Aaron Elkins - Uneasy Relations

Sheila had been two years ahead of him, he explained, although she never did finish up her doctorate because of, well, various problems. “Not academic, you understand, not at all; more… oh, personal. She was the sort of person – well, it’s hard to describe-”

“No, it’s not,” said Pru. “She was impossible to work with. She couldn’t get along with anybody.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” said Rowley, who had been silent till now, his worried attention fixed on Gunderson at the head table. “I know she wasn’t well liked, but she seemed nice enough to me. During the original dig, she spent some time at the museum – we had lunch together once – and I found her very stimulating company. An interesting person.”

“You didn’t know her that well,” Pru said. “You never worked with her. Lunch isn’t the same thing.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” Rowley admitted, and went back to watching Gunderson. He leaned toward Gideon. “How does he seem to you?” he asked in a whispered aside.

“Hard to say, Rowley. All right, I think. I hope.”

Rowley shook his head. “Oh, I hope so too.” He had eaten no more than a third of his salad and was now back to gnawing on his unlit pipe.

“She had a chip on her shoulder like a two-by-four,” Pru went on. “This lady walked around like a stick of dynamite just waiting for you to light her fuse. One of the reasons she didn’t pass her comprehensives the second time was that she wound up telling her committee they didn’t know what the hell they were talking about and stomping out.”

“Not good,” Gideon opined. “It’s supposed to work the other way around.” He was a little surprised at Pru’s vehemence. There weren’t many people she so actively disliked.

“It’s not that I disagree with you entirely, but I think we should be a little more respectful of the dead,” Corbin said.

“Oh, please,” said Pru.

“She had a very hard upbringing, Pru, you know that.” Corbin appealed to Gideon and Julie. “She never knew her parents. She grew up in foster homes, shuffled from pillar to post. No one ever adopted her.”

“That’s so,” Pru allowed. “I suppose a childhood like that might have ruined even my sunny personality. Still, you have to admit, she went out of her way to make it hard to like her.”

“She didn’t make it easy,” Corbin agreed, returning to his salad.

“Well, go ahead with the story,” Julie suggested into the ensuing silence. “What happened?”

She had been unable to land a university position when she finished up her course work, Corbin went on. Things had been tight that year; he’d been lucky to land his own post with Tunica State – and of course Sheila’s having an unfinished doctorate didn’t help any. So she’d been teaching community college evening courses and working as a part-time consultant for an archaeological survey firm when Corbin, whose responsibilities as assistant director included staffing, brought her on as one of the site’s three area supervisors, in hopes that it might flesh out her resume a little.

“Her resume wasn’t the problem,” said Pru.

Corbin ignored her. “It didn’t do her much good, though, professionally speaking, even after the dig became famous. She never did hook up with a university. She applied for my spot when I left Tunica State and even they turned her down, along with everyone else. No one really knows why.”

“ Au contraire,” said Pru. “Everyone knows why. Not only couldn’t she finish her dissertation, but Adrian would never give his ‘dear student’ a decent referral.”

“I don’t know where you get your information,” Corbin said prissily, “but I suppose everyone’s entitled to their own opinion.”

“Wait a minute,” Gideon said as a few memories clinked into place. “Sheila Chan… I did know her, or at least we corresponded. She was the one doing a dissertation on Neanderthal genetic anomalies – on ankylosing spondylitis, in particular.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Corbin said. “I’d forgotten, but as a matter of fact, now that I think of it, she told me how kind you’d been to her.”

Julie had grown impatient. “But what was it that happened to her?”

“She died,” said Corbin. He returned to his salad, apparently considering his contribution done.

“I know, but-”

“It was a couple of years after the dig ended,” Pru said. “We were all back here – well, not here – most of us were at some of the cheap hotels downtown; Horizon wasn’t picking up the tab then, and we were on our own nickel. It was called Europa Point: A Retrospective – a kind of miniconference bringing things up to date on Gibraltar Boy and the First Family two years later; maybe fifteen contributors all together – people who had had some part in it – hey, come to think of it, why weren’t you here, Gideon?”

“I remember being invited. Couldn’t make it, I forget why. But I did see the proceedings, of course. Excellent papers; a lot of good scholarship, well presented.”

“Why, thank you, prof,” said Pru, beaming. “I was program chair.”

“Is somebody going to get around to what happened to Sheila Chan?” Julie pleaded through clenched teeth.

“She was killed in a cave-in,” Pru said. “It was really bizarre. It was two days before they dug her out.”

“That’s awful,” Julie said, “but why is it bizarre?”

“Because it was the Europa Point Cave itself where it happened. The whole hillside came down on her. It was like, you know, woohoo, the Curse of Europa Point.”

“She wasn’t supposed to be there at all, that was the sad part,” Corbin said with a reproachful look at Pru. In his opinion, flippancy was out of place at any time, let alone when discussing a colleague’s death. “It’d been rainy the year before, and the soil had loosened, and they had the site roped off because they thought there might be a landslide. After all, when you think about it, there had obviously been other landslides in the past, or we wouldn’t have had to dig it out in the first place. But no, she paid no attention. She kept going there anyway.”

“Actually, that wasn’t the sad part,” Pru said more pensively. “The sad part was that she had no relatives, nobody interested in having her body returned to them. She was cremated right here in Gibraltar, when they didn’t know what else to do with her.”

“That is sad,” Julie said.

“Ivan paid for it,” Corbin added. “He had her ashes scattered in the Strait.”

“But why was she hanging around the site?” Gideon asked. “Wasn’t the dig completed and closed down by then?”

“It was,” Pru said. “That was the funny thing. But you know, I suppose there’s always something that might have been missed. And she was painstaking, boy, I’ll say that for her. Heck, she made Mr. Meticulous here” – a nod in Corbin’s direction – “look positively slipshod. Hey, Rowley-”

Rowley started. He had gone back to watching Gunderson. “I’m sorry – what?”

“Did she ever tell you what she was after, fooling around in the cave? Apparently, you got along with her better than anyone else.”

“But that was during the original dig. I don’t think I said two words to her at the meetings the following year. I wasn’t around very much.”

“Of course you were around. You picked us up at the airport.”

“Yes, I was around, but I spent almost all the time on a site survey on the west side, remember?”

“Oh, yes, so you did,” Pru said.

“Another Neanderthal site?” Gideon asked.

“No, they were considering building a hotel, or perhaps it was a condominium, and the law requires that they get an archaeological evaluation before they do any digging. That’s part of my job here. You never know what you might find. I’ve turned up two Neanderthal campsites that way in the past, and of course I was hoping for another, more permanent habitation.”