Always Emily

by Mary Sullivan

  “I love it.” When she put it on, it fit into the modest V of the dress’s neckline perfectly.

  “It’s probably the smallest diamond on earth,” he admitted.

  “I don’t care. It’s mine and I’ll love it forever.”

  She threw her arms around his neck and he held onto his growing-up-too-quickly daughter for dear life. His eyes misted and he closed them so he could cherish this moment, could record it in the recesses of his mind to keep for the rest of his life.

  * * *

  EMILY HEARD BACK from Arthur Chadwick on Friday morning when a FedEx truck drove up with a letter.

  The walk up to her room had never felt longer. She sat on the edge of the bed and opened his letter with hands that shook. What if he’d turned down her request for help? Where would that leave her?

  Dear Emily,

  It’s good to hear from you. Penny has been worried enough that she called to ask whether you had written. She had a hunch you might. She instructed me to give you my full cooperation should you need it. Please be assured you can send me anything and I will make certain it will arrive in my sister’s hands safely.

  You wouldn’t consider bringing the item to England personally? It’s beautiful here in May. Kew Gardens is brimming with lilacs and early roses. The scent is quite astounding.

  It would be my pleasure to show you the sights.

  With the deepest affection,

  Arthur

  A shaky sob escaped Emily. Dear, sweet Arthur. She’d suspected he’d had a bit of a crush on her. Now she knew.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you, Arthur.”

  Now she could retrieve the prayer book and start it on its journey home, where it belonged. That dusty mummy wrapping connecting her to her old life and Jean-Marc would finally be broken. She would be free to restart her life. Free most especially of all from the craziness that had been her relationship with a destructive, controlling man. She would take back control of her own life.

  After Wednesday’s stunning revelation with Pearl, that she loved music enough to make it a career, and that there were people who wanted to learn from her, she’d begun to imagine she could earn a living in Accord.

  Thinking of the young girl who’d cried while Emily had played Bach, she knew could share the wonderful therapeutic effects of music. She could help people, real live people, rather than being the caretaker of the dead artifacts of ancient civilizations.

  History had been good to her, but it was time for Emily Jordan to live in the present.

  On the drive to the Cathedral, she hummed. In the forest, she bobbed on her feet. Life was good.

  She’d made sure she was nice and early. The Heritage Center wouldn’t open for another hour. None of the resort guests would come poking around this side of the Cathedral. It was safe for her to retrieve the prayer book. She found the trowel where she’d left it and started to dig.

  Five minutes later, she sat back on her heels, her heart pounding in her chest. This couldn’t be happening.

  The prayer book wasn’t here.

  She tossed branches, leaves, soil. She was in the right place. The trowel had still been hanging where she’d left it.

  How could the prayer book not be here? She panicked before realizing she might be slightly off in her calculations. It had been dark and rainy. She’d had a fever. She shifted her search a foot away and dug some more, but didn’t find it.

  She continued all around the spot where she thought the book should have been. Her trowel hit something. Finally! She’d found it. She slowed down, using only the tip of the tool to clear away soil, careful to do no damage.

  She didn’t find the prayer book, but what she did uncover stunned her. And sent her panic shooting sky high.

  * * *

  FROM HIS OFFICE WINDOW, Salem watched Emily dig up his forest, watched her motions become frantic, and he smiled grimly as she dug another hole, and another. He’d wondered when she would come to retrieve it. He took a malicious satisfaction in her panic. He shouldn’t be enjoying this. To do so was petty and small.

  He couldn’t hold on to his pique for long. She looked too panicked.

  He left the building and strode to the woods, where he found Emily sitting back on her heels in the dirt, shoulders slumped, no doubt shocked her precious artifact was gone.

  “Looking for something?” he asked.

  She turned an ashen face to him, her movements slow. Maybe she was still sick. He studied her and what he saw—shock and panic—surprised him, her response more extreme than the situation warranted.

  “What are you doing here, Emily?” Would she tell him the truth about the artifact?

  She opened her mouth then closed it, but said nothing. She really did appear to be in shock.

  He retrieved the book from his pocket and dangled it in front of her. “Is this what you want?”

  “Yes. I mean no. It’s—” She barely glanced at the book, which left Salem bemused. From his vantage point on the third floor of the Center, he’d thought her actions frenzied, so why wasn’t she relieved to see the book?

  “You weren’t looking for this?” Something wasn’t adding up here.

  “No, I—”

  “Did you want money? Were you going to sell it?”

  “No—”

  “Because I know you’re not a dishonest person. So why did you take it from its home?”

  “Stop!”

  Her shout nonplussed him. “How dare you yell at me?”

  She stood, actions slow and shaky, and said, “There’s a reason for that—” she pointed to the relic in his hand “—but we have a bigger problem.”

  “What’s bigger than displacing someone’s heritage?”

  “That,” she said, pointing to the ground, and he noticed for the first time what had left her looking so pale.

  Three skeletal fingers reached out of the earth toward the sky, obscenely white against the rich dark earth of the forest.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SALEM BLINKED, BECAUSE this had to be a hallucination, or a trick of the sun. “What is that?” he asked, a thrum of excitement warming his blood. Was this one of his ancestors? “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?”

  Emily nodded.

  Salem crouched on his haunches beside her. “Could this be a Ute grave site? But this is way off our calculations of the nomadic routes.”

  Emily shook her head. “No, Salem. This body isn’t ancient. This is new.”

  “What do you mean new? There’s no flesh on those bones.”

  “I mean this isn’t an ancient burial. This is recent. Only a few years old.”

  “Recent?” Could she possibly mean... “As in—”

  “People who die of natural causes don’t usually bury themselves in the woods. It looks like...murder.”

  This was so far outside of his experience he didn’t know how to react. Maybe Emily was wrong.

  “How do you know it’s recent?”

  She gave him a look that asked, seriously?

  Dumb question. She was an archeologist. She would know whether this body was new or ancient.

  “For starters, the burial is too shallow.”

  The implications set in and Salem started to shake. Someone had buried a body on this land in the not-too-distant past. Dread snaked through him and settled in his belly like a lump of mud. This was a hell of a lot uglier than uncovering the wonders of history and heritage, than finding the clues to an ancient way of life—arrowheads, old cooking tools and the like.

  Emily patted her pockets. “We need to call the police. I don’t have my phone.”

  Salem nodded and pulled out his cell.

  * * *

  WITHIN HALF AN HOUR, the sum total of Accord’s
police force, the sheriff and all three deputies, stood around the bones protruding from the hole Emily had dug.

  “How did you come to find the body?” Sheriff White, an older, harder-edged version of his son, Justin, held a notebook and the stub of a pencil in his hand.

  “I was looking for something else.” Emily noticed the sheriff hadn’t take down a single of her responses to the questions he’d asked so far.

  “Why were you digging here?”

  “I was looking for something I’d buried earlier.” Emily prayed he wouldn’t ask what.

  “Mind sharing what that was?” Of course he asked.

  “Yes.” It was none of his business.

  “Uh-huh.” Sheriff White glanced at Salem and then back to Emily. “You had no idea this was here?”

  “No.” Emily squeezed her hands together. “It’s freaking me out.”

  “Freaking you out?” He said it with implied quotation marks. “Aren’t you the archeologist? The one who digs up dead bodies all the time?”

  Emily barely knew this man, but didn’t like him. His arrogant attitude rubbed her the wrong way. Broad-shouldered and tall, with thick hair and a thicker mustache, he might have been handsome if not for the too-forceful jut of his jaw.

  “No, I don’t dig up dead bodies. Mostly, I uncover ancient artifacts.”

  “Uh-huh.” How did he manage to make two syllables sound so distrustful? And why did he keep narrowing his eyes at Salem and hovering over him? At six feet, Salem was tall, but this guy had a couple of inches on him.

  Sheriff White called in help from Denver, and kept Emily and Salem close while waiting for the arrival of the Denver Police Department. He asked the same questions again.

  Why was this feeling more and more sinister? They’d found a body and they’d called the cops. They were the good guys, not a pair of criminals.

  It grated on Emily’s nerves. “I was digging for something. I found the body. Salem called the police. That’s the whole story.”

  She pointed to the body that had been cordoned off with tape. “You think if I had anything to do with putting that there, I would turn around and dig it back up and call the cops?”

  Sheriff White tried to stare her down. Good luck with that, she thought. In her work in the Middle East, she’d run into too many corrupt cops, army patrols who answered only to themselves, and lawless bands to be intimidated by this guy. In the unrest and unstable atmosphere of the Middle East, she’d found herself in danger many times, from coups to revolts to demonstrations.

  At least in her home country, there were procedures law enforcement officials had to follow, and a court system that wasn’t as corrupt as the ones in some of the places she’d visited.

  With all of that, and remembering her terror when she’d nearly been caught at the airport with a relic in her bag, she could handle this guy’s suspicions.

  When White looked away first, Emily felt a small satisfaction.

  DPD arrived with a coroner who suited up to do whatever coroners do before digging up a body. Emily had been away too many years and had watched no television. She’d never seen CSI, or Criminal Minds, or cop shows, though she’d heard people talk about them on her visits home. Phrases such as petechial hemorrhaging, lividity and exsanguination, terms that had become a part of the average citizen’s lexicon, to judge by some conversations she’d had, meant nothing to her.

  The phrases had been tossed around so casually and yet there was nothing casual about the breadth and depth of knowledge required to do this job. Emily’s hat went off to the technicians and detectives who could solve these crimes, but she had no desire to learn how they did their work, or to watch them do it. She just wanted to get away.

  White finally released Emily and Salem. Inside the Cathedral, in Salem’s office, Emily paced. She’d been upset to find the body, but the sheriff’s attitude had agitated her beyond belief. “What the hell was that about? Did he think we’d put the body there?”

  Salem took two bottles of apple juice out of the bar fridge in the corner and tossed her one. She drank half of it in one go. They’d been standing in the sun for three hours.

  Salem stared out the window to the scene below. “Some would say he was just doing his job.”

  “It was more than that, Salem.”

  “Yeah, it was,” he conceded. “Since he’s Justin’s father, I assume he’s mad at me for yelling at his kid.”

  * * *

  WHILE HE GAVE EMILY a moment to digest that information, Salem watched the army of law enforcement personnel tramp over his land, roping off a broad area with that obscene yellow crime scene tape.

  That this should be happening in this peaceful spot, scarring the beauty of his woods, was pure sacrilege.

  Evil had invaded Salem’s paradise.

  They’d found a dead body, mere yards from the Cathedral.

  Who was it?

  Who had done this?

  The sun still shone, the world still turned, and life went on, but someone had been murdered on this land.

  Salem crammed his hands into his pockets to still their shaking.

  Men and women suited up in protective white garb, armed with booties, latex gloves and the tools of their trade, bent over the exposed bone fingers they all assumed were still attached to a body below the surface.

  Once Emily had uncovered them, she’d gone no farther.

  “Your dad said the sheriff’s crazy about his boy.” Emily slumped onto the sofa. “Judging by his behavior, we can assume he knows about you storming into the school on Sunday and giving his son hell.”

  “Yep. Safe bet.”

  “He can bluster all he wants. It won’t do you any harm.”

  Salem didn’t respond. Life wasn’t always fair and weird things happened to people all the time.

  “We know where Justin learned to be a bully,” Emily stated. “He comes by it naturally.”

  “The sheriff can be a reasonable man. We’ll see what comes of this.”

  There was a brief silence, which Emily finally broke. “How did you find the prayer book, Salem?”

  He’d been wondering when she would ask.

  “You had dirt under your nails. Mud on your hands.” He crossed his arms, putting a barrier between them. “I found the trowel and saw that the earth had been disturbed. I dug it up.”

  “You didn’t think to ask me about it?”

  “Your behavior was strange and so was the fact that you hid it here. It made you look guilty. It still does.”

  “I’m not.”

  He didn’t know what to believe.

  “Why did you bury it here?” He turned back to the window and those disturbing images below, because he couldn’t look at Emily. His feelings pinged around like arcade balls. He was aware of her one minute, angry with her the next, then disappointed that his daughter chose her over him, and yet also grateful for what she had done for Aiyana.

  But why had she used his land as a burial ground for a smuggled artifact?

  “I can see you thinking too hard and I know it’s all the wrong things.” Emily had approached, her heat close behind him. Too close.

  “How can you know that?”

  “Because I know you. I know how you honor integrity and honesty. You need to hear my side of this story.”

  “Go ahead. Tell me.”

  “Not while your back is to me. I need you to see my face, to know I’m telling the truth.”

  He moved to sit behind his desk.

  “No, I won’t be scolded as though I’m a bad employee, either. Let’s sit over here, as equals.” She strode to the sofa.

  He sat in the armchair. “I’m listening,” he said, but she would have to come up with a hell of a story to make him understand why she’d taken an artifact away
from its homeland.

  “I’m holding you to that. You need to suspend judgment and really listen, because I did nothing wrong.”

  He wanted to believe, because for the life of him he couldn’t see Emily as a smuggler or a thief.

  “It was Jean-Marc.”

  That idiot! “He stole it and you’re covering for the bastard?”

  “No!” He’d angered her. “Just listen. No comments until I finish.”

  The story she told was fantastic enough to make him skeptical and yet, he did know Emily. He watched her face while she spoke and could see that it was the truth. He could see her being backed into a corner, to either have to take the relic out of the country with her or be arrested. The thought of her in a foreign jail...

  “That’s the truth, Salem.” He could read it on her face. She’d been smart to make him watch her.

  A tension that had been sitting on his shoulders like a heavy cloak fell away. “I believe you.”

  She let her breath out in a whoosh. “Thank you.”

  At least her story had distracted him from the cops and the grisly discovery below.

  “What happens now?” he asked. “You can’t keep it.”

  “I have a friend who also works with Jean-Marc. Penelope Chadwick. I wrote to her brother in England and he’s allowing me to mail the relic to him. He’ll put a new label on it with his return address and send it along to Penny.”

  “Cloak and dagger.”

  “May I have the book?”

  He retrieved it from his pocket and handed it to her.

  When she took it, she handled it with the reverence it deserved. He might not have been happy that her work had taken her so far away so often, but he didn’t doubt her love of it.

  “Tell me about it.”

  She talked about her last dig where they uncovered the book. She spoke about the history of the land and the people who had called it home for centuries.

  “This little book would have been treasured by the owners. It’s well preserved.” Emily turned it over in her hands, touching it as if it was a rare gem. From the first moment they’d met, she and Salem had shared a respect for the past.