Ashes and Bones

by Dana Cameron

  “Oh, especially to the faculty,” Chuck said, nodding emphatically. “You wouldn’t believe what some of them will do, given the chance. It’s like they didn’t learn how to share in kindergarten or something. They’ll hide things they think belong only to them, they’ll lie, they’ll sneak. Just like the sandbox.”

  I watched the amusement leaching out of Dora like water out of a rusted-through bucket, and decided that maybe I could help. “Hey, Chuck. How’s it going? And, hello, Dora—how’s your summer been? Productive so far?”

  “Emma!” Dora was pleased to see me, though probably more to do with the slides than anything else. “Perhaps you could help me. This—Chuck, is it?—won’t allow me to take a couple of slides from your slide collection. Now, it’s only a nice detail, but the ruins in the landscape are exactly the sort of thing I need to make my point about the influence of the Urbino countryside where Raphael grew up. A small thing, but just the touch I need to—”

  I nodded soberly. “Chuck’s right. It’s not department policy to lend the slides.”

  Chuck beamed at me. I beamed back. Then I saw Dora pulling herself together for a really good blast, and decided I would back off. I was too close to ground zero.

  “But what if I checked them out, Chuck, took responsibility for them?” I said in a hurry.

  “Well, I can’t really…but then…I have no way of knowing what you do with a slide once you check it out, do I, Professor Fielding?” Chuck gave me a big, theatrical wink. “And since you’re so good about turning your slides in when you’re done with them…I suppose it will be okay.”

  He slid the key across his desk to me. I resisted sticking my tongue out at Dora, and she successfully held her own tongue, now that she was getting what she wanted. I tilted my head toward the slide library and she followed me.

  “I suppose he took pleasure in that,” she said to me, when we were just out of earshot.

  “Of course he did. Chuck likes being able to solve problems, especially when he can do it by the book.” I let us into the library, which was warm and stale and smelled of sunlight and undisturbed dust.

  “No, I mean…” She frowned, even as she reached for the index I handed her.

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Or perhaps he was just being mulishly dense? Chuck—that’s not a name. It’s a cut of beef.”

  I figured it mattered not a whit to her that his name was actually Charles Carlton Huxley III. “Chuck’s not dense, he just has a way of looking at things that isn’t always clear to the rest of us. He would have let you have the slides if you were affiliated with the department, but otherwise it wouldn’t have been fair to the rest of us, not with the start of semester around the corner.”

  “He knew you were going to lend the slides to me. That doesn’t seem commensurate with his ‘fairness.’”

  “You have to earn that brand of fairness with Chuck first.”

  We found the slides and I extracted a promise from her to return them as soon as she had copies made. “Of course. I’ll catch our slide tech before he leaves tonight.”

  And make him work late, I finished. But that was Dora’s domain and her people knew what to expect of her, and it was none of my business. We made our goodbyes, Dora promising to email me to meet her for coffee, then she swept off.

  Ten minutes later, in my office, I was trying to make sense of two conflicting entries in a field log. Meg was there too, having a fit.

  “I look like a human sacrifice waiting for the volcano,” the short, spiky-haired platinum blonde announced.

  “I’ve already told you. You look gorgeous, the dress is beautiful,” I said, not looking up from the smudged papers I was trying to decipher.

  “Don’t you think it looks a little too ritualistic?” she asked, standing on her toes, trying to see her backside in the tiny mirror hanging from the back of my office door.

  I sighed. At first I was pleased to have the distraction of Meg showing off her wedding gown—the field notes seemed more than usually screwed up—but when after ten minutes she’d neither budged from my office nor stopped agonizing about the upcoming event, I decided she wasn’t listening to me anyway and went back to work. The problem with graduate students is that they overanalyze everything.

  “Do you think the white is too…virginal?” she asked.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Meg!” I said, tossing my pen aside. “You’re supposed to look virginal! You’re supposed to look ritualistic! Unless you don’t want to—no one says you have to wear white these days!”

  Meg gave me the wide Bambi eyes and I knew I’d gone over a line moved a little closer by her wedding nerves.

  I sighed and tried again. “Look, that dress is fabulous on you: It’s short enough to be hip, the flapper cut and the lace are extremely elegant, and the fact that it was your great-grandmother’s is extremely good family karma. It doesn’t make your butt look big, it hints at cleavage, and Neal will be blown away. You can’t lose.”

  “My butt looks big?” Meg asked apprehensively.

  “I think you’d better change now,” I said, with all the patience I could muster through clenched teeth.

  “I’m sorry, Emma. It’s not the dress,” she said, taking the overdress off.

  No shit, I thought.

  Whoever restored the dress did a great job, but Meg was pulling the underslip off at the same time, and I rushed over to help her before she ripped it.

  Meg was most uncharacteristically on the edge of tears. “It’s just we started out so perfectly. Neal and I both knew what we wanted. Then we had to make a compromise here, another there, and now it’s just turned into something neither of us recognize. It’s a total zoo. I hate it. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Hold still.” I carefully worked the layers loose. I thought about what kind of trouble unsolicited advisors get themselves into. She didn’t exactly ask, but Meg was usually so decisive, so sure of herself, that I decided I ought to give her the best advice I could.

  “Look,” I said, after I had the dress safely removed. I hoped that the Sponge Bob underpants and jog bra were not going to be a part of the regalia on the big day. “As I see it, you’ve got three choices. You could tell everyone to back off and do precisely what you want. You stand a tolerable chance of bruising a few feelings, but you remain true to what you and Neal imagined.”

  Meg nodded grimly. Unless she was made of even sterner stuff than I knew she had, that wasn’t a possibility.

  “You could keep your mouth shut, and let your relatives and his ‘help’ when they offer. Things might not be the way you planned, but everyone else may be tolerably happy. Emphasis on the word may. You’re never going to get consensus from a gang of relatives.”

  She carefully folded the dress back into its box with a small frown of concentration.

  “Or you could run away and avoid all the hassle now, and pay for it later. In all of these three scenarios, you get married and no one dies; in at least two, you get presents. Pick one, stick with it, and accept the consequences.”

  “It’s only one day,” the young woman said, pulling up her jeans. She smiled with relief. “You’re right, Emma.”

  Meg is probably the best student I ever had, but even she couldn’t have guessed that I was only about two-thirds right.

  When I got back from campus, Artie was gone but had left a pile of tools in front of the basement door, perhaps suggesting he would be back again sometime soon. The light on the answering machine was strobing, fit to beat the band. At first I thought it was only because the electricity had been off—the counter was flashing in that odd hieroglyph that indicates a failure of some sort—but then realized the lights in the kitchen were on. There might actually be messages for me. I listened to them all, frowned, and then took them one by one. Something strange was going on.

  The first call I made was to Brian’s mother Betty. “Emma, I can’t tell you how beautiful the leis are!” she said, after she recognized my voice.
/>   When I’d listened to her message, it had taken me a minute to figure out that she was not talking about epic poetry, but Hawaiian flower chains. “Um, that’s great. What leis?”

  “Silly! The one you sent me and Stan, thanking us for your visit! Completely unnecessary—you’re our family, you’re always welcome—and after such a lovely dinner out! That was more than enough thanks.”

  I thought the dinner was the thank-you, too: I’d never sent flowers.

  Betty was still talking, with all the bubbling enthusiasm that came with her love of plants. “—really too much, but thank you, they’re just stunning. I’m going to take pictures of them so I can figure out whether I can grow the same plants. Maybe I’ll take up lei-making myself.”

  She sounded so excited that I was mentally kicking myself for not having thought of doing that in the first place. Considering what I’d received in the hotel, alarm bells began ringing in my head.

  “Betty, I didn’t send you any flowers. I don’t think Brian did either, though I’m going to check with him.”

  “But…Emma. They have your name on them. Even on the card, it says ‘Thank you for a wonderful visit and hope to see you again soon, Emma.’”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t send the flowers. I’m a little worried about this. I—I have been having some problems with…identity theft lately. Someone may be using my credit cards since we were on vacation. Would you do me a favor? Get me the name and number of the florist or maker who sent them? I should check this out.”

  “Oh, no, Emma! I read about that kind of thing in the news all the time. I’ll get the label right away. Hang on.”

  As my mother-in-law put the phone down, I prayed she’d be so distracted by the thought of identity theft, that she wouldn’t ask why any identity thief would use my name to send her flowers. My stomach began churning acid as I waited for her to get back.

  She gave me the information. “Thanks, Betty. I’ll call them right away, make sure everything’s okay. Maybe…maybe it would be a good idea if you didn’t handle the flowers”—I couldn’t bring myself to say, In case there is something dangerous in with them, but then my mother-in-law helped me out.

  “Okay, you’re right. They might be meant for someone else.”

  She sounded so sad that I could have kicked myself for not sending them. Damn. “Okay, you know, it might just be…I don’t know what it might be. I’ll call you right back.”

  “Please do.”

  “And, I’ll call Brian, too. Maybe he sent them, and they messed up the card.”

  “I bet that’s what it was,” she said, and I could hear the relief in her voice.

  We said goodbye and hung up. I called Brian, who had no idea what I was talking about, then I called the florist.

  “I can’t tell you the name of the person who sent them,” the woman on the line said. “That’s a matter between the recipient and the sender.”

  “What if I told you that I was afraid it was a matter of identity theft?” I said.

  “I doubt that very much,” the woman replied. “The customer paid with cash.”

  I racked my brains. “Okay, I understand that you can’t tell me who sent the flowers. Can you…can you at least tell me whether you made up the leis yourself? Maybe not you, personally, but in house?”

  “We would never send anything out that we hadn’t prepared ourselves.”

  “Straight from you to the address in San Diego?”

  “Absolutely, yes.”

  Okay, that at least ruled out the idea, crazed as it might be, that Tony or whoever it was had tampered with the flowers. A distant memory of Nancy Drew and a funeral lei came back to me, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that Betty might be in danger.

  “Thanks for your help.” I hung up then dialed Brian’s mom again and told her that there had been some confusion at the hotel where we’d been staying; they sent a thank-you gift to us, not to our address, but to our ‘in case of emergency’ address. “It’s some kind of premium, you know. You get a tour package and ‘thank-you gift.’ It wasn’t ‘from Emma,’ the card was saying but thank you ‘to Emma.’”

  It was a lame excuse, but the best I could do with the information I had at hand. “I’m just glad that they went to you, instead of getting lost altogether. You enjoy them, and make a lei for me next time I come.”

  “Oh, dear. Well, if you’re sure…?”

  “Absolutely sure. You’ll get more out of them, than I would. What am I going to do, wear it to class? I don’t think the orchids and other stuff would go well with khakis in Maine in the fall.”

  Then Betty laughed and I knew she’d be fine.

  I, on the other hand, was having a fit. If it hadn’t been for the lilies of the valley at the hotel, I would have been able to convince myself of some hospitality error as well. But Convallaria would always be associated, for me, with the death of my friend Pauline and the death of her killer by the poisonous plants that grew in her yard, and another coincidence with flowers just didn’t work for me.

  And the note. I surely didn’t relish seeing Tony soon. Even if it wasn’t him, it still struck me as threatening.

  I pressed the button and listened to the next message again. “Emma, this is Beebee Fielding,” a crisp voice announced.

  As if I knew thousands of Beebees. I sighed. My father’s second wife. Maybe she was just making sure that I knew that they were still married, maybe she just never shook off her business background. I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  “I’m not really sure how to say this. While I think it’s very kind of you to remember your father’s tastes, and to think of him, occasionally—”

  Okay, that was when I decided that there would be no more benefit of the doubt. Bitch.

  “—I really must insist that you don’t send him any more ‘presents.’”

  There it was again—presents? And I could practically hear her making quotation marks with her fingers.

  “You know as well as I what the doctor says, and you know, equally well, that he, like most men, is incapable of curbing his appetites—”

  Dear Beebee. I have no clue what you’re talking about and I refuse to be lectured by someone five years older than me. You could be one hundred years older, and I still wouldn’t take it.

  “—and so, please. No more steaks. I will not be placed in the situation of being the bad guy, trying to keep him healthy. I must insist and I hope you will understand. Bye for now.”

  Steaks? I could barely make my fingers work the phone to call Beebee back.

  She answered at once. “Beebee Fielding.”

  “Beebee, it’s Emma. I got your message, but the thing is, I never sent Dad any steaks. I wouldn’t, you know that.” Quite apart from respecting her wishes, at least when it came to Dad’s health, I’m not the steak-sending sort. She knew that as well.

  “Well, the package had one of those preprinted labels, you know, the kind with the printed note from the sender. It said, ‘Dad, have a blast. E. Fielding.’ What am I supposed to think?”

  “Beebee, this is important. Did Dad eat any of them?”

  A delicate, frustrated sigh. “I told you in my message. The delivery truck no sooner left the driveway than he had the grill fired up and all six of them on the fire. I caught him, but he pleaded, and so we had our neighbors over.”

  “Is he…was everyone all right, after?” I couldn’t believe how stupid I felt, or how shaky my voice sounded even to myself.

  “Yes, of course. They were very good steaks,” she said grudgingly. “He had a little bellyache, after, but that was simply because he’d eaten too much, too fast. And he can never stop with just one treat, he had to have blue cheese dressing on his salad, and potato salad from the deli, and too much whiskey after his beer—”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s good. Not the stomachache, but that there was nothing worse.”

  “Emma, what is all this about?”

  “I think someone is pl
aying practical jokes on me. I’m afraid that they might turn nasty.”

  There was silence from the other end. “So why would they send very expensive presents to us?”

  To show me just how closely I’m being watched, I thought. To show that whoever it was knew me, knows my family. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just to embarrass me, when I have to confess that I’m not that thoughtful. When was all this?”

  “The day before yesterday. I waited to call because I wanted to calm myself. I was very upset that you might have…even though he loved the idea that you…”

  While Beebee tried not to offend me, while trying to correct me, while telling me how much Dad had enjoyed the treat that I hadn’t sent, I recalled what I knew about food poisoning. If the meat had been tampered with, it would have shown by now, I figured. “And it came straight from the source? Not a private home?”

  “No, it looked as though it had been sent straight from the company in Omaha. What am I going to tell your father?”

  “I…don’t know. You can tell him the truth, I guess. Just do me a favor?”

  There was a guarded pause before she answered. “Yes?”

  “Give me the name of the company that sent it? And if you get any other packages that look like they’re from me, give me a call, would you? Like I said, I’m just worried that this joker might turn nasty.”

  Beebee met my father through their mutual dealings in real estate, in the upper-end market in Connecticut. She knew something about competition and nasty tricks. “Of course. Thanks for calling.”

  “Yeah, you, too.” I hung up, then glared at the answering machine. There was one message left, and I almost didn’t dare to listen to it again.

  “Emma, it’s your mother.”

  Oh, hell.

  “You know I hate this machine.”

  So I’ve heard. Repeatedly. Never stops you, though.

  “In any case, thank you so, so much for the yummy, yummy chocolates. You shouldn’t have. I mean, you know I’m watching my figure—”

  A refrain as oft-spoke as it was false.

  “—but it was too, too thoughtful of you. You know I love these little surprises, though it would have been even a nicer treat if you’d brought them yourself.”