Death of a Lovable Geek

by Maria Hudgins

  “I’m sure some will, but most of them have brought no clothes appropriate for a funeral, and the church is going to be full to overflowing with local folk.”

  “I see. I, personally, would vote for two services, but that might detract from the significance of both mightn’t it?” I imagined all the kids filing into the tent, two days in a row, a marquee outside announcing whose life was being celebrated. “Maybe one service would be better.”

  Joyce edged over to Tony Marsh and, pulling on his shoulder, drew his ear close to her lips. “Dotsy is taking me to the police station,” I overheard. “I have to talk to them. Is it all right if we leave for a couple of hours?”

  “Sure, but I’m on my way into town myself,” Tony told her. “Why don’t I take you, and Dotsy can work out these memorial plans with6 MHannah and Graham while we’re gone? Dotsy, you’re better at this sort of thing than I am; I’m putting you and Hannah in charge. Graham, you do whatever they tell you to do.”

  Before I could protest, Tony had steered Joyce out, leaving Hannah, Graham and me staring at each other. We decided to have one service. Graham would recruit volunteers to read or speak, and we’d ask around to see if any of them had any talent, like singing or whatever.

  “Robbie MacBane is a musician,” I said. “He plays violin, bagpipes, and maybe some other things. John was his cousin and Froggy lived at his house, so maybe we could get him to play.”

  “Lovely,” Hannah said. “Perhaps he could play ‘Amazing Grace’ on the bagpipes.”

  “I’ll run over to his house and ask him,” Graham volunteered.

  Then I remembered. “He’s not home today. He’s in Inverness visiting his wife. She’s expecting a baby soon, and she’s staying with her parents so as to be close to the hospital when the time comes.”

  Hannah shrugged as if to say, “Okay, what’s plan B?”

  “But he’ll be back tonight. We can ask him, then,” I added.

  In only a few minutes we had our plans well in hand, and I had jotted notes to remind myself to 1) pick up clean clothes for Van, 2) leave a note for Robbie asking him to play for us, 3) invite everyone at the castle to come to the service, 4) check back with Robbie later tonight to get his answer.

  Graham went back to work, leaving Hannah and me alone.

  “Hannah, would you be my guest for dinner tonight at the castle?” I saw her tense up. Quickly I said, “There’ll be hardly anyone there, because of everything that’s going on, but they have several extra hands cooking so there’ll be plenty of food. I know that Fallon Sinclair won’t be there and my friend Lettie won’t be there.” It was important that Hannah know Fallon wouldn’t be there. Otherwise, I knew she’d never come. “And the coin expert from Edinburgh will be there. I want you to meet him.”

  “Well, gee. I’m too dirty to go to a nice dinner.”

  “You can run back to the camp and do whatever you need to do. Wait. How would you like to take a nice hot shower in a real bathroom?”

  Hannah clasped her hands beside her face and smiled heavenward in a parody of ecstasy.

  “I thought so. Why don’t you pick up whatever you need from the camp, and meet me here at five? We can go over together.”

  I slipped away from the dig and drove to the MacBane farmhouse, where I found Boots in the barn. I wondered if I should talk to him about what Joyce had told me. I decided not to. If there was anything to it, I’d be tipping him off too soon. Boots took me around to his own kitchen door and picked a ring of keys off a rusty nail over the door frame. Why did they bother with keys? The nail might as well have had a big arrow saying “KEYS” pointing to it.

  Once inside Van and Froggy’s now-abandoned room, I quickly grabbed clean clothes, allowing myself no time to choke up, which I knew I’d do if I stopped long enough to look around. Van’s bank of electronics stood as cold as the instrument room of the Titanic. On wן’s desk sat the microscope, the slides and cover glasses, the empty drinking glasses (minus the mushrooms that I’d seen beneath them the first time I’d been in this room) and a laptop. It occurred to me that this computer would have another record of Froggy’s work and online research, different from that which I’d studied in the finds shack at the dig. I wondered why the police hadn’t taken it. I thought they always took computers, as evidence. Mental note: Come back soon and snoop in this computer.

  * * * * *

  Needing a little time to think, I drove the car to the castle, left it, then walked back to the dig. At quitting time Hannah told me one of the students had borrowed her car so we both had to walk to the castle from the dig. Hannah carried a backpack full of clean clothes and toiletries. It was a pretty evening, with a pink sky in the west, but clouds thickening in the south warned of approaching nasty weather. As we left the dig, I turned and looked back at the whole dug-up-and-roped-off site. Iain Jandeson was standing, shoulders back, hat in hand, at the summit of a small rise south of the excavated area.

  Hannah’s gaze followed my own. She grinned and said, “Beam me up, Scotty!”

  I deliberately led Hannah to the castle by a longer route that took us through the cow pasture because I wanted her to show me where she had found that earring which was now missing, along with the coin and the stamp.

  “Hannah, if they tested John’s liver and other tissues when they did the postmortem, would they find traces of poison, if there was any poison to find?”

  “Whatever are you talking about? Do you think John was poisoned?” Hannah came to a sudden halt.

  “I don’t know, but most of us at the castle had a bout of trouble, probably due to some wild mushrooms we had in a soup. And with all the different kinds of mushrooms you can find in the woods around here, I’m curious.” I resumed walking, backward, so as to keep facing her. “And you are a doctor, so who better to ask than you?”

  “Well, John was first taken ill, when was it? Thursday? Friday? And he died last night. That’s two to three days later. By that time, most poisons would have been reduced to their metabolites, but in light of the fact that his kidneys had shut down, some might still have been present in some of his tissues.”

  “So the bottom line is?”

  “I don’t know for certain, but I doubt they’d find anything.”

  The pasture was carpeted more thickly with grass than I remembered. There were bare spots and occasional rocky outcrops but, by and large, it was lush grazing land. It occurred to me that Hannah had been extraordinarily lucky to have spotted the earring at all.

  “It was right about here.” Hannah stopped and kicked a clump of grass with her boot. We were midway between the castle and the woods. Almost exactly in the middle of the field.

  “Was it lying on top of the grass, or down underneath?” I squatted and picked up a clod of soil. It crumbled and poured through my fingers.

  “It was on a sort of bare spot. As I recall, there was a hoofprint where, obviously, a cow or sheep had stepped when the ground was wet. The earring was partly exposed, but an inch or two below the surface.”

  “So it had been there at while.” Given the fact that these pastures were virtually never plowed, that might indicate the earring had been there for years. On the other hand, it might have been lying on the surface and the hoof of the animal that made the print could have pressed it into the soil.

  “How much do you think it would be worth, Dotsy? I know nothing about jewelry.”

  “The amethyst was a nice, deep purple, as I recall, but amethysts aren’t expensive. The pearls wouldn’t have been worth much, either. But the setting was either platinum or white gold, I’m sure. It was a well-made piece. For a pair, I’d say maybe three hundred dollars? But with only one, could you sell it at all?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Hannah, was it an earring for a pierced ear, or the clip-on kind? I only saw it once, and I can’t remember.”

  “Pierced. It had a wire hoop at the back, you know, the kind that hook at the bottom.”

  Ambling toward the cast
le, Hannah slowed her pace as if there was something she wanted to talk to me about while we were still alone. She picked a blade of grass, shoved it between her front teeth, and cleared her throat. “Is Tony going to be here tonight?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “Tony and I had been seeing each other for two years prior to this trip. In fact, we had talked about getting married.”

  This wasn’t a total surprise to me. They avoided each other at the dig, and more than once I had caught a fleeting glimpse of pain as it flashed across Hannah’s face. Tony’s face looked exactly the same when he saw Hannah. Whatever else was going on, Tony and Hannah loved each other … I thought.

  “I would never have come on this dig if I had known how it was going to be,” Hannah continued. “We planned it and I applied for vacation time early in the summer. Then I discovered that Tony and Fallon Sinclair were having an affair. I broke up with him, but he came back, swearing it was all over and begging me to go ahead with this trip. He said with me staying at the camp and him staying at the castle, I could get away from him any time I wanted to, so if it didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be stuck sharing a place with him. He promised that Fallon wouldn’t be here. He told me she hated the Highlands, hated the dig, and would never consent to live for six weeks in that drafty old castle. But guess what? Sheeee’s here! I guess Tony didn’t count on the strong attraction of his own sweet self. She was willing to brave the drafts, the mud, and the absence of stores, all for a chance to grab Tony whenever John wasn’t looking!”

  “How awful! Why didn’t you go back home when you found out?”

  “Believe me, I’d have loved to, but I’ve sublet my flat for the duration. I have no place to go home to.”

  “I bet you’d like to strangle Tony. Do you want me to help you? I know some places in the castle where we could hide the body and it wouldn’t be found for years.” I glanced toward Hannah and smiled.

  “At first I wanted to kill him, yes. But, stupid as it sounds, I sort of understand. Fallon made it clear to Tony that if he dumps her, she’d tell John about the affair. John would’ve immediately severed all ties to Tony, of course. I don’t know what he’d have done about Fallon. And Tony considered his partnership with John to be his ticket to recognition in archaeological cirf he dump f”

  “But even so, that doesn’t excuse it.” We had reached the stone wall of the castle’s parking area. I set my lunch bag on top of the wall and showed Hannah how to scale it by using the uneven stones for toeholds, but she pulled it off with grace, whereas I did it with a groan and an “Oof.”

  We trudged around to the front entrance. Kenneth Owen’s car wasn’t there yet, and I hoped he wouldn’t forget his promise to come back for dinner. Before I opened the door, which at this time of day was left unlocked, Hannah whispered, “Fallon is a widow, now. I wonder how that’s going to play out.”

  I didn’t say it, but I thought, If I were you, Hannah, I wouldn’t give a flying rip how it plays out! I’d move on and let her have him.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Kenneth Owen’s performance was Oscar-worthy. Of course, as I had told him, Hannah was easy to flirt with but, without overdoing it, he made it obvious to Tony that Hannah was the most irresistible woman he’d ever seen. Hannah had washed her short wavy hair in the shower and it had dried, fluffy and shiny, all by itself. She wore a blue and magenta crinkle cotton skirt with a belted blue tunic sweater. On our way down to dinner, Hannah apologized for using up all the hot water. “It took such a long time to scrub off all the layers of dirt,” she said, “I do hope I haven’t clogged up the drain.”

  I now had several important pieces of information and I had to decide whether or not to mention each of them at dinner. I might, if I did, catch each person’s reaction to the news and see if it was, indeed, news to them or if they already knew about it. If I kept my mouth shut, the dinner conversation would probably tell me something about who knew what and who had told them. Fallon had supposedly left for Fort William shortly after I had last seen her, lying on the bed beside the empty box. Had she told anyone about the theft before she left? I had told no one, as yet, about Joyce’s story of Boots and the knife, nor had I told anyone that I now knew where the Super Bowl tickets had come from. I decided to say nothing, and to try to find out more about Boots from William and Maisie.

  I made drinks for Hannah and Kenneth, signed the sheet putting their drinks on my tab, and drew Tony into the conversation which, naturally, was about medieval coinage. The actual words bandied about like shuttlecocks were scholarly and polite, but the glances, the body language, the nervous fiddling with soaked paper napkins wrapped around quivering glasses, was wondrous to behold. I loved it. I sneaked away and sought out Maisie and William.

  “The Downeses are leavin’ tomorrow,” Maisie said. “I’ll miss them. They’ve been a bright spot in an otherwise terrible week.”

  “Aye,” William said. “I’ll not soon forget Alf wavin’ his spoon to Robbie MacBane’s bagpipes. The rest of us were horrified, but he thought it great fun.”

  “And I’ll miss bein’ called Lady Maisie. Made me feel right royal, they did. But the Merlin sisters are comin’ back, the morn. Comin’ for the funeral.”

  Changing the subject abruptly, I said, “I saw Boots this afternoon and he seemed rather odd, as if he didn’t want to talk to me. I thought perhaps he was grieving. Were he and John very close?”

  William and Maisie looked at each other. Maisie said, “I dinnae ken I’ve ever seen them together, really.”

  “Boots and John were not close, not at all,” William said. “When John and I were lads, Boots would take me fishin’ and huntin’, but John wasna interested. Boots used to make sport of John’s bookishness. I had tae tell him, more than once, to lay off because he was hurtin’ John’s feelins.” William paused and looked around the room. Then he leaned toward me. “And I can tell ye right noo, Boots hates that dig,” he said, lowering his voice to barely audible. “Calls it a boil on the bonny arse of Dunlaggan!”

  Tony, Hannah, Kenneth, and I made a foursome for dinner. I made a point of sitting across from Tony, the better to see his reactions. Kenneth did it right. Not too familiar and never crass, he teased, flattered, and extolled Hannah’s charms, occasionally touching her hand across the table.

  Tony told us he had spent the day on a rat’s nest of red tape and paperwork. Worcester University, unfortunately, was updating payroll today of all days. He’d had to tell them of John’s death, and of his own assumption of the duties of director, pending a permanent appointment by the department. Graham Jones, he had suggested, should be elevated to assistant director, a paid position, and Iain Jandeson should now be entitled to the assistantship formerly claimed by Graham. This, Tony said, would be a godsend for Iain, who was working his way through school with no help from home.

  “And then, just to make things a complete mess,” Tony said, “we couldn’t find any record of Iain’s being a student at all! I told the woman, ‘Iain has attended Worcester University for four years; what do you mean, he’s not a student!’ It turned out that Iain has changed his name since he first enrolled. His surname used to be Jameson, and he spelled his Christian name without the extra ‘i’ ”

  “Why did he do that, I wonder?” I said.

  “Iain is a strange bird,” Hannah said.

  Kenneth smiled seductively at her and Tony scowled.

  * * * * *

  After dinner, Kenneth volunteered to drive Hannah to her camp, but Tony butted in with, “I’m driving over there now anyway, Hannah. I’ll take you.” Hannah smiled sweetly at Kenneth as Tony scooped her into his old Renault.

  When they drove off, leaving Kenneth and me in the darkening parking lot, I had a moment’s pause. Was this really a good idea? Wouldn’t Hannah be better off to stay away from Tony? Oh well, I had already meddled, hadn’t I? I tapped Kenneth on the arm and said, “You were perfect! Now, don’t try to tell me you haven’t us
ed those lines before.”

  “You were right, Dotsy. She was not hard to flirt with; she’s a beautiful woman. Young enough to be my daughter, probably, but lovely. Do you want to tell me what that was all about?”

  “Not really. It’s simply that Tony Marsh needed a dose of his own medicine, and I hope Hannah makes him drink about a gallon of cod liver oil.”

  “Unfortunately, flirting with Hannah kept me from flirting with you at dinner, and I’d rather have been doing that.”

  I was so glad for the darkness. I felt the blood rise through my neck and into my cheeks. “I’m sorry I couldn’t show you the coin today, but if it turns up, I’ll call you.”

  “Why don’t you call me anyway? How long are you going to be here?”

  “Lettie and I plan to leave here on Friday, and then we’ll take two days driving back to London. We fly out of Heathrow next Monday morning.”

  “Could you plan to spend Friday or Saturday night in Edinburgh? There are a number of things at the museum that you should see, and I could take you and your friend out to dinner.”

  “Thank you, Kenneth.” My heart was pounding so hard I was afraid it was fluttering my blouse. “I’ll check with Lettie and give you a call.”

  * * * * *

  I dropped off Van’s clothes at the police station on my way to the train depot to pick up Lettie. The dashboard clock read eleven p.m. as the sleek ScotRail train whooshed in and stopped with a slight metallic screech. The doors on the platform side slid open and Lettie stepped off with a double armload of papers and shopping bags. I hurried around to the platform and past a few exiting travelers to help her with her burden.

  “I got so much info, Dotsy! You owe me a month’s salary for the photocopies I had to make.”

  “It looks like you also did a little shopping.”

  While I drove back to Dunlaggan, Lettie tried to show me some newspaper articles she had photocopied, but it was too dark in the car to see them so I filled her in on my visit to the jail, the disappearance of the coin, Joyce Parsley’s claim that it was Boots, not Van, who had killed Froggy, and my evening with Hannah, Tony, and Kenneth, the coin expert.