Death of a Lovable Geek

by Maria Hudgins

  Lettie said she’d found records of the marriage of Roger and Becky, the deaths of both, and of Fenella, mother of William and John. More interesting, she thought, were the newspaper articles she found, written after Becky’s death in 1963.

  “Some are tabloid articles, so take them for whatever you think they’re worth; you know how the British tabloids are. But some of them are from regular newspapers.” Lettie continued to shuffle through her stack of papers as she talked, in spite of the fact that she couldn’t possibly read them, the dim glow from the dashboard radiating barely enough light for me to make out the outline of her face.

  Before returning to the castle, I stopped off at the MacBane farmhouse to see if Robbie had read the message I’d left asking him to play for our memorial service tomorrow. Nothing doing. Robbie’s car wasn’t there, and, except for one lamp in the downstairs hall, no lights burned inside the house. There was a vertical row of small windows on either side of the door, and through them, I could see the note I’d left for Robbie earlier. It was still perched, tented, on the hall table. Returning to the car, I noted that there were no lights on in Boots’s cottage, either.

  * * * * *

  Lettie came to my room and arranged her papers around the edges of my bed. “I’ll leave you with the whole mess, but these are the ones you should look at first.”

  “Lettie, you’re amazing. How did you find all this in one afternoon?”

  “When you work in a library, you get good at it. I don’t waste time looking in the wrong places.”

  She made it sound so simple. The first documentL ]re simply the official records of the deaths of Fenella, Roger, and Becky. As William had already told me, Fenella died of breast cancer, and the death certificate gave the year as 1955. Rebecca Sinclair, née Seton, died in 1963, but there was an interval of ten days between the time of death (10 September) and the date on which she was pronounced dead (20 September) The certifier had scribbled a note in the section dealing with cause of death, explaining that the corpse was found in a state of decomposition that precluded any determination of the immediate cause. There had been multiple broken bones and the body had been found at the bottom of a cliff. Under “manner of death,” the box labeled “could not be determined” was checked, but another note stated simply, “Suicide letter found. Suicide probable.”

  Roger Sinclair died on September 10, 1968, five years to the day after Becky, but his death certificate was much simpler than hers. Cause of death: gunshot wound. Manner of death: suicide.

  “It’s pretty obvious why he chose that particular day to shoot himself,” I said, returning the photocopied sheet to the array of documents on my bed. “But, honestly, I’m a bit surprised that old Roger would’ve been so torn up about it. If he couldn’t get along with Becky when she was alive, why should her suicide have compelled him to do likewise, five years later?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t suicide?” Lettie looked at me, her head tilted to one side. “Maybe he killed her. Pushed her over the cliff. Then killed himself five years later because he couldn’t live with himself any longer.”

  I thought about that for a minute. It was a reasonable idea, albeit an idea with no corroborating evidence. I wondered if Roger had left a suicide note.

  “Now, here’s where it gets really interesting!” Lettie fluttered her hands and wiggled her butt. She handed me a copy of a tabloid article.

  London, 20 October, 1963.

  A meeting last evening of the South Thames Actors Guild erupted in a shouting match during the reading of the minutes of the group’s September meeting. The conflict was over a tribute to the memory of Lady Rebecca Seton offered at the guild’s September meeting, two days after the death of Lady Seton was announced in London papers.

  An unidentified member shouted out, “Retract that tribute! We cannot honor liars!” It was a reference to the address Lady Seton made at the August meeting this year, in which she told the guild that, in her will, she would be endowing a scholarship fund with the bulk of her estate. Her estate has been estimated to be in excess of ₤2 million.

  Guild president, Paul Davies, called for order and told the group that Lady Seton’s will, currently in probate, makes no mention of the South Thames Actors Guild and leaves the whole of the estate to her husband, Roger Sinclair. Davies stated that there was, in his opinion, simply nothing they could do, since the will is undoubtedly genuine.

  Another member of the audience shouted, “We can sue her estate for breach of promise!”

  A general chorus of “Hear, Hear!” echoed round the hall.

  ?Pounding his gavel for order, Davies told the group that he would ask the guild’s solicitor, Daniel Eddington, Esq., to look into the matter and report his findings at the next meeting.

  “Extraordinary!” I said, flopping onto a bare spot between the papers on my bed. “She must have changed her mind.” I looked at the date of the article again. “Or maybe she intended to change her will, but hadn’t gotten around to it. There was only a month between her speech to the Actors Guild and her death.”

  Lettie didn’t seem to be listening. She was sitting in the wing chair near the window, swinging her feet, which in that chair missed the floor by a good three inches, and writing on the margin of her train schedule brochure. “Didn’t you say that kid at the dig, Iain Jandeson, was sort of living in an Indiana Jones fantasy world?”

  “It seems like that to me, but I can’t read his mind. He dresses like Harrison Ford did in the Indiana Jones movies, though.”

  “I know why he changed his name.”

  On the drive back from the train station I had told Lettie about Tony Marsh’s discovery that, according to school records, Iain Jandeson was supposed to be Ian Jameson. “Okay, I give up. Why?”

  “What do you call those puzzles where the letters are scrambled and you have to unscramble them?”

  “Anagrams?”

  “Right. Look.” She thrust her train schedule at me. “Iain Jandeson is an anagram of Indiana Jones!”

  I checked it out and Lettie was right. “Joyce Parsley, another kid at the dig, told me Iain also believes he was abducted by aliens.”

  “Maybe so,” Lettie said, “but an anagram of E.T. wouldn’t be much of a name, would it?”

  Lettie put both hands over her mouth, but I could tell she was laughing behind her hands. I refuse to laugh at Lettie’s jokes unless I absolutely can’t help myself, and Lettie refuses to laugh before I do.

  “Lettie, what do you think of the idea that Boots killed Froggy?” I lay back on my bed and stared at the ceiling. “Joyce Parsley went to the police today to tell them she saw Boots coming from the castle that night with a knife.”

  “Piffle.”

  “Here’s the main problem: Somebody murdered Froggy, and so far, the only motives I’ve found don’t amount to much more than enough to start a good fist fight.”

  “Do you still think John Sinclair was murdered, too?”

  “Yes, I do. So let’s think about things from that angle. Let’s suppose the principal target was John Sinclair and that Froggy was involved somehow. Perhaps Froggy discovered something he wasn’t supposed to know. Now we have a richer field to till because I can think of motives galore for killing John.”

  Lettie folded her hands in her lap and looked at me attentively.

  I sat up on the bed and drew my legs around beside me. “First, there’s William Sinclair. If he knew about John’s plans to turn this place into a tourist attraction, he’d do whatever he had to, to stop it.”

  “But William owns the place. John couldn’t do anything unless William approved it.”

  “Okay, but maybe there’s some reason why William would be compelled to approve. Don’t ask me what that reason could be, but John was horrible about belittling William in front of other people. Did you notice how William never said anything back? He sat there, stone-faced, while John insulted his intelligence.

  “And then there’s Tony Marsh. Tony’s having a fling with
John’s wife and he also steps into John’s position as director of the dig. That’s two motives.

  “Fallon Sinclair. Fallon is now free to ride off into the sunset with her lover and with John’s money, if he had any, which I suspect he did. Fallon had reason to resent John after the death of their only child due to John’s negligence. That’s two good motives.

  “Amelia Lipscomb. She hated John because she was there, on the scene, when John and Fallon’s child was suffering from heat stroke in the car and John was preening for the camera. The last thing I heard Amelia say about John was ‘the bastard.’ ”

  “If Amelia poisoned John Sinclair, I doubt that she’d reveal her feelings to you by calling him a bastard. That way, if they find out his death wasn’t natural, she would have already pointed the finger at herself.”

  “Good point.”

  “What about Brian Lipscomb? That story he told us about why the police searched him and his car. I believed him at the time, but was he telling us the truth? And he’s incredibly jealous. Have you noticed?”

  “I think it’s protectiveness rather than jealousy,” I said. It would’ve been simpler for Brian to let Amelia come here by herself since he was unable to take off from work. “Now, Maisie,” I went on. “No motive that I can see.”

  “If she has a motive, it would be to kill Fallon, not John. I hate the way Fallon talks down to her while availing herself of Maisie’s hospitality.”

  “Robbie MacBane. If John’s plans come to fruition, he loses his farm and his hundred-year lease. Bad news with a baby on the way.”

  Lettie didn’t know about the MacBanes’ expected progeny, so I told her about my conversation with Robbie that morning. I held up seven fingers, although, at this point, my count of suspects was probably off by as much as twenty percent. “Boots is as devoted to the preservation of the castle and its grounds as William is. He’s lived here his whole life. If he thought John was ruining the place he’d do anything he could to save it, and William told me, tonight, that Boots and John never got along.”

  Lettie held up eight stubby fingers. “Iain Jandeson.”

  “What motive would Iain have?”

  “He doesn’t need one; he’s nuts.”

  After Lettie left my room, I sat for more than an hour with the papers she had brought me. Several of them were about the career of Lady Rebecca Seton and about how delighted Central Scotland was to have her living in their midst. One article was accompanied by a photograph of her but, other than the fact that she had nice cheekbones, I couldn’t tell if she was pretty or not. She had one of those awful late-fifties hairdos that made every woman look bad. If the photo had been in color, I could have seen what those violet eyes looked like. I thought again about the portraits of Roger and Fenella that hung in the ground floor room of the square tower and wished I could ze="2">Wee a portrait of Becky. Why was there no portrait of Becky? Probably because, once she and Roger were both dead, Roger’s sons would have been eager to retire any portrait of her to the … where? To the cellar, maybe? I cast my mind back to the foray Lettie and I had made to the cellar and remembered the picture frames stacked against the wall. Some of them had been nice frames, similar to the ones in the portrait room. Did any of them have paintings still in them? I hadn’t paid any attention when I was there before, but now that I thought about it, I’d have bet money that a portrait of Becky was, or had been, in one of them.

  On my dressing table, the little science fair experiment I had started the night before still waited for me to examine it. I lifted the shoe box off the mushroom caps, removed the mushrooms, and found that each of them had left a beautifully distinct pattern on either the white or the black paper. Most of the spore prints were some shade of tan or russet, but what good was this information? I laid the caps and the papers inside the box and stashed the whole thing on top of my wardrobe.

  I dressed for bed and stood at my window, brushing my hair. The wind flung invisible needles of rain at the panes and, beyond the reflection of my own room in the glass, the world outside was pure black. There was no way sleep would come to me in my current state, so I grabbed my robe, sneaked down the hall, and rapped on Lettie’s door. She opened it, squinting at me through sleepy eyes.

  “I really need to pop down to the cellar for a minute, Lettie. Will you come with me?”

  “No,” she said, swiping green goo down the bridge of her nose.

  “I didn’t think you would, but I thought I’d ask anyway. What are your plans for tomorrow?”

  “I’m going to Inverness.”

  “Before you leave, will you go to the cellar with me?”

  “I’d rather do that than go with you now. What are you looking for?”

  “A picture. A picture of Becky.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  It was so simple when it hit me. How the Super Bowl ticket had ended up on the castle stairs, why there was no knife slash in Froggy’s shirt, indeed, why he was wearing Van’s shirt to begin with. I lay stiffly in my bed, willing my body to relax, and revised my mental picture in light of what I’d learned today.

  Van purchased two tickets for Proctor Galigher and they arrived at the MacBane house by mail. Van would have looked them over, tucked them into his desk drawer, and probably showed them to Froggy or to Robbie, both of whom would have been interested to see tickets that cost more than some cars. Van might well have dropped one and picked it up, stuffing it into the breast pocket of his shirt (his Hawaiian hibiscus shirt), planning to put it back in the drawer with its mate.

  On Tuesday, a slow day at the dig, Froggy left his bench in the finds shack and walked back to his room. Joyce Parsley followed him, keeping well out of his sight. Once inside his room, Froggy would have made himself comfortable, taken off his shirt, perhaps taken a shower. Then something happened. Something drastic. Something urgent.

  He dashed out of the room, grabbing the first shirt he found on his way out the door, which, naturally, uld have l which, n have been one of Van’s hanging on the peg on the inside of their door. I had seen as many as five of Van’s shirts piled on that peg at one time. Running out and down the road to the castle, shirtless, but carrying the shirt with one Super Bowl ticket in the pocket, he was seen by both Joyce Parsley and by the weird sisters who had been hiking along the road to the north. They had told me of seeing a shirtless man that they only knew wasn’t Robbie. They wouldn’t have seen Joyce because Joyce was skulking around in the bushes.

  So Froggy, donning Van’s way-too-big shirt as he ran, might not have buttoned it but simply stuck his arms through the sleeves. Did he go to the castle? To the field beside or the lawn behind it? It seemed to me that if he had been stabbed in the parking lot, the field, or the lawn, the police would have found blood. Even if the killer had had time to work on the site with a garden hose, there would have been some left.

  Might he have been killed inside the castle? If so, how would that mess have been cleaned up? We had all been there at dinner.

  Lucy! The mud room off the kitchen! Lucy had gone crazy, snarling and yelping, as soon as she and Boots had walked in. I had to count backward to that day; it would have been on Thursday. If Froggy had been killed in there, the blood would have been thoroughly washed away and quickly, because the evening meal had been cooked there. The bench in the mud room was used for cleaning fish and game so there might already be enough traces of blood—on the bench, on the stone floor, in the nooks and cracks in the stone—to light the place up like a carnival with a spritz or two of Luminol from the bottle of a crime scene investigator. Would animal blood react with Luminol the same way human blood does? I was sure it would. Although there are differences from one species to another, all blood is basically a carrier of oxygen and it’s that capacity, I had heard, which makes Luminol emit light.

  But Lucy would not have been fooled by lingering traces of animal blood. Lucy would have been able to detect not only the human blood, but also the fear, the terror of poor Froggy when he knew he was abou
t to die.

  By this time, it was after 2 a.m. and I was too keyed up to even think of sleep, so I made a mental list of things to do tomorrow: 1) go to the cellar and check out the picture frames, 2) ask Fallon to show me that box again, 3) check with Robbie and see if he can play for the memorial service, 4) get chairs set up in the tent, get some flowers, make sure there’s a fresh pot of coffee before the service, 5) find an excuse to go into Froggy and Van’s room and attempt to check Froggy’s laptop for recently accessed documents and Web sites.

  By three a.m., I gave up, switched on my bedside lamp, and read some Macbeth. How far off course I was! I had come here to learn more about Macbeth and eleventh-century Scotland, but now I was engulfed by two nasty murders, a tragic family history, and an urgent need to spring a nice kid from a cold jail cell.

  Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 4:

  ’Tis unnatural,

  Even like the deed that’s done. On Tuesday last …

  At that point, my dream picked up where the text went blurry.

  * * * * *

  Macbeth swirled N qinto my dream on a windblown mist. He wore a bullet-shaped helmet with horns, and a tartan shawl over a shirt of chain mail. He moved smoothly but he had no feet, his lower body tapering off into a spiral of fog as if he’d come out of a magic lantern, but beneath him was a sort of chessboard, with squares, and the one he hovered over was labeled “Thursday,” so it might have been a big calendar rather than a chessboard. On Thursday stood a big black cauldron, and two weird sisters, possibly Winifred and Wanda, ladling out soup very sloppily into camouflage-patterned hats.

  “Should I have some of the soup?” I asked Macbeth.

  “I’d be wary of it if I were you.”