Uneasy Relations (9 page)

Before that, most of them had already gathered in Gideon and Julie’s room for predrink drinks. Among the hotel’s famous amenities (which included a bright yellow rubber duck in every guest bath and a supply of lollipops) was the provision each afternoon of a decanter of sherry and another of Scotch to every room. Gideon and Julie had earlier invited Pru to join them for a chat. She had been spotted carrying her Scotch decanter down the hall by Buck and Audrey and she had invited
them
to do the same, picking up Corbin and Adrian on the way. Even Rowley, who wasn’t staying at the hotel, had stopped by for a few words with Audrey — and a small glass of sherry — before driving off to pick up the guest of honor. As a result, most of the attendees were already pretty well oiled — relaxed and good-humored — before they ever got to the Wisteria Terrace.

As was appropriate, Ivan Gunderson, urbane and smiling in the cream-colored, subtly beige-striped blazer and midnight-blue silk ascot that had become his trademark dress, was the center of attention, and he performed brilliantly. Straight-up martini in hand, he graciously if somewhat regally mingled with the others, making sure to allow time for everyone. He had been quite charming on being introduced to Julie, bowing over her hand — for a moment Gideon wondered if he was going to kiss it — and wryly apologizing, in his elegant, agreeable tenor, for the boredom she was surely about to endure.

But it wasn’t long before Gideon, whose lunchtime wine hadn’t set well with him and was therefore one of the few not drinking, began to see that Rowley was right. Gunderson wasn’t the same man he’d had last seen a couple of years ago. Age, lying confidently in wait for so long, had finally caught up to him with a vengeance. Oh, he still looked much the same; a little more stooped, a little more frail and tentative on his feet, but still the same tall, graceful frame that made any jacket look like an Armani, the same thick, scrupulously brushed mane of white hair, the same clear, ice blue eyes, the same kindly, appealing air of intelligence and reasonableness. But behind the polished surface, it became increasingly clear that a battle had been fought and lost. The witty, urbane Ivan Gunderson known to the world had been evicted, and a confused, forgetful, and probably frightened old man had taken up residence.

He was operating by rote now, and by instinct. He was still skilled at the little ceremonies of life; his remarks to Julie showed that. But he initiated almost nothing in the way of conversation. Say something to him with a smile, and he would smile back, and look amused and knowledgeable. Say it with a solemn shake of your head, and he would turn grave too, and shake his head as well, and commiserate with you in vaguely relevant terms. Gideon had warm and grateful memories of their early meetings, when the famous Ivan Gunderson had gone out of his way to be welcoming and helpful to the young, unknown physical anthropologist. It had been Gunderson who’d taken him in hand at the very first professional conference he’d attended, and had made sure that he was included in dinner plans and social outings. Through the years they had met a good dozen times, often at small, convivial dinners, but whether Gunderson now had any idea of who Gideon was was doubtful. Clearly, familiar words and phrases served as cues:
weather
,
archaeology
,
Gibraltar Boy
,
First Family
,
I believe the last time we met was in San Diego
— all would prompt replies, lively and seemingly pertinent, but at bottom no more than stimulus-response reactions.

He was good at it too, but after twenty minutes, the emptiness behind the words sank in for almost everyone, and Adrian’s jocular suggestion that they go in and sit down to dinner before they perished of hunger was greeted with relief by all.

DINNER
was in a private dining room where three tables had been arranged in the shape of a T in front of a row of floor-to-ceiling windows. At the head was Gunderson, with Adrian to his right, and Audrey and Buck to his left. At the table that formed the stem of the T were Julie and Gideon, sitting across from Corbin and Pru. At the bottom of the stem was Rowley, who had modestly turned down the invitation to sit at the head table. Sun-dried tomato and couscous salads were brought out as soon as they came in.

“Before we begin,” said Adrian from behind his chair, before sitting down, “I think it would be appropriate if we all were to raise our glasses in memory of Sheila Chan, our cherished friend and colleague, and my dear student, whom we all mourn and miss.”

“Sheila Chan,” several others echoed. The glasses were raised, sipped (Gideon’s held tonic water), and set down, followed by three or four seconds of silence, after which the couscous salads were addressed and conversations were resumed.

“Who’s Sheila Chan?” Julie asked Gideon.

Gideon hunched his shoulders. “No idea. It’s a familiar name, though.” He looked across the table at Pru and Corbin. “Who’s Sheila Chan?”

“You didn’t know Sheila?” Pru said, surprised. “No, that’s right, of course you wouldn’t have known her. But you must have heard about what happened to her?”

A shake of the head from Gideon. “No. So, who was she?”

“She was one of the area supervisors on the dig,” Pru said with the slightest of edges to her voice, “a hard worker, competent — well, you knew her a lot better than I did, Corbin. Why don’t you tell it?”

Corbin, whose mouth was fully occupied with couscous, nodded while he finished chewing, his long, gaunt, blue-tinged jaws working steadily, deliberately away, tendons popping and shifting as hard as if they were working on a slab of beef jerky. Finally he swallowed and sipped some water. “Yes, Sheila and I were grad students together at Cal, under Adrian.”

Sheila had been two years ahead of him, he explained, although she never did finish up her doctorate because of, well, various problems. “Not academic, you understand, not at all; more . . . oh, personal. She was the sort of person — well, it’s hard to describe—”

“No, it’s not,” said Pru. “She was impossible to work with. She couldn’t get along with anybody.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” said Rowley, who had been silent till now, his worried attention fixed on Gunderson at the head table. “I know she wasn’t well liked, but she seemed nice enough to me. During the original dig, she spent some time at the museum — we had lunch together once — and I found her very stimulating company. An interesting person.”

“You didn’t know her that well,” Pru said. “You never worked with her. Lunch isn’t the same thing.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” Rowley admitted, and went back to watching Gunderson. He leaned toward Gideon. “How does he seem to you?” he asked in a whispered aside.

“Hard to say, Rowley. All right, I think. I
hope
.”

Rowley shook his head. “Oh, I hope so too.” He had eaten no more than a third of his salad and was now back to gnawing on his unlit pipe.

“She had a chip on her shoulder like a two-by-four,” Pru went on. “This lady walked around like a stick of dynamite just waiting for you to light her fuse. One of the reasons she didn’t pass her comprehensives the second time was that she wound up telling her committee they didn’t know what the hell they were talking about and stomping out.”

“Not good,” Gideon opined. “It’s supposed to work the other way around.” He was a little surprised at Pru’s vehemence. There weren’t many people she so actively disliked.

“It’s not that I disagree with you entirely, but I think we should be a little more respectful of the dead,” Corbin said.

“Oh, please,” said Pru.

“She had a very hard upbringing, Pru, you know that.” Corbin appealed to Gideon and Julie. “She never knew her parents. She grew up in foster homes, shuffled from pillar to post. No one ever adopted her.”

“That’s so,” Pru allowed. “I suppose a childhood like that might have ruined even my sunny personality. Still, you have to admit, she went out of her way to make it hard to like her.”

“She didn’t make it easy,” Corbin agreed, returning to his salad.

“Well, go ahead with the story,” Julie suggested into the ensuing silence. “What happened?”

She had been unable to land a university position when she finished up her course work, Corbin went on. Things had been tight that year; he’d been lucky to land his own post with Tunica State — and of course Sheila’s having an unfinished doctorate didn’t help any. So she’d been teaching community college evening courses and working as a part-time consultant for an archaeological survey firm when Corbin, whose responsibilities as assistant director included staffing, brought her on as one of the site’s three area supervisors, in hopes that it might flesh out her résumé a little.

“Her résumé wasn’t the problem,” said Pru.

Corbin ignored her. “It didn’t do her much good, though, professionally speaking, even after the dig became famous. She never did hook up with a university. She applied for my spot when I left Tunica State and even they turned her down, along with everyone else. No one really knows why.”

“
Au contraire
,” said Pru. “Everyone knows why. Not only couldn’t she finish her dissertation, but Adrian would never give his ‘dear student’ a decent referral.”

“I don’t know where you get your information,” Corbin said prissily, “but I suppose everyone’s entitled to their own opinion.”

“Wait a minute,” Gideon said as a few memories clinked into place. “Sheila Chan . . . I
did
know her, or at least we corresponded. She was the one doing a dissertation on Neanderthal genetic anomalies — on ankylosing spondylitis, in particular.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Corbin said. “I’d forgotten, but as a matter of fact, now that I think of it, she told me how kind you’d been to her.”

Julie had grown impatient. “But what was it that
happened
to her?”

“She died,” said Corbin. He returned to his salad, apparently considering his contribution done.

“I know, but—”

“It was a couple of years after the dig ended,” Pru said. “We were all back here — well, not
here
— most of us were at some of the cheap hotels downtown; Horizon wasn’t picking up the tab then, and we were on our own nickel. It was called
Europa Point: A Retrospective
— a kind of miniconference bringing things up to date on Gibraltar Boy and the First Family two years later; maybe fifteen contributors all together — people who had had some part in it — hey, come to think of it, why weren’t you here, Gideon?”

“I remember being invited. Couldn’t make it, I forget why. But I did see the proceedings, of course. Excellent papers; a lot of good scholarship, well presented.”

“Why, thank you, prof,” said Pru, beaming. “I was program chair.”

“Is somebody going to get around to what happened to Sheila Chan?” Julie pleaded through clenched teeth.

“She was killed in a cave-in,” Pru said. “It was really bizarre. It was two days before they dug her out.”

“That’s awful,” Julie said, “but why is it bizarre?”

“Because it was the Europa Point Cave itself where it happened. The whole hillside came down on her. It was like, you know, woohoo, the Curse of Europa Point.”

“She wasn’t supposed to be there at all, that was the sad part,” Corbin said with a reproachful look at Pru. In his opinion, flippancy was out of place at any time, let alone when discussing a colleague’s death. “It’d been rainy the year before, and the soil had loosened, and they had the site roped off because they thought there might be a landslide. After all, when you think about it, there had obviously been other landslides in the past, or we wouldn’t have had to dig it out in the first place. But no, she paid no attention. She kept going there anyway.”

“Actually, that wasn’t the sad part,” Pru said more pensively. “The sad part was that she had no relatives, nobody interested in having her body returned to them. She was cremated right here in Gibraltar, when they didn’t know what else to do with her.”

“That
is
sad,” Julie said.

“Ivan paid for it,” Corbin added. “He had her ashes scattered in the Strait.”

“But why was she hanging around the site?” Gideon asked. “Wasn’t the dig completed and closed down by then?”

“It was,” Pru said. “That was the funny thing. But you know, I suppose there’s always something that might have been missed. And she was
painstaking
, boy, I’ll say that for her. Heck, she made Mr. Meticulous here” — a nod in Corbin’s direction — “look positively slipshod. Hey, Rowley—”

Rowley started. He had gone back to watching Gunderson. “I’m sorry — what?”

“Did she ever tell you what she was after, fooling around in the cave? Apparently, you got along with her better than anyone else.”

“But that was during the original dig. I don’t think I said two words to her at the meetings the following year. I wasn’t around very much.”

“Of course you were around. You picked us up at the airport.”

“Yes, I was
around
, but I spent almost all the time on a site survey on the west side, remember?”

“Oh, yes, so you did,” Pru said.

“Another Neanderthal site?” Gideon asked.

“No, they were considering building a hotel, or perhaps it was a condominium, and the law requires that they get an archaeological evaluation before they do any digging. That’s part of my job here. You never know what you might find. I’ve turned up two Neanderthal campsites that way in the past, and of course I was hoping for another, more permanent habitation.”

“And did you find one?” Julie asked.

“Alas, no,” said Rowley, turning apprehensive eyes on Gunderson again. “How does Ivan seem to you?”

THE
salad plates were cleared and the main dish, grenadine of pork glazed with port wine and served with prune confit, was quickly brought. (The staff had been asked to be “brisk.”) Over this aromatic dish, Corbin and Pru entertained the Olivers with the usual war stories about the personality conflicts and typical contretemps at the Europa Point dig. By then, Gideon had unbent and had a glass of white wine, and the conversation was animated and entertaining.