Death in an Ivory Tower (Dotsy Lamb Travel Mysteries)

by Maria Hudgins

  I spotted Keith Bunsen. Damn! There went any chance I may have had to talk with one of his assistants without his knowledge. He had just walked through from an unseen adjoining room and was carrying a clipboard. Like everyone else, he was wearing a white lab coat. I waved, but he didn’t see me. No need to pretend I’m not here. I watched while he conferred with a young woman seated in front of a microscope. He seemed to be giving her instructions. When he straightened his tall, bony frame and turned my way, I waved again. This time he saw me and loped to the door.

  “Dotsy, w-w-what are you doing here?”

  I pointed to the neurology lab across the hall and explained, but omitted mentioning that the real reason I was here was to locate his lab. I made it sound as if my friend Lettie had been anxious for me to see where her daughter, the doctor, worked. Keith invited me in. This lab was full of chemistry apparatus, and the walls were papered with charts: Flow sheets, chemical equations, and a key-shaped diagram I recognized as the Krebs cycle. I’d seen plenty of these while waiting for blood to be drawn.

  Keith took me around a partition to a small room where a young woman sat at a wall of filing cabinets. Two built-in desks, both with laptops centered above the kneeholes and printouts scattered about, stood on the opposite wall. “This is where we keep the data. We try to keep the paperwork apart from the stuff that can possibly explode.”

  I laughed. Suddenly, the direct approach didn’t seem unreasonable. “By the way, have you found out whether Bram Fitzwaring was part of your study?”

  Both workers sat up straight and I got the feeling I’d said something I shouldn’t. Uh-oh. Double-blind study. Keith isn’t supposed to know who is in which group. For a minute, I was afraid I’d ruined his project.

  But Keith relieved my mind with, “I have, actually. In light of the fact that he’s no longer participating, I asked Katie to check for me.” The worker I assumed was Katie looked up from her work and nodded. “Fitzwaring was a part of our study, but he was in the control group.”

  “So he didn’t get the real medicine, right? He was getting a placebo,” I said.

  “Right. And I thank God he wasn’t in the test group. If we lose one more person in that group, we’ll have to battle with the old chi-square monster.” I must have had a horrified look on my face, because he quickly added, “I don’t mean I’m not sorry he died. I o-o-only meant it’s a matter of numbers. My test group is doing very well medically. It’s just that they keep getting hit by trucks.”

  “Pardon?”

  Keith ran a finger under his collar and his Adam’s apple bobbed nervously. “Not literally, of course, but one member of the group has moved to Scotland, one dropped out due to unrelated medical problems, things like that.”

  After following me out into the hall, Keith closed the door behind himself. I felt as if I was being ushered out. “This phase of the study should be completed in less than a year,” he said. “After that, if all looks good, we’ll do a broader study. Would you like to be a part of it?”

  “Would I be in the test group or the control group?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “How would I handle the evaluations? I couldn’t come here once a month.”

  “In the next stage, the consultations could be done with your local doctor.”

  “I see.”

  “We’ll stay in touch after you fly back across the pond, eh?”

  I wondered if Keith would put up with all the questions I’d ask before I joined a clinical trial. I turned and found Lindsey standing behind me.

  She didn’t ask me what Keith and I had been talking about, but looked at her watch and said, “I need to be back upstairs in twenty-five minutes. We’ve run over into my lunch break, I’m afraid. Would you like to come to the cafeteria with me?”

  I said I would.

  In the cafeteria line Lindsey chose a ready-made salad and I did likewise. After we found a table and settled in, I poured blue cheese dressing all over my salad and noticed that Lindsey had added no dressing at all. I had a large roll and butter. She had one little cellophane pack of crackers.

  “I see how you stay so nice and slim,” I said.

  “Mom’s always on my back to eat more.” She pushed lettuce around with her fork but didn’t actually pick up a forkful. “You know how she is.”

  “She’s doing you a huge favor this summer, coming over here.”

  “That she is.” Lindsey’s tone told me she’d taken my comment as criticism.

  “But she loves the time she has with her grandchildren. To her, it’s not a job. She enjoys it.” I wasn’t making things any better, so I tried to think of another topic.

  Lindsey’s husband, according to Lettie, was a jerk. He was a very successful corporate lawyer in Northern Virginia and until they split, they’d lived in a multimillion-dollar home in Alexandria. Lindsey had married him for his reputation, his well-toned body, and his bank balance rather than for any personal qualities—like empathy or flexibility. Lettie and I had talked about it a lot and in Lettie’s opinion, it all started when she and Ollie insisted Lindsey go to a private high school rather than the public school she’d attended in grades K through eight. Until then, Lindsey had never thought about social class one way or the other.

  The Osgoods had plenty of money, but they were still an ordinary middle-class family. Ollie, Lettie’s husband and Lindsey’s father, had succeeded wildly in the construction business but took his beer and football with him as they “moved on up.” He was the sort of guy whose motto was “Git ’er done.” Lettie and Ollie both thought the public school was exposing their daughter to the seamy side of life too early so they enrolled her in the exclusive private school where she encountered snobbery for the first time in her life and, rather than rebel against it, internalized it. Longing for acceptance, she tried to change herself to be like them. Whenever Ollie picked her up in his old cement-spattered truck, Lindsey ducked into the footwell until they drove out the school gate. She tossed Lettie’s artificial flower arrangements into the trash because, “Nobody uses fake flowers. It just proves you have no class!” Lettie laughed when she told me this, but I think it really hurt her.

  Lindsey went off to college after that, and then med school, but the damage was already done. Lettie and I talked about how children never get over their first steps out of the nest and into the big world—the teen world of sex and competition and alliances and self-doubt. When even the bullies are afraid. Lindsey stayed in contact with her high school crowd as they progressed through their various prestigious universities. There she found Taylor Scoggin, a man who turned the old crowd green with envy.

  They had two beautiful children, and their careers flourished while Taylor chipped away at Lindsey’s self-esteem. Slowly, she accepted the fact that to Taylor she was nothing more than an educated arm piece, and that was too bad, because that’s also why she’d chosen him. At least that was my take on it. After ten years of marriage, one day she asked him if he knew the name of her childhood dog. The instrument she played in the high school band. Her favorite color. He went O for three. Taylor got into cocaine, which he considered nothing more than a necessary part of his alleged high-pressure job, and then he became abusive. Lindsey packed up the children and moved out.

  I changed the subject. “Did your mom tell you about the man on our staircase who died yesterday?”

  “Yes. What happened to him?”

  “They’re saying it was hypoglycemia but I’m not so sure. He was diabetic like me, but the timing is wrong, I think. By the way. Where do they do autopsies?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “Will they do an autopsy on him?”

  “Was anyone with him when he died?”

  “No.”

  “It was an unattended death. They should do one.”

  “At the police station, do you think?”

  “Why there? Are the police involved?”

  “Not that I know of.”

&nbs
p; “Then I suppose it would be done in a hospital morgue.”

  “You mean here.”

  “This is the largest hospital around here, but I really don’t know. Why?” Lindsey picked at her salad. She looked up, grinning at me. “You want to sit in on it?”

  “No. I was just wondering. I’d like to know what they find.”

  “Good luck with that. They probably won’t share their findings with the general public, and, to a medical examiner, that’s all you are. General public.”

  On the cab ride back to the center of town, I sat on the right side of the back seat so I could elevate my left ankle by resting it on the seat. In spite of the ice I’d applied last night, it was still swollen and not the right color. The scenery between the hospital and the center of town was mainly residential, the homes mainly the type the English called “semi-detached,” with two residences built to look like one house, each having its own small but carefully tended yard in front.

  I reviewed my short tour of the diabetes research lab and decided I’d been lucky. I hadn’t wanted to run into Keith, but since I had, I found out what I wanted to know anyway. I found out that Bram Fitzwaring was part of his study. What were the odds that a subject in a study, from a town a hundred miles away, would die only a few yards from the residence of the man who heads the study? What was I thinking? What possible reason could Keith Bunsen have for wanting to bump off any of his subjects, especially when he was worried about having too few, not too many? And if Bram was in the control group, his death couldn’t be attributed to anything Keith had done. Bram had been receiving nothing but a placebo from him.

  I recalled the smell of the neurology lab on the other side of the hall—a mixture of ozone and ocean. Not exactly ocean. Sea bed. Shellfish. Oysters. In my mind’s eye I saw the pan of live oysters happily sucking up the foul-looking soup St. Giles Bell had them bathing in. What did he call it? Saxitoxin? A poison.

  I rested my head against the seat back. Scotland! It popped into my head so suddenly I almost said it out loud. But why was I thinking about Scotland? A few years ago Lettie and I had spent part of a summer there. We stayed in a drafty old castle near Loch Ness and became almost a part of the Sinclair family, the castle’s owners. Lettie and I had both loved Scotland.

  I almost drifted off while the taxi purred its way down the A420 toward town, my mind wandering across the gentle rolling hills of central Scotland. Mushrooms! There was the connection! Almost against my own will, I forced myself to review a horrible time when a half-dozen people’s lives were put at risk so one person could be murdered. The sheer evil of it boggled my mind at the time, and now, years later, it still boggled my mind. I could only think it took a special kind of stupidity to come up with such a scheme. Surely if one thought it through to the end, one couldn’t possibly go through with it. Any normal person would go back to the drawing board and try to come up with a better idea.

  Poison mushrooms and poison shellfish. I recalled the tray of canapés Georgina had offered around at the cocktail party in the Master’s Lodgings. Scallops and mussels—I had eaten one of the mussels. I couldn’t remember seeing oysters, but I hadn’t paid that much attention. I had been sick later that evening and Mignon had, too. Bram Fitzwaring had died with a trashcan on the floor beside his mattress.

  Surely any toxin taken up by oysters would also be taken up by mussels or clams and concentrated in their tissues as time passed. All were filter-feeders in coastal waters. I had a sickening feeling of déjà vu. Bram Fitzwaring had been murdered. I was sure of it.

  “Excuse me?” I lowered my swollen ankle to the floor and leaned forward. “I’ve changed my mind. Take me to the police station.”

  “Which one?”

  “Whichever one is closest to St. Ormond’s College.”

  The cabbie let me off on St. Aldate’s Street in front of the Thames Valley Police Station. A bronze plaque donated by the Inspector Morse Society proclaimed the building as a site seen in many episodes of that wonderful BBC series.

  Once inside, I lost my nerve. What the hell am I doing here? I had expected a large lobby with a desk manned by uniformed cops. I had vaguely imagined myself hobbling bravely across a polished floor, up to the desk, and announcing I was here to report a murder. But the room I found myself in was no more than a wide spot in the hall. Two uniformed officers stood behind a desk five feet from the door and there was no way I could turn and leave without being noticed. Both put down their work and looked up when I opened the door.

  “Yes?” one of the officers, a small black woman with her hair pulled back in a bun, asked me.

  “I’m . . . I’m . . . oh, dear, you’re going to think I’m crazy.” I know my face was red. I felt like melting into the floor.

  “I doubt it, madam,” the other uniform said. “We see crazy every day and you don’t look like it.”

  Bless his heart. That helped. “I’m from America and I’m here attending a history conference where one of our members has died under circumstances that I’m sure aren’t entirely natural.”

  “You’re suggesting that someone had a hand in it?”

  “I am. That is, I think so, but no one will believe me, I’m sure.”

  “Let us have a go at it.”

  “Okay.” I took a breath. “This is all happening at St. Ormond’s College on Staircase Thirteen. I’m staying there, and so is the deceased, a Mr. Bram Fitzwaring—was, that is. From Glastonbury.”

  “Wait. Before you go further, can we take care of the formalities?” The woman officer had grabbed a notepad and pencil. “Your name and address? Local address and home address, please.”

  The formalities took a couple of minutes, after which there was absolutely no chance I could make a fool of myself anonymously. I forged bravely on, telling the whole story as succinctly as I could and with a concerted effort to appear sane. It was useless. I heard myself talking as if through a tunnel. My real self stood safely at the other end, disconnected from that crazy woman.

  They took notes and asked a few questions politely, no trace of a grin on either of their faces, but when my story ground to a halt, the man said, “Thank you, Mrs. Lamb. We will pass this information along and, if necessary, we will contact you at your college.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d let me talk to one of your detectives?”

  “We’ll make sure one of them sees this. And thank you again for coming in.”

  I found myself back on the street, but without wheels. It wasn’t far from here to St. Ormond’s, but after walking less than one block, my ankle protested. I flagged down another taxi.

  My taxi couldn’t take me all the way to St. Ormond’s main gate because a limousine was blocking the narrow street in front. I could see a chauffeur behind its wheel, calmly reading a newspaper. My driver sounded his horn but must have had an attack of timidity halfway through the action, because his honk came out as a short peep.

  “I can walk from here.” I paid him and started down Cobbler’s Lane toward the side gate, then decided I’d rather go through the front gate, so I could get a better look at the limousine and possibly discover what notable personage was paying us a visit. The chauffeur glanced at me as I walked by and returned to his Daily Mirror.

  Inside the gate, the porter’s station appeared to be on red alert. Normally there would be one attendant visible through the window and he, as likely as not, would glance up as I passed, nod at me, and go back to whatever he was doing. Now I saw two porters practically standing at attention behind the window. I could see no one in the quad beyond.

  I stuck my face up to the little round hole in the window and asked, “What’s happening?”

  “Lady Attwood is visiting the Wetmores.”

  “Is this a problem?”

  “No. Certainly not.”

  The finality with which he answered told me not to ask any more questions. In the East Quad, three gardeners with weed baskets and rakes knelt around the perimeter, working like elves before Christmas.
It was the first time since I’d been here that I’d seen more than one gardener at work. Climbing the stairs to my room, I heard Mignon Beaulieu call my name. Her door was open. I found her sitting on her bed, barefoot and with a notepad on her lap.

  “I got the autopsy report,” she announced.

  “And?”

  “They called me a few minutes ago. They said they’d already called his family.” She heaved a sigh. “It was hypoglycemia, as we suspected.”

  “They’re sure?”

  “Sure. They said his blood glucose level was thirty-two.”

  “That would do it,” I said. “Did they say anything else?”

  “He had some bruises, but they assume he got them from banging around in his room. He probably got delusional before he passed out, and banged around trying to get out of the room or find a snack or something.”

  “That makes sense,” I said, but I was thinking, the banging noises I heard were at two a.m., long after he should have been out cold from hypoglycemia. “What happens next? Will his family come here?”

  “Bram will be cremated. It’s in his will. His lawyer in Glastonbury keeps a copy of the will in his office, so I called him. Bram wanted his ashes scattered over Glastonbury Tor.” Mignon laid her notepad aside on the bed cover and stood. “I also called his mother a little while ago. She didn’t know about the will or about his wish to be cremated, but she didn’t seem to have any objection to it. To the cremation. But she said she wants the ashes. She’s his next of kin, so I don’t know how they’re going to work it out.”

  “If his will is legal and it says ‘scatter,’ they’ll have to scatter.”

  “We have a big group of friends in Glastonbury who will want to perform our ancient ritual. It will enable him to pass through the Star Gate. That’s what Bram wanted.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked. “I haven’t had lunch yet.”

  “I’ve had lunch, sorry. I’d go with you and keep you company but there’s an afternoon session I can’t miss. Let’s go to dinner together.”