More Bitter Than Death: An Emma Fielding Mystery - By Dana Cameron Page 0,35
ago. I keep trying to tell her it’s not something I can remember offhand, but she won’t stop pestering me. And I’m not the only one—Duncan Thayer actually lost his temper with her. Would you speak to her?”
“Which little noodge are you talking about?” I asked, but I suspected I knew. And I really would kill Duncan if he’d been mean to Katie.
“Katie something. I just keep thinking of her as Katie Car Alarm, the way she keeps harping and harping on the Pelletier site. Do me a favor, do us all a favor. Tell her to calm down.”
“Katie Bell. I’ll have a word with her. Don’t worry, I’ve got a copy of the Pelletier report. I’ll lend her my copy, so she won’t bother you anymore.”
“Good.” She brushed past me, and I had just enough self-restraint left to wait until she was out of the room before I stuck out my tongue.
“She gives us Canucks a bad name,” Carla muttered. “What’s the hair across her ass?”
“She and I just hate each other,” I said. “Always have.”
“Why is that?”
I thought about it for a minute. “You know, I can’t even remember. But I suspect her warm and obliging personality has something to do with it.” I turned to Lissa, who’d just finished with packing up a piece of creamware with a spectacularly ugly overglaze painted pattern. “And you, thanks a lot for leaving me to the wolves.”
“There was just one wolf. Is it better to have two of us miserable, instead of one?”
“I could have used a little cover there.”
“Hey, it’s women and children first, as far as I’m concerned. You see those giant front teeth of hers? They’re used to shear the heads off her peons. I’m not getting anywhere within striking range. You guys want to get a drink?”
I checked my watch; it was barely one, but what with conference time—brought on by being closed off from the rest of the world, with no natural light and irregular sleeping and eating—it felt much later. “Little early for me. What about some lunch?”
“We signed up for the boxed lunches. Oh, lord, there’s Bea. And would you look at what she’s wearing? Bless her heart.”
“Oh, there you all are!”
Bea Carter was striding toward us, as if she’d finally caught us doing something illicit. Lissa was right; Bea was clad in complicated swaths of blue and green, over billowing trousers of the same material. Imagine a teal and turquoise tornado with red shoes. A walking hangover.
She stopped in front of us, panting. “I suppose everything is done, is it?”
“Well, yeah, Bea. The Grope is from twelve to one,” Carla said.
“I would have been here on time, except that someone stole my artifacts!”
She said this with such satisfaction, as if convinced of something she’d been claiming all along, that I did a double take.
“Someone stole your artifacts?” I said. “How could that have happened?”
“It could have been anyone in the hotel. It could have been any of…us.”
“Heck, Bea, who’d want your artifacts?” Lissa said. “Who cares about some early twentieth-century kiln furniture anyway?”
Carla and I scowled at her, but she didn’t back down. “Well? I’m serious. Who’d want broken bits of pottery?”
“You mean besides archaeologists?” Carla said.
“You know what I mean,” Lissa retorted.
“Was anything else stolen?” I asked Bea.
“What do you mean?” She’d danced around to the side, as if my question was an attack.
“I mean, was your room broken into? Or was your luggage ripped off at the airport?”
“No, I mean, not any more than the usual rifling they give your stuff these days. I had them here, with me. I was showing them around last night, Wednesday, after I got in, to other people working on pottery manufactories.” She glared at Lissa. “It was shortly after that.”
“And your room, nothing else was touched,” I said.
“No, Emma, nothing else was touched. In my room, that is. I guess you all haven’t heard about the book room.”
“What about the book room?” Lissa demanded.
“One of the poster exhibits was broken into. A bunch of the stuff was taken, some of it was broken.” She gave me a significant look. “Also last night.”
“Which one was it? Was it only one?”
Again, Bea took the defensive with me. “It was the one on the Florida underwater project.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said, and Lissa nodded. “Why would anyone mess with that? Wasn’t it mostly reproductions? All the stuff that was taken was fake; the only real things—the broken fragments—were left behind.”