“A nun,” Grant went on. “In white robes. I could see the fabric floatin’ around her, the veil draped ower her head, everything. And yet she wisna really there, not quite solid, like. And when she turned and looked at me she had nae face. Shadows, that was a’, in the circle o’ her wimple. That’s when my feet took ower and I ran. Sorry.” Winnie patted his arm.
“Good story,” scoffed a voice from the back row. Jerry. No one paid any attention to him.
“Have you ever seen the ghost before?” Michael asked.
“No so close. A light across the burn a time or two, when I was a lad, or a shape-thing glidin’ oot the door o’ the priory… .”
A thud reverberated across the lawns. Every body in the group seemed to jump six inches off the ground. Every eye turned to the priory doorway. We heard it shut, Rebecca thought. We heard the door shut, but it’s not there.
Adele strolled out of the open doorway, down the steps, and paused at the foot of the wheel cross. Her look toward the multiple eyes staring at her was a blandly self-absorbed as that of the cats. “Is something wrong?” she called.
Her voice drifted away down the soft evening breeze. No one replied.
1
Chapter Twenty-One
Rebecca closed the door behind Bridget and took the mended sweater-vest into the bedroom. She put it away and turned her attention to Michael’s bed, which, as usual, looked like a fabric strip mine. Not that the issue of whether he made up his bed was an important one.
Mark and Hilary, Dennis and Adele, collided in the vestibule as they put on their wellies. “What Grant saw,” said Adele, “was Anne making sure that Thomas’s mortal remains are treated respectfully.”
The others greeted that statement with noncommittal murmurs.
“However,” Adele went on, “I don’t think Anne has enough psychic energy to follow Thomas to Edinburgh.”
“Museums,” said Hilary, “ought to be the most haunted places on earth.”
“Not necessarily,” Adele said. “Artifacts are out of context in a museum; their vibrations don’t reach critical mass. And the sheer quantity of them keeps the sensitive person from tuning in on an individual echo.”
Sounds good to me, Rebecca said to herself. She fluffed the pillow.
Mark asked, “Didn’t you say your sister worked in a museum, Dennis?”
“She did once,” he replied. “Kind of a summer internship, dusting the display cases and stuff.”
Hilary glanced in the bedroom door. “Coming, Rebecca?”
“Be right there.” Rebecca looked out the bedroom window as the others traipsed toward the priory. So they had to work on Saturday. They were so far behind that they would have had to work weekends, murder or no murder.
It was a beautiful morning, the sky a clear cerulean blue like a ceramic bowl filled with cotton puffs of cloud. The rosy stone of the priory blushed and the grass sparkled. Tony was hanging over the railing of the footbridge, camera ready, while Elaine stood behind him juggling his bags with a slightly smug expression.
Jerry strode across the lawns, right through Tony’s viewfinder, ignoring them both. He shooed the students along with semaphoric arm-wavings like a policeman hurrying onlookers past an accident.
Rebecca picked up Michael’s soccer shorts and folded them into a drawer. Then she poked out the last birth control pill, swallowed it, and threw the packet away.
Michael and Devlin had started for Edinburgh right after breakfast, Michael driving the lorry, Devlin following in the Fiat. Grant and the other bobbies had stood and watched, frankly relieved, as the entourage disappeared toward Newton St. Boswells and the A68.
Mackenzie had yet to appear. Devlin said he’d gone straight to Edinburgh last night and would be back in Rudesburn on Monday. Guess he had to say hello to his wife every now and then, Rebecca thought. Maybe he and Amanda Fraser were competitors, but at least they didn’t work in each other’s pockets. Michael’s parents had been working together for years, but hardly in competition.
The portfolio with the trial records sat beside the dresser. She could have sworn she’d left it on the bedside table. She picked it up. The string was untied. Although the papers were crammed untidily inside, they were all there. Michael could have been looking at them. Or Dennis. Or… .
Swiftly she turned, lifted the covers on her bed, slipped the portfolio between the mattress and the box springs, and smoothed the spread. Maybe she was being paranoid. Maybe not paranoid enough.
In the vestibule, her wellies and Michael’s were slightly pigeon-toed, turned away from each other. She straightened his and put hers on. Michael, she thought. His reaction to her Ph.D. She could put “Doctor” in front of her name, but the degree was only a hunting license; it didn’t come with a job. Maybe she could find a job if she broadened her horizons and searched back in the United States. “Sorry,” she heard herself saying, “I just couldn’t find a job here. Guess the relationship is off.”
She started to slam the front door, caught herself, and shut it carefully. Michael wasn’t giving her any clues about his feelings—no playing on her emotions, no persuasion one way or the other. Chances were they could break up and remain friends. She saw them as seventy-year-olds meeting at a conference, smiling with wistfulness and relief over what might have been.
Rebecca’s boots scuffed across the bridge, slapped on the damp grass, and carried her to the edge of the third trench. Mark and Jerry were down on their knees in the muck. “Looks like a comb,” Jerry was saying.
“One of the most important pieces in the Jedburgh museum is a comb,” said Rebecca.
Jerry looked up, face puckered against the brilliant sunlight. “Go stake out the infirmary for some test trenches. We’ve spent too much time on this side of the priory. We’ve got to get moving. Working with volunteers is like jogging through molasses.”
Rebecca stared down at him, her mouth open in surprise. The arguments she’d carefully formulated, how despite his slowness she needed time away from the dig to translate the records, evaporated like cotton candy on her tongue. “May I borrow your knife?” she asked Mark. He fished it out and handed it over with an expressive flick of his brows that would have done Michael proud.
Tony and Elaine were setting up some lights in the doorway of the chapter house. Elaine’s jaw moved rhythmically and a distinct odor of spearmint clung to her. Maybe she was trying to stop smoking. The usual contingent of policemen, some in uniforms, some in civvies, roamed about the dig. A couple of reporters and a gaggle of tourists stood in the gateway to the car park, inspecting the blank stretch of gravel. The ghost of Anne did not perform.
In the church Dennis sorted through a pile of site recording sheets. Rebecca got some pegs and twine from the worktable. “How’s it going?”
“No problems yet,” he replied. He seemed almost disappointed.
“Was anyone in the cottage last night while you were working?”
“Not that I know of. Of course, I was upstairs with my tape player going most of the time.”
“With the doors locked?”
“Well, no—I mean, I was there, I was keeping an eye on things.”
Rebecca gritted her teeth. “Get the transit and help me, please.”
“Oh. Sure. Be right there.”
Rebecca went through the slype and found Adele sieving the excavated dirt. She held up a nondescript lump. “Look. A coin.”
Rebecca rubbed at the lump. Its dirt crust was unusually fragile, and flaked away to reveal heraldic creatures enameled on metal. “No, I think it’s a decorative disc. See the stud on the back? It was attached to a piece of leather, probably a horse’s harness. How on earth did somebody miss that? What bucket did it come from?”
Adele considered the spoil heaps. “First trench.”
“Oh.” Rebecca grimaced. “Then I missed it. I could’ve sworn I crumbled up all the lumps. Here, put it in a box, please, and label it.”
Adele carried her booty back into the cloiste
r. Shaking her head at her apparent mistake, Rebecca squished on across the grass to the lumpy ground concealing the foundations of the infirmary. She’d obviously been distracted when the disc was found.
Test trenches, my left femur, she told herself. All they could do was peel a few layers of dirt and weeds away from the remaining stones and get a vague idea of the general layout. Taking Mark’s knife, she whittled a peg and lodged it between two blocks of masonry. “There,” she told Dennis when he arrived with transit and meter stick. “That’s the datum point for this grid. When Michael gets back, he and Mark can tie it in with the main one.”
“Okay,” said Dennis, and they went to work.
By elevenses Rebecca was able to report to Jerry that the grid was laid out. “Very good! We’ll backfill the first trenches tomorrow and get the grounds people to re-sod them. Time to get going on the crypt and the tower.” He beamed as jovially as an evangelist at the door to a tent show, shaking hands and picking pockets.
Nora passed around the cups of tea. “Kerr did a layout of the crypt back in the thirties, before the doorway collapsed. Stone walls, a brick wall, lots of dust and old bones. Nothing exciting.”
“No scientists have looked at it.” Jerry gulped his tea. His face suffused with red.
“It’s hot,” said Nora blandly, and offered Hilary a scone.
“I’ll need you, Mark,” Jerry went on, clearing his throat, “and Dennis, and Michael when he decides to come back, to clear out the blockage. And we have to survey the tower, too—it’s in bad shape.”
“Some of the steps have settled,” offered Nora, “and the upper walkway has some loose stones.”
Tony added, “Have a care—the owl’s nest is in a window slit.”
Jerry barely glanced at Tony, and at Elaine nibbling her scone beside him. “This isn’t a bird sanctuary. The owl can find another place for its kiddies.” He went on, before Tony could articulate a protest, “Tomorrow Hilary and Adele join Rebecca at the infirmary. Light probes, right? Remember that the medieval idea of first aid was bleeding—you bring in a guy with his leg cut off and they say, “Hey, we’ll just drain away the rest of your blood, speed up the process.” He grinned. No one laughed. With a shrug Jerry continued, “So don’t start investigating any drains without latex gloves and lots of disinfectant. Over at the medieval hospital at Soutra Aisle they found all sorts of biological nasties.”
“I thought they were still testing the area to see if any disease-carrying bacteria had survived,” Rebecca said.
“Yeah, well, whatever. The possibility is still there.”
“Super,” said Elaine under her breath, and looked around as though expecting the black plague to come up and lay a skeletal hand on her shoulder. But she didn’t have to worry. Jerry hadn’t assigned her a task. It appeared that as far as he was concerned, she no longer existed.
“So, troops,” Jerry went on, “we’re going to have to get our behinds in gear. Our funding’s only good through the fifth of August. The cottage is booked then, too. No more of this stalling around.”
The entire crew and Nora regarded Jerry with varying degrees of incredulity and disgust. Now what was he up to? Rebecca wondered. Maybe he had a conversion experience on the road to Galashiels.
She went back out to the infirmary, spade in hand, worrying about Jerry, worrying about the trial records, worrying about having missed the heraldic disc. It hadn’t been there, she decided. Adele had got her buckets mixed up. Dennis had missed it in his trench.
Lunch time came and went. The afternoon sun was as brilliant as the morning’s, with that crystalline clarity peculiar to the British Isles. By the time Jerry shouted “That’s all, folks!” a six foot long strip of dark earth lay like a velvet ribbon across the infirmary foundations, turf rolled up tidily to the side, foxgloves and loosestrife clumped to the other. A row of stones was almost dry, the moss that had covered it now a green blob outside the taut string. With a trowel Rebecca cut the edge of the nascent trench just a little more neatly—artistically, even—and contemplated her handiwork.
Two constables strolled outside the perimeter wall, nodding cordially. A door slammed. Judging from the absence of smoke fouling the breeze, Jerry must have gone to his lair in the pub. Rebecca cleaned her trowel on the grass, picked up spade and meter stick, and started toward the church. She had been worrying about something. What was it?
She stopped at the edge of the cloister, hearing voices from the chapter house. No, not Tony and Elaine, but Mark and Hilary. She backpedaled, meaning to go back the way she’d come and around the south side of the conventual buildings, but her movement brought her next to a lancet window. Aw, she thought sentimentally.
Mark and Hilary were thoroughly engrossed in a kiss. And yet there was something in Hilary’s posture… . Rebecca visualized herself pressed against Michael. That was it. Hilary was angled stiffly away from Mark’s body, only simulating compliance.
Mark’s hands moved down to the back pockets of her jeans and tried to press her closer to him. Tactical error—Hilary jerked away. “I—I…” she stammered, not panicked, just perturbed. “I’m sorry, Mark, I just can’t.”
She pulled herself from his arms and walked quickly out of the chapter house, through the cloister, and toward the cottage. Mark stood looking after her, his hands still outstretched, holding nothing. His face went from a frown to resigned expressionlessness.
Rebecca, her cheeks flaming, trotted back around the priory buildings. She reached the church from the west side, strolled nonchalantly down the nave and deposited her tools, knowing she wasn’t fooling anyone. Mark was leaning on the frame of the transept door, arms crossed, looking for all the world like an upended effigy. “You saw that,” he stated.
“Sorry. Don’t mind me, I’ll just slink away.”
“No, I want you to tell me something.”
“Oh. Okay.” She leaned on the opposite doorpost, the stone cold at her back.
Even though they were standing in shadow, Mark’s eyes shimmered with the blue-tinted sunshine outside. They were searchlights, illuminating every crevice, leaving nothing unexamined. “I know she’s hurting. I know why. Am I some kind of sex maniac because I still want to make love with her?”
“I don’t think so,” Rebecca replied, “but what’s important is whether she thinks so. Did she say that?”
“God, no. I wish she would. She keeps apologizing.”
“Planning on seducing her, were you?”
“I was planning on letting nature take its course.”
“I’m afraid it is.” Rebecca sighed. “You’re in the unfortunate position of being the man who convinces her most men will take no for an answer. You get to teach her to trust men again.”
Mark laughed, short and bitter. “I’m not martyr material.”
“Sure you are,” retorted Rebecca, “if you care for her.”
He muttered something under his breath about “Catch-22, damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” and added more loudly, “Well, there is something to be said for simple affection.”
“A great deal to be said. She’ll get more out of your affection than any amount of—well, groping.”
Mark shook his head. A bus rumbled up the street outside the church. In the distance children shouted, car doors slammed, and a sheep bleated. The priory itself was silent, the faintest of breezes stirring the dust in the chancel and branches of the yew beyond the opposite door.
“I’ve always heard,” Rebecca went on, “that any time a man meets a woman, any woman, he appraises her as a bed partner. At least you seem to have some control over whatever pernicious instinct that is.”
He smiled lopsidedly, brows slanted. “Not just any woman. I mean, I never looked at Adele the way I looked at Hilary and… .” His eyes fell as abruptly down to his muddy wellies as if he’d just stepped in something.
“And me?” Rebecca finished for him.
“Guilty. Consider yourself flattered.”
Reme
mbering her dream, she thought, We’re even. “From you, I will. But don’t tell me Jerry’s appraisal is flattering. He’d leer at a stalk of broccoli.”
“Looks more like a rutabaga man to me.” Mark grinned.
They leaned against their respective doorposts, laughing. Great slapstick, Rebecca thought. Maybe they should take this show on the road.
From the corner of her eye she saw a movement in the opposite transept. It was Michael. She willed herself not to look guilty. She had nothing to look guilty about. “Hey!” she called, and walked briskly toward him. “You’re back. Did everything go all right?”
Mark scuffed along behind her. “No deductions about the body yet?”
Michael’s face was stamped with the same resigned expressionlessness she had seen on Mark’s. She slipped her hand under his arm and drew him toward the cottage.
His arm pressed her hand against his side so firmly that she had to flex the blood into her fingers. “The puir chap’s set up right and proper in the lab. Graham says he’ll ring us if he finds anything. A little late for a formal post-mortem. No dental records, more’s the pity.”
“Could it be Elliot?” asked Mark.
“We got on to London to see if there’re any records of Elliot workin’ for Edward VI.”
“Did Graham say anything about Jerry?” Rebecca asked.
“Nelson warned him, and he’s on his guard. He told me Jerry wisna exactly complimentary aboot us ower lunch yesterday, but he wisna tryin’ to stab us in the back.”
“Too much to hope he’s given up wasting research assistants,” said Rebecca. “I guess even Jerry, though, realizes you already have a good reputation with Graham. And me with Nelson, helpfully enough.”
“Jerry even admitted the discrepancy in the records, said mistakes happen and promised to keep a better eye oot.”
“For his own interests,” Mark said. “Maybe he won’t frame you, but what about us larva?”
“We’re all in this together,” Michael replied
Rebecca glanced at his profile. His jaw was set, his mouth taut with obduracy and unease. “Have you been looking at the portfolio?” she asked. “This morning it had been opened, and the trial records disarranged.”
Dust to Dust Page 29
