Hugh Conover had been an anthropologist whose career had followed an arc with similarities to Tuttle’s. He, too, was looking for signs of intelligent life elsewhere. But his primary interest was in places where people, human beings, had landed and lived, outposts in remote areas, cities buried in jungles or beneath desert sands, bases established and subsequently abandoned during the dawn of the interstellar age. If he’d come across something utterly new, that would have been fine. Magnificent, in fact. But he knew the odds. And he was too smart to let anyone think he took the possibility seriously.
Like Tuttle, he’d been a pilot. And also like Tuttle, he’d usually traveled alone.
Moreover, Conover had enjoyed moderate success.
His most famous achievement had been the discovery of a previously unknown space station, dating from the twenty-seventh century, on the edge of the Veiled Lady. That had happened in 1402. For seventeen years after that, he had labored in the field and, while making a reasonable contribution to the state of historical knowledge, he’d produced nothing else of a spectacular nature. Finally, in 1419, he’d retired. Three years later, he announced that he was going away. And he did. If anyone knew where he was, it wasn’t on the record.
We continued looking for data on Tuttle.
We asked Jacob to determine whether anyone had ever taken charge of his papers. He needed a few seconds to respond. “I do not have a listing, Alex.”
“Okay,” said Alex. “I’d have been surprised if we’d found anything.”
“Apparently he was never considered a suf ficiently substantive figure that anyone asked for them.”
Nobody ever wrote a biography about him. Nobody ever granted him a major award. Interviews always depicted him as a one-dimensional lunatic, a figure of fun who fell into a class of “experts” defined by ghost hunters, Nostradamus enthusiasts, and people who could make out the face of God in the Andrean Cloud. His media coverage seldom revealed the man himself. There were death and wedding notices, and one item describing how he’d pulled a drowning kid out of the Melony during a summer festival. The bottom line was that, aside from that single interstellar passion, there wasn’t much information to be had about him.
Some of his old colleagues were still active. We visited as many as we could get to, Wilson Bryce at Union Research, Jay Paxton at the University of York, Sara Inagra at the Quelling Institute, and Lisa Cassavetes, who’d long since gone into politics and been elected to the Legislature.
Several had been to the Rindenwood house on various occasions, but those visits, of course, had been long ago, and nobody remembered the cabinet, let alone what had been in it. “In fact,” said Cassavetes, who was probably 160 but who primped and grinned while implying her interest in Tuttle had been limited to the bedroom, “I don’t recall ever having been in his office.”
Nobody could assign a probable source for the tablet. “Yes,” said Bryce, who was tall and gangly, with arms and legs too long for his body, and a tendency to frame each phrase as though we should be taking notes, “they do vaguely resemble Late Korbanic. No question. But look at these characters here—”
Audree called the same day we talked to Bryce. When she appeared in the middle of the conference room, we knew immediately that she wasn’t bringing good news. “Guys,” she said, “I’d say you were right not to believe your sources. There’s no sign of the tablet anywhere in the Trafalgar area.”
“Could you have missed it?”
“Sure. It’s possible. There was a pretty bad storm just before we started the search. It might have stirred up the mud a bit. And in any case, there are a lot of rocks down there. Still, if I were betting—”
“You’d say it’s not there.”
“That’s what I’d say. You want me to go back and look some more? I can do it, but we’ll have to charge.”
“No. Let it go.”
“Sorry. Call me if you change your mind.”
When she’d blinked off, Alex grumbled something about idiots dropping things in rivers, and asked Jacob to show him the family trees of Ara and Doug Bannister.
“What has that to do with anything?” I asked.
“You remember who originally wanted the tablet?”
“Doug’s aunt.”
“Maybe. Ara said ‘our aunt.’ Let’s see who that might include.”
There were two aunts on Doug’s side, three on Ara’s. Jacob ran a search on all five women. One was married to an archeologist. But the guy’s specialty was early Rimway settlers. No likely connection there. Three more gave us nothing of significance. But the fifth was a different story.
Her name was Rachel Bannister. She was a retired interstellar pilot. And she’d had an association at one time with Sunset Tuttle.
“What kind of association?” Alex asked.
“I’m still searching.”
Alex looked satisfied. “I’m beginning to think they lied to us.”
“They didn’t throw the tablet into the river?”
“Exactly. What else do we have, Jacob?”
“Her hobbies are listed as gardening and rimrod.” Rimrod was a card game quite popular at the turn of the century. “She’s something of an amateur musician. And she’s also affiliated with the Trent Foundation.”
“As a volunteer?”
“Yes. According to this, she spends several hours a week tutoring girls who are having problems in school. As a matter of fact, she’s worked with a number of charitable organizations in Andiquar.”
“Been doing that a long time?”
“Thirty years or so.”
“Sounds like a pretty good woman,” I said.
“She worked for World’s End Tours for four years, until 1403. Resigned in the spring of 1403. And here’s the Tuttle connection.”
“Don’t tell me,” Alex said. “She used to be his girlfriend.”
“You hit it on the head, Alex.”
“That might explain,” I said, “why she wanted the tablet.”
“Sentimental attachment?”
“Yes.”
He looked skeptical. “Chase, the guy’s been dead over a quarter century.”
“Doesn’t matter, Alex. People fall in love, they tend to stay that way.”
“Twenty-five years after he’s gone to a better world?”
I couldn’t help laughing. “You’re a hopeless romantic, you know that?”
“I don’t buy it,” he said.
It was clear enough to me. “But,” I added, “it doesn’t explain why she’d get rid of it.”
“No.” Alex shook his head. “She didn’t get rid of it. She still has it.” He looked up at the time. “Jacob?”
“Yes, Alex?”
“See if you can connect with Doug Bannister.”
It took a few minutes. But eventually Bannister’s thin voice came through. “Hello?” We didn’t have a visual.
“Doug, this is Alex Benedict.”
“Who?”
“Alex Benedict. I spoke with you a few days ago about the tablet. After the game.”
“The tablet?”
“The rock you picked up in Rindenwood.”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. Did you find it?”
“No. We’ve scanned the Melony in the Trafalgar area. It’s not there.”
“Really? That’s strange. Well, you must have missed it. Where exactly did you look?”
“Doug, let’s assume the tablet really went somewhere else.”
“What do you mean?”