Charm Stone

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  “Jean?” Alasdair came up beside her. “What . . . Ah.”

  A long bundle hung from one of the lower branches of the tree, swinging gently back and forth, dappled in shadow and silence. At its top, a pale splotch like a moon in eclipse waxed and waned as the bundle turned.

  Her lips were cold. She could hardly form words. “Someone’s hung a dummy from the tree, a joke about the witch trial, a Halloween prank, something.”

  Alasdair was already striding forward. Jean had to force her suddenly heavy feet to lift, lower, and follow.

  He stepped onto the bare earth beneath the heavy branches. His large, capable hands halted the swing of the bundle. The brown, fabric-wrapped bundle.

  A backless leather shoe lay on the ground a half-inch below a sock-clad foot and bony white ankle. A glint of orange-tinted light was the metal case of a cell phone, clutched in a hand like a blanched talon. The face below a tumble of dun-colored curls was suffused crimson, contorted into a gargoyle’s leer. The huge eyes bulged between half-closed lids, shot with red, filmy, dull, sightless.

  Between collarbones sharp as knives and a pointed chin, a rope encircled a scrawny neck mottled red and purple. The rope stretched over a low branch, a taut diagonal leading from shadow into gloom. For a long breathless minute the wind faded, the voices from the Courthouse weakened, and Jean heard only the creak of that rope as the body suspended from it twisted in the wind.

  The body. The very dead, past all hope of revival, body.

  Then, over the rush of her own blood, she heard Alasdair’s hoarse voice. “Your mobile, Jean. Give me your mobile.”

  Numbly, dumbly, she reached into her bag, pulled out her phone, flipped it open. The sudden flare of light illuminated Alasdair’s taut face, thinned lips, bleak eyes.

  Jean looked back up at Sharon Dingwall’s body, and the only words that coalesced from the careering kaleidoscope of her thoughts were: I’m sorry.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jean stumbled away from the tree, the hanging tree, the horror, onto the lawn. It stretched like the dark pall covering a coffin toward the buildings and their lighted windows. No matter how dimly lit, the windows and the rooms within were brighter and warmer than this wilderness. And as unattainable as the surface of the moon.

  Bowing her head, Jean covered her face with her hands. She realized her shoulders were shaking, the cold night penetrating to her bones. But even then she wasn’t as cold as Sharon.

  Or was Sharon cold? She couldn’t have been hanging very long—the murderer had hauled her up into the tree—how had he managed to do that without her shrieking—well, someone choking didn’t have much breath to shriek.

  Through the rushing in her head and the pounding in her ears, Jean heard Alasdair, sharp as an icicle. “. . . the tree at the corner of Nicholson and the Palace Green, between the Courthouse and the Tucker House. I’m telling you, this is no prank. Aye, I’m certain she’s dead. No, I’ve not touched anything.”

  Applause echoed from the Courthouse. A strain of music coiled down the wind. The show was over, and the show was going on.

  “Jean? Alasdair?”

  She knew that voice. Rebecca.

  Behind her the cell phone chirped again. He was making another call. Stern as stone, he said, “Stephanie? Alasdair. There’s been another murder.”

  Several people strolled laughing and chatting down the path toward Nicholson Street. Two more materialized from the fire-shot gloom in front of Jean. “What’s that . . . Oh my God.” Rebecca reeled back, her hand over her mouth.

  Michael caught her from behind. “Who is it?

  “Sharon Dingwall.” Jean hardly recognized the thin tight sound, like the warm-up vocalization of a banshee, as her own voice. The lager that had been so tasty going down now bubbled up in her throat, a foul, frigid acid, and she gulped. The acid drained through her stomach, down her limbs, and out her toes. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.

  With a jittery, impatient dance step, she turned back toward the tree. Alasdair was standing there all alone. She had somewhere to go, to him.

  What she thought was his shadow moved independently, gliding away from the darkness beneath the thick tentacled branches of the tree. A slender figure in pants, either a man or a woman, with something square beneath its arm. “Hey!” Jean croaked, then swallowed and tried again, this time achieving a shrill cry of “Hey, you, stop!” that was imitated and then expanded upon by the distant wail of a siren.

  Alasdair whirled around. “Here! What’s this?”

  But the figure had already broken into a run, long limbs rising and falling like pistons, carrying him/her through the lamplight at the end of Nicholson—red hair flared—and back into darkness, around the corner onto the black-topped road edging Palace Green.

  Dylan Dingwall. It had to be. And he was carrying his mother’s tote bag with the plans and the photos of the Witch Box, plans and photos that might have been stolen from Wesley’s apartment.

  Galvanized, Jean pitched her mini-backpack to Rebecca and leaped forward. He was a witness, maybe even the killer—matricide happened outside of Greek tragedy. Catching him was something she could do. Feet up, feet down—cold air warming in her chest—her hands clenched at her sides. Move, breathe, move. The soft grass beneath her shoes gave way to graveled asphalt. She skidded, caught herself, pounded on past the intersection.

  “Jean!” shouted Alasdair. Another siren blended with the first. Footsteps thumped behind her. A woman screamed—it had only been a matter of time before someone else leaving the Courthouse saw the coda to the play.

  Geez, Dylan was fast, or she was slow, or both—where did he—there he was, vaulting the fence in front of the Brush-Everard House. For just a moment the shape was a supple blur against the pale, painted clapboards. Then it vanished into the thick shadow between the house and its outbuildings.

  A gate in the fence—Jean fumbled for the latch, found it, opened the gate and hurled herself through. Behind her the gate swung shut again with a crash. She sensed brick beneath her feet, and walls looming on either side, and darkened windows, her own shape a ghostly movement in the warped old glass.

  A scramble ahead of her, a clank, and the crash of another gate shutting. Aha, he’d gone through this one instead of over.

  There was the fence, gray pickets in a row, and beyond that billow upon billow of looming blackness like curdled thunderclouds. Jean dredged her memory—she’d been through here on a garden tour—those were massive, ancient boxwoods, shrubs that in the formal garden behind the Governor’s Palace were carved, with fingernail scissors, no doubt, into decorative hedges. Here the bushes had run riot, growing into heaping hulks of shadow straining against the fence that surrounded them.

  Dylan had gone in there. She heard him pushing along the overgrown path, branches scraping.

  Footsteps closed on her from behind and a ragged breath made the skin on her neck crawl. Spinning around, she collided with a tall, lanky body. He’d circled around, he’d trapped her between the house and the fence. She struck out, but her blow was absorbed by a padded coat.

  Hands seized her shoulders and a breath scented with ale bathed her face. “It’s me, Michael. Alasdair couldna come chasing after you, folk are gathering and he’s minding the scene.”

  “Oh,” Jean managed to gasp. “Sorry. Come on, the guy’s gone in here.”

  “Jean . . .”

  “Go back the way you came and catch him on the other side, I think there’s a gate behind the house—can’t remember the name—the one across from the Randolph House.”

  “Jean . . .”

  She pushed at him. “Go on!”

  “Alasdair’ll have my head if I let you go in there on your own!” Michael whispered urgently.

  “No one lets me do anything, I’m a free agent!” And she opened the gate and plunged through.

  “Aye, you and Rebecca both,” Michael said just loudly enough for her to hear. He caught the gate as its counterweight pulled it shut
and followed.

  The path was narrow, spongy underfoot, prickly on the sides, dank, chill and utterly opaque. Her hands in front of her—cobwebs, there had to be cobwebs, complete with spiders—Jean pushed on. She registered only the lumps and hollows of the shrubs on either side and the faintest luminescence overhead. Unless those quick sparks weren’t her own nerves firing, but were the eyes of green men, nature spirits like those carved on the Witch Box. Spirits that could be malevolent, those of nature au naturel, not manicured into better homes and gardens.

  Away to her right, sirens howled closer and closer and stopped abruptly, leaving a subliminal whine in her ears. Car doors slammed. A low murmur of multiple voices blended with the wind whipping the trees. Was that a step, a twig breaking, straight ahead?

  She stopped dead, trying to listen over the pounding of her own heart, hearing Michael’s breath but nothing else. She knew what he was thinking, channeling Alasdair: Are you daft, woman?

  Yeah, I’m nuts. We’re all nuts. She pushed on, dodging right and left, wondering if she was following the path or just stumbling through gaps in the brushy wall. Spiders, snakes, goblins, potholes, trapdoors, and a murderer waiting up ahead.

  Okay, so the odds were that Dylan wasn’t the murderer. And he wouldn’t go looking for confrontations, especially if he was trying to get that tote bag out of sight, if hardly out of mind.

  Jean stumbled on a sudden slope and fell to her knees. A twig caught her glasses but she grabbed them before they flew off into nothingness. Michael tripped over her, flailed around, fell sideways into a shrub and, cursing and thrashing, pulled himself to his feet.

  Cats had been in here, Jean’s nostrils told her. It was one giant alfresco litter box. She brushed off something hovering in front of her face that looked like a white starfish—Michael’s hand, she hoped—heaved herself up and peered into the gloom. They couldn’t get lost, the thick tangle of bushes covered only a small area. If they just kept going they’d find the surrounding fence. Which Dylan had probably scaled by now, and hotfooted it down the path to the Woodlands. She needed to get back to Alasdair and set the dogs on the young man’s trail.

  She should have stayed with Alasdair to begin with, said that snotty little schoolmarm voice in the back of her mind. She’d recognized Dylan, she hadn’t had to chase him, Williamsburg’s finest could have been waiting for him at the hotel.

  Like he’d go back to the hotel, if the police were waiting for him there.

  Gritting her teeth, Jean crashed on along whatever path opened before her, Michael either doggedly following or leading when they found themselves in a cul-de-sac. They’d been in here half the night, hadn’t they? Surely a rescue squad of Boy Scouts would appear at any moment, carrying flashlights and spooling out thread behind them. And if any of them made Monty Python jokes about shrubbery . . .

  Lights, there were lights, cold red and blue glows pulsing against the clouds overhead like a localized version of the aurora borealis. Follow the lights.

  They were in a narrow alleyway between ranks of bushes. Jean broke into a trot. Buildings materialized on either side and she walked into a gate in a fence. The lights beyond it were so bright she flinched and covered her eyes.

  Michael, wisely holding his tongue, reached around her, opened the gate, and ushered her through. A few steps brought them to Nicholson Street, which was now clotted with vehicles and thronged with people, anxious faces washed into anonymity by the lights.

  Dim figures were raising blue tarpaulins to demarcate the area around the enormous tree. Robin’s egg blue, a color much too cheery for the occasion. Alasdair stood just where the shine of a police car’s headlights faded into shadow. He might no longer be serving as a one-man crime scene perimeter, but his expression in the cold, harsh light was still dour, unmoving and unmoved. On the outside, at least.

  “Excuse me, pardon me.” Jean shoved forward, arriving at Alasdair’s side just in time to glimpse what looked like drops of dried blood spattering the ground below the dangling body. Then the tarpaulin shroud covered the site, leaving those rusty splotches burned in Jean’s eyes. Fallen leaves, not blood at all. You didn’t have to bleed to die.

  Alasdair turned on her. “Are you daft? You had no call haring away like that!”

  “It was Dylan Dingwall,” Jean said, finally getting a full breath into her chest. “He was carrying Sharon’s tote bag, with the photos and stuff.”

  “Was it?” That shape on Alasdair’s other side was Stephanie Venegas, voice slicing, eyes flashing. “Alasdair says Dylan Dingwall is standing right over there.”

  What? Jean peered into the shards of light and dark surrounding the scene. A fog was rising—no, her glasses were smudged, no doubt with her own fingerprints. Focusing, she spied Rachel Finch, her face the same bleached white as her cap and apron, her mouth set in a thin line above a trembling chin.

  A couple of long paces away stood a tall, gangly young man with pointed, fox-like features and carrot-red hair cut short and spiked—last night, then, he’d been wearing a wig to match his costume—there was nothing at all roguish about his expression now. It was closed as tightly as a bricked-in vault, only his eyes, huge as his mother’s, glinting in the moving headlights, spotlights, flashlights . . .

  Oh. “That’s not Dylan,” Jean said. “Rachel’s just standing there. He’s just standing there. If that was Dylan, wouldn’t they be hanging onto each other?”

  “Ah,” said Alasdair.

  “Then who—” Venegas began.

  “Quentin,” Jean and Alasdair said simultaneously.

  “Snap,” he added, the sound of a blade falling. “He’s come back to the U.S. with his Auntie Kelly. I’ll have Ian—”

  Stephanie pointed out, “I have resources.”

  “Then you’d best be using them,” retorted Alasdair.

  And why, Jean asked herself, would he be in a good mood? Why bother to compliment her on her clever deduction about Quentin?

  Leaving them to it, she stepped a few paces away, to where Rebecca was picking bits of leaf and twig off Michael’s jacket. Jean looked down at herself—yep, splashes of mud, green stuff, brown stuff. She just hoped that no insects were burrowing inward looking for warmth.

  “Here’s your bag,” Rebecca said. “You were gone a good twenty minutes, maybe longer. Alasdair kept pacing over to the road, then back to the tree, then back to the road. Talk about a man between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

  “Yeah.” Jean shouldered her bag and Alasdair’s anger as well, although he was as angry with the crime, and his own position in it, as he was with her.

  “I wasn’t thrilled myself.” Rebecca hooked her arm through Michael’s. “So that’s Quentin over there? It really was Dylan making a getaway with the plans?”

  “He was running around in that part of town with Rachel last night. And who knows how long he’d been here with his parents, getting to know the shortcuts and back ways. Of course, he and Quentin both could have been coming here for years—I don’t know how long Tim and Sharon have been on the Francis Bacon’s papers bandwagon.” Jean looked around to see Rachel and Quentin still standing side by side, each in a different time zone. “So where is Tim? Where’s Kelly? Where’s Jessica, for that matter? She was supposed to have been performing in the play but I didn’t see her.”

  Other voices and other thoughts were catching up with her, falling forward, retreating, falling forward again, like waves encroaching on a beach of that deep blue sea. Her stomach roiled and the manic energy ebbed from her limbs. A brief spray of cold rain slapped her face. She was tired. She couldn’t stop now.

  Yet another car pulled up and Rodney Lockhart bailed out, his expression considerably darker than his complexion. He was not having a good day, but under the circumstances could hardly complain.

  Lockhart joined Alasdair and Venegas—okay, she was Stephanie now—Alasdair had spent more time with her today than he’d spent with Jean.

  The tarpaulins flapped in th
e wind and lights strobed in the interstices between panels while the shadow of Sharon’s body swayed back and forth behind them. Jean didn’t have to look at Michael and Rebecca’s faces to know that they were thinking the same thing she was. The worst thing about being murdered wasn’t necessarily death itself. It was how your mortal shell was robbed of dignity, no longer human, simply an exhibit to be probed, laid open, inspected by strangers who resorted to mordant jokes to keep their sanity in the face of the horror you’d become.

  She hoped the occasional pungent whiff that reached her nostrils was that of horse droppings—carriages and wagons stopped here in the shade of the tree.

  Someone else appeared on Jean’s other side and blearily she looked around. It was Miranda, her shoulders hunched and her hands tucked deep into the pockets of her navy-style wool coat. Her lips were colorless, her eyes dull. “Sharon Dingwall, eh? So the poor woman’s DOA?”

  “No, she’s D.R.T. Dead Right There. And,” Jean added, “I’m not writing an article about the murder.”

  Miranda raised her hands placatingly, her burnished nails glinting like pearls. “It’s murder, then, not suicide?”

  Once again Jean saw Sharon’s naked foot, dangling only an inch or two above the ground and safety. It might as well have been dangling off the Forth Bridge. “It’s murder.”

  “Damn,” Miranda said reverently.

  In the distance, organ music swelled and faded. Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue,” appropriate music for Halloween. For a dramatic scene. “That’s right, the concert.”

  “There’s me, waiting for you and—oh, hello there, Rebecca, Michael—in the bittie lobby below the bell tower. Had a lovely blether with the lady you were speaking with at the reception, Barbara Finch. A keen gardener, I reckon, as well as musician. Then we heard the sirens. I’m thinking, no Jean, no Alasdair, sirens. This is no good. Barbara went on into the church—there was seating only in the balconies by then—and I had me a wee lookie toward the tavern, passing a bearer or two of bad news on the way.”