Death of a Lovable Geek

by Maria Hudgins

  I wondered if Boots knew about it yet. I wondered if he’d taken any mushrooms home with him. Oh dear. What an awful thought that was. If Boots had taken some home, he’d likely have made himself a simple evening meal. Single men often have one-dish dinners, but was he a single man? Somehow I couldn’t see Boots with a wife. What if he’d eaten mushrooms and only mushrooms for his dinner?

  Would there be any remains of those mushrooms and, if so, where would they be? Maisie might have stuck the extras in the refrigerator, or left them out on a countertop. Were you supposed to store mushrooms in the refrigerator? I did, at home, but I was no authority. The extra peelings and stem bottoms might have been tossed out or dumped into the garbage disposal. No, wait a minute. Maisie didn’t use a disposal; she threw vegetable parings and such on her compost pile.

  I heard cars pull up to the front of the castle. I rose, wobbled across the room to my window, and looked down on the western end of the drive that circled in front of the castle. The police had apparently decided to start parking on this side. Two panda cars had pulled off the asphalt and several men, Chief Inspector Coates among them, traipsed across the west lawn, a short walk from there to the incident room. I wished I could think of an excuse to visit them again. What were the chances they’d let me know if they’d made any progress yet? Very small, I was sure. Coates didn’t like me and I didn’t know why.

  I thought about what Joyce Parsley had told me yesterday. She had been more than willing, I’d say eager, to talk about Froggy. But what she told me—about Tracee Wagg and her sleazy spring ball stunt, about Proctor Galigher and the plagiarized paper—were reasons for hard feelings, but not motives for murder. Kids sometimes can’t put things into perspective as well as adults; sometimes they react rashly. No, that wouldn’t work. I knew that wouldn’t work. Young kids, twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, could go ballistic over a verbal wound, even an imagined slight, but these kids were what the law calls adults. They might be kids to me, but there were plenty of young folks with children and full-time jobs who were the same age as these college studentsight=Oabop>

  If someone from the dig murdered Froggy Quale, he or she would most assuredly be tried as an adult. That is, they would be if enough evidence came to light to have a trial at all. I intended to do everything I could to help make that happen.

  Did anyone from the castle have a reason to kill Froggy? After all, his body was found here. I could think of no reason at all. Nada.

  I had just dozed off when I heard a light rapping at my door. It was Amelia Lipscomb with a tentative, “Dotsy? I didn’t awaken you, did I?”

  Now why do people say that? How can you answer? “Yes, you woke me up,” sounds rude, so I, and I suppose most people, answer, “Oh, no. I was …” followed by whatever we can invent to ease their conscience for waking us up, so I said, “Oh no, I was playing chess with my imaginary friend.” That made her feel better, I’m sure.

  “I can come back later.” Amelia recognized the sarcasm, and I felt badly for having stooped to it, so I smiled and waved her in.

  “I must say you look better than you did at two o’clock this morning, Amelia.”

  “How about you?”

  “Now that you mention it, I think I’m better. I had a little nap. How’s Brian?”

  “Coming around slowly. He’s doing some work on his laptop. Brian can never simply go on vacation. He has to bring work with him.”

  Even with no makeup and her hair pulled loosely back in a scrunchy, Amelia was pretty. She had those high cheekbones that light from any source loves. “Your friend Lettie is such a darling,” Amelia said, plopping into the wing chair near the window. “She has gone around to all the rooms, running errands, fetching water, plumping pillows. She told me everyone is sick except herself and Tony.”

  “Yes. We discussed the possibility that it might be food poisoning,” I said. “The soup.”

  “Why the soup, specifically?”

  I explained our reasoning and said, “Is Lettie still here?”

  “She was on her way to John and Fallon’s room a few minutes ago. I wondered if she’d come down here.” Amelia picked at the piping on the chair arm. “I don’t want to bother them myself, but I want to know how they are.”

  I opened my wardrobe door and fingered through my clean shirts. “Amelia, you mentioned that you know Froggy Quale’s mother. Do you know anything about his relationship with the others on the dig? Or about his relationship with anyone? Did he have a girlfriend?” I knew the answer to the last question had to be no, but I was fishing for anything she could give me.

  “I don’t know much about his personal relationships, but I understand he was already a respected authority on little …” she hesitated, as if feeling around for the right term. “Little spores and pollen grains.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I know John Sinclair was paying him and some Asian kid enough to work here that they didn’t have to live at the camp with the others. They had a room.”

  “Yes, they had a room at the MacBane farmhouse, but that was necessary because of the equipment they both used.”

  “The MacBane farmhouseont>

  “Yes. Do you know where that is?”

  “I think so,” she paused a moment. “Any relation to John and William’s mother?”

  “I didn’t know their mother was a MacBane,” I said. I pulled out a green shirt and a pair of jeans.

  “Haven’t you seen those two big portraits downstairs in the square tower? They’re on either side of the room, one of their father and one of their mother, in an eternal face-off.”

  I laughed. “Are you sure it’s their parents?”

  “They have brass plaques at the bottom. One says ‘Roger-something-Sinclair’ and the other one says ‘Fenella MacBane Sinclair.’ By the way she’s dressed, I’d say the portrait was done in the fifties, so she’d have been about the right age to be John and William’s mother.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “I believe so.”

  “And their father?”

  “He’s dead, too.” Amelia rose and looked out the window while I disrobed and put on my bra. “There’s no doubt the woman is their mother. Take a look, next time you’re down there. She has the same chin and eyes as William and John.” Amelia went silent for a minute and then said, “I hope you don’t think me too nosy, but is John paying for your trip?”

  What a question! I had the feeling that this was the real reason she had dropped in on me, but why did she want to know? “Heavens, no. I considered myself lucky that he invited me to come at all. John and I e-mailed back and forth all last year, after I developed a burning desire to learn more about Macbeth. But, no, this trip is coming out of my own cookie jar.”

  “Archaeological digs like this one normally operate on a shoestring budget. Grant money is tight as a crab’s bum.” Amelia pursed her lips a couple of times. Why did that little habit of hers get on my nerves? “But the reason I asked you the question is because I know he paid Dylan and his roommate enough to lure them away from their respective schools. The Asian lad, I heard—”

  “His name is Van.” It irritated me to realize that Amelia and I were playing the same game. Wring out of her all the information she has, but skim over the fact that you don’t have much to give back. Did I dream that Amelia told me she knew Froggy’s mother? She did say that, didn’t she? And didn’t she also say that she didn’t know much about Froggy’s personal relationships?

  And she’d better not call Van “some Asian kid” one more time.

  Happily, before I found myself getting downright rude, Lettie popped in and Amelia left.

  “If you think you’re okay, I’ll head off to Inverness now,” Lettie said. “I think everyone else is going to pull through.”

  I gave her a twenty-pound note for the books and wished her a safe trip. As soon as she left, I realized I had no food coming my way until dinner, and no car.

  * * * * *

  Amelia
was right. The woman in the picture downstairs had to be William and John’s mother. It was a large oil portrait in an ornate gilt frame with a plaque that read, “Fenella MacBane Sinclairas a cr r b rather delicate-looking woman with striking brown eyes and auburn hair, she wore a blue taffeta gown with what they used to call a sweetheart neckline and a large blue taffeta flower at the waist. I couldn’t put my finger on the exact nature of the resemblance, but, as Amelia had said, the eyes and the chin line were the same. William’s eyes were blue but nevertheless they looked like hers. John’s brown eyes were practically clones of this woman’s. I studied the portrait, trying to imagine Fenella Sinclair as an animate, living soul. She would have been a kind woman, I thought. A little shy, a good mother. Now what made me think I could tell that from an oil painting? A painting showed you the person the artist saw; not necessarily the person she was.

  Facing Fenella, on the opposite wall, was the portrait of Roger William Campbell Sinclair, the same size and in the same type frame as Fenella’s. A burly man, similar to William and more robust than John, he wore the traditional Highland costume of kilt, beret, waistcoat, jacket, and fur sporan. My heart did a sick sort of thump against my ribs. He looked like my ex-husband, Chet, also known as the toad-sucking swamp rat, or father of my children.

  An old Volkswagen minibus pulled up in front of the castle. I could see it through the window in the south wall of the tower. The minibus’s dirty windows kept me from seeing in, so I waited for its doors to open. Meanwhile, William Sinclair, bent slightly forward, lumbered out to meet it.

  Both doors opened at once and the weird sisters climbed out. Heeding the police summons to return for questioning, apparently, they must have driven back from their home near Newcastle, England. I had never gotten it straight, which one was Winifred and which was Wanda. Each had a haystack of long gray hair and a propensity for wearing earth tones. They were both thin, both loped rather than walked, and neither wore makeup. One, I couldn’t remember if it was Wanda or Winifred, had a way of talking to you with her head tilted back, as if she needed to see you through the bottoms of her bifocals. But she didn’t wear glasses. The other one looked at you with her head tilted down, as if she were viewing you over the top of her glasses, but she didn’t wear them, either. I tried to remember what William had said their last name was. Something that reminded me of witches, but what? I mentally went down the alphabet until I came to M. Merlin. Aha. Funny how that works. Merlin, the magician of Arthurian legend.

  One sister climbed into the back of the VW and reemerged with a ferret suited out in a red leather harness. She set the animal on the driveway and watched as it darted off in several directions, as far as its lead would allow. William bent over as if he was greeting the ferret with the respect one should show a guest’s pet. I wondered what he was saying.

  Coming in the front entrance meant they had to walk through the square tower to get to the interview room, which is where I assumed William was taking them. I swung one of the big wooden doors open when I heard them coming, and held it for them. The ferret came through first and skittered across my foot.

  We greeted one another with smiles and handshakes appropriate for people who’d never met until five days ago and hadn’t seen each other for the last two.

  “We had just settled into our digs back home when the telephone rings and it’s the police. ‘You have to come back to answer questions,’ ” one sister said, making a pretend receiver of her left hand.

  “There’s been a muh-duh!” the other added.

  “Who’back homeminden muh-duhed?” they both asked in unison.

  William took one by the arm and said, “Awfully sorry, but the police told me not to let you talk to anyone aboot it before they see you. I’m to take you to the interview room straight away.”

  Meanwhile, I had thought of an excuse to go to the interview room myself. I wished I could turn myself into a fly and hang about on the wall in there. It had been more than two days since Froggy’s murder. By now, the police should have made some progress. If not, the hope of ever naming the murderer would soon dim. The more time passes, the colder the trail grows, and two days gives a killer a lot of time to drag red herrings across the trail.

  “Damn!”

  I heard Chief Inspector Coates’s frustrated expletive as soon as I came to the foyer that joined the stairwell, the interview room, and the door to the inner courtyard. Coates had flipped a light switch and precipitated a flash from above, around the bend in the winding stairs.

  “Sir William put in a new light bulb up there not ten minutes ago. Must be some sort of a short,” Coates said.

  The short, or whatever it was, had blown the entire circuit. The computers, the desk lamps, the cell phone chargers, the printers, the fax machines, everything in the interview room went dark and dead. Since it occupied the bottom level of the round tower, the core of the original castle keep, this room had no windows. Having been the one who asked William to change the bulb, I felt a bit responsible, but I bit back an apology.

  Instead, I said, “Chief Inspector Coates, I have something to tell you. I don’t know if it’s import—”

  “Yes, all right. Find a chair inside.”

  I grabbed a folding chair and set it down beside the weird sisters, who appeared as dark lumps in the blacked-out room. I pulled my feet under the chair as breezes from stumbling police officers, muttering under their breaths, blew past me. The light from a couple of battery-powered laptops illuminated the faces of uniformed officers still tapping away at their keyboards, oblivious to the outage.

  “Excuse me,” one said to me as the lights came back on. “The Chief Inspector doesn’t want these two ladies to speak to anyone from the castle before they’ve been interviewed.”

  “Sorry.” I carried my chair to the wall and looked around for a dunce cap.

  When Coates at last got around to seeing me, he sat on the edge of a nearby chair with one hand on his knee. His posture said, “Let’s get this over with. I’m a busy man.”

  “Well,” I began, “I thought you ought to know about the strange behavior of the handyman’s dog, Lucy. It may be nothing, but dogs are so perceptive, aren’t they? And Maisie told me the dog is quite used to their kitchen. She says she spends most of the winter there.”

  “Just tell me what happened.”

  “Yes. Well, yesterday afternoon, Boots and the dog came up to the kitchen door, Maisie let them in, and immediately the dog went berserk. Maisie had to chase the dog out with a broom.”

  “And?”

  “Well, that’s all.” I felt small. “But I thought you’d want to know, because maybe the dog smelled something in the kitchen that wasn’t supposed to be there. Something, $you know.” I also felt stupid.

  “Thanks for sharing, Mrs. Lamb. I’ll have a man look into it.”

  Ohhh! I hate “Thanks for sharing.” It’s right up there with “Have a nice day” in its power to crawl up my back, but my trip wasn’t entirely wasted. By moseying out as slowly as possible, I checked out desktops on my way, and on one I spotted the Super Bowl ticket. Bagged and tagged as they say.

  Chapter Eleven

  I hung around near the front window in the square tower, hoping to ambush the weird sisters before they left in their Volkswagen. The little ferret preceded them through the west hall door.

  “Leaving so soon?” I asked.

  “Long drive back. Bloody waste of time if you ask me.” The speaker was the one who tilted her head back. Either Wanda or Winifred.

  “Were you able to help them at all?”

  “They asked us if we’d seen anything from our window that—what was it?—Tuesday afternoon. We said no. Did we know Dylan Quale? We said no. Someone called Froggy? No. Did we hear anything unusual that afternoon? No.”

  The sister holding the leash stumbled and grabbed my arm, forcing the ferret to run between my legs and wrap himself up around my left foot. While she straightened out the leash, I held the ferret to keep it from
making matters worse. It was wonderfully soft. “What’s his name?” I asked, enjoying the sparkle in his little peppercorn eyes.

  “Scarborough.”

  We were out of the house and in the front driveway when one sister said, “They asked us if we knew anyone going to a super bowl this year.”

  “We asked them what a super bowl was.”

  “They said it’s a ball game played in America. Wanda, did they say what kind of game it was?”

  Wanda ignored Winifred’s question and said, “Dotsy, have you ever heard of a super bowl?”

  I deduced that the ticket was not theirs, and gave them a brief explanation as we ambled toward their minibus. “So you weren’t able to help them at all?”

  “Winifred remembered that we saw a young man run out of the MacBane house that afternoon. Running like the devil, he was, toward the road.”

  “About one or two o’clock, it would have been,” Winifred said.

  “What did he look like?” I asked.

  “Well now, there, I can’t be so sure. I know it wasn’t Robbie MacBane. Who could miss that flaming red hair of his?”

  “Did he have long black hair? Pulled back?” I dropped Scarborough to illustrate pulled-back hair.

  “No, I think he must have had shortish hair. Long hair on a lad, you’d notice, wouldn’t you?”

  “What was he wearing?” I asked as Wanda and I got Scarborough settled into his wire cage behind the driver’s seat.

  Wanda said, “I can’t remember. I only vaguely remember seeing him at all, but Winifred said she thought he wasn’t wearing bont sishirt.”

  Winifred jerked the passenger-side door open. “Well, I didn’t really look that hard. Could have been wearing a tan T-shirt.”

  * * * * *

  I ran into William in the Great Hall as soon as I had seen the weird sisters off. “Maisie says anyone who feels like eating can help themselves to whatever they can find in the kitchen,” he said. “She’s still busy tendin’ to folks upstairs.”