Excavations by Kate Myers

Author:Kate Myers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

The next few days were spent avoiding Charles at all costs and preparing for her guest. Each season the entire team went to the beach at Pylos for one long weekend of break; this year, keen to avoid a romantic seaside trip with her fiancé, Kara was relieved to learn that the first visiting researcher was arriving a week early. She couldn’t very well leave him in the village alone.

Dr. Louis Chen appeared a few days before the long weekend, a six-and-a-half-foot-tall archaeogeneticist from Minnesota who spent a few days in the village every year to collect new samples. He likely wouldn’t leave the confines of the lab once, yet he wore a wide-brimmed hat, cargo pants, hiking boots, and a sunproof button-down.

“My brother-in-law got melanoma from working near a window at Los Alamos,” he explained. “Where can I put the centrifuges?”

Dr. Chen spent his days spinning scrapings from pottery shards around in the centrifuges, which hurled out blood and human DNA material for him to take back in vials to the university. The archaeologists lamented how little of themselves these people left behind, while Chen marveled at how much remained. Once, it turned out a hairbrush they’d been preserving was really a knife; another time, a perfume bottle was actually filled with poison; there even turned out to be a fair amount of blood from multiple sources in a serving bowl. He frightened them and made them feel naive.

“When all you have is blood, everything looks like a machete,” he’d say.

Spending three days alone on the mountain with this man wasn’t how she pictured her one weekend off. But it was better than the alternative.

“I really am sorry. But obviously we can’t just leave him alone here with Ursula and Ian,” she explained to Gary when she broke the news about not joining him at the beach. He stood in the middle of the boys’ room, rolling up his bathing suits to fit into his backpack. He liked to pack early and re-pack often.

“Do you think you need a new suit for every day?” she commented before thinking.

He glared up at her and didn’t respond. Having her single room had ironically placed them into a summer of chastity, which she guessed accounted for the bulk of his disappointment right now. Charles had given her the room under strict rules that it not be used for “fraternization” since she and Gary were still unmarried. Upon hearing this, Gary had joked that they should just go to the courthouse so they could room together; Kara had laughed so hard that Gary asked if she was all right. It was just the most absurd thing she’d ever heard. She was an adamant rule follower, as he knew, and she would not allow Gary to visit for more than a few minutes. When he insisted on popping in, she kept the door propped open and loudly greeted anyone who passed by.

“I’m just going to say it: I feel like you didn’t really want to come this year, which sucks,” Gary aggressively zipped an outside pocket.

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