Death of a Lovable Geek

by Maria Hudgins

  Poor Maisie. She had been sick, too, and yet she had to wait on the others. What about Fallon Sinclair? I wondered. Fallon was, after all, Maisie’s sister-in-law. She and John kept a suite of rooms in the west wing that weren’t rented out to guests, but Maisie waited on them as if they were guests. Didn’t that ever rankle?

  William and I headed for the kitchen where I made Swiss cheese sandwiches for both of us, and we ate at the big wooden work table in the center of the room.

  “Maisie and I are so sorry about the … whatever it is that hit us,” William said. “We don’t know what to say.”

  “But you got sick, didn’t you?”

  “Aye, and Maisie, too. Let me tell you, we dinnae get a wink o’ sleep. Neither o’ us.” He took a large swig of his Diet Coke. “I dinnae ken but it was somethin’ we had for supper. Must ha’ been.”

  “Lettie and I discussed the possibility that it was the mushroom soup. Maisie said Boots brought her some wild mushrooms from the woods.”

  “Aye, and she put some in the soup. The police ha’ already scrabbled through the compost and collected what they could find. Coates said they’ll do some tests.”

  I smelled chicken roasting. When had Maisie had time to put dinner in the oven? While William cleaned up our plates and glasses, I told him I wanted to take a walk over to the woodland east of the castle and I asked if it was okay.

  “Aye, but I’m headin’ that way myself. We can go together and I’ll show you the shootin’ hut.”

  We shinnied across the drystone wall that defined the limit of the parking area and tramped east across a cow pasture. “William, I noticed the two wonderful portraits in the square tower. Are they your parents?”

  “Aye.”

  “Your mother was beautiful.”

  William turned to me as if he was checking my face for sincerity. “She was a lovely woman.”

  “And she died?”

  “Aye. Breast cancer. I was seven and John was five.”

  He plodded on a few yards more, then looked up and pointed eastward, past the woodland and across the paved road. “Castle lands used to go way over there, past the road and into the hills. Can you see there? Those hills?”

  I nodded.

  “The Sinclairs used to farm all of that.”

  I wondered where this was going.

  “Then, when our father married our mother—she was a MacBane—our grandfather leased that whole plot, from the road to the hills, to the MacBanes for a hundred pounds a^Mmonth. Twelve hundred pounds a year.” William stopped and looked straight at me. “They signed a one-hundred-year lease with a clause that states the rent will never go up.”

  “It’s still in effect?”

  “You got it. Our mother, Fenella, her father died and her brother took the farm and then his son and now his great-nephew, Robbie, has it. For one hundred friggin’ pounds a month! Do you know what we could get for that land noo? And they’ve still got forty years to go.”

  I laughed. We had reached a wire fence at the edge of the woods. Beyond the fence, tall bracken ferns carpeted the forest floor between trunks of tall pines.

  William bent the top of the fence down with his foot so I could climb over.

  “Your father never remarried after your mother died?”

  William didn’t reply at once. “Aye, he did. He married a woman named Becky, but she died, too, when John and I were still lads. And then, a few years later, our father died.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t help staring at your father’s portrait this morning. He looks as if he would have been a robust, dynamic sort of man.”

  “Radge Roger, they used to call him.” William led the way into the pine-scented woods. “Radge means slightly crazy. Not necessarily an insult, but in my father’s case, it wasn’t always meant as a compliment, I fear.”

  In a clearing ahead of us nestled a small lake fed by a stream on its eastern side and drained by another on the north. A solitary wooden cabin on our side of the lake, unpainted and covered with a rusty tin roof, stood silent, its chimney and windows showing no sign of life. It gave me the creeps.

  William must have read my mind. “We rent it oot to fishermen and hunters, mostly businessmen from Glasgow lookin’ for a place to get drunk. Away from their wives.”

  “Is anyone here now?”

  “Nae, not for the last week or so.” He led me toward the cabin. Under my feet, a thick blanket of dead leaves, pine needles, and cones crunched as I walked, so that each footstep sank an unpredictable distance into a hidden layer of twigs and rotten wood. I picked my way to the corner of the cabin.

  Here, against the side of the cabin, was a plain wooden bench and on it lay a large black-handled knife. “That’s our fish-cleaning table,” William said as he walked over, picked up the knife, and swiped its blade a couple of times against his trouser leg.

  “You want to see inside?”

  He plucked a key from over the door frame. The door opened with a creak and a scrape. The one-room cabin was bare inside, except for a stove, a small refrigerator, four single beds covered with navy rib cord spreads, and of course, a wet bar. Three grimy windows let in barely enough light to see by, one wall having no windows at all due to its being dominated by a large fireplace.

  “Do people have to bring their own towels and bed linens?” I asked, not really interested in the answer. I had to say something.

  “Some do. Most don’t want to bother, so we bring sheets and towels over from the house for a small extra fee.” William took the knife to the sink and laid it on the drain board.

  I led the way back out of A J*W woods, forging through the bracken along what I thought was the same way we had come in, but it turned out to be a more northerly path. My unintended detour still took us out of the woods, but by a longer route. I kept expecting to step out into the pasture after the next line of trees. Then the next. Had I gotten us lost? Surely William wouldn’t let that happen. But as I turned to ask him for help, swallowing all my Girl Scout pride, I slipped.

  “Watch oot!” William dived toward me and grabbed my upper arm. He dug his feet into the loose leaves and leaned back the other way, pulling me with him. Beneath my right foot, a cascade of rocks, twigs and soil fell—where? They made no further sound, as if they had fallen but not landed. My heart raced, and I lay beside William for a few seconds. He had landed on his tush, in a sitting position.

  “This is a verra dangerous spot. I’ve been meanin’ ta put up a fence here. Noo, I’m definitely goin’ ta do it.”

  Fortunately, the dangerous spot was at the extreme edge of the woods. The wire fence surrounding the pasture was only a few feet from where we had fallen. William helped me over the fence and I, now feeling quite safe, crept over to the fence corner and looked down.

  We were on a cliff. The fence ran along the edge of the woods, turned west, skirted the crest of a precipice for about a dozen yards, then sloped down to a wide valley. In the valley floor, a stream, probably the same one that drained the lake in the woods, flowed over cobbles and around boulders and disappeared in the distance. The cliff, with its exposed, lichen-covered granite, ran only about twenty or thirty feet horizontally, but stood at least fifty feet above the valley floor. That’s how far I would have fallen if William hadn’t caught me.

  I estimated that we were now as close to the dig site as we were to the castle. “I think I’ll go put in an appearance at the dig,” I said. “Tony might be there even if John isn’t, and Graham will have everybody working on something, I’m sure.”

  William walked with me as far as the castle drive. He still seemed shaken. Was it from my close call?

  “Will there be an inquest into Froggy’s death, William? I’ve read enough British murder mysteries to know they always have an inquest. We don’t have that in America. We have a grand jury, I think.”

  “There is a post-mortem, of course. I’m sure that’s already been done. But in Scotland, the inquiry is handled by what we call a Pro
curator Fiscal who takes over the investigation and kind of directs the police.”

  “I see. So Chief Inspector Coates is a Procurator Fiscal?”

  “Nae, he’s a policeman, but the Procurator Fiscal’s office will be directing the investigation. They’ll be advising the police.”

  I couldn’t imagine Chief Inspector Coates taking advice from anybody.

  * * * * *

  Tony, Graham, and several others stood by, arms folded, and watched Van Nguyen go crazy with the mattock. Van had shed his shirt and by the time I joined them his torso glistened with sweat, and his face was flushed a dark red.

  “Look at it this way. He’s doing the mattock work for all of us for the whole of next week,” Graham said.

  “I’m concerned, though,” Tony said. “I think we ought to make him stop.”

  “Why?”

  “He’ll knock himself out.”

  “He’s healthy.”

  “He’s insane.” Tony stepped forward but didn’t get close enough to the flying mattock to lose a body part. “Van. Van!” He clapped his hands. “Van, stop!”

  Van paid no attention.

  I tried. I inched up as close to Van as I could afford to go and said, “Stop, Van. I want to talk to you.”

  Van paid no attention. The rubber band on his hair had slipped down his back and his long, straight hair draped around his shoulders like tie-back curtains. I considered touching him to see if that might get his attention then thought better of it, so I dashed up to the toolshed, got my own mattock, ran back, and fell to work beside him. Mattocking is strenuous, but I felt confident I could keep this up for maybe ten or fifteen seconds.

  “What are you doing?” Van said.

  “Helping you.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I’ll stop when you stop.” My gamble, that Van was too much a gentleman to let me kill myself, paid off. Together, we took our mattocks back to the toolshed. I fetched a bucket of water from a tap beside the shed and Van poured it over his head. While he wrung out his hair, I turned over a couple of dry buckets for us to sit on.

  “Are the police giving you a rough time?” I asked.

  He nodded, resting his elbows on his knees, and extended his lower lip to blow the water off the tip of his nose. “Froggy’s parents came by the room again yesterday. The first time they came, they were like, well, they’d just lost their son, you know, and the police told them they couldn’t take any of his stuff out of the room yet.”

  “And when they came back again yesterday?”

  “They looked daggers through me the whole time. I could tell they’d been talking to the police, and the police had let them know I was their prime suspect. They knew all about Froggy and me arguing. They made it obvious. They think I killed him because the police think I killed him.”

  “That’s ridiculous. They have no reason at all to think it except for a silly little fight between roommates.”

  “And the fact that he was wearing my shirt.”

  “But he could have simply taken your shirt if he didn’t have any clean ones.”

  “Froggy always had clean shirts.”

  “That’s still not evidence.” I could tell there was more. I waited.

  Van swiped his hand across his face. “Do you know that girl, Tracee Wagg?” he said, squinting toward the open toolshed door.

  “I know who she is.”

  “She’s making trouble. She’s been coming on to me for weeks. One night last week she came up to my room when Froggy wasn’t there. He came in later and … caught us.” Van cleared his throat and squinted. He seemed embarrassed.

  “And after she left, Froggy told you she was bad news, right?”

  “Now, how did you know that?”

  dth="48">“I heard about an incident involving Froggy, Tracee, and a certain footballer whose name I don’t remember. She apparently stood Froggy up and went to the ball with a better-looking guy.”

  “Is that all? I thought, from the way Froggy talked, that she had some kind of disease or something!” Van rose from his bucket. “I wouldn’t have anything to do with her after that, so I figured we could avoid each other the rest of the time we’re here. But when the police interviewed her, she apparently tried to get even with me by telling them … I don’t know what she told them.”

  “Did she know that you and Froggy sometimes argued?”

  “I don’t know how she’d know that. I hadn’t told her, and she and Froggy weren’t even on speaking terms.”

  “Van, it’ll all work out. I don’t know how, right now, but you are not a murderer.”

  “How do you know I’m not?”

  “Because I’ve seen how you deal with anger. You take it out on the ground.”

  Van pulled me up from my bucket seat and grinned. “Thanks.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Everyone but John came to dinner that evening. Fallon said he was still a bit “wobbly” and asked Maisie to take him some broth and tea. “Why doesn’t she take it to him herself?” Lettie muttered. “Are her legs broken?” Maisie had prepared an easy-on-the-stomach roast chicken with “neeps and tatties,” a purée of potatoes and turnips.

  Eleanor and Alf Downes came to dinner in eleventh-century attire. Now I understood why they had brought so much luggage. He wore a thigh-length linen tunic over close-fitting pants, a leather belt, and pouch; she, an embroidered linen dress with what she called a sprang-woven belt.

  “Eleanor and I are celebrating the discovery of that eleventh-century coin. We thought we might enhance the ambience by wearing these outfits we made ourselves,” Alf said with a courtly bow. The silliness of the whole thing really did lighten us all up. I was starting to like the Downeses.

  “What if Dotsy had found a sixteenth-century coin?” Tony asked.

  “Then we would be wearing Tudor attire,” Alf answered without blinking an eye.

  Only Lettie, Brian Lipscomb, and I took our coffee in the library that evening. I told Maisie she might as well pour three cups and take the tray back to the kitchen. I wanted to save her the extra trip because the events of the last twenty-four hours were showing on her face and in her pace. Maisie needed to flop into bed as soon as possible.

  “Did you get any work done today, Brian?” I asked. He looked confused, so I added, “Amelia came to my room this morning. She said you were working on your laptop. Can’t you even take time off to be sick? You were sick, like the rest of us, weren’t you?”

  “Oh, indeed, and Amelia was as well. I’m rather inclined to think it was the mushrooms in our soup. What do you think?”

  “Lettie and I both think it was the mushrooms. In fact, I asked her to look for a book on mushrooms for me. Did you have a chance to do that, Lettie?”

  Lettie slipped into a chair by the fireplace and took an exploratory sip of her coffee. “I did, and I got the Macbeth book you wanted, but the bookstore had to order the mushroom guide from somewhere else. They were out of stock. I went ahead and paid for it today, and they said they should have it in a day or two.”

  “How much do I owe you?”

  “Nothing. You gave me twenty pounds. The mushroom book was thirteen, I believe, but the Macbeth was only five.”

  Brian set his cup and saucer on a side table and turned to us, nodding slightly as he did so. “And speaking of Macbeth, if you’ll excuse me, I think I shall go and get a bit of the ‘sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care,’ ” he said and then left us.

  I looked around the wonderful old library, wishing I could have a room like it at home. Could I do something similar but on a smaller scale? I’d have to get bookshelves and the fireplace surround custom-made. My gaze fell again on that very odd door beside the hearth.

  Lettie interrupted my thoughts. “Do you remember the night before last when we were all in here talking about where everyone was when that poor kid was killed?”

  I said I did.

  “Didn’t Fallon say she was at some castle or other that day?”
r />   “Urquhart Castle. Right. It’s on the shore of Loch Ness.”

  “I think she was lying. Today I remembered, as I was driving through Aviemore, I happened to look at a parking lot as I drove by and I said to myself, ‘Hey, that little convertible that John and Fallon drive; it was there on Tuesday afternoon!’ ”

  “Hold on, Lettie. If you didn’t know that before, how come you remember it now?”

  “I didn’t think it was important at the time. I simply drove by on Tuesday afternoon, and said to myself ‘That’s the Sinclairs’ car,’ but I thought no more about it because I didn’t know there’d been a murder here at the castle. Then today, when I drove by again and thought about it, I remembered that Fallon had said she was at some castle and John had said he was here. He had lunch with William and then he went to the dig.”

  “You’re right. John was definitely at the dig. I saw him.”

  “And if Fallon was at a castle on the shores of Loch Ness, what was their car doing in Aviemore?” Lettie tilted her head to the side and raised one eyebrow.

  “Are you sure it was Tuesday?”

  “Absolutely. As I drove by, I remember brushing cracker crumbs off my green sweater, and I wore my green sweater on Tuesday.”

  That settled that.

  The little door beside the fireplace called to me. What possible reason could there be for a door to nowhere? Beyond it would be nothing but the stone of the castle’s thick wall and then the courtyard, which had no doors from this wing leading into it. The little door couldn’t lead into a hall; to its left stood the fireplace and to the right, a window. I peeked into the fireplace and assured myself that its sides looked solid, then slipped over, stuck my forefinger through the hole in the little door on the side opposite the hinges, and pulled. After a second, firmer yank, it opened with a pop.

  Inside, a tiny stone staircase ran up to the lalled toft. I could find no light, no switch, no cord, and it took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the gloom within. The steps were no more than eighteen inches wide, but they were extremely steep. The air was stale and musty. It smelled of damp stone. At a height of about nine feet, a landing, hardly big enough to be worthy of the name, seemed to lead to another flight of steps or something on the right side, because to the left was nothing but a solid stone wall.