More Bitter Than Death: An Emma Fielding Mystery - By Dana Cameron Page 0,32

hard to pin down sometimes. We’ll see what we can do, okay?”

When I saw the eager look on her face, I couldn’t resist adding, “I wouldn’t get your hopes up, is all.”

She nodded. “That’s okay, that’s fine. I gotta go, I wanted to catch another paper at twelve and I don’t want to be late.”

“Okay, see you later, Katie.”

She practically sprang away and loped off to her next session, her slide carousel left forgotten by the projector. I went to retrieve it, and found Meg waiting for me outside after.

“Nice of you guys to come by to support Katie,” I said. “I think she really appreciated it.”

“Yeah, well, she’s not a bad kid,” Meg replied. “And we all knew that she was wicked nervous. She kept going on and on about it, so Neal and I figured we’d let her get it out of her system and then get her good and drunk tonight.”

Wicked? I thought. More of Neal’s New England speech patterns must be rubbing off on our transplanted Ms. Garrity than I imagined; although Meg had traveled all over as part of a military family, most of her accent seemed to have been developed in the western United States. “Of course, you’ve all taken into consideration that she is actually of legal drinking age? That she in fact imbibes?”

“Katie? Oh God, yes. Why do you think the other undergrads call her ‘Sandbag’? Because the morning after a party is the one time that she isn’t rocketing around like a spaz.” She looked at me, conceding the point. “And she turned twenty-one over the Thanksgiving break.”

Was spaz back into the common parlance? It never took more than a few moments with any of my students to plumb the exact depths of the generation gap that separated us.

“She’s eager,” I said. “I’m sure you were exactly the same way, when you were younger.”

Meg gave me a cool and long-practiced glance.

I shrugged. “Okay, maybe you weren’t.”

“Were you?”

“I don’t know that I was as hyper as Katie, but I had a lot of practice in how to behave at conferences. Not everyone grows up with this coming to them like second nature, right? But the thing is I remember how Katie feels. Perhaps you can recall some similar—though not, of course, identically expressed—feeling?”

Meg rolled her eyes. “Maybe.”

I wasn’t letting her off the hook that easy. “And the great thing about being young and immature is that you eventually outgrow it, right?” I insisted.

Meg snorted; apparently Katie was beyond hope of salvation. “If you’re lucky. Where are you off to now?”

“Artifact Comparison Roundtable.”

“Ah, well, maybe you’ll let me go next year? With the stuff from the second season at the Chandler house? Once we get it cleaned up.”

“Sure, if you want to. I didn’t know you were so inclined.”

“Can’t hurt.”

Her career, she meant. “Okay, well just list anything we come across that is particularly nice or unidentifiable, and we’ll pull it for you next year.”

“Good enough. See you later?”

“Absolutely.”

And my second student flew off. I found my way up to the room reserved for those of us who made it a point of getting together every year to show off our best stuff and try to identify the things that were seemingly unidentifiable. It eventually was formalized into the roundtable, limited to a dozen people or so, but we just always called it the Goody Grope. It was porn for archaeologists, a chance to touch the stuff, grok it in fullness, and maybe learn a little something new. The great thing was that, no matter what period you were interested in and no matter what artifacts were actually present, you ended up building up a pretty good awareness of who had what, and from what site.

I glanced in the room before I got in there, and the good news was that for once, it was a good-sized space. I mean, you can sit there in the lobby or the bar and look at artifacts, but what you really want is a nice big table, plenty of chairs, light, and a bit of elbow room to pass the stuff around. The bad news was that Noreen McAllister was first in there, and she’d already seen me. Crapshitpoop.

I raised a hand, not quite a wave, and walked in, grabbing the chair that was nearest the door and farthest from Noreen, who immediately pulled out a notebook and became engrossed in it. My watch told me that I was just a few minutes early, but other