“Yeah?” Mark said encouragingly.
“Adele sleeps in an old UCLA sweatshirt of Chris’s—her son’s. She says it makes her dream about him, as if he’s not really gone. He was only twenty-two when he died. A Rhodes scholar, studied at Oxford.”
“That’s sad,” said Dennis.
Michael’s heavy sigh lifted Rebecca’s hair. Sympathy? she asked silently. Or aggravation? And at what, if not everything… .
The glow of the whisky evaporated into chill darkness.
1
Chapter Seven
Michael looked as if he’d been mud-wrestling. Rebecca could barely read the words on his T-shirt, “Monty Python: The Unexploded Scotsman Skit”. “You’ve always said,” she told him, “you wanted a bit of the Auld Sod.”
“I want to buy land, no wallow in it. But I got the alembic oot in one piece. Jerry’s lookin’ at it noo. First real evidence of the hospital, a piece of distillin’ equipment.”
“They used to think whisky was medicine, didn’t they?”
“What? Do you mean it isna?” With an innocent smile, Michael plopped down next to her and leaned against the sun-warmed stone of William Salkeld’s tomb.
The on-again, off-again storms of the last ten days had gathered their clouds and departed to the east. It was now so warm Mark had shocked Nora by inquiring plaintively for iced tea. Her attitude implied that he’d spat on the Union Jack. Chastened, he now sat beside Hilary, staring into his mug and waiting for its contents to cool.
On Hilary’s other side, Adele sat looking at the door into the tower. Tony had climbed cautiously up for some panoramic shots, but today the grille was shut. Even so Adele watched so intently, a half-smile on her face, that Rebecca turned to see what—or who—the woman was watching. But the stairway was empty. Despite the warmth, the back of her neck prickled.
Grant Johnston sat down beside Michael, took off his hat, wiped his face with a handkerchief, and demonstrated Scottish grit by gulping his tea. “Sorry tae ring you in Edinburgh Saturday. I feel a right gowk, askin’ you tae come back early and the brooch lyin’ on the table at the cottage a’ the time.”
“Someone’s muckin’ aboot wi’ the artifacts,” Michael returned. “You were right to ring us.”
Nora sat down with them. “Laurence locked everything away on Friday. But then, the keys to the office were there with all the other keys.”
Rebecca shifted uncomfortably. Anyone could have taken the golden brooch with its ring of dragons and left it in the cottage. Anyone who knew where it was, and which keys went to which locks, and how the cottage would be vacant on a Saturday. The question was why.
“And someone,” added Michael aloud, “nicked only one of the nobles from the lobby. There’s no sense to it.”
Nora swore. Grant closed his eyes. Rebecca looked at Michael. The three weeks of the dig had accentuated the creases in his cheeks. She knew what the effort of not speaking, of not making one of those suicidal Scottish charges, had cost him. She was paying for the constant gritting of her own teeth with an aching jaw and tendons so tightly corded in her neck that Michael’s attentions could ease them only temporarily. Every day one or the other of them slammed the bedroom door and stood glowering over a condescending remark of Jeremy’s or Sheila’s, over some discrepancy in the data, over some mistake on the part of Tony or the students or even the townspeople that caused the puzzle pieces of the excavation to fly apart rather than come together.
Rebecca swallowed her tea and felt the sweat bead on her forehead. So much, she thought, for her visions of gamboling about Gowandale picking daisies and planning the future. They were halfway through the dig, halfway to the time she and Michael had to make a decision, and the decision was as elusive as ever.
Grant drained his cup, settled his hat on his head, and stood. His huge hand patted William Salkeld’s stone ankle. “Thank you kindly for settin’ the old boy tae rights.”
“Gave us a chance for a keek inside,” Michael replied. “Naething there but dust. Dr Kleinfelter took a scunner to that, right enough. He’s fair droolin’ to uncover something glamorous for the film.”
“I’ll bet,” said Nora. Her plump cheeks quivered with indignation. Everyone in the pub last night had overheard Jerry berating Grant and Laurence.
“So the brooch just decided to get up and go for a stroll? And why call Campbell—did you appoint me dig director or not?” Jerry had insisted.
“We had Michael’s number,” Laurence had replied reasonably. “We didn’t know where you were.”
Jerry had said, “Don’t let it happen again,” leaving unspecified whether he meant letting an artifact go stray or taking Michael seriously. No wonder Nora was still seething this Monday morning, and Grant set his jaw so firmly as he paced toward the village.
Halfway across the lawn, he was ambushed by Sheila. She led him to the gatehouse ruins, straightened his tunic, and raised her camera. “Resistance is useless,” Rebecca whined in her best alien invader voice, and Michael’s strained face relaxed. Encouraged, she went on, “My, you’re such a big strong specimen of a bobby to be patrolling a dump like this.”
Michael laughed. Ruefully, but it was a laugh. Nora’s indignation became disgust. She gathered the cups.
A red Vauxhall crossed the bridge and disappeared behind the perimeter wall. A door slammed. Grant made good his escape—perhaps with visions of his wife emerging from the shop wielding a rolling pin—but did pause long enough to enjoy Sheila’s shimmy across the grass toward the dig.
Mark, Hilary and Adele stretched and walked outside. Michael said to Rebecca, “This is the first time Jerry’s worked through his elevenses. He must like my alembic.”
“Peaceful, isn’t it?” she replied.
A man came across the lawn from the car park. Nora greeted him and gestured toward the church. Michael went to attention. “All right!”
Of course. Rebecca had seen that face in a photograph—horn-rimmed glasses and long dark hair waving around a disarming smile. It was Colin MacLeod. He and Michael shook hands, clapped shoulders, and stood beaming at each other. “Here she is,” said Michael.
“So I see,” Colin returned. “And a bonny lass, too, just as you said.” He took Rebecca’s hand in both of his.
She noted the gold band on his ring finger. “Nice to meet you at last, Colin. Where did you come from?”
“It’s where I’m goin’, to a rock chat in Durham. Thought I’d look in on you. And get another Coldstream Guard from yon toy shop.”
“He’s doin’ a miniature Troopin’ of the Colour along his mantelpiece,” Michael explained to Rebecca.
She nodded. “Those are beautifully detailed lead soldiers. The Queen Elizabeth on her horse has a side-saddle, a feather in her hat, little medals on her jacket.”
“Ah,” said Colin with a sigh, “that’s the piece I really want. But it’s awful dear. Anjali wouldn’t be best pleased if I brought it home instead of the new electric kettle we need.”
“Everyone needs toys,” Michael remonstrated with a grin. “If you get her another wee bear wi’ the wellies, she’ll no complain aboot your soldiers.”
Rebecca laughed, approving of Michael’s theory of wife management.
“Have you time for the tuppence tour?” Colin asked.
“Certainly.” Michael took the current crop of printouts from the box and led the way outside. Going from the cool shade into the blaze of sunlight was like walking into the circle of light beneath a microscope. The radiance defined the landscape so precisely that the images etched themselves on Rebecca’s retina—each gray stone of the Priory the separate stroke of a brush, Gowandale bright shades of green and gold, the sky an aching fathomless blue. The odors of dirt and mold hung on the still air.
Mark was troweling an occupation surface at the bottom of the first trench. Sheila perched on a nearby stone changing her lens and chatting cozily as much at him as with him. His expression was the wary deliberation of a soldier defusing
a live grenade. There was lust in his heart, Rebecca estimated, but what the rest of him was feeling she couldn’t say.
Adele scooped Mark’s discarded dirt into a bucket and carried it away. A shame she didn’t take the opportunity to dump it on Sheila’s head. But Adele didn’t quite acknowledge Sheila. Rebecca thought of her grandmother tactfully pretending she didn’t hear her brothers’ four-letter words. Adele might be a flake, but her dignity was impressive.
Hilary sat at her drawing board, sketching several lead pilgrim’s badges each with the tiny cross and woman’s face—either Margaret, queen of Scotland, or Mary, queen of heaven—that symbolized Rudesburn. Every few seconds she glanced up at Mark and Sheila, her delicate brows drawn together in —in what? Rebecca wondered. Resentful bafflement? Hilary was hard to read, no doubt about it; at times she seemed less shy than carefully guarded. Maybe her wealthy parents had never before let her out without a chaperone.
By the south cloister wall Jerry stood reaming the spout of the alembic Michael had extracted from the cellar of the lay sisters’ dormitory. It looked as if he was doing dental work on an earthenware tortoise, Elaine the nurse handing him his picks. Tony circled them, his video camera on his shoulder. Circling him was Dennis. Dennis had never missed his morning tea before, either, Rebecca thought. But he was unlikely to know an alembic from a chamber pot.
Jerry looked up, saw Dennis, and scowled. He threw down a pick for Elaine to retrieve and started toward Rebecca. “I want to talk to you!”
She froze. With raised eyebrows Michael and Colin walked on, Colin inquiring, “The infamous Kleinfelter?”
“Oh aye,” Michael replied. “And that’s the glamorous Sheila.”
Colin’s eyes appealed to heaven. “I see what you mean.”
Jerry said to Rebecca, in the voice of a drill sergeant addressing a recruit, “In the future you will keep that geek on a shorter leash.”
“Dennis?” Rebecca asked. “He’s doing his work.”
“He’s bugging the hell out of me. Elaine actually saw him in our hotel in York this weekend. She threw a holy fit. It’s bad enough I can’t turn around at the dig without falling over him, I can’t even get a weekend away.”
“Don’t you want him to help her with the computer?”
“She’s having enough trouble entering the data without him breathing down her neck. Tell him to lay off.”
“I’ll talk to him.” Again Rebecca’s clenched jaw twinged with pain. Jerry skulked away like a grizzly returning to its den. Damn the man, expecting her to do his dirty work for him. “Dennis!” she called.
The young man ambled toward her, his chubby, child-like face glistening with sweat, his Star Trek T-shirt stained with dirt. “Yeah?”
He was a social klutz, but harmless. As Rebecca groped for words, she saw Tony looking for a place to lay his camera bag. Inspiration struck. “Tony? Could you come here, please?”
Tony’s heron-like legs lifted him over a trench. “Yes?”
“We’re trying to shift Dennis around to different jobs so he’ll have a variety of experiences. We thought it was time to take him off the computer and see if you could show him how to make a photographic record.”
Tony looked at Dennis. “Do you know anything about videotape?”
“Sure,” Dennis said brightly, but not without a sideways, reluctant glance toward Jerry and Elaine.
Rebecca smiled. “Today’s sunlight is just the ticket, isn’t it?”
“That it is. Come along, then.” Tony handed Dennis his bag and led him toward the slopes of Battle Law, stopping only to point out a kestrel silently floating overhead.
Rebecca’s smile curdled. She caught up with Michael. “Here’s the undercroft beneath the lay dormitory, just where your gadgets said it was,” he was telling Colin. “I’m uncoverin’ a lovely tile floor, and the cut stone of the piers supportin’ the vaultin’ is still there.”
After Colin had properly appreciated the surface appearing three feet down in the trench, Michael and Rebecca led him around the refectory and the nun’s dormitory, past the site of the infirmary, and behind the east end of the church. Inside Colin eyed the blocked door of the crypt. “I thought you’d be on to this by now. Kleinfelter’s takin’ his time, is he?”
“He’s a proper professional,” Michael conceded, “but he no seems to realize he has a deadline.” He thrust the printouts into their box. “And what was that aboot Dennis, hen?”
She explained, concluding, “Probably he just has a crush on Elaine.”
“Maybe,” Michael replied. “Temptin’, though, to think Jerry’s usin’ Dennis and Elaine to cover his fiddlin’ the data, just as he did do that lass in the States.”
“But we have no evidence he’s cheated here, there, or anywhere; every mistake we’ve caught he’s been perfectly happy to set right. I hate to attribute to malice what can be explained as inefficiency—and not Jerry’s. Whatever he is, inefficient he is not.”
“Half a minute,” said Colin. “Fiddlin’ the data?”
Michael looked at Rebecca. She looked back. If they couldn’t trust Colin who could they trust? Together, interrupting each other, repeating each other, they told him all about it.
“Jesus Christ Almighty!” he exclaimed when they’d finished. “The dig from hell, eh?”
“From purgatory,” said Michael. “You hope if you work hard enough, you’ll be goin’ on to heaven.”
“There are compensations,” Rebecca admitted. “The music, the pub, the local people, the students—even Dennis and Adele.” Michael cleared his throat. “And you,” she told him, with a pat on his dirt-caked back pocket.
“But it was only the once you heard Jerry say something about the Bruce’s heart?” asked Colin. “Do you suppose that’s the treasure Sheila meant for her film—the lost treasure of the spectral nun and all?”
“But the spectral nun is supposedly Anne,” said Rebecca. “The heart is associated with Marjory.”
Michael tried a shrug, but his shoulders were coiled too tautly. “Jerry and Sheila want something spectacular for the film. Everyone does. That’s why it surprises me he’s movin’ so slowly. Unless he realizes we’re watchin’ him. The uncertainty principle—our observin’ him changes him.”
“He’s outwaitin’ you,” Colin suggested helpfully. “You lot are not only witnesses but also competitors.”
Again Michael and Rebecca exchanged a careful look. “The dig in Virginia went over time,” she pointed out.
“But,” Colin went blithely on, “if Jerry—or Sheila, for that matter—is simply bidin’ his time, why are the artifacts goin’ walkabout?”
“If only something would break,” moaned Rebecca. “If only one of the local border collies would be caught with his paw in the till, or if we found microfilm in Jerry’s cigar, or if Sheila would salt the dig with the Holy Grail.”
“Or,” Michael said, “if Anne Douglas would jump oot of the cemetery and tell us all to sod off.”
Even as he laughed, Colin glanced over his shoulder. “You mean the place really is haunted?”
“Something’s here, even though it’s keeping a mighty low profile.” Rebecca crossed her arms over her chest. “Adele swears she’s seen Anne. Tony even promised Adele he’d try and photograph her. It. Whatever.”
“Mind you,” said Michael, “the only ghost photos he’s done so far are underexposed shots of Sheila poncin’ aboot in her nun’s habit. She and Tony are oot here at dusk almost every day, filmin’ atmosphere, they say.”
Rebecca snorted. “That’s a new word for it. Did you notice the grass stain on the seat of her robe?”
“Havin’ it off in a convent’d be to Sheila’s taste, right enough.”
Rebecca didn’t want to know what memory produced that comment. Colin looked down at his feet, concealing a grin, then up again, so that his eye met Rebecca’s. Sympathy overcame amusement, and he steered the conversation into less controversial topics.
All too soon Colin
had to leave. “Gather the evidence, lads and lasses, and save it for Sherlock MacLeod. I’ll stop by on my way back from the geology conference—maybe by then I’ll decide to buy the wee Queen. Maybe by then you’ll have had your break.”
Rebecca leaned against Michael’s shoulder, watching Colin walk toward the car park. That had been a pleasant interlude. What a shame they had to go back to work. Even though work was half the point of being here.
Michael bent his head to hers, not quite kissing her, but quickly caressing her lips with the tip of his tongue. That particular playful and yet tender sensuality of his always made her go weak in the knees, and for a moment she clung to him, mud and all.
“Now, now,” said a voice like velvet draped over acid, “that’s not on. You mustn’t scare the students.”
Rebecca spun around. Sheila picked up a light meter from the supply table and offered them a conspiratorial smile in which her own pink tongue was prominently displayed.
“Christ,” Michael hissed between his teeth, “I thought I got shut o’ her two years ago.”
Two years ago, Rebecca asked herself, had he kissed Sheila like that? In the back of her mind, she heard her mother admonishing a grandchild, “Don’t put that in your mouth, you don’t know where else it’s been.”
She almost gagged. Wordlessly they walked into the cloister, Michael once again glowering, furrows cut deep into his cheeks.
They’d been with Colin so long Rebecca that expected Jerry to deliver one of his variations on, “How nice of you to come do your work.” But all he said was, “Help me put this back.” He was lifting the alembic into the trench.
“Here,” Michael protested, “that was a right bugger to get oot. Tony already took the still…”
“A good scene in the film,” Jeremy interrupted. “Excavation techniques—a professional at work.”
Sheila waited, lipstick in one hand and microphone in the other. Tony loped back toward the dig, Dennis at his heels, video camera ready. “Right,” Michael said, his tone equal parts fire and ice. He leaped into the pit, nestled the alembic into its muddy hole, climbed out and stalked away.
Dust to Dust Page 10
