Dust to Dust

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “How’s it…” Rebecca began cheerily. Dennis dropped one of the two-by-fours they were using to shore up the ceiling, parting Jerry’s moustache.

  Mark arbitrated the ensuing accusations and counter-accusations, finally sending Dennis up the tower to clear away weeds. Not the ideal solution, Rebecca thought. Dennis had to squeeze up the narrow passageway, a round peg in a square hole if there ever was one. But if Mark’s scowl was any indication, another snide remark and he would have used his two-by-four for attitude adjustment.

  Michael was holding his injured arm tensely, bunched at his side. “Put on your sling,” Rebecca directed him.

  “I need both hands to type.” He didn’t even glance up from the screen.

  “You’re straining the stitches like that.”

  “We’re behind on the data.”

  “Then let me bring you another painkiller.”

  “I’m all right,” Michael said so loudly that Mark looked warily around.

  “Have it your way!” Men! Rebecca added to herself as she stamped away. Her shoulder throbbed as she eased her way down into the infirmary trench. She gripped her left arm with her right hand, picked up her spoon left-handed, and went on scraping at a deposit of glass shards.

  *

  This night she tried a glass of warm milk and a droning BBC documentary, and actually managed a bit of sleep. Michael, too, sat up in his bed Thursday morning looking somewhat less worn. “Good mornin’ to you, hen.”

  “Good morning to you, rooster. Sleep well?”

  “I dreamed I was playin’ Macbeth—‘is that a dagger I see before me?’”

  “‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,’” quoted Rebecca, “‘creeps yet in this petty pace from day to day… ’”

  “‘To the last syllable of recorded time,’” Michael finished. “I wish Mackenzie’d bring oot the thumbscrews and get it over wi’.”

  “We do need something to force the issue.”

  “Like the end of the dig? The killer’s waited around this long hopin’ we’ll turn up the treasure. If he—she—is half as frustrated as the rest of us, we’re in for a good go.”

  “Thanks for the encouraging prediction, Nostradamus.”

  “You’re welcome.” Michael disappeared toward the bathroom.

  Rebecca sat down at the dressing table. There was her next packet of pills. She’d have to check the calendar to see when she stopped the last one. At least she now knew they didn’t have pregnancy to contend with. She glanced around at Michael’s crumpled bed. Frustration was an understatement.

  At the breakfast table Dennis put an extra teaspoon of sugar in his coffee. “Did you hear the singing from the priory last night?”

  “There’s usually singing from the priory,” said Hilary.

  Adele folded her hands over her omelet. “Anne is getting restless. She wants something of us. What can we do?”

  Mark looked as if he had a suggestion or two, but he managed to stifle them in his toast.

  Through her long acquaintance with Murphy’s Law, Rebecca knew losing a contact lens was next on the agenda. New glasses were an expense she hadn’t budgeted, but she might soon be cutting down on birth-control pills. Harry Devlin drove her to a one-hour optician in Edinburgh. He had no qualms about discussing the case; they reviewed the suspects, agreed there were only four viable ones remaining, commiserated over not catching one of them in the attic, and concluded that it was all a proper cock-up, and no mistake.

  By the time they returned to Rudesburn the rainy morning had been transformed into a cool, clear afternoon. Men with lawnmowers and hedge clippers were manicuring the priory grounds, various police people dancing attendance. The pearly half circle of the moon rose in the east.

  Rebecca skirted a police car just pulling up at the curb and hurried into the cottage to change. By the time she’d put out scraps for the mendicant cats and arrived at the dig, she found Michael and Jerry in the crypt door in close consultation, Tony stalking them with camera aimed. “… a circle wi’ side chambers, just like Kerr’s map,” Michael was saying.

  “Are you through the collapse?” Rebecca asked.

  “We certainly are,” said Mark. He hammered another two-by-four into the opening and stepped back. “Most of the crypt’s untouched by the collapse. Laurence has an electrician on the way to string up lights.”

  Dennis was sitting on the bottom step of the tower. “Michael went in with a flashlight a little while ago.”

  “Dust and bones,” intoned Michael. “All we need is Vincent Price.”

  “There’s one wall made of brick,” Jerry went on, “not stone, that’ll need to be repaired. Probably some nabob’s tomb.”

  “Then we should open it up.” Rebecca waved her trowel, ready to go.

  “Let’s get the lights in there first. What you need to be worrying about now is what the girls are doing at the infirmary.”

  Suppressing her impulse to say, “Yes, master,” Rebecca walked out to the new trench. Hilary was drawing, Adele was putting bits of glass in a box, and Elaine, of all people, was on her hands and knees scraping at a tile surface. “Thank you for filling in for me,” Rebecca told her.

  Elaine sat back and wiped at her face, leaving a smudge of dirt on her cheek. Without her red lipstick she looked younger, almost innocent. “No problem,” she said.

  Rebecca stepped down to inspect the tiles. Oh, nice; their yellow and green glaze was fairly well preserved. And since such decorated floor tiles were usually confined to lowland England, here was more evidence that Rudesburn had indeed been wealthy and on the pilgrim’s route.

  Shadows moved across the surface. Rebecca glanced up. Uh-oh.

  Mackenzie looked like Death with a hangover. Behind him stood Devlin, wielding his notebook, his mouth half-smirking, half-frowning. They were backed up by several stone-faced constables. Five masculine figures, a cigar and a camera at point, looked around the corner of the chapter house. “Miss Vavra,” said Mackenzie.

  Elaine squeaked and stepped back, bumping into Adele.

  “A man from Jedburgh drove to Melrose on the night of the murder. On his way back home, about 8:30, he saw a silver Jaguar parked outside the priory wall. He identified you as the driver from your photograph.”

  8:30? Rebecca thought. Well, could be… .

  Elaine’s olive complexion turned an ugly mottled green. “I was sitting and thinking, all right? Where’s the ‘arm in that?” A policewoman stepped forward, extending her hand. Elaine ignored her and leaped out of the trench as though she were jet-propelled. “I didn’t kill the bitch!”

  Mackenzie held his ground. “Scotland Yard found notes for a story in Miss Fitzgerald’s London flat. About how some nightclubs are fronts for prostitution rings. There’s a photo of you doing some dance with feathers.” He didn’t need to put neon lights around the inference.

  Hilary clapped her hand to her mouth as if suddenly overcome with nausea. All color drained from Elaine’s face. She swayed and would have buckled if the female constable and one of her heavier colleagues hadn’t grabbed her arms and frog-marched her away. As they rounded the end of the cloister, she shrilled, “What do I ‘ave to do to get some respect?”

  “Act respectful,” returned Adele, and went back to her glass.

  “That’s a bit flip,” Rebecca said. “There’s more to it than that.”

  Adele didn’t reply. Hilary lowered her hand and stared unseeing at her drawing board. The male audience beside the chapter house shifted; Tony seemed exasperated and amused both, but Jerry had the gall to laugh.

  Rebecca’s head buzzed—that could be it, the supplemental motive—Elaine was trying to improve her lot in life. And not only monetarily—how inconvenient for Sheila to remind her of her dirty linen.

  She visualized Elaine trying to kill Guinevere. Trying to kill Michael, for that matter. But Tony had been with her that night. Although, typical man, he could have been easily induced into a sound sleep. Wearily she rubbed her shoulder
. Unless Elaine confessed, she would be back. Mackenzie wouldn’t prosecute until he could get a conviction, and a photograph in Sheila’s apartment wasn’t proof of anything.

  Mark and Michael came strolling toward the infirmary. “Well,” said Mark, “I got off. The same guy who saw Elaine sitting in the car on his way home saw me on his way to Melrose a little before eight. He remembered the duck T-shirt.”

  “A vote of thanks to the T-shirt,” murmured Hilary.

  Michael climbed down into the trench. “Oh, tiles. Aye, you see them all over. Sgraffiato, they’re called.”

  “Michael,” Rebecca said with a short laugh, “you’re losing it. They’re not sgraffiato—those are incised, and are really rare. Even these are unusual this far north. Why don’t you stick to rondels?”

  His face jerked around. He eyed her like a police surgeon considering a bullet wound. “You dinna have to patronize me, either, Dr. Reid.”

  “For God’s sake, Michael, I was joking…”

  He turned and stamped away before the words were out of her mouth. The snap of her teeth sent a shock wave through her skull. Damn that tartan chip on his shoulder.

  Mark sidled quickly back to the church. Hilary bent over her drawing board, engrossed in her sketch. Adele closed the box of glass shards and set it gently on the side of the trench. Michael kicked the wall, winced and clutched his arm, and disappeared into the cloister.

  Profanity was inadequate. Rebecca sat down on the ground, hard, and picked up Elaine’s spoon. She was shaking. No, that had been a tiny tremor in the earth. A rumbling crash echoed from the church, followed by cries of alarm. Now what? All three women leaped to their feet and ran.

  Dust eddied from the transept door. Tony stood peering dubiously inside, protecting his video camera beneath his jacket. “What is it?” Rebecca demanded, shoving him aside.

  “Wall’s come down, I think.”

  Rebecca squinted through the haze. There were Michael and Mark, standing just inside the door, hands raised defensively. Jerry’s strangled voice emanated from the depths, shouting something that evolved from incoherent into, “… blasted idiot! You don’t lean on brick walls with decayed mortar!”

  “You pushed me!” returned Dennis, and broke off coughing.

  The dust was settling. Grant raced down the nave demanding explanations. “Give me your flashlight,” Rebecca said to the bobby.

  It was Michael’s hand that took the flashlight from Grant’s. He and Rebecca ducked through the crypt door. The beam of light illuminated curtains of swirling dust, clogging her throat with dirt and decay. Someone bumped into her, and she turned to see Mark, his eyes shining in the backspatter of light. “Can I come too?”

  They followed Michael down the steps, hollowed treads slippery with grit—right, left… . All Rebecca could see was a few feet of narrow passage. She didn’t want to know what was crunching beneath her feet. An aperture opened into shadow. A niche held a long, dim shape surrounded by debris—a lead coffin, its wooden sheathing rotted away.

  A large gray figure lunged toward them. As one they jumped. But that rotund form had to be Dennis. The whites of his eyes glinted. “Michael?” he croaked. “You and Mark went outside, Tony followed Elaine and the police, and Jerry came in here all by himself. I figured he was plotting something, so I followed him. And he deliberately pushed me against that wall.”

  “To break it down?” asked Rebecca.

  “He could’ve destroyed everything behind it,” Mark protested. “An archeologist wouldn’t do that!”

  “We’re talkin’ aboot Jerry,” Michael said.

  Like an evil genie out of a bottle, Jerry plunged from the murk. Dennis yelped and ran. “Stupid geek jumped out at me,” shouted Jerry. “Ran smack into that brick wall. Down it came, broke my flashlight… .” He pulled off his glasses, blinked at the faces confronting him, apparently decided the view was no better without them and put them back on. Another flashlight beam wavered in the thick air, Laurence’s voice calling, “Is everyone all right in there?” Still muttering, Jerry, too, shoved past.

  Rebecca figured Laurence could protect Dennis and glanced at the garishly shadowed faces beside her. “Okay. Who wants to go see what was behind that wall?”

  No one needed to answer. Michael aimed the flashlight and pushed on ahead. One pace, two, their footsteps thudding in the quiet. A bend in the corridor. He stumbled over a brick and Mark seized his arm. The injured arm. Michael gasped. “Sorry,” said Mark.

  Gingerly they stepped through the still-settling pile of bricks and found themselves facing a black void. The slow sweep of the light revealed a room about the size of a closet. The walls were smudged with damp, tracked with the angular marks of writing and with sketched emblems. One was repeated over and over, the crowned heart of the Douglases.

  The floor was lumpy… . An electric shock quivered through Rebecca’s limbs. A skeleton lay on the flagstones, the brown threads of a nun’s habit strung like cobwebs over it. A fallen brick crushed the right femur, but the rest was chillingly intact.

  Her hand was outstretched, fingers splayed, toward the door; the face peered upward, mouth open, empty eye sockets focused as if in one last despairing look toward the invisible heavens. Between the upthrust pelvic bones, swaddled in dust, lay a perfect miniature. A baby, still curled inside the body that had finally, dreadfully, failed to sustain it.

  The light in Michael’s hand swooped and swayed, glancing from the bones to the arched ceiling and back. “Anne Douglas, I presume,” he whispered. Even a whisper reverberated harshly in the terrible silence of the tomb.

  But not as harshly as an agonized inhalation just behind Rebecca’s shoulder. She spun around. In the dim light, Mark’s face was ashen, contorted with pain, as though a dagger had just struck deep between his ribs. He spun, stumbling over the rubble, his body only a blotch in the gleam of the approaching light. Voices queried, then protested as he pushed by.

  “What the hell?” Michael asked.

  “I’m not sure I want to know,” said Rebecca.

  The bones lay silently, as they had lain for over four hundred years. Rebecca couldn’t tell whether she heard in her mind or in some subtlety of light and air the distant voices singing of a tomb opened. Adele was right. Anne had wanted something of them.

  1

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Rebecca found Michael standing in the far corner of the cloister, one foot propped on a rock, his face turned toward the distant hills as though fantasizing escape. His sharp profile looked somewhat less yielding than the—what had Colin called it, the whinstone—of the Law.

  She folded her hands over her notebook like a child called upon to recite. “I’m sorry I patronized you yesterday. I picked a bad time to joke.”

  The blue eyes he turned on her were as bright and brittle as the warning lights of a police car. “I dinna have much of a sense of humor these days. I’m sorry, too, lass. But… .”

  The caveat hummed in the air like an electric field. “Hey, Rebecca!” shouted Jerry from the door. “Lights, camera, action! You’re on!”

  So much for the only two minutes they’d had alone since the discovery of Anne’s body yesterday afternoon. Once Jerry had cleaned off a layer or two of dust, he’d made a beeline for the pub and Bob Jenkins, leaving Michael and Rebecca to fend with academic necessities and media impertinences far into the night. They’d gotten to bed so late that even a polite kiss had been an effort, let alone remembering to set the alarm clock. Hilary’s discreet knock had woken them up barely in time for breakfast and Adele’s solemn dissertation on Anne’s life, death, and supernatural proclivities.

  At least they’d had no time for a pitched battle like the one they’d fought the day Sheila died. Maybe neither of them had that kind of fight left in them. “Duty calls,” Rebecca said, faking a smile.

  Michael’s smile was no less stiff. “Right.”

  In the church Laurence and Bridget were making sure the electric cables were eith
er tucked next to walls or covered with boards. “It was time to put the floodlights up for the Festival anyway,” Laurence said. “We’ll arrange some permanent fixtures in due course.” He ran his hand across his scalp and inspected his palm as if to gauge how much hair the Rudesburn follies had cost him so far today. “I own finding the body is important enough for a news conference. But even so…”

  That “but” Rebecca could complete. “You were picturing Rudesburn as an attraction for scholars and schoolchildren, not sensation seekers.”

  “Nora’s already had calls this morning from two priests offering to exorcise Anne’s ghost, and a parapsychologist who wants to set up cameras, tape recorders, trip wires, the lot. Sure is a good thing Mackenzie and Devlin already booked a room—I’ve had calls from all over the country.”

  “Hilary snagged her mohair sweater,” Bridget said, “climbin’ ower the fence to avoid Jenkins and his pals. I told her I’d set it to rights.”

  “Rebecca!” shouted Jerry. Nodding cautiously to the others, she and Michael headed for the crypt.

  The place was, if possible, even more claustrophobic with light bulbs strung along the ceiling; the harsh light emphasized its desolation, a desert a million miles from the lush trees and flowers of Rudesburn. Tony was perched precariously on the pile of rubble taking both still and video photos of the corpse. Both corpses, to be accurate. The repeated camera flashes bleached the bones of humanity and made them sterile artifacts.

  Jerry stood by the doorway; he’d be in half of Tony’s photos. With nervous glances shared equally between Jerry and the skeleton, Dennis piled bricks into a wheelbarrow. Adele swept up dust, her luminous mask firmly in place. Mark held a meter stick and Jerry’s trowels, his expression of calm industriousness virtually remote-controlled. He’d spent last evening alone in the attic, avoiding even Hilary; now she sent him a quick, curious look which ricocheted without effect.