Death of a Lovable Geek

by Maria Hudgins

  “He denied knowing anything aboot it,” William’s friend said as he walked around William and closed the door.

  * * * * *

  On the drive home, I determined to find out how much William knew about John’s plans for the future of the castle lands and whether or not William himself was involved, but I figured I’d better do it without revealing what I’d seen in Van’s video presentation. I didn’t want to be accused of starting a war between brothers if, in fact, William knew nothing, as I suspected he didn’t.

  So I broached the subject by saying, “How do you see the Castle Dunlaggan, say, fifty years from now, William?”

  “Ach! An American question if I ever heard one. Americans assume a place will be different fifty years from now, but we Scots think more in terms of centuries. Fifty years is nothing.”

  “You don’t see much changing during your lifetime?”

  “Are ye assumin’ I’ll be dead in fifty years? In fifty years I’ll be a hundred and … aye, you’re probably right. But, no, I don’t see much changin’ as long as I’m there. It’s my heritage, ye ken? It’s my responone. I sies. Fiftyity to keep it and to keep it up right.”

  William turned his head to the side window and was quiet. I imagined that he was composing himself lest he get too sentimental about the “auld hoose.” I waited.

  “I see the coos disappearin’, though,” he finally said. “I cannae afford to keep ’em, I fear.”

  “Oh, but they’re so adorable! You can’t get rid of the coos.”

  William glanced toward me and chuckled.

  * * * * *

  At dinner that evening I had to kick Lettie under the table because the pain killers she had brought back from the hospital had loosened her lips to the point that she monopolized the conversation. It was only the Downeses, the Lipscombs, Lettie and me. Christine, with responsibility for the whole meal, was uncharacteristically subdued; she didn’t yell at us once. But perhaps that was because we were all at one table, and yelling was unnecessary.

  We exchanged all we knew about John’s precarious condition, about Van’s arrest, and about the car accident that sent Lettie to the emergency room. Amelia Lipscomb had gone to the hospital in mid-afternoon, and she reported that there was no change in John’s state. I voiced the opinion that the police had arrested the wrong person for Froggy’s murder, and the other five at the table reminded me that they had never met Van, and therefore had no opinion.

  Brian Lipscomb raised his wineglass as if to propose a toast and said, “At least the police will have no further reason to keep their incident room in the round tower open. Perhaps now we’ll be able to go for a shower without parading past the constabulary in our bathrobes.”

  “And perhaps now,” Lettie said, “you won’t have to ‘assume the position’ anymore.” She threw her arms up and out in imitation of Brian’s pat-down against his car on the morning the police searched our vehicles.

  I kicked her under the table.

  “What was that all about, Brian?” Lettie ignored the kick. Given the numbing effect of her pain pill, she may not have even felt it. She prattled on, making it worse. “They had you up against your car good and proper, didn’t they? Did you say something that set them off? The rest of us didn’t get felt up.”

  This time, I kicked her hard.

  “Ow! Whaja kick me for, Dotsy?”

  Brian rescued us before I had to haul Lettie out by the collar. “It was poor judgment on my part,” he said. “That’s all it was. I had brought some rather confidential papers from my office to work on while we were here. I’m responsible for protecting them, and when the police said they were going to search cars, I panicked. If I had stopped and thought first, I would have realized they’d have no interest in those papers. As long as they didn’t confiscate them, no problem.”

  Amelia scraped the frosting from her strawberry cake and made a mound of it on the side of her dessert plate. “Dotsy, did you take a look at those portraits of Roger and Fenella Sinclair? Did you notice the resemblance between William and John and their mother?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but I wonder why there are no portraits of Roger’s second wife around. Did you know he remarried after Fenella died?”

  Eleanor Downes jumped intoA sai oversation. “Of course. Everybody knows he married Lady Rebecca Seton, of the London stage. A spectacular mismatch if there ever was one, wouldn’t you say?” She turned to her husband for reinforcement.

  “Terrible,” Alf said, and a blob of frosting flew off his bottom lip as he said it. “Terrible.”

  “Sounds as if you know the whole story,” I said. “Tell us.”

  “You know already that we’re royal watchers, and that includes the people who surround the royals as well,” Alf said. “The people who flatter them, party with them, dilly-dally with them …”

  “Are you saying that William and John’s stepmother had an affair with one of the royal family?” Lettie asked.

  “No one knows what goes on behind closed doors, do they?” Eleanor said, taking center stage. “Or on the royal yacht, Britannia, either. But Lady Rebecca was a renowned beauty in her day. In the fifties. She was the toast of the town as they used to say. She had a string of husbands, each wealthier than the last, and she was certainly a guest on the royal yacht, usually when the wives of the royals and their guests were elsewhere. There was talk.”

  “Well, of course. You know the London tabloids,” Brian said. “They always infer fire whether there’s any smoke or not.”

  “In this case, there was plenty of smoke, wouldn’t you agree, dear?”

  Alf nodded and harrumphed. “Lady Rebecca, they said, had the most striking eyes, not really blue, but a brilliant—”

  “Violet,” I said.

  “How did you know that?” both Downeses asked in unison.

  “Boots, the handyman, told Lettie and me about her. He said her eyes were violet.”

  “Yes. Well, she and Roger Sinclair had the stormiest of marriages. Roger was the wild Scotsman, barely tamed. Lady Rebecca was the prima donna. Oh, there were stories! The servants had hiding places around the castle and they knew when to take cover. It all ended, of course, with Lady Rebecca’s violent death.”

  “Boots told us she committed suicide. Jumped off that cliff on the other side of the pasture,” Lettie said, nodding roughly eastward and out the dining-room window.

  “Right. Her body was found, days later, at the foot of the cliff. But although they found a suicide note, there were those who didn’t think it was suicide.”

  “Aren’t there always?” Amelia said. “Whenever there’s a sudden death, someone always cries ‘murder.’ ”

  Lettie volunteered to take the coffee tray to the library so Christine could get on with her kitchen clean-up. That didn’t seem like a good idea to me, given the fact that Lettie was too woozy to walk straight, but she insisted she could do it. I caught Christine by the elbow and suggested she load the tray with something other than the Royal Doulton bone china.

  As the six of us ambled through the Great Hall on our way to the library, I managed to pull Amelia Lipscomb aside. I wanted to clear up the discrepancy between what she and Mrs. Quale had told me. Froggy’s mother had come to the castle specifically to see me, a person she’d never met before, and had not attempted to see Amelia, although Amelia had told me tha f m Mrs. Quale had asked her to keep an eye on Froggy while she was here. That made no sense. Obviously, Mrs. Quale knew that Amelia was staying here at the castle. Why hadn’t she asked to see her?

  With anyone in the news media, I think the quick and dirty approach works best. “Amelia,” I said, steering her away from the group, “Brenda Quale was here Thursday night. Did you talk to her?”

  “Who?” Amelia said, then caught herself. “Oh, yes, Dylan’s mother. I mean, no. I didn’t know she was here.” Amelia led me to a front window while the others walked on. A floodlight shone through the window, highlighting her sculpted cheekbones with silver. She sta
red out the window for several seconds before she said, “Okay, truth time. The fact is, I’m not here on holiday, as I said I was, and I’ve never met Dylan Quale’s mother. I told you she’d asked me to keep an eye on him because I was pumping you for information. I was trying to find out what you knew about the financing of John Sinclair’s archaeological dig.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re aware that I’m a news reporter, aren’t you? Well, I convinced the station I work for to let me come here and see what I could uncover. John Sinclair is a professor at our local University, Worcester. He has too much money for an archaeologist. Digs are normally financed on a shoestring budget, with everyone involved paying his or her own way. Bring your own trowel, you know. But John has brought his own media man, a pollen expert, and at least fifty thousand pounds’ worth of video and computer equipment. Where is that money coming from?”

  “Grants?”

  “Grant money is so tight, you’re lucky if you can get enough to rent a tent.”

  “Do you suspect John is involved in something illegal?”

  “If he is, I haven’t uncovered any evidence of it.” Amelia’s pursed lips glistened in the floodlight. “Brian, my husband, is here because he didn’t want me to come alone. The only way he could leave his office was to bring work with him and do it here. He has a laptop and a phone, so he’s in touch with his company every day. That’s why he had that flap with the police over those papers. He sneaked some very sensitive papers, dealing with radioactive wastes, I think, out of his company. He knew they wouldn’t be missed since he’s the only one working with them right now, but those papers are never supposed to be taken off the premises. He’d get in big trouble if his company found out he took them to Scotland.”

  “He was worried about you coming here by yourself?”

  “Yes, but he should know by now that I can take care of myself. Perhaps, if we had children, he’d have someone other than me to worry about.” She sighed. “Brian and I have been trying for years to get pregnant, but so far, no luck.”

  “I never had that problem, myself. I was like the old woman who lived in a shoe.” That sounded a bit flippant, I thought, so I added, “Children always change a marriage. Sometimes for the better; sometimes not.”

  Amelia stared out the window as if she was debating whether or not to tell me something important. At length, she cleared her throat and said, “When I was a new journalist, barely twenty years old and recently hired by the Brighton TV station, one of my first assignments was to go to a dig out in West Sussex and interview John Sinclair. It was a hot day.” Amelia paused, and my heart did a flop.

  I knew what was coming next.

  “I saw that he had a little boy in his car. A beautiful little boy. I did the interview. John Sinclair preened. Basked in the limelight. Boasted.” She choked a little on that last word. “Such arrogance! It didn’t even occur to me to wonder where the little boy was. I suppose I assumed Sinclair had left the child with someone. But the child was in the car the whole time. With the windows rolled up.” Great tears ran freely down Amelia’s face.

  “You don’t have to go on,” I said. I took her hand in mine. “I know what happened.”

  “I didn’t find out until we went on the air that evening with the taped interview.”

  “I know.”

  “That bastard.”

  * * * * *

  Lettie had poured the coffee and Eleanor Downes was cozily tucked into her favorite chair with her Robert Burns poetry when Amelia and I entered the library. Alf Downes bent over a large world atlas, and Brian Lipscomb held Lettie captive with a lecture on the purity of the waters in Loch Ness.

  I tasted my coffee, found it too cool, and poured myself a wee dram of Drambuie instead. As the warming amber liquid slid down my throat, the doors swung open and William and Maisie slipped in, both their faces drained of color. It was Maisie who first found her voice, but it came out in a croak. “John died tonight. He’s gone,” was all she said.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I plumped my pillows against the headboard and settled my back against the downy fluff while Lettie perched on the chair at my vanity table. Our basket of mushrooms sat on the floor by her feet. “Lettie, do you know the difference between cause of death and manner of death?” I asked.

  “No, but I bet you’re about to tell me.”

  “It’s important. The cause of death on John’s death certificate will probably say cardiac arrest, or renal failure, or something like that. I know this stuff because I saw the death certificate when my father died.

  “That would be the immediate cause of death, but they have another space on a death certificate for underlying cause of death. In my father’s case it was diabetes, but what would it be in John’s case? Mushroom poisoning? Alcoholism? I don’t know. I hope they do an autopsy. If it was the mushrooms, would any of the poison still be in his system? Would they find it in an autopsy?”

  Lettie shrugged.

  “Now, manner of death. Here we have five choices: natural, accidental, suicide, homicide, and don’t know. What should John’s death certificate say?”

  “Accidental?” Lettie guessed.

  “I think homicide, Lettie.”

  Lettie gasped. “You don’t know that!”

  “I don’t know it for sure, but I can’t forget what John said to me the evening of the dinner when we had the mushroom soup. ‘If anything happens to me,’ he said, and something did, didn’t it?” I crammed a pillow under my armpit and rested on one elbow, facing Lettie. I wanted her to see how serious I was.

  “But, Dotsy, he could have been speaking generally. He didn’t say, ‘If someone murders me.’ ”

  “But you should have seen his face, Lettie. It wasn’t a general statement. He expected something to happen to him.”

  Lettie and I unwrapped the mushrooms one by one and arranged them in a row on my vanity table. I asked her to recall where we had found each one because, according to my book, knowing the habitat helps in identification. Lettie is blessed with an almost photographic memory for details, so she slipped a piece of paper under each one, with “beside the path,” “on a rotten log,” or “in the middle of a patch of moss” identifying it.

  “William called one of his lawyer friends for me this afternoon,” I said, easing into what I knew would illicit a sharp response from Lettie. “I’m going to hire one for Van. I don’t want him to be represented by a generic solicitor, so I made an appointment to meet with this guy in Aviemore tomorrow morning. Can you drop me off on your way to Inverness?”

  “You’re going to what?”

  Stupid of me to think I could slip in “hire a lawyer” in the midst of “I need a lift” and Lettie wouldn’t notice it. “This is something I want to do.”

  She took a step back and yelled, “How much is that going to cost? You’re crazy, Dotsy! You don’t owe that kid anything. If he can’t afford a lawyer, let his parents get him one!”

  “He doesn’t want his parents to know. It’s odd, but I think I understand how he feels. His parents have immigrated to the United States, worked hard to make a decent life for their children and they have high expectations for them. Van doesn’t want to shatter their dream. Can you imagine calling home and saying, ‘Hi, Mom, this is your son doing graduate work at Cambridge. Guess what? I’ve been arrested for murdering my roommate.’ ”

  “If it was one of your own kids, wouldn’t you want to know?” Lettie’s voice was softer now.

  I thought about that. Sure, I’d want to know. I’d hate for a child of mine to go through something like this alone. I’d want to be there. But I could also imagine my daughter Anne not telling me. Anne was the only one of my offspring I could possibly imagine getting arrested for anything, and for her, my breath was perpetually held. My four sons were pillars of their communities, but Anne …

  “Well, wouldn’t you?” Lettie repeated.

  “Yes, but the decision is Van’s, not mine.”

  Let
tie fiddled with the mushrooms and their labels for a minute, then snapped her fingers. “Hey! Why don’t you take the car tomorrow? I want to spend a day in Edinburgh. That’s where the General Registry House is, where they keep the birth, marriage and death records. And I’d rather go by train than try to drive.”

  “Sounds sensible to me, given our experience at the roundabout.”

  “The train station is in Aviemore. I’ve already picked up a train schedule.” In a flash, Lettie was out the door and back again with a small printed folder. “There’s a train that leaves Aviemore for Edinburgh at eight twenty-nine. Could you get me there that early?”

  “That’ll work. I can be at the lawyer’s office by nine.”

  “Oh, how exciting! I’ve never ridden on a y t Pn.” She studied the schedule and decided she could take the return train that would get her back to Aviemore at seven-thirty. “Could you pick me up then?”

  “Sure.” I thought about driving to Aviemore at seven-thirty p.m. and realized that it wouldn’t even be dark at that time. Assuming I hadn’t worn the gears down smooth by that time, it would be no problem. “Would you look some stuff up for me while you’re at the registery? Find out what they’ve got on the marriage of Roger Sinclair and Rebecca Seton. No, wait. Seton may not have been her last name at that time. Look for Roger William Campbell Sinclair. And find out all you can about the deaths of both Rebecca and Roger.”

  Lettie worked part-time at her library back home and was the best I knew at ferreting out information. With her memory, she didn’t even have to bother writing down the names. “Will do. A man in Inverness told me they call this place the ‘hatch-match-dispatch’ building,” Lettie said, and laughed longer than that joke deserved.