Death of a Lovable Geek

by Maria Hudgins

  Before Tony left me, I said, “You know where John keeps the coin, don’t you?”

  “Yes, he showed me.”

  “He showed me, too. But do you have a key to the box, Tony? I don’t. What if something, well, happens to John, and the coin expert does pay us that visit John mentioned? Don’t you think you should get the key from John? Just in case?”

  “I think not. I’d hate to suggest to him that I think anything might happen to him. But don’t worry. I was a locksmith-slant-safe-cracker in the S.A.S. I can get into that little box if need be.”

  * * * * *

  I settled down to troweling the charcoal-blackened area of the Neolithic camp site. I sat on my foam kneeling pad, leaned on the heel of my left hand while troweling with my right, and, after a few minutes, traded hands and turned my legs to the other side. It’s amazing how knapped flint retains its razor-sharp edge, even after five thousand years in the ground. I raked my trowel over one spot, catching the tip of a flint flake as I did so. The flake shot up and cut my forefinger.

  I dashed to the first aid box we kept in the tent. Graham Jones smiled, not bothering to remind me that he’d already warned us about the dangers of buried flint. “A little alcohol first, on cotton wool,” he said.

  “Cotton wool? In America we just call it cotton. Wool is what comes from a sheep; cotton comes from a plant. Two different things.”

  “What do you Americans know?” He grinned and handed me a Band-Aid.

  I went back to my post and did it again. Another flake, another cut on the other forefinger.

  “You’re a slow learner, aren’t you, Dotsy?” Graham said when I plodded back to the first aid box.

  “Shut up and hand me the cotton wool.”

  “And another plaster, right?”

  “In America we call them Band-Aids.”

  “What do you Americans know?”

  Both forefingers now shielded with “plasters,” as Graham called them, I went to work in earnest. It made sense to me that we’d find many mor V flakes than actual arrowheads. So far we’d found only one flint arrowhead at this site, but dozens of flint flakes. The flakes, naturally, were concentrated in the area around the charcoal where early people would have sat in the evenings. They would have knapped flint, sewn hides with bone needles, and what? Sung songs? Did they have songs?

  The arrowheads, now. The people would have reused them when they retrieved them from their quarry. The quarry that got away, wounded perhaps, might have carried arrowheads far away across the fields and through the woods, to be deposited wherever the animal did die, so you wouldn’t expect to find arrowheads near a campfire. Were there Heelan coos in Scotland back then? There was a coo-like animal called an aurochs. Maybe aurochses were ancestors of Heelan coos. I’d try and remember to ask John or Tony.

  I troweled away, thinking about John. He was awfully sick, I thought. I hoped Fallon had called the doctor this morning as she had indicated she would. If I hadn’t been where I wasn’t supposed to be, I could have told Maisie and William what I had heard last night. John had been raving, out of his head.

  What the hell was wrong with me? I should have told them!

  Thoroughly ashamed of myself, I scrambled to my feet and dashed across the barley field. Talk about maturity! If I found a snake in the cookie jar, I’d let somebody get bit before I’d admit I’d been sneaking cookies.

  I had gotten no farther than the gate at the edge of the barley field when I heard the siren scream out from the castle and saw the ambulance streak past, down the castle drive.

  The black Jaguar sped by, close on the tailpipes of the ambulance, and followed by William’s Volvo. At the end of the castle drive, all three vehicles made a left turn, taking the road toward town.

  I found Maisie and Christine standing like stalagmites in the parking area outside the kitchen door. Maisie shielded her eyes from the sun with her right arm but neither of them moved until I was right up on them.

  “They’ve taken Dr. John to hospital,” Christine said.

  Maisie pushed her frizzy hair back with both hands. “The doctor came oot and checked on him, and straight away he called for an ambulance. They brought John downstairs on a stretcher. Wouldn’t even let him walk down by himself. They took off, flyin.”

  “I know. I saw. What did the doctor say was wrong?”

  “I dinnae have a chance to ask him before they dashed off. Fallon ran to her car, and William shouted for me to help him find his car keys. All William said was, ‘John’s delirious. Doctor said it might be liver failure or kidney failure.’”

  “Crikey, what next?” Christine shook her head.

  “What hospital are they taking him to?”

  “I dinnae ken. The closest one is in Fort William but the largest is in Inverness.” Maisie threw an arm around Christine’s shoulders. “William took his mobile phone with him, so he may call when he sees which way they’re headin’.”

  Maisie turned with a deep sigh toward the side door. “I’d better get back to the kitchen in case the phone rings.”

  “And check the eggs on the stove,” Christine added.

  “Oh, Lord, the eggs! Pot’ll be boiled dry bd) noo.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The lunch van blasted me out of the way with its horn. I was lost in thought as I crossed the muddy parking area beside the tent. On my walk back to the dig site, I had decided to find Tony before I did anything else, and tell him about John. I’d let him decide whether or not the others should be told. I found him in the tent, bent over a stack of site grid plans, tapping his cheek lightly with a metal ruler. He dragged out a folding chair for me and shifted it to a couple of different spots on the downtrodden grass before he found one that let all four chair legs touch ground.

  “Did you know John’s been taken to the hospital?” I asked.

  Tony’s eyes widened. “Why?”

  I related all I knew about it. Tony listened, absently squeezing his lower lip into a V between his thumb and forefinger.

  “I haven’t mentioned it to anyone else yet, Tony. Do you think we should tell everybody?”

  “Not yet. You can tell Graham, of course, and Hannah, if she asks, but before we tell the kids, I want to find out more.” Tony plunged through the tent flap, pulling a cell phone from his pocket as he went. The grid plans he’d left on the table rolled up around his ruler as if they had a life of their own. Tony stuck his head back in and said, “Dotsy, the lunch wagon’s here. Would you take care of it for me?”

  In case I should fantasize I’m Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, there’s always someone to remind me I look more like Betty Crocker.

  * * * * *

  Since the police were now gone, most of the kids brought their lunch bags inside the tent because it eliminated the chasing of napkins caught by the wind and the spilling of drinks on the bumpy ground. I took a seat at a table occupied, so far, by Hannah Dunbar. Hannah, I noticed, had eyed Graham Jones when he came in with his lunch, but Graham had gone to the table Tony had recently vacated. Graham unrolled the grid plans, setting his canned soda on one side of the paper and a rock on the other.

  “Aren’t you getting a little tired of camp food, Hannah?” I asked.

  “A bit, yes. I do have a car here, you know, so if I get desperate, I can drive into the village for a proper meal.”

  “With the wonderful breakfasts and dinners at the castle, I need this inedible junk at noon. It keeps me from gaining too much weight.”

  We chatted a few more minutes before I told her about John being taken to the hospital. “The night before last,” I said, “almost everyone who ate dinner at the castle got sick. Several of us think it might have been the mushroom soup because there were wild mushrooms in it, but the soup tasted fine, you know? In fact, the only people who didn’t get sick were my friend Lettie Osgood, who doesn’t like mushrooms, and Tony Marsh, who Lettie says didn’t eat much of his soup.”

  “But everyone got better, apparently,” Hannah said. “
I mean, you’re here now.”

  “Right. All of us recovered within a few hours. All of us, that is, except John. He’s been in his room ever since, and today, when the ambulance came for him—”

  “An ahrombulance? They took him in an ambulance?”

  “He’s so sick, he’s delirious. They took him out on a stretcher.”

  “Liver failure,” Hannah declared. “John’s been showing signs of jaundice, edema, especially around his ankles, spider veins all over his face; all signs of cirrhosis. John drinks way too much.”

  “You sound like a doctor,” I said.

  “I’m an endocrinologist.”

  I’m sure my mouth fell open, not because I don’t realize that a pretty woman can also be a doctor, but because, let’s face it, an archaeological dig is hardly where you’d expect to find an endocrinologist. “I’m looking for a connection, Hannah, and I’m drawing a blank. Okay, I give up. Why are you here?”

  She balled up her sandwich wrap and tossed it into her lunch bag. “This is my hobby. One does need a change of pace sometimes, doesn’t one?”

  I agreed with her wholeheartedly while making note of the facts that she had shrugged her shoulders, rubbed her nose, and her voice had climbed upward a full octave as she said it. She was lying.

  “Dotsy, you knew Froggy rather well, didn’t you?” Hannah said, changing the subject. “And I know you talked to Van yesterday, at some length. What do you think has happened? The police are leaning on Van pretty hard, I’ve heard.”

  “Hey, I only got here last week. You and everybody else have known both of them longer than I have.”

  “But you have a way about you. People confide in you, don’t they?”

  “Yes, I suppose they do. I’m interested in people, and I guess it shows.”

  “Your eyes sparkle when you’re listening to someone. It’s quite flattering to the person who’s talking, you know.”

  “You’re embarrassing me,” I said. “But to get back to your question, I have no idea who killed Froggy. No one here has a motive, and the police’s alternate theory about some random thief wandering across the moors, looking for someone to rob and kill. It’s ridiculous.” I studied Hannah’s face. “Have you heard anything? You stay at the camp so you’ve heard the kids talk.”

  “I’ve heard nothing. They all thought Froggy was a bit odd, but nice. There is that kid, Proctor Galigher, though. He didn’t like Froggy, but I don’t know why.”

  I didn’t mention what Joyce Parsley had told me about Proctor, Froggy, and the plagiarism charge. Hannah, I thought, was probably “out of the loop,” as they say, around the camp.

  I had an idea. “I’d like it if you’d come to the castle some evening for dinner, as my guest.”

  Hannah didn’t answer at once. She ran her finger around the wet circle her soda can had left on the table and made a swirly pattern with the water. “I do fine in the evenings with my tin pot and my Sterno.”

  “A change of pace would do you good.” I smiled, pushed my chair back, and stretched my legs. I didn’t want to pressure her.

  “Perhaps,” she said.

  At another table, Proctor Galigher was flipping grapes into the mouths of his tablemates, while Tracee Wagg ate a banana in a manner that would get a film |an X-rating. Another kid had crammed all the leftover sandwich crusts from the entire table into his mouth until his cheeks ballooned out like a chipmunk’s, and yet another stepped on the chipmunk’s foot, as if the foot was a step-on trash can. What a group! It reminded me of the banquet scene in the movie Tom Jones.

  “That girl, Tracee. Do you know her?” I asked Hannah.

  “She stays at the camp, of course. She could, I think, benefit by a serious talk about high-risk behavior … from someone.”

  “But not from you, right?”

  “Not from me,” Hannah said. “It’s not my job. I’m on vacation.” She smiled a little; it was the first time I’d seen her smile. “Tracee needs to stay out of the bushes, if you know what I mean.”

  “Stay out in the open,” I added, and that reminded me. “Hannah, someone, a girl, John said, found a pretty amethyst earring and gave it to him for safe keeping. Do you know who that was?”

  “Me. I found it.”

  “Where?”

  “Do you know that patch of woods over there?” Hannah pointed roughly northward. “Where the Sinclairs have what they call a shooting hut?”

  “I was there yesterday.”

  “There’s a pasture between that woods and the castle. We were field walking that pasture about a week or so ago, and the earring was simply lying there, between a couple of clumps of grass.”

  “As if it had been dropped recently?”

  “I couldn’t say. It was sort of embedded, as if it had been rained on. Settled into the soil. But with rain and wind and erosion and whatever, I suppose it could have been there quite a long time.”

  “Buried and then re-exposed?”

  “Yes, or dropped there two days ago. How could you tell?”

  “I’m sure I couldn’t,” I said. “Was it near that fence between the woods and the pasture?”

  “No, it was in the middle of the pasture, about the same distance from the woods and the castle and that cliff. Did you notice that horrible cliff on the other side of the fence?”

  “I nearly saw more of it than would have been good for me,” I said. “If it hadn’t been for William Sinclair, I would have gone over the edge.”

  “How? There’s a fence.”

  “Not on the woods side, there isn’t. Someone needs to put one up.”

  * * * * *

  Several times in the course of the afternoon’s labor, I heard “Shroooom!” from one or another of the kids as they tramped over my feet or yelled across the top of me as if I were part of the subsoil. In one instance, when Joyce Parsley had squatted beside me in a painful-looking position and was prattling on about Froggy, Proctor Galigher lurched by and “Shrooomed” at Joyce.

  She shot him the old watch-your-mouth-there’s-a-mother-type-person-listening glare.

  I could have asked her to explain, but I didn’t want to get her off the subject of Froggy. “Have you heard anything about V>I an Nguyen being questioned by the police, Joyce?”

  “They suspect him, I’ve heard.”

  “Do you think there’s any basis for their suspicion?”

  A sliver of flying flint hit me on the cheek. I twisted around and found that the source was Iain Jandeson in full Indiana Jones regalia, Aussie bush hat and all, sitting cross-legged on the grass and knapping a chunk of flint with another rock. “Watch out, Iain,” I said. I swiped my hand across my face and checked my fingers for blood. “If you let those flint flakes fly in here, someone might think they’re Neolithic.”

  “I’m not a complete idiot,” Iain said. His attitude sometimes crossed over the boundary from pomposity into pure arrogance. I elected to drop the subject and turn my attention back to Joyce, who still sat in that folded-up squat.

  “Van doesn’t seem like the type, does he?” Joyce said. “Still, I know that he and Froggy had a few fights. Not …” Joyce pummeled the air with her fists. “Just arguments. But since Froggy was wearing Van’s shirt when they found his body, and since no one can remember seeing Froggy after he went back to their room, I guess it does look suspicious.”

  “What do you mean, after he went back to their room? When did he do that?”

  Joyce jammed her camouflage hat over her face. “I don’t remember. Somebody said they saw him, but I can’t remember who.”

  * * * * *

  Lettie bounced into my room, waving the mushroom book. She handed it to me with a big, “Ta da! Fast work, eh? The book store had it waiting for me when I stopped in on my way to the car.”

  I thumbed through the book. It had pages and pages of glossy photos with common as well as scientific names and detailed descriptions. It was exactly what I wanted, but I couldn’t read it yet. I still had to shower before dinner, so
I laid the book on my nightstand and turned back to Lettie.

  “John has been taken to the hospital,” I said.

  “I’m not surprised. You said he was raving mad last night. He probably should have gone yesterday. Do you think it’s because of the mushroom soup?”

  “If so, why did the rest of us get over it so quickly?” I picked up my new book again and looked at the table of contents to see if it had a chapter on poisonous mushrooms. It didn’t; the species were arranged according to their shapes. “Two people have suggested to me that that it might be cirrhosis of the liver.”

  “What two people?”

  “Tony Marsh and Hannah Dunbar, this woman at the dig. You haven’t met her, but she’s an endocrinologist, so she should know.”

  “John does drink too much, doesn’t he?” Lettie said as she backed out the door. With her hand still on my doorknob, she tilted her head and said, “What’s an endocrinologist doing at an archaeological dig?”

  * * * * *

  William came back from the hospital in time for dinner and told us that Fallon planned to stay the night there. “They’re doing tests, and they’ve put him in the intensive care unit. There’s no point in any of you going to see him, because they won’t let you in,” he told all of us as we took our seats for dinner. There was an extra party of six with us that evening. Locals, they told me, celebrating an anniversary.

  “Have you talked to his doctors?” I asked.

  “I tried to, but they were in a rush. Dr. Ashton, me own regular doctor and the one Fallon called this morning, noo I did talk to him. He fears John’s kidneys and maybe his liver, too, are failin’. If that’s the case …” William’s voice trailed off. He shook his head and pulled out chairs to seat Lettie and me.

  Amelia and Brian grabbed the other two chairs at our table as Christine barged through the swinging door from the kitchen to make her nightly spectacle of herself. Her commando-waitress image was enhanced this evening by the large combat boots and argyle socks she had chosen to wear with a soft blue dress and little white apron.

  “Listen up! I don’t want to have to say this but once! We have two starters tonight: Caesar salad or clam chowder. The clam chowder is made with broth; not milk and not tomato. Broth. Got it? If ye don’t like it made with broth, have the salad!”