Death of a Lovable Geek

by Maria Hudgins

  Froggy had accessed a spreadsheet program, several word processing documents, a large file of photos, a pinball game, and some sort of combat game. On the Internet, he had looked at several scholarly papers, all related to spores or pollen, a half dozen microscope and laboratory equipment suppliers’ sites, and some more games. I was happy to see that Froggy had been a typical young man in that respect.

  Then I found what I had hoped, or perhaps feared, I’d find. Froggy had accessed sites that dealt with Psilocybe, Paneolus, and Conocybe mushrooms. These were all hallucinogenic mushrooms whose names I recalled from my reading last night. He had read about the physiological effects of ibotenic acid, serotonin, and muscimol—all chemicals found in hallucinogenic mushrooms—and he’d visited one site that dealt with laws on the selling, harvesting and buying of magic mushrooms.

  Joyce had told me that Proctor had supplied the mushrooms for the party, and I believed she was telling me the truth. Not the whole truth, though. Joyce was hiding something. I felt certain she did remember yelling at Van, but didn’t want to discuss it now, in the sober light of day.

  Froggy could have actually been the mushroom procurer. He could have obtained them and given them to someone who simply saved them until party time on Saturday night. Froggy would have been better qualified than anyone else to identify mushrooms from the woods, and I knew he had been out somewhere, collecting. There was a woven basket beside the desk in his room much like the one I had bought myself.

  If Joyce was telling the truth when she said that Proctor was the mushroom man, Froggy might have found out what he was doing, researched it online, and threatened to tell John Sinclair. That might have gotten Proctor thrown out. That, plus the fact that Froggy had already turned Proctor in for plagiarism, might be a motive for murder.

  From the finds shack, I walked the few feet to the main tent to locate someone who could relock the door for me. Tony and Graham were seated at a table with a site map between them, unrolled and held flat with a couple of rocks. Tony was on his cell phone. He flipped it closed, looked toward me, and waved me over.

  “That was Maisie on the phone. You need to run over to the castle, straightaway. The coin expert from Edinburgh is on his way.”

  “Oh, no! I don’t know what to tell him.”

  “Apparently, when John talked to him last week, he gave him your name and told him to see you if he wasn’t available. His name is Kenneth Owen. Dr. Kenneth Owen.”

  I dashed to the grass on the side of the tent where we all kept our backpacks and found my car keys.

  “You have a car, Dotsy?” Tony asked. “May I ride over with you? I’ve left my own car at the castle.”

  Pulling out of the dig site parking lot added one more challenge to my already overtaxed driving skills, and I thought the crumpled hood was quite enough damage for Lettie to have to explain when she returned the car. Mud holes big enough to swallow the little Micra, at least up to its axles, peppered the lot like Swiss cheese. I had to steer around them while shifting gears with my left hand and remembering which pedal was the clutch. Tony, ever the gentleman, maintaine^>ba straight face and said, “Maisie has called a couple of local women in to do the cooking and see to the guests for the next few days.”

  “Very sensible. I was thinking about volunteering to help her, myself. Obviously, Christine can’t handle it all.”

  “Maisie and William will have all they can manage with funeral arrangements and such. There’ll be friends and family coming in, and people dropping by. Fallon has been on the phone all morning, passing the word along to the college and to their friends back home.”

  “It would be nice if we guests would leave until the funeral is over. We’re just one more problem William and Maisie don’t need. She should kick us out, or at least tell us to get our meals somewhere else.”

  “Maisie would never do that,” Tony said as I swung into the castle’s parking area. A woman I didn’t know met us at the front door and told me I could find Fallon in the library. Tony asked if Maisie was around and was directed to go to the kitchen.

  Fallon was on the phone. Pacing back and forth in front of the fireplace, she pushed her limp hair out of her eyes and kneaded the back of her neck.

  I could tell she was exhausted. I waited until her caller hung up and said, “Fallon, I’m so very sorry.” Such an inadequate, stupid thing to say, but it was the best I could do.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Dotsy. I can’t deal with that museum man on top of everything else.”

  Fallon and I talked for a few minutes. She told me that she’d given permission for an autopsy and that the doctor had ruled John’s death to be natural and the result of massive organ failure.

  “I’m glad of one thing, Dotsy. He never regained consciousness after he went into that coma. If he had, he’d have been in horrible pain, so at least he was spared that.”

  “What happened to him, Fallon? Why did his liver fail like that?”

  “Well, we all got sick that evening, didn’t we? I think it’s obvious. The rest of us fought it off and got better. John couldn’t because he drank too much, and his liver was already half shot.”

  I followed Fallon to their suite on the third floor. Four days’ worth of clothes and towels hung off the unmade bed, the chairs, the dressing table, the lamp stand. Two or three trays of petrified food still sat on the floor and the top of John’s dresser. I went to the closet and pulled out the big metal suitcase.

  “Oh, that’s where it is,” Fallon said. “John told me he was keeping the coin in that old box of his, but he didn’t tell me where he had put the box. Oh, dear, I’m supposed to know the combinations to the luggage locks, but I never use that big one. I’ve forgotten what numbers he used.”

  “Four-four-four,” I told her, spinning the number wheels myself. “Four letters in the name John.” The little treasure chest was inside, exactly as John had left it. “Do you have the key?”

  “It’s in the sitting room, I think.”

  Not exactly high security, I thought, keeping the box and the key to the box within thirty feet of each other. I followed Fallon into the sitting room. The sofa where John and I had sat on the only other occasion I had been in this room, caught my eye and made a lump in my throat. I could still hear him saying, “If anyof on S:g happens to me, Dotsy, get this box immediately and take it to the Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh.”

  Well, that was okay. The museum was coming to us, today. Fallon scrambled through a couple of drawers but couldn’t find the keys. “I know they’re here,” she said, pulling up the sofa cushions. She ran her hands around the inside and down in the grooves. I checked under the chair cushions, beneath the slipcover skirts and then spotted a pretty lacquered box on a demilune table against the wall. I opened it and said, “Ta da! Are these the right keys, Fallon?”

  “Wonderful! I don’t know why I’d have put them in there, but I obviously did.”

  Fallon and I hurried back to the bedroom.

  The box was still on the bed where I had left it, but it was open.

  And empty.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  I could have been sick right there, but I didn’t have the time. The door to the hallway stood slightly open, as Fallon and I had left it when we came in. To the best of my recollection, we hadn’t completely shut it before I fetched the box from the closet. I dashed down the hall and into the square tower from which the only egress, at this level, was the one stairwell that extended all the way down to the cellar. Thanking the Lord for my rubber-soled shoes, I flew down to the second floor and peeked down that hallway. Deserted. All the doors along the hall, including the ones to Lettie’s room and my own, were closed. Down again, to the first floor and into the room in which Fenella and Roger Sinclair’s pictures still stared at each other. That hallway was also empty, but the library door on the right-hand side was open, I surmised, from the fact that a rectangle of yellow light poured across the stone floor and onto the opposite wall.


  The only other doors in the portrait room were the two large ones leading into the great hall. I opened one of those wide enough to peek through and saw a gray-haired gentleman perched rigidly on one of the two huge Jacobean chairs that flanked the stone fireplace opposite the front door. Uh-oh. The coin expert; the man I least wanted to see right now. How had he gotten here so quickly?

  I backtracked to the other door and into the west hall. There was an exit door on my left, the one out of which I had tossed my cookies the other night. I stuck my head out and looked up and down the west lawn of the castle, along the stone wall where Froggy’s tarp-wrapped body had lain, and to the pasture beyond. Boots stood, doing something with a garden hose, at almost that very spot.

  I called out, “Boots, have you seen anyone out here in the last few minutes?”

  “Nae,” he called back. “But a car pulled up in front aboot ten minutes ago.”

  That had probably been Dr. Owen, the coin expert. Hurrying down the hall to the library, I found William and a woman I’d never seen before. William motioned me in to meet her. She was one of the local women Maisie had called in to help. As soon as I made the mandatory comments about how glad we were to have her, I asked them both if they’d seen anyone else in the last few minutes. They hadn’t.

  Back up the stairs, this time via the stairwell in the round tower, and down to Fallon and John’s suite again. The door was still open, and I found Fallon lying on the unmade bed, tthe open treasure box at her side. A tear had left a trail across her right temple and into her hairline.

  “I’ve let John down. Of all things to get stolen, why does it have to be the coin?” She seemed too defeated to even lift her head. “Did you find anyone, Dotsy? Surely, someone … I mean, how did it happen so fast? There were four leather bands to unbuckle and the lock to open. And we had the key! It would take a Houdini to pull that off.”

  “Fallon, do you know what else was in that box?”

  “John told me something about an earring someone found.”

  “Yes, that was in the box, and something else. There was a stamp. A stamp attached to a letter. John told me it might be worth as much as fifty thousand pounds.”

  She blinked and sat up on one elbow. “Incredible! Are you sure? He never said anything to me about it.”

  That rather fit my impression that John and Fallon’s marriage had not been that close. There was the death of their child; did Fallon blame John for that? I was pretty sure that she and Tony Marsh were having an affair. Had John known? Did Fallon know what John had had in mind for the castle property? I wished I had an hour to myself, to think, but I didn’t. I had an important man from Edinburgh waiting for me downstairs, probably slapping his watch by now.

  “I have to leave again, Dotsy,” Fallon said. “Tell Maisie I won’t be here for dinner because I’m driving to Fort William and I’ll be back late.”

  “Will do,” I said, backing out the door. “The coin guy is downstairs, so I’d better go and face the music.”

  * * * * *

  I was expecting to meet a fusty old pettifogger smelling of mothballs, so I was rendered temporarily speechless when the gray-haired man who stood when I entered the great hall flashed me a heart-melting smile. He looked a lot like Cal Ripken, Jr., with his buzz-cut, thinning hair and cornflower blue eyes, and he had wisely chosen a royal blue polo shirt to wear with khaki trousers. The effect was devastating.

  “Dorothy Lamb?” he asked, extending me his hand.

  “Call me Dotsy,” I said, “but you’ll probably call me something worse when you hear my news.”

  Dr. Owen raised his eyebrows.

  Might as well get it over with.

  “I’m afraid the coin was stolen not more than ten minutes ago.” I then spilled out the whole story, ending with, “Has anyone come through this room since you’ve been sitting here?”

  “No. A young girl with short brown hair received me and suggested I sit here until she found you.”

  “That would’ve been Christine. She must have forgotten to give me the message, or gotten sidetracked. Things are in a horrible mess here today, Dr. Owen. You’ve heard about the death of Dr. Sinclair, I’m sure.”

  “No!” The look on his face was one of genuine shock. “What happened?”

  I needed to do a lot of explaining about the coin, about John’s death, about why John had given him my name, so I suggested we go to the library where we could talk comfortably. On the way there, Dr. Owen asked me to call him Kenneth and explained that he had dropped by today becaueC n he had to go to Fort William anyway to scout out a couple of badminton players he hoped to recruit for his team. They had a seniors’ tournament coming up, he said, and one of their regular players had had a heart attack.

  I thought it was a bit odd that, although shocked, he didn’t seem to be tremendously upset about John’s death or the loss of the coin, until I realized that he may have never actually met John Sinclair and that it was we, not he, who had suffered the loss of the coin.

  “Did you know John Sinclair well?” I asked, leading him into the library. William and the woman he’d been talking to were gone now, and we were alone. I indicated a chair by the hearth and took the one on the other side for myself.

  “I met him once, at a symposium in Edinburgh. I remember we discussed some recent Roman finds from London but, of course, we had no idea at that time that he’d be calling on my services for a find this far north.” Kenneth settled into the chair and threw one leg over his other knee. His white socks and a bit of hairy leg showed above his Adidas. “John Sinclair was a young man, wasn’t he? I mean, younger than I am?”

  Our conversation turned to coins and to medieval history. “Based on photos John found on the Internet,” I said, “our coin appeared to have been Byzantine, and minted in ten-forty or thereabouts. Do you think that’s right?”

  “Of course, that’s why I wanted to see it, but from the photo he e-mailed me last week, it appeared to be a gold tetarteron minted in Constantinople during the reign of Constantine the Ninth.”

  “I can’t help but hope that it ended up here because of King Macbeth’s pilgrimage to Rome in ten-fifty,” I said. “I have a keen interest in Macbeth.”

  “Ah yes. A pilgrimage to Rome. Very possible.” In stark contrast to Kenneth Owen’s gray hair and eyebrows, his lashes were jet black which made it even more impossible to avoid staring at his crystal blue eyes. “Have you heard of the Via Francigena?”

  “It was a route through France and through the Susa Valley into Italy, taken by pilgrims traveling from the British Isles to Rome,” I said. “I know they traveled on foot, and that a king like Macbeth would have gone with a large entourage, staying in monasteries along the way.”

  Kenneth raised his eyebrows again and smiled. “This is your field, I take it? I can’t help noticing that you have an American accent.”

  “I teach ancient and medieval history in a junior college. Yes, this is my field, sort of.” I shifted in my chair and folded my arms across my lap because I had held my stomach in as long as I could, and I wanted him to think of me as thinner than I really am. “I’ve heard that when Macbeth was in Rome, he threw his gold around like King Midas or something.”

  “Perhaps, but this coin had to have been picked up on the Continent. Trading activity along the Via Francigena was intense. Pilgrims from the British Isles often came from Canterbury through Flanders and across the Alps into Italy. Byzantine coins were traded frequently, and it wouldn’t be at all unusual for some of them to be brought back home. What’s unusual is to have found one this far north. This area was the boondocks in the eleventh century.”

  “Would anyone from this far north, other than a king and his entourage, have made such a journey?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “If this coin has been stolen by someone who plans to sell it, Kenneth, how much could they get for it?”

  “Not much. Whoever stole it will be sadly disappointed because with no prove
nance, no documentation at all as to where it was found and by whom, it’s nothing but a Byzantine gold coin; fairly rare, but the thief won’t get more than a couple hundred pounds for it.”

  “What a shame!”

  “Don’t be surprised if you get a ransom demand. The only way to make this theft worth the risk is to put the screws to someone who understands its importance.”

  I gasped. I hadn’t considered that possibility, but it made sense. “They’ll be wasting their time if they put the screws to me. I’m tapped out this month.”

  As we chatted on, I had an idea. Since Fallon wouldn’t be at dinner, it shouldn’t be any extra trouble for the kitchen if I invited Kenneth to join us. He got up to leave, so I guided him back to the great hall and on the way I asked him.

  “I’ll be at Fort William for a couple of hours,” he said, “and that’s about an hour’s drive from here, right? Sure, I can be back here by dinnertime. Thank you.”

  “Come to the kitchen with me. I need to make sure it’s okay.” We found Maisie and Tony sitting at the big wooden work table as three women plus Christine dithered around them. Tony had a sheet of scribbled notes in front of him.

  Christine turned and yelled at me, “Mrs. Osgood called a few minutes ago. She said to tell ye she cannae make the early train. She’ll take the one that gets here at ten-fifteen.”

  “So Lettie won’t be here for dinner, either,” I said. “Maisie, Fallon said to tell you she won’t be here for dinner and now I hear that Lettie won’t be, either. So is it all right if I ask Dr. Owen and a friend of mine from the dig to join us?”

  “Two less, two more? That’s no problem.”

  Tony looked up from his notes. “Someone from the dig?”

  I ignored the question and shuffled Kenneth Owen out the side door. As we walked through the little mud room at the side of the kitchen, the room where the game, the unwashed vegetables, the muddy boots were dropped off before they messed up the kitchen, I remembered Lucy’s reaction to this spot. The little Border collie had gone crazy over something she heard, saw, or smelled here and, since she was a dog, I’d bet it was a smell.