Plaid and Plagiarism

by Molly Macrae

  “Or the Lawries? They just passed the window. Maybe they’re stopping . . . and yes, here they are.”

  Janet looked at the door in time to see a transformation. At the moment they reached the door, Pamela and Kenneth glowered. When the bell chimed as they came through, their personal clouds lifted and gapped teeth shone. However briefly.

  “So nice to see you,” Janet said.

  Kenneth’s smile disappeared. “I’m surprised you’re able to say that.”

  Janet glanced at Tallie. She appeared to be frozen to the spot, but calm. Janet hoped she looked calm, too.

  “What he means,” Pamela said, “is that we had a misunderstanding. About the week of our time we were giving you. Kenneth thought you’d told us we weren’t needed, and that’s why we haven’t been coming in.”

  “It’s what you told me,” Kenneth ground out between his teeth.

  “I never did,” Pamela said. “There, you can see he feels badly.”

  “I do,” Kenneth said. “But here’s your first weekend in the shop coming up, and if you’d like extra help, you’ve only to ask. Or if you have any questions.”

  “One question.” Janet motioned them closer. “Do you know who that woman is?”

  “Can’t say I’ve ever seen her before,” Pamela said.

  “No, not familiar,” Kenneth said. “So would you like us to come in tomorrow?”

  “I—” Janet looked at Tallie, who shrugged. “I think we really will be all right.”

  “Aye. Right, then. Phone if you change your mind. One more thing, though. I left a length of tartan in the office. Do you mind if I get it?”

  “Oh, dear. We thought—”

  “Christine has it,” Tallie said.

  “Why?”

  “Another misunderstanding, I think,” Janet said. “We’ll see that it’s returned.”

  “Thank you,” Pamela said. “He isn’t happy I forgot it. It’s nothing to worry about, though. It’s not, Kenneth.”

  The two left, glowers firmly back in place.

  Tallie had luck in one of her searches that morning. She found an Emma Graham online, with references to Scotland in her profile and sympathy expressed over the recent death of her mother. From there, she found Emma’s sibling—Tristan—and evidence that he and Emma had immigrated to Australia. Tristan left first, seven years earlier. Emma followed a year later.

  “Why couldn’t Norman just tell us that?” Janet asked.

  “Because there was no good reason to. Once I had Emma’s name, it was easy enough to find them. But Hobbs has to worry about privacy issues whenever he tells us anything.”

  They rang up one of the signed copies of The Halberd in the Hostel and answered questions about the smell of baking.

  “There’s no record of a child traveling with Emma,” Tallie said, “and I can’t find Lucy in the local schools. And I looked, but I didn’t find a death notice for her. I didn’t know that would make me so emotional.”

  Janet held her daughter for a moment, and then told her to go sit near Mrs. T-W and read.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’ll get my break when I go with Summer to the Guardian this afternoon. But if you’re feeling guilty, read contest entries.”

  “Oh, goody.”

  A short while later, Janet saw Tallie searching the shelves in the folk and fairy-tale section. She came back to the desk, holding pages of contest entries under her arm and paging through a fat paperback of traditional travelers’ tales.

  “I thought I’d heard this or read it before,” she said, taking the manuscript pages from under her arm and putting them on the desk. “This is a short story called, ‘Blind, but Now I See,’ and here’s ‘The Wily Auld Carle.’ It’s a murder ballad about a woman who wants to kill her husband but ends up being outwitted by him. It’s supposed to be a comedy.”

  “Told the other way around, it might be,” Janet said.

  “So is there a rule in the contest about fairly transparent retellings? There’s no author’s note with the entry to say where the story came from.”

  “I’ll ask Sharon.”

  Janet had worried that Summer would find an excuse for going to the Inversgail Guardian alone that afternoon for her first day as the new gossip columnist. True, Summer was the one who’d voiced the rule about none of them traveling alone, but in practice it had the awkwardness of walking a grown child to school. And there’s the awkwardness over the arguments after Nev’s and that dreadful contest entry . . .

  “Did Christine tell you that the Pollards are completely in the clear?” Janet asked as they walked toward Paudel’s to pick up something for lunch along the way.

  “I scratched them off the great suspect list in the cloud.”

  Did that really merit sarcasm? If we’re like this before the first week is out, we’ll soon be at an end. “Summer—”

  “Do you know what bugs the snot of out of me?” Summer stopped short, crossing her arms and looking anywhere but at Janet. “I was right there. In the kitchen. Watching her. And I didn’t see her put those envelopes in the tin. Not in the tin, not in the cupboard.”

  “It’s still possible it was someone else.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. I’m agreeing. I think it was Una. But what kind of observant reporter am I, that I missed her playing that shell game? She totally snowed me and it’s been making me pissy and pick at everything.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Una seems to have been an expert at games like that.”

  They went into Paudel’s and each picked out a meat pie. Janet asked Basant to add a small bag of sweets to the order.

  “What kind?” he asked.

  “Surprise us,” she said, and while he wrapped the pies and then studied the jars of candy, Janet described their frequent knitter. “Any idea who she is?”

  “She rings no bells,” he said over his shoulder. “But is she a comforting presence?”

  “Yes, I guess you could say that.”

  “More comforting than the rats we spoke of, anyway. And she comes to your bookshop, to your hearth, so she is clearly wise. I think she must be good luck.” He handed the meat pies to Summer and the bag of sweets to Janet. “Pink and white sugar mice. They bring better luck than rats.”

  The newsroom for the Inversgail Guardian was bigger than it needed to be. The paper probably hadn’t ever needed an entire fleet of desks and clattering typewriters, but the room Janet and Summer walked into looked almost abandoned, and they heard the hushed pattering of only a few keyboards.

  “They sound like the ghosts of newsrooms past,” Summer said.

  “It smells like the dust of newsrooms past, too,” said Janet.

  James Haviland greeted Janet cordially and accepted curiosity as her reason for being there with Summer. To demonstrate her curiosity, she asked him how his ankle was and then why he was sometimes called Scotty.

  “On the mend for the ankle, and insider’s joke for the name. I had the great good fortune to intern at the New York Times, thirty-five years ago. I came home to this job with a love for kosher pickles and a personally autographed picture of James ‘Scotty’ Reston, patron saint of the Times. It’s on my desk, pride of place. Haven’t had a good garlic dill since.”

  He didn’t introduce them to the other two people in the room— a man typing and a woman staring at the ceiling. Neither the man nor the woman seemed to expect him to. Which no doubt accounts for why he doesn’t know the names of Una’s children, Janet thought. He took them across the room to Una’s desk—wooden, two sets of file drawers, cigarette burns. It faced the wall. She’d taped a variety of quotations to the wall over the desk, arranged in a circle with a single typed line, “Creep up from behind!” in the center.

  “I have my patron saint,” James said; “she had her motto.”

  “It’s okay if I use her desk?” Summer asked. “I’ll have something set up in my flat, eventually, but for now—”

  “Free to use. The police have b
een through it. They had to break the lock. She liked things under lock and key. Part of her persona, she said, because people entrusted her with their deepest, darkest secrets.”

  “Did the police take anything away with them?” Janet asked.

  “Her laptop.”

  “She had that with her at the bookshop Monday afternoon when she interviewed us. Did she stop back here after that?”

  “She must’ve done.”

  “You weren’t here?”

  “Home with the ankle. They took some files and papers, too, but as you can see, they left plenty of, uh, stuff behind.”

  He took a newspaper from a knee-high stack to the left of the desk. There was a similar stack flanking the other side of the desk, and Janet leafed through the top several papers in it. They were mostly American papers, some with address labels on them—to libraries and individuals— in Inverness, Fort William, Oban.

  “Some of these are decades old,” Janet said. “How did she get them?”

  “Scrounged, collected, stole—kidding. Mind you, everyone has their ways and their sources. She called these her reference library. She was interested in American news and American crime. She was writing a novel and she said these gave her story verisimilitude. I haven’t had the time to bother with clearing them out yet.”

  “Have any new letters come in for the column?” Summer asked.

  “One.”

  “Is that typical? How did she fill the column?”

  “Ah. The eternal question. Mind if I put the ankle up?”

  He rolled a chair over from a nearby desk and propped his foot on the nearest stack of newspapers. Janet sat on the other stack, shooing Summer into Una’s chair.

  “Una loved being called an agony aunt. She believed that role made her a power for good, a voice answering and calming the yowl from the wilderness. Her words, honest to God. And—I’m letting out a trade secret here, so keep in mind the old joke, ‘If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you—’”

  Janet had never seen the color drain from anyone’s face before, but James aged ten years before her eyes. He took his foot from the newspapers, put his elbows on his knees, and leaned his forehead against his steepled fingers.

  “That was undeniably the most insensitive thing I’ve ever said in a long life of not caring what anybody really thinks of me.”

  “This is going to sound rude,” Janet said, “but—”

  “Open season,” he said into his hands. “Your rude won’t measure up to mine.”

  “How do you know what Una thought of being an agony aunt or that she was writing a novel, and yet you don’t know the names of her children?”

  “It’s the work.” He made it sound as though she should have known the answer. “For her, for me, it’s always been the work. That goes back to what I was going to say, when I so rudely interrupted myself. She did make up letters for the column. A good portion of gossip columns probably do. But Una’s letters were part of her personal crusade to improve people—or to needle them. The woman had a singular ability to hold a grudge. Una—the one, the only. Again, her words.”

  “Grudges against anyone in particular?” Summer asked. She’d found a pencil and twirled it in her fingers.

  James watched the pencil and nodded. “Una never turned off her inner reporter, either. But you’re here for the column. I don’t need you for a story.”

  “It’s a story that happened in my garden shed,” Janet said. “I’m not a reporter. But stories have been my life, as a librarian and a bookseller. And this one is having an effect on my life.”

  “Then I wish I could tell you. But Una held a lot of grudges—and new ones every week. You might find something in the desk the police didn’t want. Notes for the novel, maybe. It hung around her neck like a millstone, but she was also writing an article about agony aunts. She was always working on something that would be her breakout piece. Now I’ve taken up enough of your time. And you mine.”

  “Thank you, James,” Janet said.

  He didn’t answer, and they watched him limp away.

  “Do we pretend to be working on the column,” Summer asked, “or be honest and do the nosy thing?”

  “I think he expects us to be nosy. You take the left side. I’ll take the right.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Anything like the letters in the tin. Or anything like the novel or the article he mentioned. Any kind of writing that might be considered extracurricular. If the police didn’t take it all.”

  There were two file-size drawers on each side of the desk. Janet took the chair that James had vacated and opened the bottom drawer on her side. She found three pairs of shoes and two umbrellas. The upper drawer held a framework for hanging files, but no files—or none left. “I’m a whiz,” she said. “Done on my side. Any luck on yours?”

  “Mph.”

  “I’ll do the middle drawer, then.” She slid the kneehole drawer open. It held the usual hodgepodge of office supplies, including a stack of envelopes—empty and unused. There were also three books. She took them out and laid them on the desk—Scottish Ballads; Dear Auntie: A Social History of Agonizing Answers; and The Claymore in the Cloister, the first book in Ian Atkinson’s Single Malt Mysteries—valuable if it was a first edition.

  Janet opened the book to see. First edition, yes, but discarded from the Orkney Public Library and Archive and full of underlining in pen and pencil. Dear Auntie’s pages bristled with sticky notes. She opened it to one of the marked pages and found two paragraphs highlighted in pink. There were sentences or paragraphs highlighted on each of the other marked pages as well. It reminded Janet of college days and cramming for exams. The book of ballads, a paperback, had a cracked spine. She picked it up and it opened to “The Wily Auld Carle,” the ballad Tallie had recognized as the source for the contest entry she’d read that morning. And now it seemed it was also the source for the quote over Una’s desk. The last wry lines of the ballad were, “Eggs, eggs and marrowbone/Will drive your old man blind/But if you wish for to do him in/Creep up from behind!” She glanced over at Summer.

  “You’re reading the newspaper.”

  “The Virginian-Pilot,” Summer said, “from July 28, 1994. But only part of it. And parts of the other two that were sitting on the desk. And I’ve just learned that I can save myself a lot of time by writing Una’s column the way she did.” Summer smacked her hand against the paper.

  The woman who’d been staring at the ceiling when they came in had left, but the typing man looked over the top of his glasses at them. Then he went back to typing.

  “Maybe she made up letters,” Summer said, “but she also copied them from old columns in papers from the States. I’ve been reading her recent columns online, to get the flavor of her answers. They are these exact columns; I’m sure of it.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “It took almost no time or effort, there was zero chance of being caught because she stole from decades-old columns, it gave her loads of free time to pursue other writing projects, she got paid—take your pick.”

  “Does he know?” Janet tipped her head toward James’s office.

  “I don’t know. My guess is no. He’s a newspaperman. You heard him. It’s the work that matters to him. Una might’ve been a newspaperwoman once, but she was trying to be something else. And this makes it look like she really was something else.”

  Janet glanced toward the office again. “What if someone found out? What if there’s a slippery slope to her plagiarism? Letters, columns, articles, short stories, novels.”

  “And what would James do if he found out?”

  “Or the person she stole from.”

  26

  Phlegmatic,” Janet said. It was the first word she or Summer had spoken since leaving the Inversgail Guardian office. “I was trying to think of the word for James. It’s phlegmatic.”

  “I’ll give that plagiarizing phony some phlegm,” Summer said. “I feel betrayed and I barely met her.
Through all those years at the paper, I reinvented myself every time the newspaper world shifted. Write the community engagement column? Sure, I can do that. And I went to PTA meetings, city council meetings, and every single pancake breakfast and fish fry. Take over the business and finance section? Show me the stock charts and the suits and I’ll sip a three-martini lunch with the best of them. And when they moved me to the food column, I couldn’t boil an egg without making it explode. But do you know what I did? I played your why not game and I asked myself, why not learn to bake cakes instead of burn them? What I didn’t do was steal someone else’s words.”

  “He’s phlegmatic and you’re simmering,” Janet said.

  “I’m boiling bloody mad.”

  Rab MacGregor was puttering among the bookshelves when Janet and Summer got back to Yon Bonnie Books. He appeared to be dusting. Possibly rearranging. Janet wondered if they’d gone over a job description of any kind with him. Possibly not. But with Schubert’s “Trout Quintet” playing in the background, the shop was an oasis of calm. Mrs. T-W knitted, Christine chatted with a customer and didn’t seem bothered that Ranger napped in a chair across from Mrs. T-W’s. But Summer still simmered, and she’d told Janet she was going straight to the kitchen to work it off. She steamed straight past Tallie, who greeted Janet with worried eyebrows.

  “Trouble?” Tallie asked.

  “Developments in the case.”

  “At this end, too.”

  Tallie told her she’d found evidence online of Ian Atkinson’s rocky relationship with the community. He’d tried to buy another building, before Yon Bonnie Books, and that also fell through. There were rumblings about him suing people. “But last week he made an offer on another building, and so far, so good.”

  “Is it too soon for anyone to know or protest?” Janet asked.

  “Or is it that Una’s gone? I found a couple of interesting stories in the Guardian, too.” The first was a report of Kenneth involved in a loud disagreement outside the Chamberlain’s Arms, Nev’s apparently going by its formal name in the press. The second was of a road accident that had claimed the life of their daughter, the Lawrie’s only child, ten years earlier.