Ashes and Bones by Dana Cameron

Author:Dana Cameron [Cameron, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Women Sleuths, Mystery fiction, New England, Women archaeologists
ISBN: 9780060554675
Publisher: Avon
Published: 2006-07-06T04:00:00+00:00

As always, there was plenty of work for me to flee into. I presently was tracking down more leads on the Chandler family, who were leaders of the community of Stone Harbor, the next town over from where I lived. Although there were a number of interesting primary documents that mentioned the English-born Matthew Chandler and his work as a judge in the early eighteenth century, I was actually more interested in his wife, Margaret, whose diary I’d had the chance to study.

The accounts that didn’t fall in line to praise her were the interesting ones. I’d only recently come across one, by painstakingly going through every period diary and collection of letters that I could lay my hands on that had anything to do with anyone in coastal Massachusetts. While locating the diaries was time consuming, reading them wasn’t as arduous as it sounds. Usually they weren’t too hard to read, if they were in good condition, and the handwriting wasn’t too awful. Awful, you could get used to, especially reading the scribbled exam papers of panicked and hyperventilating freshmen. And sometimes, rarely, there was even a transcription, though you were usually better off rereading the original for yourself, to avoid errors the transcriber made, intentionally or not. The problem, as far as I was concerned, was that oftentimes these diaries were one-line accounts of weather, ships arriving and departing, or amounts of grain harvested. That was fine, and the right kind of scholar could do a lot with them.

What I had was a fragment of a note that mentioned Margaret. It described her as an “iron-hearted wretch,” which was remarkable to me, given her reputation.

This was the best part of my work and I couldn’t stomach it. I couldn’t concentrate, but worse, I found myself not wanting to. I’d been tired before, overworked and pressed for time, but had never been able to put something as juicy as this aside with so little regret. I couldn’t bring myself to care.

I thought about eating the sandwich I’d brought with me, but these days, the thought of food just made me queasy. I knew what I was avoiding, so I decided to confront it head on. I went to Chuck’s apartment.

Chuck rented the top floor of a three-decker not too far from campus, in the center of Caldwell. As I had come to expect, the Christmas lights were still up, though the bulbs were still red, white, and blue, for Independence Day. Chuck believed that if lights on a house were pretty at one time of year, they were pretty all year round: What his landlord must have thought, I didn’t know. The windows were uneven, giving the house a rather cockeyed look.

I climbed to the third floor. The front door was propped open. I knocked on the door to his apartment, and after a moment, heard shuffling, the chain being drawn across, and then the door was cracked open.

Chuck peeped out, a black eye turning to green and yellow behind thick glasses that replaced his usual granny glasses.

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