Charm Stone

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Another familiar face leaned into the pale aura of the dashboard lights, a rectangular grin beneath blue eyes dancing with humorous intelligence and a head of shaggy, light brown hair touched with auburn. Michael Campbell-Reid added, “Most likely the Yanks will go muttering about men wearing skirts, all the while handing you bourbon, not real whiskey, and just when you’ll want bracing up for the honor of the Auld Sod.”

  “Their loss, then.” Alasdair’s teeth flashed in a smile, even though he couldn’t brace his back and shoulders any further. “No worries, I’ll mind my manners.”

  “I’d be careful who you call a Yankee here below the Mason-Dixon Line,” Jean told Michael.

  Rebecca said, “My brother in Richmond was telling him that this morning, but he thinks he gets a pass, being an outlander.”

  “You’re after driving yourself, are you?” Alasdair asked. “Good man.”

  “I learned to switch sides of the road whilst I was working in Ohio some years since.” Michael nodded at his wife, another benefit of that job in Ohio.

  Silver-white headlights flashed as a speeding car almost bottomed out in the ravine, then dodged the SUV idling at the side of the road. Jean’s skirt and Alasdair’s kilt fluttered in its chill draft and she suppressed a twitch of evil memory. Never mind that they were standing on the sidewalk, such as it was, they were still vulnerable to a careless driver. Or a malicious one.

  With a screech of brakes and a flare of taillights, the car rounded the corner onto Nassau Street and then, a block further on, turned right into the parking lot behind the Hospital. “Good grief,” said Rebecca. “The invitation to the reception didn’t say anything about having to punch a time clock.”

  “It’s just now gone seven.” Alasdair raised his wrist and its watch into the light.

  Jean asked Rebecca, “You’re not coming to the reception after all?”

  “We have to get back to my brother’s place and rescue Linda. My mom probably hasn’t put her down since we left this morning. You think she’d be used to grandchildren by now, but no. Maybe she’s checking this one over to make sure she’s not growing thistles or something.”

  “Linda’s getting on famously with your folk,” said Michael soothingly. “It’s high time she made the acquaintance of the American side of the family.”

  Jean supposed the umbilical cord between the Campbell-Reids and their four-month-old daughter stretched only so far, and the fifty miles to Richmond was its limit. Not that she could offer any advice. She’d never had children, and her nieces and nephews had been presented to her as faits accomplis, enjoyable to entertain and just as enjoyable to give back.

  Alasdair had no offspring, and, being an only child, no nieces or nephews. What he had was the wisdom not to comment on matters he knew nothing about. “They’ll not have rearranged the exhibition since you approved the installation this morning.”

  “No, the artifacts from Scotland are the Museum’s responsibility now,” said Rebecca. “You said then you thought the security arrangements were good.”

  “Oh aye,” Alasdair agreed, and glanced at his watch again.

  Jean got the message. Business now, chat later. “We’ll represent Scotland, then, the Museum, the National Portrait Museum, Protect and . . . Oh! Alasdair just heard that the copy of the Witch Box at Blair Castle was stolen today.”

  “Was it now?” asked Rebecca, and Michael asked simultaneously, “They’ve nicked the villain, have they?”

  “No, more’s the pity,” Alasdair replied, and presented the situation in full outline form, signing off with the name of Kelly Dingwall.

  “Another Dingwall, is it?” Michael asked. “You’ll have heard about Sharon, then.”

  “No, what about Sharon?” Jean stepped a bit closer to Alasdair and crossed her arms over her chest. He’d been right, her jacket wasn’t heavy enough for the increasing cold of the evening. But curiosity came before comfort.

  He put his arm around her. She wasn’t sure which was warmer, the wool of his jacket or the solid flesh of the arm beneath. Two more cars passed at much more suitable speeds, one going on toward the intersection with Henry Street, another also turning on Nassau toward the Hospital. “What of Sharon?” he repeated.

  “One of the Museum curators was telling us that Sharon, and, I assume, Timothy, are suing a professor at the college for slander.” Rebecca waved in the general direction of the campus. “Or libel—that’s the one in print, isn’t it, while slander is verbal?”

  “It’s all defamation of character,” said Alasdair.

  “You Yanks being right quick off the mark with the lawsuit,” Michael said, “though we Brits are catching you up.”

  “Whoa.” Jean’s agenda cartwheeled, top to bottom, and then sprawled sideways. “Will Tim and Sharon do the interview tomorrow—well no, they won’t turn down a chance to talk about their theories—but they’re probably not supposed to say anything about a pending lawsuit. Unless they want to present their case in the media. The suit I was in a couple of years ago, that was for wrongful termination, and the slander was against me. However, I had a good reputation to fall back on, which the Ding, er, walls don’t especially have. Not beyond The National Enquirer and the fringes of talk radio, anyway.”

  “The lawsuit’s concerning their theories?” Alasdair’s gaze shifted from Jean to Rebecca and Michael’s faces framed in the window. “I’m using the term loosely, mind. Theories can be proven.”

  “Their fancies?” suggested Michael. “I don’t know, we’ve not heard details.”

  “Just,” Rebecca went on, “that a Professor Evesdottir called Sharon either a witch or a bitch or both, though there’s got to be more to it than that. Do you know her? Professor Evesdottir, that is.”

  “Evesdottir?” Jean repeated. “No, I don’t. Sounds Icelandic, except in Iceland it’s the father’s name followed by ‘daughter’. But there are lots of historians jostling for precedence. More than a few of us get pushed off the academic merry-go-round and then go looking for someone to blame.”

  “You weren’t pushed. You jumped.” Again Alasdair raised his watch, this time giving it a long, hard look. “Let’s be getting on, Jean.”

  It wasn’t that he was on duty—his security chieftainship was only honorary, here—or that he was anticipating a social occasion. It was that he’d agreed to appear, so appear he would.

  So was she at his side? Or was he the sidekick of Jean Fairbairn, girl reporter? Hard to say, other than that this evening, this trip, was one more exercise in team-building.

  Chapter Two

  With promises to share information as well as entertainment—dinners, tours, concerts—Rebecca raised her window and the SUV rolled off toward Henry Street and the highway to Richmond.

  Jean’s teeth were starting to chatter. She leaned into Alasdair’s embrace as they scurried across the street and onto a sidewalk angling toward the Public Hospital building. Clever, she thought, how historical Williamsburg compromised between anachronistic street lights and letting the customers trip and fall—and probably sue—by hiding downward-focused lights in the branches of the trees. Still the glow of Merchant’s Square and the college campus, just two and three blocks away respectively, washed out the stars to the northwest.

  Pausing at the foot of the steps leading to the entrance, Jean glanced back toward the darkened Historic Area. Above it, the indigo sky was strewn with stars. “How dark were the nights before Edison and his cronies gave humanity a twenty-four-hour day?” she murmured, half to herself.

  Alasdair answered anyway. “Dark enough to be generating witches, vampires, werewolves.”

  “But we’re still generating witches, metaphorically, no matter how bright the lights.”

  “That’s another sort of darkness, lass. A matter of perception.”

  “Like sensing ghosts?”

  That one he didn’t answer, and almost succeeded in concealing his half-smile, half-frown by pulling open the heavy doors.

  Wit
hin the Public Hospital’s orderly Enlightenment-era, Georgian lines, had once been confined the community lunatics. Or mentally ill, as they’d be called today, unless political correctness had decreed some term even less direct. Reality-challenged, perhaps. Jean could sometimes apply that label to herself.

  A door to the left of the well-lit lobby opened onto re-creations of both the eighteenth and nineteenth-century hospitals, showing the transition from warehousing, and often abusing, the insane to attempting to treat them, if with methods that now seemed little more than abuse. And what, Jean wondered, was being done to sick people today that would make future generations roll their eyes in horror?

  “May I see your invitations to the reception, please?” asked the college-age woman behind the desk, and, with a quick look at the thick, creamy paper suitably engraved with Jeffersonian script, waved them toward the elevator. The gleaming metal doors glided open the moment Jean pressed the button. Alasdair bowed her inside, not without a half-glance back at the woman, whose black-lined eyes not only hadn’t blinked, they had opened wide enough to reflect a ripple of tartan.

  Jean swallowed her grin.

  Just as the doors started to close, two women entered the lobby, the younger one flashing an invitation, the older saying not nearly far enough beneath her breath, “Rachel, for the hundredth time, get those damned hearts and flowers out of your head! Love doesn’t conquer all. It doesn’t conquer anything. It’s the woman who’s conquered.”

  Alasdair lunged, arm extended, and the doors bounced open again. The two women stepped into the elevator and stood just inside the doors, vibrating like high-tension wires. They acknowledged their captive companions only by their averted eyes and their tightly closed mouths.

  The metal cell slipped downward. Alasdair and Jean exchanged glances, his cautious, hers curious.

  The two women looked like a sinner with her clerical escort. Rachel’s bolero jacket only partially covered her scarlet mini-dress, made of something shiny that squeaked as she shifted her weight on spike heels so tall and thin they could stake a vampire. Chin-length curtains of blond hair framed her crimson lips and tip-tilted nose, and set off her earrings and necklace, Celtic-interlace silver wires set with small chunky stones. It was probably her perfume that was permeating the confined space, rich and flowery, with an undertone of bubble gum.

  The older woman’s long, straight, black coat flapped open over a long, straight, black-and-white dress. The high, square, solid heels of her shoes seemed less appropriate for stabbing than for crushing and grinding. Her face was a lived-in version of Rachel’s, shrunken around the wide cheekbones and soured about the dimpled chin, with something grim stuck in the corners of thin, red lips. Her blond hair was wrinkled rather than smooth, a streak of silver rising above her forehead and sweeping around to the side.

  Jean’s brows tightened into a frown. She knew that face and that streak of silver, like crumpled tinfoil. She knew that astringent voice. She just couldn’t think of a name and a provenance.

  The elevator doors opened and the two women bolted. “Mom, get out of my face and get a life. We’re over twenty-one. We’re nobody’s business but our own. Hearts and flowers? Yeah, right.” Rachel’s voice was typical of so many young American women, squeezed through her sinus cavities so that it produced a mosquito-like whine.

  She had a point about the hearts and flowers, but what a shame she’d reached it at her tender age. Shaking her head—ah times, ah attitudes, ah when did she start feeling so, er, mature—Jean stepped in front of Alasdair into the lobby of the DeWitt Wallace Museum of the Decorative Arts, which was concealed beneath and behind the Public Hospital building like a secret government installation in a spy movie.

  The mother and daughter tapping briskly across the marble floor didn’t stop to look at the gift shop across the lobby, where every article for sale—books, pottery, textiles, high-quality souvenirs—was temptingly illuminated. Neither did they pause by the small but choice exhibits of antiques and period art that lined the corridor to the Museum’s central atrium.

  Jean had to admire Rachel’s skill in maneuvering those shoes. Shoes. That was it. “I know her,” she murmured to Alasdair. “Rachel’s mom, there, in the sort of clerical outfit.”

  “Eh?”

  “She’s Jessica Finch, in Women’s Studies at the university at Charlottesville. I’m not surprised she’s here. Her specialty is the artifacts of witchcraft, like the Witch Box and the charm stone. I met her at a conference a couple of years ago, when she spoke about finding shoes walled up in old houses to defend against witches, something she traced back to shoes being good luck—you know, how you tie them onto the bride and groom’s getaway car.”

  “Shoes,” Alasdair repeated, one corner of his mouth twitching suspiciously.

  Fine. Let him laugh. To him, shoes left prints at a crime scene. “Her husband Matthew’s a historian at the college here. His field is Scots immigrants, not just the convicts and indentured servants but educators and religious figures. Though he’s not really well known. More of an Indian than a chief.”

  “Ah. A long-distance relationship,” said Alasdair, perhaps remembering the six weeks or so that he had lived in Inverness and she in Edinburgh. What was it about distance fanning a big fire but extinguishing a little one? Could you draw a similar conclusion about proximity?

  The Finches, mother and daughter, peeled away from each other. Jessica zigzagged past the groups of people gathered in the atrium and disappeared down a side hallway. Rachel ran up the central staircase beneath the huge Peale portrait of General George Washington. His painted eyes seemed to peer bemusedly over the railing at her dress, an assertive but scanty splash of red against the white marble, the white surrounding columns, the white latticework of the ceiling.

  A waiter costumed in stockings, knee breeches, and a long waistcoat offered a silver tray filled with tall flutes. All right! Champagne! Alasdair seized two glasses and handed Jean one. She drank, the bubbles tickling her nose and throat, and sized up the scene as several of the attendees sized up Alasdair.

  To one side, a quartet of musicians dressed in eighteenth-century clothing played light but elaborate music that Washington would have recognized. On the other side, against a display of guns and swords, stood a linen-draped table stocked with food and drink that, Jean assumed, Washington was intended to have recognized—pastries in decorative stacks, dollops of pink fluff that was probably Virginia ham relish, carved pineapples spilling out-of-season grapes and strawberries, mounds of cheese bits and swirls of toast squares.

  At the foot of the staircase, front and center, sat a sign reading: Lord Dunmore and the End of Empire. A man in a tuxedo stepped forward to the sign and the music paused. So did the murmur of voices echoing from the giant box of the atrium.

  Rodney Lockhart had greeted Jean, Alasdair, and the Campbell-Reids that morning with a gleaming smile. Now his mahogany face wrinkled in an expression that was obviously intended to be another smile, but which was closer to a shocked grimace. His deep voice, like Jehovah’s rumble, welcomed all and sundry. Then he spoke briefly of the exhibit and of the Scottish institutions that had lent their precious items, the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Scotland, the duke of Atholl and Blair Castle—here Lockhart nodded toward Alasdair, who nodded graciously back—and thanked several contributors, including Big Oil, Big Pharmaceutical, and Great Scot magazine.

  Jean looked around for Miranda Capaldi, her full-time partner and part-time boss at Great Scot, but didn’t see her. She had probably stopped off at either a nail salon or a boardroom and was going to be fashionably late.

  Lockhart stopped even pretending to smile. “I’d also like to recognize the contributions of Wesley Hagedorn, who passed away suddenly this afternoon—a tragic accident, or so . . .”

  Or so they say? Who said, the police? Bereaved relatives? Or Lockhart himself, spinning . . . What? Jean didn’t have to look around at Alasdair to sense his police-antennae bristling. He
had to be remembering the police helicopter.

  Lockhart cleared his throat. “Welcome to Lord Dunmore and the End of Empire.” To a smattering of applause, he faded back into the crowd and the musicians glided into Pachelbel’s Canon.

  “Who was Hagedorn?” asked Alasdair. “What happened to him? Just this afternoon, was it?”

  “I haven’t a clue. Miranda will know who he is—was—though. She’s been working to set up a beachhead here for several months. You know, Williamsburg and its Foundation as the first step in her conquest of the Americas.”

  People drifted up the steps much more sedately than Rachel had run up them. “Shall we? Not that we haven’t already seen everything.”

  “But I’m by way of keeping up appearances, and you’re working, more or less.” Placing their empty glasses on a tray to one side of the table, he eyed a pile of gelatinous green cubes. “Jelly?”

  “I bet it’s pickled watermelon rind.”

  Alasdair’s eyes rolled in her direction.

  “Look at it as American chutney.”

  “Right.” Alasdair offered her his arm and up the stairs they went, making their entrance, showing Alasdair’s tartan colors and probably disconcerting General Washington, who at different times in his life had fought both with and against kilted, red-coated troops.

  On the landing, Thomas Jefferson, not in oil paint but in the person of an interpreter-scholar, spoke with a couple in black tie and evening gown. “. . . Charlotte Murray, Lady Dunmore, is a most charming lady, both in personality and appearance. Hers is the better family, related to the Stewarts of Galloway and through them to the now extinct royal line, as well as to the present Hanoverians, with whom she has found great favor. Her connections have served her husband’s ambitions very well indeed, when late he was His Majesty’s Lieutenant, Vice Admiral, and Governor-General of the Colony and Dominion of Virginia.”

  Very late, as in long-dead, Jean thought. But then, in historic Williamsburg, time bent back on itself like a Möbius strip. Modern-day restorers and interpreters had no fear of living amid spirits, ghosts, whatever you wanted to call them and however you might, or might not, sense them.