Death of a Lovable Geek

by Maria Hudgins

  We had reached the field we were supposed to walk. Iain halted us with an upraised hand. It was a flat, rock-strewn area that adjoined the woodland I had seen Boots entering earlier. It was oddly shaped, occupying a wide area south of the barley field, the sheep meadow, and the woods.

  Iain said, “To field walk properly, you should maintain a uniform distance between yourself and the person beside you. Walk from one end to the other, then move over and go back the other way. Don’t pick up everything you find. If you think something is good, bring it to me, and I’ll decide if we should bag it or toss it.” Iain had perfect teeth and a broad, square jaw which always sported two days’ growth of whiskers. I wondered how he kept them from turning into a full-blown beard.

  I had to ask. “What sort of stuff are we looking for?”

  “Can’t tell you that until you find it,” Iain answered, somewhat impertinently I thought. “Flint that’s been worked would be great. Anything medieval or earlier. Tile or pottery, but not stuff that’s obviously modern. Animal bones would be recent, and we’re not interested. Exposed bones don’t last long in this climate.”

  One of the two kids behind me asked, “What about human bones?”

  Iain ignored the qgeth astion and continued, “We’re not likely to find much because this area hasn’t been plowed, but you never can tell. You four—” he meant Joyce, me, and the two behind me “—take the space from the barley to the fence. Tracee, Proctor, and I will take the area from here to the edge of the woods.”

  We four lined ourselves up at the edge of the virgin moorland, about five feet apart, and tramped slowly westward.

  “Tell me about Tracee,” I said to Joyce as we walked. “Do you know her?”

  Joyce let out a loud snort that metamorphosed into a laugh. Her head jerked up, sending her canvas hat flying. “Tracee! I guess I oughtn’t to tell you. Oh, why not? Everyone else knows. Tracee asked Froggy to the Spring Ball at school. Froggy was all flattered and everything, because he hardly ever went out. With a girl, I mean.”

  From the way she said it, I suspected that Joyce wished she could have gone out with Froggy, herself.

  “Tracee asked him way back in February or something,” Joyce continued, “and the ball was in May.”

  I picked up a small piece of pottery that had bits of green and orange glaze on its surface. Joyce took it from me, squinted, and flipped it over her head. “Post-medieval trash,” she said.

  “In the U.S., we’d put that in a display case,” I said. “Sorry I interrupted. Finish your story.”

  “Okay, so Froggy rented a tuxedo, ordered flowers from the florist, got a haircut, the whole bit, y’know? Then the day before the ball, guess what? Tracee calls him and breaks the date. Froggy’s friends asked around, and they found out that this really hot footballer, Harry Something, had asked her at the last minute.

  “Froggy was embarrassed. I told him I’d go with him if he didn’t want to waste the tux and flowers, but he was too upset to talk about it. So Froggy’s mates, mostly blokes that worked with him in the university herbarium, made up all these signs, right? They didn’t tell Froggy, because he’d have told them to back off.”

  “Signs that said what?”

  Joyce giggled. She had to jettison her first couple of attempts to tell me because her snorts buried her words. “One sign said, ‘You could have kissed a Froggy, but is this what you call a handsome prince?’ Another one said, ‘Get her to the ball, quick, before she picks up another date.’ They went to Tracee’s flat and stood on the other side of the street waving their signs, and this huge crowd was there when Tracee and Mr. Hottie came out. It was great!”

  I laughed. “Were you there, too?”

  “Yeah, I made a sign that said, like, ‘Tracee’s date for the ball.’ ” With her hands, Joyce pantomimed a big poster in front of her. “And it said, ‘Froggy’ and that was crossed out and under that it said, ‘Harry,’ and that was crossed out and under that it had a question mark, and that was crossed out.”

  A girlish squeal made me look up. Proctor, with Tracee Wagg flung over his shoulder, ran into the woods. With thumb and forefinger between his teeth, Iain whistled shrilly and waved them back. Tracee, I had decided, was here for more than the archaeological experience.

  Boots and his dog emerged from the woods not far beyond them. The burlap bag now swung heavily from Boots’s hand. Proctor and Tracee stepped aside to let them pass, as if the obsize="2">Fighman and his dog were lepers, the dog giving Proctor’s jeans an indifferent sniff as it trotted by.

  * * * * *

  I saw Boots and his dog again on my way back to the castle. The Border collie padded along beside him, head down, sneaking. Border collies don’t so much trot as sneak—a sort of sniper-like creep—with their muzzles always in position to snip at a runaway hoof or heel.

  Dark clouds building in the west and a freshening breeze foretold of rain, perhaps by evening, but I wasn’t returning to the castle early because of the weather. I estimated that John would have completed his visit with Froggy’s parents by this time, and I wanted to see him before dinner. He had promised to show me the coin.

  “C’mon, Lucy. Maisie might could gie ye some water,” I heard Boots say. So the dog’s name was Lucy. Lucy’s fur could have done with a good combing. Burrs and thistles probably formed the nucleus of most of the fist-sized clumps in her thick black-and-white coat. As she slunk along, panting, she turned her head every few seconds and sniffed the burlap bag her master still toted.

  I stayed back thirty yards, more or less, so I doubt that Boots knew I was behind them. They crossed the castle’s parking area and trekked up to the side door of the kitchen. Boots rattled the screen door and called to Maisie while Lucy sat back, politely waiting. The door swung open and Boots announced, “Clear off some counter space. I got shan-ta-rellies, I got bluets, I got penny buns.”

  “Whoo-ee!” Maisie’s voice came from inside.

  A few seconds later, I heard a long, low growl followed by barks, bangs, thunks, and angry shouts. The screen door burst open and Lucy came flying out barely ahead of an old straw broom. “Away wi’ ye! Dog’s gone pure mental!” Maisie yelled as the dog landed on the asphalt and turned, fangs bared, crouched for attack. The dog slunk around, head down and growling, as Boots dashed out and swatted her with his billed cap.

  “Wha’s got inta ye?” Boots yelled. Lucy backed away from the door, still snarling, with Boots still slapping away at her. “Gone totally radge,” he added, herding the herd dog across the parking lot and down to the road.

  Chapter Nine

  John was waiting for me in his suite of rooms on the third floor of the west wing. He volunteered the information that Fallon was out but would be back before dinner and, with a sweep of his whisky glass toward the bottles on a small cart, said, “What can I make for you?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s a bit early.”

  “Oh, but after a day’s toil in the hot sun, you need something to slake your thirst, surely.”

  “It was hardly what I’d call hot today. In Virginia, we’d call this downright chilly.”

  John had changed shirts and added a paisley ascot to his open collar. I did hope I hadn’t been invited up to “see his etchings,” as they say, then I chided myself for being so vain as to even think that. He led me into a small, cozily furnished sitting room separated by a short hallway from their bedroom. Another door I saw in the hallway probably led to a bathroom, I guessed. John and Fallon didn’t havalle to hike to the top of the tower to take a bath.

  John seemed to be waiting for me to come up with something in the way of a drink order, so I said, “Plain soda, please.”

  He tonged ice cubes into a glass, poured in some soda, then freshened his own drink with a large splash of Scotch and a tiny blip of soda. He handed me my glass and in a faux pirate voice said, “Follow me and I will show you the hiding place of the sacred treasure trove.”

  He led me into the bedroom and to a close
t on whose floor sat four aluminum Zero Halliburton suitcases. He pulled out the largest of the four and plopped it on the bed. “The combination is four-four-four,” he said. “Simply remember that there are four letters in my first name.”

  Inside the suitcase lay a lacquered wood box with a vaulted lid. It was about the size of a jewelry box and bound around by four leather straps, each of which was fixed firmly to the box with brass studs and buckled in the front.

  “What a beautiful box,” I said. “Is it very old?”

  “Not very,” John said. “An uncle gave me one and William one for Christmas when I was about eight, I guess. It’s one of those things every young boy needs: a secret hiding place for his treasures.” The box tucked under his arm, John led me back to the sitting room. He adjusted a lamp beside the sofa, placed the box on the coffee table in front of us, and unbuckled each of the four leather straps. He used a key on his key ring to pop open the padlock on the lock plate.

  “But wait,” John said, raising one finger. “There’s one more thing you have to do.” With his thumbs on the corners of the lid, he showed me that the box still wouldn’t open. “You have to move a little pin just … over … damn.”

  John was apparently attempting to shift a hidden lever near one of the back hinges, but I couldn’t see clearly because he had turned the box so as to get more light on the critical spot, and that left me on the wrong side. He grabbed a letter opener from the end table and worked through several more expletives and a pinched finger, which he sucked on, then laughed.

  “I’ve never been good with tools,” he said. “I think I have a screwdriver in the other room.” He left me alone with the box.

  So the coin was in a “secure location,” huh? In a suitcase in John’s closet? That’s secure? How hard would it be for a thief to tuck the whole box under his jacket and walk out? The only difficulty would be opening the suitcase, but it wouldn’t be that hard to make off with the whole suitcase. Good thing John overestimated the outside world’s determination to possess that coin.

  He called to me from the other room. “What were the years of Macbeth’s reign?”

  “Ten forty to ten fifty-seven,” I called back.

  “Did you know he made a pilgrimage to Rome while he was king of Scotland?”

  “In ten fifty,” I said.

  John reappeared in the doorway. He held up a screwdriver and smiled. “You’ve really done your homework.”

  “I told you, I got a bit obsessed when I found that so little had actually been written about the man.”

  “And most of what has been written is wrong,” he said.

  “

  “ ‘Until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come.’ Isn’t that what one of the three witches said?”

  “Yes, but I don’t think we should put much stock in Mr. Shakespeare’s version.”

  “No.” John jiggled the screwdriver in the little slot on the back of the box while he was talking. Then he jammed it in, and the screwdriver slipped sideways, gouging a wedge-shaped dent in the wood. “Damn!” He ran his thumb over the damaged surface.

  I remembered that the eye-glass repair kit in my purse had a tiny screwdriver in it. I picked up my purse and rummaged through. “Here, try this,” I said.

  John went to work with the smaller screwdriver, moving the box closer to the light. “If anything happens to me, Dotsy, get this box immediately. You know where I keep it, now.”

  I was flabbergasted. What was he talking about? “What about Tony?”

  “I want you to take charge of it. Take it to the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh. Take the whole box to them.” John turned to me and, for an instant, I saw fear in his eyes.

  “What do you mean, ‘if anything happens’? What would happen?”

  “I’m not saying anything will. I said ‘if.’ ”

  The screwdriver must have worked, because John casually opened the lid with a soft, “Aha.” The box, lined with red felt, held three items. In addition to the coin, I saw an amethyst earring and an envelope that looked old. John lifted the little coin out almost reverently and put it in my hand.

  The coin bore the face of a bearded man on both sides. Now, I could see that one was definitely Christ, with a halo and a cross behind His head. On the other side was the head of a man wearing a crown. Some primitively formed letters on both sides could be either Latin or Greek. I looked for the “REX” I thought I had read yesterday and I found it near the crown. There were some other letters I couldn’t quite make out, but it was reasonable, I thought, to assume that those three letters meant that this was some king or other.

  John slipped over to the cart, poured himself more Scotch, and returned to the sofa with his glass and a sheet of paper. “I got this off the Internet today. As I said earlier, I’m no coin expert, but I found a lot of pictures on the Web. This is the closest thing I could find. What do you think?”

  The photos showed both sides of a coin that did look similar to ours, but the edges were shaped differently, and the relief varied enough from one to the other that I couldn’t tell how close a match it was.

  “This coin, the one in the pictures, was minted in Constantinople between ten forty-two and ten fifty-five,” John said.

  “That puts it at the right time for Macbeth’s trip to Rome, but the wrong place. He didn’t go to Constantinople,” I said. “Still, coins are traded around, aren’t they? This could have been picked up in France, or even in Rome.”

  “Exactly. If this is the correct date, we can definitely rule out any previous pilgrimages, such as the at one wrnut, the English king, is thought to have made in about ten thirty a.d. It’s logically impossible for his entourage to have brought back a coin that wasn’t produced until ten or twenty years later.”

  “And in those days,” I went on, “people didn’t go tootling off to sunny Italy for vacation. Only monarchs could afford it.”

  “And monks or bishops. Sometimes.”

  I placed the coin in his hand and reached for the earring. “Lovely,” I said. The large purple stone was set in a silvery drop so that it would hang slightly below the ear. The setting was white gold or platinum, I assumed, since there was no tarnish. Little seed pearls encircled the amethyst. “Was this your mother’s?”

  John cleared his throat before he answered. “It was found by one of our field walkers the other day. It’s not very old, of course, but, obviously, if we can find the owner, we’ll give it back to him. Or her.”

  “A field walker? Which one?”

  “Actually, I’ve forgotten the name. One of the girls.”

  “Did she find the other earring?”

  “No, unfortunately not. I guess you could wear just the one earring. Queen Elizabeth the First did, and it became the fashion for a while.”

  “If you can’t locate the owner, will the finder get to keep it?”

  “No. If we don’t find the owner, it’ll belong to the castle.”

  Returning the solitary earring to the box, I picked up the envelope. “What’s this?” Perhaps, I thought, I’m being too nosy.

  “I’ve had that for probably twenty years,” John said, taking the envelope from me. “The envelope is nothing. But the stamp may be worth fifty thousand pounds or more.”

  “Your little insurance policy against an impoverished old age?”

  “Absolutely.”

  * * * * *

  Dinner was excellent, as always. We started with a homemade mushroom soup to which, Maisie told us, she had added some of the chanterelles and penny bun mushrooms Boots had brought in that afternoon.

  “I was in the parking lot when he brought them to you,” I said, remembering that Boots had used those same words when he called out to Maisie. “What got into that dog?”

  “Ye saw that, did ye? I have no idea. She didn’t even go into the kitchen proper. She stopped at the bench in that little mud room, I guess ye’d call it, where we clean fish and such. She sniffed at the floor and went completely
daft.”

  “Has she been there before?”

  “She spends half the winter in there! She’s got her favorite spot by the cooker. I don’t know what got into her.”

  Lettie slid her soup toward me, grousing about how she didn’t like mushrooms, but one cup was all I could handle if I intended to indulge in the lamb I knew was coming.

  “Oh, but it’s delicious,” Eleanor Downes said.

  Lettie and I had been tapped to do Downes duty since, as Amelia Lipscomb whispered to me before we were seated,( “Brian and I had to sit with them last night. Your turn.” The hardest part of Downes duty, to me, was listening to them without laughing. They lived in such a complete fantasy world, I could hardly believe they themselves were real. Eleanor slipped her reading glasses on and checked the back of the silverware. Discreetly. But it wasn’t as easy for her to be subtle about checking under the china. She caught me watching her and pretended to brush something out from under her plate.

  Eleanor and Alf both taught school back in Texas, they told us. She taught third grade and he, eighth grade social studies. Recollecting the behavior and stinky attitudes of my own flawlessly raised children when they were in eighth grade, I got a vivid mental image of what a man like Alf must have to deal with in the classroom. A room full of thirteen-year-olds is a job for The Terminator. Surely, they’d run all over Alf Downes.

  “I’m rather surprised that Lady … Maisie doesn’t leave the serving to the serving girl,” Alf said.

  He had almost said Lady Sinclair. He’d probably been calling her that, in his head, for months while anticipating this trip, I thought, and now he was hard-pressed to call her Maisie.

  Maisie used a towel to serve the hot plates of roast lamb with mint and crabapple sauce. While the Downeses were distracted by the lamb’s arrival, I took that opportunity to mutter under my breath to Lettie, “At least he didn’t call Christine ‘the serving wench’!”

  Christine popped through the kitchen door and yelled, “Dotsy! Phone call!”

  My heart bounced in my chest. I had given the castle phone number to each of my kids (except my daughter, Anne, whom I hadn’t been able to locate, as usual) and to my next-door neighbor. This couldn’t be good. My house had burned down or been burglarized; one of my boys, daughters-in-law, or grandchildren was hurt. Oh God, please let it not be a grandchild! Take my house, steal my car, but let my kids and grandkids be okay.