by Sarah Shaber
SIMON SAID
Sarah R. Shaber
What others say about Simon Said
"Shaber charms us with her personable proffesor and her warm, vibrant portrait of small-town Southern life."
-New York Times Book Review “Sarah Shaber takes modern Southern Life and gives it a slowroasting in this gently mocking tale of past murder in present-day Raleigh. Spiced with old-timey prejudices and up-to-date neuroses, and served with a generous helping of Southern –fried academia, this is a perfectly delicious book!”
-Margaret Maron
Author of the Deborah Knott Mystery Series
“…a most auspicious introduction.” —Washington Times
Winner of the 7th Annual St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery
also by Sarah R. Shaber Simon Shaw Mystery Series: Snipe Hunt
Fugitive King
Bug Funeral
Shell Game
The Louise Pearlie Series: Louise’s War
http://www.sarahrshaber.com http://facebook.com/sarahrshaber
FOR STEVE, KATIE, AND SAM, MY BEST FRIENDS This book is fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are imaginary or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 1997, 2010 by Sarah R. Shaber. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published by St. Martin’s Press
Chapter One
PROFESSOR SIMON SHAW HADN'T OPENED THE OLD-FASHIONED Venetian blinds on his floor-to-ceiling office windows yet this morning. He needed his breakfast Coke to work its biochemical magic on his system before he could deal with the intensity of the North Carolina day streaming in.
He usually had a good view, too. He could even see the columns of Bloodworth House, the historic home that presided over the front corner of the small campus. This morning, if his blinds had been open, he could also have seen the police cruiser, its lights flashing, pull into the brick gates of the college, followed by a huge van marked INCIDENT INVESTIGATION UNIT, CITY OF RALEIGH and what was unmistakably a hearse. Within minutes, the porches of the college buildings that fronted the lawn were filled with gaping spectators, shading their eyes as they watched the police vehicles proceed parade like around the traffic circle and pull into the parking lot of Bloodworth House.
But Simon was unaware of the scene outside when the departmental secretary, Judy Smith, knocked on his door a little later.
"Go away," Simon said. "Can't," Judy answered from outside. She opened his door and walked in. She cracked her gum, put her hands on her hips, and studied him. "Try to pull yourself together," she said. "You're not going to make a very good impression." Judy was a small-town girl who wore cheap dark brown hose with white shoes and baby-doll dresses with lace collars. She had her long hair permed and dyed red (Autumn Mist) every three months and her nails done every week. She had come to Raleigh to make good money and find a new husband. She had left her ten-year-old son with her mother to simplify the process. She was almost thirty, and time was running out.
"I don't have to make an impression," Simon said. "I have tenure."
"There's a policeman here to see you," Judy said. "You're probably under arrest."
Sure enough, a real live cop followed Judy into the office. His hair, cut short at the back and sides, and his blue eyes set off the perfectly pressed dark blue of his uniform and the shine of his boots. Simon instantly felt guilty. He sat up straight and ran his hands quickly over his hair. He couldn't imagine why a policeman would come to see him.
"Good morning, Officer," Simon said. "Have I done something?" The policeman was used to eliciting undefined guilt feelings from people. Unnerving the public was part of the fun of wearing a paramilitary uniform and carrying a sidearm and handcuffs.
"Not at all, Professor Shaw," he said. "I have a favor to ask, that's all." So this is the prodigy, the policeman thought. What had the guy digging at the old house said? Dr. Simon Shaw was an A. B. Duke scholar, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the youngest full professor in the history of the college. He didn't look it. The man was small behind the big desk. He had black hair, brown eyes, and hadn't shaved in a couple of days. He was wearing jeans, old Nike running shoes, and a rumpled black polo shirt with some kind of emblem on it. He had the same look in his eyes as the old homeless guy in the park the cop had rousted this morning, a look that happened when the bum realized that only half an inch of comfort was left in his bottle of Wild Irish Rose.
The office itself was a mess. Books were shoved into bookshelves every which way and were stacked deep on the floor. Papers, mail, and pink message slips littered the desk. The desk lamp was so covered with Post-It notes that it cast a canary glow. Obviously, the guy had not made much progress with his paperwork lately. Well, the cop had always heard there was a lot of slack in the academic life.
Underneath all the mess was some real good stuff, though. The cop was sure that the desk was an antique. It was the kind that two people could sit at facing each other. You could look into its dark mahogany surface and see your reflection two feet away. There was an Oriental carpet and two expensively framed bird prints on the wall. One picture showed every variety of hummingbird known to man hovering over a lone red trumpet vine. The other was of a giant pileated woodpecker perched on a branch. This could not be standard college-issue furniture. The guy must have brought it in himself.
"What kind of favor?" Simon asked.
The officer hesitated, obviously not sure how to word his response.
"Sir, this is not an official visit. I cannot compel you to come with me. But Sergeant Gates of the Raleigh Police Department requests that you come over to the Bloodworth House so he can ask you some questions. A Dr. David Morgan gave him your name."
Morgan was an archaeologist for the state of North Carolina, and one of Simon's closest friends. Morgan and his apprentices were excavating part of the grounds of Bloodworth House.
"What's going on?" Simon asked. "They've dug up a woman's body, and the medical examiner says she died at least fifty years ago. Dr. Morgan told us you know the history of the house better than anyone. Sergeant Gates thought you might be able to add some information that would help us."
"Of course I'll come, Officer, but why is this so urgent?"
"There's a bullet hole in the back of her head."
Chapter Two
ON THE WALK TO BLOODWORTH HOUSE, THE POLICEMAN FILLED him in, but Simon already knew the first part of the story. It had taken a long time to pinpoint the Colonial kitchen's location and to raise the funds to start excavating. Simon had attended the official pre-dig conference at a local bar the previous Friday night.
Morgan had been sinking trenches at the site all week. Finding a corpse would have certainly startled him. There were no graves noted on any of the old maps of the property and no mention of a graveyard of any kind in the documents Simon had seen, and he was sure he had seen them all. And if there had ever been a murder associated with the history of the house, Simon would know about it.
"He found the corpse this morning," the policeman was saying. "And it looked recent to him. Recent, that is, compared with what he was used to. So he called the police. And we started the formal investigation procedure, called the medical examiner, had the incident van there, roped off the scene of the crime and everything. Then the ME tells us that the woman's been in the ground at least fifty years, and that she was shot in the head. It could be homicide, but we can hardly conduct a standard criminal investigation in this case. Dr. Morgan says you know everything about the house and who lived there for generatio
ns, so Sergeant Gates sent me to get you."
It was true: Simon did know the history of the place backward and forward. His monograph on the house and the Bloodworth family was sold at the gift shop and at bookstores and historic sites all over the state. He was on the house's board of directors and consulted regularly with David Morgan, who kept digging up bits of the property as funding became available.
Bloodworth House was located on the corner of the block that largely contained the college itself. Until it was given to Kenan College, it had been in the Bloodworth family since the late 1700s. In fact, Kenan was built on the original grounds and orchards of the house. The land had been donated to the college—leaving just the house for the family to live in—when the family lost interest in agriculture. Since one of the Bloodworths, Charles, had been a founder of the Chesapeake and Seaboard Railway and had figured in Simon's studies of industrialization in the South between the world wars, Simon had been the likely person to ask to write the history of the house. He was fascinated with the project. The house had been continuously lived in by the same family since the eighteenth century. Its furniture and other domestic paraphernalia had hardly been touched. The last resident was Adam Bloodworth, who had been a cousin of Charles's. Adam's heir, a nephew, had not wanted to pay the taxes on the house, so he had deeded it over to the college, who then leased it for ninety-nine years to the Historic Preservation Society to restore and maintain.
To get to Bloodworth House, Shaw and the policeman had to walk diagonally across the campus of Kenan College, where Simon Shaw had taught history for six years. The college had been founded as a women's institute in 1832 and barely survived Reconstruction, when cash for tuition and donations was scarce. Despite its troubled inception, Kenan College had grown and prospered into one of the finest small private colleges in the South. Bolstered by a number of large bequests, the college began to admit men in 1952 and offered a full curriculum, including a half a dozen master's-degree programs, by 1965. The campus itself was spectacularly beautiful; its historic buildings were set in landscaped grounds bounded by Hillsborough Street, St. Mary's Street, and the old Cameron Park neighborhood, where Simon lived.
As Simon and the policeman crossed the traffic circle in front of the college, they had to buck the opposite flow of a crowd dispersing. College employees and students who had gathered to view the scene were walking back to their offices and classes, hav
ing milked the event for as much time as they could. The last person Simon passed was Rufus Young, the public-relations officer for the college. He wasn't called that—he was vice president for community affairs—but his job was to keep the college's image positive. He looked as relieved as Simon had ever seen him. He mopped his face and the top of his bald head, then tucked his shirt into his belt.
"Thank you, God," he said, stopping next to Simon and clapping him on the back. "My secretary came running into my office, yelling about a dead woman. I thought a student had been murdered. Aged me twenty years right then. But it's just an old corpse —really old. I could throttle David Morgan. What business did he have calling the police before telling me about this? Thank goodness I had enough time to explain everything to the TV people before they slapped it on the noon news."
"He had to call the police," Simon said. "And it takes an expert
to figure out the age of a corpse."
"He's an archaeologist, isn't he?"
"That's right—an archaeologist, not an anthropologist. He specializes in structures, not bones." "Well, whatever." Young continued to pat Simon on the back. Simon was one of his favorite people. He generated good publicity for the college on a regular basis. "All I know is, I'm going to have a double bourbon with lunch." He walked off, then turned and called out to Simon. "Let me know if there's a human-interest angle to this. We could send out a press release."
The handsome Greek Revival addition to Bloodworth House faced the street, but all the action was taking place outside the back part, the original three-room house built in . Yellow crime-scene tape surrounded an excavation between what was now the gift shop, which had been the old smokehouse, and a restored slave cabin. The kitchen garden, which was planted with authentic herbs and vegetables, fronted the excavation. The incident van was pulling out into the street, followed by a police car, leaving just the hearse and a patrol car behind. Standing in the middle of the excavation with Simon's friend David Morgan was a man Simon felt sure was a physician, as well as another person, who was the largest black man Simon thought he had ever seen. Morgan spotted Simon and called out to him with relief.
"I'm glad you were in your office, Simon," he said. "This is too much for me." He crossed over to Simon and ducked under the yellow tape. Simon's policeman escort did the opposite, joining the group near the pile of earth a few yards away.
"This is a cheap way to get off work," Simon said. "Couldn't you have just called in sick?" "It has not been entertaining," Morgan said. "I had one student throw up, one burst into tears, the police are messing up my dig, and the PR guy from the college practically took my head off. I've had six cups of coffee and my heartburn is acting up." He patted his belly. "You don't have any Mylanta, do you?"
Said belly was hanging over Morgan's belt, not repulsively, but noticeably. Too much fast food and beer. But the belly was just one part of the total picture. Morgan dressed in stained pants, a flannel shirt, and work boots even at the office. His dark hair and gray beard were untrimmed and untended. Morgan's house was a mess, too. Simon had learned never to go into the kitchen if he didn't want to lose his appetite, and that the two chocolate Labs had first dibs on the sofa. He wondered if the excessive neatness required of a professional archaeologist explained Morgan's personal messiness. Hours of exact notation on graph paper, painstaking photography of sites from dozens of angles, and lengthy cataloging may have left him no energy for bringing order into his personal life. Morgan had never married. He was a misogynist, but whether by birth or training, Simon didn't know.
Simon dug around in his pockets and came up with an antacid tablet. "It's probably too little, too late," Morgan said, popping it into his mouth.
"Are you sure this isn't a standard burial?" Simon said. "It wouldn't be extraordinary to find a grave on private property." Morgan started shaking his head before Simon had even finished his sentence. "No way," he said. "There's no coffin, no marker, and besides, she was buried under the dirt floor of an unused outbuilding. Then there's the bullet hole."
"Oh, yeah." Simon said. "I forgot about the bullet hole." Simon didn't usually forget anything. Morgan looked at his friend closely. The bags under Simon's eyes weren't quite as pronounced as they had been. Maybe he was getting some sleep.
The big black man Simon had noticed earlier joined them, and Morgan introduced him to Simon.
"This is Sergeant Otis Gates of the Raleigh Police Department. He's the head of the major-crime task force." "I'm glad you were willing to join us, Professor," Gates said. His huge hand completely enclosed Simon's and covered his wrist. Simon looked up to just about everybody, but he actually had to crane his neck to talk to Gates. The man was immense. His nose had been broken more than once. Simon instantly thought, ex-football player, then dismissed the thought as stereotypic. Considering his size, Gates should have been forbidding. But his look was softened by grizzled gray hair cut short and reading glasses that dangled from his neck by a beaded chain that had to have been made by a kid in crafts class.
Gates gestured toward the man Simon had decided was a doctor, who was kneeling over a trench in the middle of the site. He had a tool, maybe forceps, in his hand and was poking at something in the ground. Simon felt the acid in his stomach bubble slightly. He should have forced some real breakfast into himself. "That is Dr. Philip Boyette, the medical examiner," Gates said. Simon had guessed correctly.
"We've got a situation here, Professor," said Gates. "This corpse is too recent to be an artifact and too old to know exactly what to do with. It's probably homicid
e." The medical examiner joined the group. "She was shot in the head, no question," he said. "Bullet entered at the back of the head—there's a bullet hole in the occipital lobe. I wouldn't be surprised if the bullet is still rattling around in her braincase."
Simon's stomach turned again, and he began to wish he had been anywhere but in his office this morning.
"What exactly can I do, Sergeant?"
"We're hoping you can give us some idea of what we're dealing with here," Gates replied.
"I told them if anyone could give the police any useful information about this woman, or connect her to the house in some way, you could," Morgan said.
Dear heaven, Simon thought, they want me to look at the body! "She's pretty well preserved," the medical examiner said. "She's wrapped in a quilt, and the good drainage of the site kept the body very dry. I won't really be able to say how long she's been in the ground until I get the body in the lab. But from the color of the bones, I'd guess fifty years at least."
Simon couldn't believe that he was being asked to look at an old corpse on the grounds of an historic house he had written a book about, on the theory he could tell these three men something about the victim. The woman couldn't possibly be recognizable. She could have come from anywhere and been buried by anybody. Besides, he did not want to look at her. He began to feel a little warm.
The medical examiner cocked his head and gave Simon a look of the skeptical sort Simon had become all too familiar with recently. Without saying a word, the doctor's manner questioned whether or not Simon was up to what was being asked of him. Simon didn't like the way the doctor looked. The man had practically no lips and his mustache looked as if it had been penciled on. Although he was thin, his body was soft and amorphous. Simon could believe this man spent his life under fluorescent lights in a sterile room, poking at dead people.
Simon felt as though he was on the verge of failing some kind of a manhood test. "Of course I'll take a look, if you think it would be helpful," Simon said.
