The Salvage Job

By Teresa Hubley

Archaeologist Charlotte Parrish got guilted via skillful family politicking into helping her real estate developer sister, Sybil, to 'speed up' the historical survey of her new site. Now she has to overcome treasure-hunting kidnappers, warring sheriffs, extra-fickle weather, and, most of all, an ex beau who still knows the way to her heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Teresa Hubley
• Release date: Jun 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463755150

Teresa Hubley

Teresa Hubley was born in Minneapolis and moved every couple of years after that, winding up in a handful of small Midwestern towns, suburban California and even west Africa. As an adult, she acquired a doctoral degree in anthropology and has lived most of her life in Maine, where she works in the health field. She usually has too many books to keep track of going at any time on her reading list. Favorite authors include Charles Dickens, E.M. Forster, Agatha Christie, Elizabeth Peters, and Dave Barry. Lunch out with Teresa and her family usually includes the reading of a few pages while the meal is delivered. When she's not reading or writing, she might be drawing, going for a long walk, or sneaking a guilty pleasure moment playing games on her tablet.

Book preview

[[1]]

She was not prepared to hear that name again, not then, not there. Who would ever expect it to come up out of the blue in the middle of a family barbeque?

Charlotte’s grown siblings and their various progeny and paramours were huddled together on a sunny, muggy summer day under the canopy in the parents’ Midwestern U.S. backyard, all the cicadas and crickets in full voice. The occasion was the introduction of Charlotte’s future sister-in-law, Paulette, to the family. Paulette was a petite Lakota woman with a wide face and large dark eyes framed by shoulder-length blue-black hair, bravely working through her first time at the boisterous Irish-American Parrish family table.

It would never have struck Charlotte as a setting where her old paramour’s name would rule the conversation at any time. He wasn’t natural fodder for the ‘Charlotte’s Loser Ex-Boyfriends’ topic, a topic not completely out of place for the occasion (as she could be made suffer by comparison to her more settled siblings once everyone was done praising them). However, the majority had never heard of him before, their association being brief and somewhat secret even back in Vancouver where she lived. There were plenty other, more colorful entrants on the list for discussion and lecture, from The Burglar to The Stalker (ending with the most recent entry Would Rather Work for a Certain Russian President). She’d purposely not mentioned him to anyone but her brother, loyal Ted, who always kept the faith between them and buried their secrets well.

Charlotte’s younger brother, Ted, favored the ‘Black Irish’ side of the family and so vaguely resembled a Native American, if you squinted a bit, being wiry and dark-haired and almost black-eyed. He looked at home beside Paulette. Charlotte and her twin, Sybil, took after the fairer Irish in the Parrish gene pool. Charlotte had mousy, curly hair whereas Sybil wore a flat-ironed sweep of hair tinted in various golden shades (formerly the same color and texture as Charlotte’s but whipped into shape by a high-toned stylist). Their parents, Joe and Matty, resembled the twins. There were jokes aplenty about Ted’s parentage as a result.

Sybil was picking through the salad Charlotte had made with Matty, tossing the items her latest diet did not allow onto her husband’s plate. Juan Suarez took the items with the air of one familiar with the ritual, giving it his solemn approval. He ate each new morsel that came his way. Juan reflected the classic mix of Central American ancestry with a faintly russet complexion, dark brown hair, and thick-set, tallish build. His upper lip was adorned with a narrow stripe meant to be a moustache. He wriggled the stripe as he sorted through the food that came his way.

Juan had just completed his customary rant about how the local police in the Parrish family’s Midwestern rural hometown seemed to have it in for him because he looked Mexican. Ted had once commented on the side to Charlotte that the real problem was that Juan looked Native and that in their area people tended to associate the reservations just off to the West and North with trouble. Ted and Paulette got stopped by police about as often as Juan, maybe more so, since Juan’s luxury SUV had become well known and so had his wife’s tendency to call up superiors and complain, while Ted’s rusty hatchback looked ready to crumble and no one had ever heard a peep from the Parrish family about pulling over their youngest child.

Now Sybil was ranting about the pompous bureaucrats who posed obstacles to Juan’s construction projects. As business owners, Charlotte’s parents, an auto parts dealer and a hair stylist, tended to sympathize with Juan’s plight. They were nodding in unison and muttering their sympathy. Sybil paused only to say not now repeatedly to various members of her squirming brood of children.

Ted and Paulette, a journalist and a bookkeeper respectively, pretended to pay attention. Paulette’s narrow window of opportunity to speak had closed shortly after the introductions. Being naturally reticent, she did not care but Ted was fuming, gnashing his teeth and rolling his eyes. Sybil took his gestures as encouragement and forged ahead.

Charlotte held her breath, waiting for what she knew would come, a jab at the historic preservation laws that necessitated clearing the construction site for possible antiquities before development could begin. Sybil would always shoot her twin a glare, as if she, as an archaeologist herself, was personally to blame for the laws. Sometimes Joe or Matty would glance at Charlotte too as if to say DO something. In fact, Matty did ask once whether she could help her sister out, since she happened to be in the business. Charlotte begged off getting involved by explaining that since she didn’t know any of the persons involved and worked for a far-off Canadian university, she wouldn’t be able to do anything but stir up resentment among the local archaeological community.

Then in the middle of her familiar ramble, Sybil dropped the name. She started by informing her listeners that Juan, the genius (as she sometimes—well, fairly often--put it), had hired a salvage archaeologist, a woman named Phyllis Louden. Did Charlotte know her? No. She plunged ahead and added that the laws in the state where they were building a hunting lodge and spa, the next state over, a high-plains state best known for lots of bison scapula shovels in the prehistoric record and plenty of live pheasants and other critters for shooting, had a law that compelled sites to give time and space to the state university.

Sybil huffed, That’s where the problem sits now. The state university crew has slowed everything to a crawl. And the guy who runs that crew, he’s an archaeology professor with a real attitude. She looked to Charlotte, conspiratorially nodding. You know the type, sis. He drives Phyllis nuts with his better-than-you airs. Apparently, he wrote the intro text they use in the classes there. He has an ego the size of Brazil. I can’t stand the man but we have to put up with him because the state archaeologist insists. By the book. As if the state archaeologist can really DO anything to us if we don’t include the university crew in every little thing.

Their mother helpfully hinted, Charlotte doesn’t know Dr. Louden but she might have heard of the state university guy. She may have even read his book, might have even met him.

Sybil worked at a speck of salad stuck in her teeth with her tongue and said, Right… René something. She gave up and picked at her teeth with one of her artful fingernails.

Juan said, Claude is his first name.

I think it’s all hyphenated.

It’s not. He uses the whole name professionally, like on the book, but usually goes by Claude or Dr. Guilbeau when he’s at the site. He makes us non-academic types call him by his title..His title! Doctor so-and-so. Only Phyllis calls him ‘Claude,’ her and the history guy.

Sybil snapped, I’ll be dammed if I call him ‘Doctor’ anything. Hell will freeze over first!

Charlotte felt queasy but managed to keep it off her face. Juan and Sybil had not been curious enough to check out Claude René Guilbeau’s background or they would have known he used to work for Humantias University in Vancouver as Charlotte now did. The rest, they would not have guessed, since they tended to think Sybil’s twin was a hapless spinster with no decent prospects and most probably a virgin too, despite the ardor of The Stalker. After all, The Stalker was clearly deranged.

Charlotte glanced at Ted, but he had managed to make his face go blank. He would know that name, because his sister had bleated it through tears once or twice on late night phone calls. Things hadn’t gone well in the brief interlude between them. Claude had taken off and married one of his students rather than work it through with Charlotte. It had been three years since she’d watched them drive away together and nearly that long since anyone had said his name aloud to her. The university had sailed on without him, blithely inserting a couple desperate adjuncts in his place while claiming that was a temporary measure. They’d all saved themselves a boatload of money and a similar-sized cache of headaches when they said Adieu to Monsieur Guilbeau.

Joe said, Maybe while you have Charlotte out here you can bring her over and have her take a look at things, give the place a professional look-over and maybe hand you some pointers. At least you’d have one more person in your corner against those red tape mongers at the government and that jerk of a professor.

Sybil nodded. That would be a big help to us.

Matty asked, What do you think, dear?

Charlotte recognized the ‘not-really-asking-but-telling’ tone of the question. The parents expected her to help out. ‘No’ was not an option, not if she ever wanted to hear the end of it. They could expertly hound a person until their victim begged for mercy. And she had a whole six months sabbatical on her hands with plans to spend it at home (whereat she’d be expected to follow ‘house rules’). Her stated plan was to write up several items she’d been meaning to work on and follow through on one new project to end with a publication and a proposal for funding a more permanent investigation. She’d thought her own hometown area under-appreciated by her colleagues and perhaps ripe for attention. Also, she badly needed to prove her worth for an upcoming tenure review. If anything, the quiet of the small town would be perfect to motivate her, if only by provoking enough boredom to propel her through the project in hopes of getting out faster. Such was her theory. She was feeling a lot less clever just now.

Ted piped up, Charlotte’s pretty busy with her sabbatical work. I was supposed to help her get into a project for it.

Sybil asked, How are you helping?

There are a lot of stories that came up in the paper this year with a historical-type angle. We were going to go through them together. I’ve got a couple great ideas where she can start.

I’ve got a project all lined up already, a real live Indiana Jones set-up, complete with a bad-mannered Frenchman.

Juan grunted, Man’s Cajun. Not real French.

But the bad-mannered part sticks.

Agreed. Don’t forget. He’s just a shrimper’s son from down on the gulf. Going to the Sorbonne didn’t make him a prince.

Don’t I know it.

So, thought Charlotte, do I. She still kept that thought out of her expression.

Matty said, You can help your sister, Charlotte. And she’ll get you anything you need to do your project on her site. Everybody wins.

Joe said, How about dessert? His ‘not-a-question’ pronouncement shifted the conversation away from Matty’s decisive closure. The young kids in the crowd that thronged around the table cheered. Sybil shook her head and announced she was watching her weight. Ted shrugged. Matty crooked her finger at Charlotte and she trundled after her into the house.

Thankfully in Charlotte’s eyes, they stuck to talking in low tones only about the dessert, how long it took to make and how skinny Sybil looked just now. Matty praised Charlotte along the way for ‘having some healthy meat on her bones.’ That was a nice way of saying that she’d noticed Charlotte’s perpetual struggle with her weight hadn’t yielded any results and left her little on the chunky side but she was better off not obsessing. Claude’s student lover, a Costa Rican by birth, had called Chalotte ‘vaca gorda,’ meaning ‘fat cow.’ From her it was a slam. Her mother’s ‘healthy meat’ comment was just her way of putting a positive spin on matters and it did serve to cheer her up a little. As little as Charlotte looked forward to ever laying eyes on Claude again, seeing Gabriela was less appealing, less so now that Charlotte had experienced a much less painful method of being reminded of her weight gain. Well, she had sought a lot of comfort in chocolate at the end of the Claude chapter, so in some ways it was Gabriela’s fault anyway for having helped to end it.

Matty winked at Charlotte to let her know it was time to jump into the next wave of feeding frenzy in the backyard. They delivered the dessert together into the surging crowd of youngsters. The two stars of the show were a raisin sour cream pie and a double-fudge volcano cake. In honor of the dieters in the crowd, Matty had added strawberries with cream (lite of course) but the Parrish family did not count those in the dessert column. Sybil wrinkled her nose again even at that.

As the plates hit the table, everyone but Sybil fell on the bounty with forks drawn. She sat back and scowled at the mess on the kids, directing Juan to wipe here and there. He took a few swipes and then turned the job over to the oldest daughter. The strawberries and cream were shoved to the side while the volcano erupted all over the children.

Charlotte backed out of the chaos with a modest sliver of pie loaded on her plate and retreated to the house. Ted caught up with her as she slipped into the craft room that had once been Charlotte’s bedroom.

What are you at, Lottie? Ted called as Charlotte wrangled with the bag of books she’d brought for reference. She silently fished it out of the pile and held it aloft, That Book.

Oh, he said, clasping his elbows and furrowing his brow in worry.

Charlotte stood and rifled through her copy of Archaeologist in the Field, fondly known as ‘ATF’ back at Humanitas University where that had been the introductory text for first year students. How excited they’d been to get the author into their faculty stable! He’d soaked it up with an entitled air at first, coming off exactly as Sybil and Juan had seen him, all ego and bluster. Charlotte’s first encounter with him had been near the doors to the museum beside the no smoking sign, where, of course, he had just lit up. To her observation that there was this sign behind him that he may not have seen, he snapped, You have any idea who I am?

Charlotte flipped through the book, avoiding but yet wanting to see the author picture at the back, blitzing over the scribbled notes, hers and his, in the margins, his correcting her at times, sharply of course. She couldn’t resist a peek in the end. There were those pale, ice-blue eyes, the sweep of sandy hair, the confident side-look, immaculate, tidy tailoring. It was all the classroom persona he wore, a character he played almost everywhere he went, complete with put-on accent, sometimes vaguely French with a tinge of Boston. Not many got the backstage pass to the real article but she had had it once.

Then she had to see the front of the book, the formal dedication, that cryptic note: A Ma Chère Shay. No one else knew what it meant, which was just as well. He’d scrawled underneath it in his own hand Toujours and then his name, his plain, unadorned real name and not the academic version. For her at that time, he had been just Claude without his middle name René (which he sometimes tacked on with a hyphen to become Claude-René Guilbeau, as it was on the book cover). Here, he wasn’t trying to emphasize his being a Sorbonne graduate or actually French (If you stretched your definition to an American-born Cajun) as he’d preferred to do in academic circles. Here, he was just Claude, reduced to C, her own nickname for him, as Shay was his shorthand for her.

She sighed and slammed the book shut.

Ted shook his head at her. You don’t have to go there, Lottie. I’ll find you something nearby. That would make more sense anyway. You’ve got all your stuff here and a place to live. Mom and Dad will settle down and see reason once I’ve explained my logic.

No offense but I doubt they’d define yours as the voice of reason.

Ted considered the book, drawing a finger across the cover. Why do we let Sybil walk all over us?

She walks with more confidence and she never walks alone. It’s hard to beat her back. You won’t say anything, right?

No, of course not. It would just turn into another chorus of ‘loser ex-boyfriends on parade,’ no good for you and not so hot for him either. Knowing Sybil and Juan and the way they exaggerate everything, he’s probably just doing a perfectly decent job that doesn’t deserve all the whining they’re doing. You might be able to do him a favor by speaking up on his behalf. He might appreciate you for it.

It’s an impossible position I’m going to be in. I can’t do or say anything right for any good reason for anybody.

Ted patted her on the arm and said, Well, I suppose you’re used to that by now. Ted picked the book up and waved it at Charlotte. Stop tormenting yourself with this thing. Put it away someplace. That’s my advice. Get rid of it even.

Charlotte replied, Well, I need it for… She shrugged. It was an intro text, an instructor’s version, full of insights from its author, both personal and public...It was...It was utterly irrelevant to the project and she knew it. It was also her touchstone in life and she couldn’t imagine being without it.

Out in