen from Fort Archer.

  “That didn’t sit too well with him, and he asked one more time, would I buy them or not? And I answered, for the last time, no!” she sputtered. “He started swearing and stomping around, and I thought he was going to leave at last, but he just stuck his head out the door and yelled to his friend to come in, have a word with me.”

  My ears pricked up. “Did his friend come in?”

  “No-ooo,” Frannie let go of my arm as she tried to remember. “They were arguing.”

  “Did you see his friend? Did you recognize him? Or her? Was it a man or a woman?” I asked excitedly.

  “I didn’t see anyone. I think it was a man. Now wait a minute, let me think.” Mrs. Maggers pressed her finger to her mouth in a monumental display of self-important cogitation. “His name, I don’t remember what Tichnor called him, exactly, but it was something common. Nick? Donnie? No name any polite mother would give her child. Mine are all named properly for their grandparents: Margaret, Richard, Lillian, and Gustav.”

  I reckoned that if any of the little Maggers were anything like their dam, their names would be rendered “Mad Maggie,” “Needle Dick,” and “Frigid Lily.” God only knows what unkindly moniker would have befallen little Gustav.

  “Could the name have been Tony? Maybe Augie?” I knew from all of my ethnographic training that the worst thing in the world I could do was give an informant a leading question, but this wasn’t a textbook exercise.

  Mrs. Maggers considered. “Might have been. Possible, but I don’t say for certain. Anyway, I didn’t wait to find out what the word might be. I shoved him out the door, hard, and then locked it.” She nodded once: Good riddance to bad rubbish.

  I looked at the sharp-dealing shopkeeper with a new respect. It took guts to do something like that. “What happened then?”

  “I pulled down the shade and listened to make sure that he wasn’t going to stick around. He stood out there, hooting and hollering for a while, banging on the door. I called the sheriff’s office, and he sent one of his little Cub Scouts around, but Tichnor had left long before that.”

  She looked me up and down appraisingly. “Are you going to write a book about all the troubles that’ve been up here? Something for a magazine? Lots of excitement last summer,” she pointed out hopefully.

  I dumped every ounce of tedium I could into my lie. “Well, it’s really more of a monograph, for a sociological journal, you might have heard of it, Annual Review of Criminal Psychological Pathology? It’s really quite interesting, see, I’ve been focusing on the presumed correlation between murder victims and their own criminal activities, I mean, the specific types of illicit behavior, and I’ve found the most fascinating data on—”

  “Oh.�
� Clearly it was nothing any of her friends were going to be reading under the dryers down at Ruby’s Hair Fair. Fran lost interest in a hurry.

  “Thanks very much for all of your help.” I almost felt bad for disappointing her. “If it gets published, I’ll be sure to mention you.” Which was not entirely a lie.

  “You’re welcome,” the prim reply came. “Perhaps you’ll stop by another time, when you’re ready to buy something nice.”

  I got out before I was subjected to any more familial fairy stories. Meg was sitting on the bumper of the truck, throwing pebbles aimlessly down the rain grate. Distant plopping noises could be heard after the ping off the grate itself, and the whole endeavor smacked of morose contemplation of things better left undisturbed.

  “Ready to go?”

  “Well, I did have this sizable stockpile of pebbles that needed throwing, but I s’pose I can tear myself away.” I was surprised to hear the glum cast to Meg’s sarcasm.

  “Is there anything you want to talk about, Meg?” I asked. “You seem a little depressed today. Bummed out, not to put to fine a point on it.”

  “Oh no. It’s just, you know, the personal stuff I mentioned, nothing you can do anything about.” She dismissed my offer out of hand. A little brusquely, I thought.

  “I didn’t think that I was going to solve anything, just talk.” I was feeling pretty churlish myself.

  Meg stood up, stretched, and with a lightning movement, kicked the rest of the pebbles down the drain. A wet splash was followed by a fetid smell rising up from the sewer. I picked up her empty Coke can and followed her back into the truck.

  After a while Meg spoke. “It’s only that sometimes people, guys, can be really irrational and it confuses the hell out of me. They like something about you, then when you’re being yourself, they get pissed off with you for it.”