Charm Stone

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  She did a double take at a stack of children’s novels that prominently featured Alice Walker’s Finding the Green Stone, then spent a moment scanning the titles of a rack of ghost stories. She’d take Eric’s word that there were none about the Dinwiddie Kitchen. She and Alasdair must simply be on the right wavelength—not that she had a clue how ghosts actually transmitted.

  There, several copies of Witches and Wenches reposed on an end cap. Jean hoisted one of the heavy trade paperbacks and eyed the cover. It was designed around a caricaturish period print in the style of Hogarth, of two wasp-waisted women in voluminous skirts and hats the circumference of serving trays, neither one of whom could be considered wench or witch.

  Nor could Jessica. Her photo on the back was a glamour shot, sculpted hair, thickly applied make-up transforming her face into a mask, scarf artfully deployed to conceal her sagging throat.

  There she’d sat in the Dinwiddie Kitchen, for at least an hour and a half, while Thomasina brushed invisibly by her, brewing, baking, fending off witches with a Bellarmine bottle, clinging to the customs of her youth. Although if the bottle was indeed Thomasina’s, she might have been fending off her own ancestry.

  Thomasina had worked at the Palace during Mason’s tenure. He had to have known her, and about her gender ambiguity, in a day when gender ambiguity was highly suspect. After seeing Lady Dunmore’s Box with its empty space, he could well have presented the elderly androgyne to her as both a curiosity and as the daughter of one of Charlotte’s family’s retainers. Oh to have been one of no doubt many flies on the wall!

  A quick application of her credit card, and Jean now owned a copy of Jessica’s book.

  The green plastic sack and its contents banged at her side as she scurried down the sidewalk and across the street to the campus. Skirting the original Georgian buildings—more red brick, cupolas, dormers, symmetrical windows, round-headed doors, the model of Enlightenment architecture—she spared a thought for roads not taken.

  Matt waited at the front door of a structure considerably later and heavier than Georgian, wearing a college-logo sweatshirt and loose cotton pants. With no more than a “Hi,” he conducted Jean to the sanctuary of his office.

  She collapsed into a straight-backed chair, catching her breath and relishing the scent of academic incense—books, coffee, a pinch of mildew, a soupçon of hair gel—and gazed around her with, if not lust in her heart, then an itch in her memory.

  With its overstuffed shelves, student papers, stained coffee cups, computer peripherals, the room reminded her of her old office. Matt’s was personalized with a CD player even now tinkling with harpsichord music. Atop the changer sat several intricate bits of metal that Jean at first thought were modern mousetraps, but then realized were puzzles. That’s right, Rachel was a skilled metalworker.

  Photos tracing the young woman’s growth from toddler to siren ended with one of her in cap and gown, Matt on her right, Barbara on her left, Jessica half hidden beneath the picture frame. “What’s Rachel doing now?” Jean asked.

  “Working as an interpreter at the Palace. Hoping to turn her art degree into an apprenticeship at the silversmith’s shop.” Matt sat down in the leather chair behind his desk and leaned his head against the back. The crown of skin rising above his gray hair reflected damply in the light from the window. Maybe he’d been out jogging. Maybe he was sweating out some intricate bit of campus politics. Maybe he knew a little too much about the double murder investigation.

  “I just saw your mother at the church,” Jean said, nodding toward a photo of a youngish couple that had to be Barbara and Matt’s father. He looked like Matt on steroids—more hair, thicker neck, squarer shoulders. And a much sterner expression. Right now Matt looked like an armadillo stranded in the middle of a four-lane freeway. “You said she was a former academic. What’s her field? Music theory?”

  “No, religious studies. She may be retired, but she’s still on the go, traveling overseas, even. I’m surprised she can find her way back to her apartment. No pets, no potted plants, she doesn’t have time to deal with them.”

  “Yeah, it can be complicated caring for a pet. Where does she travel?”

  “Places like Sedona, Glastonbury, Lourdes, Sri Lanka, analyzing healing traditions. She’s thinking of updating her work on how the witchcraft craze was caused when the rising male medical-scientific profession tried to eliminate village healers.”

  “Healers using healing traditions like charm stones?”

  He shrugged tightly, his hands flexing on the arms of the chair.

  No, he hadn’t asked her here to see his office. Jean kept on rolling the conversational boulder uphill. “I was checking out Robert Mason’s gravestone, because the Dingwalls think it’s the key to Bacon’s vault, and Barbara implied he was dabbling in the occult or something.”

  “No, that’s what you inferred. He was just interested in the history of witchcraft, which was an iffy hobby in his day. Unlike Walter Scott with his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft a generation later. And back home in Scotland.”

  Accepting his correction without quibble, Jean asked, “Mason was a Scot, too?”

  “From Glasgow, like Governor Dinwiddie.”

  “He named his son ‘Stewart’. A nod to the Jacobites?”

  “Probably. But the poor little guy was gone by the time Dinwiddie and then Dunmore arrived.”

  “And by then Mason knew what side his bread was buttered on,” she said with a smile. “His Hanoverian, Georgian bread.”

  If he got the joke, meager as it was, he ignored it. He took off his glasses, rubbed them with the hem of his shirt, and peered myopically around the office as though everything looked better in soft-focus. Amid the pile of papers and magazines on his desk lay a catalog of the Dunmore exhibit, open to a photo of the Witch Box—artifact, artwork, historical flypaper.

  “So all the names on Mason’s gravestone are legitimate names of living, well, of people who once lived. There’s no secret code—now there’s a redundancy, a code by definition is secret.”

  “No, there’s no code. The Dingwalls are the worst kind of idiots, smart ones.”

  She knew what he meant, people whose intellectual gyroscopes couldn’t tell which way was up. Pointing sideways, toward the catalog, she went on, “What about that carving at the top of the stone, that looks like the slot for the charm stone on the Witch Box? The initials may be coincidence, but that’s not. I’m guessing Mason had it carved there for no other reason than social climbing, reminding passersby of his position poking around the cupboards of power.”

  “That’s what Jessica thinks. That’s what Mom thinks, too. That’s what they both told Sharon, but no, she and Tim kept pumping hot air into the subject.”

  “Have you written about Mason? What about Jessica and your mom, have they?”

  He replaced his glasses and turned toward her. “Why are you asking all these questions about Mason? Do I detect a bit of detecting?” His chuckle came a moment late, and was distinctly hollow.

  “Well, yeah. And I’m writing about the Dingwalls for Great Scot.”

  “Are you making any progress in solving Sharon’s murder? What about Wes’s? The news conference this morning . . .” He leaned against the headrest, eyes closed, lips so tight his goatee pleated.

  We come to the bottom line. She said, “They’ve arrested Jessica.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m assuming you don’t think she killed anyone.”

  “No!” he exclaimed. “She and Wes, well, I know there was something, they went off to the U.K. together, for God’s sakes, but she’s a free agent.”

  “Were you friends with Wes?”

  “I wasn’t his enemy, if that’s what you mean. I wasn’t jealous.”

  Jealous, Jean thought. There are lots of ways of being jealous, as she’d discovered for herself.

  Slapping his hands on the leather armrests, making a double report, Matt stood up and paced over to the window. From below came
the shouts of an impromptu football game. “Jessica and I met Wes through my mom, who knew him because of the music and the harpsichord. Jessica got her hooks into him when he was commissioned to copy the Witch Box, and then the Dingwalls—mostly Sharon, she’s the brains of the operation—turned up and I tried to help her with her research, and so did Jessica and Mom, too. And here we are. No good deed goes unpunished. Mom already found that out, helping Jessica with her book and then getting no credit.”

  Jean glanced down at the sack resting against the leg of her chair. So Jessica had—not necessarily plagiarized, that was a strong word and a stronger accusation—Barbara’s work. But it was Sharon who’d accused Jessica of plagiarization, out of revenge and spite after Jessica refused to share the as-yet-mysterious Charlotte document.

  Jessica, Barbara, Sharon, like the three witches, the weird sisters in Macbeth, all stirring the cauldron of the Witch Box. Eye of newt, toe of frog, pen of ink and stone of charm.

  “You know, I envy you your plagiarization suit,” Matt said over his shoulder. “At least something happened in your academic career, something to make you stand out from the herd.”

  “It wasn’t a plagiarization suit, the plagiarized dissertation was just the beginning . . .” There was another area in which her reputation preceded her. Doing the right thing never went unpunished either.

  “And the Dingwalls. Those crazed theories of theirs, not a logical construct among them, get taken seriously by way too many people, when I’ve carefully researched and footnoted and now I’m going to be reduced to imagineering, for God’s sakes. Betraying everything I’ve worked for.”

  “Look at it as using everything you’ve worked for in a new and different way.”

  He leaned on the windowsill. “You’d think the damn Dingwalls had cast some sort of spell on our family. Jessica, Sharon, Dylan was probably with Rachel last night—they said he ran away from the scene—she’s at that age, swimming with estrogen and not a lick of sense.”

  Jean suppressed her smile of agreement, even though Matt wasn’t looking at her . . . Wait a minute. Jessica said Rachel went to Matt’s house last night. Had Matt not been there himself? “Um, surely Rachel was pretty upset with the, er, Sharon’s death. And Jessica wasn’t at home, she was, ah, being questioned—you’d think Rachel would come to a parent for comfort.”

  Matt didn’t take the bait. The harpsichord music stopped and the CD changer whirred. The notes of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” filled the room, the lush romantic-era orchestra in stark contrast to the rippling intricacies of the harpsichord. Jean glanced over at the stack of CDs by the changer and adrenaline shot like drain cleaner through her body.

  Matt had an album by Williamsburg’s Fifes and Drums. She couldn’t see the track listings from where she sat, but she didn’t need to. “Over the Hills and Far Away” poured through her mind, drowning out Tchaikovsky. Three times now she’d heard a shadowy someone whistling that. Surely Matt wasn’t . . . What he was, as Alasdair had pointed out, was well-informed.

  Hardly aware of what she was doing, she looked over her shoulder to make sure she had a clear path out of the room. And she saw not only the sturdy paneled door but also Matt’s wastebasket, looking like her office rubbish bin, teeming with torn envelopes, wadded papers, cancelled notes. Except on top of his pile of dead-tree debris rested a small piece of paper with three words printed across the top. Protect and Survive.

  Shielded by the music and the sounds of sporting revelry outside, Jean slipped out of the chair and reached into the basket. Yes, the list of phone numbers was in Alasdair’s handwriting. It was the bittie paper he’d lost Friday night.

  Bracing herself, she took a stab in the dusk. “You know, you’ll never make a good spy if you go around whistling ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’.”

  His already tight shoulders spasmed, drawing his hands into fists and his body into a defensive crouch. His head fell forward. Maybe he was tempted to bang it against the window in frustration.

  Okay then, Jean thought. Guilty as charged.

  Her mouth was dry. She managed to find enough spit to swallow and then speak again. “You went for a stroll around the Historic Area after the reception Friday. Were you thinking about Wesley’s untimely death? Were you following Rachel? Or were you following Alasdair and me?”

  Slowly Matt straightened to his full height, a head taller than Jean. Slowly he turned around. He saw the paper in her hand, and the quizzical expression was wiped from his face. One blank moment, and then his lips twisted, his eyes flashed, and his skin all the way to his scalp flushed an ugly, angry red. “Yeah. To all the above—Wes was dead, and I was hoping it was an accident, but had a bad feeling . . .”

  “How is sticking someone with a sharp instrument and holding them under water an accident?”

  “I didn’t know that then.”

  That he showed no surprise at it now was discomforting, but then, Jean didn’t know how many details of Wesley’s murder Stephanie had released. Still, she eased herself down and picked up the book in its sack, heavy as a blackjack. With her other hand she thrust Alasdair’s note into the outer pocket of her mini-backpack, then gathered it up. It wasn’t light, either, and if necessary she could swing it by its straps. And there were pens and pencils on Matt’s desk, speaking of sharp instruments.

  But Matt made no move toward her. “Rachel’s much too good for one of the Dingwall boys, especially Dylan, I’d like to, to . . .”

  “What?” Jean asked, thinking of Tim punching a hole in the wall.

  “You and Alasdair should have left him in the pillory. You should have called the police on the Dingwalls in the churchyard. When you didn’t, I thought you were working with them.”

  “What, you were too far away to hear what we were saying?”

  “Yes, and he’s got a pretty thick accent, too.”

  No, he didn’t. At least she didn’t have to squint with her ears to understand him.

  “I saw the scrap of paper fall out of his sporran. I picked it up. The phone numbers written on it, the police and security. And you and he are on the ’net, the Scottish newspapers . . . He’s who he says he is.”

  “Oh yeah, he sure is.” As Alasdair had told the woman on the bus, Madame, I’m not pretending to be anything. Transparent the man was not, but he never claimed to be anyone else.

  Jean heard her voice sharpening. “You followed us back to the Dinwiddie Kitchen. You were watching me with the Dingwalls at the Cheese Shop. You were wandering around last night keeping an eye on Jessica. Not Rachel, Jessica.”

  Had he been wandering around behind the Courthouse, keeping an eye on Sharon, a spindle from Wes’s shop beneath his arm? Waiting and watching until he could get her alone?

  Jean smiled, hoping he couldn’t read the tension in her clenched teeth, stretched mouth, dry lips. “What do you want from me, Matt?”

  His return smile was a rictus grin. His molasses-brown eyes softened, and again she saw in them something both haunted and hunted. Maybe he did think Jessica had killed Sharon, and Wes as well. Maybe he was trying to take the blame.

  The ties that bind and strangle.

  “What do you want?” she asked again, with a long step back toward the door.

  “You’ve got to get Jessica off,” he said, in his distress unaware of the sexual double meaning. “It’s not fair, arresting her, she’s just doing her thing. She can’t help being abrasive, getting into problems with people like Wes and Sharon, any more than a black widow can help eating its mate.”

  “That’s not for you to decide. Or me. Alasdair and I will do all we can, but if it turns out Jessica killed Sharon and or Wes, then . . .”

  His eyes began melting, gathering moisture. His shoulders drooped. The color drained from his face and scalp, so that his gray hair and beard seemed to be absorbed into his ashen skin. Shrinking to a fraction of his height, he sank into his chair, buried his face in his hands, and rocked back and forth, moaning. The chair creaked in
rhythm.

  Jean considered several parting salvos and settled on a simple, “I’m sorry, Matt.” She walked into the corridor and shut the door behind her. The sound of the “Pathetique” followed her down the hall and out of the otherwise silent building.

  Yes, she felt pity for Matt. Hell, she felt pity for all the Finches and the Dingwalls. Like Lord Dunmore in 1775, events were slipping through their fingers like sand through an hourglass. And yet, surely, it was one of them who’d overturned that hourglass to begin with.

  She dodged the young men playing football, carelessly risking their fresh faces and taut, agile bodies, and crossed the street wondering how much she’d just risked.

  Matt hadn’t attempted to harm her. It was a stretch to think that he’d had murder on his mind when he summoned her. He’d have a hard time disposing of her body, for one thing, but then, murderers weren’t known for logical thought.

  Matt was a sneak, not a murderer.

  Still, she’d gone to his office without letting anyone know where she was going. She awarded herself a demerit for that, and two more for having cut Matt so much slack over the last couple of days.

  Alasdair was probably with Steph—er, at the police station. Pausing by Jefferson’s statue, Jean found Stephanie’s number in her phone’s memory and punched the button. Her mouth was still dry. She practiced saying “Hello.”

  “Stephanie Venegas.”

  “Hello, it’s Jean Fairbairn.”

  “Do you want to talk to Alasdair? He’s right here.”

  Of course he was. “No, thank you, I just wanted to draw your attention to Matthew Finch, Jessica Evesdottir’s not-quite-ex-husband. I just talked to him in his office, and he, well, you need to talk to him.”