Everything green looked like poison ivy, and everything flowering was an allergy suspect. To Victor, a simple woodland walk took on the proportions of a minefield crossing. Victor patted his pockets. Maybe he should take an antihistamine when he got back to the church. Where were they? He must have left them back in his toilet articles kit with his green pills, sunscreen, asthma medicine, and the other antidotes to the immediate world. He sneezed, and glared suspiciously at a small yellow flower blooming beside the path. He advanced toward it, intending to grind it into the dirt, but then he remembered the pollen that would be sent into the air from shaking it and turned aside.
Someone was watching him.
“Hello,” stammered Victor to the vaguely human outline concealed in shrubbery. “Are you walking toward the church? I’m going back to get water.” He held up the water jug. “It’s empty. Oh, you have one too,” he said upon seeing his companion more clearly. “Oh? It isn’t water? What’s in there? Nothing alcoholic, I trust. Oh. Cider. I’ve heard that cider is good for allergies. Oh, no, really I couldn’t. It’s very kind of you to offer, but… well, if you’re sure. Perhaps just a taste. It’s an oven out there in the clearing.”
He took the stoneware jug, hooking his thumb through the circular handle, and held it up to drink from, in what he imagined to be mountaineer fashion. The uncorked jug sent a great wave of cider down Victor’s throat, so that he felt something feathery hit his throat, but not in time to spit it out. He was just opening his mouth to ask what it was when he felt his throat being stabbed from within, and cold ripples of numbness began to encircle the ache.
“It’s a bee,” he rasped. “I’m allergic.” He opened his eyes and found himself alone on the path. The trees around him began a slow horizontal rotation, as if they, too, were walking away.
Victor’s heart thudded against his ribs. His sweat was cold. “… Have to take a shot,” he mumbled to himself. “Bee kit…” Was this the way to the church? He couldn’t tell because the path was spinning. Nothing was clear except the pinging little pain in his throat. He listened to the pain for a while.
A new sensation, seeming to come from far away, penetrated his consciousness. He could not swallow. Victor gasped for breath, tugging at the neck of his T-shirt. Dimly he realized that the bee sting in his throat was causing the tissue to swell and closing the air passage to his lungs. It felt a bit like an asthma attack. You strained and strained but nothing reached your lungs. Victor tried to think of a way to breathe without using his throat. He was still puzzling over this riddle in physiology when the spinning path became a blur, and he fell facedown into the weeds, clutching at them to keep from being swept away. He shut his eyes until the darkness filled his brain, and then he was still.
“Where is Victor?” asked Elizabeth, looking around. “He’s certainly taking his time with that water.”
“He’ll come strolling in about lunchtime with some story about a headache,” grumbled Jake. “I should have known better than to let him go for water.”
“I wonder what possessed him to study archaeology?”
“It sounds a lot more romantic than it is,” said Jake. “He probably has visions of strolling through a well- landscaped jungle and coming upon an abandoned Mayan temple just waiting to be discovered.”
One of the day crew shook his head. “Nah. He figures that when he’s the head man, he’ll get somebody else to do the spade work.”
The work continued for another hour, as the sun rose higher in the sky. It cleared the tops of the surrounding trees and blazed at them with white heat. Elizabeth dabbed at her forehead with a tissue. “Gosh, it’s hot out here,” she remarked to Jake. “I’m getting nearly as brown as you are.”
Jake had taken off his shirt and was troweling in the trench next to her. He had wrapped his red bandanna around his head for a sweatband, but a few trickles slipped past it and slid down the sides of his face. He held his arm up against Elizabeth’s to compare tans. “I’ve got a considerable head start, Blue-Eyes,” he grinned.
Elizabeth giggled. “With that thing around your head, you look like an Apache.”
He grunted. “You mean I look like Jeff Chandler, I suppose?”
“What?”
“Jeff Chandler played Cochise in the movie
Elizabeth thought about it. “Was Jimmy Stewart in it?”
“Yep. He was the Indian agent.”
“I guess you’re right then. It’s too hot to think. Where
“Where’s the water? you mean.”
She sighed. “Well, he is a pig to leave us without any. Especially since he drank most of it to begin with.”
“That’s Victor. What are our problems compared to millions of his?”
Elizabeth threw down her trowel. “I give up! I’ll go after the water myself!”
“Victor took the jug,” one of the diggers pointed out.
“Well, I’ll find him and bring it back. Or I’ll get a milk jug from the church. I am going to get some water up here. And when I find Victor, I’m going to tell him exactly what I think of him.” She scrambled up the clay bank and dusted off the legs of her jeans.
“Elizabeth! Wait!” Jake looked worried. “Remember what we said about not getting separated.”
“Oh, stop it! Victor is goofing off. I won’t give him the satisfaction of getting worried about him! If I’m not back in twenty minutes, you can send the cavalry after me.”
“Wait! Wait!” he called as she stalked off. “Don’t you want to take… er…” He pointed to the shrubbery.
Elizabeth gave him a look of complete exasperation. “Twenty minutes, okay?” And she was gone.
Elizabeth was careful where she walked, trying to make as little noise as possible. She was not trying to sneak past some monster lurking in the woods; her thoughts were on the deer they had glimpsed that morning on the way to the site. “There are lots of animals in the woods,” Jake told her, “but unless you’re quiet, you won’t see them.” She had followed his instructions and watched the underbrush carefully, delighted when a log turned out to be a fat groundhog having his breakfast. Now she tried to concentrate on sighting a rabbit or a fawn in order to keep her mind off lower forms of life, such as insects, snakes, and Victor.
He really was impossible, she thought. He had no more sense of responsibility than a groundhog. Was that a groundhog? She bent down to inspect a clump of bushes; no, it really was a log this time. She heard a skittering a few feet from the path and decided that it was a rabbit running for cover. At least the plants didn’t hide. She spent the next hundred yards trying to identify the plants along the path, and mentally rehearsing the tongue-lashing she was going to give Victor.
“… Selfish, infantile, neurotic…” Elizabeth stopped short.
In the weeds ahead she saw a patch of bright blue. Victor’s trousers? What a funny place to sleep, Elizabeth thought, as the truth registered farther back in her mind. “Oh, no,” she whispered.
Victor lay facedown in the weeds, still clutching at a stalk of broom sedge. His legs were spread at a convulsive angle, but he was quite still. Elizabeth was glad that she could not see his face.
“Victor,” she said softly, edging closer to the body. She wondered what had happened; there didn’t seem to be any blood. A stroke? Tentatively, she stretched out her hand. He might still be alive. His cheek felt cool, though. Elizabeth knelt and peered into Victor’s swollen face, and then she was sure.
To Elizabeth, shocked into slow motion by the sight of the body, it seemed that she stood for hours in the clearing contemplating the stubble on Victor’s chin, the water jug resting in a clump of knotweed, and the sound of birds far above her. Actually, only a few minutes passed before fear snapped her out of her reverie and sent her running back toward the site.
Jake looked up as she came crashing through a patch of thistles. “Will you be quiet? Do you want Mr. Stecoah to mistake you for a buffalo?” He saw her face and his smile faded. “What’s wrong?”
“Victor’s dead,” gasped Elizabeth, sinking down on the log.
“How? Same as Alex?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t tell. There’s no sign of a wound.”
Jake turned away. “Okay. That’s it,” he muttered. He turned to the diggers staring up at him from the trenches. “Listen up!” he said, unnecessarily, for he had their full attention. “There has been an accident, and I’m stopping the dig. Everybody go back to the church, but don’t leave. The police may need to talk to you.”
“Stopping the dig?” someone said. “What’s Milo going to say?”
“I don’t much care,” said Jake. “As long as there is someone left for him to say it to.”
