Vigil (6 page)

Ezra looked at her, and she knew he could see right through her. But that didn’t bother her all that much—their cards had pretty much been on the table from the start. Even as the first Mrs. Metzger was going downhill at Sloan-Kettering, Kimberly had been seeing Sam, and Ezra had found out about it. She could explain a lot of it, how she’d tried to get Sam to wait, how she’d never felt right about it, how the whole thing had just sort of happened (well, maybe she did give it a push now and then, like that time she’d pretended that her boss at the ad agency had demanded that Sam himself okay some layouts, which had allowed her to stop by his apartment, on a night when she just happened to be dressed to kill), but what good would that do now? It was ancient history. And frankly, none of it was any of Ezra’s damn business, anyway. It was time he got over it and grew up.

“I don’t think that would be a very good idea,” Ezra said, and she wondered if he meant working for his dad, or letting her feel out the situation for him. “I’ve never been very interested in real estate.”

“So, what are you interested in, then? What do you want to do now that you’re back in America?”

“Continue with my work.”

That again. “And what is that, exactly?”

“Research.”

“And you can do that research here? You don’t need to go back to Israel, or someplace?”

“No.”

Kimberly’s heart sank. This kid—the exact same age as her brother Wayne, though Wayne could cream him with a single punch—might be planning to hang around the house indefinitely. And that was going to put more than a crimp in her style; if she wasn’t careful, it was going to put a major dent.

“Oh, wow,” she said, “that’s some news.”

Ezra gave her a wry smile, and said, “I bet it is.”

This afternoon, the atmosphere in the lab was more to
Carter’s liking. No Bill Mitchell, no Eminem on the boombox, no one else hogging the electron microscope. Carter was seldom happier than when he had something new to study, to analyze and classify and figure out what it was. Even when he was a kid, he’d been that way. The day he knew his calling in life was the day his parents built a family room onto the back of the house, and the bulldozer, which had just dug a deep trench as part of the foundation, scooped up a rusty spoon and some bone shards from the earth. You’d have thought it had come up with rubies and pearls. Carter, ten years old at the time, raced to school the next morning to show the specimens to the science teacher, who had been singularly unimpressed. But his classmates had shared in his enthusiasm—especially when he suggested to them that the bones were old enough to be a dinosaur’s (never mind where the spoon came from)—and from that day forward, he’d had the nickname “Bones.” That’s what his friends had started to call him, and he’d actually kind of liked it; even now he knew that his students sometimes referred to him among themselves as Professor Bones.

The specimens that had been sent to him for identification were a hodgepodge—no wonder the university wanted some help—and whoever had donated the collection must have assembled them in a variety of ways. One was indeed a fossilized fragment of jawbone from a
Smilodon
—the aptly named saber-toothed cat of the Ice Age—and most of the others were fragments of saurian tibia and tarsal. Not badly preserved as fossils go, but also nothing to write home about. Another hour or two and Carter could finish the job, complete his report, and move on to more challenging work.

As long as the phone stopped ringing.

It had rung earlier, and kept ringing, but Carter hadn’t stopped working to answer it. The only person who knew he was there was the department secretary, and she’d just take a message for him and leave it in his in-box—along with the mail that he just remembered he hadn’t picked up for three days.

Now it was ringing again, and although he wanted to let it go—it was probably just Bill Mitchell, checking to see if anyone else was in the lab, moving ahead of him on the tenure track—he knew it would only ring again, ten minutes later, and break his concentration all over again. He got up from the stool, stretched, and walked across the room to the wall phone. He got it on the fifth or sixth ring.

“Lab, Carter speaking.”

“Carter Cox?” The connection wasn’t great, but he could already guess who was speaking. Dr. Giuseppe—Joe, to his American friends—Russo.

“Russo? Joe Russo?”

“Yes! The secretary, she told me you would be there. I have been calling.”

“Where are you calling me from? The line is bad—can I call you back?”

“No, no, my friend. Now that I’ve got you, I do not want to let you go.”

“It must be important for you to pay for the call.”

Russo laughed—it had been a running gag on the dig site in Sicily, where they’d met, that Russo had no money in his budget for anything, even food and water.

“I have the job now, at the University of Rome.”

“Congratulations! That’s great.”

“That is why I am calling.”

“You want me to come and give a lecture? Beth will be ecstatic. She’s always looking for an excuse to go to Italy.”

“No. No lecture. I do that myself.”

“Okay, I can take no for an answer.” But then why was he calling, and so persistently?

“Did you not get my package?” Russo asked. “The material I mailed to you with the Federal Express?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I send it to your department office, last week.”

Shit. “I haven’t picked up my mail for days.”

The line crackled, but under it Carter could hear Russo cluck.

“You must get it,” Russo said, “and read it. Soon. It is very important.”

“I’ll pick it up the minute I leave the lab. What’s in it?”

Either there was a time delay on the line, or Russo was pondering how to respond. “We have found something here,” he finally said. “Actually, to be true, it was two Americans who found it first—and it is a very . . . interesting find. We will need your help, I think.”

Russo—a man who’d helped Carter unearth the remains of some of Europe’s earliest inhabitants from the “Well of the Bones” in Sicily—was not a man to make empty pronouncements. And Carter knew that if he claimed something was a “very interesting find,” it meant that something very big might be in the offing. Carter felt a tingle of anticipation in the back of his neck.

“What do you want me to do? Look over what’s in the package and call you tomorrow?”

“Yes! My number is on the package. Call me at six in the evening, Rome time. You will want to, my friend,” he said, with a chuckle. “You will not want to wait.”

Carter could hardly wait right now—and he silently swore to himself that he would never again let his departmental mail back up. As soon as he’d hung up, he put the donated fossils away—force of habit made him do it by the book—then grabbed his jacket and headed for the door.

Mitchell was just coming in, holding a bag from Burger King. “Whoa, Bones, what’s the rush?”

“Forgot to pick up something at the office,” Carter said as he squeezed past him.

“Good luck,” Mitchell said, “they’re probably closed up for the weekend.”

That was just what Carter dreaded. “You were right, by the way, about the jaw fragment,” he shouted over his shoulder as he turned the corner of the hall. “It is a
Smilodon.
”

 
The departmental office was indeed closed up by the
time Carter, all but out of breath, managed to get there. Through the glass door, he could actually see his mailbox, the top slot in the wooden cabinet, jammed to bursting—and he could even make out one of those distinctive FedEx envelopes, with its big block lettering, sitting on top of the stack. He rattled the door handle, hoping against hope, but it was locked.

That’s when he heard the janitor, Hank, plunging his mop into a bucket down the hall.

“Hank, that you?” he called out, rounding the corner.

Hank looked up, the mop still in the metal bucket. “What’s up, Professor?”

“Could you do me a huge favor? Could you unlock the departmental office for me?”

“You know I’m not supposed to do that.”

“Yeah, I do, Hank, and I wouldn’t ask you to, but there’s something in there that I absolutely have to have tonight.”

Hank blew out a gust of air, ran one hand over his bald head, and then rolled the bucket and mop against the wall. “I never did this for you, okay?”

“Never.”

Hank trudged to the office door, unlocked it, and waited while Carter grabbed the FedEx envelope, which was thick and heavy, from his mailbox; he checked the return address to make sure it was the right one, and sure enough, it had come from Russo in Rome. “This is what I needed,” Carter said, showing it to Hank. “You’ve saved my life.”

Hank nodded, locking up the office again. “That’s what I do.”

All Carter wanted to do next was rip open the envelope and read its contents right there, but it was now close to seven, and he knew he was supposed to be meeting Beth and their friends Abbie and Ben Hammond at Minetta’s Tavern for dinner. Opening the envelope would just have to wait. But at least he’d been able to get his hands on it—if he hadn’t, the chances of his getting any sleep that night, or all weekend for that matter, would not have been good.

The restaurant was only a few blocks away, and when he got there he spotted Beth and the Hammonds at a table near the bar, sharing an antipasto platter.

“I’m glad you didn’t wait,” Carter said, bending down to kiss Beth on the cheek.

“It never even occurred to us,” Ben said, spearing an olive.

Carter laughed, pulled out the empty chair, and sat down. There was a half-empty carafe of white wine on the table, and he poured himself a glass. Ben was still in his banker’s suit, and Abbie—who worked at an ad agency whose name Carter could never remember—was also in a suit, though hers was red with white piping around the lapels and collar. To Carter, she looked like she was auditioning for the role of Santa’s wife.

“What’s in the FedEx?” Abbie said. “You’re clutching it like it’s a winning lottery ticket.”

“Oh, just some work I need to get done later tonight.”

But Beth, who could read him like a book, tilted her head and gave him a curious smile; there was more to it, she knew, than that.

“What are all these?” Carter asked, hoping to change the subject and gesturing at a bunch of photographs spread out on the table. In one, he could see a winding country road, in another an old farmhouse with a wide front porch.

“They bought a country house,” Beth said, with enthusiasm. “Upstate.”

“In Hudson,” Abbie said, proudly. “With four acres of land and an old apple orchard.”

“And don’t forget the barn falling down in back,” Ben added.

“That’s terrific,” Carter said, studying the photo of the house, which looked small but well maintained, with a range of low mountains off in the distance behind it. “I’ve been meaning to get out of the city more, I just never had a place to go.” He looked at Ben and Abbie and said, “Thank you so much. I’ll bring my own marshmallows.”

“Don’t forget the graham crackers and Hershey bars,” Abbie said.

Beth raised her glass in a toast. “To the landed gentry!”

“Salud!”
they all said, clinking glasses as the waiter approached with the menus.

After hearing the specials and ordering, the Hammonds went on some more about the house; they’d been looking for a place for months—“we’ve really needed a place outside the city,” Abbie said, “to unwind”—but Carter thought he knew the real, unspoken reason for getting the house. It was meant to serve as a distraction from the problems they were having starting a family—and he could certainly relate to that. In fact, before very long, Beth and Abbie had fallen into their own conversation about Dr. Weston (it was Abbie who had consulted with him first). They lowered their heads toward each other and spoke intensely—and not for the first time Carter found himself admiring the depth of their friendship. As far as he could tell, there was nothing under the sun that Beth and Abbie couldn’t talk about with each other—and probably nothing that they hadn’t. They’d met as roommates at Barnard, and been best friends ever since. Even when Beth went to England for a year to study art history at the Courtauld Institute, Abbie snagged a Sloan Fellowship at the London School of Art. Her original goal had been to be an artist herself, an abstract expressionist, the next Lee Krasner, but things hadn’t worked out that way, and she’d had to settle instead for a lucrative but spiritually less rewarding position as an art director for an ad agency.

Ben and Carter were just the appendages in this relationship, and they both knew it. While their wives laughed and chattered, and continued to confer in lowered tones, Carter and Ben searched amiably for one topic or another to talk about. It wasn’t that they didn’t like each other—they did—but their backgrounds and professions, even their interests, were pretty dissimilar.

Ben came from Main Line Philadelphia money, prepped at Exeter, graduated at the top of his class from Wharton Business School, and had been rising through the investment banking ranks ever since.

Carter’s family was what he’d come to refer to, out of their earshot of course, as “comfortably lower class.” His father had driven a delivery truck for a dairy chain in northern Illinois, and his mother had stayed home to raise Carter and his four brothers and sisters. A lot of the time, Carter had been home sick; as a boy, he’d suffered from all the usual ailments—mumps, measles, chicken pox—but he’d also had what seemed to be a kind of asthma. He would always say “seemed to be” because it had mysteriously cleared up by the time he was a teenager. And ever since then, he’d done his best to make up for lost time, by rock climbing, skiing, and traveling all over the world. When he’d won a generous scholarship to Princeton—to everyone’s astonishment, including his own—he’d grabbed it and never looked back.