Grave Consequences

by Dana Cameron

  “Yes, of course. More important, I want his children. But I’m so newly established that I don’t want to jeopardize things.”

  “And Greg doesn’t see it that way?” I knew I didn’t see it that way; as far as I was concerned, Jane was in the catbird seat and perfectly situated to start a family.

  “No. We had the most frightful row over it, just Friday night. It was…hell, it was my birthday dinner. I hate the fact that I’m thirty-four. I feel ancient. I feel exhausted…and there’s so much more work to be done. Anyway, we went out to this place—it was far too expensive, I said, but Greg insisted—and were becoming rather twining and romantic when he brought it up again. I’m afraid I lost patience.”

  We ran on in silence for a few moments, just the sound of our pounding feet, rhythmic breathing, and the television morning show in the corner. There wasn’t another soul around now.

  Jane wasn’t done yet. She took a deep breath, held it for a few paces, and let it out. “The long and short of it was, I left before dessert. Stormed out, actually. I mean, honestly. He of all people should understand what I’m going through. He’s been very supportive, but it’s only a few more years. I just want to get caught up on my reports, and get one or two more juicy articles out before we start talking about bairns.”

  There is no perfect moment, I thought, never a real stopping point. There’ll always be one more thing. And a couple of years puts one rather close to the biologically decisive age of forty, but there was no way I’d say that out loud to Jane. Especially since I hadn’t ever been able to shed the “just one more book/project/conference and I’ll relax” theory myself. Yet.

  “And as for last night, well. All he wanted to do was talk about Julia and I…just couldn’t. It’s still so fresh, it’s so awful, I just needed some space to get past the shock. Some people can do that by going on and on about it, till it doesn’t smart anymore, but some just need to hide themselves away. I need some time to take it in, is all.”

  As if aware she might have revealed too much, Jane suddenly sped up into a sprint and, deciding that I was feeling pretty good myself, I matched her speed.

  “How about a race?” she panted after a bit. “First one to finish the next half mile buys breakfast?”

  “No, thanks, I hate races,” I said, breathing heavily myself. “I like it being just me and the road.”

  “Suit yourself,” Jane said.

  After another fifteen seconds, I decided that I wasn’t actually straining and picked up the pace a little bit. My friend noticed this and again raised her own speed.

  For God’s sake, I thought. Fine, she wants a race, I’ll give her a race. I jabbed at the touch pad accordingly.

  This went on for the next few minutes, both of us pounding away, sweating rivers, neither saying a word over the mechanical rhythm of the treadmills. Then a timer beeped, announcing a cool-down period. We slowed to a fast walk, still not able to talk after the last hard push. It was then that I realized something from the way that Jane dealt with her advanced students, what she’d said about Julia, how she behaved with me. She was perfectly fine with people who were students, who were somewhere beneath her level, academically speaking, but when they started to approach that, she became nervous and pushed them harder because she was intimidated. The irony of it all was, the more Jane pushed, the better they generally became, so that she was surrounding herself with excellent students, who in turn, drove her to surpass herself.

  “Nice job,” Jane gasped out after a bit. “Not bad after a late night.”

  “You too.” I nodded. “You got a tenth farther along than I did.”

  “Ah, well,” she replied, pleased with herself. “You’ve been jet lagged. Besides, we weren’t racing,”

  “No, ’course not,” I said. “I hate competitions.”

  On the way back to the locker room, however, I happened to notice that I got my breath back a whole lot sooner than Jane did.

  There was a nasty surprise waiting for us when we returned to the house, a message asking Jane to come down to the police station to be interviewed by the Marchester constabulary. Greg was pacing, waiting for Jane’s arrival.

  I watched her face go from curiosity to concern to alarm to…boredom. “God, how tedious,” she said, after she’d read the note. “Well, maybe during morning coffee I’ll nip down and take care of this—”

  I thought it was a classic example of covering, but apparently Greg didn’t see that; Jane seemed to be pretty good at it. “They’re serious, Jane!” Greg said. “They mean first thing, not at your convenience. It’s not just one more thing to be shoved aside to await your leisure.”

  Ouch, I thought. That bit.

  Both Jane and I looked up at him. Although his voice was level, his words were angry. I thought about what Jane had told me about their present marital difficulties and how they’d left things last night.

  “No need to take my head off,” Jane snapped, nerves fraying past masking. “I only thought—”

  “Jane, this is serious. Julia has died—”

  “Greg, I—” Jane was now visibly rocked, but it came too late for Greg to notice, and I wished myself anywhere but there.

  “Only sometimes, I wonder if you have any sense of the importance of anything besides your job. I wonder if anything else matters. It colors everything you do. Even your relationship with Julia was poisoned because you were threatened by her—”

  “I think you’d better leave off there,” Jane said, quite coldly. “I have to change. I have to see the police, and I wouldn’t want to keep them waiting.”

  “Fine,” Greg said stiffly. “I’ll see to things at the site.”

  “Fine.”

  And with that it was over, even before I could figure out how to sneak away and give them a little privacy. Greg banged out the door and Jane turned to me, all business.

  “Sorry. Emma, if you think you can manage, I’m going to be away for a bit. But if you have any questions, just pass them on to Greg, okay? If you don’t mind, I’ll take the tub first, okay? Brilliant, thanks.”

  As if I hadn’t been there to see any of their fight. Whatever doubts I’d had as to the existence of the unflappable British exterior during the argument were slammed back into place by Jane’s behavior afterward. It happened so quickly, so much compressed emotion forcibly released, that it was like being stunned in the aftermath of an explosion.

  Soon after Jane left, I washed up and trotted out to the site, where everyone was just starting work. Everyone, that is, except Andrew, I noticed. He was nowhere to be seen. Then I frowned. Trevor the Odious was also missing; it wasn’t so much his absence that I noticed, it was the lack of complaint coming from his area. I began to head out to the center of the site, but was halted by Greg’s call. I joined him by the work desk, where I saw a pile of lumber and tools.

  “The materials I picked up from the DIY yesterday,” he explained, and I recalled that we’d discussed getting the materials to make me some screens. Wasn’t that like Greg to remember, even after last night?

  “No one was in any state to start anything…last night,” he continued, apologetically and a little embarassed.

  “No, naturally not,” I said, thinking at last someone would be willing to talk to me about it. “Everyone was in a state of shock.”

  “Dreadful. I offered to let some of the students off for the day or two—those who knew Julia best, that is, but no one was really very close to her,” he said hesitantly. “Everyone seemed to want the security of a normal day, what with all the uncertainty about. I think they are looking to Jane for some guidance, but she’s only going to find solace in work.”

  “Everyone except for Trevor?” I said.

  Greg sighed. “I don’t know where the little pillock has got himself off to, but it wasn’t with any of my leave. I’d just as soon he kept himself out of my sight, to be quite honest with you. And,” he said, anticipating my next question, “I haven’t the faintest notion of where Andrew is.
I don’t believe he ever came home last night. The man might have had the sense to help out, today of all days, but there you are.” Greg finally seemed to be losing patience with his unreliable friend.

  I shrugged. “What about the modern skeleton? Has he finished working on that in the lab yet?”

  “I leave that up to Andrew; no matter what, he’ll meet his work obligations—in his own time, mind you. But we do tend to leave our specialists to their own devices in England; it’s not so hands-on for the directors in England as it is in the States.”

  Greg then rubbed his hands together, shaking off these unpleasant thoughts and effectively squelching any more of my questions. “But let’s get you set up. As you can see, I got the timber you wanted. Took a bit of doing, but it’s all just as you ordered. Good English oak,” Greg pointed out with satisfaction. “We’ll get you sifting away in no time.”

  I looked down at the pile of lumber stock, nails, and screening and frowned. Something wasn’t quite right; the lengths of wood were absolutely enormous. The stock was thick, like beams for a house, it seemed.

  “You got two-by-fours,” I said uncertainly.

  “Yes. Had to have them ripped to specification, of course, as timber on this side of the water is in metric and in different standard heights and widths. I’m very interested to see how you put this all together.”

  And so was I, I thought. The problem was, there isn’t a two-by-four in America that is actually two inches by four inches; it’s just a handy approximation. Everything’s actually a bit smaller than that and, for my purposes, much better suited to comfortable use. But I told Greg that everything looked fine and in a little less than an hour, we’d got things into roughly the right shape. It would sift dirt, certainly, but it wasn’t portable by any stretch of the imagination.

  “Well, that’s not going anywhere,” Greg announced, beads of sweat running. “Make it through the next ice age, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  He was right. What one generally ended up with, in my experience, was a shallow box with a screen bottom, the long sides of which extended out into a pair of handles with the opposite end supported on the bottom by a hinged set of legs. It took a bit of balancing, but ordinarily what you’d end up with was a screen that folded neatly onto its legs and was fairly portable. This one was similar but on a larger, bulkier scale, portable the same way the Empire State Building was portable. With that in mind, I silently dubbed my new screen Kong.

  “Is this really what you use on your digs?” Greg asked, a little confused. “It’s enormous.”

  “I guess I got the measurements off,” I said. After all his trouble in getting the materials, I wasn’t about to tell him that it wouldn’t do. “I’ll cut down the handles a bit, so that they’ll be a bit more manageable.”

  We both struggled to get Kong out to my burial, and then I began work. The day was pleasant enough, but the first break came and went without any sign of Jane. I tried to put it out of my mind, but found myself unable to concentrate properly. I kept looking up for her arrival, and kept being surprised when she didn’t come. I was starting to get worried about my friend, and it reflected in my work. Rather than bringing the entire length of the stain down in one even level, I got into a sort of downward spiral, where I would get one corner sorted out, only to find that the other three were still too high. Every time I tried to bring things level, I realized that I had gone too far.

  At lunch I finally gave up trying. The crew was unusually subdued and Greg, so far from his usual pleasant efficient self, was snappish, particularly after a small red car pulled up to the site and a man got out, asking for a moment of his time. When Greg returned, his face was a torment. I didn’t dare to ask him what he’d learned.

  We continued to eat in silence, but before the bulk of the crew returned from their pub run, I heard Greg sigh yet again. Knowing that personal conversation wasn’t his favorite thing, I decided to risk it, on the off chance that he might relax a little.

  “You’re worried about Jane,” I said.

  “I was hoping she’d be done by now,” he said abruptly. “I…I assumed that it would just be the same as before, when Julia was first reported missing. The police simply took statements from everyone, right here on the site. But this is different. I don’t know why and I don’t like it.”

  That having been said, there was little I could say to comfort him. I stuck with the commonplaces, which were as ever horribly insufficient. “I’m sure they’re just asking about Julia’s behavior on site, who she knew, that sort of thing. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  Greg looked at me with impatience. “I’m absolutely certain it’s not nothing. I was just told that she probably won’t be back to work today, but that I should continue on here. There’s a student dead, and my wife quite well known for disliking her, and she wants me to keep working. How could anyone—?”

  Then his face almost crumpled. He mastered himself before he’d even allowed himself the emotion. “Oh, God, Emma, I apologize. It’s…there’s no excuse. I’m dreadfully sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said hastily. “Please.”

  Greg said nothing, but only kept shaking his head and staring at the tops of his rubber work boots.

  I hated seeing him like this. “Look, I’m going to straighten out the mess in my unit. I’m keeping you from looking in on the others when I’m supposed to be a bigger help.”

  “Right, and we wouldn’t want Jane to come back and find us slacking off, would we?” he said with a faint smile. “I’ll stop by later.” He fled.

  It took most of the rest of the afternoon, but at last I got my unit to a respectable state: corners square, floor level, extraneous dirt removed. Rather than follow the others for tea, or bother Greg, who had found refuge deep in a notebook with the intent of ignoring what was going on, I stayed by my unit, squatting on an upturned bucket, scribbling notes. Truth to tell, there wasn’t much to write, only that the feature of the burial was becoming more and better defined, and that based on the depth I would probably start to uncover any skeletal remains shortly. There was a light breeze coming off the river, and off in the distance I heard the faint tinkling of wind chimes; I pulled the shell of my barn coat closer around me, wondering when spring really started in around here. I found myself doodling names—Jane, Julia, Palmer, Andrew—but none of them meant anything to me in relation to the others. I tried to dig back through my memories, reexamine everything of context that everyone had mentioned to me since I’d been here; there seemed to be connections, but nothing clear. I knew so little that it was meaningless. Add to that the presence of a relatively recent skeleton that showed every indication of having been murdered, and a less suspicious nature than mine would be concerned. As Jane was embroiled in this, innocent though I knew she must be, I decided suddenly I was going to make it my business to find out exactly what those connections represented. After all, I was on vacation, I could afford to nose about, and I simply couldn’t stand idly by…

  One tiny little something did surface, however, from all my mental sieving that I began to wonder about. Julia’s body had been found on a construction site, in a Dumpster or skip, to be precise. I recalled Palmer’s comments that Jane was at odds with one of the local builders. That struck me as something worth investigating.

  At that moment, a chill stole over me. At first I thought the sun had gone behind a cloud, but after I hurriedly jotted down my last notes, I realized that someone was standing behind me. I covered over my notes. It wasn’t Greg, it wasn’t one of the students—twisting around awkwardly, I knew that none of them would be wearing a long black skirt. The tinkling I’d heard earlier was closer now, and I now knew that it came from two rows of tiny bells sewn into the skirt. As I looked up, the first thing that caught my eye was a pale white hand, with what at first I thought was a complex bracelet draped over it. Then that little part of my brain that is so good at recognizing patterns identified the bracelet as a tattoo, a complex trailing green vi
ne that wrapped around the woman’s middle finger and curled up round her wrist and presumably up the rest of her arm. I swung all the way around to look up into the stranger’s face.

  “Brightest blessings,” said the woman, smiling warmly, though there was a guarded look in her eyes.

  I sighed. Oh, puh-lease.

  “You know, I don’t think you’re supposed to be here,” I said.

  “Oh, but you’re wrong there,” she replied with an accent that was coarser and less precise than either Jane’s or Greg’s: I knew that I was talking to Morag. “I think we’ll both find, at the end, that I’m exactly where I’m meant to be, in the midst of all these lines and triangles. But judging by the look on your face, I wonder: Can you say the same for yourself?”

  Chapter 7

  “ACTUALLY,” ISAID WITH SOME ASPERITY, “I CAN say why I’m meant to be here, but why don’t we discuss that outside the dig parameters?” I noticed distantly that I sounded a bit like Jane.

  “Certainly, but I don’t see what harm I’m doing here,” Morag replied haughtily. “Simply standing here, not touching anything. My mere presence isn’t going to pollute your work.”

  Her tone struck me as the same used by teenagers at times, confrontational and defensive all at once. Her stance was very much the same: arms crossed over her plump little pot belly, head tilted backward, so that her tangle of red hair was thrown dramatically back, exposing a silver pentacle pendant snagged on the laces of her blouse. Morag was a nice study in contrasts: the round face I might expect to see across the bakery counter and the clothing—all black, save for a bit of gold and red trim—that made me think of first-year art students.

  “No, of course not,” I said as I got up out of my crouch with a crack of my knees. “But there are issues of safety and security that I need to attend to.”

  “Fine, but—” Morag turned, a little cascade of single notes following the abrupt motion of her skirt. “Just one thing.”