A Fugitive Truth: An Emma Fielding Mystery - By Dana Cameron Page 0,7

way.”

I knew he was making the most of his uniform and this flashy car that he didn’t own, and bullies never expect confrontation. That became even clearer when he backed off. “I’ll just take your name, for now.”

I told him my name. “Emma Fielding. That’s Fielding, as in Samuel Richardson’s friend Henry,” I explained helpfully, just in case he was a fan of Tom Jones, which I think is one of the funniest novels in the English language. But I was starting to believe that he was beefcake between the ears, too.

“I don’t care who your friends are, you’re not supposed to be on the premises without your I.D. badge,” he said, ignoring the fact that I’d just told him I didn’t have a badge. He very carefully clicked a pen and wrote my name down.

What an awful lot of clipboards there seemed to be around here, and all attached to macho idiots. “What’s your name?” With the gate so securely guarded at the front and no one for miles around, and on top of everything else, presumably, he’d been told to expect me. I was determined to report this nonsense.

He stared at me another minute. “Officer Gary Conner. I don’t like your attitude.”

“I guess we’re even then. I don’t like yours.”

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at how immediately hostile he became, but I found myself settling into a ready stance out of habit. What the heck was going on around here, that everyone should be so wound up?

Officer Gary Conner suddenly decided to depart from our little tête-a-tête. I jumped back out of the way, but he didn’t, however, pull away fast enough for me to miss the words “just like that other dyke” he spat out on the way past. Obviously he had many other calls of a similar nature to make, possibly kittens that wanted a jack-booted stomping.

I just shook my head and wandered back to the house as the sunlight finally bled away in the west. Talk about falling down the rabbit hole; the acquaintances I’d made in the past several hours were no less strange than Alice’s. And this wasn’t even my first official full day.

I sighed and let myself in the back door. Welcome to Shrewsbury, Emma.

Chapter 2

AS I DESCENDED THE STAIRS THE NEXT MORNING I smelled coffee and was grateful that I wouldn’t have to figure out the kitchen without benefit of caffeine. One good thing about the Shrewsbury library was that it didn’t open until nine in the morning, which meant that I was able to sleep in moderately late. In the field, I was forced to drag my carcass out of bed at the ungodly hour of six, or even earlier, which was anathema to my natural inclination to late nights. As the saying goes, I get more done between 1 and 2 A.M. than most people do all day.

When I got downstairs, I found Michael sitting in the kitchen, staring out the window with a cup on the windowsill. He was wearing his overcoat over pajama bottoms, and it was abundantly obvious that he wasn’t wearing the matching top. The Wall Street Journal and a copy of the Weekly World News were spread out in disarray on the table.

I sat down at a corner of the table and let the coffee have its way with me; I could feel the crenellations in my brain deepening as my mind was resurrected from the chaos of dreaming sleep. After about five minutes of comfortably mind-blank silence, Michael spoke without turning around to face me.

“Would you ever, on pain of your life, buy a mug like this?” He held up his coffee mug as if he were saluting the view outside rather than carrying on a conversation; he was funny about making eye contact sometimes, I was learning, either making too much or too little. I looked at my mug, and it had a row of ducks with bows around their necks, some with little galoshes on. One had a jaunty sailor hat.

“Uh, no.”

“Precisely. Made expressly for the aunt market, stocks depleted at Christmas time. Terrifying.”

“What is it you have against aunts?”

“Nothing, in principle. It’s the auntie attitude that I can’t abide.”

Michael continued his contemplation of the world outside, and I put another pot on.

“That’s some choice reading material you’ve got there,” I said, when I finally felt my spinal cord connect with my brainstem. Houston, we have contact.

“Do you know what the worldwide readership of the Journal is? Close to