More Bitter Than Death: An Emma Fielding Mystery - By Dana Cameron Page 0,30

death certificate wouldn’t be sufficient, as you should have anticipated it and planned your work accordingly,” Duncan said.

Automatically I checked for whether he was being sincere, but I didn’t see any of the telltale signs that would indicate otherwise. Scott cut me off in my thoughts.

“Yeah, you’re right.” Scott turned and smiled ruefully at Duncan, then gave himself a shake. “Right, thanks guys, I’m feeling better. Let’s say if I need you to do anything, I’ll leave a message in your rooms or on the message board. Okay?”

I nodded and glanced at my watch. “Sounds good. I’ve got to get back in there and finish up this session. With any luck, the paper hasn’t ended early. As if that ever happens. I’m really sorry, Scott.”

He nodded. “Me too. Figures it happens when I’m the one running the show. Old bastard.”

But he said it fondly, not with any of the real ire that I’d always heard from Grandpa Oscar and sometimes used myself. Duncan nodded, of course, and said to Scott, “Walk and talk with me.”

I got up and left abruptly, hearing him say “Good-bye, Emma,” from behind me. I waved my hand without looking back.

As I suspected, I got back to my post just in time to give the “one minute, wrap it up” signal. To my relief, no one much noticed my hasty departure, and things seemed quite as usual. The reader obligingly finished, fairly smoothly, and I got up to announce my own student, Katie Bell, whose paper I was planning to see in any case.

Several things happened at once. As I announced Katie’s name and her paper title, I heard a roar of laughter from the session right next door to us. That meant that they were running over, but it also meant that my little surprise for Carla had been discovered, just about on time. I also noticed that Katie kept looking around, disappointment evident on her features. As she fiddled with her scrunchie, which was too big for the ponytail it held, I realized that she hoped that Garrison would appear in time for her paper. I couldn’t tell her that wasn’t going to happen, but I did give an extra flourish to my introduction, which brought a smile to her long narrow face.

I don’t know why I should have been nervous for Katie, except that she was young, just a senior, and this was her first paper. All on her own, she was showing enough nervous energy to power a small factory, but I had vetted her paper at her request, made some suggestions, and she swore that she’d practiced reading it out loud to her roommates. It was good experience, and I didn’t think it would do her any harm, but she was high-strung as a new tightrope and as jittery as the first person to try it out. I guess I just felt for her.

She started off okay—she’d managed to clear her throat away from the mike and didn’t go three octaves higher than her normal voice—and was actually doing well reading the paper, which was on the smoking pipes from the Fort Providence assemblages. I actually found myself leaning forward, eager to hear her next words about a site I’d researched and excavated myself, until she went disastrously off script.

She lost her place, which led to several seconds of stuttering. Then she took a deep breath and a drink of water, just like I’d told her to do if she got hung up somewhere. Then, for some reason, she started talking about the slide that was showing a preliminary overview of the site with the location of the units superimposed over it. She was starting to repeat what she’d already said at the beginning, and worse, seemed to be spiraling downward into needless detail. I sat on my hands and tried to find the right moment to correct her course, biting my lip in anxious sympathy.

“—and the crew used trowels—not the roundy, gardening kind, but flat mason’s trowels—to dig. They followed the existing stratigraphy, the layers of soil that were deposited by wind, water, or human landscaping, until they hit the glacially deposited sand, which meant there would be no human artifacts below that, because there were no people around here before the glaciers. As far as we know.”

Aw, hell, Katie, I thought, you don’t need to go into this basic stuff, not with this crowd. Grandma doesn’t like being taught how to suck eggs. I considered clearing my throat, trying