Past Malice (4 page)

We had an old stone barbecue with a chimney out back. “No thanks, Meg. I think I’ll wait for Brian and my sister to get home.”

“So we’re actually going to get to meet her?” Rob took a beer from the cooler and opened it. “What’s your sister like? Do you guys look alike?”

“No, not at all. Bucky’s a lot younger than I am, almost eight years.” I was at a loss to describe her politely. “She’s…more compact and athletically built.”

“Shorter and flatter,” translated Dian.

“Well, maybe a bit, five-five or so. I guess our faces aren’t too different—my nose is way cuter, though, if anyone asks, and she’s got that stubborn chin on her. Same hair and skin color, and freckles—neither one of us can be out in the sun without scorching—but her hair is short, it was shorter than Meg’s at one point, but now it’s down to her ears. It still looks a trifle rad, but Mother is delighted.”

“And she’s spending her vacation here because…?” Meg was piling packages of ground meat, hot dogs, condiments, and buns onto Joe until he didn’t have any arms left.

“She claims she wants to know what it is I do for a living. She’s going to help out a couple of days.” I frowned. Bucky had never been all that interested in archaeology, and I suspected there were other, more personal matters at hand that she would bring up only when she was good and ready.

“We’ll see how that goes. Anyway, I suspect it’s because she thought it would be nice if we fed her for a week or two. Cheaper than a real vacation.”

“Way cheaper.” Dian frowned. “Why do you call her Bucky?”

I fished the other wedge of lime out of my drink and worried it for a while. “She didn’t like her real name when we were kids, so I gave her a new one. Too bad for her; I think I was looking for something that would reinforce what I perceived as her sidekick status.”

“Does your mother call her that?” Joe asked from behind the pile of food.

“No, she calls her by her real name.”

“Which is?” Dian was getting impatient with me.

“You’d better ask her that.” I grinned. “I wouldn’t want to give away any state secrets.”

The students exchanged a glance, making faces. “Must be something awful.”

“I’m not telling. She’ll tell you if she wants to.”

“Hey, guess who I saw this weekend?” Rob announced.

“Who’s that?” I said.

“Alan Crabtree. He’s working at the library again; I think he’s going to go for a degree in library science. He said to say hi.”

“How’s he doing?”

“He looks real good. Seems happy. He doesn’t miss the fieldwork at all. Likes air-conditioning in the summer.” Suddenly Rob hopped up and began rooting through a backpack. “Before I forget, Em, I got the flyers photocopied like you asked.”

“Thanks. We’ll use this bunch, and if we need more, we’ll get the Chandler House people to do more for us.” I looked over the sheet and handed one to Meg. “So what else should I have put?”

Meg read, nodding. “You’ve got a nice summary of the site and what we’re doing. What about a FAQ?”

I shrugged. “We can do that on the next batch, I guess. Top Ten Answers to Questions Archaeologists Get Asked. Anyone?”

They all chimed in, in varying tones of boredom and sarcasm because there were some days it felt like there really were only about a handful of questions we ever got asked.

“‘No, we didn’t find any gold.’”

“‘No, we’re not looking for dinosaurs.’”

“‘No, we don’t get to keep what we find.’”

“‘No, we probably won’t find any bodies—ah, skeletons, I mean.’”

Meg smacked Joe in the arm and they all looked at me, the giggling turning nervous and dying away. Everyone in the department remembered what had happened out at another site I’d worked on where there were actual bodies. Meg especially.

I shook it off. “Nope, not a chance of it. Sorry to disappoint you all. I don’t suppose anyone has another lime, do they? I’ve just about killed this one.”

It worked; the mood lightened, I got another chunk of lime to torture, and the students finished unloading the cars. They all went around back to start their dinner.

Just then Brian and Bucky came back from the grocery store. I suppose that it would have been easier to say simply that Bucky and I look a lot alike, but the truth of it was, I just couldn’t see what other people did of our resemblance. Brian Chang and I have been married for almost seven years now, and even though he is a couple of inches taller than I, has dark brown hair that always needs cutting, and is almost always in a good mood, I really felt he and I were more similar looking than me and my sister, though no one else would ever have suggested that resemblance in a thousand years. I
guess it’s just the way that people who have been together for a long time start to rub off on each other.

I ran over, ostensibly to help with the bags, but it was really to kiss Brian. He tasted saltier than usual. I kissed him again, trying to figure out what it was.

“Hey sweetie, where you been?”

He knew what I meant. “We got pizza down by the supermarket.”

That’s what I tasted: sausage. “And you didn’t wait for me?”

“We didn’t know how long you’d be.” Bucky dug a couple of plastic-handled shopping bags out of the back of the pickup.

“Still.” I grabbed a couple of bags, and we walked up to the house.

“Next time,” Brian said. He looked down at the side steps. “Bogus. Squirrel tartare.”

“I know. Quasi left it as a booby-trap for me.”

“You don’t understand him. He’s just a big muffin,” Bucky said, closing the kitchen door with her foot.

“You can say that, you and Brian are the only ones who can get near him.” I began unloading the groceries onto the counter, handing things to Bucky to put in the fridge. “When God was making nasty, scary animals, he came up with Quasi, but decided that cat was too damned mean. So then he came up with the Tasmanian Devil and thought it was much sweeter.”

Bucky frowned, trying to make room amid the leftovers. “Naw. He’s just a little, you know, territorial.”

“Did you bring your stethoscope with you? I’d love it if you could check him out.” Quasi and I had opposing ideas about going to the vet but had come to a compromise in the past year when he’d grown beyond even Brian’s ability to wrestle him into a carrier: I wouldn’t make him go to the vet
and he wouldn’t try to tear my spleen out. We settled on having Bucky check him out and give him his shots when she came up to visit. “I know you’re on vacation and all….”

“Sure, but I keep telling you: The day he lets you take him to your real vet, you’ll know he’s really ill.”

“And that’s your considered professional—” I went to pass Bucky the milk and suddenly a small bottle of water went whizzing past my face: Bucky had thrown it behind her without even looking. “Hey!”

I looked over and Brian had snagged the bottle handily. Neither of them had said a word to the other. “Hey,” I repeated. “Someone could have gotten hurt!”

“You want some water, Em?” my sister asked.

“No…but take it easy, will you? We just patched up the walls in here and I want one room without big, gaping holes in it.”

“Relax.” Bucky opened her water. “You always worry too much.”

She knows I hate being told to relax.

Brian drank some of his water and then came over to rub my shoulders. “Have you eaten?”

I was in no mood to be mollified. “No. I was waiting for you guys.”

“Good thing I brought this for you then.” He pulled out a small box from the last of the bags, marked Mario’s. I could smell the sausage and snatched it away from him, all forgiven. “Let’s go sit on the porch then?”

The porch was really the living room, this summer. Bucky finished in the fridge and then ran past me, so that she could claim a seat on the swinging bench. Brian sat down next to her and I found myself annoyed with both of them again. Then Brian reached over and poked Bucky in the side, and said, “Shift it over to the steps, kiddo. I want to sit next to your sister.”

My storm clouds evaporated and I sat down next to Brian, who pulled me closer. Bucky made a face and sat on the stairs.

“How’d the meeting go?”

“Oh.” I stopped smiling and felt my shoulders slump. “Okay.” I told them about my presentation, that it had gone well, and then paused.

“What else?” Brian nudged me.

“Something happened to one of the board members. She was hit by a car.” I fished a piece of onion from the bottom of the box.

“What?”

“Holy snappers!” Bucky gaped, then sat back and stared at the birds hopping around the field on the opposite side of the street.

I gave them a brief account of what I knew. That little furrow between Brian’s eyebrows got deeper. “It doesn’t sound like it’s a good time to be on the Stone Harbor Historical Society board, does it?” he said.

Bucky looked up at us. “Why do you say—?”

“The vandalism at the Tapley House?” he said. “I read about it in the paper. And the flap about the bus route? Everyone in town is up in arms about that. That was in the paper too.”

I thought about the proposed rerouting of the local bus, the one that took tourists from the train to the downtown and commuters from downtown to the train. If it moved to “preserve the aesthetic and historic qualities of the historic district,” a lot of people were going to have to find another way across town to get their bus to work. And that included the workers at the Voeller assembly business. “Hmmm.”

“This is where we’re digging tomorrow, Em?” Bucky looked more interested than worried.

“No, we’re at the Chandler House. None of this has any
thing to do with us,” I said, as much for Brian’s benefit as for Bucky’s. I put my thoughts that had run along similar veins aside for the moment. The sun was taking its time setting and the bugs still weren’t out yet. It was the perfect time to let your cares seep away.

Brian sighed and raised his bottle halfway to his lips when a thought struck him. “Ah, Emma? You did speak to Meg about leaving her you-know-what at home, didn’t you?”

Brian was referring to the fact that Meg owned at least one handgun, something he wanted to keep as far from our house as possible. “Yep. She had no problem with it. We’re going to be fine, hon.”

“You girls be careful out there, tomorrow. That’s all.”

“Ha!” Bucky said. “I defy anyone to take on the Fielding girls and walk away with their full complement of body parts!”

“Or an unbruised ego!” I added. “Speaking of which, Brian, I left a copy of my book out on the table last night and I can’t find it now. You seen it?”

“Nope. Try your office.” He pushed back on the swing. “Hey, Bucks, did Emma tell you what I’ve been working on lately?”

“No. She doesn’t know a Suzuki reaction from an Erlenmeyer flask.”

“I do so know the difference,” I said, but I didn’t really. One was some kind of procedure and had nothing to do with the admiring glances one gets from a new motorcycle, and the other was a piece of glassware. “I’m just happier working on a cultural level than the molecular.”

“Well,” Brian said, “the biologists screened the natural products library against a protein implicated in Alzheimer’s, and they found something that looks good. All they want from me now is to resynthesize the molecule in sufficient amounts to test in animals.”

“Sounds like a bitch,” my sister said.

It sounded like magic to me. Even though when Brian explained what he did to me, I still couldn’t imagine manipulating nature like that. It left me in awe of what he did for a living.

“Yeah,” Brian said. “It’s gonna keep me and Roddy off the street for the rest of the year, that’s for sure—”

I worked on my pizza, trying not to feel left out while they talked about things that were far beyond my ken. I nudged Bucky in the butt with my foot when she made a grab for the slice I wasn’t quite done with. “Knock it off. Jeez, some day I’d like to be able to eat something without finding your paws in it.”

“I thought you were done.”

“Likely story. So, you gonna be ready to leave when we go tomorrow? And don’t forget to bring your inhaler, just in case; the work’s going to be hard. I don’t want you to collapse and have an asthma attack.”

She groaned. “What time again? Zero-dark-hundred hours?”

“Tch, we leave here at seven-thirty. Sun’s up for hours by then. Wimp.”

Bucky leaned against the railing and scrunched closed her eyes, pouting. “Wah. Yes, I’ll be up then, just wake me when you get up. You never used to be such an early bird.”

“When you get to my age, you learn a few virtues,” I replied, primly. “Including how important it is to get a jump on the day.”

Brian stared at me, incredulous. I put my finger up to my lips; I was still the polar opposite of a morning person, but Bucky was worse. And there is no point in having a sister unless you can torment her.

I
GOT UP EARLY THE NEXT MORNING ONLY BECAUSE
I knew I needed five minutes by myself before the general rush hour. Most everyone in my acquaintance knew not to speak to me until the second or third cup of coffee, but there was no sense in needlessly taking risks. In the bathroom, I brushed my teeth and looked out the window blearily; I thought I saw Dian skulking across the yard, hair trailing wet tendrils, with something clutched in her hand. A towel. Although they had the use of our bathroom, the grad students had also rigged up a camping shower in the back yard where we had plenty of trees to ensure everyone’s privacy. Just from the way she was moving, I knew something was up.

Sure enough, I heard a squawk and saw Joe, fully dressed, come shooting out from the woods, yelling, “It wasn’t me! I didn’t mean to see you!”

Meg followed, uninterested in Joe, dripping wet, utterly naked except for a pair of work boots, and completely unselfconscious. I would have run too, if I knew myself to be
the cause of the look on her face. “Where is it, Dian!? I haven’t got time for this shit!”

I rapped on the window and raised the sash. “Um, Meg? If you don’t mind? It’s a little early in the season for dryads.”

The student peered up at the house, hand shielding eyes that were squinting against the sun. “Morning, Emma. It’s Dian’s fault, she stole—”

A towel came flying out from the underbrush and Meg caught it, wrapping it around herself, shaking her head. “You’ll get yours, Kosnick!”

I heard a giggle come from the shrubbery and realized that I was struggling against the gravitational pull of no coffee. I shut the window and headed downstairs, where I could smell the coffee brewing. Brian handed me a mug and I drank, waiting for everything to come into focus.

“Good morning,” I said at last. He came into focus and looked cute, for all he was awake already.

“Hey there. What was the noise outside?”

Good, he hadn’t seen Meg. “Kids were fooling around. I told them to knock it off.”

“You wake up Bucky?”

“No, I’ll do it now. Give me another—”

But Brian had already filled another cup from the pot.

“You’re so good to put up with me. With all this.”

“I know. But the secret is that all you require is equal parts coffee and sex, so it’s really not too difficult for me.”

“Hmmm, I never thought of myself as quite that simple. Well, now that I’ve had the coffee part….” I kissed him and gave him a friendly pat on the butt. “Good morning. Have you decided what you want for your birthday, yet?”

“We already got the presents—is yours charged up, by the way?”

“No, I’ll go plug it in when I wake up her nibs.”

“Good, just don’t forget it when you leave. There’s no
point in having a cell phone for safety if you keep leaving it home.”

I nodded exaggeratedly. “Right, I get it already. I meant, what do you want to do for your birthday? Party? Dinner out?”

“I don’t know, maybe. I’ll think about it. Go on, now.”

I could hear the students clambering into the kitchen and pause in silence until Brian said, “It’s all right. She’s had a cup and is making sentences.” Then conversation began and I heard the fridge door opening and the tap running as breakfast was made.

I didn’t bother knocking; I knew what would be waiting for me on the other side of the guest bedroom door. The door opened about halfway before it jammed on something, but I was able to squeeze myself in through the crack. Jeez, she’d only been with us two days, and already my sister had turned the guestroom into a pigsty. Clothes—clean ones, I presume—were strewn about the floor and chair, and my sister herself looked like she was strewn on the bed: on her belly, face nearly buried in the pillow, mouth open, one arm flung across her back, the other still resting over a book. I got a closer look and realized that it was my book, the one I’d been hunting for the night before. Bucky was drooling onto it.

“Jeez, Bucks! Have a heart!” I said out loud, but my sister sleeps like the dead, just like me. I kicked at the side of the bed and got a moan for my trouble. I set the coffee down on the nightstand, and carefully tried to lift Bucky’s head from the book, but the pages were stuck to her face. I peeled the book away and dropped Bucky’s head back onto the pillow; this time, I heard her snort and she pried one eye open, which gazed at me, full of resentment.

“—’ acation,” she mumbled.

“If you wanted to take a real vacation, then you shouldn’t
have said you wanted to hang out with me.” I looked at her, almost moved to pity. Almost. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

“No, s’ good, I’ll—” Bucky suddenly pushed herself up, the other eye open now. Presumably her sense of smell had just woken up. “Gimme.”

I handed her the mug as she groped for it, doing a pretty fair imitation of young Patty Duke at the dinner table in
The Miracle Worker
. “Well, look, whatever you decide, I’m leaving in about half an hour.”

“N’ kay.”

“And Bucks?”

“Nnnnh?” came from behind the coffee mug.

I frowned and brushed at the damp spot on the crumpled page. “Lay off my books.”

Twenty-five minutes later, Bucky came downstairs, which might be an overstatement of her active participation in the matter. At first I thought she was just treading heavily on the steps, but then I realized that she was really smacking into the wall on one side of the staircase, then into the railing on the opposite side. “Bucks? You up for this? Why don’t you just stay in bed?”

She waved away my suggestion. “No, no, I’m good.”

I would have believed her more if her eyes had been open, but she was dressed—after a fashion—in khaki shorts, an oversized sweatshirt, and sneakers. She was, however, using real words now.

“Coffee?”

“What happened to your other cup?”

“Gone.” She shrugged. “I dunno.”

I handed her another mug without a word as she slumped
down into the kitchen chair. She took a sip and mumbled something.

“Didn’t catch that, kiddo. Got to open your mouth more.”

“Least it’s strong.” She leaned back, the cup clutched precariously to her chest, eyes closed again.

Rob came down from the bathroom and looked at Bucky, and then at me. “Man, there couldn’t be two of you like this in the same household, could there? How’d you ever get out the door in the morning to get to school?”

“Mother’s voice was enough to propel us out the door,” I said. “There was always the bus, homeroom, first, second, and third periods for napping….” I took the coffee cup out of Bucky’s hand. “Come on, if you’re coming with me, you’re coming now. Last chance to crawl back up to bed.”

“No, I’m good, I’m coming.”

“Don’t be too far behind, you guys,” I said. “Brian, I’m leaving.”

“I’m right here,” he said, popping up behind me. “I was just outside having a look at your car. It looks like it’s leaking coolant again.”

“Oh, man. Will it be okay to get to the site for a couple more days?”

“Yeah, I topped it off, so it should be fine. But we might have to accelerate our plans to shoot ol’ Bessy sooner than we thought and find you some new transportation.”

“Thanks. Just so I can get through the next week or two.” I kissed Brian, then got interested in the procedure and stayed around for some more.

“Ahem.” My sister was starting to sound impatient.

“Okay, we’re off.” I patted Brian’s hand and went out. Sure enough, there was a puddle of green stuff under the car; Brian had thrown cat litter on it to clean it up before any of the local critters ate it and were poisoned. I threw my stuff
into the back and waited until Bucky got her own seatbelt fastened.

My sister shook her head hard, as if she was trying to clear up her reception. “So, you going to give me the low-down on what to do? What we’re looking for?”

“Well, we can start with that. It’s not something specific we’re looking for, at this stage, it’s more like we’re trying to identify what’s there. We will probably be finding the foundations to a wing that burnt down a couple of years after the place was built, and maybe we’ll find out why they didn’t rebuild it after. Other than that, we’re identifying what remains are still present, whether the construction of a small restroom facility will destroy anything important. If we’re lucky, we might find some neat information about the family.”

She scratched her arm and yawned. “And you didn’t get any of this from the documentary research you did? Didn’t you tell me you’d spent a lot of time in the library and at the archives?”

“Well, yeah, but the archaeology gives a totally different perspective on things. You might find discrepancies between what they say they were doing and what they were really doing. For example, if we found that the Chandlers paid their taxes during certain years, but we find really cheap pottery that dates to those same periods, it might indicate that they were just scraping along, trying to keep the household going. You only get one side of the picture looking at one set of data or the other. Also, the documents usually only tell about significant situations or people, and in the case of Massachusetts in the eighteenth century—or anywhere else, for that matter—it would have been mostly what men were doing. Women generally only show up in the documents when they hit a life event—like being born, giving birth, dying, breaking the law—”

“I’m looking forward to that one myself,” Bucky said.

“You know what I mean. You never get a whole lot about them, unless you are very lucky. The documents also tend to favor the very rich, the literate, the socially or politically powerful, and so on, so archaeology is also the best chance we have for learning about the poor, servants, slaves, children, the illiterate, and the like.”

“Yeah, but why would you want to?”

I turned quickly to look at Bucky, but she was smiling. I looked back at the road, hitting the signal for the turn a little more vehemently than I usually would, and gnawed at the inside of my lip.

Driving and, more importantly, parking, were perennial problems in the coastal towns of Boston’s North Shore, and Stone Harbor was no exception. The streets were for the most part narrow and twisting, built when most people went on foot or horseback or by water. Even on the main roads, the houses were pressed in close together, built when it was imperative to be as close to the center of town—and trade and business—as possible. The modern demands of the tourist trade and upscale housing with a water view had done nothing to diminish the competition for the best spaces down on the waterfront. I let these thoughts occupy me while I tried to think of a response to Bucky.

She tried to placate me. “I’m serious, Emma. Well, half serious. Why is it so important?”

“How about getting the full picture? How about knowing how the bulk of the population lived?” I paused to let a minivan take a left turn, then continued on, trying to transmute my fervent feelings into convincing reasons. “I mean, most everyone wasn’t literate, male, white, well-off, right? Even if we only learn a little at a time, it adds to what we know about the past by a huge percentage, as far as I’m concerned. I mean, take the Chandlers. We know scads about
him
: Matthew Chandler was a judge and a magistrate, literally a
bigwig in town. We know he was not trained as a military man, but he went on scouting expeditions with the other leaders in the town. We know something of where his commercial interests were and I suspect that they not only paid their taxes on time but also ate off some fairly high-falutin’ dishes too. I don’t know for sure, but maybe we’ll find out.”

I pulled onto the main street by the common and made the last turn onto the road for the site. I noticed that most of the houses were typical New England colors: gray, white, and yellow clapboards, with the occasional brick house thrown in for good measure. There was one, however, on the far side of the common, that always caught my attention. That was because it was striped with every color you could see on the other houses, and then some. I shook my head and resumed my lecture.

“But we don’t know much about his wife, Margaret. She had, like, nearly a dozen kids who survived. Think about that, in a time when the leading cause of death for women was childbirth. We know she died when she was eighty-six, a tremendous age for anyone at the time. There’s a chance she was literate: The town library has a book with her name in it. But what else? Was she a decent person? How did she use her position in town? Was she a hostess of renown or a shoddy housekeeper? Was she religious, how did she treat her servants, did she like living in Stone Harbor or did she wish she was back in England every day of her life? There are so many questions I could ask, and yes, it is important to know these things.”

We made it down the long, tree-lined avenue, heading for the large colonial house at the end of the road, and I turned into the parking lot off at one side in the front and killed the engine. If I’d rolled down the window and listened carefully, I could have heard the waves crashing on the other side of the property.

“The best reason I can give you, Bucky, is that when you are studying anything, I don’t care if it is history or archaeology or chemistry or whatever, you don’t ignore more than half the population. You can’t only look in the light for your lost keys, you have to forage a little further afield than that. What you don’t know is going to shape what you do know. You see what I mean?”

She didn’t. Bucky was fast asleep, her head against the passenger side window.

I thought about waking her, even thought about whispering “Ma’s here” in her ear—that was always good for a reaction—but decided to let her sleep. I got out, got my stuff, and, after a moment’s hesitation, shut the door quietly behind me.

I crunched down the gravel of the parking lot toward the house, waving to Fee as I walked by the window to her office. She didn’t notice me at first, and I saw that she was talking on the phone; she looked distinctly worried. I paused, wondering whether anything was wrong, and then she saw me and a huge, false smile split her face. It was like watching a curtain rapidly descend as another set magically transformed the stage. I waved again and walked around the right side of the house, unlatching the gate and letting myself in.