Charm Stone

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  “You didn’t see Jessica at the church, by any chance?”

  “No, nor Matt. Jessica’s performing in the play, isn’t she now?”

  “It ended right when we found the—Sharon. Rachel’s over there.” Jean pointed, then realized Rachel was being urged away by several other interpreter/actors, including two women in long skirts. Maybe one of them was Jessica. Rachel finally acknowledged Quentin’s existence, looking at him long, hard, and futilely, before allowing herself to be walked away.

  Quentin didn’t seem to notice her. He stood, eyes downcast, swaying slightly, bookended by a Williamsburg cop and a security officer, probably awaiting if not Stephanie’s pleasure then at least her spare moment. Whether she was going to admit Alasdair to the impending interview—the impending round of interviews—was beyond Jean’s present ken.

  Her ken was contracting to a pinpoint. Even wrapping her arms around her own body didn’t allay the seeping chill that deadened her muscles but not her nerves. She was trembling. Go figure.

  Among her cascading thoughts, two stood up like rocks at high tide. Had the same person killed both Wesley Hagedorn and Sharon Dingwall? If so, were both murders committed for the same reason?

  For just a moment, she wished she didn’t care, but she did.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Miranda pressed a mug into Jean’s hands. They were so cold that the pottery seemed searing hot. Her lips were cold too, and even her tongue, but the gush of sweet, hot, milky tea past them and down her throat was delicious, as close to soothing as she was likely to get tonight. “That’s the best cup of tea I’ve had since I left home.”

  So now Edinburgh was home.

  “I stood there in the kitchen ’til they made a proper job of it,” said Miranda. “The cook, she was after adding lemon after I’d already added milk. ‘We’re not making curd,’ I said.”

  Stephanie was supplying her own metaphorical lemon, Jean decided. The detective stood at the window of Chowning’s small upstairs room, her lips pursed with determination when she wasn’t articulating orders both into a cell phone and face-to-face to a variety of underlings. Or sidelings, in the case of the security people. If she’d been a man her golden skin would be shaded with whisker stubble. As it was, it stretched tightly as a drumhead on its bone armature. Her svelte figure was outlined against the spotlights outside, the ones that were driving back the night—for the moment. There were plenty of hours of darkness yet to come.

  Rodney Lockhart had gone to consult with those who needed to know, leaving the Foundation’s director of security, safety, and transportation at the scene. Michael and Rebecca, having had their fill of the evening’s unintended consequences, had gone back to Richmond and the solace of little Linda. Hugh had cleaned Jean’s glasses for her, patted her shoulder encouragingly, then bundled up his guitar and headed to the hotel where he and the other members of his band were staying. The usual evening program of games and songs at Chowning’s had been cancelled and the visitors and interpreters who’d witnessed the ghastly finale to “A Matter of Witchcraft” sent away.

  Alasdair sat on the other side of Jean’s table, his hands cradling his own mug of tea, the crease between his brows deep as the Mid-Atlantic. “Millions of visitors,” he said, half to himself, “acres of property, outhouses, gardens, woods. We’ll be using the telephone book as our list of suspects.”

  Jean didn’t point out that “outhouse” meant here in the U.S. what “earth closet” meant in the U.K. What “privy” or “necessary” meant to the interpreters. Nor did she query his “we” and “our”. “Did you see anyone hanging around . . . ?” Wincing, she edited her question. “Did you see anyone standing near the tree before we found Sharon?”

  “Everyone in the vicinity was watching the play.”

  “Well, no, there was a custodian . . .”

  “. . . with a trolley, walking away from the scene. Oh aye. You never quite notice the staff, do you now?”

  “Always speak with the staff,” Miranda repeated her injunction.

  Stephanie called across the room, “We intend to,” then turned back to her phone.

  Of course she would be an excellent multi-tasker. Jean went on, “Big question. Were both murders committed by same person? If so, then Kelly’s out for the first one and Sam Gould’s out for the second. Bigger question—were both murders committed for the same reason? The same motive?”

  Alasdair’s eyes seemed to be dusted with ash, but they were as direct as always. “Money, jealousy, revenge, protection, a cover-up. There’s many motives for murder. And before you go reminding me, most murders are committed by someone knowing the victim, not a random passerby.”

  “Never mind the telephone book, then.” Miranda plucked a few stray leaves from Jean’s hair.

  “Thanks,” Jean told her, feeling like a monkey being groomed for lice. She asked Alasdair, “Do you think Dylan killed his own mother? Or was he just trying to get his parents’ incriminating papers away from the scene?”

  “I’m thinking he needs careful questioning, soon as may be.”

  “Soon as we find him.” Stephanie paced across the room, inserting her cell phone into her pocket. “We found Tim Dingwall and Kelly at Huzzah, the restaurant at the Woodlands. They’d just ordered dinner, but it hadn’t come yet. Table for two.”

  “They were not expecting Sharon, then. Or Dylan. And they’d just arrived.” Miranda set her elbows on the table and steepled her fingers a la Sherlock Holmes.

  Stephanie regarded her with her best—or worst—obsidian gaze. “Mrs., ah . . .”

  “Miranda Capaldi. Ms.”

  “Capaldi’s a Scottish name?”

  “Aye, that it is.”

  “Ms. Capaldi, you weren’t present when Miss Fairbairn here, Jean, and Alasdair found the body, were you?”

  “No. I was likely walking to the church just then.”

  “From where? You’re staying at the Inn, right?”

  “Oh aye, but I’d been having myself a coffee and a keek at the bookstore at Merchant’s Square. I wasn’t near the scene, sorry.”

  “Then I need for you to leave. Please. We’ll talk to you later.”

  Miranda shot a rueful glance at Jean. Jean summoned a wobbly smile. “Nice try.”

  “Very well then.” With good grace, to say nothing of gracefully, Miranda stood up and headed for the door. “I’ll be phoning you the morn, Jean.”

  “Please do.” Jean darted a glance at Stephanie, expecting to be kicked out, too, but apparently she’d earned the seal of approval as body-discoverer, or fount of Dingwalliana, or just as friend-of-Alasdair.

  Miranda opened the door, revealing an officer poised to knock. Tim Dingwall hulked behind him. With polite murmurs from Miranda, impatient ones from Tim, and silence from the officer, everyone jockeyed around each other.

  The whitewashed room with its dormer windows, furnished with a few simple tables and chairs and a stark, empty fireplace, seemed to shrink when Tim entered it. His hands opened and shut powerlessly, his jowls quivered in a tug-of-war between belligerence and despair. His eyes were so bloodshot that the gray irises were almost invisible. They turned to each feature, each face in the room, assessing every one for potential conflict.

  His thick lips wavered, parted, flapped. Words burst forth. “She could not have killed herself. She was happy, anticipating the conclusion of our work and the final production of the movie. No, she was not pleased that Quentin resigned from his employment in London so precipitately, but then, he discovered that The Sunburn is no refuge for responsible journalists.”

  “I’ll not be fainting in amazement at that,” Alasdair murmured.

  No kidding, Jean thought. Quentin didn’t know the true colors of The Sunburn? Come on now, a visit to the paper’s website would have told them all they needed to know. In fact, The Sunburn would probably be one of the few publishers happy to serialize Tim and Sharon’s work, especially now that murder had validated it.

  Or had m
urder validated their work? Did someone take the Dingwalls’ conspiracy theories that seriously? Sharon as the target of a killer seemed as unlikely as Hagedorn, the soft-spoken craftsman, being the target of one.

  “Please sit down,” said Stephanie. “Do you know . . . ?”

  “Yes, we’ve met,” Tim said, and chose a chair at the table farthest away from Jean and Alasdair’s.

  The door opened again, admitting a young man with blond hair trimmed in a military-style cut and a broad pink face, open and intelligent. He looked no older than one of the Dingwall twins but was probably thirty, in the irritating way that some men were either blessed or cursed, depending, with Peter Pan genes.

  Stephanie had already introduced her sergeant, Olson, first name unspecified. Now Olson set a small glass in front of Tim and chose yet another table, where he opened the notebook he’d been using to collect names and addresses, clicked his pen, and looked up expectantly.

  Alasdair eyed the young man with approval. A good sergeant was like a good sheepdog, quietly and efficiently herding witnesses into their proper places. A bad sergeant—as Alasdair could testify—would rush barking at the sheep and scatter them all over the hillside, where they’d sulk and refuse to cooperate.

  “I’m Detective Venegas,” Stephanie said to Tim. “We need to ask you a few questions.”

  “She did not kill herself,” he told the glass, and tossed back the contents—whiskey or brandy, probably, though presumably not Chowning’s best brand.

  “No, she didn’t. There was nothing for her to have stepped off of, to begin with. And the bruises on her throat indicate she was strangled manually before being hanged. This is a homicide case.”

  Tim stared into the glass, hardly mollified. And who could blame him? Jean thought. If she’d just lost her partner—and she hadn’t known Alasdair nearly as long as Tim had known Sharon—not that she and Alasdair had achieved the same level of commitment . . . Alasdair’s gaze was fixed on the witness. She drove that train of thought into a dark tunnel and abandoned it.

  “We’ll need you to identify the body,” Stephanie told Tim.

  “I have—already looked at her—it’s her, it’s Sharon.” Tim hid his face in his hand.

  “The identification is just a formality.” Giving him a moment, Stephanie said to Alasdair, “We’ve scheduled a press conference for tomorrow morning. Just a quick PowerPoint presentation. Could you say something about the theft in Scotland?”

  “No problem.” Alasdair no doubt remembered many a news conference in his past.

  Tim looked up. “Oh, good, I shall explain our work and its significance. Sharon would have wanted that.”

  “You won’t be involved, Mr. Dingwall,” Stephanie stated. “Now. Where were you between, say, six-thirty and seven-thirty this evening?”

  “Where was . . . You don’t mean to imply that I’m a suspect?”

  “The spouse is always a suspect. For the reason that the spouse is often the killer.”

  “Listen, I’ve just lost my wife, how dare you accuse me of . . .” Tim’s language skills devolved to a sputter. He finally managed, “Obviously my poor wife was murdered by a robber.”

  “Obviously?” muttered Alasdair.

  But Stephanie was on top of it, just as she was on top of Tim, standing over him and signaling dominance instead of sitting down and pretending to be his equal. “She still had her cell phone and her wedding ring. A robber would have hit her over the head or even shot her. Going to the effort of hanging her . . .” The words twisted as Sharon’s body had, in the wind.

  “It was personal, you mean?” Tim demanded. “Well then, you need to look no farther than that two-faced witch, that self-serving bitch Jessica Finch. Evesdottir. Whatever name she is calling herself. She killed Sharon to stop the lawsuit, which we would most assuredly have won. Why question me, not her?”

  Jean knew that Jessica was already above Stephanie’s event horizon. But all the detective said was, “What was behind the lawsuit?”

  “Jessica’s big mouth. She slandered Sharon at a conference last month. Called her a witch, right out in public.”

  Well, no, she hadn’t, not if what she’d said at the reception was an exact repetition of her original statement.

  “We believe Jessica and Sharon were working together on, um, some research,” Stephanie went on.

  “Jessica shares our interest in some aspects of colonial history, but Sharon would never descend so far as to actually work with her.”

  Stephanie almost but not quite kept herself from glancing at Jean, acknowledging the contradiction. She asked Tim, “What aspects? The history of the Witch Box?”

  Now it was Tim who glanced suspiciously toward Jean. She looked blandly back at him. The Dingwalls had known up front she was going to repeat everything they told her—that was the whole point of the interview. If he was thinking about the photocopies and plans accidentally spilling across the table, and Sharon’s speed in shoving them back into the bag—you’d think they had something to hide, wouldn’t you?—then he wasn’t going to call the detective’s attention to them. As for his provocative statement about the replica Box not being exact, did he even remember saying that?

  Now Tim said, “The history of the Witch Box is an important part of our research.”

  “We’ve gotten that far. Now I’d like to know why you’re calling Jessica two-faced and self-serving, if you and Sharon never worked with her.”

  His eyes focused abruptly on the top of the table and the empty glass. He was stonewalling. Hiding something, then, was more important than pinning the crime on Jessica.

  Stephanie shot another glance toward Jean, a direct one she interpreted as, No, I’m not opening the Witch Box can of worms any further right now. Turning back to Tim, the detective asked, “Did you and Sharon have a problem with Dylan seeing Rachel Finch?”

  “Really, Miss, er, Detective, er . . .” A mottled red flowed into Tim’s cheeks and then faded. “Our private family relationships have no bearing on the situation in hand.”

  Situation in hand? Jean repeated to herself. How about a spouse’s murder?

  “It was no robber who removed Sharon’s tote bag from the crime scene,” Stephanie told him, “it was your son Dylan.”

  So I have some credibility after all, Jean told herself, and looked over at Alasdair. He was sitting back in his chair, indicating approval, rather than leaning forward. In August he’d butted heads with the officer in charge, an old colleague. An old male colleague.

  Well, he’d butted heads with Stephanie until she accepted his bona fides.

  Olson’s pen stopped moving as Tim looked blank, perhaps visualizing the scene beneath the tree. No surprise he hadn’t noticed that the bag was gone. At last he said, “I thought she’d left her bag in the room—of course it has many valuable papers, understandable that she would want to keep an eye on it—but Dylan? Someone is imagining things! Or casting aspersions—this is not the first time we’ve been the target of slander.”

  “Do you know where Dylan is?” Stephanie asked.

  “Well no, I haven’t seen—Sharon went off with him and Quentin about six-thirty or so, to show Quentin the area and have a bite to eat—Quentin was among the first people on the scene—poor, poor lad, finding his mother in such a state.”

  We found his mother, too, Jean corrected silently. Dylan, now, he’d probably wandered over to the Courthouse looking for Rachel. By how many minutes had he missed saving his mother’s life? Was he on the scene quickly enough to have seen the killer? Unless . . . No. Until she had further evidence, Jean wasn’t going to think Dylan was himself the killer.

  For a long moment Tim sat shaking his head, his face set in the bleakest of frowns. Then, suddenly, he jerked upright and declaimed, “There’s your solution. One of our enemies lynched poor Sharon—that’s the word, lynched—in order to stop our work and prevent us from releasing our movie and revealing all. The conspirators are trying to suppress the truth. That proves
that we’re right, doesn’t it? It proves that we’re closing in on them!”

  Alasdair winced. Even Stephanie retreated a step at that. Judging by the movement of Olson’s pen, he was drawing a series of question marks across the page. It was his smooth tenor that broke the silence. “If the killer wanted to hinder your work, why didn’t he steal the tote bag? Why leave it there beneath the tree for your son to pick up?”

  And to run, Jean thought, as though the very hound of hell, not a mild-mannered historian, was on his tail.

  “You’re working with them,” Tim stated, his jowls trembling with self-righteousness. “You’re trying to stop us and our sons from proving our conclusions—I should have known, an official government body like the police—if we don’t toe the official line then there’s no help for us, is there? If only Dylan or Quentin had been there, if only I’d been there, Sharon would be alive now and giving you a piece of her mind.”

  Stephanie’s black arches of eyebrows rose and fell. “If she was alive now, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Where were you between six-thirty and seven-thirty this evening?”

  “I was eating dinner with my sister,” Tim spat, “who I have not been fortunate enough to speak with on an individual basis for quite some time. We had just ordered our meals when Sergeant Olson here appeared at our table.”

  “That’s where you were at eight. Where were you earlier?”

  Even more sullenly, Tim said, “I was doing some work in our room, Sharon’s and my room. Kelly was recovering from her difficult journey—really, the people allowed on airplanes these days—in her room, on another floor. Even though we had booked adjoining rooms, the hotel was unable to provide them. The manager will be hearing about that.”

  So did Kelly have a motive for killing her sister-in-law, Jean wondered, other than general friction? “Why didn’t Sharon eat dinner with you?”