Death of a Lovable Geek

by Maria Hudgins

  As William turned to leave, Lettie pulled me back inside my own room and shut the door. “Oh Dotsy! What are the police going to do to me? There’s a big dent on the fender from where I ran into a sign post yesterday!”

  “Why should the police care what you do to a rental car?” I said. “And how will they know if you did it yesterday or someone else did it last month?”

  “Oh. What a relief.”

  Sometimes my friend Lettie doesn’t think things through before she speaks.

  Chapter Four

  “They’ve brought in more police. Four squad cars out there, now.” Lettie let the curtain fall and brought her fresh cup of coffee to our table.

  I loved the dining room at Castle Dunlaggan. The morning sun danced on the green and red Sinclair tartan of the rug and chairs. The walls were white stucco with heavy, dark, oak ceiling beams and wainscot. Today, Maisie had placed a bowl of creamy white hydrangea blossoms on each table.

  I tossed my orange juice into my face in response to a loud shout and a thud from the parking area. Lettie and I rushed to the window. Beyond several guest cars parked next to the building and the police cars parked willy-nilly behind them, two uniformed men wrestled Brian Lipscomb into a spread-eagle stance and shoved his hands against the top of a blue BMW.

  “What the hell?” Lettie said.

  I heard the screen door of the kitchen slam and guessed that Maisie had heard the ruckus and had gone out to investigate.

  After the police patted Brian down, they let him stand up straight and take his hands off the car. Brian appeared to be explaining something at great length. One policeman took a handful of keys from his jacket, and Brian pointed to a particular set. They moved around to the trunk of the car.

  “Is that the Lipscombs’ car? The BMW?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Lettie said. I can always count on Lettie to know things like that. She has a phenomenal memory for details. “Here comes the detective.”

  “It’s Chief Inspector Coates,” I said. The little rooster planted his feet wide apart,h and Brian continued his explanation of whatever it was, gesturing frequently at the trunk. The officer with all the keys stepped forward and unlocked the trunk. Brian pointed to something inside.

  Coates lifted out what appeared to be a stack of papers, handed them to Brian, and waved a finger toward the driver’s-side door of the car. As the men searched the front and rear seats, Coates escorted Brian, still carrying the stack of papers, around the back of the building.

  “What’s going on?”

  I turned from the window to find Tony Marsh standing behind me. “The police and Brian Lipscomb have been having a sort of … well, I don’t know what it was, but it seems to be over now.”

  Tony drained the last bit of coffee in the urn into a cup and joined us back at our table. “I’m so sorry about Dylan, Tony,” I said. “How is John taking it?”

  “I think he’s in shock, as I am.” Tony stared at his cup for a long time in silence. When he looked up, I noticed that his eyes brimmed with tears ready to spill over. “This is hard to accept. Who in the world would …” He choked on his words. “Everybody liked Froggy! He was brilliant. He had so much ahead of him.”

  Tony shook his head slowly and stared at his cup. “Who could possibly want to kill him? Why?”

  There was nothing I could say to that. I waited a minute, then said, “Have his parents been told?”

  Tony didn’t seem to process that question right away, but at length he said, “The police asked John if he wanted to be the one to call them, but he said no, he’d rather they did it.”

  Maisie came in from the kitchen. “They’ve almost got the interview room set up. Whenever you’re ready, they said, you can go round and give a formal statement. Chief Inspector Coates’ll go out to the dig site and the camp and tell all them clingin’ bairns what the situation is. After that, he’ll let us all do whatever we’ve got planned for the day.”

  “Including going to the dig?” I asked.

  “I suppose so,” Maisie said.

  “Are you going over there then, Tony?”

  “As soon as they let me, yes.”

  Maisie looked down at our table. “I need to know what ye’ll be wantin’ for yer suppers. Ye’ll be eatin’ here, I suppose?”

  We all nodded.

  “We’re havin’ rabbit and salmon. Dessert will be raspberry tart, I ken.”

  Although the Castle Dunlaggan was a bed-and-breakfast, Maisie always offered dinner as an optional extra. This far out in the country, guests often found themselves too far from town, or too exhausted after a day’s hiking to eat anywhere else in the evening. But Maisie’s evening meals were so fine that word had gotten around to the locals. As long as they called ahead, she could usually accept more diners, and it wasn’t unusual for us to have four or six people from a nearby village eating with us.

  “Is your salmon fresh?” I asked.

  “Still swimmin’. Boots is doon at the river noo.”

  * * * * *

  With a little time to kill, Lettie and I explored the gsaid, you i ~ hall. It ran the entire length of the south wing from the square tower to the new tower, the new tower being the accepted name for a tower that was round but had to be distinguished somehow from the other round tower which already had dibs on the name. The floor in the great hall was inlaid with three colors of marble in a geometric pattern. The granite walls, lit by the morning sun slanting through tall, bare windows, were covered with antlers, swords, guns, claymores, helmets, and coats of arms.

  Directly across from the front entrance were a tile-lined fireplace at least twelve feet high and wide and, incongruously, two cannon balls as big as bowling balls, one on either side of the hearth. This was not a woman’s room.

  Lettie gravitated toward a particularly painful-looking suit of armor in one corner.

  “Ouch!” I said. “Did you ever wonder what knights wore under their armor?”

  Lettie ignored the question. “I’m afraid my imagination was running away from me.”

  “How so?”

  “I was thinking about those noises we heard last night,” she said, “and I was wondering if this castle has a ghost. Most castles do, don’t they? Assuming there is a ghost here, maybe he or she comes out at night and puts on the armor and clunks around, pretending to be a knight of old.” Lettie clunked around, stiff-legged, to show me what she meant.

  I looked at her, refusing to laugh while I searched for a snappy comeback. I couldn’t think of a thing. “A ghost in armor would make a sort of creak-clank sound, I believe. What we’d heard last night was more of a clink-shush.”

  To my great relief, Lettie laughed first.

  * * * * *

  Chief Inspector Coates led me to a table and chair along the wall of the interview room. They had already moved out most of the stored furniture and had set up a large rectangular table in the center with computers and folding chairs. Cables and cords running from the table to a couple of wall outlets, I noticed, needed to be taped down before somebody hurt himself.

  Coates gave me paper and pencil. “Write down everything you remember, from the time you heard the young lass scream until our men arrived. Everything. When you’ve done, don’t leave. I have a few questions to ask you.”

  My recollections ran to three pages. As I turned them in, Coates ended his phone conversation and motioned me back to my chair. He pulled up another one in front of me for himself. “Can you tell me anything more about this Van what’s-his-name? Quale’s roommate?”

  “Not much,” I said. “He’s a tall, nice-looking kid, an electronics wizard, they say. He’s in the U.K. on a fellowship. At Cambridge, I believe. Most of the students here are from Worcester University, but I’m almost certain Dylan told me that Van goes to Cambridge.”

  “Asian kid?”

  “Asian-American. He’s from Seattle, Washington, I seem to remember hearing, but you’d better check on that. I think his grandparents came from Vietnam.”
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  “Anything else? Does he speak good English?”

  “Of course. He’s third-generation American.”s [ x Sp height="0" width="48">“Who else did young Quale hang around with?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’d only known him a few days. He seemed to spend most of his time at his microscope. By the way, did you notice the writing on the palm of his left hand?”

  “No, but the forensic examiner will. He’ll have it in his autopsy notes, I’m sure.”

  “Yes. Well, I just thought it might be important.”

  Coates gave me a look that said, in no uncertain terms, “I’m in charge of deciding what’s important.” As he checked back through a few pages of his notes, his jaw muscles clenched and unclenched repeatedly.

  Then he said, “We need background information on you, Mrs. Lamb. Your home is …?”

  “Staunton, Virginia, U.S.A.”

  “Occupation?”

  “History instructor.” I gave him the relevant addresses and phone numbers.

  “Married?”

  “Divorced.”

  He glanced at me as if to say, I’m not surprised, and jotted something in his notes. “Where were you yesterday between noon and midnight?”

  So Froggy had been killed yesterday. I had already guessed that. “I was at the dig site until nearly five. Then I came back here, showered, dressed, and went down to dinner at about six-thirty. We always have drinks before dinner in the new tower, next to the dining room. After dinner, I visited the library. Lettie Osgood, John and Fallon Sinclair, William Sinclair and Tony Marsh were also there. I returned to my room at about ten and went to bed.”

  “Was Maisie Sinclair with you in the library?”

  “No, she was in the kitchen, cleaning up from dinner, or I assume she was.” I wondered how I could have said that without sounding as if I suspected Maisie of not being in the kitchen. All I meant was that I hadn’t personally seen her in the kitchen.

  “John Sinclair and Tony Marsh were in the library with you the whole time you were there?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you showered before dinner, Mrs. Lamb, did you use the bath on the third floor above us here?”

  I was impressed. Chief Inspector Coates was already well up on the layout of the castle. “Yes, I did.”

  “Did you look out while you were up there? What I mean is, did you look at the area where the body was found this morning, and, if so, did you see a blue tarp?”

  “I didn’t look out, as far as I can recall.”

  “You didn’t look out, or you don’t recall whether you looked out or not?”

  “I didn’t look out … as far as I can recall,” I said as nicely as I could. “There is one other thing, sir. It’s not important, I’m sure, but on Wednesday, I believe it was, Dylan and I had a long talk in the finds shack at the dig. About his work. He showed me how he identified spores and pollen grains. He gave me a photo he’d taken of a heart-shaped fern, an embryonic fern, and he signed it ‘Love, Dylan.’ ”

  “">Coates looked at me blankly.

  “I mean, I know it’s not important. I simply wanted to tell you so you wouldn’t think I was holding anything back.”

  His look progressed through patronizing all the way to “You poor, pathetic, deluded, old thing.”

  Tony Marsh came in and handed a sheet of paper to a uniformed man at one of the computers. The man handed it back to him and pointed toward us. Tony brought the paper over and handed it to Coates. “It’s the list of workers at the excavation that you wanted,” Tony said. “I’ve put notes beside the ones who aren’t students and explained what their job is or why they’re here.”

  “Very good,” Coates said.

  Thankfully, I was dismissed.

  Chapter Five

  I found Lettie in her room, poring over a city map of Inverness. Lettie’s justification for coming to Scotland with me was to do research on her ancestors. She loves to travel, but has no interest in archaeology and even less in wielding a shovel on her vacation, so the ancestor hunt provided her with an adequate excuse to come with me. Lettie’s husband, Ollie, isn’t much of a traveler, but he encourages Lettie to go places, particularly, I believe, when she goes with me. Ollie told me once that he trusted me to get Lettie out of any jam she might get herself into.

  Last summer, however, we had gone on a group tour of Italy and it was I, not Lettie, who had nearly gotten into more trouble than I could extricate myself from. It wasn’t my fault that two members of our group got killed, but I was the one who got us both mixed up in it. Lettie said that when she got home, she found that Ollie had already packed himself a bag and bought a plane ticket to Florence.

  “Chief Inspector Coates is on his way over to the dig,” I told her. “He told Tony and me to give him an hour to talk to the kids and get them organized for interviews before we come over.”

  “So he thinks the kids don’t know about the murder?”

  “I reckon.”

  “I bet they already know, Dotsy. Someone’s bound to have heard the sirens.”

  “The real question is, did any of them know about it yesterday? Did any of them know about it when it happened?” I had to shiver at my own words. “Lettie, would you go to the cellar with me? Let’s see if we can find out what was making those noises last night.”

  “It’ll be dark down there.”

  “We have flashlights.”

  “How do you know it was coming from the cellar? Are you sure there is a cellar?”

  “No, but this is the best time to do it because we know Coates is at the dig. I’m not sure I could explain it to him.”

  Lettie looked unpersuaded.

  “Or, we could do it tonight after they’ve gone—when it’s really dark.”

  * * * * *

  We paused on the landing at the first floor. This stairwell gave access to the various levels of the square tower and the west wing. A nail-studded wooden door gu? Arrded the steps leading belowground. Lettie and I switched on our flashlights and descended to a small sort of alcove littered with garden and lawn equipment. Three old tires leaned against one wall. There was an exterior door which was locked, but a small, barred window allowed me to look out and see another flight of steps leading up to groundlevel. That little window, though caked with dirt, let in a bit of light.

  A doorway joined the alcove and a small room beyond, but the stone flooring ended at the threshold. I took my flashlight in and played it around the room, while Lettie stood in the doorway emitting a continuous stream of objections to our being there.

  This room was about fifteen by twenty feet and empty except for a brass headboard, a dozen or more old picture frames, and some more tires. A light bulb topped by a conical reflector hung from the ceiling in the center of the room. It worked; I snapped it on and clicked my flashlight off.

  “Stay by the door, Lettie.”

  The plain dirt floor was packed hard everywhere but one corner. There, away from the clutter lining the walls everywhere else, was an oval of tilled dirt, about two by three feet. Recently tilled. As I scanned the four walls again, it looked obvious to me that the clutter had been shifted to clear out this space. I really didn’t want to stick my hands down into that dirt, but I had to.

  “Do you see anything I could dig with, Lettie?”

  “Dig with? There’s a shovel out here. Don’t people sometimes dig with shovels?”

  I jammed the shovel down with my foot and removed a gallon or so of dirt, then felt around and tried another spot. After several test holes, I knew there wasn’t anything like a body underneath. At a depth of about a foot and a half, I hit hard-packed soil. The tilled area wouldn’t have been large enough for a casket, but a body, not in a casket but tucked into a fetal position, might have fit. I could have missed a small box or any number of small items hidden in the dirt, but I could find nothing. Without actually removing the dirt and sifting through it, I’d done the best I could for now.

  “Listen, Lettie.�
� I used my foot to push the shovel into the dirt one more time. “Clink-shush?”

  Lettie was fed up with me. “Please, Dotsy. Let’s go!”

  “One more minute. Put this shovel back where you found it.”

  There was another room. An opening in the center of the wall to the right of the door from the alcove had apparently had a door in it at one time because there were halves of hinges on one side. I walked through and found that the other room was about the same size as the first. I used my flashlight again and spotted a long fluorescent bulb suspended from an overhead beam by a couple of chains. It proved to be a low-wattage bulb, emitting little more light than my flashlight. Odds and ends, about three feet deep, obscured one wall, and against another, rows of wooden slats formed three wide shelves. I swept my beam along the shelves. Why were they all empty when there was so much junk on the other side of the room? Rooms collect junk either all over or in a few spots, not jammed up along one wall while three shelves on the other side remain perfectly empty.

  Lettie sighed impatiently and added a little squeak.

  My light found a dark, furry lump in the doorway and I knelt to touch it. It felt slightly damp and $qooked like spongy peat moss, but it smelled like mildew. I’d seen a bit of the same sort of material scattered on the slatted shelves. Beside a pile of spilled nails, I spotted a brown paper bag and slipped the strange mass into it.

  “Let’s go, Dotsy. I hear someone coming.”

  “One more minute.” I felt sure Lettie did not actually hear someone coming; she just wanted to leave.

  Back in the first room, I walked along the wall to the right of the tilled oval and directed my beam along the perimeter of the empty picture frame at the front of the stack. A heavy layer of dust covered all but one small spot about as wide as a hand. This frame had been moved recently.

  * * * * *

  Lettie left for Inverness with a sputter and a lurch but, for the first time ever, she got away from the castle without actually killing her motor. I tramped across the sheep pasture with my trowel and the insulated bag that held my emergency supply of little orange juice cartons.