I tucked my legs underneath me and stared at him. “Are you serious?”
He laughed a little. “Yeah.”
He’d rendered me speechless, at least for a minute. “Thank you.”
And I had my permission to dig at Kilkarten.
So I wrote to Dr. Sam Gregory, the Dublin specialist I’d always meant to contact for the electrical resistivity survey. He came down on Wednesday. He brought two assistants, grad students my age, and we spent three afternoons walking over Kilkarten, staking the land with metal probes and taking readings of the voltage. The survey created a map that showed the resistivity of the land. If we had any large, subsurface features, they’d show up.
Not much showed up.
I’d hoped for a very obvious footprint of a ship, but nothing indicated that strongly. There were some areas that looked promising enough to dig units there, but not what I’d been hoping for. The entire northwestern quadrant of the site was impenetrable by radar because the soil was too dense, so that was a waste.
It would be fine, I was sure. I’d just sort of wanted Jeremy to arrive and to be able to say, “Look! Here it is! I found Ivernis!”
However, I had good news for Mike. “Oh, hey,” I said as we lay out on the grass, and his head rested in my lap. “No weapons.”
He kept shaking his head, amazed. “I don’t understand. This was the defining trauma of most of my life. How can it not exist? Did we just miss them?”
“I don’t know, it’s possible. We seemed to have missed my harbor.”
He laughed and turned his face against my thigh. “What am I going to do without you this week?”
My hand froze on the top of his head. “Um. What? Why will you be without me?”
He stared up at me guilelessly. “I told you. I’m going to London for a charity event this week.”
I scowled down at him. “You most certainly did not tell me.”
He looked surprised. “Oh. Well, I am.”
“Hmph.”
I wasn’t exactly pleased, but at least I had no trouble keeping busy. I had to organize the crew, and gather all my tools. One day I went with Amanda O’Rourke to a folk festival several towns over, and Maggie had me over for dinner with her and Paul. Everyone was very sweet about my boyfriend leaving me for a week. Especially when I sat in the pub and scowled at the wall. At least three different people bought me drinks. As I finished off my last, O’Malley from the restaurant, Tim O’Brien and Eamon Murphy came over, wide grins on their faces.
“We hear he’s quite the athlete, your man. He any good at hurling?”
“Don’t know.” I took a swig and widened my eyes. “He plays football, actually.”
“Does he now? And how is he then?”
They couldn’t have been genuine. I bet they thought they were laying a trap. It made me smile for the first time all day. “He’s a professional, if you’d believe it.”
“Isn’t that a surprise? Charlie, did you hear that? Mike O’Connor plays football. You should have him in your next match.”
Charlie, a young man with gleaming blue eyes, looked back at me with unintentionally complicit glee. “That so?”
I widened my eyes. “It is so.”
We parted with mutual pleasure at binding poor Mike into a soccer game.
I also went into Cork to rent a truck. I had never rented one in my life. I wasn’t even sure if it was legal. Didn’t you have to be twenty-five? Or maybe you just have to pay ridiculous fees under twenty-five? I didn’t know. I lived in the city and barely ever drove.
I needed a truck; something that would carry the archaeologists and crew around, and fit our shovels and pick axes and buckets in the back. In Ecuador, we used to cram in ten people. Our shoulders and knees overlapped while the wind slapped our faces. We clutched the sides and laughed hysterically at each bump.
Which worked great, on the Pan-American. These little Irish roads looked far too narrow for an actual truck.
I managed to make it over to the hardware store without dying. It was much cheaper to buy local than to ship supplies over, and I’d already done my research and figured out where to shop for screens and tools. By the time Jeremy arrived, I’d have everything in perfect shape.
Theoretically.
Next, I set up a meeting with the local crew hires. In the pub, of course, no surprise there. They’d already congregated in the back half of the pub when I arrived on Saturday. They laughed loudly, foam clinging to the sides of their pints. I lifted a hand and smiled, and headed first for the bar and Finn. “Can I have a dozen pints of Guinness?”
“That’s a lot of alcohol.”
Startled, I took in Anna to my left. “Hey. What are you up to?”
Anna finished off her clear liquid. “Day drinking.”
I raised my brows and examined her glass. “Sounds like a solid life choice.”
Anna frowned, like she wasn’t sure if I was teasing or not. “Why are you here?”
“I’m meeting with the crew. You want to come with?”
Anna threw a look back at Finn, and then shrugged her shoulders with studied disinterest. “Yeah, sure.”
Anna’s inability to be impressed actually reassured me as we approached the table. If Anna could be that devil-may-care, surely I couldn’t be intimidated by a table of brawny Irish. I cleared my throat. “Hello, everyone. I’m Natalie Sullivan, crew chief for the Kilkarten dig. Thank you for all meeting me.”
I recognized some of the dozen. Sean Larry, who’d spoken to me at the month’s mind. Eileen’s granddaughter, Amanda, who helped around the inn, and Finn’s sister, Molly, who as far as I could tell was one of five siblings that belonged to the pub. A young man with the same stretched face as MacCarthy—his nephew, I thought he’d mentioned. In addition to the four I knew, eight others ranged around the table. The youngest was Simon Daly, at eighteen and nervous, while the oldest was in his forties with a suspiciously thick mustache for a balding man. The Wójcik siblings, Anka and Jan, whose parents had immigrated here thirty years ago. And three men in their thirties and a twenty-something with attitude. But they were all strong and healthy and outdoorsy, which was the important thing.
One of the men, with a head full of prematurely gray hair, said, “Not to worry, lass. Why don’t you pull up a chair?”
Lassied in the first thirty seconds. I worked to maintain level breathing. Not a good sign for establishing authority.
“Call me Natalie, please.” I tried to make my tone firm but friendly as I sat, Anna squeezing onto the bench next to me. “This is Anna O’Connor, Patrick’s niece.”
Everyone nodded, because most of them had already met her. She delivered her signature scowl, but didn’t say, “I’m not his fucking niece,” so I considering it a positive.
We did a round of introductions as Finn delivered the pints, then I plunged in. “I had several requests that I give an overview of the work, so I thought I’d tell you a little about the dig and answer any questions.” I took a long pull of my Guinness.
Anna kicked me, delivering a pointed look as she raised her hand to her nose. I wiped mine quickly. Dammit, I’d gotten foam on it.
Several of the gathered smirked slightly. One of the men, Colin, who had ears that stuck straight out of his head, a bobbing Adam’s apple and startling beautiful green eyes, spoke. “And you’re the one in charge and all?”
The others laughed.
I sat straighter. “I’m a doctoral candidate in archaeology and I’ve worked on plenty of digs before.” I’d just never been crew chief. “I’m very well qualified.”
The twenty-something smirked and leaned back in his chair. “Don’t have to be,” he muttered, adding some additional comment under his breath.
MacCarthy thwacked him and sent an apologetic look my way. “It’s all in good spirits.”