Death of a Lovable Geek

by Maria Hudgins

  “Aye, first thing the morn.”

  Robbie promised he’d let me know what he found out when he talked to the solicitors, and pointed me up the stairs when I asked if I could see Van. “Knock before ye open his door, unless ye want to get an eyeful,” he cautioned me.

  * * * * *

  I paused outside Van’s door until I decided that the strange sound filtering through from the other side was merely a human voice speaking a language in soft undulating tones. Short sentences followed by long pauses. Van must be on the phone to his mother, I decided, because mothers do eighty percent of the talking when on the phone with their children. I knocked.

  Van, a little cell phone held to his ear, opened the door. With a toss of his head, he invited me in but continued his phone conversation. I recalled that Van had told me his family ha Dd immigrated to the United States at the end of the war. Had his mother never learned English? Van seemed to be at ease speaking Vietnamese, but then how could I tell if he was speaking it correctly or not?

  His whole bank of electronic gizmos danced with blinking lights and flashing screens. On the other side of the room, Froggy’s side, a microscope and a laptop sat idle and dark.

  “Sorry about that. That was my mom,” Van said, punching a button on his phone with his thumb.

  “You always speak Vietnamese with your mom?”

  “She speaks English, but when she’s on a rampage, she flips over to her native language. She came to America with my grandparents when she was about eighteen. I learned to speak Vietnamese at home when I was little.”

  “What’s she on a rampage about?”

  “She thinks I’m waffling about coming home for Christmas.”

  Van was wearing jeans but no shirt, shoes, or socks. His long hair was wet, so I concluded that he’d recently showered.

  “Put something on your feet,” I said. “This floor is chilly.”

  Van put his phone to his ear. “Mom?” He scowled at it and thunked it against the palm of his hand. “That’s funny. I thought I heard someone tell me what to put on my feet.”

  I lowered my head in mock humility. “Forgive me. It’s a habit I’ll never break.” I glanced at Froggy’s abandoned desk again. “Have the police talked to you since yesterday?”

  Van sort of grunted and stretched out on his bed. “Nope. Maybe they’ve decided to get off my case and start looking for the real killer.”

  I relaxed a bit at this news. “Boots said something about a party at the camp last night. He wouldn’t tell me about it.”

  “I ran into him last night when I was walking over there. We went in together but we didn’t stay long. At least I didn’t. Boots might have.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Very strange. They were all in this one camper. Proctor’s, I think. There was this fire coming down and making this weird noise and they were all just sitting there, staring at the flame with their mouths hanging open.”

  “You mean the camper was on fire and they weren’t doing anything to put it out?”

  “No, it wasn’t on fire. I don’t know what it was. It was more like some kind of bogus light show.”

  “Do you think they were on some sort of mind-altering substance?”

  “Yep. I think that’s a safe assumption.” Van cupped his hands behind his head. “Then all of a sudden, this girl, Joyce. You know Joyce?”

  I nodded. “Joyce Parsley.”

  “Well, Joyce stands up and points out the door, toward me, and yells, ‘You killed Froggy!’ and I ‘bout freaked.”

  Horrified, I said, “Then what?”

  “Then nothing. They’re all sitting there like zombies and I said something like, ‘Me? You’re crazy!’ and she didn’t answer me. I definitely di “n’t want to go in there with her calling me a murderer and fire coming down and a dozen kids in lalaland. I’m not that nuts.” Van looked at me and quickly averted his gaze. “So I split.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  I filled him in on my trip to the hospital and told him that John was in a coma. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to him, Van. His liver and kidneys have both shut down, and his wife says he’s Rh negative so the odds of a tissue match are slim. The doctor told us he’s too weak to survive a transplant anyway.”

  Van rose up on one elbow. “What if he … no, that’s selfish, I shouldn’t say that.”

  “Say it.”

  “What if he dies? Would I be stuck here with no rent money and no tuition for next term? I’m counting on the money he promised me for putting this presentation together.”

  “Do you have anything in writing, or was this an oral agreement?”

  “Oral. I mean, his wife, Fallon, she’s a Cambridge graduate, and he’s a college professor. I didn’t think I’d need a written agreement.”

  “Perhaps you don’t,” I said, looking at the stack of open documents on Van’s computer monitors. “What is this presentation for, after all? How far have you gotten with it?”

  Van popped up from his bed and dashed to the wheeled chair in front of his keyboard. He slid the mouse around, clicking windows shut. “You want to see what I’ve got so far? Have a seat.”

  I pulled out the chair at Froggy’s desk and turned it around to face Van’s wall of electronic boxes. What he had so far amounted to fifteen minutes of photos with voiceover in places, music in others, and a couple of short segments with John Sinclair and with Tony Marsh talking about the dig and about Scottish history. There was a scene in which ghosts from the past—taped, I assumed, by some sort of double exposure process—walked through the current dig site. Neolithic ghosts in hides and furs, medieval ghosts in tunics and leggings, fifteenth century ghosts in their Sunday finery. A chill ran up my arms because this was so very close to the vision I had had the other day as I worked at the old wall. It was as if Van, or whoever had thought of this, had crawled into my head.

  “Here’s where he wants me to put in a picture of the coin you found,” Van whispered.

  This was followed by several segments in which the camera panned around the area of the MacBane farm, the road past the dig, the meadow, and the castle. It lingered longer on the castle than the other spots. The next snippet showed a hand-drawn map on which I could make out the castle and the dig site, but everything else looked unfamiliar. There was no narration in this part.

  “This is about as far as I’ve gotten. I’m going to have to cut some stuff because Dr. Sinclair wants the finished product to run no more than twenty minutes,” Van said, reaching toward the mouse beside his keyboard.

  “No, wait! Don’t click it off yet. I want to see this.”

  There was a hotel drawn on the map, as large as the castle in area, and located east of it so that the castle, the hotel, and the dig site formed a roughly equilateral triangle. The MacBane house was gone. The roads between the three places had obviously been widened. They had med }iftan strips!

  The moors between the dig and the woods where Lettie, Boots, and I had walked an hour ago, had been renamed the Grimpen Mire. Shades of Sherlock Holmes! I was aghast.

  “Whose idea is this?”

  “Dr. Sinclair’s. He drew the map. He said we’d put in a professionally drawn map later.”

  “He’s planning to make this place into Disney World, Highland Branch. Oh my God! How awful!”

  “Bogus. Yeah. I thought so, too.”

  “Do William and Maisie know about this? Is Tony Marsh in on it, too? What about Robbie? Has he seen this?” I waited for an answer but someone was knocking at the door downstairs.

  Van called out, “Robbie! Get the door.”

  The knocking got louder; more insistent.

  “Oh, crap. I better go down,” Van said. He still had no shoes on. “I guess Robbie’s gone somewhere.”

  I heard him pad down the squeaky stairs and I heard the front door open with a pop.

  “Nguyen Van Duc? We’re here to arrest you for the murder of Dylan Quale.” />
  Chapter Twenty

  I dashed down the stairs to see who was there and how many of them there were, but Van’s tall frame blocked most of the doorway. Past his right shoulder, I glimpsed Chief Inspector Coates and a uniformed man I thought I had seen in the incident room back at the castle. “Now wait a minute,” I said. “You can’t come barging in here like this!”

  “Don’t, Dotsy,” Van said, turning his head slightly toward me. “Let me handle this.”

  “What evidence do you have?” I spat out the words. “A Hawaiian shirt?”

  “Be quiet, Dotsy.”

  Van said that in a tone of voice that sent me back up the stairs. I stood in his room and trembled with rage. Almost immediately, Van came in and fell to his knees. I knelt to help him up, but then realized he had not collapsed; he was merely looking under his bed for his shoes.

  Dragging out a pair of huge Nikes, he rose and turned, the scent of coconut shampoo swirling around his head. He pulled on a sock while standing on one leg, fell to the bed, and tried unsuccessfully to twist the heel of the sock around to the back of his foot. He got it as far as his instep and gave up on it. Ripped it off and flung it against the wall. His trembling fingers broke off two shoelaces when he tried to make a bow. “Shit!” He swiped his cheek across his shoulder and said, “Hell with it. In jail, they take your shoelaces, anyhow.”

  I felt so helpless. I could see that it was taking a Herculean effort for Van to hold back the flood of tears behind his eyes. I wanted to help him tie his shoes, but that would have really made his humiliation complete. “What’s your home phone number?” I asked. “I’ll call your parents for you.”

  “No! They can’t find out! No way! Dotsy, if you tell my parents about this, I’ll—”

  “They have to know, Van. You’ll need a lawyer.” I thought of how I would feel if one of my childr parents c&was in this situation and going through it alone. “They need to know!”

  “Pleeassee. Don’t tell them.” The look in his eyes forced me to promise that I wouldn’t. For now, at least. His hair, falling like a shroud around his shoulders and bowed head, would need to be combed and tied back when it dried. But they’d probably take combs and rubber bands away from him, too. I pulled a shirt off the peg on the back of his door and handed it to him. Van looked confused, as if he was unaware that he didn’t have a shirt on.

  Outside the bedroom door, a uniformed man in a navy sweater and a hat with a checkered band stood silently. I hadn’t noticed him before, but he might have been there the whole time. He followed close behind Van as they descended the stairs.

  I watched from Van’s window as they led him off, in handcuffs, to one of the two cars they had arrived in. Two uniformed officers and two men in suits. Who was the other suited man? He might be the Procurator Fiscal that William had told me about, I decided.

  I pressed my forehead against the cold window glass and willed my tears to hold back a little longer. They drove off with no sirens or flashing lights, thankfully, because I hoped this wasn’t being watched by the kids at the camp. They would’ve been able to see this far down the road, if they were looking.

  I didn’t trust myself to shut down all of Van’s electronics, and, in fact, I didn’t know how to, so I clicked off the open programs on his computer, turned off the two power strips into which everything seemed to be plugged, and drew his curtains.

  * * * * *

  “I’ll take you in my car,” William offered when I ran into him at the entrance to the castle parking area. He backed down the stepladder he was using to reach the top of a tall shrub with his gas-powered hedge trimmer.

  “I can drive myself,” I said, “if you’ll tell me where they’ve taken him. I’d get Lettie to take me, but she’s on pain killers. Did you hear about our accident?”

  “Oh, aye. Maisie told me. You lassies need to take care; this is a different sort of driving for you.” He folded his ladder and carried it along as we walked across the parking area. “They’ll have taken him to the police station in Aviemore, I ken. Let me call them before we head that way. I’ll make sure, so we’ll not be wastin’ a trip.”

  William stowed his hedge trimmer and ladder inside the kitchen door and stepped in to make the phone call. I waited at the door until he reemerged. “The lad on the desk said ye probably won’t be allowed to see your young friend. Do ye still want to go?”

  I definitely did, but I hated to take up William’s time. He led me to his greenish Volvo and moved an armload of boots, jumper cables, and boxes of ammunition to the backseat to make room for me to sit. The car smelled of diesel fuel and hay. “Have you been to the hospital today?” I asked as I fastened my seat belt.

  “Maisie and I are going there as soon as I get back. She’s tellin’ Christine how to handle dinner, but she hates to leave all of ye to yerselves. Can’t be helped, though. We need to spell Fallon for a bit. She’s been there since yesterday, and she needs sleep.”

  “Will you spend the night there?”

  “Aye, so ye’ll be at Christine’s mercy for breakfast, too.”

  “Don’t worry about us. We can take care of ourselves.”

  William drove past the woods where the shooting hut stood and beyond it to the low-lying glen. I looked back over my shoulder and saw the cliff off of which I had nearly tumbled to my death. From this side, it didn’t look as high as it actually was because the trees and gorse bushes below camouflaged its base. William stopped when our narrow road intersected a paved two-lane one and turned right onto it.

  “If John comes to, that is, if he regains consciousness tonight, I willnae tell him aboot this lad of his gettin’ arrested. He doesnae need anythin’ more to worry aboot.”

  “Oh, of course not,” I said. “Do you have the same system as we have in the U.S.? You’re entitled to have a lawyer, I mean a solicitor, present when you’re being questioned?”

  “Aye, and if ye cannae afford one, they’ll give ye one.”

  “That’s just it. Van can’t afford one, and if it works like it does back home, the court-appointed lawyer doesn’t always knock himself out to help you.”

  “They appoint a duty solicitor from a list of regular practicing solicitors. They’re competent, I’m sure.”

  Competent wasn’t good enough. I didn’t want Van to be at the mercy of the merely competent. I wanted him to be represented by someone who would fight for him as if his own life depended on it. As I watched meadows and grazing sheep roll past my window, I realized that I was going to have to hire that solicitor myself. Could I afford it? No. Was I going to do it anyway? Yes. Maybe they’d let me put it on a credit card. I could take out a loan when I got home.

  William pulled up to a boxy granite building on the main street in Aviemore. A big sign in front read “Police,” and it seemed to me that Aviemore consisted of not much more than one main street with smaller ones leading off it. I really could have found the station myself, assuming that I could have driven this far without destroying the Micra’s transmission.

  A man I’d never seen before was on duty. When I asked about Van, he said, “Van Nguyen? We have a Nguyen Van Duc (which he pronounced Nooyen von Duck) we brought in this afternoon.”

  I was confused about which of those names was his first and which was his family name, but this was no time to worry about it. “May I see him?” I asked.

  “Are you a relative?”

  “A friend.”

  “Sorry, but we cannae let him see anyone before he’s been questioned.”

  Slowly, I dragged out of him the information that Van would be interviewed tomorrow morning and that he would be allowed to see a solicitor first. After that, he would, if appropriate, be formally charged.

  William stood silently behind me until, through an open office door off the reception area, he spotted a man he apparently knew. The man beckoned to William with a subtle jerk of his head, an invitation into his office that obviously didn’t include me. I noticed he took William’s elbow in a famili
ar way while William, I assumed, explained to him why we were here. My common sense told me William would get a whole lot more information from that man than I ever could from Mr. Formality at the front desk. It was a matter of friend-to-friend versus junior officer-to-total stranger.

  t size="2">I scooted around the desk until I was as close to William and his friend as I could get without an invitation to join them, and tried to keep the duty officer engaged in a discussion about solicitors.

  “I want to retain the best solicitor I can find to represent my friend,” I said. “How might I go about doing that?”

  “People usually ask around. Ask other people they know.”

  At length, he was persuaded to pull out a printed list of local solicitors and let me look at it. Perfect. I could kill a lot of time standing there, writing down names. Unfortunately, William stood with his back to me, about five feet beyond the office door, so I couldn’t make out what he said, but the other man’s voice, although conspiratorially low, was somewhat audible. By straining my ears, I could hear about half of what he said. I fished a little notepad from my handbag and started copying names.

  I heard: “The lad was wearing this Van kid’s shirt when his body was found … know they had an argument … students at the dig told us … some girl he was shaggin’ … stood young Quale up, they said … might have been still sweet on her … ticket for an American football game …”

  At this point, I was pretty certain William’s response was something like, “I’m the one who turned in the ticket.” He may have also told him that I, the lady standing at the counter, was the one who found it because, without actually looking up, I got the feeling they had both looked my way.

  I heard: “Aye, fingerprints all over … but I told Duncan Coates, I said … Right … I said, nobody buys one ticket … searched his desk, and what do you think we found? Another ticket. For the stadium seat right next to the other one.”

  I felt sick. Even with half the conversation missing, I had heard enough to know that they’d searched Van’s room and found another ticket, obviously half of a pair. I needed to talk to Van, to hear his explanation, but at the moment I couldn’t think of any possible one. I swallowed hard and forced myself to keep writing, or rather, pretending to write. I wanted the policeman to tell William about the fingerprints on the second ticket. That would tell the whole story, wouldn’t it?