Past Malice by Dana Cameron Read Free Book Online Page A

before any of the local critters ate it and were poisoned. I threw my stuffinto the back and waited until Bucky got her own seatbelt fastened.
    My sister shook her head hard, as if she was trying to clear up her reception. “So, you going to give me the low-down on what to do? What we’re looking for?”
    “Well, we can start with that. It’s not something specific we’re looking for, at this stage, it’s more like we’re trying to identify what’s there. We will probably be finding the foundations to a wing that burnt down a couple of years after the place was built, and maybe we’ll find out why they didn’t rebuild it after. Other than that, we’re identifying what remains are still present, whether the construction of a small restroom facility will destroy anything important. If we’re lucky, we might find some neat information about the family.”
    She scratched her arm and yawned. “And you didn’t get any of this from the documentary research you did? Didn’t you tell me you’d spent a lot of time in the library and at the archives?”
    “Well, yeah, but the archaeology gives a totally different perspective on things. You might find discrepancies between what they say they were doing and what they were really doing. For example, if we found that the Chandlers paid their taxes during certain years, but we find really cheap pottery that dates to those same periods, it might indicate that they were just scraping along, trying to keep the household going. You only get one side of the picture looking at one set of data or the other. Also, the documents usually only tell about significant situations or people, and in the case of Massachusetts in the eighteenth century—or anywhere else, for that matter—it would have been mostly what men were doing. Women generally only show up in the documents when they hit a life event—like being born, giving birth, dying, breaking the law—”
    “I’m looking forward to that one myself,” Bucky said.
    “You know what I mean. You never get a whole lot about them, unless you are very lucky. The documents also tend to favor the very rich, the literate, the socially or politically powerful, and so on, so archaeology is also the best chance we have for learning about the poor, servants, slaves, children, the illiterate, and the like.”
    “Yeah, but why would you want to?”
    I turned quickly to look at Bucky, but she was smiling. I looked back at the road, hitting the signal for the turn a little more vehemently than I usually would, and gnawed at the inside of my lip.
    Driving and, more importantly, parking, were perennial problems in the coastal towns of Boston’s North Shore, and Stone Harbor was no exception. The streets were for the most part narrow and twisting, built when most people went on foot or horseback or by water. Even on the main roads, the houses were pressed in close together, built when it was imperative to be as close to the center of town—and trade and business—as possible. The modern demands of the tourist trade and upscale housing with a water view had done nothing to diminish the competition for the best spaces down on the waterfront. I let these thoughts occupy me while I tried to think of a response to Bucky.
    She tried to placate me. “I’m serious, Emma. Well, half serious. Why is it so important?”
    “How about getting the full picture? How about knowing how the bulk of the population lived?” I paused to let a minivan take a left turn, then continued on, trying to transmute my fervent feelings into convincing reasons. “I mean, most everyone wasn’t literate, male, white, well-off, right? Even if we only learn a little at a time, it adds to what we know about the past by a huge percentage, as far as I’m concerned. I mean, take the Chandlers. We know scads about him : Matthew Chandler was a judge and a magistrate, literally abigwig in town. We know he was not trained as a military man, but he went on scouting expeditions