WHOEVER DECIDED THAT ARCHAEOLOGY WAS AN EARLY morning event was in a class with de Sade, I thought for the nth time as I rolled out of bed, cursed the sunlight, and scrubbed my sand-locked eyes open. Splashing a couple of handfuls of cold water on my face didn’t do much except irritate me; what I really needed was coffee. Stumbling past piles of books and papers, I found that the only tidy spot in the room was the laundry basket, and I dressed, silently thanking whatever gods were attending the faithful at this hour of the morning for having let me impose that much order on my life. Nakedness covered, resentment temporarily subdued, but still bleary, I went to find salvation in the Mr. Coffee.
The doorknob slipped from my hand and the door slammed open with more force than I had intended. I vaguely understood that people—students—were gathered in the kitchen, talking and eating. I was grateful that they knew me well enough to give me the distance I needed in the morning, while I was still in the condition I had once described, in a moment of lucidity, as B.C.: Before Coffee. A pre-Columbian state, as it were. Voices were muted and no one yet tried to assail me with the problems that I was sure had already sprung, full-blown, from the newborn day. Rob hopped up and found me a mug, filled it with coffee, and just as I raised the cup to my lips, beginning to believe that I might attain humanity within the next half hour, a lone voice broke through the respectfully muted conversation.
“Morning, Emma!”
I jerked suddenly, splashing coffee down the front of my clean shirt. I brushed at the stain but to no avail. Not trusting myself to speak yet, I waved a hand in the direction of the speaker. The gesture might have been “stop!,” it might have been “bye-bye,” it might have been the barest of morning greetings, but it had the desired effect of stanching further attempts at conversation. I found my way back to my room and, with some finality, shut my door.
I swallowed greedily. As the coffee penetrated the somnolent recesses of my mind, I began my morning prayer of thanksgiving, a paraphrase of Vonnegut. “Aahhh, thank you God, for this magical bean. Thank you God, for letting me need coffee: It makes me more than talking mud.” I felt my vision focusing and my thoughts sharpening, the universe suddenly revealing its inherent logic and my place in it.
And, now that I was a little more alert, I could also hear every single word that was being spoken in the kitchen. It was largely the fault of the dorm’s thin walls and badly designed architecture, but I’m also very nosy. It works out nicely that nosy happens to be part of my job description.
One voice, the same one that so misguidedly greeted me minutes earlier, rose again in irate tones above the quieter murmur. “What the hell was that all about?”
So the new kid hadn’t tried to wake me up on purpose, I thought. Ah, Meg. If you’ve been a good girl, the others will tell you how thin the walls are, how your words carry. If you haven’t, well, we’ll just see how far they let you go. Maybe they’re counting on me being semiconscious.
Apparently no one was interested in saving Meg from herself just yet, or maybe she already knew and didn’t care. She did have an attitude, I’d noticed. “I’ve seen better manners at a drive-by shooting!” she announced.
Not bad, I thought, but inaccurate. I took a big sip of coffee. My manners are impeccable; they just happen to be dormant until about ten A.M. Everyone else knows this and loves me in spite of it. I put my mug down to examine the damage to my shirt.
“She’s just not a morning person, that’s all,” a reedy voice I recognized as Alan’s said quickly. “Just let her have the one cup, and then you can try conversation.”
Rob, then, I guessed, chimed in. “Yeah, but no complex sentences until the second cup, and no problems till the pot’s rinsed out.”
Huh, the smartass! I never thought of it that way, but then I wasn’t objective enough an observer at the critical times. I could have gotten away with the coffee-stained shirt—it was only going to get dirtier, after all—but seeing my trowel on my boots reminded me: I had senior faculty visiting today and needed to be as presentable as work would allow. My shoulders slumped as I realized I also needed to get going a little earlier so I could get the things organized for Tony’s visit that I hadn’t managed last night. I quickly unbuttoned my shirt and donned a clean one.
I laced up my boots and gathered up my notebooks and maps, then threw a couple more books on the pile. I’d need pictures to show Tony Markham the sort of things we were looking for, as we hadn’t uncovered anything from the seventeenth century yet. With any luck, since we were so close to hitting the early surfaces, we might actually uncover some finds in time to really impress him. No sparing the lash today.
But I decided that I’d better make time to have another cup of coffee. Just in case. Gear and notes ready in a pile to leave with me, I put my trowel on top of them and went back to the kitchen. As I sucked down that cup of coffee even quicker than the first, I wondered for the eleventy-seventh time who it was I should be nominating for beatification, the CEO of Starbucks or Juan Valdez himself.
The students were making their lunches, and I slapped a sandwich together, thinking wistfully of Brian’s cooking. I’d been eating too many sandwiches lately. Then I watched as Alan scraped a microscopically thin layer of peanut butter across a slice of bread and put that into a Baggie. I’d suggested before that he needed more lunch, but he always said it was too hot to eat. I worried about the pinched look of his face. I said nothing, but shook my head and emptied the rest of the pot into my travel mug.
“Let’s go, let’s go, guys,” I called out. “Lots of work today.”
“You say that every day,” Dian said, reaching across the table for the pastrami.
“And it’s true every day,” I agreed. I put my sandwich in the cooler, and noticed that there was more than lunch construction going on. I stifled a groan: It was way too early for sexual displays.
Having leaned right across Rob to get the ingredients for her sandwich, Dian stretched to grab a new loaf of bread from on top of the fridge and then dropped the box of sandwich bags and bent over to retrieve them. Since Dian is built like a Hindu temple goddess, mostly luscious curves and brown curls, and since her cropped sweatshirt alternately rode up over her navel or gaped to reveal copious cleavage, she was guaranteed an audience. She looked up from her task, as if all innocence, and caught Rob staring. Looking straight at him, she licked the mustard off her knife. He dropped the apple he’d been holding, and it rolled away on the floor almost unnoticed.
I shook my head in disbelief, but then resigned myself to the fact that most field crews are just simmering cauldrons of lust. Brian was right, though. I had no business interfering.
“Fifteen minutes!” Neal yelled. “And keys! Who’s got the keys to the big truck?”
“I do,” Alan said, tossing them to him. Neal threw them to me, and to my surprise, I snagged them one-handed. I just as quickly pitched them back to him.
“I have to bring my car today,” I explained. “In case Professor Markham comes late, I don’t want to keep you guys. And I’m heading up early, to get a few things set up for him.”
I also had an ulterior motive. Generally speaking, if I get a few more minutes of semiconscious decompression, I’m not so likely to get the cognitive bends. Today I could get a little more thinking done if I was driving on my own.
“I’ll come with you, Emma,” Meg said unexpectedly. She already had her gear and lunch put together.
I didn’t have time to argue. Shrugging, I said, “As long as you don’t mind classical music and a contemplative driver, because it is a nice day for a drive-by—”
Meg flushed violently, and I continued as innocently as I could “—a nice drive by the river with Herr Beethoven. If you’re ready, then let’s get going.”
I gave myself until we’d pulled off College Drive before I decided to examine last night’s reflections in the cold light of morning. Literally cold, I shivered and turned on the battered old Civic’s heat. Mornings are often chilly in Maine, no matter how warm the day shapes up to be, even in July.
I turned up my sonatas, let muscle memory guide me toward the site, and settled back to think. Last night I’d realized that there were two things that still particularly bothered me about my unfortunate discovery of Augie Brooks. The first was the awful sensation of actually, literally stumbling over his body. I’d been walking along the beach below the site, looking up at the eroding bank for any sign of the seventeenth-century English habitation, when my foot struck something soft but solid. I instantly thought of a life preserver lost on the beach, but it was far too heavy for that. I looked down slowly, hoping that it wasn’t a dead seal—they usually were farther down the river, closer to its mouth and the ocean—and was grateful to see a dark red sweatshirt, half buried in the sand and tangled with seaweed. I thought it was something lost from one of the hundreds of sailboats and motorboats that travel the river until I saw how the flies swarmed around the bundle when I’d disturbed it. When I pulled my foot back, the body shifted and the sickly sweet smell of deteriorating flesh assailed me all at once. I gagged and stepped back. Please be a dead seal, please be a dead seal, I repeated to myself in the eternity it took for me to look closer. But I had already known the truth in an instant. I was just not willing to believe that I had found a human body.
The odd thing was that, after I convinced my breakfast to stay put, I’d mostly been curious, rather than horrified or nauseated. The fact is that, in our sanitized twenty-first-century lives, most of us seldom encounter a corpse outside of a hospital or a funeral parlor. The man, for male the body was, looked strangely out of place, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why he didn’t wake up, prodded by my heavy boot, or at least complain about me disturbing him. I stood staring at him for I don’t know how many moments, not touching, but rather cataloguing what I saw, as if by analyzing what I observed I could make some sense of it.
The figure was facedown, left at the high-tide line. He was a short, stoutish, older man, say about sixty, based on the age spots, wearing a red sweatshirt and dark blue work trousers, the sort my mother calls “janitor pants.” His dingy sweat socks and tennis shoes had seen better days. An overgrown fringe of thinning gray was all that was left of his hair, and I was grateful that his poor face was turned and half buried in the sand, for apart from some scary-looking bruises, when I noticed his shriveled white hand, I saw that the seagulls had been trying to make a meal of them. The mere thought of what the birds might have done to the soft tissue of his eyes and lips caused me to stumble back, and I decided suddenly that I should be initiating the modern rituals of death. I had hastened back up to the site, as calmly as I could, past the students, and went into the big gray house to call the authorities. Later I’d been told his name: Augie Brooks.
“Uh, Emma—”
Meg’s warning woke me up to the present; I had been idling at a green light. I hurried through the intersection and picked up the thread of my thoughts a little more cautiously as I hit the highway.
I suppose that in a way I am constantly prepared to find bodies, although I expect that they will have been dead for a much longer time and be nicely, cleanly fleshless. I’ve worked on human remains in the field on many occasions, and I believe that I’ve become pretty good at remembering that the bones were once people, with all their attendant worries and hopes, good qualities and bad. I try to remember that their probate inventories, letters, diaries, and bills were not created just to be fodder for my research, but were real parts of many lives. Folks consider me pretty sensitive when it comes to dealing with the dead, but I have to admit, it is the immediacy of flesh on bone that brings that humanity much more forcefully to mind. Knowing a name doesn’t hurt either.
Signaling to turn off to a secondary road, I mentally shook my head. After all, I’d just been walking, trying to sort out some site questions, and happened upon this quiet, almost private scene, purely by chance. A decision to walk down the dirt road instead of the pebbly beach and I would have never seen it. There was the second thing that bothered me: Why did Augie prey on my mind so? I didn’t know him and, really, hadn’t been terribly upset by the mere fact of my discovery.
Finally I decided that I resented his proximity to Greycliff, a place that meant so much to me all through my life and was now the focus of my professional scrutiny as well. You get protective about any site you’ve worked on, no matter how scrubby-looking it is or uninformative it turns out to be. Never mind that this had occurred practically at the front doorstep of my friend Pauline Westlake, who happened to own the site.
That rational explanation didn’t sit quite right, however. There was a pricking in my thumbs that persisted in the face of all that good sense. Forget it, Emma, I scolded myself, there’s work to do. As I pulled down the last, pine tree–lined road that led to the site, I reached the conclusion, not for the first time, that I think too much for my own good.
“So, what’s up?” I said, finally addressing Meg. “Any particular reason you wanted to join me?”
“Nothing much,” she answered. “Just wanted to get out a little early. I think I’m changing levels, and I wanted to get a look at the dirt in the direct sunlight, before we get the shadows.”
“Good enough. You’re close to Dian’s depth, so keep a sharp eye out.”
“I always keep a sharp eye out,” came the prompt reply. Not shirty, but a little too self-assured, perhaps.
I raised an eyebrow but kept my response mild. “It’s just an expression, but we are getting close to the seventeenth-century levels, and one careless swipe of the trowel could do a lot of damage.”
“Right.”
“You can get right to it. I’ll check in with Pauline and then get my stuff sorted out for Tony, er, Professor Markham.”
We pulled into the drive and got out. As trite as it sounds, the smell of salt air and fresh dirt really has a powerful effect on me, like a call to battle. If a shower strips you down emotionally at the end of the day, when you can only see the huge amount of work that still remains to be done and the problems you still haven’t solved, then the arrival on a site equally brings the sense of new beginnings, the opportunity to figure it all out, another chance to solve all the mysteries.
I’d just grabbed my notebook when I noticed a black car, some sort of Camaro or Corvette or something, drive slowly up to the house. It almost came to a stop, but then suddenly speeded up and tore off up the road. I frowned: This end of the road was well away from the beach that attracted so many tourists, and the locals were usually much more cautious about speeding around the twists and turns. Guy must be lost, I thought.
As I walked down the driveway I could see that Pauline was already on the porch of the large gray house that was built before the turn of the century, and named Greycliff for the gray granite outcropping behind it. Pauline professed to hate the name, bestowed by the sentimental, Scot-loving Victorians who’d built the place, but unless she wanted to take a hacksaw to the fancy wrought-iron fence plate that spelled out the name, she was stuck with it. No one could have had the heart to undo that beautiful ironwork, though, no matter how good the cause.
Even from a distance one could see that Pauline Westlake was tall and slender and indomitable. Her erect posture had, in the past, occasionally been echoed by a silent armada of lanky Siamese cats, who periodically aligned themselves around their mistress, as if subjecting her guests to the same sharp scrutiny that she was too polite to make obvious. They were gone now. When the last one, the patriarch, had been carried off by one of the eagles that soared over the river, she hadn’t had the heart to replace him.
I had first met Pauline when I was eight, the age at which my grandfather believed that children ought to start being introduced into the adult world. She was already nearly sixty then and she’d scared the hell out of me. My mistake had been in assuming that she was not kind simply because she’d not spoken down to me, a child. I eventually learned over the years that although Pauline did not tolerate silliness, she had a great capacity for good humor and, on occasion, an impulsive sense of daring that took my breath away.
The passage of time had little altered my friend (surely too pallid a term for our relationship, but we had negotiated our relationship carefully over the years and earned the finer connotations of the word). The years only appeared to have distilled her to an even more essential form of herself. Pauline’s hair was whiter, and still carefully bobbed to just above her chin, her posture not a whit relaxed from its military bearing. She still dressed with crisp orderliness in the jeans and men’s shirts she’d worn since time immemorial. Pauline had always been a remarkable woman, and even now seemed to possess the secret, if not to eternal youth, then to eternal vitality. She’d done nearly as much as Grandpa had in making me the adult I am today, by sharing her tales of travel in far-off lands and her love of the objects she brought back from those solitary journeys.
“Morning,” Pauline greeted me. She held up the mug that I’d come to think of as my own. “Coffee?”
“No, thanks,” I said as I took the mug. “I hear caffeine is bad for you.” I sat down on the swing next to her and drank deeply. “Oooh, plasma.”
“Close. Jamaican Blue Mountain,” Pauline said. Her words were Beacon Hill Yankee, with the patina of antique family money. I loved listening to her speak.
We rocked back and forth for a moment, enjoying the morning sounds of birds and wind on the river, which we could see in an unparalleled view from the porch. We could see Meg beginning to work below us, but were too far away to hear the sound of her trowel on the soil. On the far bank, a few scattered houses peeped through a dense, dark green wall of trees. On the river, moored sailboats bobbed lazily on the wake of two lobster boats chugging past. The sun was rising quickly now, burning the mist off the river.
“What’s the plan for today?” Her words were the same every morning, and if they had not been, I would have worried.
“We’re getting down through the eighteenth century, I think. If we get through that burn layer I’ve been seeing—you remember?—we may be close to Fort Providence. Today could be the day,” I said carefully, with no other emphasis.
“That’s something, isn’t it?” Pauline said, staring out at the water. “An English site that was settled before Jamestown? That predates the Pilgrims at Plymouth by almost two decades? And I have a front-row seat to it all.”
That thought jarred my memory and my worries of the morning. “Paul? Weren’t you bothered by…what happened yesterday?”
“What happened yesterday?”
At first I thought she was teasing me, but then I realized Pauline would never joke like that. “The body? Down by the shore?”
“Oh no.” Pauline shook her head. “No. Dear me, Emma, from what you told me of it, I’ve seen much worse, and they had him all neatly covered up by the time the ambulance came, so I didn’t even see that. And Augie Brooks? It’s a sad thing, certainly, but anyone who knew him would have bet that he would have come to just this sort of end. Really, we were prepared for it after they found his motorboat without him in it. The man wasted every chance everyone, including God, ever gave him.” She looked at me. “You are bothered, though, aren’t you?”
I shrugged. “I guess I was wondering: Why here?”
Pauline laughed. “Well, why not here? They say if you stay in one place long enough, the entire world comes to your door, and if I’m lucky enough to have Fort Providence, then surely one drunken old fool should come as no surprise. Augie Brooks was never handy on the water; too nervous.” She sighed. “He must have been on quite a bender.”
“I couldn’t see everything,” I said hesitantly. The deputies had said it was an accident, but it looked worse than that to me. I couldn’t shake off the memory of those bruises. “But from what I could see, his face was…” I decided there was no point in finishing.
Pauline patted my arm. “I’m sorry you had to be the one, but the way I see it, better Augie should land here than downriver, on the public beach, for some poor tourist to find. This way we can take care of our own.”
“That’s what the officer said.” I watched the fair-weather clouds glide over the Point and realized that I needed to get to work.
Pauline nodded her approval. “That Dave Stannard’s the best kind of man. Not too pleased with his badge and his title, like some sheriffs we’ve had. Sensible, fair. And his wife’s a dear, one of the best cooks I’ve ever met.”
It was my turn to laugh as I got off the swing. “And that’s got exactly what to do with his qualities as a cop?”
“Sheriff. Nothing, only it’s nice to see good people with good people every once in a while. Speaking of which, when will Brian be by for a visit?”
“I hope in a week or two. He’s pretty busy right now, something big’s happening at the lab, I guess.” That reminded me. “Oh, I wanted to give you the heads-up. I’ve got a visitor stopping by today, a sahib from the department, Dr. Tony Markham. So if you see anyone wandering around…”
Pauline nodded. “I’ll send him your way. As if anyone would mistake what’s happening down there for a polo match. I’ll be down later.” She reached out her hand for my mug, and I reluctantly gave it to her.
I stood watching Meg and chewing my lip. Pauline gave me a gentle push in the small of the back.
“Go on. No more brooding over Augie. Go find my fort.”
On the scrubby lawn below the house and toward the river was The Site. My site. Even though I had visited a thousand times as a kid, it was now mine eternally, because I had put spade to earth there. All my history in the house, and all that history waiting for me under the lawn—it made me dizzy to think about it.
I marveled over the events that seemed, like fate, to lead me to this amazing site, but it was really the indirect cause of my acquaintance with Pauline to begin with. Grandpa Oscar had met Pauline during one of his searches for Native American sites in the area more than thirty years ago. The area was a strategic location for hunting and a center for politics and religion. When he approached Pauline about permission to survey her property, a situation that could easily have turned into a hostile encounter, their mutual interest in antiquity had sprung into lasting friendship.
Last fall, a few years after Oscar’s death, I had been visiting Pauline at Greycliff, pacing restlessly in the living room, confiding to her my fears about the whole academic roller coaster over tea and sympathy.
“There’s just so much at stake,” I remembered saying to her. “There’s so much other work to juggle before you can even think about doing your own research. I can’t afford to screw up, not in the least little way, not if I want to keep this job. And the landowner at the MacGuire farm has suddenly decided that he doesn’t like the idea of me working on his property this summer. So now I’m out of luck for this season.”
Pauline just sat listening, watching me, waiting until I ran out of steam before she offered any advice.
I went over to look at a picture of Oscar that resided among the collection of photos on the mantelpiece. He was with a group of Native American men, the only one in the photograph who had a beard. Pauline had an array of things on the mantel with the picture, and at first I’d taken it for granted that they were more costly souvenirs from her travels, small pieces of the art she loved so much. But it was a dirty piece of dull green-glazed pottery that caught my attention and forced me to examine them all more carefully. I picked one up and turned it over and over, not willing to believe what I was seeing. It couldn’t be…
I looked at my friend in shock. “Paul, where did you get these?” They weren’t beautiful or expensive things at all; they were broken, dirty, and, to many eyes, nondescript.
She rose and joined me at the mantel. “Oh, I’m glad you saw them. I’ve been meaning to ask you about them. I found them when that old pine down front finally uprooted last winter. These things came up in the roots. What are they?”
“You found them here?” I asked excitedly. “Pauline, they’re about four hundred years old! They’re European, I think they’re English! What the hell are they doing here? Could they be—?”
Pauline was silent a moment. “Everyone’s heard of Fort Providence, of course. There’s even been a number of attempts to locate the site of it—Oscar was mildly interested, but his first love was the Indian history around here. He believed that it was upriver, where Fort Archer is now. And I never thought that there was anything but the remains of the eighteenth-century farm around here, myself.” She laughed. “There were all sorts of stories about buried treasure—gold—in Fort Providence, and of course that’s what people always thought of, not that it was the first English settlement in New England.”
“And no one’s ever found it,” I said, amazed. “No traces of it ever turned up?”
“There were just a couple attempts in the sixties, but Oscar told me that because there were so few documents associated with it, it was practically impossible to locate the site. People knew it was on the Saugatuck River, but it’s a very long river with a very long history.”
We exchanged a glance. “Do you really think they could be from Fort Providence?” she asked. “All the way from 1605?”
I hardly dared to believe it was possible. “It could be. Why don’t you show me where you found them, and then, well, it’s worth a few test pits, that’s for sure.”
And it was at that point that I began to believe that I could initiate a fresh search for the earliest English site on the American mainland.
A seagull screeched overhead and I paused in my reflections to scan the site. To the south was the dirt road and a slight rise in back of Pauline’s house, which faced the river. To the east, a cluster of scrubby pines and oaks marked the edge of the property, as well as another edge of the land itself, and threatened to overwhelm an ancient barn that was standing more out of habit than structural integrity, but still saw use as our storage depot. The western boundary was proclaimed by a sparse line of silver birches, planted when the property was sold and the house constructed. A comparatively flat stretch of land lay below the slope on which the house sat. It had once been a field and probably an unproductive one for all of that, now roughly mown so that we could work. To the north of this field there was another slight slope, then the bluff dropped off to the river, literally and figuratively: It was eroding quickly. At the northeast corner was a staircase of disintegrating concrete steps with the rusting remains of a railing that led down to the water. An equally rusted iron ring remained at the base, once used for tying up dinghies. I just told the students to stay away from the whole crumbling mess. The excavation areas were in the field, to the west of the barn and pine trees.
Now I had to get to work and prove to everyone else what I already suspected, that I was on the track of an extremely hot site. I tried not to think about how much I had riding on this work, emotionally and professionally. My whole future and my whole past.
I sauntered down the hill and, nodding to Meg, who was finishing scraping the last bit of soil from a corner into a dustpan, squatted well away from the edge of the unit to prevent knocking anything into the unit she was working so hard to clean. Meg dumped the soil into a galvanized bucket and went to the sifter screen. Like everyone else, I noticed, she had uncovered the scorched layer yesterday, but was moving quickly this morning, just as Neal had indicated to me last night, and was nearly through that already. I looked at the unit, a one-by-two-meter oblong trench cut into the ground, nearly a half meter—or about a foot and a half—deep. If her walls were any indication, she had everything well under control: They were surgically clean, the corners were square, and the soil carefully sifted through a screen into a pile off to the right. In her artifact bucket, she had plastic bags marked with the state site designation number, ME343–1, the unit number, and the number of the level in which she was presently working, with the date and her initials at the bottom. Good; everything we’d need to keep track of where the artifacts had come from. This information would also be marked on the artifacts after we washed them.
The sound of the dirt rasping on the screen stopped momentarily, and I watched as Meg examined what had not passed through the mesh. She was maybe four inches shorter than I, maybe five-four or so, and well muscled; I could tell that she had spent a lot of time in the gym. Her hair was cut short and spiked and was bleached almost to a platinum. A row of earrings lined each ear, giving her a tribal appearance. Her every move seemed to bespeak aggression, or maybe confidence was the better word.
Systematically Meg began at the top of the screen and scanned back and forth, occasionally stopping to look more closely at something that caught her attention. The student used her trowel to flick at some clusters of pebbles, checking for artifacts that might be mixed in with them. After she’d collected everything she could see, she gave the screen one more shake, took another quick look at the contents, and then, satisfied that she had missed nothing, turned the screen over, dumping out the pebbles and other non-artifactual detritus. I watched as she knocked the overturned screen to loosen anything that might have stuck between the mesh and the wood frame and then cast a glance at what had knocked out onto the top of the spoils heap. Perfect technique.
“Nice stuff,” I said, returning the artifacts I’d been looking at to her bucket. “A little local redware, a piece of English creamware, nails and such. Just not a lot of it.”
“I think I’m coming to the end of the eighteenth-century level,” Meg said. She started sorting her finds from the screen. “What was going on back then?”
“Not much, down here, at any rate. The farmstead had been abandoned, burned in the 1770s or so—that was off a ways to the west. This area’s always been a strategic location. There’s probably a few shipwrecks to be found out there too, what with all the river traffic.”
Meg hesitated, then, a little embarrassed, came out with her next question. “When I told folks at Caldwell that I was going to work out here, everyone kept saying that there was supposed to be treasure out this way.”
I nodded; it was a common rumor, one that seemed to dog every site. “Yeah, those legends seem to be particularly thick around here, don’t they? I haven’t tried to trace the source of the legend yet, but I’m willing to bet that it’s probably just something that the local nineteenth-century hotel operators came up with, to attract interest.”
I cast a glance in her artifact bucket. “I noticed you’ve already divided the artifacts into smaller bags by type,” I remarked. “That’s nice, but I usually wait until we’re in the lab for that. Saves the bags for use in the field, so we don’t need to go running around looking for sandwich baggies to substitute when we run out in the middle of the dig.”
Meg looked put out and arched an unbleached eyebrow at me. “Sorry. That’s how we used to do it for Schoss back in Colorado.” She didn’t sound sorry and just continued sorting her artifacts.
“Ah, but Professor Schoss had the finances of the National Geographic Society filling his pockets, and we, alas, do not,” I said. “Looks like you’ve got a change of soil coming up there.” I pointed to the corner. “You uncovering a little feature there, or is it just the light? Looks like the soil is a little lighter, a little more mottled in color.”
Again Meg looked at me impatiently.
Oh kiddo, I thought, if you can’t take a little cooperative observation, what’s going to happen when I really have to criticize you? A little knife between the shoulder blades? I’m on your side, really.
Finally she dropped the last of her artifacts into the bags and turned to look where I was pointing. “I think you’re right,” she said, after a minute. “I wasn’t sure. I’ll start a feature sheet along with the new level.”
And that was that, or would have been, but I wasn’t about to be psyched out of checking her record sheets just because she had a chip on her shoulder. “Mind if I go over your notes? Just to make sure I can read them.” I am the big dog here, I thought, and I have just as much attitude as you do. And if you aren’t up to snuff, I’m going to let you know. In the nicest way possible, of course.
“Here you go.” She handed me the clipboard.
I flipped through the sheets, checking her descriptions and observations. “Good, good. Lots of nice, precise adjectives. Your mapping looks right on, just add the scale, okay? Excellent work.” I smiled at Meg, who seemed surprised.
“Thanks.” A pause. “I’ll draw a plan showing that feature when it’s a bit better defined.” She hazarded a smile as I returned her notes.
I hunkered down in a squat and took out my creased little notebook so I could write down my own impressions while they were still fresh in my mind. “You know,” I said as I scribbled, “one of the things I love about fieldwork is that everyone gets to own it. I mean, everyone contributes and everyone gets to take some pride in it. The community of a project gives it its identity and we’ve got a good one going here. Give and take, everyone working toward the same goals. A group effort, know what I mean?”
Meg’s brow was furrowed in concentration. She stopped trying to define the edge of the stain with her trowel to look at me. “Yeah, I suppose so.”
“I’ve got to get some stuff together for Tony. Let me know if that stain turns into anything.”
“Sure. Hey, Emma? Who’s that?”
The student pointed down the slope. I saw someone coming up the stairs at the edge of the site. That in itself was unusual enough to alarm me, but my heart nigh on stopped when I saw the stranger fiddling with a metal detector. I realized that he was a pothunter, a looter. Whatever you wanted to call him, I wasn’t about to let him steal anything from my site.
“Emma, should you—” Meg began, but I was already tearing off down the slope.
I gasped and began to run when I saw the stranger lean over and pull out one of the nails that held the strings that delineated the nearest of our units to the stairs. The nail out of his way, he made another pass with the metal detector and then tried a few more adjustments.
“Hey, leave that alone!” I shouted as I approached. It didn’t matter that we’d already abandoned that unit. “This is private property—”
The stranger, a man, looked my way expressionlessly and then turned away again to play with the knobs on the metal detector. Call it intuition, call it pheromones, but I instantly knew this guy wasn’t just some tourist with no clue. He was nothing but trouble. Tall and thin, he wore a greasy pair of jeans, a light blue windbreaker, and a pair of badly worn black leather cowboy boots. His eyes were concealed behind a pair of wire-rimmed aviator-style sunglasses. His face was lean and tan and weather-beaten, and his mouth was busily working a piece of gum. I was pretty sure that he was no younger than forty, and nearly positive he wasn’t any older than sixty, but beyond that, I couldn’t be certain of his age. His hair was yellowing white and shoulder length; it blew about in the wind, and he made no move to remove the strands that caught across his sunglasses as he turned his attention back to me.
I said with more authority, “You’re trespassing. This is private property and you’re interfering with my research. I’m asking you to leave. Now.”
The stranger giggled, as if I were doing something naughty, and then shook his head regretfully. “Don’t ever take that tone with me, sweetie,” he admonished, enunciating carefully. His voice was like a dry cornfield crawling with locusts. “You have no idea what kind of trouble smart talk will get you. You want to end up like Augie Brooks?” He bowed his head back over the controls he was studying.
I couldn’t believe he’d just said what he’d said. Surely I must have heard wrong…I couldn’t believe any of this was happening. End up like Augie? Hostility was coming off this guy in waves. It was a good thing I was so mad; it let me ignore how much I was shaking. My only concern now was to get him away from the site, away from Pauline’s house, as soon as I could. “Like I said before, this is private property. You’re not welcome. Leave!”
The stranger didn’t even bother to look up at me. “Why don’t you just fuck off and mind your own business?” He stepped forward, clearly intending to use the detector.
I stepped directly into his path. Look at me, you maggot, I thought.
Realizing that I was not going to move out of his way, the stranger sighed, and placed one hand on his hip, as though trying to summon up patience. His eyes did not move from the ground near my feet. He removed the headphones, letting them rest around his neck. The wind fanned his white hair into a demonic halo.
“Sweetheart,” he said, “there are people in this world that you do not fuck with. I am one of them. And you are starting to bug me.”
He finally lifted his head and removed his sunglasses impatiently, then fixed me with a pair of icy gray eyes so pale that they almost looked white. With the shades off, there was no way of hiding their intense malignancy, as systematic and uncaring as a virus.
“Why don’t you just save yourself a lot of trouble and take a hike?” I said. “You’re not going to use that thing around here.”
He smiled foully, showing sharp canine teeth. He was savoring the confrontation. I was shaking from indignation mixed with fear.
The stranger cocked his head, considering the situation. “I should just break your kneecaps, bitch,” he said regretfully.
He’s out of his mind, I thought in a panic. I mustn’t let him know he’s scaring me. I locked eyes with him, willing myself not to look away. Not to run away.
The stranger held my gaze for another moment. “Baby, this is probably the biggest mistake of your life.” With another sigh, he reached under his windbreaker and drew out a large pistol, which he aimed carefully at my head.
I felt my face freeze into a blank mask that concealed my fear. It was a curious sensation, maintaining that kind of control while you are feeling just the opposite. With the weapon no more than a meter from my face, my mind churned over a thousand thoughts at once. I prayed that Meg would stay still and not do anything to make this nut pull the trigger. I hoped that my knees would not buckle. Anger at the absolute wrongness of the situation and the stranger bewildered me. At the same time, I foolishly wanted to shush the seagulls, squabbling overhead with no concern for my predicament, so that I could think without distraction.
The wind whipped his hair around crazily and billowed my shirttails, lending frenzied motion to an otherwise static tableau. All the while the arctic wastes behind those pale eyes froze me to the marrow.
“It would be so easy for me just to blow your whole fucking head off right this minute. Her too.” His words were filled with awe at the simplicity, the efficiency of his solution. The stranger gestured with the pistol at where Meg was standing, stock still, by her unit; I couldn’t help but follow his gesture. “Wouldn’t take but another second.”
I remained rooted to the ground, never letting my eyes move away from his. Another moment passed.
“I’m getting bored,” the stranger said irritably. “You act snotty, you get in the way of my livelihood, my living. Now you’re fucking with me, and I told you, I am one of those people you do not f—”
Pretty limited vocabulary, I thought hysterically, blocking out the last of his words. Pretty repetitive. The gun looked heavy and very deadly. A giggle almost broke the surface, and yet I knew my face was still impassive. But I was very close to the edge and could feel my reserve giving way.
There’s nothing I can say, I thought, as the stranger returned my stare. That gun’s too close, he can’t miss. There’s nowhere to run.
But I can’t just stand here and let him shoot me…
I had absolutely no idea what to do. So the stranger made my decision for me.