I put the message in an envelope and mailed it, then spent the next few days half sick with hope and anxiety. Nothing happened, except that Chloe Feingold told me Andrew was taking everything very hard and invited Jane and me around to have dinner with him. As a result of that excruciating evening, I began to think about my own specialty and how my knowledge might be put to use.
My first attempts were abortive. I made an intensive study of eastern woodland bows and learned to shoot one. I spent some enlightening afternoons with an elderly member of the Narragansetts, and I got so that I could flake a point pretty well. I did not get to where I could see myself skewering Andrew with a brilliant shot to the heart.
I considered Native American botanicals next and worked more hours than I care to remember in the pharmacy lab and in the crumbling shed where Mrs. Margaret Laughing Bear stores dried plants and her musty-smelling packets of traditional medicines. I published a couple of papers that were well received, but Mrs. Laughing Bear was dexterous in fending off all inquiries about poisons. Besides, as I began to get ahold of myself, I could see the difficulties of slipping tincture of nightshade into Andrew’s cocktail or of feeding him a Death Angel mushroom.
I do think that these fantasies, and others even more embarrassing and puerile, kept me sane. They gave me hope; they kept me from doing something obvious, unforgivable, irretrievable. And then came the road and, all of a sudden, everything fell into place. All my futile efforts, my midnight walks, my sad canoe trips, even those cruel phone calls, had been so much priming of the pump. When the road came, I recognized my chance. All that remained was to proceed in a timely and orderly fashion.
What had happened was that Eh Webster, the senile fool who had given Andrew his alibi in the first place, finally went into a home. The grandchildren wasted no time subdividing the old farm and contracting with a particularly fast and profit-hungry developer to transform sixty prime acres into something to be called Webster Estates, with a projected forty houses. Few of us in town were pleased about that and a good old-fashioned zoning and development fight ensued.
I pitched in to testify about the archaeological value of the fish weirs and the campsite on the property, and I helped Sue LeBonte assemble some of the environmental data on the impact such a big project would have on the watershed. The neighbors were pretty much all against the development, but I found it significant that Andrew didn’t get really involved until the business of the road came up.
Access for the new Webster Estates was going to have to be that dirt road along the Donaldsons’ little wildflower meadow. Nothing could be done, no construction, certainly no heavy truck traffic, until that lane was widened and upgraded. At this point, Andrew went ballistic. I felt I had him for sure.
Like so many other things in small towns, the Webster Estates finally came to a compromise: bigger lots, fewer houses, an environmental tract set aside. We were to have ten houses, which was more than enough, and over Andrew Donaldson’s strenuous objections, the town agreed to widening and paving the road. I was at the council meeting the night the agreement passed, and I went right from there to the university. My book bag was in the car. I took out my texts and my grade book, locked them in the trunk, and went into the building with my empty knapsack.
This was not unusual behavior. I’m nocturnal by choice; I often work late and I make midnight rambles to the museum for books or records or to check some item in the archives. I remember stopping that night at the museum and looking in at my favorite exhibit: the bark house my students built several years ago as part of our Eastern Woodlands display. In the light from the hall, the support pillars cast long treelike shadows over the little bark house, a miniature of the noble halls of the Iroquois.
I had an impulse to go inside, and I did, crouching for a few moments in the cramped space that smells of cedar and bark, mingled with the institutional odors of floor polish and air conditioning. I knew from Mrs. Laughing Bear’s shed that it should also smell like dried plants and dirt floors and the residue of fires and cooking fat. I’m not sure what I’d have told the custodian if he’d come by. Certainly not the truth, which was that I was paying homage to people who understood blood vengeance and who were about to help me get it.
After a few moments in the half-darkness, I crawled out and relocked the door before descending to Archives and Research, a pleasantly old-fashioned room. Below the horizontal windows set high in the walls are banks of good mahogany cabinets where we store our specimens. Most of the collection is pottery shards, but we also have a lot of arrow and spear points, some clothing, a couple of pieces of first-rate embroidery and beadwork, and some bones.
In the last couple of years, we’ve returned a number of complete skeletons to the Mohican and Pequot tribal authorities, and we’re negotiating with the Pequots over some other artifacts. They’re building a collection, and I’ve been trying to interest them in some scholarly activities. I see an endowed chair eventually, perhaps other ventures; with their casino revenue, they’ve certainly got the money.
By rights, some of the skulls in case #14 should be returned as well. They came from federal land and fall under NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), but that’s a future project. My own favorite, #2456, is from my personal collection and belonged to a woman of the Adena, the mound-building people of the central Ohio Valley. I’ve had her carbon dated. She lived around 1000 B.C., and I’ve had her skull ever since I stole it from the excavation I was working on the year I received my doctorate.
There’s a certain symmetry, isn’t there, to my only two cases of professional malfeasance? Beauty must be my excuse: #2456 was a lovely skull, darkened to an elegant biscuit color by the soil where it had lain for so many centuries. As I examined it that night in the strong halogen lamp over the case, I saw that her head would have been round, her face broad, perhaps plump like Eva’s. I hoped her short life had been happy, as I believe Eva’s was. The eye sockets were large; #2456’s eyes would probably have been black or very dark brown, instead of Eva’s gray-blue, and her hair would have been dark. I think that she was a pretty woman.
Fortuitously, I had put a paper label on her skull instead of numbering the surface of the bone, and, after making sure that there were no extraneous marks, I peeled the tag off and cleaned the little sticky patch that remained with alcohol. Then I wrapped #2456 in a piece of old newspaper and put it in my knapsack.
I had only to wait until the road crew arrived, a matter of considerable vigilance. I went the long way to the university every day in order to be sure the town hadn’t yet begun work, and every afternoon in decent weather, I was in the swamp, listening for the sound of graders and bulldozers — or for the softer, fainter sound of a man digging through tough meadow grass.
At last the contract went out, and one May morning just as we were finishing exams, I found the road crew had arrived. That evening, as late as I dared make it, I told Jane I was going to take a paddle around the swamp.
“Perhaps I’ll go with you one night,” she said. “It’s been lovely weather.”
I had the horrible feeling that she was going to suggest coming with me right then. “Mosquitoes,” I said, ashamed of the reluctance in my voice and aware that I was neglecting Jane. “Let me buy some more spray. I’ll get that tomorrow. And a paddle. You’ll want a paddle, too.”
“It’s not worth the fuss,” said Jane.