Death of a Lovable Geek

by Maria Hudgins

  By trekking diagonally across the sheep pasture and a field of barley, I cut a quarter mile off the distance between the castle and the dig site. Lettie had offered to give me a lift but for some strange reason, I had told her I preferred to walk.

  I thought about the kids at the dig, searching my mind for anything like tension or conflict that I might have noticed so far. I hadn’t even talked to most of them individually yet. There was one girl, Joyce Parsley, who I suspected had a crush on Froggy. Joyce appeared to be an outsider, a square peg, like Froggy. She tried too hard to fit in, to be cool, with predictable results. It made her look even dorkier.

  As I approached the site, I counted three squad cars parked in the mud beside the tent. A few kids were outside, sitting on the ground in a conversational circle.

  “Did you hear about Froggy?” one of them asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m staying at the castle, so I was among the first to know.”

  “No shit. Did you see him?”

  I perceived a definite hunger for lurid details and wanted no part of it. I changed the subject. “What’s going on now?”

  “The police are interviewing us one by one. We’re not supposed to talk to each other about … you know, until we’ve been interviewed,” a small redheaded girl said. “We’ve already been interviewed, but they—” she swept her arm around, indicating a dozen or so kids who were working in isolation on various parts of the excavation “—haven’t.”

  I pushed through the tent flap and got stopped by Graham Jones. Graham was third in command. John Sinclair, the director, spent most of his time doing PR, but worked with Tony Marsh to map out the overall plan and analyze the finds. At least once a day, John and Tony walked together around the site and took stock. Tony coordinated things, like a general contractor on a building site. Thanks to Tony, the backhoe showed up when needed, bag lunches were delivered by a local caterer at noon, and digging proceeded in a logical sequence.

  But Graham, a wiry, no-nonsense Welshman, was the nuts-and-bolts man. If you found a suspected piece of pottery, no matter how small, you showed it to Graham, and he decided whether it should be bagged and tagged or tossed away. Graham double-checked the readings when a new worker was on the surveying equipm outsi a loOand it was Graham who condemned the unfortunate to the dreaded mattock, a heavy-duty sod-busting tool, whose use was the rough equivalent of swinging an anvil.

  “You’ve already been interviewed?” Graham asked the question in the tone of a funeral director.

  “And given my formal statement. The whole works.”

  I saw three centers of activity inside the tent. At two folding tables sat two students, each being questioned by an officer. At a third table in the far corner sat Van Nguyen, Chief Inspector Coates, and a uniformed woman who was taking notes. I had the definite feeling I shouldn’t be in here at all.

  Graham pushed on the tent flap and looked out. “The lunch van just pulled up. Is Tony outside?”

  “I didn’t see him.”

  “Lovely. Leaves me to handle everything. I can’t be gopher for these guys and take care of things outside, too.” He peeked out again. “Do me a favor, Dotsy. Take care of lunch outside. You can send a couple of kids in here to pick up the soft drink cooler.”

  At least I had a job I was competent to do: feeding youngsters. I directed the caterers to lay the bag lunches on a tarp beside the finds shack and sent a pair of idlers into the tent for the cooler full of drinks. “We’re dining al fresco today, folks,” I said. “Sorry, no chairs, no napkins, no salt.”

  “We didn’t get our tea this morning,” groused one. Several others glared at him.

  Before I came to the U.K., I thought that tea time was a ritual still followed only by little old ladies in hats. Wrong. The young, the old, the construction worker, the hip-hop star, all require tea twice daily to sustain life.

  The kids, more subdued than I’d ever seen them, sat on the ground’s few grassy patches, avoiding the worst of the mud. One student, Joyce Parsley, didn’t come over for lunch at all. She wandered around the south end of the excavation alone, her canvas hat pulled down low, her hands jammed into her jacket pockets. I started to go to her, but thought better of it. It didn’t seem like the thing to do right then.

  As I crammed the lunch trash into a large garbage bag, Graham Jones came out and called a couple of students into the tent for their interviews. He thanked me for supervising lunch and asked, “You want to work on the old wall this afternoon?”

  “The eleventh-century wall? That one?” I pointed to a trench in the southwest part of the dig. “You betcha.” Telling me to dig out an eleventh-century wall is like throwing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch. Macbeth was king of Scotland from 1040 to 1057 a.d. This wall, if we had dated it accurately, had been built at or the near the time when my main man was king.

  I grabbed a foam kneeling pad and walked to the wall, but before I began I looked around the whole site. It was beginning to look like a Lego city with its squared-off trenches and pits hollowed out to various depths. They had started out, three years ago, to explore the remains of a Neolithic campsite dating back some six thousand years, but in the process they found a stretch of drystone wall which, based on its depth, would have been built in the eleventh century. Then, while digging to see where that wall went, they ran into the foundation of a fifteenth-century church. Now, we were trying to expose as much as we could of all three without destroying the other two ZZ [t an easy task.

  I sat on the pad and tried to imagine the Stone Age hunter-gatherers knapping flint, perhaps telling stories and laughing, around the campfire a few feet away from which we had now pitched our meeting tent. I could see an eleventh-century Scots woman, in homespun wool and soft-soled leather shoes, stirring a cauldron over an open fire. Which side of this wall was the inside and which was the outside? Inside and outside of what? A fort? A homestead? Which side of this wall would a cooking fire have been on?

  I turned to the church foundation, such as it was, behind me. It would have been Catholic, of course, and built in a time of opulent French-style manor homes, castles and constant warfare. A century in which four Scottish kings were crowned, but not one died peacefully in his bed. For the first time, I saw this place in layers of time, with overlapping ghosts.

  Joyce Parsley trudged by. She had been walking clockwise laps around the perimeter of the dig since before lunch. I spoke to her, but she merely glanced my way, not answering. I wondered when she had last seen Froggy.

  When, in fact, had I last seen Froggy? I had stayed at the dig until nearly five. I had sat with him inside the tent at morning tea, but I couldn’t recall seeing him after that. Had he been there at lunchtime? I couldn’t remember. Too bad Lettie hadn’t been with me; she could have told me exactly what he did, when he left, and whether he’d eaten all his lunch.

  Where, between here and the MacBane house, or between here and the castle, could Froggy have been attacked? Where could it have happened without someone noticing? There were no large trees this side of the woods. The woodland was a possibility, I thought, because a densely wooded area stretched the length of the sheep pasture south of the castle. Between the dig and the woods, there was a corner of a barley field and some moorland.

  Froggy might well have gone to the woods in the afternoon. The ferns and mushrooms on the forest floor would have been like spore heaven to him. He could have been attacked in there without anyone seeing, but how would his body have gotten from there to the other side of the castle? The thought of someone dragging his body, or a tarp with his body in it, across the entire pasture was ludicrous.

  Perhaps he had gone to the castle for some reason and been attacked there. Near the car park sat a barn and several other outbuildings with farm equipment, an old truck, and some baled hay lying around. Almost always, you could see at least one person, usually more, working around that area. Maybe Froggy happened upon something he wasn’t supposed to see.

  Could he have
been killed at the MacBane house or at the dig? Or at the kids’ camp along the road between the house and the dig? Did it happen before or after dark? Was he killed behind the castle, where Christine found him, or was he brought there from somewhere else? If the latter, was he dragged or carried? Could he have been brought around in a car, wrapped in the blue tarp? Why?

  I couldn’t imagine any of those scenarios succeeding in broad daylight, and I couldn’t imagine it after dark either because, by evening, the castle was full of guests having cocktails in the new tower and eating in the dining room behind the large windows on that corner.

  But one thing above all didn’t make sense: The simple fact was that in this part of Scotland, crime was so rare, many folks didn’t even lock their houses or cars. I’d heard someone mention a homicide that happened more than a decade agoween Between iles north of here, on the shores of Loch Ness. It was still news.

  The whole thing made no sense.

  “You’re not getting much done.”

  I jumped. Van Nguyen had sneaked up behind me. “Oh, Van, I’m so sorry about … Froggy. This must be awful for you.”

  “It’s a nightmare. Look, Dotsy,” he said, looking, not at, but beyond me, “can I talk to you? Sometime, I mean. Not now.”

  “Sure. But now’s okay.”

  “I have to go.” He walked on past me, jumped the fence, and left the site.

  I turned back to the wall and considered where I should start. The soil appeared uniform in color and texture all around and felt dry now that the dew was gone. We hadn’t yet reached the base. I knelt and ran the tip of my trowel along one of the rocks and pulled back a bit of soil. Continuing along that side for a few feet, I decided to go a bit deeper before moving my kneeling pad. My knees and back won’t allow me to maintain that position long, so I turned and sat on the pad, curling my legs to one side and resting my left forearm in the coarse dirt. I scraped my trowel along the stone and felt the tiniest resistance.

  Up popped a gold coin.

  It took a few seconds to register. How many gold coins had been found here already? None. Still as bright and shiny as the day it was lost, it was the diameter of a nickel but much thinner, and irregular around the edge. Before my hand began to shake, I held the coin on the tip of my forefinger long enough to see a bearded face on one side and to read the word “REX.”

  I had the presence of mind to mark the spot on the ground with my trowel before I dashed to the tent to find Graham. I folded the coin between the palms of my hands and forced myself to slow down and watch my step. This was no time to fall and drop the coin into a mud puddle.

  Graham was still at his post inside the tent flap. I opened my hands wide enough for him to see the glint of gold and to be drawn out into the light like a kid smelling brownies in the oven. He took it from me.

  Normally, Graham had a colorful, often profane, response to a good find but this time all he could come up with was, “My, oh my!” He turned it over and over. A tear trickled down beside his nose. He called out, “Tony!”

  Tony Marsh, who had apparently returned within the last half hour, rounded the corner of the tent and took the coin from Graham’s hand. “Show us where you found it.”

  I felt proud that I was able to point to the exact spot beside a loaf-shaped rock in the wall. “It was here, almost touching this stone.”

  “Don’t do anything else here today. We’ll rope this area off for now,” Tony said.

  “Do you think there are any more down there?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Tony took the coin away and Graham cordoned off an area about eight feet square around the spot. I spent the next hour telling and retelling my story until I had practically memorized the “Saga of the Coin near the Loaf-shaped Rock.” Every student, it seemed, wanted to hear it for himself.

  Within minutes, Tony Marsh himself was flat on his stomach, working with trowel and brush in the spot which Gnear the Lto become hallowed ground. I was not good enough to dig there anymore.

  Chapter Six

  “Mr. MacBane?”

  “Robbie MacBane. And you be?”

  “Dotsy Lamb. From the dig down the road.” I had expected an elderly farmer, I suppose, and was taken aback by the impish red-haired guy eating a marmalade sandwich. He was probably in his early or mid-thirties. He met me at the door wearing a black tuxedo jacket with white shirt, bow tie, cut-off jeans, and black socks. No shoes.

  “Oh, aye! You knew Froggy then, did ye?” Robbie hid his sandwich behind his back, as if he thought one shouldn’t be caught engaging in such earthly delights as a PBJ so soon after the murder of one’s tenant. He swallowed hard and motioned me in with a sweep of his empty hand.

  “Yes, I knew him. This is so hard. I’m sure it is for you, too.” I glanced around the hall and spied a stairway behind Robbie. “I’m looking for Van. Is he here?”

  “Aye.” Robbie pointed with his sandwich toward an outbuilding as Van rounded the corner of it and loped toward us. I admired the tall, clean-looking kid with shiny, waist-length hair that he kept pulled back in a rubber band. As he approached the house, I asked Robbie if the police had been there yet.

  “They came, they went up to the lads’ room, they took about a thousand pictures, they left. They’ll be back later, they said.”

  “Did they take anything away?”

  “Not that I noticed.”

  Van stepped onto the front stoop. “I didn’t mean for you to come here, Dotsy. We could talk anytime. Now, you’ve gone out of your way.” Van was apologetic as he indicated the way to his room, up the stairs. “Or would you rather stay outside? Take a walk?”

  “Your room will be fine. I’d like to sit in a real chair.”

  “I’m not sure you’ll be able to find one under all the junk. I’m afraid the room is kind of messy.” He paused at the top of the stairs and waited for me.

  “I have four sons,” I said. “I’m immune.”

  “Four sons?” Van’s eyes widened. “Any girls?”

  “One,” I said, entering the room he and Froggy had shared. It rivaled my son Brian’s room at its worst. Well, maybe not that bad; Brian lost a gerbil once and found it a month later, still fat and happy after living off the food scraps under Brian’s bed.

  “The police have been here. They just left. This is all their mess, really. The room was neat as a pin before they came,” Van said with a straight face. “And Froggy’s parents will be here soon. They’re driving up.”

  “Oh, no. They’re not staying here, are they?”

  “God, I hope not. I assume they’ll get a room in town.” The town Van referred to was no more than a village and five miles north of here, but it had a small hotel or two.

  Van’s room didn’t look dirty, but it was hopelessly cluttered. Electronic gizmos, speakers, computers, a fax machine, monitors, DVD players, tennis rackets, gym shoes, and miles of (cables and cords. I could easily tell which side of the room had been Froggy’s and which side was Van’s because one side was stacked nearly to the ceiling with computer and video equipment and on the other, a couple of microscopes, little plastic boxes of glass slides, rolls of waxed paper and a stack of woven wooden baskets. On the desk beside one microscope stood two drinking glasses, each one inverted protectively over a mushroom cap. I felt my nose begin to sting from the sadness welling up.

  Van lifted an armload of clothes from a ladderback chair so I could sit. “I feel sort of stupid,” he said. “We don’t know each other very well, but I don’t know any of the kids at the dig very well, either.”

  “Oh, of course.” It dawned on me. “You’re from Cambridge aren’t you? And the others are from Worcester University.”

  “I’m from Seattle, by way of Cambridge.”

  “How did you end up here, Van?”

  “Dr. Sinclair’s wife. She knows some people at Cambridge who recommended me when she told them her husband was looking for a media man. I’ve had to take time off from my research at Cambridge, but Dr.
Sinclair made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

  “He’s paying you well, huh?” I said. “Was Froggy also being paid, or was this part of his course work at school?”

  “Paid. The other kids aren’t, of course. They’re getting course credit for the work.”

  Van was interrupted by the ringing of his phone and the flickering of a desk lamp which he’d apparently rigged up somehow to the phone. Clever. I noticed a heavy-duty padded headset hooked around the stem of the desk lamp.

  When the caller rang off, Van walked to the room’s only window, a large one with a view of the road and of the Castle Dunlaggan nestled in the distance against blue hills. He pressed his arms and his forehead against the glass. “They think I did it, Dotsy.”

  He turned to me with fear in his eyes. “The police think I killed Froggy!”

  “But why?”

  “Well, for one thing, I was apparently the last person who saw him.”

  “That means nothing.”

  “And somebody told them they heard him and me arguing. Probably true, because he plays his Mozart so loud I can’t hear my own music … at least I wear headphones.” Van shook his head. “Never mind. Yes, we argued sometimes.”

  “Who told the police about the arguing?”

  “I don’t know, but Froggy and I liked each other okay, y’know? But, yeah, we argued sometimes, like guys do.”

  “I know.” How well I know!

  “And Froggy was wearing my shirt.”

  I felt my limbs go cold. “The red and white shirt with the hibiscus? That’s your shirt?”

  “Yeah. They asked me if we wore each other’s clothes often, and I said, ‘No, we never did.’ ”

  “That’s what I couldn’t put my finger on this morning! I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what. The shirt was way too big for him.”

  “Froggy and I couldn’t wear each other’s clothemebs. I’m six-two and he is—was—about five-seven. Plus, I’m not into argyle vests and pleated pants.”