Death in an Ivory Tower (Dotsy Lamb Travel Mysteries)

by Maria Hudgins

  They were marching in, two by two, the New Agers. Dressed in long robes and carrying flashlights held aloft as if they were torches. I counted ten marchers, their robes of uncertain color in the dim light of the East Quad.

  “Oh, Lord! It’s an invasion!” said the Oxfordian.

  The overhead lantern under the college’s main entrance cast the invaders in silhouette as they turned toward Staircase Thirteen. The last pair carried the drums. Striking in unison they sounded like one. The marchers in back stopped to allow the front ones to go up the stairs in single file. Stepping up and onto the stone threshold, they entered, lowering their flashlights and giving me a quick glimpse of their faces, but I really didn’t need to see their faces to know they were Mignon Beaulieu and her friends.

  As the doorway swallowed the last one, a tremendous bolt of lightning lit up the courtyard. A deafening thunderclap followed less than a second later. I jumped, and I heard several startled cries from the room behind me. Then the rain began, and it came in undulating sheets.

  The front of my shirt and slacks caught the first of it so I quickly lowered the window, the sheer drapes sticking to my raised arms. I turned and saw others rushing to close windows along both exterior walls.

  Another flash and another clap, and the lights in the room went dark. I stood there stupidly, wondering whom we’d find lying on the floor, murdered, when the power came back on.

  “Oh, my Lord! My brolly is in my room! Who has one here?”

  “Those damned hippies! How did they manage to start a storm?”

  “I don’t know about you, but I still have a half bottle of Merlot. I’m staying right here until it blows over.”

  “Are the lights out all over college?”

  “Dotsy! Where are you?” This came from Lettie.

  A man said, “May I suggest we all either leave the room or find a seat? We’re going to start banging into each other if we don’t.”

  Another flash of lightning showed me where I was in relation to the settee, so I groped my way over, found Lettie’s spiky hair with my hand, and guided both of us to the same seats we’d left earlier.

  “Any good ghost stories?” someone said.

  I heard the door open and close several times as people left to brave the elements. Lettie and I waited until the rain slackened. Meanwhile we joined the other stragglers in making silly comments about dark and stormy nights. Fifteen minutes later the pounding tapered off. I returned to the window and pulled back the curtain. A small figure leaning into an umbrella turned the corner at the Porter’s Lodge and hurried toward the Master’s Lodge. I recognized Daphne by her size and her determined gait.

  Lettie and I grabbed sections of yesterday’s Oxford Daily Mail for our heads and made a run for it.

  Climbing the stairs, I wasn’t the least surprised to see yellow light slipping under the door of Bram Fitzwaring’s former room. The electricity was still off, so it had to be candlelight, I thought. I stopped and grabbed Lettie’s arm, shushing her.

  Now they were doing a really strange chant. One at a time, in voices high and low, they uttered sounds that might have been words, but I don’t think they were in English. We kept climbing. Lettie fumbled for her keys and asked me in. I groped my way around the wall until I felt the back of her desk chair. We talked for a few minutes, mostly about Lindsey. Lettie said she thought Lindsey and her new boyfriend, St. Giles Bell, had broken up because Lindsey came home to her apartment that day with red, swollen eyes and told Lettie to leave. Whatever the problem was, Lindsey wouldn’t talk about it.

  I left and felt my way up the next flight to my room. My footsteps sounded like gunfire on the wood floor outside my door. Opening the door with one arm while pressing my body against the wall, I saw a pale stream of light slanting through my little garret window and onto my bedspread. I managed to dress for bed and brush my teeth in the dark. I had to use my travel flashlight to read the number on my blood glucose meter. As the light brushed my face, I looked in the mirror over my sink. My hair was dripping wet and beginning to kink up around the ears. The hair dryer was plugged in and draped over the unheated radiator. I flipped the switch. No electricity, of course. I’d need to wash and style my hair tomorrow morning.

  I skipped over the machinations necessary to restore my rain-soaked and sleep-flattened hair the next morning. The power was restored sometime during the night, and I heard Lettie’s hair-dryer through her closed door as I descended the stairs on my way to the bathroom. I knocked.

  Lettie used the same gel/mousse hair product Rod Stewart was reported to employ for his famous spiky look, but Lettie’s hair was red rather than blond. After she opened the door for me, she flicked the dryer off and slathered both palms with hair product. “I may actually have a day off. I just tried to call Lindsey to see if she is working today, but she didn’t answer. This is supposed to be her free day.”

  The door to Bram’s room stood open, the aroma of sandalwood drifting out into the narrow hall. I found Mignon still there, staring out the open window. It looked as if all traces of Bram’s short stay had been erased.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Of course. I’m just taking one last look before I return the key to the porter.” She jangled the key and sighed. “His spirit is no longer here.”

  “When will you go back to Glastonbury?”

  “Bram’s mother and I have divided his ashes. She’s gone home already and I’ll take my half back to Glastonbury where we’ll scatter them on the Tor.”

  I paused a minute before I dropped my big question. “What was Bram intending to reveal in his speech?”

  Mignon’s face flushed and her hefty frame wavered. I thought she might actually pass out. She bent over Bram’s bed, turned, and sat with a grunt, both feet leaving the floor. She inhaled through tight lips and said, “What are you talking about?”

  “I know he was planning to show slides of the Tor, and he had something to tell us about bones, and about Richard Whiting. He planned to mention the little village of Sharpham, which is very near Glastonbury, isn’t it?”

  “And you know this, how?’

  “I found a note on the floor when you and I came in together, remember? It was on the floor. There.” I pointed to the floor of the closet, its door hanging open. “Apparently the scout missed it when she cleaned.”

  “What did it say?” Mignon required a complete description. Her head jerked nervously, setting her neck fat in motion as I told her what the note said. “Where is the note now?”

  “I still have it.”

  “I need it.” In case I had any doubt, I knew now that Bram’s speech before the whole group on Saturday was to have been a blockbuster. Hadn’t he told me he was going to blow the doors off this place? Mignon seemed to be in a state of inner turmoil, as if she was weighing the wisdom of taking me into her confidence versus diverting me with lies.

  I tried everything I could think of, but to no avail. She knew what Bram’s speech contained and she wasn’t about to tell me. More than ever, I was convinced it was to have been something important. Was Mignon now planning to confer with the group back in Glastonbury and reach a mutual decision, or was she planning to strike her own bargain with the press and reveal it herself?

  I went for the gut. “I know his speech had something to do with the bones of a large man, perhaps six and a half feet tall. I know that King Arthur was reputed to have been a giant and, in his day, six foot six would have been a giant. I know that bones thought to be those of Arthur and Guinevere were found in Glastonbury after the old abbey and church burned down in eleven eighty-four. I know that King Edward the First and Queen Eleanor attended the reburial of the bones in a black marble tomb in front of the high altar of the new church when it was completed, about a hundred years later. I know that Henry the Eighth destroyed the abbey and church in fifteen thirty-nine. That was the title of Bram’s speech, wasn’t it? The Dissolution of the Monasteries in fifteen thirty-nine?”

  Mign
on’s head bobbed rhythmically as I talked, but she said nothing. Her sausage-like fingers grasped the bedcover, their knuckles white.

  “It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination,” I said, “to suppose Abbot Richard Whiting saw trouble ahead before the king’s men arrived. There were reports that Whiting took the abbey’s most valuable possessions to nearby Sharpham. Gold and silver and probably some relics of saints. But what was, far and away, the abbey’s most valuable possession? Arthur’s bones, of course.

  “And, since Bram’s lecture notes mention both Whiting and Sharpham, I figure Bram had King Arthur’s bones!” I stopped, demanding a response.

  Mignon laughed. “Ridiculous! I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my life.”

  “But true, isn’t it?”

  “Of course not. If Bram had King Arthur’s bones, do you think he’d announce it in an insignificant little conference like this? A conference full of dusty old snobs moldering in their crumbling ivory tower?” The sneer she didn’t try to hide bared her front teeth on one side.

  “This is precisely where I would expect him to announce it. He, in fact your entire Glastonbury group, has been ridiculed by these dusty old snobs for years. This would be a perfect way to throw concrete proof of King Arthur and Camelot right in their faces.” I tilted my head to one side and lowered my voice. “Tell me. Have you had the bones dated with carbon fourteen?”

  Mignon continued to deny my whole theory. She could have cleared it all up by simply telling me what Bram’s speech was to have been about, but she refused to go there. I felt certain my idea was right. Or mostly right.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  * * *

  Tuesday, July Tenth. A day Lettie Osgood will never forget.

  Lettie and I ventured outside the college to breakfast at The Mitre on the High, navigating leaf-strewn streets, still wet from last night’s storm. The building that houses the restaurant, a part of Lincoln College, dates back to about 1630, but an inn of some sort has stood on this site since perhaps 1300. With Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries fresh on my mind, I told Lettie the story about the tunnel that ran under the High and joined The Mitre to The Angel, another inn across the street. “Henry’s soldiers chased a group of monks into the tunnel and walled it shut on both ends with the living men inside. They say you can still hear their screams sometimes.”

  Lettie stopped and threw her pudgy hand to her mouth. “And you expect me to eat breakfast here?”

  “It’s only a legend. I’m sure it never happened.”

  “How do you know it never happened?”

  “Why would a bunch of monks just stand there while they’re being walled up? Wouldn’t they fight to the death before they let that happen?”

  “What if Henry’s men knocked them out, and when they came to, they were trapped?”

  The maitre d’ took us to a back room with exposed beams and lots of little alcoves. Lettie switched her cell phone’s ringer to vibrate. Mine was already turned off to save the battery. We placed our orders and considered what we’d do with our day. Tomorrow would be the last day of the conference but today’s schedule held nothing I couldn’t miss. Larry Roberts was in charge of a breakout session I wanted to attend, mainly to harass him as he had done to me. If my PhD was already in the toilet, I figured, I might as well enjoy myself. Lettie and I decided we’d shop first and then take a tour of the castle.

  Lettie was buttering her scone when her phone vibrated. “I’ll take this outside,” she said, “I hate when people talk on the phone in restaurants.” She walked through a short passage to the front of the restaurant and out the main door, but I could still see her from where I sat. The front was all windows. Her caller was probably Lindsey, I figured, asking Lettie to babysit again today. I did wish Lindsey could be more considerate of her mother. Lettie needed time off, too, and much of her babysitting had been when Lindsey wasn’t even working but was out somewhere with St. Giles Bell.

  Through the front window, I saw Lettie turn, cell phone to one ear, and press her forehead against the glass. Then slowly, slowly, she sank until all I could see was the points of her spiky hair above the windowsill.

  I stumbled through the front door behind a couple of waiters who also saw Lettie faint and beat me to the sidewalk. One knelt beside her, felt her pulse, and called out, “Get a doctor!”

  Lettie’s eyes fluttered open.

  “I’m her friend,” I said. “Give us a minute. If we need a doctor, I’ll let you know.” They stood back and I knelt beside Lettie, her legs sprawled out on the wet concrete, one shoulder against the wall. I took the cell phone from her hand and checked to see if the call was still open.

  “Hello?”

  I waited for an answer, then looked at the screen. It said, “Thames Valley Police.”

  “Hello? This is Mrs. Osgood’s friend,” I said. “Mrs. Osgood has passed out. Can you tell me what this is about?”

  “Where are you? We’ll send officers to help, straight away.”

  I told them, then repeated my question.

  “Dr. Scoggin, Mrs. Osgood’s daughter, has been shot. She’s in hospital.”

  Lettie raised her hand to me. “Let me have it.”

  I handed her the phone and sat beside her, the wet sidewalk soaking the rear of my slacks. Waiters and a few patrons poked heads out and asked if they could help. I asked one of the waiters to bring me our check, as we wouldn’t be finishing our meal. He waved my request away with a sweep of his hand. “No charge.”

  Lettie’s face was still an unhealthy grey, but her eyes shed no tears. Not yet. “She’s at the Radcliffe Hospital,” she said. “Emergency room. We need a taxi.”

  I dashed into the street and flagged the first one I saw. Lettie struggled to her feet and lurched toward the rear door of the cab. Before the driver could manage to hop out and open it, Lettie opened it herself and fell in. I fell in beside her.

  “Radcliffe Hospital,” I said.

  “And hurry!” Lettie added.

  We had both left our purses with all our money at our seats in The Mitre. I explained this to the driver, who wasn’t pleased, but handed me his card and explained how I could pay him later. It was in his own best interest not to say what I’m sure he wanted to say. As the cab weaved through the outskirts of town past rows of homes and shops, Lettie sat like a stone, her gaze straight ahead and her hands clamped on the edge of the seat. I talked to her throughout the whole trip but she didn’t appear to hear me. The driver dropped us off at the emergency entrance.

  Lindsey was in one of the emergency rooms, but a nurse told us they needed to take her to surgery right away. They’d been waiting for us since the police had called and told them we were on our way. Lettie apologized for having no identification and had to establish that she was indeed Lindsey’s mother by answering a couple of questions they pulled from their staff contact files. They let us go in briefly while they prepared to move Lindsey to surgery.

  Lettie may be a scatterbrain, but when circumstances call for bravery and calm, she rises to the occasion. Lindsey lay on a gurney, her mouth and nose covered by an oxygen mask. Naked to the waist, she had a blood-spattered sheet on the lower half of her body. Lettie slipped between two nurses and placed a hand on Lindsey’s head.

  “You’re going to be all right, Punkin. They’re taking you upstairs to remove the bullet and I’ll see you as soon as you come out. Okay? Dotsy is going to take care of Claire and Caleb. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  Her composure in the face of this great uncertainty brought tears to my eyes, and mine weren’t the only wet ones in the little room. An attending physician had told us on the way into the room that she had been shot below her rib cage and above her navel so they didn’t know exactly what sort of internal damage they’d find. Lettie’s simple “remove the bullet” sugarcoated what might be a life-threatening injury. Lettie squeezed her daughter’s hand and kissed her on the forehead as they wheeled her away.

 
Then Lettie broke down.

  I had to lead her to a chair in the hall and hold her until she started sobbing out loud. Until I heard sounds, I was afraid she was choking on her own tears. When, after some minutes, I looked up, I saw two plainclothes detectives flashing badges at us.

  “She was shot coming out of her flat at eight thirty-three this morning. We don’t know who or why. We’re talking to all the neighbors, but so far we’ve found only one who thinks he saw someone running away, down a path behind the building, but we’re hoping we’ll get better information when we locate others. Most of the residents are at work now.”

  “Do you have a description?”

  “No. Dark colored anorak, he thought. But nothing definite.” One of the detectives had a notepad in hand. The other one said, “Wait here a moment, please. I’ll find us a room where we can talk.”

  The room the hospital staff found for us was a fair distance away and Lettie worried we wouldn’t know when they brought Lindsey back from the operating room. I had to ask the detectives their names again, since I hadn’t listened when they told us before. The man was Chief Inspector Child, an efficient-looking man of about fifty. His assistant was a shiny-faced young woman named Detective Sergeant Gunn. In less dire circumstances I’d have made a comment about the appropriateness of her name.

  We were in an office with a large desk, upholstered chairs, and bookshelves. Chief Inspector Child rolled a utilitarian office chair across its protective PVC mat for himself, and waved Lettie to an armchair. He turned to me. “I suppose we should conduct these interviews one at a time, but under the circumstances I think it will be all right if you stay, Mrs. . . .”

  “Mrs. Lamb.”

  “Officer,” Lettie said, pulling a tissue from the box on the desk, “my friend needs to go to my daughter’s apartment and take care of my grandchildren. They’re seven and five. They’re too young to be left alone.”