“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 resume a little.
“Her resume 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.
At the head table, however, things were considerably more stilted. Gunderson’s resources seemed to diminish by the minute. Audrey and Adrian, on either side of him, worked at trying to engage him in conversation, but Gunderson, eating with the single-minded avidity of the aged for their remaining pleasures, was in a ravenous world of his own, devouring his food as if he’d never have another opportunity. Gideon’s heart sank further every time he looked up at him.
The only comment he was heard to make came when he had finished using a roll to mop up every last scrap of his dinner (an action that would have been unthinkable in the Ivan Gunderson of a few years ago).
“I don’t remember my mother,” Gunderson said suddenly and quite loudly, “but as I may have told you before, when my father remarried, his new wife brought her three grown daughters to live with us: Sally, Veronica, and Annie-Maude. So there I was, one impressionable young boy of eleven who’d never been around women, suddenly surrounded by a household of four of them. Four of them! Now that’s enough to give anyone pause.”