More Bitter Than Death: An Emma Fielding Mystery - By Dana Cameron Page 0,29

the person he’d been speaking with and saw to my surprise that it was Scott, who looked pale as a sheet of paper and slick with sweat. “What’s wrong?”

He took my arm and pulled me out of the room. Duncan followed.

“We found Garrison, Em.” Scott swallowed a couple of times. “He’s…he’s dead.”

“Oh, jeez,” I said, shoulders slumping. “What was it, his heart or something?”

“They found him outside. They think it was exposure, but it might have been his head.”

“What do you mean? Like a stroke?”

“I dunno, it could be.” Scott looked off, then straight at me. “He was out on the pond behind the hotel. Out on the ice. There was a hell of a lot of blood. His head was split open.”

Chapter 5

“THEY SAID IT LOOKED LIKE HE FELL ON THE ICE, and cracked his head open,” Scott continued. He was shaking like a leaf, and it scared me to see him so. He exchanged a look with Duncan, and I found myself suppressing an urge to shoo Duncan away.

But of course he was looking at Duncan; they were at New Hampshire College at the same time. Under Garrison.

“Okay, do you want me to make an announcement?” I asked. “What are we supposed to do in this situation?”

“I don’t know. What I want to do is wait until the authorities can make their way here and take care of the body. I don’t want to make any formal announcements until we hear from them, and that’s going to take a while because of the weather. I’m hoping it won’t get around too much, but you know how gossip moves.”

“Who found him anyway?” I said.

“One of the hotel people gave me the news. One of their people went to get a snowblower out of the utility shed down by the lake.”

I looked at Scott closely; he was still sweating and his face was now gray. “Are you going to be okay?”

He shook his head. “Yeah, but I think I want to sit down for a bit.”

“Let’s go over there.” I indicated a couch flanked by two end tables with ghastly, oversized silk floral arrangements badly in need of dusting. As I put my arm around his shoulders, I bumped into Duncan’s hand. Although my first instinct was to pull away, I wasn’t about to make a scene in front of Scott.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got it.”

“No, that’s all right, Emma,” Duncan replied. “Why don’t you go back to the session?”

“Why don’t you go and—” I took a breath. “Scott was looking for me. I’m fine here.”

“Actually I was looking for—” Scott began, then sat heavily onto the couch. “I was looking for Dunk. But I’m glad you’re here too, Em. I’ll need all the help I can get.”

“Right, sure, anything,” I said, nodding quickly. “Do you want some water?”

“That’d be great.”

“I’ll get it,” Duncan said before I could answer.

I sat next to Scott, whose head was in his hands. I put my hand on his back, and waited for him.

“It’s just so strange,” he kept saying to the carpet. “The man was a force of nature. Not that he was Superman or anything, he was old, and was feeling his years. Healthwise, I mean. But his personality, for whatever faults you might have seen in him, was just huge.”

I chose to take Scott’s “you” as the general one, and not me personally. Duncan had returned with a glass of ice water from the coffee table.

“I just can’t believe that he’s…that he won’t ever…ever again.”

“It’s the end of an era,” Duncan said.

I wanted to tell him to shut up, and I almost did, but then I saw Scott nodding again. I bristled, thinking it wrong that Duncan should also have history with Scott, who was my friend; territoriality, especially under these circumstances, is not my best look.

“Yep. Now we need a plan. I want to wait until the business meeting tonight, to make a general announcement. That will give me a chance to talk to the board and to call his family; I think that would be best, even if the authorities contact them too. If we address it tonight, we can get that over with, maybe have a few speeches and a moment of silence, or something, and carry on with things tomorrow.”

I opened my mouth to protest, we couldn’t possibly carry on, and then realized that of course we could. We should. “Right.”

“He always said that there was no excuse for not handing in work, and even a