It was the first time I’d seen Maisie in the library after dinner. By the time she finished washing up in the kitchen, the rest of us had usually toddled off to bed. She set the tray with coffeepot, cream, sugar, and cups on a sideboard, and then allowed herself to be persuaded to stay and relax a few minutes. She sat ign="Ctly on the arm of a chintz-covered chair. “Well, inn’t this nice,” she said, “sittin’ here in me own house, just like I belonged here or somethin’.”
We all laughed.
“You ought to do more of this and less runnin’ around. I always tell her, ‘Maisie, the house can wait. Relax a wee spell.’ ” William patted his wife on the shoulder. She held her coffee cup and saucer awkwardly in front of her, as if she were unused to such fine surroundings, but she had lived here for more than thirty years.
“Just like a man, inn’t it? ‘The house can wait. The house can wait.’ But while you be relaxin’, the house be savin’ up work for ye. It don’t be doin’ the work for ye.”
We laughed again, but all the women present knew exactly what she meant, I’m sure. I couldn’t imagine taking care of a house this large and routinely feeding a dozen or more people twice a day. Deep lines of care were etched into the faces of both Maisie and William.
Fallon sank into a chair beside the hearth and drew her lightweight sweater around her. There was no fire tonight and the library was chilly. Fallon was a thin, wispy woman who looked as if she would blow away in a stiff breeze. From her husband, pouring himself another whisky, her gaze veered around the room to Tony who was scanning book spines along one shelf, then up and down Tony’s well-muscled backside.
Tony turned, caught her watching him, and grinned. “I assume we’ve all given the police our formal where-were-you-yesterday-afternoon statements?’ ”
He said it in a rhetorical way, but Lettie took it as a literal question that he intended us to answer. “I was in Inverness all day,” she said, “and they can verify that at the library. I had to sign in and out.”
William looked from Lettie to John. “John and I were here,” he said, “in the kitchen, from about—what, John?—from about noon until maybe one-thirty, I ken. I made us our dinner. Soon as John left, I picked up my tools and went oot t’ mend the fence. The fence along the road to town. One section was doon.”
John said, “I came over for lunch and Maisie was gone, so William made us both an omelet and toasted some scones.” I noticed that William had referred to the midday meal in the Scottish way, as “dinner,” and John had used the more English “lunch.”
“So you didn’t actually eat a bag lunch at the dig? That’s not fair, John,” I chided him. Our lunches at the dig were a running joke.
John blushed as he took a gulp of Scotch. “Ah, but I did go over right after lunch, and spent the rest of the afternoon there.”
Tony said, “I stayed at the dig until I saw John coming back and then I left for town. I met with the bloke at the construction company who schedules our heavy equipment rentals.”
“I was at the dig all day,” I said.
“I went to Urquhart Castle,” said Fallon. She turned her face to the dormant fireplace.
For the first time, I noticed a strange, small door in the wall beside the hearth. It was no more than five feet tall, so one would have to stoop to enter. Its dark wood was aged to almost black and there was no knob. Only a circular hole through which, I assumed, one could stick a finger and pull the door open. What could possibly be the purpose of a door there? There were no rooms beyond ` it. The fireplace chimney ran up an exterior wall of the west wing, and the window a few feet to the right of the little door looked out on the central courtyard.
Everyone, including the Downeses, looked at Maisie, the only one who hadn’t yet revealed her whereabouts yesterday afternoon. “I went to Aviemore,” she said. “To the farm market … and they were havin’ a sale on table linens, so I shopped a while.”
Alf Downes said, “We didn’t land at Heathrow until mid-afternoon, did we, my dear? So, I guess that lets us out.”
We all agreed that the Downeses were in the clear.
“But the Merlins, noo, the police are looking for them,” William said.
“Who?”
“The ladies that were here, you know, stayed in the round tower, the ones who left late last night.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I’d forgotten all about them. They were here.” I didn’t recognize the name because Lettie and I had always referred to them as the weird sisters. “What were they doing yesterday afternoon?”
Apparently no one knew.
“I gave the police their home address and the license number of their car,” William said. “They’ll find ’em.”
Chapter Eight
After breakfast the next morning, I found John Sinclair in the parking lot dragging a corduroy jacket from his lovely black Jaguar XK convertible and walked with him to the dig site. It promised to be a warm day, and John was wearing a fresh white shirt, the sleeves rolled up, with khaki trousers. He flung the jacket over his shoulder and carried it, hooked over one finger.
“You said an expert was going to look at the coin I found,” I said.
“Yes. He’ll drive up in the next few days.”
“He’s driving here to see it?”
“From Edinburgh. Indeed, he sounded quite ebullient.” John Sinclair, I had noticed, never used an ordinary word when a pretentious one would do as well.
We took the direct route to the dig, tramping diagonally across the sheep pasture to the southeastern corner of an adjacent barley field. When I walked by myself, I usually took the easier, but longer, route by the road. A paved road between the castle and the nearest two-lane road intersected with a dirt road that led past the students’ camp and the dig. All the land on the castle side of the dirt road belonged to the castle, but I was unsure who owned the land on the other side. Altogether, the Sinclairs’ holdings numbered in the hundreds of acres. The day Lettie and I arrived, William had pointed to a distant wooded area in the northeast and told us they had a shooting hut near a small loch in those woods. A seemingly vast expanse of rocky slopes dotted with rosy heather stretched northward. All of this was castle grounds.
I said, “What about William? Was he excited about our finding the coin?”
“William doesn’t understand history, cultures, or anything, in fact, that’s beyond the Highlands or before the Sinclairs got the castle. He couldn’t tell you the difference between a Pict and a Viking.
h="48p> William has never been a scholar. He fishes, hunts, and farms. I doubt if he’s read a book in thirty years.” John trudged a few steps in silence, then squinted back toward the castle. “When our father died, I didn’t think his will was fair. I admit I was resentful for a time. William got the castle, the land, and about thirty thousand pounds. I got thirty thousand pounds and nothing else. But I was able to finish my schooling on that money, and William used his money to keep the farm going. Since then he’s had to ‘rob Peter to pay Paul,’ as they say. There’s no profit in farming on this scale nowadays. At least, not the way William does it.”
I spied Boots, the handyman, in the distance. Toting a floppy bag that hung like burlap, he cut across the corner of a field south of us and walked toward the woodland. A shaggy black-and-white dog, a Border collie, followed close on his heels. “How long has Boots been with your family?” I asked. I couldn’t recall having heard Boots’s last name; I thought he had been introduced to us as simply “Boots.”
“Since I was a boy. Longer than I can remember.”
“Does he live at the castle?”
“He has a wee … a small cottage at the MacBane farm.”
We stopped at the fence between the sheep pasture and the barley field. John raised the metal loop off the wooden post, pulled the gate open, and bowed gallantly as I passed through. He closed the gate behind us.
“You have a lunch bag with you,” John said. “Don’t you like the lunches we have delivered?”<
br />
“I don’t like the lunches we get on-site, but that’s not the reason for this.” I held up my zippered nylon bag. “I have cartons of orange juice in here. I’m diabetic and I like to have it handy in case I get a dizzy spell.”
“Do you take insulin?” John tripped over a stone, but regained his balance in time.
“Yes, and I keep my blood sugar monitor in my waist pack, so I can do a test any time I’m curious.”
“Doesn’t the orange juice get warm in that little bag?”
“I don’t mind drinking it warm. It’s only for the quick sugar boost if I need it.” I looked back toward the woods. Boots and the dog had vanished into its depths. I made a mental note to take a walk through those woods. Maybe Lettie would like to go with me. Before we do that, I thought, I must ask William to tell me about any special dangers this woodland holds. In my experience, every wood had at least one fearsome specter awaiting the unwary, be it poison ivy or snakes.
“Dotsy, stop by my room this afternoon when we get back. We can talk about the coin and I’ll even show you where it’s being kept.”
“Oh, wow!” I smiled at him.
“That will make three people: you, me, and Tony, who know where it is. Have you thought about a possible connection between the coin and your friend Macbeth?”
“I have, but I don’t want to get my hopes up.” Changing the subject, I said, “Have you always wanted to be an archaeologist?”
“When I started at Balliol, in Oxford, I intended to become a classical historian. The Golden Age of Greece was my main area of interest. In fac”t, I was rather repelled by what I perceived as the coarseness of the ancient Scots, the fact that they were so wild the Romans didn’t even bother to conquer them. But as time went on, I became more and more intrigued by the interplay of many cultures in Scotland, especially the Highlands.”
“I see.”
“I’ve written more than thirty papers for various journals. My latest deals with symbolism on Pictish stones. I’ve also done some notable work on the spread of Ogham writing in the British Isles. But the paper on the stones, I think you’d be especially interested in. I’ll let you have a copy of it.”
“Thanks.”
We had come to the edge of the dig. A cluster of students plodded down a rutted path that ran along the edge of the barley field, and poor, lonely, little Joyce Parsley walked several yards behind them, her head down. Behind her was the even lonelier, I thought, Hannah Dunbar. Hannah was older than the students, in her mid-thirties, I estimated, and I wasn’t sure why she was here. I had the impression she was affiliated with Worcester University in some way, but was she faculty, staff, or what?
The students and a few adults, like Hannah Dunbar and Graham Jones, had pitched camp several hundred feet from the dig site and beside the dirt road. They had planted a conglomeration of little campers, bright nylon tents, olive drab tents, and pop-up trailers. There was a portable potty and a spigot, an offshoot from the waterline that ran to the camp. But no electricity, no gas, and no mother to make them clean up the place. I had walked over there with Froggy two days ago. Could it really have been only two days ago? The whole area around the spigot had become a mud hole any pig would be proud to call home.
John was still on his Oxford scholar kick as we entered the dig site. He said, “When I go back to Balliol now, for reunions and such, I’m usually asked to tea in the master’s lodgings. He has a keen interest in the work I’m doing. I do love to go back there, but I have to laugh when I see my old classmates driving up in their prestige cars, working so devilishly hard to make an impression. Hah!”
And you bought a black Jaguar XK convertible because of its safety rating, I guess.
* * * * *
John called a general meeting inside the tent. There weren’t nearly enough chairs to go around, so most of us sat on the ground while John took a seat on the table beside the coffeemaker. A couple of kids offered me a chair, but it was important to me that I not ask for any special consideration due to my age. I sat cross-legged on the ground, a position I can only maintain for about two minutes.
John cleared his throat and began. “I understand, that is, Tony has told me that there is some grumbling about over the fact that we have put the coin in a secure location.”
Tony Marsh stood a foot or so behind me and I heard him mutter, “Sheesh! He’s making me out to be the bad guy.”
John went on. “Let me explain why it was necessary. We don’t yet know exactly when or where the coin was minted, or have anything but guesses as to how it came to be here. As you well know, nothing like a gold coin has popped up in our years of excavation in this area. Viking hoards have been found in the north, around the Orkneys and Shetlands, and near the coast. But this is a single coin, apparently dropped, probably just lost, sometime near the start of the medieval period.”
“But sir,” a student piped up, “most of us didn’t even get to see it before you took it away. Can’t we at least see it?”
“I will try to arrange a time for all of you to see it, under supervision, of course. My worst nightmare would be for this find to be swiped and to end up melted down for the metal.”
John’s cell phone rang and he answered it as if he didn’t care in the least that twenty-five people were watching and listening.
There was a general restless shuffling all around as students ducked under the tent skirt to get out, even though John had not dismissed them. The kid they called Ian stood up and said, loudly enough that John could probably hear, “The bloody nerve! The man just called us a bunch of thieves.”
From the far side of the tent, Graham Jones shouted, “Assignments for today are posted on the board outside. Check it, and do what it says.”
I waited until I could get close enough to the bulletin board to see what my assignment was. Bunching up in a solid mass, crowding around, is something an adult forgets about after they’ve lived in the civilized world beyond school for a few years. It felt strange to be jammed up like this, just one of the kids, getting elbowed and pushed. I found my name on the field-walking list.
There was a star on that same list beside Iain Jandeson, which meant he was the designated captain of our seven-person group. So he spelled it Iain, not Ian, did he? I had seen the name spelled that way before, but I didn’t know if it was a regional spelling quirk, or what.
John Sinclair pulled me aside as I hurried to catch up with Iain. “I have to leave for a while. The Quales, Froggy’s parents, are meeting with the police and they’ve asked me to be there. They have some issues regarding our site security, apparently. It’ll probably take a couple of hours, so I’ll see you back at the castle later.”
“Oh dear, it’s bound to be difficult for you.”
“I don’t look forward to it at all,” he said.
* * * * *
Joyce Parsley was on the field-walking list, also. I fell in beside her and followed Iain, who announced that we were headed for the moor. Joyce was a round-faced girl who looked far too young to be in college. She always wore an old anorak and a canvas camouflage hat pulled down low so she had to tilt her head back a little to make eye contact. She didn’t seem to have any friends at the dig, but I had noticed that wherever Froggy Quale had been, Joyce had tended to be also.
“You’re staying at the camp, aren’t you, Joyce?” I asked. “What are the students saying about Froggy? Surely they have some thoughts on what happened.”
Joyce’s face reddened. “Actually, I haven’t heard anyone say anything, not really.” She side-stepped a clump of emerging barley and glanced quickly toward me. “We’ve all been talking about it, of course. But nobody has said anything, like, you know, like they think they know who did it. Everyone’s totally baffled.”
Ahead of the group, Iain Jandeson marched purposefully toward the heather-sprinkled moor. He wore, as always, an Aussie-style bush hat, khaki shirt and pants, like a junior Indiana Jones. Two other students, a boy and a girl, caught up with him. They p
ushed each other off balance in what appeared to me to be more sex-play than horseplay.
“Tell me about them,” I said to Joyce.
“Who?”
“Those three in front. They seem to be together a lot.”
“Yeah, well. The one with the hat is Iain Jandeson. He’s okay. Serious, like. He’s determined to become a famous archaeologist. Discover the holy grail or whatever.”
“He’s a little strange, is he?”
“No, not strange. Well, maybe a bit. Determined would be a better word, I’d say.” Joyce paused a minute. “He believes he was abducted by aliens.”
“What?”
“He says his memory is missing a whole day, and he’s pretty sure he was taken to this round sort of metal room. He says he has flashbacks.”
“You are joking, of course.”
“Not joking. The bloke with the bushy red hair is Proctor Galigher, and the girl is Tracee Wagg. All three of them go to Worcester, same as me and most of the people here.”
I studied the young man. Like Iain, Proctor was tall. His hair shrouded his head in a roughly Hershey’s Kiss–shape. His unbuttoned black shirt and low-slung jeans exposed a well-muscled torso. The girl gave him a big shove that he pretended knocked him off his feet.
“Speaking of people who might have had a reason to kill Froggy, there’s one right there,” Joyce said.
I grabbed her sleeve and pulled her to a halt. “What do you mean?”
“Last term at school, Proctor submitted a research paper to an ecology professor who gave it to Froggy to read. Froggy was the prof’s research assistant. Froggy knew the paper was plagiarized, so he gave it back to the prof with a copy of the article it had been copied from. Proctor got probation for a year, but he nearly got kicked out.”
“He shouldn’t have blamed Froggy for that,” I said, “but I’m not surprised if he did. People so often blame the messenger.”
Death of a Lovable Geek Page 6