Ashes and Bones: An Emma Fielding Mystery - By Dana Cameron Page 0,1

a vacation, Bri, or had you forgotten whose idea this was?” I sounded a lot bitchier than I meant to, but he was the one picking a fight.

There was a long sigh, and I thought he was giving it up. Then he said, “Em. The fingerprints weren’t Tony’s.”

“What fingerprints?” I was so nearly asleep, if he could just not raise his voice or anything, I’d be off in a few moments…

“Don’t be like that. The fingerprints on the postcard. The postcard that you got back in January, the one that could have come from your disgruntled student or even a few people who might be upset that you got them arrested. It couldn’t be from Tony Markham. Tony’s dead.”

“Whatever.” I shouldn’t have answered; I was awake now. He’d pushed too many buttons in one go.

“You know, I was fine when there was still a possibility that Tony was alive, that he’d sent that card. But the police—your friend, Detective Bader—said that the prints weren’t his, weren’t a match for any they had in the…whatdoyoucallit.”

“The AFIS database. Automated Fingerprint Identification System.”

“Right. And the handwriting was similar, but not a real match, and there wasn’t even enough to be conclusive. You saw that yourself, right?”

I didn’t answer. Tony Markham was once a colleague of mine at Caldwell College in Maine, an archaeologist like myself. He’d happened onto a couple of petty criminals, people responsible for, among others, the death of my dear friend Pauline Westlake, and found himself intrigued by the possibilities that life outside the law offered. Something about his first murder awakened a diabolical spark in him, and although the authorities believed that Tony was dead—lost at sea during a hurricane—I had never been convinced. Tony was too wily to die so easily.

“But the fingerprints, that is conclusive,” Brian continued. “I think we need to just chalk it up to a bad prank. You did everything you could.”

“Everything I could? I went to Detective Bader, asked a favor. What else could I do?”

I could hear him as he sat up now, quite serious. “Worry, apparently. I don’t know why you’re letting this get to you so bad. You’ve been so depressed—”

I sat up, too. “I have not.”

He fished out my sandwich, which I’d only nibbled, and began to tear it up, then threw it to the birds. “Looks pretty textbook to me. I mean, shit, half the guys in the lab down the hall work on developing antidepressants. I’m not entirely thick.”

I ignored him; he wasn’t thick, but neither did being a chemist qualify him as a psychiatrist. “Don’t. You shouldn’t feed them.”

“Fine.” He stuffed the other half of the sandwich back into the bag and dusted the crumbs from his hands. “Okay, maybe some of this is still fallout from last semester, and the plagiarism thing and all. That really wore you out. But I think it’s Tony. It’s like you’ve got some kind of morbid crush on him. It’s kinda freaking me out and I don’t think it’s healthy for you.”

“That’s ridiculous!” I ignored the fact I’d used “morbid” myself ten minutes ago.

“It’s like you want him to be back. The way you obsess about it.”

“I do not obsess. I just try not to think about it. I mean, after all, Tony’s dead, right?”

“And for some reason, you won’t believe it. It was a postcard, Emma, that’s all. And you’re building some kind of fantasy around it.”

It wasn’t just the postcard that had only my name and the lone word “soon” on it, I thought. It was someone introducing himself to my revolting ex-boyfriend as Billy Griggs and asking after me. I’d watched Billy die, shot by Tony, almost exactly four years ago this month. It was the lack of a body; Tony had sailed off into a hurricane that he couldn’t have survived, yet there was no wreckage. It was the lily-of-the-valley pips anonymously sent to me two years ago: Tony had killed another man using lily of the valley.

I’d looked up the meaning of lily of the valley according to the “language of flowers” and found that it represented sweetness. It also represented humility, which worried me. In a twisted way, I was convinced that Tony held me responsible for interrupting his scheme and that, with these new “messages,” he was coming back for me.

Tony had been brilliantly manipulative—he’d come close to making me believe that I was responsible for my friend Pauline’s death—and the farther he moved away from his old life, the more his