Past Malice

by Dana Cameron

  “What’s the scoop? What’s happened?”

  I filled them in briefly. “So here’s the plan. You’re going to head back to the house with the artifacts we’ve found up to today—the rest of the bags are in the backhouse at home. It’s a wash day, for now. I’m sorry we have to waste the sunshine, but I’m hoping we’ll be able to be out here again tomorrow. I’m going to stick around for a bit, see what they need from me, keep an eye on the units, and then run some errands. Bucky, you head back with them, okay? You can either hang out, go to sleep, or work on the sherds if you want.”

  “Why can’t I stay here?”

  “There’s nothing for you to do here. I probably won’t be long in any case.”

  “Whatever. I’ll work on the sherds then.”

  This brought a murmur of surprise and approval from the crew. The work was dull and tedious, and it took a far better attitude than we collectively had now to do it happily. Another set of hands—and fresh, unjaded ones, at that—was something to celebrate.

  “C’ mon, Bucky,” Meg said. “I’ll show you how it’s done.”

  I could see Meg getting a slight dose of the Chin; when Bucky stuck out her chin at that particular angle, it took me right back to our childhood; she was digging in, ready for conflict. “Great. But call me Carrie, okay?”

  “Emma calls you—”

  “Yeah, well, she’s the only one and someday God will punish her for it.”

  “What’s Carrie short for?”

  Bucky shook her head, making a face like someone who’d just stepped in dog mess. “It’s short for Charlotte, but just call me Carrie. I think my name is really gruesome.”

  “Okay, Gruesome. I’ll show you how to do the lab work.”

  They collected their tools and lunch bags when another large truck pulled up next to us, also filled with tools and young people dressed for outdoor work. I noticed that Dian and Meg brightened considerably and that Rob and Joe rolled their eyes. Bucky looked over as two guys in cut-off jeans, company T-shirts, and work boots hopped out of the cab. For the first time that morning, my sister smiled with genuine pleasure. The landscapers were here.

  “Morning Emma,” the driver called.

  “Morning, Jerry.” I hustled over to the truck before they could start unloading, and explained what was going on. “You might want to check with the cops first,” I concluded.

  The smiles faded from their faces, replaced by stunned looks. “You’re kidding me. But he’s such a good kid—” Jerry said. He rubbed his hand over his face. “Okay, thanks. We’ll go see what we can get done today.”

  “Get his phone number, Emma?” Dian asked as I returned to where the crew was standing.

  “Not exactly.”

  “She’s completely oblivious to other men since she got married,” said Bucky.

  “I’m not actually shopping,” I said. “Especially not for landscapers.” I left the field wide open for Bucky.

  “Just leafing through the catalogue,” my sister shot back.

  “But I wouldn’t go for a rake like Jerry,” I replied.

  “Too much of a weed,” Bucky said.

  “You’re the one who likes her men so seedy—” I announced.

  Meg finally couldn’t take it anymore. “Enough with the puns already. Dear God, it’s not fair.”

  I felt a little guilty about making jokes, but the speed with which Bucky responded assured me that we both needed to think about something besides the morning’s events. I sent them off and then returned around the back to see if there was anything else I could help Detective Bader with.

  He started right in again, as if there had been no interruption. “Have you noticed anything around here that might suggest why Mr. Fisher was killed?”

  “There’ve been a lot of, well, I wouldn’t call them problems, but let’s say issues between the Historical Society and the town, lately.”

  “Like what?” Detective Bader appeared as if he knew the answer already, but I told him what I knew of the vandalism at the Tapley House, the proposed rerouting of the bus, and the friction between the Bellamys and the Chandler House. I also mentioned what I’d overheard in the board meeting, about Fee not thinking that Justin was suited to the job. I didn’t think it was related, but he wrote it down anyway.

  “You never know,” he said as if reading my mind. “It could be anything. We won’t know until we dig around a little.”

  I guess that makes two of us, I thought. I was starting to lose my focus.

  “It might be something to do with Mr. Fisher here, nothing to do with the Historical Society.”

  “Oh!” I remembered Perry’s broken arm and told him about the incident. He frowned.

  “That’s rather more serious, isn’t it? I’ll look into that. Here’s my card; call if you think of anything else.”

  I looked at the card: Detective Sargeant Douglas Bader. I realized that he used the Americanized pronunciation of his name, rhyming the first syllable with fade. Maybe his family changed it during the war, maybe it was something they adopted right away, when they came to this country to better assimilate—

  “Thanks very much, Ms. Fielding.”

  I looked up; I’d gone into my own little world again.

  “Officer Lovell has your number? Well, until tomorrow, then.”

  And with all due courtesy, Detective Bader dismissed me from my own site.

  Chapter 5

  I WAS ABOUT HALFWAY BACK TO LAWTON WHEN I REALIZED that the camera I had with me actually had the shots I’d taken of the site yesterday, so I went to the photo place to get them done as a rush order. The nuisance was that I’d have to come back after that to pick up the shots that weren’t a rush order.

  After I’d dropped them off, I figured I might as well stop by the Stone Harbor Library while I was nearby, to look up Bray Chandler’s ancestor, Nicholas. I looked in the birth records and found what I remembered and expected: Over the course of fifteen years, Margaret Chandler had eight children who lived and two who died, one at childbirth, one as a toddler. There was no mention of a Nicholas Chandler anywhere. I checked the death records and there was a Nicholas Chandler listed as having been deceased in 1738, the same year as the fire downtown. While that didn’t necessarily indicate that he was a son of Margaret and Matthew’s, my curiosity was piqued. I looked in the marriage records and found that he married Abigail Bradley in 1736 and had two young children with her at the time of his death. I realized I would have to double check the records at the courthouse to see if there was any information there that might confirm that he was one of Margaret’s children. Birth and death records, though, were subject to mistake, just as Bray had said, but usually there were ways of corroborating your information.

  I was glad when I finally pulled into the driveway a couple of hours later. I’d just put on the brake when my phone rang, scaring the hell out of me. I answered it once I realized that the ringing was coming from deep in my backpack. I fumbled with the buttons until I hit the right one. “Hello?”

  “Hi, it’s me,” Brian said. “How you doing?”

  “Um, good. How about you?”

  “Real good. Where are you?”

  “In the car—”

  “You’re not driving and talking on the phone, are you?”

  “No, of course not. I just pulled into the driveway.”

  “Is something wrong? What are you doing home?”

  “There was some trouble out on the site today. One of the security guards died.” I took a deep breath. “I found him.”

  “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

  “No, I’m fine. I think, I don’t know, but I think he was shot. There was…an awful lot of blood.” I told him the rest of the story.

  There was a long silence from Brian’s end before he answered. “Okay, is Bucky home with you?”

  “Yes, of course. Everyone’s here. Everyone’s okay. It happened long before we got there.” That didn’t sound as reassuring as I meant it.

&
nbsp; “I’ll come home right now.”

  The urgency in his voice worried me. “Brian, there’s no need. I’m fine, there’s no emergency. Don’t get yourself wound up over nothing.”

  “Only if you’re sure. I’m glad we got the phones. I’m really glad.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d run into the office to use Fee’s; I hadn’t even thought about my cell phone. I’d have to get the hang of using it. “Okay, I’ll see you soon. I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  I stared at the keypad for a moment until I found the off button; the battery was low. I’d have to recharge it tonight.

  The students were out by the tree, having set up the rudiments of a lab at the house, washing outside and drying and labeling inside. “I’m glad we have a few things to work on,” I announced. “Looks like tomorrow is lab day too.”

  The groans that usually accompanied this sort of news were absent; they were all understandably quiet and Joe was downright stricken.

  “Any news, Emma?” Rob asked.

  I shook my head. “Maybe tomorrow. I’m not first on the list to be told anything in any case.”

  As much as I wanted to head up to my office, I decided that I’d keep an eye on everyone to see how they were doing. None of them knew Justin all that well—being on the site early and late was how I got to know him—but it never hurt, in the face of such news, to be part of a group. Realizing that Justin wasn’t so much older than them, and that he was involved in the same sort of academic endeavors, had been sobering.

  I had a look at what everyone was washing—mostly nails and a few sherds of redware, creamware, and stoneware—and noticed that there were a lot of seed fragments showing up. It would do to pay attention to the stratigraphy here to see if this stuff was coming from before or after the fire. When I got to Bucky, I saw that she was engrossed in trying to get all the corrosion off a nail.

  “Hey, Bucks, just get the dirt off. The corrosion is there to stay.”

  “You won’t remove it at all?”

  I looked at it; it was pretty clearly a cut nail, with a bit of pebble stuck with the rust. “Nope. Just clean it up as best you can. If it looked like it might not be a nail, we’d spend more time on it, but don’t get hung up on them. You’ll get too many to worry about them or the brick chips.”

  “Okay.” She scowled at the nail and put it aside, not liking to leave anything half done. “This isn’t nearly as interesting as I thought it would be. I mean, I could go and look in the street and find pieces of brick and glass and nail. It doesn’t seem all that different from today.”

  “And just think if you had a thousand bags or more to go through,” Meg said. “All by yourself.”

  Bucky looked at Meg like she was insane. “Are you kidding me? I’d rather express the anal glands of fifteen cranky Great Danes every day for a month.”

  “Good God, Bucky!” I thought Meg was going to pass out at the image. “That’s a bit much, isn’t it?”

  She shrugged. “Hey, Em, welcome to my world. No guts, no glory.”

  “Well,” I said queasily, “at least by going over the bags yourself, you get to know the entire collection though, and that’s invaluable.”

  “I always worried about you,” my sister said. “There’s something scary about this kind of obsessive attention to detail, when there’s no life at stake.”

  I smiled, showing as many teeth as I could. “Yeah, there is. Welcome to my world.”

  Brian pulled up a short while later. By this time, it was late afternoon and we’d put away the artifacts and broken out the beer. Everyone seemed to be doing tolerably well, although the atmosphere, which usually might have ranged from the jovial to the scatological or the just plain silly, was muted. I couldn’t blame them a bit.

  “How you doing?” Brian whispered, when I ran up to greet him at the car.

  “I’m good. I’m fine. I was glad to come home, though, after. I just wanted things to be normal.”

  “She’s fine,” Bucky announced, rudely appearing behind us and breaking up what would have been a rather nice moment. “Perfectly well behaved. Well, except for that one thing….”

  I shot her a look; I hadn’t done anything at all, and there was no use in playing on Brian’s nerves, not at a time like this.

  Brian didn’t look too concerned, however, as we went into the house. “And what was that, I’d like to know?”

  “She was totally eyeing the landscapers out at the Chandler House. You might want to watch out for that, Brian. They were young, tanned, and had extremely well-defined leg muscles.”

  Brian snorted. “I’m not worried. She’d never leave all this.” He gestured to the newly plastered but still unpainted kitchen, the stripped hallway, and the dining room with no floor.

  “I wouldn’t count on it.” I stuck my tongue out, making sure he could see me.

  “Landscapers aside, you’re going to be careful, right?” he said to me.

  “Yes, of course. I’m always careful.”

  “Okay.” He let my hand go. “What do you girls want for dinner tonight? Anything you want, as long as it’s meatloaf, because that’s what I’ve got stuff for.”

  “That sounds good. Want some help?”

  “Get the dishwasher unloaded, would you? Want it crusty or not so crusty?”

  “Extra crust,” I said.

  “Yeah, it makes your coat glossy,” Bucky added.

  “All right, then.” He began to pull out the ingredients. “I’m glad you had your phone on you. It’s not like you were out in the middle of nowhere, but….”

  I caught Bucky’s eye and shook my head slightly. “Yeah. It was a good idea on your part.” He didn’t need to know that I’d never even thought of using it. I had to get into the habit.

  Bucky let out a beer belch in response to my half-truth.

  “Gross,” I said.

  “My God,” Brian said. “I’ve married into a family of Yeti.”

  Joe came in from the little house, shaking an alarm clock. “Emma, have you got another battery? This one is dying and I wouldn’t want to be late for work.”

  “Heavens forefend. Give it here.” I rummaged through the junk drawer until I found a new battery and took off the back. The dying battery was stuck in good, and I couldn’t wiggle it out no matter what I tried; I attempted everything that I thought wouldn’t damage the old clock. “Brian, is there a trick to getting the battery out?”

  “Yeah, there’s a trick.” He pulled a screwdriver out of the junk drawer and slid it under the battery. He tried to pry it out with no success, then tried again. This time, with an alarming creak of plastic, the battery came shooting up and he grabbed it in midair. He handed it to me with a self-impressed grin.

  “That wasn’t a trick, that was brute force,” I protested. “I could have done that.”

  “Ah, but that is the trick: knowing when to use brute force.” He smiled and replaced the back of the clock, then put the battery away for recycling and the screwdriver back in the drawer. “Hey, you guys want meatloaf? I’m making a double batch.”

  “Hon, they don’t want to be stuck with us,” I said hurriedly. I didn’t want to force them into anything.

  “Meatloaf sounds good,” Joe said. He hollered out the back of the kitchen. “You guys want meatloaf?”

  A chorus of approval came from the side of the house. “Yes, please,” Joe said. “We’ll finish getting the artifacts put away.”

  Dinner was a lot of fun, and I was surprised to find just how pleased I was at the students’ willingness to join us. We sat around the table for two hours after, trading stories, and it went a long way toward blotting out what I’d seen that morning. It surprised me, too, to see how much that community meant to me, how badly I needed to be surrounded by people like my crew.

  Brian, Bucky, and I sat around a while after they excused themselves and withdrew to the little house. “So, spill it,” I said, handing Bucky another beer. “Anyone
new on the horizon?”

  She shrugged and took the bottle. “Not really.”

  “What about whatshisname? Joel, wasn’t it?”

  “You know perfectly well what his name is.” Bucky began to peel at the label on the bottle contemplatively and I was pretty certain I’d just hit on the reason Bucky was visiting us. “I’ve told him I’d like a break. It was about a month ago.”

  “What on earth for?” I’d had hopes for Joel. More than that, my sister’s abrupt desire to spend time with me suddenly made sense. Not that she would have ever admitted it.

  Again came the shrug, with just the merest hint of the Chin. “Ah, I don’t know. He’s too much of a geek for me. He was boring.” It was as if she was looking for backup on her decision, but she would find none here.

  “Nothing wrong with being a geek,” Brian said. “Geeks and nerds make very good mates.” He and I clinked our bottles together.

  “Besides, what would you call a person who didn’t take summers off from college?” I said. “Who was busy racking up the college credits even before she finished high school?”

  “Eager to get where I was going,” Bucky said, peeling the label off her bottle with real concentration now. “It’s not just that. He’s got all these plans. He wants, you know, a house, he wants to figure out how he can save up enough money to travel when he retires. That kind of stuff.” She paused as if unwilling to confess the rest. “He wants all sorts of things.”

  “The bastard,” Brian whispered in mock horror.

  “Yeah, come on, Bucks. Those all sound like positives to me.”

  “Well, he was crowding me, so I told him to back off. Talked to Ma lately?”

  I knew I’d touched a nerve there; the subject of our parents seldom came up unless we were planning how to cope with them, tag-team style. Bucky had retreated into her shell and would only reappear when she was good and ready to. “Yup. Her study group is going to Paris this year, for a week, end of July. They’re going to do twentieth-century poets. She’s worried about the garden while she’s gone, so I volunteered you to go over and water it a couple of days.”