The Date Was Wrong

Somebody fucked with Grandpa.

Zairya Saadia Marrow knew it before she finished the first page.

The date was wrong.

Not obviously wrong. Whoever had done this wasn’t stupid. It was the kind of wrong that could survive an administrator’s review, an investigator’s questions, and probably three attorneys billing the University by the hour.

But Zairya knew where her grandfather had been that day.

She’d been with him.

She turned the page.

The photograph was worse.

It supposedly showed Doctor Marrow leaving a private collection with an artifact whose provenance was now being questioned.

The photograph was real.

The building was real.

Grandpa’s coat was real.

The date wasn’t.

Zairya leaned closer to the screen.

“Son of a bitch.”

The citation was legitimate, too. Grandpa had written the paper. She remembered it because she’d listened to him complain for three days about another scholar’s interpretation of the source material.

But the sentence attributed to him?

Grandpa had never written that shit.

She knew how Elder Marrow wrote. She knew how he thought. She knew which words he used when he was certain and which ones appeared when he wasn’t. She had listened to him argue provenance over breakfast, complain about citations over dinner, and change a single sentence seventeen times because almost accurate irritated him more than simply being wrong.

Doctor Marrow was Chair of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota.

Elder Marrow was a member of the Council.

Grandpa was her best friend.

And somebody had made one serious mistake.

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