More Bitter Than Death (21 page)

Once again, however, Lissa decided that she was not there to protect me or offer any refuge.

“Emma’s people came over on the Mayflower,” she announced.

“No, they did not!” I said. “They didn’t, I promise you.”

“Well, if not the Mayflower, then the next boat over,” she said, shrugging. “I’m better with the boats coming in to Raleigh.”

“Lissa, would you
stop
?”

“You know what I mean,” Lissa said, then turned to Gennette confidentially. “Very old family.”

“Everyone’s family is very old,” I said, gulping down more coffee.

“Anyway,” Gennette said. “I bet I could find a connection between your family and those in Richmond. They were early too. And speaking of which, I see you’re from Caldwell College in Maine.”

Her fascination with my name tag was apparently endless. Perhaps we both needed more coffee. “Yes, that’s right.”

“I spoke with someone there at the art museum about one of the paintings I’ve been trying to track down. A Dr. Sarkes-Robinson.”

I gulped. “Oh, boy. Dora.” If she’d been talking to Dora, I knew what was coming next.

Gennette’s face soured. “You know her, then? I have to say, Emma, she was not very helpful. In point of fact, she was downright rude.”

“That’s Dora for you,” I said. “She’s a bit, um, preoccupied with her own work.” Which was the understatement of the year. And since her work was exclusively with the Italian renaissance painters, what the hell was Gennette doing talking to her?

“Apparently she’s taking over the role of the head curator while he’s on leave,” Gennette continued, as if she’d read my mind. “She actually told me that she didn’t have any time for, quote, unschooled provincial painters whose only virtue was that they were so untalented, they couldn’t fully or accurately represent the obvious ugliness of their parvenu sitters. Unquote.” Gennette sat back, and looked at me and Lissa with disbelief. “Can you get over that? I told her that if she was so darned important, what was she doing in a piddly little school like Caldwell, way the heck up in Maine, instead of someplace decent like New York or London.”

“Ahem, Gennette,” Lissa said.

Gennette’s hand flew up to her mouth when she realized her faux pas. “Oh, Lord, Emma, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

I waved it aside. “Don’t worry about it. Caldwell
is
small. Of course, it’s the department that matters.”

Gennette nodded quickly.

But I’d often wondered about that myself, why Dora was in our little part of the world, when her attitude was so clearly geared to a larger stage? Truth be told, Dora could be a world-class pain in the neck, but for some reason, we were drawn to each other. It wasn’t quite friendship, not quite. More like mutual fascination. “Maybe if you told me what you were looking for, I could check it out for you. Sometimes I can catch Dora when she’s in a good mood.”

“When’s that, when the moon is full and she’s just eaten her fill of freshly slaughtered cattle?” Gennette said. Then she shook herself. “I’m sorry. Yes, please, that would be very helpful.”

“I’m over there all the time, because there’s a small collection of colonial portraits. Nothing great, fine arts–wise, but some really interesting stuff.”

She handed me her business card. “Right, that’s the collection. It’s a picture of a small plantation house…” She went on to describe the architecture and landscape and colors. “So if you could just look at it—I think it’s in storage—and let me know what you can see in the background, I’d really be forever in your debt. And if it’s what I need, I’ll tackle Ms. Pert-pants and try to get a slide made up of it. Thanks so much for this.”

I nodded, scribbling down the last of her description. “No problem. I have to go down there when I get back anyway, so it will be a piece of cake. If you don’t hear from me in two weeks, give me a call or drop me an e to remind me.”

Lissa and Gennette got back to their conversation, and I was left mercifully with my hot, brownish water and muffin. I was grateful I had time to get it down—I was really in a hurry now—and finished just as the other two women said goodbye to each other for what seemed like a full five minutes.

“You guys are going to see each other on your panel later, aren’t you?” I said, signing my check, after Gennette left.

Lissa got it right away. “Yes, of course. But we like to make sure everyone is fine and happy with everything before we go our separate ways. It’s a Southern thing.”

“Whatever,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”

And leaving just enough time for Lissa to say “bye,” I was gone myself.

I was really running to hide, and was mostly successful. I saw Chris and Scott off in a corner with a few other guys, huddled around a piece of blue plastic tarp spread over the carpet. It was the noise that really drew me over: hard crack of stone on stone, followed by the occasional clink of what sounded like breaking glass. I knew what they were doing without even looking, knapping pieces of flint into tools. With good enough flint, clean with no impurities in the matrix, you got the clear ring of glass as it broke off in regular pieces. Although I really didn’t want to be drawn into it, there’s something mesmerizing about watching the larger hammer stone in the hands of someone who knew what he was doing, knocking a sharp blade from a core stone and then rotating it for the next strike, almost like watching someone repeatedly removing slices from the round meat of an apple. One of the guys was actually making an arrowhead; he was also saving the waste flakes, or debitage, perhaps to use as a demonstration tool for a class, to show both the waste and the finished product. I figured Chris would be taking his blades and using finer tools of antler or some softer material to shape them into flints for his musket for reenacting. Or maybe he’d use some of the other fragments as a strike-a-light with an iron for making his encampment fire. I just hoped they’d all be careful with the flakes—they were incredibly sharp all on their own. And by the sounds of things, the stone they were working came from somewhere other than coastal Massachusetts, Maine, or New Hampshire
for all I knew; usually the stuff around where I lived was pretty rotten to work with—it didn’t fracture as nicely as some materials from New York or Vermont.

After that brief distraction, I actually hit a few morning papers. But it felt like I absorbed nothing of them. I was just sitting there, trying to look like an archaeologist, trying to hide in plain sight, trying not to think. Sue had been in the shower when the cops came to ask her questions—there was no saying how long she’d been in there, or whether she might have come back to the hospitality room to clear up any traces of her connection with Garrison.

A shower might have helped clean up any gunpowder residue.

Was there any connection between the shots fired by “hunters” on Thursday evening, and the shots I could have sworn came from outside and below me, when I was out on the porch roof? Even if Sue had been involved, there was no way she could have been in both places at once. And she was certainly not one of the two voices I’d heard whispering behind me at the farmstead session, not that one of them had to be the murderer, but…

Laurel Fairchild must have made an unprecedented foray out of the bar, for she caught me wandering toward the dead end of a hallway before I registered that I was nowhere near where I meant to be heading.

“Whoa, there, cowgirl. Nothing you want to see down there, is there?” She took my elbow and led me back down toward the hospitality suite. The door was open, the lights were on, and there were coffee mugs and donuts. I was so grateful that I almost didn’t notice how the room got quiet when we went in.

After we loaded up, we found an empty corner by a large fern on the mezzanine. “How you doing?” she said. “You look a little…well, honestly, you look like hell.”

I stared at her. “Okay.”

She nodded. “And I heard you had a little excitement last night.”

“Oh?”

“Emma, don’t be like that. You know I hear things. Well, right now, rumors are flying thick and fast and everyone’s talking. About Garrison, about the gunshots fired the night of Scott’s announcement, about student vandalism, and now we hear cops are discussing the crazy bitch out on the roof during the storm—”

“It wasn’t the hotel
roof
.”

“—and you know, the odds favor the news—in whatever shape—getting around. But I’m not here about that now.” Laurel’s face was dire. “You know I don’t listen for the sake of gossip. I’m not here to dig for juice.”

I looked at her tiredly. She was right, and I knew it. “Okay.”

“I’m giving you the head’s up about a few things. Things you might already know, but if you don’t, well, I think you’re better off if you do.”

“Okay.”

“First.” She ticked off her points on her fingers, long, tapered, with carefully polished nails. “Noreen McAllister. Never a friend of yours, I know, but she’s taking it to a whole new level now. I don’t know what happened between you guys, but she’s stopped mouthing off about you trying to draw attention to yourself, and she’s started saying that the cops are talking to you so much because they have decided you are “a person of interest” in Garrison’s death. Which, as we know, is Noreen’s way of saying you offed him.”

My jaw dropped. “You can’t be…”

“Yeah, I am. Just when you think you’ve plumbed the depths of someone’s stupidity, they have to go and surprise you. I told her that she should consider whether her words are actionable, whether they could be construed as slanderous, and that shut her up for a while. But you never know.”

“Thanks. And thanks for sticking up for me.”

Laurel shrugged. “I’ve never heard anyone bitch so much about so little. It drives me up the wall. Next, news you might also not be too thrilled about. A couple of people I know you have close ties to lied about their movements on the night of Garrison’s death. Both of them were seen having words with Garrison, and both of them did not tell the police this.”

“Who?”

“Sue Ayers, for one. I understand that they had another interview with her last night.”

“She’s really in a state,” I said. “I’m getting worried about her.” And she also told me that she hadn’t met Garrison, I thought. Made a point of reminding me that I’d seen her go up to bed, which didn’t really count for anything, but it felt like she was trying to snowball me.

“Yeah, well, I heard her talking with Jay Whitaker in the restaurant last night. She went up and saw Garrison, and they had a row. She didn’t mean to, but somehow she just lost her head, was how she put it.” Laurel’s words were loaded with meaning.

“If she saw him, it doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “No one’s said Garrison was killed.”

Laurel gave me a pitying look. “Right, they haven’t. But there’s been gunplay on two separate occasions and enough crazy shit to keep the cops here on an almost twenty-four-hour basis. What do you think, Em?”

“Okay. Still doesn’t mean she did anything about it. Who was the other person?”

“Duncan Thayer.”

I froze. “I don’t have ties to Duncan.”

Laurel canted her head and glared at me over her glasses. “Maybe you didn’t for a while there, but you sure do now.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“He wants something from you, Emma. That’s clear.”

“He’s going psychotic on me, is clear. First he was trying to be decent, but then he went all paranoid—about what, I don’t know—and now he’s sucking up.”

She tilted her head. “Sounds about right.”

“Laurel, what do you know?”

“I don’t know anything for sure, but I have my suspicions. One thing is strange: Someone’s reviewing some old work of his. Going through the collections, reevaluating his work. That would make anyone edgy, but an egotist like Thayer?” She shook her head.

“Which work?”

“His dissertation work. The stuff out on the western frontier of New York State. The Haslett site, wasn’t it?”

I shrugged. “It’s been a while; if someone’s doing work out there, it would make sense. A lot of sites get reviewed; people come back to the data for all sorts of reasons. It doesn’t need to mean anything.”

“Maybe.” She stood up, shoved her cat glasses back up her nose. “Well, you’re looking less like you’re going to puke all over someone’s new shoes. My work here is done.”

I had a sudden inspiration. “Hey, before you leave?”

“What?”

“Duncan started acting weird when I mentioned Josiah Miller. A nineteenth-century amateur, did some work way out in New York State.”

“I don’t recognize the name. And that’s a little far inland for me.”

Laurel’s work kept her focused on ports and coastal sites. “Oh, I heard it in the farmstead session,” I explained. “The guy who was chairing it, I think, was the presenter.”

“That was Kevin Leary,” she said promptly, and I realized that it was possible that she’d committed the entire program to memory. “He took off right after; had some research to do in Massachusetts while he was out here. I know because I
wanted to ask him about a reference and I just barely caught him.”

“Shoot.” Well, I was sorry to have lost that lead, but I began to wonder about whether Leary had been the one reviewing the Haslett site. Maybe he was the link between Duncan and Josiah Miller—that was it! Relief at having solved that puzzle flooded me.

Then I remembered seeing long ago the manuscript Josiah Miller had written on Duncan’s desk. But why should Duncan be so upset now by the mere mention of Miller’s name?

Because Leary had described Miller’s work as “recently discovered”! If that was the case, then why would I have remembered seeing it in Duncan’s possession back before he’d even started his work at the Haslett site? Was that the reason Duncan was so defensive about it now? Holy cow, the implications of all of this were quite…breathtakingly serious.

Laurel seemed unaware that I’d checked out, stunned by my realization. “I’ve got to get back,” she said. “People will start to talk if I’m not helping hold the bar down.” She looked past my shoulder. “Hey, Gutierrez, wait up!”

Laurel vanished as quickly as she had appeared. I did feel better, even though I had a lot to think about in terms of what might be up with Duncan. At the same time, a tiny sliver of my brain was free to wonder just why Laurel had decided to tell me any of this at all.