Timeline - Michael Crichton [36]
She felt the hot sun on her neck and her legs and thought for the hundredth time how glad she was to be in France, and not sitting in New Haven at her cramped little workspace on the sixth floor of the A & A Building, with big picture windows overlooking fake-colonial Davenport College and fake-Gothic Payne Whitney Gym. Kate had found architecture school depressing, she had found the Arts and Architecture Building very depressing, and she had never regretted her switch to history.
Certainly, you couldn’t argue with a summer in southern France. She fitted into the team here at the Dordogne quite well. So far it had been a pleasant summer.
Of course, there had been some men to fend off. Marek had made a pass early on, and then Rick Chang, and soon she would have to deal with Chris Hughes as well. Chris took the British girl’s rejection hard—he was apparently the only one in the Périgord who hadn’t seen it coming—and now he was behaving like a wounded puppy. He’d been staring at her last night, during dinner. Men didn’t seem to realize that rebound behavior was slightly insulting.
Lost in her thoughts, she walked down to the river, where the team kept the little rowboat that they used to ferry across.
And waiting there, smiling at her, was Chris Hughes.
:
“I’ll row,” he offered as they climbed into the boat. She let him. He began to pull across the river in easy strokes. She said nothing, just closed her eyes, turned her face up to the sun. It felt warm, relaxing.
“Beautiful day,” she heard him say.
“Yes, beautiful.”
“You know, Kate,” he began, “I really enjoyed dinner last night. I was thinking maybe—”
“That’s very flattering, Chris,” she said. “But I have to be honest with you.”
“Really? About what?”
“I’ve just broken up with someone.”
“Oh. Uh-huh. . ..”
“And I want to take some time off.”
“Oh,” he said. “Sure. I understand. But maybe we could still—”
She gave him her nicest smile. “I don’t think so,” she said.
“Oh. Okay.” She saw that he was starting to pout. Then he said, “You know, you’re right. I really think it’s best that we just stay colleagues.”
“Colleagues,” she said, shaking hands with him.
The boat touched the far shore.
:
At the monastery, a large crowd was standing around at the top of grid four, looking down into the excavation pit.
The excavation was a precise square, twenty feet on a side, going down to a depth of ten feet. On the north and east sides, the excavators had uncovered flat sides of stone arches, which indicated the dig was now within the catacomb structure, beneath the original monastery. The arches themselves were filled in with solid earth. Last week, they had dug a trench through the north arch, but it seemed to lead nowhere. Shored up with timbers, it was now ignored.
Now all the excitement was directed to the east arch, where in recent days they had dug another trench under the arch. Work had been slow because they kept finding human remains, which Rick Chang identified as the bodies of soldiers.
Looking down, Kate saw that the walls of the trench had collapsed on both sides, the earth falling inward, covering the trench itself. There was now a great mound of earth, like a landslide, blocking further progress, and as the earth collapsed, brownish skulls and long bones—lots of them—had tumbled out.
She saw Rick Chang down there, and Marek, and Elsie, who had left her lair to come out here. Elsie had her digital camera on a tripod, snapping off shots. These would later be stitched together in the computer to make 360-degree panoramas. They would be taken at hourly intervals, to record every phase of the excavation.
Marek looked up and saw Kate on the rim. “Hey,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you. Get down here.”
She scrambled down the ladder to the earthen