Jo oozed respect and deference for the sacrifice involved. “A long-term project.”
“Very long. My wife left me over it,” he added abruptly.
“Oh.” Jo sounded startled, then rallied. “I'm sorry to hear that.”
“Her name was Noreen.”
“Oh,” Jo said again, adding lamely, “It's a beautiful name.”
Wy grinned.
“Yes. She was a good worker. There wasn't anything she couldn't turn her hand to: cooking, cleaning, bookkeeping, mending. She'd even take a hand in the dig-under strict supervision, of course.”
“Oh, of course.”
Jo's irony was lost on McLynn, who was lost in reminiscence. “It halved the work, having her here.”
“I imagine it did. How long was she here?”
“One summer.”
Another tiny pause. “One summer out of the last twenty?”
“Yes. She walked away from me at Anchorage International Airport, when we were on our way back to campus for the fall semester. She said she was going to the ladies' room. I never saw her again.”
“I see. What did you do?”
“What could I do? I went back to school, and I taught my fall and spring semester classes, and then the next summer, I came back here. It was all I had left.”
“I see.” Jo was noncommittal, but Wy could hear her thoughts as if she'd spoken them out loud. If McLynn hadn't treated his wife like his own personal serf, he might not have run her off.
Wy was more charitable. McLynn had loved, and lost, and nineteen years later, he was still grieving. It explained a lot of his behavior, if it didn't excuse it.
McLynn's voice rose a little. “Twenty years I've been coming here, most of the time alone, sometimes with an assistant. None of them ever had the commitment to the project that I did.”
Jo was soothing. “I'm sure they didn't.”
“Not one of them ever believed in my thesis, that the Bristol Bay Yupik was an entirely different people from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta tribes. Have you ever looked at a map of Alaska?” He rushed on without waiting for a reply, which was probably just as well. “There's a mountain range that divides the Delta from the Bay. That's one thing. Another is that the Yupik used to paddle regularly across the Bering Sea from Siberia to the Aleutians, first to make war and then to visit relatives.”
“It's almost a thousand miles, continent to continent, in some places.” Jo was noncommittal, reserving judgment.
McLynn's voice went up again, a specialist mounted securely on his own personal hobbyhorse. “There are family names in common between the Siberian Yupik and the Aleutian Yupik, did you know that? Right down to the present day. There are some very fine examples of woven armor, too, and waterproof boatwear made from seal gut. The art is very similar-since the Wall came down I've been to Korjakskoe, I've seen some of the villages there.” He was excited now, skipping from subject to subject, eager to bolster his thesis. “There is one small village-I won't tell you the name, I'm saving that for publication but I'll give you an exclusive-where I found items in use by the people who live there this”-a thump of a fist-“very”-another thump-“day”-a third thump-“that are so similar to thousandyearold artifacts which I have excavated from this”-thump- “very”-thump-“site”-very loud thump-“that the items could be exchanged and put into use with little or no familiarization on the part of the user.” A triumphant pause.
“Well.” Jo seemed at a loss as to what to say next. “I-it does seem to support your premise, sir.”
“It proves it!” Thump!
Jo maintained her respectful silence, and again Wy could almost hear her thinking. Jo didn't know anything about archaeology or anthropology, Alaskan or otherwise, but she knew enough about fanatics to realize that any opposition to pet theories could get one killed. Wy smothered a chuckle and waited to see how Jo would divert McLynn back to the topic she was investigating.
Surprising them both, he returned to it voluntarily. “And after all this, after twenty years' hard labor, the ridicule of my colleagues, the funding reduced and then taken away, the days spent fighting mosquitoes in Alaska and the nights spent fighting Stalin's revenge in Korjakskoe, do you know what that ignorant little brat was going to do?”
“You mean Nelson?”
“He was going to ruin it! Ruin it all! Destroy my thesis, negate twenty years of work, besmirch my standing in the academic community, all for what? All because he'd found a storyknife and decided that all by itself that proved that the Yupik of Kulukak were an offshoot of the lower Yukon tribes, instead of a migratory band of Chuckchi from Siberia!”
Wy's smile faded.
“What nonsense! Anyone with half a brain would review the evidence, the artifacts, and know the truth for what it was! Look at this! A stone lamp with a bear fetish, a classic Siberian Yupik design! Look at this!”
“What is it?”
“Can't you tell? It's a fragment of an armored vest! Look at the weaving! That pattern never originated on this side of the Bering Sea!”
“If you say so.” Jo was doing her best to be soothing.
At first, McLynn seemed to calm. “I told Nelson there was nothing in it, that it had been left behind by a much later group passing through.”
“Certainly seems like a viable possibility. Desmond, what I really wanted to ask you was-”
“You see my whole thesis is predicated on the movement of peoples between the Siberian Chuckchi region and the subarctic region of western Alaska.”
“Er, yes,” Jo said. “The Aleuts used to row their kayaks-”
“Baidarkas.”
“-whatever, across eight hundred miles of open sea to get from one continent to the other. I remember learning that in Alaska history in high school. Very, ah, daring. Gutsy. Admirable, even. But what I-”
“And they settled here,” McLynn said firmly.
A barely repressed sigh. “Yes.”
“No matter what Don Nelson said.” A contemptuous sniff. “A grad student. Really. What could he know?”
“Less than the dust beneath your chariot wheels,” Jo agreed, “but what about-”
“He had to be stopped.”
“-what he says here, where- What?”
“Nelson had to be stopped.”
Silence.
“I couldn't let him do it. Years of fieldwork, excavation after excavation, most of the time pulling up nothing but potsherds. The semesters teaching undergrads with minds like sieves the ABCs of anthropology. All for nothing, if I let Don Nelson tell his theory of the storyknife. I couldn't let him. I had to stop him. Now I have to stop you.”
Before Wy could yank back the flap, she heard the sound of a dull, metallic thunk. When she finally got the canvas out of the way, she found Jo in the act of rolling into one section of the excavation, her eyes closed and blood draining from her temple.
There was a movement to her right and her gaze shifted just in time to see McLynn, a determined frown on his face and a number two spade in his hands. The spade was already on the downswing and Wy instinctively stepped back, tripped over the Blazo box and went sprawling.
“Sir! Sir!” An ungentle hand shook his shoulder. “Sir, wake up!”
Liam swam up from a great depth. The light was dim and distant at first, steadily increasing in wattage, until it became so bright it hurt his eyes. The light resolved into a long, rectangular fixture on a ceiling somewhere. The two fluorescent bulbs behind the white plastic cover seemed to burn right through his retina, and he closed his eyes. Somebody groaned.
“Sir! Are you okay?”
His head hurt. No, that wasn't right, his head was thumping, pounding, hammering with pain. He felt his gorge rising. He opened his eyes again and this time saw Prince, her expression anxious. “Help me up.”
“What?”
“Help me up.”
Prince helped him sit up, and he staggered to the sink and vomited. The water ran cold and clean from the faucet and he held his head under it. The water swirling in the bottom of the sink turned pink. He kept his head under the faucet until it ran clear again. She was waiting with a tea towel when he stood up.