More Bitter Than Death

by Dana Cameron

  There was a pause. “And since they got hit in New York before they got hit here, all the flights were canceled. So Marty’s stuck here with us.”

  Another pause, then Brian soldiered on. “So I guess she and Princess Sophia will be staying with us. It was good, that they canceled the flight before she got to Logan, but she’s really, really not happy about it. I think she was really counting on seeing her folks—hang on a sec.”

  There was a muffled sound of the phone being moved and I heard Brian say, “Yeah, thanks, Marty. I’m just on the phone to Emma. Yeah, I’ll tell her hi. Popcorn? Great. I’ll be right there.”

  When Brian got back to the phone, he sounded even more deflated. “Okay, I gotta go before the no-salt fat-free popcorn gets cold. Marty’s feeling fat and trying to watch her eating, so we’re kinda toning down the whole snacking thing.”

  I thought about the elaborate plans that he and Kam had made so joyfully, involving prepackaged salty meats, cheese, and alcohol.

  He continued with the message. “She says she hopes you’re having fun, up in New Hampshire with your friends.”

  Ha! I thought. Everyone always thinks these conferences are for fun.

  “…and all I can say is, Kam owes me for this, big time. Okay, you don’t have to call here when you get in, I don’t want you to wake Sophia, but if you want to leave a message on my phone, that would be cool, ’cause I’ll leave it off. I love you, pork chop.”

  I hung up, trying not to think about how depressed he was, and how bad off Kam must be, when they’d been so looking forward to being guys together, as they had been when they were roommates. At least Brian was safe, and Marty, and that was the important thing. But it was sure not the fun they had planned.

  Jay and Chris came in about ten minutes later, and Brad a few minutes after that. Jay had calmed down or sobered up since the events in the ballroom, and Brad was ashen. Chris looked troubled.

  “I’m going up to bed,” Brad announced suddenly. “I’m not feeling very well, I think I’m coming down with something.”

  “Hey man, I haven’t seen you all day almost, Braddyboy” Chris said. “I’ve got some NyQuil if you want it. Take it prophylactically, get you some sleep anyway.”

  “What am I supposed to do, rub it on my dick?” Brad said.

  We all looked up; it was unlike him to make rude jokes.

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, no thanks, Chris, I’ve got some echinacea and goldenseal I can take. I really am feeling poorly, though, so I’ll say good night.” He lifted a hand vaguely and moved to the elevators.

  “That was strange,” Jay said. His phone was out of sight now, and he seemed to be drinking a coke. “But what happened to you? What did the cops say?”

  “They were just asking about the last time I saw Garrison, where I was last night,” I said.

  “Holy shit,” Chris said. “I wonder if it had anything to do with the artifacts that were stolen?”

  “Or the shots that were fired,” Jay added.

  “They didn’t say anything useful about them,” I said. “Chris, are you talking about Bea’s artifacts, or the repros from the book room?”

  “Either. There’s a hell of a lot going on here, now,” he answered. “The cops talked to you, huh?”

  I exchanged a look with Chris; he knew that I’d had experience talking to the police from a nasty little event that took place near his place of work in western Massachusetts. I guessed it was his way of asking how I was doing.

  “What were they talking to you about?” Jay asked.

  “It wasn’t anything special,” I said, after a moment. “They weren’t accusing me of anything. Though they did make a meal of the fact that Garrison and I spent time alone out at the site yesterday. He and I spoke for maybe two minutes on the way up the hill to the bus.”

  “Damn, Em,” Jay said. “That’s messed up.”

  I spread my hands. “Tell me about it. But that’s all it was, really.”

  “Quite the news about Garrison, huh? And after we were all just talking about him last night?” Carla had joined us. “It’s enough to make me want to start smoking again.”

  We greeted her, but we were all really wrapped up in our own thoughts.

  “Hey, you.” She nudged me. “Serious weirdness going on, huh?”

  I nodded. “You can say that again. Say,” I asked her, keeping my voice low, “the slide with the frog in the fez—that was the only thing you left for me, right?”

  “Whatever do you mean?” she said, batting her eyes at me. Something in my face must have clued her in, because she stopped fooling around right away. “Yeah. Why do you ask? What’s wrong?”

  “Someone left me a nasty note,” I said. “Real nasty. The cops tried to make out like it was a joke, but at the same time, they suggested I don’t go wandering off on my own, you know what I mean?”

  She shook her head. “No way, it wasn’t me. I wouldn’t—”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “I just thought I’d make sure, you know.”

  The bar was filling up now, and maybe it was the drinks, maybe it was the density of souls that was bringing a little more life to the gathering. Liveliness went straight into a kind of high-tension frenzy, as people put a little too much effort into putting the evening behind them or into perspective.

  Jay went up to the bar to buy drinks. I watched him order, then his attention was drawn to the fight on the television. I glanced at it briefly—it was a heavyweight match, and so a little slow-going for me; those big guys don’t often have the speed to keep moving for very long. Jay, still watching the television, motioned for the bartender, asked him a question; the bartender scowled, shook his head, held up his hands. Jay took out his phone, eyes glued to the match, and made a quick call.

  Another archaeologist in a name badge accosted him. When his order came, Jay and his friend both looked over at me, briefly. Jay shrugged, came back with the round of drinks, but even before I got my bourbon to my mouth, I saw his friend go over to his own party, all of whom immediately swiveled their heads my way before leaning into each other to talk.

  I picked up my drink and thought: that’s how rumors start. God only knew where they would take me from here.

  Chapter 8

  IT WAS STILL SNOWING WHEN I LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW the next morning, Friday. After a round of shower combat, followed by coffee and a muffin wolfed down in the lobby—the restaurants were just too crowded this late in the morning—I pulled out my phone. I was really not looking forward to telling Brian what was going on here, afraid of his reaction to what was a perfectly normal situation. Well, if not normal, then not unusual. For us. For me, anyway. But after we said good morning and I told him about the events of the previous evening, explaining that, so far, the cops were telling people that the gunshots were probably from hunters and that, so far, despite the fact that Garrison was found outside, they had no reason to suspect that he hadn’t died of natural causes. I had, however, omitted the note that Church had showed me. No need to get him excited over nothing, yet.

  Brian was uncharacteristically inattentive. “Well, let me know when you hear anything definite, okay? And look after yourself, whatever the case” was all he said.

  And then I was aware of another pause, a hesitation that was hanging particularly awkwardly on the other end of the line. It was the kind of hesitation that every person in a long-term relationship learns to recognize, the one where you can practically hear the nervousness on the other side, the sort where you just somehow know that the next words that come are not going to be good news.

  For once it was Brian who was hesitating with the impending doom-laden silence. If it had been anything truly awful, he would have said it up front, so it was a second-tier disaster or less. I found myself almost eager to hear his story even as I felt the apprehension building.

  “Brian, what is it?”

  Brian’s words came out in a rush. “So. If you talk to Marty, don’t believe her. She’s got all
those hormones and everything, and it makes her exaggerate and you know how she’s given to dramatics anyway—”

  “What’s Marty going to tell me? And what shouldn’t I believe?” Marty’s hormones weren’t part of the issue; Sophia was nearly a year old and Marty’d pretty much evened out after the first few weeks. Dramatics, on the other hand, were another story.

  “I’m perfectly fine. It’s not nearly as bad as she says and you can ask Kam too, he’ll tell you—”

  “What happened, Brian? Tell me right now.”

  “My nose isn’t even broken, and there wasn’t that much blood.”

  “Holy crow, Brian! Will you tell me!”

  “Okay, so you know how things haven’t exactly gone to plan? Well, the last straw was Titanic. Marty wanted to watch it, and Kam had seen more of it than he liked already. He wasn’t going to watch it again, no way was he going to sit through it again. He even hid it from Marty, said that he’d let someone at work borrow it, which was a crock because you know how he is about his media, right?”

  “Never mind how Kam is about his ‘media.’ What happened?”

  “Marty was really reaching a new state. She’s been cooped up here for too long and she really did want to see her parents and her sisters and show off the baby and go into the city and maybe get a break from everything, right? So she’s been moping and there’s nothing that will get Kam broken down faster than watching his wife want something she can’t have.”

  He made it sound like he kept me on a shorter, stricter leash and that this was a forgivable failing in his too-soft friend. “Ha! Go on.”

  “Finally, Kam decides that he’s going to ‘find’ the copy of Titanic downstairs, like he left it in the car or something. But we’re also going to see whether we can get the car out of the garage and try getting her out somewhere, anywhere, because the place was just getting too small for us, you know?”

  Kamil and Mariam and their daughter Sophia live in a brownstone on Beacon Hill. It has four bedrooms, two parlors as well as a den, a dining room, and a kitchen as large as many studio apartments. There are four bathrooms and a basement that is still an evolving space. The roof has a garden with one of the most enviable views in Boston.

  So, no, I didn’t know about it getting too small.

  Brian had been talking the whole time. “—and we go downstairs and we can’t get out, but maybe we’ll go for a walk later, and while Kam is digging out the DVD, I realize that he’s got all his old gym stuff downstairs. A treadmill, some weights. Plenty of floor space, covered in mats. And a heavy bag.”

  I began to see where this was going. “Keep talking.”

  “So I took a couple of jabs at the bag. It felt pretty good, so that by the time Kam dug out the DVD—he’d hidden it in the wine cellar, behind the Austrian stuff, where Marty would never think to look—I’d got some rhythm going and a little footwork. So he saw me just as I was throwing hooks. He was pretty surprised; he’d never seen me do that before.”

  “I can imagine.” Brian’s flirtation with exercise was a new phenomenon, and he’d started taking Krav Maga after I got into it, long after he and Kam had been roommates in graduate school. A surfer and skateboarder in his youth, more recently Brian hadn’t much bestirred himself to physical exertion unless it involved the beach, or maybe some yard work. The occasional set of sixteen-ounce elbow bends, usually with imported beer.

  “So he gives me some gloves and he pulls on some gloves and we were just going to go at it easy—”

  I finished. “Except you boys got all wound up and competitive and then it started going a little harder, and then everyone’s primitive male instincts came screaming to the surface and…”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Okay, well yeah, and then what happened?”

  Another pause. “And…did you know that classically trained boxers don’t really expect to be kicked?”

  I closed my eyes. “Oh. My. God.”

  “I guess I kinda took Kam by surprise when I got him with a nice round kick to the ribs. Okay, actually I was getting a little heated and I forgot how good he’d been at university, and that boxing isn’t the same as Krav. Jeez, was he steamed! I realized what I did and was about to apologize, and I dropped my guard just in time for the Shah express to come barreling through, final stop, my nose. Next thing I know, I’m lying on the floor, blood everywhere. It was awesome.”

  This is not the man I married, I thought. How do they get like this? They’re a race of aliens. “Probably not the word I would have chosen. And your nose isn’t broken?”

  “Well, I felt it, and it’s sore as hell but it doesn’t feel broken, and we put some ice on it and the swelling’s gone down. And Kam didn’t think it was broken either.”

  “You know, I’d be more convinced if the initials after both your names were M and D rather than Ph and D.”

  But Brian knew himself to be on safer ground now. “Kam saw enough broken noses when he was boxing regularly in the bad old days. He knows one when he sees one. And I’d think I’d know if my nose was busted. It feels a lot better now, but it is still tender, and I swear I’ll be smelling leather for the next month.”

  “And Marty…?”

  “Marty came downstairs just in time to see Kam pop me. You should have heard the wailing.”

  “Oh, sure, hon, but I’m sure it hurt like hell. It’s okay if you cried, too, you know.”

  “Not me, her. She walked in just in time to see me kick him and him belt me back, but good. Man, I don’t think he’s lost anything of his punch since undergrad.”

  “Yeah, great, I’m glad for him. How’s Marty doing now?”

  “Actually, she’s fine. Once she realized that we weren’t really trying to kill each other, that it was just a little overexcitement, she got into it.”

  I took another deep breath. “You mean there was more?”

  “Well, Kam wasn’t going to let me get away without getting back on the horse. And showing him how to kick. And he’s helping me get more power into my punches. So we ended up having a pretty good time. And Marty thought it was pretty interesting too, watching us work out, and so we haven’t had to watch any more damned tearjerkers since then. Kam got some boxing on the pay-per-view, and we’ve all been getting an education.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  Again the nervous hesitation, so I knew I was on the right track. “And how is Kam doing?”

  There was a kind of nervous giggle. “Oh, we’re pretty sure I didn’t break any ribs. But we put some red electrical tape on his side and on my nose, so if we get…overexcited again…it will be a little flag to calm it down. Or at least, not to hit those particular spots.”

  “You could lay off for a while.” Reason was always an option, but not one I expected to be taken seriously.

  “Yeah,” he said, “but it’s so cool that we’re both doing this. Me and Kam, I mean. And it’s fun.”

  “Okay, well just be careful, okay? And don’t get any bad habits that Nolan will have to train out of you.”

  “Oh, no,” Brian said quickly; he believed he was out of the woods now, as far as I was concerned. “Kam’s been real careful to ask what Nolan does and how he does it. He gets all, you know, serious and professorial about this kind of thing, so I doubt I’ll get into any trouble.”

  “And it would be nice to offer to clean up the blood off the floor when you’re done.”

  “Yeah. But it was really neat, for a while there.”

  “You’re both brutes and I get all warm and tingly thinking about you big he-men going at it like animals. So just take it easy, slugger, and save some of that energy for when I get home. And you can tell Kam that if he hurts you again, he’ll have me to deal with.”

  “Thanks, pork chop! You’re the greatest! Any man would be proud to have you emasculate him in front of his friends.”

  “You know what I mean. Now, be good.”

  We made our goodbyes and I turned around to se
e that Chris and Sue were there.

  Sue suddenly became engrossed in her schedule. Chris was holding his head in his hand, massively hung over by all appearances. He was on the phone, checking in with home. Or at least I hoped he was, because I was starting to hear things that disturbed me.

  “Whatever you do, make sure you clean out the tub before I get back. Last time I ended up picking chopped pickles out of my butt.”

  He met my glance before I could duck out, and I waved halfheartedly. “It’s Nell, Em. Nell says hi.”

  “Hi, Nell.”

  “Okay, kiss the kids for me…all right, wash them first, then kiss them. I miss you all…no, not enough to come back. Love you, bye.” He disconnected and turned to Sue. “Sorry, I had to take it. Nell’s making sure I’m not having too much fun.”

  I looked at him; his eyes looked like roadmaps and his shirt was buttoned wrong. He saw my glance. “Last night was great. I’m not having too much fun now.”

  “Do I dare ask?” I said.

  “About what?”

  “Uh, pickles?”

  “Oh, I asked what she had planned for tonight. After the kids are in bed, she’s going to get a Monster Burger—extra cheese, extra onions, extra pickles—from the joint down the street, pour a glass of wine, and get into the tub and soak for an hour.”

  “Everyone’s got their idea of paradise,” Sue said.

  Chris shrugged. “Yeah, well, that’s fine, and I don’t begrudge her anything, but steam doesn’t help you keep a burger that big intact. It gets messy.”

  “As you’ve apparently learned,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, with all the boats and ducks and shit the kids have in there, you don’t notice the stray pickles until it’s too late. Not as bad as sitting on a Lego, though. How’s Brian?” he asked. I’m assuming that was Brian.”

  “He’s good. Got punched in the nose, bled all over the place.”