Razing the Dead by Sheila Connolly

it.
    â€œOkay. We can talk tomorrow. Gotta go.” He ended the call.
    Which left me feeling vaguely unsatisfied. But, hey, I’d said yes to him starting a real estate hunt, hadn’t I? I got up and ambled down the hall to Shelby’s office.
    She was surrounded by stacks of paperwork but looked up when I arrived. “Hey there. Before you ask, I don’t have time for lunch if you want me to finish this anytime soon.” She waved at the piles in front of her. “You need something?”
    I flopped into a chair. “No, not really. Things just seem to be moving awfully fast. In a good way. James sent us a possible registrar candidate, and he’s already been interviewed and I think we’re offering him the job. Marty says she has a good possibility for the Wakeman research slot, and I’m going to meet her this afternoon. And the man himself invited me to go out and look at the development site this afternoon. Oh, and I told James we could go ahead and look for a bigger apartment.”
    Shelby sat back in her chair and laughed. “Lady, you weren’t kidding when you said things were moving fast! But it
is
all good, isn’t it?”
    â€œI think so. I hope so.” I hauled myself up out of the chair. “I’ll let you get back to work. I’m going to go find a sandwich and wait for Marty’s pick of the day to arrive.”
    I left the building to get a sandwich and was surprised that the streets of the city seemed positively calm compared to the whirlwind that had been my morning. At least things were falling into place, although it might have been easier if they’d been spread out a little more. But I couldn’t complain. I rewarded myself with a bag of potato chips to go with my tuna on rye and ate lunch in the break room at the Society.
    Lissa Penrose, Marty’s latest find, arrived seven minutes before her scheduled appointment at two. At least I’d had time to finish my sandwich. She turned out to be a tall, self-assured woman who looked to be in her later twenties, with straight, shoulder-length brown hair and glasses that hovered between hip and nerdy. Given what I guessed her age to be, I wondered if she had worked for a while or traveled or done something else before returning to school—she seemed a bit past the usual age, although these days a lot of younger people were returning to school rather than trying to find satisfying work.
    I stood up and offered my hand. “Welcome, Lissa. I’m glad you could make it on such short notice.”
    She shook briefly but firmly. “Thank you for seeing me so quickly.”
    â€œPlease, sit down. How much did Marty tell you?”
    She sat. “Just the outline—that there’s a developer who wants to vet a large suburban property before he proceeds with a major development project there, and he wants the Society to review any potential historical problems. I assume he has other people working on other aspects, such as any possible contamination of the site and the water supply.”
    A smart young woman. “Good heavens, you’re already way ahead of me! I hadn’t even considered the contamination question. Are you thinking there might be some overlap with the Society’s part, if there was an old factory or something on the site?”
    â€œExactly. We should be prepared to coordinate. If I get the gig, of course.”
    â€œGood thinking. So give me the snapshot version of your credentials.” Good thing I was in interview mode today.
    â€œBorn and raised in the Philadelphia suburbs—north of the city. Went to Juniata as an undergrad. Then my mother got sick, so I spent a couple of years taking care of her. She died last year, and since she left a little money, I applied for a graduate program at Penn and got in. But the money didn’t stretch as far as I’d hoped, even with a grant, so something like this would be perfect.”
    â€œIt