Death of a Lovable Geek

by Maria Hudgins

“Let’s call them tomorrow and insist on paying.”

  By the time I got us jerked and lurched back to the A86, I was able to shift into high gear and relax. It was smooth driving for the next twenty might=es. I pulled into a grocery before we had to turn off the main road and said,, “We need to get some waxed paper if we’re going mushroom hunting.”

  “Let’s get some bug spray, too,” Lettie added.

  Back in our rooms, we changed into jeans and sprayed ourselves with insect repellent. I put the roll of waxed paper, a carton of orange juice, and my mushroom book in a woven wood basket I’d bought at the grocery. The book said that if you gather mushrooms, you mustn’t put them in plastic bags or they’ll sweat and become slimy. It recommended wrapping them loosely in waxed paper and putting them in a flat-bottomed basket.

  There must be some law or other that says if you look for any sort of thing, you find it all over the place. It’s like programming your eyes to find all the orange shirts in a stadium full of people; orange dots pop out by the hundreds. If you think blue, you see blue. Seek and ye shall find, everywhere you look.

  And so it was with mushrooms. I’d have sworn, before Lettie and I started out, that we’d be lucky if we found two or three, but we found some nice ones before we even left the parking lot. I spotted them growing out the side of the wire mesh around Maisie’s compost heap beside the herb garden. My first specimens. I snapped two off and wrapped them in waxed paper.

  While we tramped through the pasture, the sheep turned their backsides to us as usual. Lettie laughed when I told her that was the sheep’s way of making people disappear. At the edge of the woods we found a fairy ring of mushrooms—they looked a lot like the ones we had collected from the compost—and a strange yellowish growth on some sheep droppings which I did not collect.

  “The mycelium is the main part of the fungus’s body,” I told Lettie. “It grows underground in a circle and every so often it sends up fruiting bodies around its edges. That’s what mushrooms are.”

  “Are you trying to destroy my belief in fairies?” Lettie asked, her fists planted on her hips.

  A vigorous mass of blooming heather lined a path into the woods. Beyond the heather, mossy groundcover gave way to bracken ferns and rocks encrusted with lichens. We followed a clear, apparently well-trod path, but it soon branched and intersected other paths. “Should we be dropping bread crumbs?” I asked.

  Lettie looked all around. The trees were branchless up much higher than our heads, letting daylight in. “I don’t see how we could possibly get lost, Dotsy. Not unless we stay here ’til after dark.”

  We found more mushrooms and more mushrooms; within twenty minutes we had a dozen samples in our basket. Most of them had an umbrella-shaped cap with rows of gills underneath, but some had cute little conical tops that looked like coolie hats, some had gills on the top, and some had caps like umbrellas blown inside out.

  I had never seen chanterelles in the wild before, but beside our path we found some yellow ones and another type of mushroom that looked so totally phallic that Lettie blushed and hesitated to touch it.

  “Go ahead, Lettie. I won’t tell Ollie,” I said, thumbing through the book for a picture of something similar. I found a photo of its twin. “It’s a Phallus impudicus.”

  “I could have told you that,” said Lettie. “Is it edible?”

  I waPa forced to find a rock to sit on until I could stop laughing and get control of myself. Through my tears, though, I saw another mushroom that looked a lot like the chanterelle. It was frilly, yellow-orange, and it was growing out of a decayed stump. “A Jack O’Lantern!” I gathered one quickly, ripped off my jacket, and threw it over my head.

  “What are you doing, Dotsy?”

  “Looking for an eerie greenish glow.”

  “Of course. I knew that. And are you seeing a greenish glow?”

  I closed my eyes for a few seconds to let my pupils adjust to the dark, then turned the mushroom over and over. No glow. Nothing. “Maybe it’s not a Jack O’Lantern after all,” I said, tossing the jacket off and grabbing a piece of waxed paper to wrap the mushroom in.

  On the opposite side of the same old stump, there grew a cluster of a different type mushroom. Tan with thin stems and flat caps. Lettie knelt beside me and picked a couple of them as I wrapped and stashed the possible Jack O’Lantern.

  “Drop ‘em!” a voice from above growled.

  I froze. Lettie and I both turned toward the sound and found ourselves staring at the barrel of a rifle.

  Slowly, my gaze traveled up a pair of denim overalls to a plaid jacket, and I breathed again. It was only Boots, and he wasn’t pointing the rifle at us. In fact, he had it broken and draped across his arm, the way you’re supposed to carry a rifle.

  “They be poison. Drop ‘em.”

  I explained what we were doing and unwrapped one specimen to show him.

  “Ye think I gave Maisie bad mushrooms for the soup, dinnae ye?”

  “No!” My instinct cautioned against suggesting any doubt whatsoever in the competence of a man with a gun.

  Boots put his rifle down and examined every sample in the basket. “Then why the sudden interest? Maisie said ye went all peelie-wally ’til morn.”

  “I did wonder about what caused us to get sick, but mainly, we’re exploring around to try out my new book.” I showed him the book, wondering if he found my explanation plausible.

  “Ye dinnae need a book! Ye need ta ken these woods. Like me. I’ve lived here since I was a bairn and ye cannae find a mushroom in these woods that I have’na seen before. But that book—” Boots made a derisive hiss with his mouth, and flipped my book with the back of his hand “—that book’ll make ye think ye ken more than ye do.”

  “So how about helping us with these?”

  Boots peered into the basket and pointed to the first mushrooms we’d collected. “Blewits. Good. More blewits. Chan-ta-rellie, verra good! This be stinkhorn.” He held the Phallus impudicus under my nose.

  “I think we can toss that,” I said, dumping the foul-smelling thing on the ground.

  He took a long time examining the yellow-orange specimen from the stump.

  “That looks like what the book calls a Jack O’Lantern,” I said. I showed Boots the photo in the book. He studied it a while longer and squatted down beside the stump, examining the ones that were still attached. w ee took the book from me and held the specimen beside the picture.

  “Nae, this one—” he tapped the photo “—has different gills, ye see?” He ran a rough, cracked finger along the underside of the specimen. It took a minute, but at length I did see that, unlike the Jack O’Lantern, our specimen had branched gills. Other than that, they looked almost identical.

  “The Jack O’Lantern is poisonous,” I said. “Is this one, too?”

  “Nae, but it has no flavor. I don’t pick these. Noo, the one your friend here was aboot to collect; that’ll give ye a stomachache ye willnae soon forget!”

  When Lettie got to her feet, Boots slapped his thigh as a signal for Lucy to hop to it and guided us around the woods with a running commentary on mushroom identification. If nothing else, I learned that Boots either poisoned us all deliberately or he didn’t poison us at all. He knew the woods and its fungi so well, there was no way he could have picked bad ones by accident. Several times I checked my book’s description of a particular species, only to find that Boots and the book were in agreement.

  I started feeling woozy. My signal that hypoglycemia loomed. “I need to sit down and have some OJ,” I announced, pulling my little juice box from the basket. Boots used his billed cap to dust off a couple of rocks for Lettie and me. Gallantry in the rough. Lucy watched Boots, not committing herself to a spot until she saw where her master was going to sit. My fingers itched to get into Lucy’s matted fur with a good brush. She had some clumps that would have to be cut out, I was sure.

  With a groan, Boots lowered himself onto a rock. He ran his hand across the stubble on h
is lantern jaw and sniffled. Boots’s face had the texture of a dried apple and his ears had lengthened with age until they grazed the collar of his plaid jacket. He squinted at me as I tipped up my juice carton, but he made no comment.

  “Has this place changed much since you were a kid?” Lettie asked him.

  I waited for the wonderful surge of energy the orange juice always brought me.

  “Nae, not the castle itself, or the grounds. From the outside, it looks the same as it did fifty, sixty years ago. Inside, they got electricity in every room, noo. Dishwashers, TV, computers.” He turned and nodded toward the east. “The dig didn’t used to be there, o’course. Used to be all barley.”

  “Did you know William and John’s parents?” I asked. “Their father was named Roger, I heard.”

  “Oh aye.” Boots tapped his temple with a gnarled finger. “Radge Roger, they used to call him. Nothin’ much he wouldnae do. Now Fenella, their mother, was a beautiful woman. Not like a film star, ye ken, she was plain, but beautiful. Sweet natured. Pretty brown eyes. Reddish hair. She was a MacBane. She’d be Robbie’s great aunt. Nae, she’d be a cousin. I dinnae ken how ye figure it. Maybe third cousin.”

  “And after she died, Roger remarried?” I asked.

  “Becky, they called her. Lady Rebecca. She had money. She was an actress in London before they married. Hung around with a fast crowd. Always gettin’ her name in the paper. She was a beauty, too, but not like Fenella. Becky was the sort that made your eyeballs pop. She was film star pretty. She had these eyes, these … not blue, not purple … violet.”

  Boots tilted his head as if he could sti. yl see Becky’s eyes. “She and Roger got along like cats and dogs. Whew! She’d always got her own way, ye ken? And Roger had always got his way, too. Neither one o’ them had any practice with things not going to suit them. Roger had his way of doin’ things. Same as they’d always been done, right? Men go fishin’ in summer, huntin’ in autumn, coos eat grass, women do whatever it is they do around the castle. Meals be there when ye be hungry, bairns be clean.

  “Becky, she had parties. Big parties. Fancy folk from London come roarin’ up here on weekends, sometimes stayed ’til Wednesday! Becky’d tell Roger what to wear, who to take grouse huntin’ and how long to stay. Her friends talked about plays, art, books, things Roger had no interest in.”

  “One wonders how two people so different from each other would get hooked up to begin with,” I said.

  Boots shifted his rifle out from under Lucy’s front paws. “After Fenella died, Roger was at sixes and sevens, so to speak. He had two little lads to raise, all this land to see to, and a castle to run. Plus, Roger never was too reliable, and bairns need washed and fed on a regular basis. Need somebody to make sure the nanny is doin’ her job. Roger was the sort to go off for days at a time. I guess there weren’t any lasses, hereaboot, for him to marry. He knew everyone from here to Inverness and they knew him. There were those as Roger thought too plain, or plain ugly, and those as wouldnae go out wi’ him because their folks wouldnae let them!”

  Boots grinned and looked at me, his watery blue eyes twinkling. “So he started to hang aboot in Edinburgh and London wi’ a fast crowd. Folks wi’ more money than sense. That’s where he met Becky. Lady Rebecca.”

  “Where did she get her money?” I asked.

  At the same time, Lettie said, “Did she really have a title?”

  “She’d been married several times before Roger. Came oot o’ more than one divorce smellin’ like a rose, they said. Plus, she was a successful actress; came by some of her money honestly.”

  “And she killed herself?” I asked. “She sounds as if she had the world by the tail on a downhill pull. Why did she kill herself?”

  Boots didn’t answer immediately. He stroked Lucy’s head. “She left a note. Said she couldnae stand it here, and couldnae go through another divorce.”

  “How did she—”

  “Jumped.” Boots pointed northward through the trees. “Over near the shootin’ hut there’s a cliff that goes straight from the woods down to the glen. She jumped off. They dinnae find her body for almost a week because she landed in a spot where the autumn leaves were fallin’ and blowin’ aboot. She was covered up. It took search dogs to find her.”

  “And Roger?” Lettie asked. “I guess he was devastated.”

  “Aye. I wouldnae ha’ thought it, because they never had gotten along that well, in my opinion, but Roger was never the same after that. Crawled in his shell—”

  “And finally killed himself.” Remembering what William had told me, I finished Boot’s sentence for him. “Did he jump, too?”

  “Nae. He shot himself.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Lettie took the basket of mushrooms to the castle, and I walked with Boots to his little cottage at the MacBane farm because I wanted to check on Van, if he was around. Lucy trotted along beside us, her thick, matted coat flopping from one side to the other with each step. Boots still carried his rifle draped across his arm as he led me off the road and up the gravel drive, taking one long stride for every two of mine.

  “If ye do find that lad, Van, make him tell ye aboot the party they had last night,” Boots said.

  “What do you mean? Where?”

  “At the camp. Ask him to tell ye.” Boots’s tone of voice told me that he had no intention of telling me himself. He directed me off the driveway and toward a little stone cottage a few yards away. “Ye’ll come in for tea, will ye?”

  Boots sounded as if he was issuing a sincere invitation, not an obligatory one for the sake of politeness, so I said okay. He stamped his boots on the stoop and pushed the front door open. It wasn’t locked. We entered a small hallway, so crammed with junk I had to walk sideways through the narrow gap between old magazines, odd bits of furniture, newspapers, and a stack of neatly folded clean towels that looked quite out of place.

  In his kitchen, I sat at a wobbly wooden table covered with a red-and-white checked oilskin cloth while Boots put the kettle on the stove and a cellophane pack of Bourbon Creams on the table. He filled Lucy’s bowl with fresh water and set it on the linoleum floor. Lucy lapped it up sloppily.

  A large wicker basket on the table in front of me brimmed over with picture postcards. Hundreds of them. I turned over one of Hadrian’s Wall and saw that it was from Wanda and Winifred Merlin, the weird sisters. I glanced toward Boots; he was searching an open cabinet for something, probably the sugar.

  I slipped another card out from the bottom of the basket. It was a glossy photo of azure tropical water and a white sand beach, from someone I didn’t know, but it bore a 1987 postmark. From the smudges in its lower corners, I deduced that this, and probably all the cards in the basket, had been thoroughly enjoyed. In this basket was a quarter-century’s accumulation of “wish-you-were-here.”

  I doubted if Boots kept fresh lemons about, so when he asked what I took in my tea, I said, “Nothing, thanks,” for the sake of simplicity. He brought out two mugs, dropped a tea bag into each, and poured in the steaming water.

  “Would ye like toast and butter wi’ yer tea?” Boots pulled a saucer of fresh creamery butter from his fridge, buttered two split scones, and popped them into a toaster oven. They were excellent.

  “Back to the Sinclairs,” I said. “What were William and John like when they were little?”

  “Verra different. Hard to believe they had the same parents. William was athletic. He played football. He made a name for himself in the Highland games, tossing the caber, the hammer throw. Had a room full of trophies, did William. He set a record for the stone throw at the games in Braemar.”

  I knew he was referring to the annual Highland games held each fall in Braemar, near Balmoral Castle. The royal family often attended, I had heard.

  “Noo, John, he was the bookish one. Dinnae ha’ any interest in sports. John was his mama’s lad, ye ken? William was his daddy’s. If Fenella had lived, I’ve 6 Yondered if she would ha’ always looked oot for J
ohn like she did. She tried to protect him from William and from Roger. Roger dinnae think John was going to turn oot to be all man, ye ken?” Boots glanced at me through his lowered eyebrows.

  “Fenella’s death must have been really hard on John,” I said.

  “He was never the same after she died. He was a wee lad, five years old, when she died, but it took away …”

  When it became apparent that Boots didn’t intend to finish that sentence, I said, “How did the boys respond to their father’s remarriage?”

  “William seemed to accept it. By that time he was aboot ten or so, and John, eight. It was John who never even pretended to like Becky. She was not his mother, and he made it plain she’d better not try to be. O’course, Becky had no interest in bein’ anyone’s mother, so that was fine with her.

  “I don’t think I ever heard John even speak to Becky. I recall him leavin’ the room most times when she came in.”

  I thanked Boots for the tea and the lesson in mushroomology, and left by his kitchen door. From the general direction of the barn, Robbie MacBane tramped toward me. He had a chainsaw in one hand and a large metal tool box in the other. Having shed his kilt in favor of jeans, he was apparently back in farmer mode today.

  “I want to apologize for my behavior las’ nicht,” he said, blushing.

  “No apology necessary,” I said. “It’s understandable that you were upset.”

  “But I shouldnae ha’ ruined your dinner.”

  “You didn’t ruin it. Most of the guests thought your bagpipes were the evening’s entertainment.”

  “I nearly blasted the napkins off the tables!”

  I laughed and slapped him on the shoulder.

  “I’m half convinced that William dinnae ken anythin’ aboot that letter from his solicitors.”

  “I agree. I don’t think he did,” I said.

  “Well then, who did tell them to write it?”

  “No idea. Maybe John?”

  “It’s not John Sinclair’s land. It’s none o’ his business.”

  “Are you still going to call them? The solicitors?”