Then again, even I could see that O’Malley was making Terence’s death all about him. And I’d picked up the odor of mead on his breath. Had he, perhaps, had a little too much of the stuff?
He was lifting his head and moving it about, eyes closed, nostrils flaring. It rather resembled the way dogs react when someone opens a food container in the next room and releases a faint but enticing scent into the atmosphere.
“If you’re having trouble picking up any vibes, it could be because he didn’t spend the last few weeks of his life here,” I suggested. “Up until last night he was camping over there with everyone else. See where there’s a gap in the line of tents? You might want to do your vibe sniffing over there.”
If I hadn’t been studying his peculiar behavior with an eye to describing it to Michael later, complete with snarky comments, I’d have missed the expression of exasperation that flitted across his features, just for a second. Then he recovered his expression of romantic melancholy.
“Alas! A ‘name writ in water’ indeed!”
Thanks to the many evenings I’d spent making polite conversation with Michael’s faculty colleagues, back before Caerphilly College’s Drama Department seceded from the English Department, I recognized the melancholy words that John Keats had wanted carved on his tombstone. I’d heard at least half a dozen somewhat-inebriated English professors quote them while whining about how underappreciated they were by the department. I wasn’t quite sure how applicable the words were to Terence, but I decided to respond in kind. Nothing apt from Keats sprang to mind, but I could lob back a little lugubrious Percy Bysshe Shelley. “Ozymandias” would work.
“‘Nothing beside remains,’” I recited. “‘Round the decay/Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.’”
The odd sidelong look O’Malley gave me was rather reminiscent of a horse preparing to shy. Not, I deduced, a genuine fan of the English Romantic poets.
“It’s hopeless.” Was he casting aspersions on my ability to recite poetry? “And I had such hopes. I wanted to get a better handle on his character. It would give so much more … depth to my performance.”
“Ah,” I said, in what I hoped sounded like a sympathetic tone.
I probably needn’t have bothered. He sighed heavily and began shambling away with his head bowed and his shoulders hunched. Not toward the gap in the line of tents at the far left side of the camp, where Terence’s tent had rested for four weeks, but in a more direct line back toward the gate.
“Curious,” I said aloud.
“What’s curious?”
I started slightly, and turned to see that Horace had come up behind me and was standing at the entrance to his tent.
“O’Malley.” I nodded in the direction where we could still see the actor, making a beeline for the exit.
“I was wondering why you brought him here,” Horace said.
“I didn’t bring him here,” I said. “I followed him. Found him standing here staring at the place where Terence’s tent used to be, claiming he wanted to pick up the vibes so he could get a better handle on his character.”
“Some of these actors are pretty peculiar that way.” Horace wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t said, more than once. “And meaning no insult to Michael and the rest of the players in the Game, because what they do is not only entertaining, but pretty darned challenging, although the characters aren’t exactly deep. How would learning more about where the real Terence Cox was camping help him play Sir Terence of Albion any better?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “And here’s an even better question: how did O’Malley know where Terence’s tent used to be pitched? It was over there in the main part of the camp for the last four weeks—it was only the last twelve hours of his life that the tent was here.”
Horace whistled and looked thoughtful.
“Maybe someone told him?” he suggested. “Gave him directions?”
“Damn good directions,” I said. “I was watching. He made a beeline here. No hesitation. It’s as if he knew the way already.”
“Like if he’d been here before,” Horace said. “Tell Chief Heedles.”
I was already pulling out my phone. Horace grabbed something from his tent—a Blake Foundation tote bag full of something or other—and headed back toward the gate. I followed more slowly as I talked to the chief.
The chief found O’Malley’s pilgrimage to the site of Terence’s tent as interesting as I had.
“Did you confront him about what he was doing?” she asked.
“I asked if I could help him find whatever he was looking for,” I said. “But I didn’t push it. I thought maybe you’d rather I left any heavy confrontation to you. And maybe I’m being overly imaginative, but what if he was looking for Terence’s tent because he wanted to search it for some reason?”
“To retrieve something incriminating, for example.”
I nodded and then, realizing the chief couldn’t see it, said aloud, “Yes. Exactly. Or plant something incriminating.”
“Keep this to yourself,” she said.
“One more thing,” I said, in case she was about to hang up. “You have all of Terence’s stuff locked up, right?”
“In that studio you cleared out for us.”
“We’re reasonably careful with the studio keys,” I said. “Because we usually have a lot of valuable craft works and supplies in the studios—especially that one, since it’s the jewelry-making studio. And I’m sure you remember that summer we had all the sabotage here at the center.”
“Vividly.”
“We’re careful—but not paranoid, because we don’t usually have anything in them anywhere near as important as critical evidence in a murder case. And unless you have some prime suspects I’ve never met, I bet most if not all of your suspects have been around the center long enough to figure out how to get the key to that studio if they really wanted it.”
“You think we should move our evidence?”
“Or put a guard on it.”
“Probably a good idea. By the way, are you still anywhere near the falcon place?”
“Not that far away—why?”
“Could you drop by to see me? I’m with your grandfather and Mr. Dorance.”
“On my way.”
What now? As I passed by the forge, I waved at Faulk and pointed in the direction of the entrance to the grove. He nodded and went back to supervising as the boys demonstrated to the tourists how the bellows worked.
In the grove I found Greg, Grandfather, and the chief gathered by the falcon enclosure, staring at what I now knew was a large white oak. Perhaps I should remedy my woeful incompetence at tree identification by studying it and then seeing if I could identify other nearby white oaks.
Maybe later. After I figured out what the chief needed.
“Thought you said the Mad Monk was behind that tree.” Greg pointed to the oak.
“He was.”
“He isn’t now,” the chief said. “Lenny couldn’t find him. I went and looked behind it myself. Behind several other oaks, too.”
“And he didn’t leave the grove,” Grandfather said. “I was keeping my eye out for him.”
I glanced around. The Mad Monk wasn’t visible anywhere else in the grove.
“Well, he can’t have vanished into thin air,” I said.
I left them and strode over to where I’d seen the Monk. They were right—he wasn’t behind the tree. I glanced back. They were watching me. Greg and Grandfather had “I told you so” written all over their faces. The chief’s face was neutral, but then it usually was.
I looked around to see if the Monk had moved on to another tree, or perhaps taken refuge behind some bit of shrubbery.
I took a step or two deeper into the woods—but only a step, because I didn’t want to get tangled up in the mesh deer fencing.
I glanced over at the mesh, just to be sure I wasn’t about to run into it and spotted something: a break in the net. I
drew closer. Not a break—a cut.
I gestured to the chief. She strolled over. Grandfather tagged along. Greg didn’t leave the falcons, but he was paying more attention to us than to the birds.
“He went thataway,” I said, pointing to the slit in the fence.
The chief frowned and stepped closer to examine it. From a few feet away you couldn’t easily see the mesh, much less the cut.
“I’d forgotten you had the place fenced in,” she said. “The stuff’s invisible from a foot away. Looks like a relatively new cut.”
“It can’t be more than a few days old,” I said. “We inspect the fence about once a week to make sure it’s more or less intact.”
“Only more or less?” The chief smiled slightly. “Isn’t that a rather cavalier attitude toward security?”
“We don’t expect the fence to stop a determined trespasser,” I said. “We just want it to slow down the clueless tourists who don’t realize that beyond the fence in that direction there’s thousands of acres of park and timberland and not much else. Most of the time the only problem we find is places where trees have fallen on the fence and dragged it down. Never seen anything like this before.”
The three of us stared at the hole in the fence in silence for a few moments.
“So,” the chief said finally. “Is it your theory that this Mad Monk of yours killed Mr. Cox? And fled when he noticed you were watching him? I’m open to considering the idea, but what’s his motive?”
She was looking at me, but Grandfather spoke up before I could.
“He killed someone he’d seen trying to abuse the falcons, of course,” Grandfather said.
“And after doing so,” the chief went on, “Instead of making good his escape, he hung around—”
“In the hope of taking out others he considered to be animal abusers.” Grandfather nodded as if he’d been expecting something of this sort.
“But upon seeing that Meg had spotted him, he was so unnerved that he sliced a hole in the mesh fence so he could make his escape the long way round, by hiking through the woods.”
“Maybe he didn’t cut the hole to make his escape,” I pointed out. “Maybe he cut it this morning to sneak in after the front gate turned him away.”
“And was leaving by the same route he used to enter,” the chief said. “Could be.”
“Doesn’t that logging road run somewhere by here?” I asked.
The chief nodded and took out her phone. Grandfather and I listened while she gave orders to her officers, sending one to search up and down the logging road for either a parked car or a hiker fitting the Monk’s description, another to stake out the place where the logging road met the main road, and a third—evidently the lone officer still patrolling the rest of the town—to establish a roadblock at an intersection I recognized as the first place a fugitive leaving Biscuit Mountain could possibly take a turn instead of heading straight on to Riverton.
“That was quick work.” Grandfather nodded with approval. “Catching the killer in less than twenty-four hours.”
“We haven’t caught him yet,” the chief said. “And we don’t know yet that he’s the killer.”
“Then why would he flee?” Grandfather asked. “Guilt! That’s why.”
“But maybe he wasn’t guilty of killing Terence,” I said. “Maybe all he did was sneak in without paying. We could ask the ticket sellers—I bet they’d remember him. And when he saw us staring at him, it unnerved him and he fled.”
“If that’s all he did, the chief won’t have any reason to hold him,” Grandfather argued.
“Trespassing,” the chief said, nodding to the hole in the fence. “Vandalism. And in a murder investigation I have considerable latitude to detain persons of interest who flee when I try to question them. Even if he’s not the killer, he could be a material witness.”
Just then Horace appeared. He carried his forensic kit and the tote bag he’d fetched from his tent.
“Ready whenever,” he said.
“First let’s see if you can tell me anything about this.” She gestured to the slit in the netting.
First? If the netting wasn’t what Horace had come over to do forensics on, what was it?
The chief noticed me watching.
“Thank you,” she said.
I could take a hint.
“Could you let me know if you find the Mad Monk?” I asked. “I’m probably not the only one who’s a little wound up about having him lurking around.”
“Will do.”
As I strolled toward the opening in the trees that marked the entrance to the grove, I began noticing crowd sounds—cheering and laughter and occasionally the sort of “ooooh!” that usually accompanied those moments when a tightrope walker pretends to lose her balance.
And when I drew near the forge, I found the crowd was gathered around it. What the—
Chapter 35
As I drew closer to the forge I heard someone bellowing loud enough to be heard over the crowd.
“‘Before my body I throw my warlike shield!’”
O’Malley’s voice. And not his everyday speaking voice, either—this was the sort of exaggeratedly dramatic voice that I’d expect to hear when Michael’s first-year acting students did their auditions. Could the man get any more annoying?
“‘Lay on, Macduff!’” O’Malley declaimed. “‘And damned be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”’”
Macbeth, I noted. And then, even though I hadn’t said it aloud, I corrected myself, in deference to theater superstition: The Scottish Play.
Still, I was curious, so I pushed my way through the growing crowd until I could see what O’Malley was up to. He was standing in front of the fence surrounding the forge with a huge leather tankard in his left hand and an unsheathed longsword in his right. He let the point of the sword droop toward the ground as he lifted the mug to take two deep gulps. I could see his Adam’s apple bobbing beneath the stubble. He swayed slightly as he lowered the mug.
The tourists were gathered around in a rough semicircle. A reasonably large semicircle, but not large enough for my taste. A few stumbling steps was all it would take for O’Malley to be at their throats. How clueless could they be?
Of course, I couldn’t think of any reason he’d have to skewer the tourists. But this was O’Malley. Quite possibly an inebriated O’Malley. Reason didn’t enter into it.
He set the tankard down and scanned the audience around him with a surly expression.
“Get on with it!” someone called.
“Yeah, let’s see some action!” another tourist shouted.
As if he needed encouragement.
“I order you to hold your tongues!” O’Malley began to turn slowly in a circle, pointing his sword toward the tourists and waving it slightly. “I dare the floor collectively to utter another sound! I challenge you, one and all! I will take down your names.”
People backed away a little. Not nearly enough.
I glanced over at the forge. Faulk was standing in front of the door to the back room. Behind him I could see that the door was partly open, and Josh and Jamie were peering out. Josh, Jamie, and Spike.
“‘Step forward, budding heroes! Let all who wish to die hold up their hands! Not a name? Not a hand? Very good. Then I proceed.’”
Not Shakespeare, I thought absently. But familiar sounding. Cyrano de Bergerac, perhaps? I shoved the question aside to ask Michael later and began pushing my way through the crowd again, aiming for the side of the forge. If I was careful, maybe I could slip inside the fenced enclosure. I didn’t want to leave Josh and Jamie—or Faulk—to deal with O’Malley by themselves.
“‘If we are mark’d to die, we are enow,’” O’Malley was declaiming. “‘To do our country loss; and if to live, the fewer men, the greater share of honour.’”
Back to Shakespeare. Probably Henry V. If the wretched man wanted to do a Shakespearean monologue, why didn’t he just ask us for a slot on one of the stages? And where the de
vil had he gotten his hands on a sword?
I had reached the far side of the forge. I hopped the fence and went over to join Faulk—staying toward the back of the enclosure.
“‘We would not die in that man’s company,’” O’Malley shouted, “‘that fears his fellowship to die with us.’” He was waving the sword more wildly than ever, and I was relieved to see that the crowd was now giving him plenty of room. But they hadn’t yet realized that this wasn’t a scheduled part of the entertainment. Some of them were laughing—maybe a little nervously—some were looking uncomfortable and uncertain what to think, and a few were looking at their watches with an expression that clearly said “if this doesn’t get a lot more interesting pretty soon, I’m moving on.”
“‘Once more unto the breach, my friends!’” O’Malley roared.
“What the hell happened?” I asked Faulk in a low voice.
“We heard Spike going crazy during the demo, but we figured it was just another squirrel teasing him.” He was breathing heavily—not a good sign. “I sent Jamie back to check on him, and he found O’Malley rummaging through the back room, with Spike firmly attached to his ankle. Jamie pried Spike loose and I frog-marched O’Malley out. He didn’t put up much resistance, but once I came back into our enclosure, he pulled out his sword and started doing that.”
“Have you called for help?”
“Not sure the Beggar’s up to dealing with him,” Faulk said. “And Tad would overreact.”
“I didn’t mean the palace guard.” I pulled out my phone and called the chief.
“Is something wrong?” she asked. “I can hear the crowds—”
“We have a violent drunk right outside the forge who’s waving a sword and shouting insults,” I said. “Normally I’d sic Horace and Lenny on him but—”
“Officers on the way,” she said.
I hung up and tucked my phone back in my pocket.
Emboldened by my arrival, Josh came out of the back room.
“Don’t get any closer to the fence,” I said. “In fact, go out the back way and fetch your grandfather. Faulk might need him.”
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