Past Malice (12 page)

I laughed. “Good thing you don’t have to drive, with those. If the bus route had changed, you’d be out of luck.”

Bucky showed up then, looking a little groggy.

“There’s always a cab, and Fee would be happy to give me a lift if I asked.” Perry shrugged. “But I do enjoy the walk down to the corner. And I’m not the only one glad that the bus route hasn’t changed. So’s Daniel, that was a real
victory for him and his father. A lot of folks at their factory would have been out of luck.” Perry wrinkled her brow. “But I understand that you had a little mishap yesterday too. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, I am.” I looked down at my hands, which were a sorry collection of scratches; I was down to just one bandage on the deepest cut. I lowered my voice. “It just seems as though the Historical Society is going through a really bad time at the moment. First with you, then Justin, and—”

Perry’s eyes welled up and she caught her breath. “I just can’t believe that,” she said. “I mean—Justin? Who in God’s name would want to hurt him? There’s no reason, no reason at all.” She wiped her nose on a little old-fashioned lace handkerchief.

“I’m sorry, Perry,” I said.

She was finding it difficult to stop crying, and it was obvious she’d been doing a lot of that lately. “No, Emma, it’s not your fault. We live in an ugly world, and it looks like it found its way to Stone Harbor at last.” She put her hanky away. “It’s going to be a private service, just family, a few close friends. His mother is in a state of shock.”

“I can imagine.”

She checked her watch. “Damn. Almost time for the first group; there’s no chance they’ll stay away today, that’s for sure. I thought we would still be closed, but after two days already, Fee is ready to go berserk. How’s my mascara? No raccoon eyes?”

“No, you’re good,” I said. “Time for me to get down to it too.”

Perry turned to go, and I heard an odd little clicking noise. Bucky heard it too, but judging from the puzzled expression, she couldn’t place it either, so we went and found the others ready to start the day’s work.

It took us all a while to settle into it. The students couldn’t help looking over to the area where Justin had been when they went to sift their soil. There was nothing left to show that there had been an investigation there, save footprints that weren’t ours and trampled grass, muddy in the areas where Justin had been: Someone had hosed down the area to remove the last traces of blood. It was more than enough to be suggestive.

The rhythm of work eventually took over, and when the visitors began to peep over the fence, or line up along the barricade, that provided the rest of the necessary distraction. It occurred to me as I answered the questions that all of the visitors could be divided into distinct categories, based on how each group perceived the past. Some embraced it, because they thought that it was a better time—more elegant, more polite, more religious, simpler, less cynical, less vicious—than the present, though I could have given them examples otherwise in every case. Some scoffed at it, rejecting it for being unenlightened, brutish, ignorant, too false, too coy, too harsh, and I could have made arguments either way there, as well. Some people wandered through the house tour, eyes glazed over, only there because it was on the checklist, or because they were supposed to, or because they couldn’t find where they really meant to be; these treated the past as some people treat an older relative, visiting only out of duty or obligation, but taking no joy in it. Other people were eagerly lapping up every morsel, possibly because it fed their own images of the past, their own theories of local history, their own notions of what life should be like. Sometimes these were indiscriminate, never questioning anything they were told, never moving past the spiel of the tour; some of them, on the other hand, were combative, actively arguing with the guide over interpretations, dates, facts. There were
still others who were there out of a sense of curiosity, some who were there because they got on the wrong bus, and some who just had a whim and decided to try something new. What you take from the study of the past, I decided as the crowds thinned toward lunchtime, was pretty much what you brought to it. As far as I was concerned, any difference between humans in the past and today and the future would only be a matter of degree.

The last of the crowd consisted of a young girl and her parents, who made as if to move on to more interesting sights in town. The girl balked, wanting to stay. She’d asked a couple of pertinent questions about how we date artifacts, and I let her handle the sherd of the day, a nice piece of eighteenth-century Rhenish stoneware with dark blue and purple glaze. I realized she was at the age, ten or maybe a bit older, when most archaeologists get the bug.

“Do you think you’d like to do this?” I asked at last.

She seemed to think about it for a minute. “It looks like hard work.”

“It is, but it’s a lot of fun too. You can learn a lot.”

She cast another eye over the students, then nodded. “Yeah, maybe. I like history and that.”

“Come on, Ashley, we’re going to be late for lunch,” her mother urged her. Over Ashley’s head, she mouthed the words, “Thank you,” to me, which made me glad I’d spent the time with her daughter.

As Ashley and her parents went past us, heading back toward the parking lot, I heard Ashley confide to her mother, “I think I want to be an archaeologist, Mom.”

Her mother replied in no uncertain terms. “Not if I have anything to do with it. You’re going to get a college education, missy!”

My face froze and I clamped my hand over my mouth. I was torn between horror, annoyance, and amusement. Meg
and Rob were exchanging delighted looks and quickly shared the line with the others. Considering that between them they had four bachelor’s degrees and three master’s, and were working toward adding a few more letters after their names, I realized that, like the differences between past and present, the way people viewed archaeology was only a matter of degrees.

I told Bucky, who had just looked up and was unaware of the joke. “That’s why I went into archaeology,” I explained, grinning. “It was to avoid all the studying.”

“That’s stupid,” she said, frowning. “People should know better.”

“It’s just ignorance, Megabucks. It’s just silliness, it’s no big thing.”

“Still.” My sister hunkered back down over her work. I sighed; she could be so impatient with anyone who wasn’t similar to her, dismissing whole chunks of life as it went on around her because it didn’t immediately appeal to her.

I sighed. “Hey, Meg, how close are you to wrapping up in that pit feature?”

“I’m almost done. Why?”

“I’m thinking that when you get to a good stopping place, I want you and Bucky to open up a couple of units over on the other side of the house. We’ve got permission to do one or two tests over there, beyond where the tourists are allowed, and I’d like to drop a couple of quick ones, just to see what that mark on the insurance map could be. Okay?”

“You got it.”

Perry had finished up with another group of visitors around the back of the house. I heard Daniel Voeller’s voice as he called to her. “Perry! You left these in the bathroom.”

I glanced over and saw him hand her the brown bottle with her painkillers. She shook her head as she took them from him, and looked around, catching my eye. She shrugged, self-
deprecatingly. “Thanks. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Same thing that’s wrong with the rest of us, I’ll bet,” Daniel said. “Take it easy on yourself, Perry. You’ve had a bad time lately.”

“Thanks. You know, I really have. You just don’t have any idea. Daniel, when you get done talking to Fee, could I have a word with you? It’s about the….”

She trailed off delicately and whatever it was, Daniel took the hint. “Sure. I still don’t know what I can do for you, but when I’m done with Fee and before I see Aden, we can take a moment.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it.”

They both entered through the back of the house, and I got back to work.

It was interesting to watch how history was told at the Chandler House. There was a standard spiel to go along with every room, of course, and when the windows were open, the smell of grass and salt air and roses from the garden wafting over us, we could almost recite the history as the visitors got it by rote: Justice Matthew Chandler had built the house in 1723–24; his family was large, with as many as eight children living at home at one time with his wife and servants; that he was an important member of the community; that part of the house was burned in 1738, etcetera. But I noticed that each guide put a slightly different spin on his or her version of the house’s history and what we were doing to add to it.

Fee emphasized the beauty of the house and the objects that would have filled it, now only partially represented by reproductions and similar objects. She tended to play up what I thought was a very romantic idea of the past and the house, although she didn’t actually make any factual mistakes when it came to the family’s history.

Perry also focused on the things in the house, but then added information about what the objects represented at the
time, and filled in more of the town’s history, so that the Chandlers were a part of the community. I did notice that her family’s name showed up on more than one occasion: “Other families, including the Taylors, Bradleys, and Tapleys, would have had similarly fine wares.” It was almost as if she was showing off her family’s house, the number of times she made such comparisons.

And every time Perry came by that day, we heard that clicking noise again.

Ted, on the other hand, seemed to go the social history route, filling in the blanks that the others left behind, suggesting how the Chandlers would have made their money, what the harbor would have looked like filled with fishing boats, and how differently the wharf would have looked as an industrial area rather than a tourist area. He surprised me by adding Margaret Chandler to the narrative, pointing out that she would have been a busy person with her large family and the duties of the wife of an important man; he included the idea of how many servants would have been needed to run a house of this size or work in the family warehouses, even if he did suggest that Matthew was a capitalist ogre.

As for describing what we were doing, the guides usually hit the mark pretty well. Fee did throw out a couple of clunkers about what we could expect to find: furniture, clothes, meals still intact on plates. After I tried to correct her a couple of times between tours, she eventually just didn’t bother anymore. I did tell the crew to put aside a marked bag containing the “artifact du jour,” so that the guides could show the visitors without interrupting us.

Taking all the guides’ narratives together, it wouldn’t be such a bad picture of life on the site; one at a time, though, they left me with the idea that people were all leaving the site with a skewed idea of the history of the house. I’d heard
worse, though, and was pleased that this was a place where the guides really took an interest in the past as something more than an amusement park.

Apparently Daniel thought so too. He was leaning over the sawhorse, taking us all in. “Wonderful what uses the past is put to, isn’t it Emma?”

“I suppose so.” But I got the impression that he was being sarcastic. “You don’t think people should learn from the past?”

“Oh, I do, I do indeed. It’s just that everyone who works at the house seems to enshrine history, and never learn from it. I say you learn from your mistakes, and then forge on ahead. Chuck the rest of it and move on with life.”

“Pretty funny sentiments, for someone on the Historical Society board, don’t you think, Daniel?”

“Not at all. It’s the perfect place for a little shakeup, to insert the thin end of the wedge. If I had my way, there’d be a whole lot less of Fee’s way of thinking, or Perry’s for that matter, and a whole lot more of Ted’s. Use history to teach people about how to get along with each other, not as a monument to one family.”

“I liked what Ted said too, but he didn’t seem to mind including a discussion of the Chandlers along with the rest of it. It is their house, after all.”

“Well, never doubt that Ted does everything to a very specific end. He thinks of himself as an agent provocateur, a political creature.”

“Like you?”

Daniel laughed. “Ah, he’ll never be the schemer I am. Take care, Emma.”

“See you Daniel.” I checked my watch. “That’s lunch, guys.”

I was glad to imagine that things were back to normal by this time. It was a busy day, for everyone, with record num
bers showing up to the house, and the foundation now fully exposed. The puzzle there was that it was clearly not the brick foundation to a house, as I’d thought there must be, but seemed to be a much less substantial structure. The uneven surface that we were uncovering also puzzled me; we were obviously still above the charred remains, and those were incorporated into some of the holes, making mottled fill. All I could tell was that it was done by human agency.

It was while we were eating that I noticed something unusual. I was keeping an eye on everyone, trying to gauge how their morale was, when I noticed that Bucky wasn’t at all engaged with the banter as she had been the day before. She was sitting next to me, peering intently at one of the brightly colored flowers at the border between the beds and the lawn where we were eating. It soon became apparent that she wasn’t so interested in the flower itself, but its occupant, a fat bee that was gathering pollen with workmanlike diligence. My sister’s stillness was what made me remark the scene; it wasn’t the laziness that she was so fond of, it was a focused tranquility that separated her from the outside world. Even when she raised her hand, it was almost meditative, and as I watched she slowly, with infinite gentleness, stroked the soft hairs on the bee’s back. Before I turned away to answer Rob’s question about our strategy for that afternoon, I saw her examine the yellow grains of pollen on her finger with the same deliberateness. I was glad for the interruption, reluctant that anyone else should see her or break the moment for her.