Charm Stone

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  If she was trying to be tough, Jean thought, wouldn’t she call herself “Steve”?

  Alasdair frowned, but Stephanie didn’t need him—or Jean—to defend her. “Why come here?”

  “I saw you two talking to Matt last night, and outside the cabinetmaker’s shop this afternoon talking to—that was Stephanie Venegas, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Typical police, can’t do a thing about the break-in at Wes’s place, then bark up the wrong tree with Sam Gould. His bark is pretty loud, but he has no bite at all, if you’ll excuse the play on words.”

  Alasdair’s face showed not the least trace of amusement.

  Jean responded to a grumble from her stomach by sending a longing look toward the pantry and the packets of cocoa. Delayed gratification, she told herself. “Sit down, Jessica. Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “Thanks.” Jessica plumped down into one of the wingback chairs by the hearth, where, judging by the wrinkled throw pillow, she’d already been sitting, her purse and a garment bag close by. She nodded at the cup and saucer on the coffee table. “I fixed myself tea, sorry, but I was here for a couple of hours, and the cats didn’t offer to run over to the Lodge and get me another gin and tonic.”

  Jean chose the desk chair, not without a suspicious glance toward her computer—the lid was shut, the power off. Beside it sat the witch bottle. Had Jessica moved the bottle or had it moved on its own? But Cardinal Bellarmine’s ceramic face revealed nothing.

  With a surreptitious sniff—she didn’t smell horse shit on anyone’s shoes, not that her nose was a finely tuned forensic instrument—Jean slid her notebook and a couple of pencils out of her bag and prepared to play Sergeant Olson’s role. Her movement didn’t escape Jessica’s notice. With an exaggerated roll of her eyes the woman settled back, all but groping for a seat belt.

  On the couch, Alasdair assumed full interrogatory mode, elbows on knees, hands clasped, snow gathering on his brow. “Why us? How’d you know where we’re staying?”

  “I called Matt this afternoon and asked who you were. He filled me in, especially since he’d already looked you up on the ’net. You might be head of a security agency now, but you used to be a cop. And you and Jean are getting a pretty good track record solving crimes.”

  Hence Matt’s remark about crime solvers. Jean didn’t have to glance at her Scot to know he was thinking about reputations and two-edged swords. What she was thinking was that she hadn’t told Matt they were staying at the Dinwiddie Kitchen. But it wasn’t as though they were in hiding.

  “Well,” Jessica went on, “there’s been a crime and I’m suspected of committing it. And I bet Detective Venegas would love to finger me for poor old Wes’s murder yesterday. I could use some respectable allies.”

  “Then you’d best be telling us the truth.”

  “Yeah.” Jessica looked at Jean. “I didn’t recognize you last night. I was distracted by Rachel. Silly girl, Dylan might be good for a few laughs, but not for the long run. She should hardly be worrying about the long run. Marriage is a crock, you know. Men and women should just live next door to each other and get together for happy hour.”

  There was something to be said for that, Jean thought. Alasdair didn’t respond.

  “You’re Jean Inglis. Fairbairn now, Matt says.”

  “I got divorced and went back to my maiden name.”

  “Your maiden name is still your father’s name, evidence of a patriarchal society. But gender nomenclature isn’t our topic for tonight, is it?”

  “Ms. Evesdottir,” said Alasdair, reclaiming her attention.

  “Dr.,” Jessica corrected. “Let’s get this over with. No, I’m not a big fan of Sharon Dingwall’s, but she at least has some intelligence, unlike that oaf of a husband. She’s—she was—the brains of the operation. The problem is, it’s Tim’s sister who’s the money. I’m shocked, appalled, fill in the appropriate verb, that someone killed her. It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it. I’d check out that brute of a husband, if I were you. Thumbscrews might get his attention.”

  “Where were you between six-thirty and seven-thirty this evening?”

  “Getting ready for the play, then saying my lines at the beginning.”

  “Why not stay for the entire program, especially with your daughter playing the lead role?”

  “I wrote it. I know how it ends. And Rachel plays Mary like a victim.”

  “Wasn’t Mary a victim of gender prejudice and paranoia,” asked Jean, “you know, society using accusations of witchcraft to keep women submissive?”

  “Sure. But I’d rather think of Mary as defiant. Her story is longer and more complex than I knew when I wrote Witches and Wenches, damn it, but then, this way there’ll be a second edition.”

  “And yet you’re avoiding the media?” Jean couldn’t help but ask.

  Jessica laughed. “Touché. Let’s just say that to every press conference there is a season. Anyway, I did my bit in the play and headed over to the Lodge for a drink.”

  “You didn’t get there until almost eight,” Alasdair reminded her.

  “I stopped to change my clothes in a restroom at the Lodge. No one saw me, I’m sorry to say, but at the time, I didn’t know I was going to need an alibi.” Jessica rooted around in her purse and produced a pack of cigarettes. “May I?”

  “No,” said Alasdair. “You’ve already left a fag end on the porch.”

  “A cigarette,” Jean translated quickly.

  “I know that one. I’ve traveled in the U.K.” With a shrug and a crinkle of cellophane, Jessica stowed the pack away. “I know I should stop smoking, get me a nicotine patch, but I’ve already got an estrogen patch. You know what they say, once you’re past fifty it’s patch, patch, patch.”

  That one sailed right by Alasdair, Jean estimated. He didn’t bother grabbing for it, but went on, “Sharon rang you from her mobile just before she was killed, replying to you phoning her.”

  “Yeah, we were playing cell phone tag. She wanted to meet me after the play. I called her, she didn’t pick up, so I left a message. By the time she got back to me I’d turned off my phone and was hoping everyone in the audience had, too.”

  Jean remembered Tim and Sharon and their respective calls from Kelly, at a time they’d been cautious about who could overhear. Sharon, at least, learned quickly.

  “I told her to wait for me beside the Courthouse, but I didn’t pick up her message saying okay until I got to the Lodge. Little did I realize it was a message from beyond the grave.” Jessica shrank into the chair, leaning her head on her hand. “I called her back, to tell her to come up to the Lodge instead, but again, voice mail. If I’d only looked for her behind the Courthouse . . .”

  She might still be alive, Jean concluded, and swallowed the acid welling in her throat. Had Sharon’s phone been playing the Mission Impossible theme while she died?

  Alasdair was doing his best great stone face impression. “And why was Sharon after meeting with you the night? With the both of you being on such good terms and all.”

  “Business.” Jessica made the word an acid hiss. “Nothing to do with the murder.”

  “It’s for the police to be saying what’s doing with what.”

  A faint ding-dong resonated in Jean’s gut, first one note, then two, then an entire peal of bells. Great, it all came back to her now, when she was so tired. She put down her pencil and wriggled her fingers. “Your business with Sharon was the new material for Witches and Wenches. It’s the new original source Alasdair and I heard Louise Dietz and her friend Denny talking about.”

  “Louise.” The name was another hiss. “She descended on me tonight like a wolf on a lamb. All right, on a sheep, on mutton dressed as lamb—no one gets less respect than a woman of a certain age.”

  Alasdair’s expression was blank as driven snow.

  “She was all sweetness and light and dig, dig, dig. All because I asked her help with a literary reference. Second-rate scholar that she is, living on
borrowed glory.”

  Standard academic procedure. Jean picked up her pencil. “I heard her say something about Nathaniel Bacon, so I’ve been thinking your source had to do with his rebellion. What—did you say something about the Dingwalls and ‘Bacon’ and she extrapolated, logically enough, from there? But Nathaniel Bacon isn’t your field. You helped Sharon track down the name of the indentured servant who supposedly brought the charm stone to the colonies in 1660s. Mary Napier.”

  “Eh?” asked Alasdair.

  Jessica stared at Jean, her expression shifting swiftly from astonishment to anger.

  “You went to eastern Scotland and to London—the British Library, maybe—while Wes was studying the Witch Box at Blair. Berwick is in eastern Scotland. Francis Stewart, the Earl of Bothwell, and his supposed coven of witches were tried in Berwick—when? 1590?”

  Jessica’s mouth set itself in a stubborn line.

  The snow gathered on Alasdair’s stony face, forming the sort of overhanging cornice that could collapse into an avalanche and carry away anyone in its path, the guilty and the innocent alike. “I’d be answering the question, if I was you.”

  “I’m not trying to trump you academically,” Jean insisted. “I—we—are trying to help solve a murder. Two murders, counting Wesley’s.”

  Closing her eyes, Jessica rubbed her lids. She probably hoped to see something different when she opened them. Water dripped outside. A bus drove by and somewhere someone was whistling “Over the Hills and Far Away”.

  No, just as Jean recognized the tune, the whistle stopped. Maybe all she was hearing was the air leaking from her brain.

  Several splats resounded from the window above the desk and she leaped out of the chair.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jessica half-rose, then fell back as Alasdair dematerialized from the couch and rematerialized at the door. Throwing it open, he hurtled onto the porch. Great reflexes, indeed.

  Dropping the pencil, Jean raced across the room and switched on the porch light, then a fraction later switched it off again—no need to make him a target.

  The sound of laughter and running feet came from the street, and she caught a glimpse of several people—young people, judging by body shape and gait—loping away. A couple were wrapped in sheets, another wore plastic armor and helmet over a sweatshirt, a fourth boasted a wide-brimmed and plumed pirate’s hat. “Happy Halloween!” called a young woman’s voice, and they were gone, absorbed into shadow.

  “The pranksters are out tricking,” Jessica said. “Only little kids actually ask for treats. Rachel has a vampire costume to wear at a party, but she’s gone to Matt’s house. He’s a better mother at times like this than I am.”

  Again Jean gulped her heart back down to her chest. With an aggravated sigh, Alasdair disappeared around the side of the house and a few seconds later returned. “They’ve chucked eggs against the window. Like moths, attracted by the light. The rain’ll wash most of it away. And send the rascals inside—it’s a dreich night and they’ll get drookit, right enough.” He wiped his feet, slammed the door, and locked it. Water droplets glistened on his hair and the shoulders of his sweater like diamond dust.

  Hoping the cats were safely tucked away at their home, Jean went back to her chair and angled it a bit further away from the window. This would have been a good night for a fire in the little fireplace and a cozy conversation, drinks, cuddles. But right now she felt as cuddly as a cactus, and she’d rather grasp a nettle than Alasdair. She took up her back-up pencil and waited, lips sealed.

  Alasdair sat back down. “You were saying, Dr. Evesdottir?”

  “I wasn’t.” Jessica said with a laugh. Rueful, sardonic, but it was a laugh. “I asked for the third degree, didn’t I? Yeah, Wesley was murdered, too. I’m even more shocked about that, since he was considerably lower on the obnoxious scale than Sharon. I had a very brief affair with him, seemed like the thing to do since we traveled to the U.K. together. I broke up with him a couple of weeks ago, all very nice and civilized—much more civilized than the break-up with Matt, if the truth be told. Although Matt and me and that, that arrogant dictator-mother of his, made a pact to spare Rachel the worst of it.”

  “Good of you,” said Alasdair, with only a trace of sarcasm. He didn’t point out that Wesley’s mates thought the break-up had been traumatic for him. “Civilized” could simply mean that she hadn’t slashed the tires on his car.

  “And no, I didn’t kill Wes either. He was getting threatening calls, he wouldn’t tell me from whom. Since he did say ‘he’, I think they were from Tim, the animal.”

  “Not Matt?” Alasdair asked. “Was he not jealous?”

  “He liked Wes. He didn’t know about Wes and me. We were discreet.”

  Discretion being in the eye of the beholder, Jean told herself, and shifted uncomfortably on the hard chair.

  “Why would Tim be threatening Wes, then?” Alasdair asked.

  “Wanting Wes’s information about the Witch Box. He finally just stole it.”

  “Possibly.” Alasdair leaned back, ceding the floor to Jean.

  “The Berwick witch trials were in 1590?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “One of Francis Stewart’s coven of witches—so-called coven, although he was undoubtedly up to something.”

  “Playing games, hocus-pocus, woo-woo,” Jessica said. “Witchcraft was about social issues, about who holds power, about definitions of right and wrong and justice, not the supernatural.”

  “Some people see supernatural,” Jean told her. “Some people see conspiracy or witchcraft, others . . .”

  “See ghosts?” Jessica asked with a smirk.

  She’d heard them talking as they came in. Alasdair’s cornice of snow thickened. Jean plunged on. “One of Francis Stewart’s associates was named Barbara Napier. Like Francis, and unlike their other associates, she got off, supposedly because of her social status.”

  “Rumor has it she was the widow of Earl Archibald of Angus or the wife of an Edinburgh burgess. In reality she was neither. She was reprieved because she was pregnant. The witch-killers were perfectly happy killing children, or orphaning them, but this time the victim got off.”

  “Maybe she was protected by Francis Stewart’s family,” Jean suggested.

  “Probably she worked for them. Barbara—same name as my mother-in-law, which doesn’t tell you a thing but probably should, interfering, bossy . . . Well, Barbara Napier may or may not have been servant-class, but her great-granddaughter Mary Napier certainly was. Mary was born in Berwick in 1660 and followed the Stewarts back to London after Cromwell and the Puritans lost power—she shows up on a palace payroll as a scullery maid, then is listed on the manifest of a ship leaving London in 1675. She was indentured to a John Armstrong of Middle Plantation as a cook.”

  Jean’s spine tingled. She felt rather than saw Alasdair draw himself up and cast a glance at the bottle sitting at her elbow—of course he’d noticed it wasn’t where it belonged. But life expectancy was against Mary living in this little house in the 1750s.

  Jessica went on, “As a skilled laborer, Mary’s indenture was probably for no more than five years. But the only further record of her is in 1685, at her trial for witchcraft in James City County. After she’d been ducked or swum here at Middle Plantation, she confessed to casting spells and charming her neighbors—I used the exact words from the trial transcripts for the play. People will confess to anything under torture, even woo-woo.”

  “Francis Stewart.” Alasdair pronounced the surname the name as only a Scot could, pressing it through a pinhole until it exploded out the other side. “Women named Napier accused of witchcraft. Is there a legitimate connection with the Witch Box, or is that a fancy of the Dingwalls?”

  “Sharon came to Matt asking about immigration and witchcraft. Since he’d helped me find material on Mary Napier for my books, he sent her to me. Oh, I knew Sharon had some unorthodox ideas, but she was so knowledgeable I blamed that all on Tim and
worked with her. Big mistake.”

  “You’d already written about Mary’s life here in the colonies,” Jean said. “It was only when Sharon asked about Mary’s ancestry that you traced her back to the Berwick witches. That’s why you went with Wesley to Blair, to use resources in the U.K.”

  “Imagine my amazement, and my gratification, when Sharon’s hunch actually paid off. At the time, I thought Mary’s ancestry would be an interesting sidebar to the story of the Witch Box, like the story of the charm stone. I kept on working with Sharon so I could nail down the facts, get enough for a second edition.” Jessica let her head fall back against the chair. “And now I’m in deep shit.”

  “Oh aye,” said Alasdair, and waited.

  When Jessica didn’t speak, Jean asked, “So why did you fall out with Sharon?”

  “Why has she been going around calling me two-faced and self-serving, and why did I respond that she was slandering and scandalizing—well, she started it, dropping hints that Witches and Wenches was plagiarized from her and Tim’s unpublished, or unfilmed, to be accurate, work. Yeah, right.” Jessica lifted her head wearily, as though it was too heavy for her neck, and turned her face toward Jean. “Matt says you blew the whistle on a plagiarist and it cost you your career.”

  “Matt looks like being quite well-informed,” murmured Alasdair.

  No kidding. Not that Alasdair needed to point it out with such relish. “It gave me an excuse to give up my career is all. You didn’t answer the question. Why did you and Sharon fall out?”

  “I found documentation I hadn’t expected. I wanted to publish it academically, with proper referencing, in my own book and in refereed journals. But Sharon wants, wanted, to use it in that movie. Which turned out to be more fantasy-paranoid that I’d thought. Hoped. Feared.” Jessica snorted. “Yeah, I sure pulled the wool over my own eyes.”