Past Malice by Dana Cameron Page A

for me to have gotten dirty. “How can I help you?”
    “Claire Bellamy.” She didn’t offer her hand, but jerked her head back toward the house across the road. The sound of large dogs barking loudly seemed to continue nonstop. “I live across the road there, and your students have been causing a real disturbance.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “You’re the archaeologist, right?”
    “Yes, I’m Emma—”
    “The way your students were carrying on out here this morning really is unacceptable. It’s starting to affect my quality of life, more than that, it’s beginning to take a toll on my children.”
    “I beg your pardon? My students? My students haven’t even arrived yet, they were still at home when I left, maybe twenty minutes ago.”
    “Well, I don’t know who else you think it could possibly have been. All I know was that there was all sorts of racket out here about five-thirty, by this side of the house. Where you’ve been working. Then there was all this noise, tires squealing, and by the time I made it to the window, I saw a dark car taking off down the road. If it wasn’t your students, who else could it have been?”
    She was nuts. “Mrs. Bellamy, it could have been anyone.” I recalled that Perry had been hit by a dark-colored vehicle. “This is a public road—”
    “And I still don’t understand that, if ours is the only house on it—”
    And yet you’d probably complain if it wasn’t plowed first thing in the morning during the winter, I thought. “The Chandler House is on it too. Maybe someone got lost and was trying to turn around; it could have been kids fooling around, it could have been a lot of things, but I know for a fact it wasn’t my students. None of them has a dark car, none of them is even here yet.” And fully one-fifth of my crew was stark naked at that hour, so I know she didn’t even have her car keys on her, I concluded to myself.
    Her eyes welled with tears, reminding me of those pictures of sad clowns. “You don’t understand, this is just not acceptable. We moved here for the quiet and all we get is noise and trouble. It’s not fair. If I’m not even allowed to sleep in my own house—”
    I watched her chin quiver and I bit my tongue, trying to keep from saying what was really on my mind, that her dogs barking and her attitude were probably more than half the problem. “I’m sorry you were upset, and I’m sure that it was vexing to be woken up, but I assure you, it was nothing to do with me. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work.”
    “Wait!” she called after me. “You’ve been told, haven’t you, that you’ll have to get rid of all this mess by next Saturday, right? I can’t have my guests over with this going on over here.”
    I recalled the discussion about this topic from last night’s meeting, and decided to pretend I hadn’t heard her. That wasn’t an option, however, as I was rapidly learning what was meant by the expression “shrill as a fishwife.”
    She pressed on. “You are going to close up these holes, right?”
    “I haven’t been told anything of the sort. As far as I understand the matter, the board is quite pleased to go along with our original agreement, which means that I’ll close up here when I have finished my work, in about two weeks. That’s not a very long time and in any case, you really wouldn’t want to burden yourself worrying about what is going on with someone else’s property. Unless your guests are going to be hanging out in your side yard, next to the trash bins, I doubt they’ll even notice that there are holes in the ground over on this side of the street. And if they did, you could use it as a conversation point. They might find it interesting.”
    She put her hands on her hips. “You know this conversation is really pointless—”
    Hallelujah. My thoughts exactly.
    “—and I’m just going to have to bring it up with your boss.”
    She paused and waited to see how I would react