by Dana Cameron
“It’s Michael Glasscock.” He said it as if he was the only one in the world with my phone number and I was a dope for not recognizing that fact. I was his dull old “Auntie.” “And you never sent me the letter, did you?”
“What letter are you talking about?” My heart was still pounding. There was really no point in asking how he was. For Michael, it was either agony or ecstasy and he could rationalize his way from one to the other in a microsecond, the benefits of a staggering ego, a brilliant mind, a mercurial wit, and too much philosophy, or not enough.
“The really filthy letter, detailing your undying lust for me and what you were willing to do to prove it.”
Michael’s sense of humor, such as it was, did not run to practical jokes. And yet, I still hoped. “Michael, this isn’t funny.”
“You’re telling me. It was so good that I almost believed it. Nearly thirty seconds of unalloyed shock and excitement. How often do humans get that, really, these days? We’re a jaded lot, we modern humans.” I heard a massive sigh, the sound of a man who’d come to grips with the fact that he’d been robbed. “But of course, it wasn’t you. Couldn’t have been.”
“Why not?” I couldn’t tell why I was so annoyed by this.
“Well, the handwriting was pretty similar to yours, in some ways—the downward stabs, characteristic of someone who digs, a gardener, perhaps—but it was the crowded left margin of someone clinging to the past that suggested an archaeologist to me. But the rhythm was off, the spacing was strange—with those too-wide spaces between the words? Shit, it was nearly as antisocial as my own. And the variation from the baseline showed me that it was someone with no interest in conforming. Dangerous, even. And that my dear, is not you.”
“Thanks a lot. Now you’re telling me that someone sent you a letter, and signed my name?”
“That’s about it, Auntie. Except for the picture. That almost killed me.”
“Picture?”
“I’m going to leave orders that it be buried with me. Or cremated, I haven’t decided which I favor, yet. The jury’s still out on the afterlife.”
Michael might have been a philosopher, but it never seemed to do anything for him, except provide rationalizations. “What kind of picture?”
“As a man, I’m a connoisseur of pornography. As, well, me, I take my hobbies seriously. This…whew. Like I said, if I had really believed you’d sent it to me, I would have dropped everything, run out, and bought new underwear, just on the possibility.”
I took a deep breath. “Michael, please! Start over. Someone sent you a dirty picture?”
“Yes. One of you.”
I gasped. “It couldn’t be—”
“No, of course not. But it was a good enough fake to keep my interest. Someone put your head on an astoundingly inventive, and might I add very flexible, body. God bless the Internet. Not that you aren’t flexible—I’m sure you are—and frankly, since I got the picture, I’ve been speculating about that. But there was a certain quality about the upper body that, while similar to yours, was just a trifle too…enthusiastic. Enhanced, but an outstanding job, in my considered opinion.”
“Damn it, knock it off, Michael!”
“I’m just building the proof, don’t take it out on me.” Another pause, and I could almost hear the effort it took to wrench the conversation back around to me. “So it seems like you’ve got some problems. Someone’s got it out for you, and they’re not playing nice, are they? Am I the first?”
“The first to get smut,” I said.
“Why me?”
“I couldn’t tell you.” I told him about the “gifts” sent to my family, the fire at the animal hospital, the picture of Sophia. The site, the chase. The art museum guard, the painting, and Dora’s parents.
“It’s not like you’re a member of my family. Or a particularly close friend.” As soon as I said it, I felt uncomfortable, but it was the truth.
It didn’t seem to even register with Michael. “Hardly. I would have said that the odd email now and then didn’t actually constitute a relationship. But people are getting married on the strength of just that these days, and the odder the email, the better, in some cases. Perhaps, if you’ve got a stalker, which it seems to me you do, he’s trying to indicate how well he knows you, knows your movements. How long’s it been since we were at Shrewsbury? Year and a half?”
“Something like that.” I shuddered, thinking that if he was right, Tony’d been very, very busy.
“Huh. That’s scary, isn’t it? Someone who’s willing to go to that kind of trouble, spend that kind of time?”
“Yeah.” Suddenly, I felt my eyes welling up. As much of a weirdo as Michael could be, he was taking my fears seriously, and I found myself promoting him to friend status on the spot. “It is scary.”
“Hmm. Kind of obsessive, if you ask me.” Asking Michael about obsession was kind of like asking the Pope about Rome. “Once I started really studying the letter—”
“Oh, enough already!”
“Emma, please.” His disdain was so palpable I could almost hear Michael drawing himself up out of his perennial slouch over the phone lines. “I meant, once I realized it wasn’t you, I started to analyze it. I’ve picked up a thing or two about graphology, studying personal documents as I do, and a little bit about forensic attribution along the way. And it’s my informed opinion that whoever’s responsible for this is a nut case.”
“That’s a big help. Huge.”
“Also highly intelligent, perceptive, inventive. An egoist of galactic proportions, he’s as desirous of an audience as he feels impossibly superior to any one else in the world.”
“You got all that from the handwriting?” Frankly, the description sounded like Michael himself.
“Not all. Handwriting is not a good indication of gender, but, well, men and women write porn differently. In my considered opinion, this felt like a guy trying to sound like a woman to me. Do you have any idea of who might be doing this?”
The flesh at the back of my neck crawled. “I’ve got an idea.”
“Presumably you’ve been to the authorities?”
“Yes, but it’s only recently that there’s been a crime—or any evidence—worth troubling about. No one’s seen this guy, and they’re also mostly convinced that Tony is dead.”
“Well, that’s what I call dedicated. Good work, from beyond the grave. Do they have Kinko’s in Tartarus?” A pause. “Can you get me a sample of Tony’s handwriting?”
“Uh, yeah. You think you could compare them, find out for certain?”
“No. But I have a friend who could. Specializes in attribution. I’m just more of a talented amateur. Developed while I was stalking women as an undergraduate—oh, and doesn’t that word have such a rotten, narrow, loaded connotation these days? Send me a more recent sample of your handwriting, too. For comparison.”
“I will. And you have to send the letter and the photo to me.”
“I can’t!” he said petulantly. “I’m going to have it buried with me, I told you!”
I counted to ten, then to twenty. “Make a copy, if you must, but get me that letter. The original.”
“Okay, but after I show it to my friend. She works better with the original.”
“Fine. I want the cops to be able to check for fingerprints. I want them to have every opportunity to nail this guy.”
“Interesting choice of words, given the situation. Emma, this letter troubles me. This guy seems to know exactly what buttons to push, on you and those around you. A person with a less subtle grasp of the situation would be impressed. I’m just scared.”
Michael’s frank admission surprised me. “Me too. I don’t think Tony would do anything to you, but be careful, would you?”
“Oh, sure. He’ll have to cut through the swathes of adoring women.”
“Sasha’s out of the picture, then?” Too bad, I thought. I liked Sasha, and if anyone had a chance of taming Michael, calming him down, it was she.
You can be elusive and still live in the same house? It struck me that Sasha was doing things exactly right; Michael’s obsessions usually ended with a trip to the altar, at last count, four. If Sasha could keep him entranced, while still enjoying domestic bliss, then she was even cannier than I gave her credit for. Not marrying him, for example, apparently keeping herself unattainable, by his lights. “And these other layers of women?”
“Oh, nobody. Just the usual armies of enthralled. Send me the sample text when you get it.”
“Right. And then make sure I get the originals.”
“It might take a while,” he said. “The tattoo artist works better from originals, too.” He hung up.
I remembered that I’d wanted to speak to Artie, find out if he’d ever left the house when I wasn’t there. I tried his number, got nothing. Called his boss, got a gum-chewing secretary, and was told that Artie wasn’t due at my house that day.
“I know that,” I said.
“So why do you want to talk to him?” The gum stopped for a moment.
“I need to find out something from him. Can you have him call me?”
“Is there some complaint?”
Not yet, I thought. “I’d just like to speak to him.”
“I’ll leave a message…” she said doubtfully, working the gum back up to normal speed.
“Thanks.” It all led me to imagine that I’d hear from Artie when next I saw him, whenever that might be.
I waited until the department was even emptier than when I came in, and then went down to the map room. There had never been anyone to claim Tony’s papers and files and books and things; after his disappearance, the college boxed up the materials in his office, and were presumably charging rent against Tony’s estate or the day he should reappear. Didn’t make things easier for me; a few friends in the department, while shocked to hear of what had gone on, had always seemed a little more distant to me since then. Tony wasn’t there, and since I was, it was almost as if I was to blame for disrupting things so much. The three new professors that had to be found, the gaps in the table at faculty meetings were obvious reminders that I had rocked the boat.
I couldn’t really blame my colleagues; it was a lot of upheaval. We were lucky to get the slots filled, not lose the lines or the funding. That was the quick work and diplomatic ways of our new chair, Jenny Alvarez.
The rest of the files were in Professor LaBrot’s office; I could get at the map room, though, and assumed that some of them would be annotated.
I was in luck. A terse, irritated and threatening note from Tony about the return of maps to the correct places was stuck near the top of the pile in the map room. Long enough, complex enough, to possibly be of some use.
I cast about for a piece of paper to leave a note and realized how foolish I was being. Yes, I was taking something from the files and not leaving the appropriate paper trail. No, it didn’t really matter.
Still felt funny, though. I didn’t like skulking and sneaking and taking things that didn’t technically belong to anyone. Stealing wasn’t my style.
I made two copies of it, replaced one in the files, and then packaged up the original to send to Michael in the next day’s overnight bag. I put the other in the file I’d been keeping, just to keep track of what I’d done and why, in response to what. It was getting rather thick, I thought glumly.
The next day, I stopped by the office to check my mail. A strange young woman was sitting in Chuck’s seat, filing folders. Not just strange because she was unfamiliar to me. A long, burnt-orange dress in velvet with a long row of jet buttons from the high neckline to the skirt swept the floor—it looked like something from a vintage store. As she rolled the chair back to the desk, little black boots with matching buttons skittered beneath her. Short black hair was a surprise—I would have expected Beardsley’s flowing locks to go with the dress—but her beautifully shaped face could have taken any haircut easily. The kohl around the eyes and dark lips told it all, and I was putting my money on first-year fine arts major.
She must be roasting in that dress, I thought. Even with the air-conditioning.
I waved as I stuck my head into the mailbox area. Nothing yet. “Hi. I’m Emma Fielding. Chuck’s out today?”
The look she gave me was fixed and poisonous. “I know who you are.”
Not “I’ve seen your name,” not “Oh, hi! I’m Trixie!” “I know who you are.” I shivered in spite of myself. “Oh? How is that?”
“You were in the museum yesterday. When the guard was killed and Professor Sarkes-Robinson collapsed. I heard that you were responsible.”
“She collapsed because a painting was stolen. Apparently there was a threat made against her as well.” Why on earth am I explaining myself to this child?
“I see.” But clearly she didn’t. She sniffed and turned to her computer.
“Any messages—?”
She looked up at me. “Justine.”
Of course it was. I was also willing to bet it wasn’t the name on her birth certificate either. “Justine. Any phone messages?”
“I put any messages in your mailbox.”
“Okay. I’ll be in the lab.”
Justine didn’t bother to reply. I didn’t bother trying to make her.
I let myself into the lab, wondering how the bones at the site had been removed from the storage. There were three students in there; two of my undergraduate majors were wielding toothbrushes, carefully washing artifacts, and yammering to beat the band. It was impossible to walk past them without picking through the goodies to see if there was anything new that I hadn’t seen in the field. It’s amazing what can get collected unknowingly, and then, when the dirt washes off, you find you’ve got a little jewel, arti-factually speaking. Archaeologists get excited about odd things.
They glanced up when I came in, of course, but they didn’t quiet down a bit. I must be losing my terribleness for them, I thought. Have to fix that.
But their work was fine—the dirt was coming off the artifacts, everything was being kept with its original artifact bag so that we wouldn’t lose the important associative information, and there were no unpleasant surprises like modern nails mixed in with nice eighteenth-century pottery, which would mean that our context was not sealed.
I’d let them live.
“We have a question,” John said.
“Shoot.”
“What’s that that Nick’s got?” John pointed to his friend, who had a brownish lump hanging off his tongue, a grin on his ugly face.
“It’s not his best look, whatever it is.” I reached over and pulled it off; Nick made a yuck face. I glanced at the artifact. “Well, if it’s sticking that good, it’s probably earthenware, right?”
“Yeah, we know, but it’s really thin. Delicate. It looks like it could be a teacup or something, but it seemed too nice for earthenware.”
“Refined earthenware,” I said. “Go check Noël Hume, for a start; there was an attempt to reproduce some of the Asian dry-bodied red stoneware. It works for the period.”
“Cool,” Nick said. “John said it came from the privy.”
John was fibbing; we hadn’t excavated a privy at the Chandler house. “So how’d it taste?”
He shrugged. “Oh, fine. No worse than that piece of sewer pipe I tested yesterday.”
Twenty years old, and you still can’t break them of an oral fixation, I thought. “Fine, good. Don’t actually eat anything, will you?”
“Not intentionally. Say, Professor Fielding…we need some more storage boxes.”
I eyed them suspiciously. “Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes. We need them for the stuff we finished processing.”
I glanced down the long table covered with cleaned and labeled artifacts; they’d made good progress, for all their fooling. “O
kay, you can make two each.”
“Three,” John said quickly; he caught my eye and backed down.
I glared at them both. “You can make two each. No more. And I’ll count.”
They exchanged sheepish grins. “Okay. Thanks.”
I walked to the back of the lab where a young woman was reading an osteology text. While she read, she took notes, and with her other hand, rolled a tennis ball down the table. She caught it when it hit the wall and gently rolled back. That was one way to keep from chewing fingernails, I thought. Her lowered head was bobbing, as if to music I couldn’t hear. A thin white wire snaking through her thick dark hair told the story; she had earbuds in, listening to her iPod. Made sense, given the racket my two reprobate students were making.
I waved my hand, trying to get her attention. No luck. “Ms. Shepherd? Phoebe?”
She looked up, and pulled her earbuds out as soon as she saw me. She had a foxy, pointed face, and eyes that were so deep, and bewitching that I’d actually caught Brian staring into them when he met Phoebe at the last departmental party. “Sorry, Professor Fielding. I was just trying to—” She waved her hand at the guys.
“I understand. I don’t know how you manage to get any work done. You can tell them to keep it down, you know.”
“Oh, they’re okay. But…you know that they were putting things in their mouths? Won’t they get a disease or something?”
“Probably,” I said. “But not from that. It’s okay, it’s a porosity test. Generally speaking, if it sticks to your tongue, it’s probably earthenware, low fired, porous. If it doesn’t, it’s probably stoneware or porcelain, which are higher fired, harder, less porous.”
“Right, I hoped that was the case, but with them, you never know.” Phoebe was relieved. “And…I don’t want to say anything, but…they’re making boxes again.”
“It’s okay. I gave them permission.”
Phoebe’s concern was well-founded. The acid-free artifact storage boxes came flat, ready to be folded into shape. They were an elegant design and, well, really fun to make. Nick and John had discovered this one day, and decided to get a head start on the busy field season with a “box-off.” They’d constructed twenty of the boxes before anyone caught them. Twenty boxes for which there was yet no storage space in our increasingly small lab space, most of which had to be unmade later.