Relics Read Online Free PDF Page A

breakfast?”
    “It’s worse than that. I bribe her,” Carmen said. “She still keeps chickens, so she’s fried me some of the freshest eggs I ever tasted, but she’s got no cash to buy things she can’t raise herself, now that her husband’s gone. When I come walking up every morning carrying a package of bacon, she meets me on the porch, already talking. ‘What kind of questions you got for Miss Dovey today?’ she wants to know. And you should see her kitchen. She’s got an electric pump on her well now, but the old hand pump is still right there by her sink. And she never moved her wood-burning cook stove out of the house when she upgraded to LP. It just sits there like a museum piece.”
    “Like the kitchen in our bunkhouse,” Faye said. “It’s a real antique.”
    “Yeah, but Miss Dovey’s kitchen feels—I don’t know, it feels alive. She and her husband grew and slaughtered all their food for over fifty years, and they preserved it and cooked it in that room. She has a wooden table he built her, just to knead bread on. He made it low, so she could lean over and put her back into her work. She’s had to let a lot of the gardening and canning go since he died, and I think her diet has suffered for it, but that kitchen has her life’s history in it.”
    Faye couldn’t help herself. “I do believe Dr. Raleigh has a home economist on his team after all.”
    Carmen rolled her desk chair over closer to Faye’s, so she could smack her on the head with a brimming file folder.
    “Seriously, Carmen,” Faye went on, “this is a treasure trove. You’re absolutely right—you may have already gotten some critical information from Miss Dovey, but when will you find time to do the digging it’ll take to uncover it?”
    “Here’s an extra copy.” Carmen handed her a second binder. “You want to read it? I’m not going to get any more work done on these notes until I’ve finished Dr. Raleigh’s precious door-to-door survey.”
    Faye was impressed by the generosity of an academic willing to part with primary data. “You think I work all the time, too?”
    “It’s still Saturday, isn’t it?”
    “Busted,” Faye said. “Okay, I’ll read your interviews. I’ve done about all I can on the archeology side today.”
    “Good, you can come with me on my afternoon round of interviews.”
    “Me?” Faye was honestly taken aback. “I don’t do interviews—I dig in the dirt. I’d be in the way. Wouldn’t I?”
    “Not at all. It’ll give you a chance to get a feel for the place. And unlike Dr. Raleigh, I don’t think it’s productive to pigeonhole a talented staff. I have no doubt you can help me in my work. Later, maybe I can help you in yours. That’s how real professionals operate.”
    Faye held out a hand, and Carmen gave her a quick, deal-sealing shake. With a colleague like Carmen, things just might work out well, after all.
    ***
    Despite Faye’s initial concerns, she found that Carmen’s easy charm had worked its magic on the Sujosa. Wherever she went, whoever she passed as they wandered through the settlement, she called them by name and asked after their children and their pets, and they responded warmly. Faye, they more or less ignored, but Carmen, they loved.
    Faye didn’t mind being on the sidelines. The walk gave her archaeologist’s brain a chance to look around and enjoy the contrast between old and new, between now and long ago. Actually, she was using the words “new” and “now” rather loosely. She doubted that a new home had been built in the Sujosa settlement during her lifetime—and she was pushing thirty-six. Some of the houses had to be way over a hundred years old, but the people who inhabited them weren’t fossils. They were vibrant and lively, if poor, products of the twenty-first century who just happened to live in very old houses. She wondered what the odds were that any of them would let her excavate in their own back yards. They could be treading on