Site Unseen (Emma Fielding Series #2) by Dana Cameron

From Barnes & Noble

A significant archaeological find in a coastal Maine settlement that could predate Jamestown propels soon-to-be-tenured professor Emma Fielding into the heart of a closed community, where dark secrets and jealous rivals could jeopardize her reputation -- or bury her.

From the Publisher

Brilliant, dedicated, and driven, archaeologist Emma Fielding finds things that have been lost for hundreds of years — and she's very, very good at it. A soon-to-be-tenured professor, she has recently unearthed evidence of a seventeenth-century coastal Maine settlement that predates Jamestown, one of the most significant archaeological finds in years. But the dead body that accompanies it has embroiled Emma and her students in a different kind of exploration. With her reputation suddenly in jeopardy — due to the ruthless machinations of a disgruntled rival — and a second suspicious death, heartbreakingly close to home, Emma must unearth a killer among the relics. But that means digging deep to get to dark secrets buried in the heart of the archaeological community — which, in turn, could bury Emma Fielding.

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Table of Contents

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Chapter One

My trousers fell to the floor with a heavy, metallic thunk. My husband, Brian, complains that while other women undress with a whisper of silk, I tend to clank and require the services of a squire to disrobe. He doesn't mind, though, really, there's a certain cachet to being married to an archaeologist that he likes to think rubs off on him. I pulled my shirt off over my head without unbuttoning it, balled it up, and threw it in the general direction of the corner where the rest of my clothing from the week had been piling up, forming my own laundry midden. One thick, overworked sock followed the shirt, and then was followed by its mate, but the second sock went awry and landed on my desk amid piles of notes and books, scattering about a dozen empty film canisters onto the floor. I stared at the new disruption tiredly, took another sip of my well-deserved beer, and decided to take my shower instead of picking up. No one would have been able to tell where the new mess began and the old one ended anyway.

In the bathroom I reached over and set my beer bottle on the cracked tile ledge of the shower and turned on the water, hot and full blast. The shelf was a precarious perch for the beer, already crowded with my soap and shampoo, but it was worth the risk. The utter luxury of a cold beer going down my throat at the same time that steaming hot water poured over my body was not one to dismiss lightly. I could never decide which was more desirable, the beer or the shower, but the combination of the two was positively restorative. Lifegiving.

Outside the shower, I got a start as I caughtmy reflection in the mirror and grinned: I was still wearing my baseball cap. I looked more closely at the lines that were developing around my eyes and mouth and decided that once again, the Red Sox had let me down. The crow's-feet made me look a little older, which I suppose, horrid to say, lends a little more credibility to me as a scholar. I could be as much a feminist as I liked, but I still had to admit that my age and sex were working against me. Academia is still very much a man's world.

Cynic, I chided myself. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You're just tired, same as every other day -- but there I stopped. Today was most certainly not like every other day.

The steam from the shower rolled across the room, fogging up the mirror, obscuring my reflected image. I was forced away from my morbid thoughts as I watched the steam creep down the mirror, blurring and then hiding the freckles on my nose. I batted my eyes in my best imitation of a Southern belle, convincing myself that I came off more like Scarlett O'Hara than Blanche DuBois. Hazel eyes, instead of green, notwithstanding, and red hair, closer to chestnut than black, though. Okay, so what if I was born in Connecticut, was presently working on the coast of Maine, and had never been within spitting distance of Georgia -- it doesn't matter. Every girl needs to believe she's belle-quality indomitable. As the steam reached the bottom of the mirror, I made a kissing noise and bade my image farewell -- y'all come back now, girl, y'hear? With that I slung the hat out of the bathroom door, shucked off my underwear, and prayed that the shower would work its magic.

The moment when that hot water hit my back was like my own private revival- meeting. A moan escaped my lips, and I thought, if my muscles loosening could feel any better I'd be speaking in tongues. In fact, I realized I was already. I was chanting "Oh god, oh man, oh man, oh thank you--" as the water hit my head and worked its way through the sweat to my scalp. With another sip of the cold beer I thought my knees would buckle with pleasure, and as I got down to the serious business of trying to scrape the remains of the day's labor from my body and troubling thoughts from my mind, I began to believe that I might just make it.

When I'd finished, I stood under the water for an extra five minutes; not only was it one of thefew moments of privacy that I would enjoy all day, but it was getting physically harder and harder to tackle this kind of work. I couldn't move around as carelessly as I did when I was eight when I started this work by trailing after Oscar, my grandfather and first mentor in archaeology, and I couldn't bound in and out of meter-deep pits the way I could when I was eighteen and starting my own small-scale digs. It was all Oscar's fault, I decided. If he hadn't introduced me to fieldwork, got me addicted, Id be working in a nice air-conditioned office somewhere. A nice boring air-conditioned office.

At thirty I was in great shape for your typical American adult, but it was clear from the way that I was hitting the Advil this field season that I had to be better about delegating work if I was going to oversee things the way they deserved. I was just having a hard time convincing myself that the students could dig as well as I could, and for no good reason. After all, I'd trained most of them, except for Meg; it was just that I wanted to do it all myself. My role as project director was to organize and synthesize. Archaeology is no place for the incurious or the perfectionist: I couldn't digthe whole site by myself and expect to...