More Bitter Than Death: An Emma Fielding Mystery - By Dana Cameron Page 0,34

short two,” he said. “I’m expecting Jay Whitaker. And Bea Carter responded to my email and said she was going to join us.” He shrugged, and we all exchanged glances; Bea was perennially late and notorious for being a flake of galactic proportions. “Well, we’ll get started and they can jump in when they get here. As usual, we will start to my left and go clockwise. Chris, what have you got for us?”

Chris brought out a piece of pottery.

“Looks like redware, Chris,” Michelle said. “Local? New England?”

“Yeah, it is, but have a look at the inclusions.” He pointed to the tiny bits of pebble and shell that were incorporated into the paste of the fragment. “My idea is that the inclusions are a little different from the other stuff we’ve found locally, and since I think we might actually have some Native people working in the neighborhood we’re exploring now, I was wondering whether they might be using some Indian techniques and applying them in making the Anglo-American forms that their neighbors would have been used to.”

“Umm, sounds a little dicey,” Brad said skeptically, “unless you’ve got hard proof they were actually Indians. I mean, you get all kinds of variation of temper and inclusions, depending where you are—”

“See what they’re doing?” I whispered to Widmark. “They start off with what they know, and try to expand from there, based on other evidence. It’s kind of like how detectives work.”

He shot me a startled, puzzled look. “Oh. Okay.”

I turned back to the discussion; if he wasn’t interested, he shouldn’t have bothered coming.

Then Kelly Booker brought out a small lump of metal; it seemed to be brass to judge from the corrosion: there were still traces of greenish corrosion, though she’d cleaned it up nicely enough. After a moment, it was obvious that it was a button and that there was lettering and a date on it, some of which read: “638” and then “ourable Art.”

“If we could see it better, it would say sixteen thirty-eight, and ‘Ancient and Honourable Artillery,’” Lissa said promptly.

“But it’s from a farm that dates to the middle part of the eighteen hundreds,” Kelly said doubtfully. “The context is probably eighteen sixty, but I suppose it could have been an heirloom someone lost.”

“It was, but it’s a nineteenth-century button,” Lissa explained. “The U.S. Army issued them right at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to commemorate their roots in the seventeenth century.”

“You could try looking it up in a text, Kelly. Any text,” Noreen said. She was looking out the window. “You would have seen it’s not four hundred years old.”

Kelly nodded. “Well, yeah, I didn’t think it looked that early—the shape is all wrong—but I was cleaning the bag with this in it right as I was leaving, and it was so cool, I figured I’d bring it with the other stuff Dr. Marlatt sent with me.”

Noreen pursed her lips, irritated to be troubled with so obvious a problem.

I couldn’t resist poking at her a little. “The great thing about the roundtable is that it is easy for someone else to identify what you’ve got right away, and then the problem is solved.”

“Moving on,” Brad said hastily. “Michelle, what have you got for us?”

Jay came in then, flushed, and apologetic. He grabbed a seat and tried to make himself as unobtrusive as possible, but that just made things worse, and he took a while to catch his breath. Still, it was good seeing him try to make an effort with the professional aspects of the conference, rather than chasing parties the whole weekend.

Michelle had a textile fragment from a National Park Service site; none of us could identify it, but a couple of people suggested contacts. I had some pottery from Fort Providence that Brad confirmed was French; Carla suggested a book that had illustrations of the forms. And so it went, until everyone had had a turn, everyone a little better informed, a little more enlightened.

As we packed up, Noreen approached me. “Hell, Emma, why do you have to encourage them with that small stuff? We’re here to get some serious work done.”

“Kelly seemed pretty serious to me,” I said, my hackles rising. “And it solved her problem, made her happy, and didn’t cost anyone anything. Except maybe a little patience.”

Noreen remained unconvinced. “Speaking of which, I’m starting to lose mine with that other little noodge of yours. She keeps trying to get me to talk about a project that was over years