I dashed out of the hut and past the little loch, picking my way upslope through a rhododendron thicket. I didn’t bother looking out across the field toward the castle or eastward to the road that led to the MacBanes’ house or to Aviemore and Fort William. I knew where William had gone.
To the cliff.
* * * * *
“Wanda, do you have your mobile phone with you? Call nine-nine-nine.”
From the way William’s body lay at the bottom of the cliff, it was obvious that it had been smashed like a bag of lightbulbs but, while Wanda walked to a clearing to get better reception on her phone, Winifred volunS K*ered to make the long trek around and down to the bottom of the cliff.
She placed one end of Scarborough’s leash in my hand and closed my fingers around it. “I’m going down there and feel for a pulse or something,” she said. “I know it’s futile, but when the police get here, the first thing they’ll ask is, ‘Did you try to help him?’ We want to be able to tell them that we did.”
“Of course.” I found a rock to sit on, folded my arms across my knees, and buried my head against them. My brain swimming with the events of the last few minutes, I needed time to sort them out. Behind me, Wanda was speaking to someone on her cell phone, so once again I found myself watching over a body until the police arrived.
William’s most startling revelation, to me, was that John had been blackmailing him all these years. That the castle and its lands wouldn’t have been operating in the red but for John with his hand perpetually out for a payoff. I hoped there would be records at the castle that would either bear that out or refute it.
The earring, not the coin and not the stamp, had been the reason for the theft of the treasure box. With the one earring, found with Becky’s body, fully described and included in the original postmortem reports, John’s possession of the other one and, if necessary, Hannah Dunbar’s word on where she found it, gave John hard evidence that Becky had been dead before she went to the cliff. I have pierced ears and I have never lost an earring of the latching-loop sort, which Hannah said that one was. To lose one would require a yank that would practically tear off your earlobe. Becky couldn’t possibly have lost it while walking across the field on her way to commit suicide, but a body draped over a shoulder, perhaps even dropped into the brambles a couple of times? Yes. It could easily have been ripped off.
My top priority at this point had to be Van. Was there actually any hard-and-fast proof that Van was innocent? Without a confession from William, could I convince the police to let him go? That Boots was innocent, too? I had Wanda and Winifred to affirm that William and I had been alone together in the shooting hut and that William had dashed out and jumped off a cliff while we were chasing the ferret, but what did that prove?
Wanda came up behind me. “I got through. An ambulance and the police are on their way.”
“Good,” I said, handing her Scarborough’s leash. “Wanda, I need to think. Would you deem it too awful of me if I sit here quietly by myself for a few minutes?”
“Of course not.” Wanda took Scarborough back, a safer distance from the edge of the precipice, and left me alone.
The box. Where was the box now? Were the three little items still in it? Might William have stashed them away and put John’s box in the place where he normally kept his own? Might he have put them in a safe, or a bank’s safety deposit box?
This is the evidence that will free Van! I’ll be able to tell them that there’s a black-handled knife under the bed at the shooting hut with William Sinclair’s fingerprints on it, but I can’t tell them where the box or the three little items are. The police will have to find those things themselves. I’ll be able to tell them that they can find William’s box in Fallon’s room and Fallon can tell them where she hid it this time. I don’t even know that myself. I’ll be able to tell them that, when they do find the other box, they’ll find screwdriver marks on the back. Fallon can back me up on all of this. =Zr the eight="0" width="48">I’ll be able to tell the police that if they go to the cellar, they’ll find a portrait of Lady Rebecca Seton Sinclair with a clean spot around the ear. I can tell them that if they can find the contents of the box, they’ll see that the earring matches the one on Lady Rebecca’s ear in the portrait.
All together, that certainly ought to do it.
The strange thunks in the cellar and those coming from the wall in Fallon’s room had been William, of course. That’s how he’d known that I knew about Becky and about the switching of boxes.
Finally, I saw how the theft had been pulled off. William, hiding in the laird’s lug anytime he felt the need to do so, might or might not have known that John had put the box in the big suitcase in his closet. William could have stashed his own box, open or closed, inside the laird’s lug at any time and waited for a chance to make the swap. He would’ve needed to wait until someone took the box out of the suitcase, because to have walked out of the room with that huge shiny metal suitcase (which, I was sure, was too big to fit down those tiny stairs in the laird’s lug) would have been too conspicuous. His chance would have come when he heard the coin expert was on his way and he saw me heading up to Fallon’s room, obviously to get the coin. The fact that the box was about to be opened made it imperative that he do something quickly. After all, Fallon or I might have decided to remove the earring as well as the coin.
So he had dashed through the library, up the secret stairs, and to the third floor where he could have waited behind the paneling until Fallon and I extracted the box from the suitcase, and, while we were looking for the key to the box, he popped out, switched boxes, and popped back into the little hole in the wall.
Wait a minute. How would William have known we’d have to look for the key? He must have hidden it himself. He’d have had plenty of time to find it and hide it during the two days Fallon had been at the hospital with John. Even if John had had the key with him when the ambulance carried him off, William would still have been able to retrieve it while he sat with his poor brother in the ICU, or from Fallon’s purse while she sat with John.
“Mrs. Lamb?”
I couldn’t believe it. Here we were again, Chief Inspector Coates and I—and another dead body.
I told him everything I knew. Surprisingly, he didn’t seem to doubt my story about William holding a knife to my throat, and that struck me as odd, given the fact that he was a friend of William’s and he didn’t like me at all. “I can hardly expect you to believe all this,” I said, “but I’m telling you the truth.”
“I believe you,” Coates said dully. “There’s blood on your neck.”
* * * * *
I sneaked through the side door of the round tower to go back to my room because I didn’t want to talk to Maisie yet. I wanted Chief Inspector Coates to break the news to her that her husband was dead. The stairwell, as usual, was dark because the bulb in the wall light, as usual, was missing. I found it somehow comforting to see that some things hadn’t changed.
Once inside my room, I kicked off my shoes and plopped down on the chair at my vanity table. My own reflection in the mirror startled me. I looked a complete mess, of course, but that wasn’ Ht it. An angry red line slashed diagonally across the left side of my neck and ended in a trail of dried blood that ran down into my collar. That had been close! If only I could leave it that way until Lettie got back. I wanted her to see it. But I’d really have to clean it up and find a way to cover it before I dared talk to Maisie.
My gaze fell on the wastebasket and on a small brown paper bag in it. That was where I’d put that stuff I found in the cellar. I pulled the bag out and held my breath before opening it. It hadn’t smelled good a week ago; I expected it to smell worse now. Strange, but the contents of the bag seemed to have expanded.
Inside, I found the black fibrous material, still damp, probably because it had been sharing the trash can with some wet napkins. Nestled in the center of the dark material was something new. Something that looked like an egg, but wasn�
�t an egg, because it was soft. My finger made a dent.
I snatched the mushroom book out of my bag and frantically flipped through the color plates. I had seen something that looked exactly like this thing. It was in here somewhere. I found it on page 58. “Death Cap, button. Amanita phalloides, emerging from sac-like cup.”
Chapter Thirty-one
“Maisie gets the castle, of course.”
I felt as if I looked good because, with the money I saved by only having to pay Van’s lawyer for five hours’ work, I had treated myself to a shopping spree up and down Princes Street in Edinburgh topped off with a visit to Penhaligon’s Perfumers on George Street for some of their heavenly Eau de Toilette. I splurged on an amber bouclé knit dress that exactly matched my eyes. Now, where had I heard that recently?
Dr. Kenneth Owen took Lettie and me to the Queensferry Arms for dinner. Our window looked out over the rail bridge spanning the Firth of Forth, a name which becomes progressively funnier the more you’ve had to drink. Kenneth was wearing a dark suit and plaid tie in which he looked less like Cal Ripken, Jr. than he had in that blue polo shirt, but he was still handsome. I had promised myself another, more leisurely, trip to Scotland someday and was already agonizing over how I’d manage to let Kenneth know I was coming.
“Will she be able to take care of all that land on her own?” Kenneth looked up from his baked salmon with neeps and tatties.
“She’s going to ask Robbie MacBane to co-manage it with her. He is, after all, sort of a Sinclair. By marriage at least. And she confided to me that if the partnership goes well, she’ll leave the castle and all the land to Robbie in her will. Maisie had no idea that William had slipped another species of mushroom, a nonlethal but sick-making kind also from his little farm in the cellar, into the soup we all had for dinner.”
“He made himself and everybody else sick in order to carry out his plan.” Lettie shook her head and sighed.
“Maybe he didn’t eat the same soup, himself,” Kenneth suggested. “He might have dipped out a cupful from the pot for himself before tossing the bad mushrooms in. He could have been pretending to be sick along with everyone else.”
“Ooh, that is possible!” Lettie said and then added, “Robbie and his wife are going to move into the castle after thei u a baby is born.”
“And a little MacBane means an heir for Robbie to leave it to. Had the castle stayed in William’s hands, it might have been left to an elderly Maisie who wouldn’t have known who in the world to leave it to.”
I pulled a little enameled pill box from my purse and passed it across the table to Kenneth. “Your coin, sir, and may you discover that it was actually dropped by the hand of Macbeth.”
“Thank you. I’ll write you about my progress when I know more,” Kenneth said. “Shall we exchange addresses? E-mail and otherwise?”
I wrote mine out for him and he gave me his card.
Lettie put down her fork and said, “Fallon gets the stamp.”
“Of course,” I said. “And the earring? Well, Maisie probably has both of them now, but I bet she never wants to see them again. I wouldn’t blame her if she fed them to the geese.”
Kenneth looked at both of us. “What sort of financial shape is the castle in?”
“Fairly good, I gather,” I said. “William and Maisie had actually been operating at a profit all along. Good management on both their parts. But John’s constant demands for money to keep his mouth shut ran them into the red.”
“And the Super Bowl tickets?”
“When the police release them, they’ll belong to Proctor Galigher, I imagine, and I really don’t care what he does with them.”
Lettie wiggled her shoulders and put her hand beside her mouth as if she was telling us a secret. “Tony Marsh could still use them. He could take Hannah with him to America, and they could go to the Super Bowl.”
“Ah, ha! So my little flirtation worked, did it?” Kenneth said, his eyes twinkling.
“I believe it did,” I said. “Van Nguyen is free to return to Cambridge, his parents none the wiser. Tony Marsh and Graham Jones are in the process of applying for grant money to finish the work on the dig. It would be a shame to stop now. But when they complete their work, Tony told me, they plan to cover it all back up and return it to the barley field it was before.”
“Much better than a theme park,” Kenneth said.
I noticed then that Lettie had gone silent. “Are you all right, Lettie?”
She nodded.
“How about your ancestor research, Lettie?” Kenneth asked. “Did you find everything you wanted?”
Lettie’s face screwed up and reddened. “No! I found out what I didn’t want!”
“What do you mean? Lettie!” I didn’t know whether to steer her toward the ladies’ room or offer her my napkin. It was an awkward moment.
“I found out … I found out that Ollie and I are related!” Lettie’s eyes welled up and overflowed. “I was looking for information on Ollie’s grandmother, who was from Glasgow. She was a Cruikshank. So I found her and discovered that her mother was a Hynd, daughter of Flora and Robert Hynd, the same Flora Hynd who was a Sinclair from Aviemore, and she’s my ancestor, too! So there’s no doubt. No doubt at all. Ollie and I are related!”
“Small world, isn’t it?” I said.“But, Dotsy.” Lettie sniffled. “This means that our children are retarded!”
Kenneth ducked his face into his napkin. When he managed to wipe the silly smirk off his face, he said, “You have the same great-great grandparents? Or is it three greats, I lost count. That would make you and your husband no more than sixth or seventh cousins, however you figure it, and if that constituted in-breeding, we’d all be idiots.”
“Lettie,” I said, “if you marry your first cousin, your children may be retarded. If you marry your sixth or seventh cousin, the rule says, only one of your children will be retarded. Now, which one of your kids would it be? The one who’s starting her residency after graduating summa cum laude from med school or the one who runs his own computer software firm?”
Lettie’s face told me she knew I was teasing. She took a playful swat at me.
And Kenneth added, “But part two of that rule states that if the ancestors in question are Scottish, all other rules don’t apply!”
About the Author
Maria Hudgins is an avid traveler and note-taker whose recent trips have taken her to Spain, England, and Egypt. Before her retirement, she taught high school oceanography, chemistry, biology, and Earth science. She now lives in Hampton, Virginia, and writes full time.
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Death of a Lovable Geek Page 25