Grave Consequences Read online

  Palmer answered my unspoken questions. “We’re just coming to the outskirts of Marchester, this moment.”

  The townscape was familiar to me, I realized with a start, because I had been studying Jane’s website in preparation for working on the dig. “Great! Mr. Palmer, the dig is over by the new church. Well, not really new new, but the replacement after the old abbey was burnt down in the sixteenth century. It’s Church Street, that makes sense doesn’t it? I guess that’s where I’d better try to find Jane first.”

  Palmer drove along without paying much attention to me. “I know the town very well, ma’am. Never fear.”

  “So what is it you’re looking for on this project?” Dora said. “Something unwholesome, I presume.”

  I frowned: Dora knew perfectly well what I was doing, we’d been over it all when we were trying to see whether our schedules in England would overlap. Her studied interest could only mean that she was planning something; I could practically hear the wheels turning within wheels. More machinations than a Detroit assembly line, more plots than a graveyard.

  Nonetheless I was used to Dora, and more than that, I was presently grateful to her. So I indulged her, wondering what was hatching in that byzantine brain of hers.

  “Jane Compton and I know each other from conferences and books—”

  “Your books.”

  “And hers,” I agreed. “We met just after I finished graduate school, years ago now; her work here in England tends to date earlier than mine in New England, but she is doing some fairly neat stuff with women’s presence in the archaeological record, and that’s how we connected. She and her husband Greg Ashford have been working on the site of Marchester Abbey, a Benedictine monastery that was built in the twelfth century. This is their second season. I thought I’d take a couple of weeks and see how things get done on this side of the puddle.”

  Dora looked sour and picked a tiny fleck of tobacco daintily from her tongue. “Don’t be vulgar. What you really mean is that you wanted a vacation, but were too much of an obsessive actually to go somewhere warm with lots of rum. So you thought you’d take your spare time and do some more work. How typical of you, Emma.”

  “Not at all.” I shifted a little in my seat. “Not entirely. I have other work in England, documentary research, that I need to get on to, for Fort Providence and my new research on the Chandler family. But I also thought I’d give myself a break by actually digging, for a change, rather than overseeing everyone else while they have all the fun. Being the director is great, but you never get to dig. And for your information, Brian and I are going on vacation, the last two weeks before classes start.” So there, I thought.

  Dora wasn’t impressed. “Let me guess; you’ll be tearing down more of that monstrosity of a house of yours?”

  “No, we’re taking a break from renovations.” I had her now. “We’re going away. Don’t know where yet, he won’t tell me. Anyway, Jane and Greg have been working on the burials this year, which will be fun for me. The rules about grave excavations are different in Britain than in the United States. It will be less complicated here anyway.”

  I noticed that Palmer was now studying me in the rearview as often as he could safely tear his eyes away from the road. I couldn’t blame him because I was still as fascinated by archaeology as I had been when I started out in the field, almost twenty-five years ago, at the age of eight.

  “The site is pretty close to the new church that was built after the abbey was destroyed. The abbey ruins are on the banks of that river we just crossed, so it should fill my requirements for working on really gorgeous sites. And I figure if the beer is as good as Jane keeps insisting, I may never go home.”

  “You know there was a student gone missing from that dig?” Palmer offered. “She’s been missing since last Thursday.”

  “Did she go home?”

  “Didn’t say a word to anyone; she just vanished,” he replied with ghoulish satisfaction.

  “Students can get discouraged and take off,” I said. “It happens, sometimes. Was there a fight or anything?”

  “Nothing at all,” Palmer said.

  “Her parents must be going crazy.”

  “You might think so.”

  “Well, yeah, I’d think so,” I said. “At home, a kid goes missing, the parents are all over the television, flyers plastered all over town—”

  “Well,” the driver said. “Twenty-two’s hardly a kid, is it?”

  “I really don’t think there’s that much difference—” I began, but it was then that I realized with a start that we were heading away from the church tower that I knew marked the site’s approximate location. A few minutes passed, and it became clearer and clearer that we were not just navigating our way around the one-way streets, but were in fact heading for the outskirts of town, and directly away from the site. I began to worry.

  “Dora, Palmer’s overshot the site, I think,” I said in a low voice. “The church tower back there—”

  “He’s not missed anything; he’s taking us to Marchester-le-Grand. To see Pooter.” Dora flicked an even inch of ash into the ashtray.

  Panic rose in me. “What! Dora, Jane and Greg are going to get worried when I don’t—”

  “Jane and Greg should have picked you up hours ago if they were that worried,” she mimicked back. “Emma, Pooter will be dying to meet you! He’s never met an American archaeologist before and will be utterly charmed by you. It will only be for a moment or two, then I’ll make sure that you’re whisked back to your precious Jane and Greg.”

  I considered my grubby state and knew that I wasn’t fit for meeting a lord of the realm. I was tired, worried, and plain pissed off with Dora for being exactly as she always was. “I’m not some sort of prize you can go parading around in front of your friends,” I said tersely.

  “Oh, my dear.” Dora looked at me sympathetically; of course I was. “If Pooter’s kind enough to offer you a lift, then you should be gracious enough to say thanks in person. Where are your manners?”

  I eyed Dora sourly; Pooter didn’t know I existed. I knew full well that she didn’t buy all that Miss Manners nonsense and that she didn’t really expect me to believe she did. She, however, knew that I believed in it and was using my ingrained pretentious Connecticut upbringing against me like a canny judo opponent. Anyone who treated other people’s servants like her own, smoked Cuban stogies in other people’s Bentleys, and generally ordered the universe to suit herself wasn’t going to pay attention to my protests, no matter how logical, polite, or anything else. There was simply no gainsaying Dora, as I’d learned by hard experience back at home. So I settled back into the Bentley’s upholstery and consoled myself that I could try calling Jane and Greg again when I got to Marchester-le-Grand, but deep in my heart, I knew I didn’t have a choice at all.

  “How’s Brian?”

  Since I knew Dora and Brian cordially loathe each other, it was obvious that the question was a distraction. The one thing I had been able to insist upon, early on in our relationship, was that she not criticize my husband to my face.

  “Brian’s fine. Busy,” I said, not mollified by her overtures. I stared out the window.

  “Good, good.”

  “Sure you wouldn’t like to try one of the cigars, ma’am?” Palmer offered. “Might take the edge off you.”

  Great, now everyone thought I was edgy and unpleasant. I crossed my arms over my chest and continued to inspect Marchester as we drove away from it. The low, whitewashed shops and brick row houses gave way to low hills and fields separated by lines of trees. If you squinted, it wasn’t so different from where I taught, in Maine, and where I lived, in rural Massachusetts.

  Shortly thereafter, we turned down a long, tree-lined drive that led to a vast house of venerable gray masonry and darker sandstone details. I guessed that the main part of the house was sixteenth century, but it was clear to me that other, later additions had been built on through the years. The grounds were immaculately kept an
d I had to believe that the little folly that I could just make out on the horizon contained a piece of genuine classical statuary brought back for the purpose from someone’s Grand Tour three hundred years ago.

  The house was in good repair, and that, along with the Bentley, the grounds, and the driver, coupled with Dora’s casual talk of “pictures,” led me to believe that Lord…Pooter…was definitely not one of the growing fraternity of the titled impoverished.

  We pulled up to the front of the house with a crunch of gravel. This time I waited until Palmer had opened my door for me, then got out and stretched. Dora headed right up to the front door as if she knew the way, and, once again, I was left to follow if I would.

  “Perhaps you’d like to freshen up first, while I inform Lord Hyde-Spofford that you’re here and get the tea?”

  Hyde-Spofford makes much more sense than Pooter, I thought with relief, but why is the chauffeur getting the tea? “Yes, please, and if I could trouble you to use the phone? I’m sure my friends are quite worried—”

  “Of course. Over there.” Palmer led me to a curtained alcove that housed a modern touch-tone phone.

  I dialed the number for Jane and Greg’s house for the tenth time that day. This time I got an answer after the second brrrr-brrrr.

  “Hello? Yes?” came the frantic answer. It was a male voice.

  “Hello, er, this is Emma Fielding—”

  “Oh, Emma, thank God!” Relief suffused the voice on the other end of the line. “This is Greg, Jane’s husband. Where are you?”

  “I’m in a house, Lord Hyde-Spofford’s house, in Marchester-le-Grand. A friend gave me a lift.”

  “Oh?” There was a pause in which Greg was too polite to ask obvious questions. “Well, I’m glad you found your way this far. Things have been in a dreadful muddle here and when I ever realized that we’d left you stranded…Jane’s almost in a state of nervous collapse—”

  The worry in his voice was enough to infect me. “Is she all right? What’s happened?”

  “Jane’s all right,” Greg reassured me hurriedly. “Only she’s had a dreadful shock. We unearthed something rather nasty and puzzling this morning, and since Julia’s gone—”

  I broke in before he could add any more confusion. “Greg, what did you find this morning?” I mentally ran down the list of possibilities: a broken sewer line or alarm system, contaminated groundwater, and old tannery or other early industrial waste site, any of which would require emergency attention.

  “We…we found a skeleton.”

  That took me a minute. An instant urge to be sarcastic was replaced by a growing concern, and, hoping against hope that he didn’t mean what I thought he did, I tried to keep the irony out of my words. “But Greg…it’s an abbey graveyard you’re working on…”

  “Emma, this skellie isn’t like the others.” I could hear Greg swallow and, moisten his lips, and I knew I was correct. My heart sank.

  “This one isn’t right,” he continued. “The orientation, the location, the depth…it doesn’t look medieval. It’s hard to tell, we’ve only just hit it and all, but it looks modern. Very modern. Too modern, actually. We called the police. They’re still at the site. We’re still trying to determine whether…whoever it is…died naturally.”

  Chapter 2

  WHATEVER IT IS, I TOLD MYSELF FIRMLY, IT HAS nothing to do with me. It’s not my problem, I don’t know who it is; I wasn’t even here when the skeleton was found.

  “Emma? Are you there?”

  “Yes, Greg, sorry, it’s the jet lag. Umm, I’m not sure what to do. I’m not even really sure where I am, exactly—” I looked around, as if expecting to see a conveniently placed address plate inside the house. Outside the nook, the ever-helpful Palmer made a polite noise. I covered the receiver and stuck my head out from behind the curtain.

  “Pardon me, Professor Fielding, but I’m sure Lord Hyde-Spofford would want me to offer you a lift after you’ve had a chance to catch your breath.”

  There at least was movement in the right direction: toward the dig. “That would be wonderful,” I said with relief. I was pretty certain this place wasn’t on a bus route. “Greg, I can find my way to you, but it will be an hour or so, while I—” What? Visit? I hadn’t been invited. Pay my respects? I was certainly not some tenant shuffling in front of the great house, ready to drop eager curtsies to the laird. “—While I have tea,” I finished.

  Again, Greg’s pause was full of politely unasked questions. “Well, if you can manage that, we can sort things out here, perhaps calm down a bit before you arrive. I’m most dreadfully sorry about all this—”

  “No problem,” I said. I was starting to develop the most appalling headache and wanted nothing more than to be left alone in the dark and quiet for a while, but that clearly wasn’t in the cards, at least for the next few hours, at any rate. “Should I stop by the house or the dig? What would be easiest for you?”

  “We live within walking distance of the site, so it might be better if you met us there.” I heard another nervous swallow. “The police aren’t entirely finished with us. Unless you’d like to go directly to your room—but, wait, no, you won’t have a key, will you? I could meet you at the house, but, no I have to get—”

  “Greg, I’ll just come to the site. It will be simpler all around if I do that,” I said firmly; clearly the morning’s events were taking their toll on him. “I’ll see you all shortly. Tell Jane I’m fine; I’m one less thing for you all to worry about.”

  “Right. Great. See you then.” Greg rang off.

  As I hung up, Palmer was again prepared. “Perhaps you’d like to freshen up a bit?”

  My thoughts flew back to the airport and my hours incarcerated on the plane. “Ah, you’ve traveled, clearly. Yes, thanks.”

  Palmer pointed to a door just past the phone. “Not so’s you’d notice, ma’am.” His lips twitched. “Once to London, and several times to the Hackmoor, but apart from that, it’s been back and forth from home to here, most my life. I don’t hold with gallivanting to foreign parts.”

  I thanked him and then closed the door behind me with relief. The bathroom was small and modern, the space obviously renovated from one of the original rooms. It was the first time in twelve hours that I’d had anything like privacy. I washed my face and hands, and buried my face in the towel. I didn’t want to leave the bathroom; it was quiet, it was clean, it was very pretty. I didn’t want to meet Lord Hyde-Spofford; if he was anything like the few other of Dora’s art history colleagues I’d once encountered, he’d be horrible. They were all overdressed, arrogant, ironic, and dismissive, and I couldn’t stand any of them. On the other hand, it was always fun to observe exotic creatures interacting in their native habitat. The plumage and pelts were spectacular, the mating dances complex, and the marking of territory aggressive. Since I am a much duller creature by comparison, I am generally ignored and left to watch in comparative safety, but there’s a big difference between watching and interacting.

  Just one more reason to dislike Lord Pooter, I decided, replacing the towel and opening the door. My irritation at Dora for this detour had quickly replaced gratitude; it overflowed effortlessly to engulf anyone else I thought was keeping me from the dig.

  Especially when Jane and Greg had such troubles suddenly heaped upon them. The last thing they needed was to worry about me. It was imperative that I get to the site as soon as possible, to allay at least one of their concerns. I might even be able to take some of the burden of the dig from them while they worked with the police. I’d help with directing the crew, perhaps. It really was essential that I leave as soon as politely possible. They needed me.

  When I returned to the entry hall, there was no one there, not even Palmer. Typical Dora, I thought, to leave me behind as casually as she’d picked me up, but then I realized that I could hear her voice farther down the hallway. Given Dora’s capacity for projection, it wasn’t difficult to follow her. Despite my earlier resolution to have my tea and leave
quickly, however, I had to pause. This room, which might have been called the front hall or entryway if it had been in my house, was spectacular. I dug back through my memories of architectural research and lectures and decided that this would properly be called a hall or perhaps a communicating gallery. The fact that there were paintings and a tapestry hanging from the wall was incidental: this was not a place to loiter in, but a space to be walked through. It was made to make a grand first impression, but overall, it was an insignificant part of the whole establishment.

  I glanced at the floor, which was polished marble covered with oriental carpets. They were Chinese, for the most part, I decided, and if they were real, the smallest red one would probably be worth about a year’s worth of mortgage payments to me. I looked at the wainscoting that covered the walls—where there wasn’t a painting covering it—and saw how the oak had aged, darkening over the course of centuries, had been aging since before the Pilgrims started shivering in their little shacks in salt-blown Plymouth Colony. Looking up, I could see that the ceiling was ornately carved into a complex pattern of lattice work and drops and had once been brilliantly painted, perhaps even gilded. Though the decoration had faded to near oblivion and there were cracks in the carving, it was astonishing still.

  I found myself gaping like a baby bird waiting to be fed while I stared at the ceiling and forced myself to stop craning and move down the hallway toward the voices. It’s just a front hall, Emma, I thought to myself. No boots scattered on the floor or coats hanging off the baluster or cat toys gathering dust in the corners, but it is a front hall. I thought of the Funny Farm, the nineteenth-century house with connected buildings that Brian and I had struggled to save for, had only bought just two years ago. I had prided myself on its age, its spaciousness, its architectural details, and, well, its style. It was larger than the Cape that most people can afford for their first house and far more interesting than the 1990s prefab McMansions my father had tried to convince me to buy—at a drastic discount, of course. It didn’t matter to me that it was presently decorated in the height of early twenty-first-century Renovation Eclectic, with sawhorses and plywood stacked in the dining room, orange extension cords snaking along the floor between rooms, and a large hole in the kitchen wall where Brian had removed some water-cracked plaster.