Dust to Dust

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  The cats disappeared into the darkness. Rebecca inhaled the scent of baking bread and went back inside. Before long all the others had drifted casually into the kitchen, just happening to pick up knives and napkins. Rebecca took the brown loaves from the oven and started slicing them while they were still hot, producing not neat slices but uncouth haggles. No one complained.

  Dennis and Hilary asked for milk, Adele for juice. Michael proffered the remains of the bottle of Cragganmore to the others, and its sweet, smoky flavor perfectly complemented the warm wheat of the bread. Solemnly Michael and Rebecca touched glasses, although whether they were toasting a beginning or an end, he was probably no surer than she was.

  Jerry drank his whiskey and water in a gulp. Elaine hung back, waiting for him to pass a glass to her, until Tony finally reached over and gave her one. Colin’s dark eyes, like Michael’s with their depths of intelligence, peered around the group. Between sips and munches he said, “Do you think Mark was havin’ it off with Sheila?”

  Jerry snorted. “Sheila would tease anything male, from the Pope to Don Juan.”

  “Maybe she had a vitamin deficiency,” offered Adele.

  Tony pensively licked crumbs from his lips. Rebecca passed around the butter. Michael said, “No, Mark’s just payin’ dearly for a bit of snoggin’.”

  “Snogging?” Dennis asked.

  Hilary answered expressionlessly, “Necking.”

  Dennis colored and refused a third piece of bread.

  Rebecca said, “Yeah, Mark was just telling me yesterday about his Twinkie principle. How a nibble is all very well, but the whole thing will make you sick.”

  The Americans emitted various kinds of laughter, from Jerry’s acid guffaw to Adele’s thin chuckle. Michael groaned in agreement, but the other Britishers looked blank. By the time Rebecca had explained what a Twinkie was, the joke had died a well-deserved death.

  She saved the last two pieces of bread and wrapped them up for Mark.

  “Thank you,” Tony told her. “That was a treat.”

  “You worked for hours, and now it’s all gone,” said Elaine sadly, and smeared butter on her last morsel of crust.

  “That’s usually the case, isn’t it?” Rebecca replied. “Anticipation, and then crumbs…” Michael, upending the bottle of whiskey so that the last drop would fall onto his tongue, didn’t seem to hear.

  “Would you like to have Mark’s bed tonight?” Dennis asked Colin.

  “No, thank you, I’ll take a blanket into the sittin’ room.”

  Dennis nodded earnestly. “I guess you don’t want to walk on his grave or anything.”

  That did it. With various polite mutters the gathering unraveled, Jerry, Elaine and Tony out the front door, Adele, Hilary and Dennis up the stairs, Colin into the bathroom. Rebecca left the pans to drain, smoothed the washcloth over the faucet, and went into the bedroom. She didn’t bother to turn on the light but sat down on her bed and slipped off her shoes. Michael stood in the doorway, a silhouette against the light glowing into the hall from the dining room. “Are you fair clapped oot, then, lass?”

  “Yes, lad, I do believe I am.”

  “No surprisin’, is it? I’m well and truly knackered mysel’.”

  He stood and she sat, in silence. Water ran and footsteps echoed from upstairs. They both started speaking at once. “I’m sorry… .” They stopped, eyeing each other through the darkness that bandaged their wounded expressions.

  “I’m sorry,” Rebecca said. “About a lot of things, but mostly about our argument. I didn’t have to hit you with all that.”

  “I started it,” Michael returned. “I was thoughtless, inconsiderate, rude… . Choose one of the above.”

  “Or all of the above,” said Rebecca dryly. “Jerry and Sheila would drive a saint to distraction. I should’ve backed off.”

  “I should’ve understood what you were on aboot. I should’ve tried to understand.”

  Again silence fell. Colin tiptoed through the hallway into the sitting room and shut the door. Faint music emanated from the wall as he turned on the television just loud enough to muffle whatever they were saying. Normally he was considerate, Rebecca thought; why had he blurted that question about Sheila in the kitchen? Did he have some idea of drawing hints from the assembled suspects? Too many detectives spoil the broth, or something to that effect… .

  Michael collected his soccer shorts and shaving kit, kissed her forehead and went off toward the bathroom. “That’s it?” she wanted to call after him. “You think that solves everything?” And she answered herself, yes, he probably does. He’d never found sackcloth and ashes becoming.

  Groaning, she put on her tartan nightgown and wool socks. During the dark nights of winter and spring, she’d made a ritual out of putting on that gown, of propping herself up in bed, of dialing the long string of digits that would make the phone ring in Michael’s flat just as he was getting up in the morning. They’d talk, her in her bed alone, he clattering about his kitchen fixing his toast and tea.

  She took out her contact lenses. When she came right down to it, Michael had opened himself to her a lot more than she’d opened to him. His map of himself was finely scaled, the elevation lines of anger, joy, boredom, precisely marked, the cross-hatched city labeled “Dun Iain”, with all its palaces and slums, duly recorded.

  His map was marked with green braes and sparkling burns, snow-topped bens towering over ancient castles, deep lochs from which smirking monsters waved their fins at tourists. Her map had dry arroyos, cypress-haunted bayous, vast grassy plains, and skyscrapers strangled by jostling steel freeways.

  On her map, Dun Iain was a bomb crater softened by a lush growth of loosestrife and rambler roses. The swampy coastline of her childhood was edged with fortresses of education and experience. Beyond those was a blank area labeled “Here be Dragons”.

  Rebecca picked up her brush and dragged it painfully through her hair. Poor Michael, to stumble into that blank area. They’d shared a difficult journey last winter, they were sharing another this summer, perhaps there was a limit to how much they could travel together when their maps depicted such different landscapes.

  Michael walked into the room, threw down his clothes, and said, “It’s all yours.” Rebecca took her bag of toiletries and headed for the bathroom.

  When she came back, Michael was a long lump in his bed. She climbed between her ice cold sheets and curled into a ball, willing to herself warmth, sleep, and amnesia. Instead she shivered. Her tired mind mocked her with dart-like images: Sheila’s body, the wheel-cross, Michael smiling in the airport as though he’d never known unhappiness or doubt in his life.

  A quick sob of frustration and cold escaped her throat. She clapped her hand over her mouth. Too late. Behind her back, Michael stirred and made a soft query under his breath. Blankets slid aside.

  He climbed into her bed and wrapped her body with his own. How could he be warm in nothing but shorts? But he was, his skin radiating heat through the flannel of her gown as though she stood before a fireplace on a cold, raw afternoon. Surely he didn’t think—not now… . She stiffened.

  His breath stirred the hair on the back of her neck. “Hush. I promised you I’d keep you warm, that’s all.”

  “Yes,” she said, with a short laugh. And in mingled gratitude, affection, and exasperation, she went limp in his arms.

  1

  Chapter Thirteen

  The rain didn’t conceal the countryside but illuminated it, each drop a miniature lamp dispersing a tender, silvery light. Pink and maroon foxgloves edged the gray stone fences, yellow broom splashed across the green fields, and the equally green hills were shaded by dark brown heather. Streams burbled merrily beneath the patent-leather ribbon of road that bound Galashiels to Melrose to Rudesburn.

  Laurence and Nora’s mini-van led the way, followed by Jerry’s Jaguar and then the Fiat. Grant Johnston’s car was at the end of the procession, dutifully keeping them all under surveillance. Mackenzie had t
old them they’d have an official escort. That Grant was also a witness was an exemplary bit of Scottish thriftiness.

  Rebecca eyed her reflection in the car window. Her own face looked funny, as if she’d caught it unaware before it had time to assume a suitable public expression.

  The verdict of the inquest had been murder. No one was astonished at that. It wasn’t that Rebecca had expected any dramatic revelations, but neither had she expected the inquest to be quite so anticlimactic. The Procurator Fiscal had required only bald facts—who had or hadn’t seen what. Any inferential details such as Jerry’s collusion with Sheila were in the formal statements that Mackenzie was holding like a poker hand close to his chest. His omniscient attitude, she told herself, had to be a bluff.

  Michael said, “The do was gey perjink, right enough, but that’ll no winkle oot the daft slaisterin’ gowk.”

  Rebecca smiled; Michael was being deliberately obscure. Mark, slumped in the back seat beside Colin, pried open his eyelids. “Would you mind translating that?”

  “The inquest,” said Michael obligingly, “was all very fine and proper, but it dinna find the stupid dirty fool who killed her.”

  “Not so very stupid,” Colin put in. “Whoever dragged the body into the church was damned lucky no one saw him. Her. It.”

  Rebecca asked, “Beginner’s luck? No one’s suggested we have a serial killer in our midst. Thank goodness.”

  “Just serial suspects,” Mark said dryly. He smothered a burp. “Michael, thanks for the warning about the bread. Let me warn you about the coffee. Pure battery acid.”

  “Very good of you, but I’ve no intention of goin’ back there, let alone drinkin’ their coffee.”

  “Yesterday you looked as if you’d been rode hard and put up wet.”

  Michael said, “You’ll have a go at translatin’ that, will you?”

  “Worked half to death without adequate care,” explained Mark.

  “Right.” Michael nodded emphatically.

  A black and white collie bounded suddenly into the road ahead of Laurence’s van. Brake lights flared. The dog turned to look back the way it had come, head erect, tail flattened. Rebecca leaned forward. “That’s a professional dog if I ever saw one.”

  The brownish-white blobs of sheep spilled down the hillside and clustered at the side of the road, the dog’s stance letting none cross. Black faces looked incuriously at the waiting cars. Rebecca saw Hilary’s face, a pale, taut oval, watching the dog and his charges from the Baird’s back window.

  Hilary had avowed that around the time of the murder she’d been playing with just such a border collie in the fields south of Rudesburn, while Tony encountered Dennis in the camera van. While Jerry lurked in the bar. While Adele meditated beneath the yew tree in the cemetery, seeing and hearing nothing of Sheila’s death. Of course, Adele meditating was the next best thing to a stone statue; the murderer would have had to blow a trumpet fanfare to get her attention. Unless Adele had done it herself… .

  Rebecca grimaced. She could flog that damnable list of suspects all she wanted, but no one, not even Simon Mackenzie, could formulate a hypothesis without facts, or get facts without reliable testimony. But even her own testimony was suspect. How did she know she went into the Craft Centre at eight? she asked herself. By the clock in the toy shop window. How did they know it wasn’t eight? By Bridget’s watch, which she didn’t look at until—when, almost nine? Either clock or watch could have been off.

  A piercing whistle cut through the murmurs of car engine and rain. The shepherd, a young man in slicker, wellies, and shapeless hat, waved at the waiting cars. The dog shooed the sheep across the road.

  Michael shifted gears and accelerated. His wrist didn’t flick the hem of his kilt up his thigh. Rebecca hadn’t known he owned a coat and tie, but in honor of the occasion, he’d produced both. He’d also smoothed back his hair. Now it once again flopped casually over his forehead. Except for the dark circles of exhaustion beneath his eyes and his knotted brows, he wore his usual expression of alert, almost startled, intelligence. He didn’t kill Sheila. Someone else did it. That brought her right back to the list.

  Colin pulled a notepad from his sporran. “The pathologist testified that Sheila died of a stab wound to the heart, made by a dagger with a serrated edge like Michael’s sgian dubh, between seven-fifteen and nine-fifteen. Rather earlier, he thought, but admitted that’s too broad a time to be helpful.”

  Everyone nodded gloomily.

  “The reporter, Bob Jenkins,” Colin went on, “said he had a bargain with Sheila, exclusive rights to report on any interestin’ finds. Dr. Kleinfelter says he didn’t know that. Although he had, of course, every intention of makin’ the finds available to the press.”

  “Flannelin’ like a proper politician,” scoffed Michael.

  Colin said, “All the men tested, bar Dennis, have A-positive blood.”

  “No point to DNA tests,” said Michael. “No proof whoever was shaggin’ her killed her. No proof a man did it at all. Mackenzie’s a canny one, he’ll no be missin’ that.”

  Colin had easily proved he was at the conference in Durham that night. Not that Rebecca had ever suspected him anyway. Mark—well, he’d been out walking, alone, unnoticed… . Not Mark, part of her mind said, and another part said, why not? Just because you like him?

  This morning Devlin had not seemed at all chastened by his second suspect slipping through his fingers. As the group greeted Mark at the police station and handed over a set of clean clothes, Devlin’s bellicose leprechaun face still seemed convinced that with patient excavation his pot of gold would eventually materialize.

  Not to mention the murder weapon. The sgian dubh was conspicuous by its absence from Michael’s sock. “Did Sergeant Devlin give you back your Swiss Army knife?” Rebecca asked Mark.

  “Sure did. Reminded me of a toreador turning his back on the bull.”

  “Stopped badgerin’ you about that note, did they?” Colin asked.

  “Finally. If I can’t prove I wrote it ten days ago they can’t prove I didn’t. Like you and the attic, Michael.”

  “Just that,” Michael muttered.

  A night in jail under Mackenzie’s chilly version of the third degree, Rebecca thought, hadn’t hit Mark as hard as it had Michael. But then, the murder victim hadn’t been Mark’s lover, just a snack… .

  The car tires hissed along the wet tarmac. The windshield wipers scraped and thudded softly. Rebecca abandoned her futile efforts at mystery-solving and visualized Melrose Abbey. Today, as they’d passed, she’d seen the rosy gray ruins streaked dark red by the rain, as if blood flowed over the stones.

  In 1545 it had. Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, had sacked Melrose just as he’d devastated Rudesburn and ravaged Edinburgh. The destruction went against his grain; he’d protested to his master, Henry VIII, that it served no purpose. But the corpulent old spider had only two years left to live and more than one old score to settle.

  Hertford’s name had been just above Henry’s on the records of Anne Douglas’s trial. Probably Hertford had presided on behalf of the king, and then, like a dutiful flunkey passing around an office memo, had brought the records to be initialed by the boss. “Odd,” Rebecca said, “that Henry himself was concerned about Anne’s trial.”

  “She was a Douglas,” said Michael.

  “But it was here in Scotland that the Douglases had fallen out of favor. That would explain why the Scots didn’t help her—but then, they couldn’t, could they? They were at war.”

  “So there’s a reason we found a body in the cellar?” Mark asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Rebecca replied. “One of the old mossy stones in the far corner of the cemetery marks a mass grave of soldiers from the battle of Ancrum Moor, just down the road from Rudesburn.”

  “Mary Pringle,” said Michael, “thought the commendator, Thomas Elliot, is the one who was in London several years later workin’ for Edward VI. I’d no have stayed for the Rough Wooin’, either.
”

  “A commendator is some kind of tax collector?” asked Colin.

  “More of a lay administrator. By the sixteenth century many of the religious houses owned vast property. Here in Scotland the kings granted abbey revenues as political rewards. Beginnin’ of the end of the monasteries.”

  “So Elliot would’ve been checkin’ Anne’s accounts?”

  “Some commendators worked wi’ their religious counterparts, some against. How Anne and Elliot got along I canna say.”

  “From the glimpse I had of the trial records,” said Rebecca, “they were both accused of gross malfeasance—even though if he went on to London later, he must’ve been acquitted.”

  There was Rudesburn, nestled in its green fold of land like a bone china model enfolded by tissue paper. “Naething like a four-hundred-year-old mystery,” said Michael, “to take your mind off the new one.”

  Rebecca darted him a sharp look. Sure. He turned the car onto Jedburgh Street and sent her a rueful sideways gleam.

  The toy shop clock read one-fifteen. A constable opened the door of the van, even though the reporters had migrated to the inquest in Galashiels—much good it had done them. Michael parked the Fiat between the Plantagenet van and the Jaguar. Jerry climbed out into the mist and cursed, probably wishing for windshield wipers for his glasses. He hurried into the hotel, Elaine sulking right behind. Tony trudged after them. Colin and the students went into the cottage debating the merits of coffee or tea for lunch.

  Across the Gowan Water the gentle rain dampened the priory into the same ambivalence as its parent Melrose. Rebecca thought of a nun, her wimple and veil hiding her expression so well she could pretend devoutness when actually her thoughts were far from benevolent.

  As Anne Douglas might have looked, facing her accusers. “Her foreign English accusers,” Rebecca said aloud to Michael, “who’d sacked the only home she’d known, who’d brutalized her people, who were adding insult to injury by bringing her to trial for—well, the charge was witchcraft, but that covered a lot of territory in the sixteenth century.”