Ashes and Bones

by Dana Cameron

  That is, they didn’t turn away until they recognized me. Then a few actually turned and fled inside the house.

  They didn’t run, not really, but it was a definite retreat. One didn’t move fast enough. I called him. “Ryan! Hang on a second!”

  He was either too dumb or too honest to pretend he hadn’t heard me. He did pretend, however, that he hadn’t noticed his friends taking off like a pack of scared wildebeests. I could give him that; it wasn’t a matter covered in most etiquette books. “Oh. Hi, uh, Professor Fielding. Are you having a good summer?”

  “No.” I looked around the porch, but it was completely deserted. “Where is he?”

  “Uh…who?” He tried to look baffled, but gave it up after a moment. He then tried a look of delayed recognition. “Oh. You mean…Tyler?”

  “Yes, Tyler. Where is he?”

  “Uh…Belgium?”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and sucked my teeth. He had exactly ten seconds before I…

  He must have seen something in my face, because there was genuine panic in his now. “No, I’m serious! I think he’s in Brussels until the end of the week, and then he’ll be back. He’s not due back at the house for a couple of days, anyway, and if it’s not Brussels, it’s somewhere else in Europe. He’s been away for almost two months.”

  “Excuse me. He’s in Europe? He gets caught cheating on a paper—by me—handing in a paper from one of those Internet term paper mills, gets subjected to a college disciplinary hearing, is reprimanded, flunks my class, and you want me to believe that his parents sent him to Europe? For two months? Try again.”

  “I’m serious. He’s been away the whole summer. But they didn’t let him go by himself. They made him go with them.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t see the punishment there.”

  “But he didn’t flunk your class,” Ryan blurted.

  I turned on him. “The whole sordid episode has been burned into my memory for all time. I believe I recall quite clearly the moment I hit the enter key and submitted my grades.” I recalled quite clearly thinking the entire ghastly mess—the hearing, the wrangling, the pleading—was behind me.

  “Oh, sure, you might have. But what he told me was, the dean told him he could just not get credit for the class. He could take another one and it would just be…gone.” He shrugged.

  Oh, dear God. The dean. “He…I never signed a drop form. I wouldn’t…” But I knew that Dean Belcher would. Especially if…

  “Ryan, remind me. Tyler’s family. They’re the aluminum Tuckers, aren’t they?”

  It made them sound as if they were cut out of shiny foil, but Ryan knew what I meant. At least the little wiener had the grace to shrug again as he nodded.

  That explained a lot. Dean Belcher was a sucker for a sob story, especially if it was backed up with a significant family fortune and the possibility of incoming funds. “I cheated because I was scared that I wouldn’t pass” sounded so much more logical when accompanied by the potential, perhaps the promise, of big donations.

  “Okay, thanks.”

  Ryan looked relieved and turned to climb the porch.

  I waited until he was almost at the top step. “One more thing, Ryan.”

  Give the kid credit. He didn’t bolt for the door. “Yeah?”

  “He’s been with his folks? The whole time? You see, there’s been some…oh, let’s just use the coy euphemism ‘unpleasantness’…this summer. You don’t think that he…?”

  I sounded like an idiot.

  Ryan shifted his weight, back and forth, as he tried to decide what to say. “Professor Fielding, I won’t lie to you. He was pretty pissed off at you, during the whole…thing, but—”

  Pissed off at me, I thought. Because he got caught cheating.

  “—but after his parents…and the dean…after the dust settled?” Ryan shook his head. “I’m sure he doesn’t even remember you exist.”

  I nodded, a bit numb. “Sure, fair enough,” I said, marveling at how stupid the words were even as they left my mouth. I turned back to the main path.

  Ryan hesitated, before he opened the door. “I really enjoyed your class. I mean, I didn’t do really well, but it wasn’t because I didn’t like it.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t bring myself to say thanks, not for the information, and not for the pity. Because now I was getting pity from undergraduate fraternity porch ticks.

  Great.

  I walked back down Maple Walk. My stomach was still in turmoil, but for a completely different reason.

  Long before I reached my building, I had convinced myself that Tyler was no longer on my list of suspects. He couldn’t have done it, not while still in Europe, not with whatever lax parental observation—exerted in response to having had to deal with the dean—was present.

  Other suspects wouldn’t be ruled out so easily. Not by me, anyway.

  Okay, say it is Tony. How on earth do I go about finding where he might have gone and what he might be up to now, without getting the police involved and without getting Brian more convinced than he is already that I’m a mental case? I just don’t have the skills to deal with—what? Stolen gold, double identities, that sort of thing. And everything I do know is four years old, to say the least…

  Shit, Em. Everything you spend your days learning about is three or four hundred years old, depending on how you look at it. You want to talk about partial evidence, the impositions of time and space on your work, and you’re worried about four years, in the age of the Internet? Where simply everything is documented?

  Most everything. Most everything legal—you can’t imagine that Tony has been doing everything on the up-and-up, can you? But still…this might not be impossible.

  Of course not. In fact, more than half of the problem is asking the right questions. Start there—

  Work from the known to the unknown. Begin at the beginning.

  —and move to what you know now. Give it a shot, at any rate. Give yourself some peace of mind, maybe, finding out one way or the other. Maybe you’ll find out he’s dead.

  And that would mean I have no idea who’s behind these events? That’s comforting how? I’ve crossed one name off a list of four and a half billion, that’s all.

  Pish and tosh. You’re not that important, my girl. How many people have you ever taught, all together—thousands? How many of them might want to mess with you? A dramatically smaller number, never mind that little turdbag Tyler, who apparently we can temporarily shelve as a suspect. I ditched my parents all the time when I was growing up, and all the little rat needs is a credit card and a cell phone or an Internet café…

  He’s off the list for the moment.

  I arrived at my office and flung myself on the couch there.

  Okay, so subtract Tyler, add in colleagues, competitors, neighbors, people you accidentally cut off in the supermarket parking lot, most of whom can be written off the list immediately, and you’re dealing with a hundred, maybe. Instantly, your list is magically, logically, smaller.

  Okay, so you’ve talked me into it. Where do I start?

  You start with gold.

  Don’t know a thing about it. Don’t know where you’d turn gold into cash, don’t know who might pay attention to those things…

  But you do know folks who know about stolen antiquities. Time to get online and start asking some pertinent questions.

  That got me out of my funk and off my couch. I pulled out a couple of books from the shelf, on the antiquities trade, and my ASAA directory. I flicked through the articles, and realized that they were all dated and most of them dealt with areas other than the ones I suspected—the Caribbean, Mexico—but they had some anecdotal evidence that suggested I was on the right track. The rates of antiquities theft these days were quite staggering, partly because of collectors, who were a constant plague, and partly because of countries that sold the antiquities to raise money, though this was usually for arms and not the populace at large. I learned a bit about how sites were looted,
and how the collectors, looters, thieves, call them what you will, were almost as skilled as my archaeological counterparts. I learned that the trade in illegal antiquities was third behind drugs and weapons dealing.

  I also learned that archaeologists were killed by site looters.

  But it didn’t tell me where the artifacts went. How one turned them into cash, and more, did it without being caught. I was just too law-abiding for my own good.

  I figured I had two options then. I could go the usual route, check colleagues I knew might know. Then I could branch out a bit, check out some folks who might have the information and be amenable to sharing it, if I put the question just the right way.

  My first call was to Rob Wilson. Rob’s been a friend since the bad old days, even though we hardly ever get the chance to hang out anymore. As much as I missed that, I knew that if I had a question that he could answer, he wouldn’t rest until he got what I needed. Actually, it was kind of unfair to ask him anything, as he was as bad as me about obsessing over tracking down a fact.

  On the other hand, I was more than willing to exploit that and his guiltiness for never hanging out with the old crowd at the conferences.

  Getting to be quite the coldhearted creature, aren’t we, Em?

  Sod off.

  I lucked out, he was there, for once, and more than that, answering his phone.

  “Hi, Emma! How’re you?”

  Damn caller ID. Always took me by surprise. “I’m doing okay, Rob, you?”

  “Can’t complain. What can I do for you?”

  Was there just a touch of impatience there? I didn’t care. “Got to ask you some questions about the antiquities trade, if you’ve got a minute.”

  “Just about five, but I’ll see what I can do for you. Shoot.”

  I outlined the problem, without giving him the reasons I was so interested in it. “I’m hopelessly out of date when it comes to the latest bulletins, and such. Where are the best places to sell gold, or rather, golden antiquities, these days?”

  There was a heavy silence on the other end. “What the hell are you getting into, Em?”

  “Um, let me rephrase that—”

  “What did you find this time, Emma? Exactly what kind of trouble are you in?”

  “I’m not…I didn’t find anything, it’s not me.” None of it was me, I thought angrily. “Look, I don’t know if you heard, if you remember what happened a couple of years ago—”

  “Is this the stuff that Duncan Thayer was going on about, back at the ASAAs?”

  There’s that name again. “What? No. Well, yes, but probably not the way he was…why? What did he tell you?”

  There was a long pause. Rob was going to be diplomatic. It was one of the things that I loved about him, ordinarily. Now, it just seemed like he was covering for my evil ex, the oft-wished-I-could-eradicate-him-from-the-record-of-my-life, Dunk the Skunk.

  “You know everyone was pretty well jarred by what happened at the end of the conference this year, up in New Hampshire?”

  How could I not know? I’d exposed a killer, one of my colleagues and someone I’d accounted a friend, and nearly got myself killed in the process. “Half of the folks blamed me for causing trouble, half thought I was a liar, and half of them just thought I was mental.”

  “Um, okay. Jarred. But Duncan falls into that third half. He claimed that he passed along a hello from someone and you assaulted him.”

  “Assault is a strong word,” I said carefully, knowing it wasn’t too strong: I’d gone ballistic, true, but with good reason. Didn’t make it less of an assault, I guess. “He gave me greetings from a murdered man, and the person using that man’s name was probably the murderer. The same guy who tried to kill me.”

  “This is to do with that thing out at the site that time? Three, four years back?”

  Rob was an old enough friend that he knew about the murders at Fort Providence on Penitence Point. “Yeah. You know, at the conference in January, Duncan made a point of telling me that a guy approached him. I don’t think Duncan was lying, now. I think the guy is back. Looking for me.”

  “Give me some context, Em.”

  So I told him about Tony and the gold he’d stolen and why I thought he was back. “I was trying to figure out if I could trace him by the British gold he took from the river. I never saw it, but I figure if I could track the dealers, find out which illegal antiquities markets would be the most like to give him a good profit and yet not send up any signals to the authorities—”

  “Emma, believe that I say this from a place of love: You think way too much. Always have, always will. You’re over-complicating this to extremes.”

  “Yeah? So tell me how you’d approach it.” Okay, I was feeling prickly.

  “Shit, if it were me? Either the gold is in bars, in which case you melt it down and sell it to your local refinery, or it’s in coins, and you don’t melt it because of the numismatic value. Also more portable that way. Go to your local coin dealer and say you found Grandpa’s collection in the attic and you’d like to cash it in. They’re not going to ask.”

  “They don’t have to report it to the authorities, or something? The IRS wouldn’t—?”

  “Look, kiddo, you could find an auction house—you said it was British gold, right? Find a large British auction house, if you want, and get the best price. But that’s too high profile, even. You could go and sell it online. Or you could just go down to the corner—”

  “Yeah, yeah, the corner coin store. Rob, seriously? Is it that easy?”

  “It’s that easy.”

  I shivered. That not only meant that it would be nigh on impossible to track Tony, if it was bars, as I bet the dealers wouldn’t be likely to tell me who’d been selling them what. It also meant that he had a very large amount of very disposable income.

  “Look, I can tell you the other stuff if you want, Em, but really? You don’t need it.”

  I didn’t need it: I was already hosed. “Okay, gotcha. Thanks for your help, Rob.”

  He laughed, and in other times it was a noise that would have brought a smile to my face, too. “You make a shitty criminal, Em. But if you ever stopped thinking so damn much, that would be different.”

  “Yeah, yeah, rub it in, why don’t you?”

  Maybe he could hear the frustration in my voice; it had nothing to do with my lack of criminal genius. “I’ll email you, if I think of anything that will help you, okay?”

  “Thanks, Rob, I mean it. Catch you later.” I hung up and rubbed my head. I guess if it ached, it was from running headlong into so many dead ends.

  Chapter 6

  WITH ARCHAEOLOGY, YOU’D THINK THINGS WOULD be straight forward, but they never are. Read the books, dig the site, wash the stuff, write up the report, reap fortune and glory. And while that is essentially correct, it leaves out the details of schedules, paperwork, personnel, budgets, meetings, PMS, home life, and homicidal maniacs. So it was a relief to be able to actually get out into the field the next two days to do some testing out at Penitence Point.

  There wasn’t a lot to be done, and so it worked out to be just Meg and me, again, out at the Point. Neal had gotten his doctorate in the spring and was trying to set up his own company, and so didn’t have the time, even if he could have used the money; Dian was gone, out of the picture, having been offered a job as an office manager that was going to keep her a lot more secure than any job in archaeology would. It was a little sad, too, to think this might be one of the last summers that Meg and I would work in the field together, as she was working full-time on her dissertation and would be gone, probably, in a year or two.

  There were lots of emotions that I was trying to clear out of my head so I could concentrate on the work. A nice collection of one-by-ones, all along the western boundary of the site, near the line of silver birches that led down to the edge of the bluff and the river. Meg looked a lot happier than she did in my office; now she was more surely in her element.

  “Did I rememb
er to mention in my email yesterday?” Meg said. “I asked Katie Bell if she wanted to join us, just for the experience. She was back for a visit, before she goes off into the wide world of graduate school next year. Told her we’d be dropping some phone booths and maybe some TPs, and did she want to come along?”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “She had no idea that you were talking about.”

  “Right. I mean, she knew TP was ‘test pit.’ But it wasn’t just that she didn’t know that I meant square-meter units, she didn’t know what an actual phone booth was.”

  “Surely she must have seen them in movies,” I said. “How old is she? Twenty-one, twenty-two?”

  Meg nodded. “She finally did remember having seen them in movies, but that was her only reference point. I bet she doesn’t know what a vinyl album is, either, or that you can make tea without a microwave, or that floppy disks used to be floppy.”

  “She’s a smart kid, but a very new soul,” I agreed. “Ah, well, now she has a bit of dated jargon, which she will probably think of as ‘lore.’”

  The fact that it was just the two of us had struck me from the moment our plans were set. Meg and I had been alone on the Point before, and bad things had happened. Good things too, but the stuff that was on my mind was directly rooted in our first experience there, and a particular night that had involved gunplay, a death, and Neal being wounded—by Tony Markham.

  If Meg was bothered, then she didn’t show it; as far as I knew, she still thought the mention of Billy at the conference had been a parting jab from Duncan. For my part, after the flowers, mysterious deliveries, and fire, every noise that might have been a footstep, or might have been nothing at all, caught my attention. Finally, it was only the physical labor itself and the concentration that digging a neat square hole in the ground required that diverted me. The fact that Tony had used fire to destroy the house that had once stood on this site, and conceal the murder of my friend, just gave me an even worse case of the jumps.

  I finished the balk drawings that were left over from yesterday and Meg had just finished sifting and sorting the artifacts into carefully marked bags. As I gazed across the site, I realized something wasn’t right.