Dust to Dust

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  His bearing was as dignified as one of Colin’s toy redcoats. “Thank you, Rebecca. I’ll get right on it.”

  From the church came Mackenzie’s most casual voice. “You saw this yesterday afternoon, I take it?”

  “Ah yes,” Jerry replied. “A heraldic disc of Henry VIII. Establishes that the man took a personal interest in Rudesburn.”

  “How does it do that?”

  “Because old Henry must’ve sent one of his personal flunkies up here. Not just any Tom, Dick, or Harry could wear the king’s arms.”

  Mackenzie went on playing out the rope and tying the noose. “So you’d say this was dated quite solidly, an important find.”

  “Well,” Jerry replied in his favorite speaker-to-peasants voice, “since it came from the 1545 destruction level in the first trench…”

  Dennis sat down by the computer, fingers poised. Mark leaned on his spade. A shadow inside the door to the tower was Michael.

  “Actually, Dr. Kleinfelter,” said Mackenzie, “the disc came from an antiquarian’s shop on the Edgware Road in London. We knocked up the shopkeeper this morning and faxed him a copy of the disc. It’s in his records.”

  Silence, except for the thud-slide of dirt filling the trenches, the squeak of a wheelbarrow, and the harsh call of a crow high overhead.

  Mackenzie continued, “The shopkeeper sold the disc to Miss Fitzgerald last month—along with the second gold noble. He recognized her at the time, from her telly programs.”

  Rebecca nodded. So that’s where the coin came from. Sheila was checking Kerr’s coin, then, not her own. So she could plant hers, maybe?

  Jerry sputtered, probably with his patented codfish stare, “Well, that goes to show you, doesn’t it? The bitch’d resort to anything to get herself some publicity. Salting the dig. Absolutely beyond the pale.”

  “That level hadn’t been uncovered when Miss Fitzgerald died.”

  “Okay, so she left it in the spoil heap.”

  “That particular spoil heap,” said Devlin amid a rustling of notebook pages, “wasn’t there when Sheila was killed.”

  Jerry’s voice was getting louder and louder. “Then it was that nut who turned it up—Adele. She was in it with Sheila.”

  Mackenzie said quietly, “We have a deposition from a witness who was told by Miss Fitzgerald that she bought the disc for you.”

  “This is ridiculous! Why don’t you just do your job, Inspector, and let me do mine? Thank God I don’t pay taxes in this country. The quality of public servant is pathetic, leaving murders unsolved to harass foreign nationals who are simply going about their business!”

  “I am doing my job,” said Mackenzie.

  “We have a deposition,” Devlin said. “Sheila bought the disc for you.”

  A chair scraped abruptly. “Someone’s out to get me, huh? That figures. People are always jealous of a man at the top of his profession.”

  Jerry stormed out of the transept door, pushing Rebecca against Mark. He strode back to the trenches, grabbed a shovel from one of the lads and starting scooping dirt as fiercely as though he were stoking a fire.

  Mark scowled at Jerry’s back. Dennis tapped the space bar on the computer keyboard, watching the cursor bounce across the screen, his mouth tight. Footsteps trudged up the tower. Devlin took a step after Jerry but was recalled by a quiet word from Mackenzie.

  Of course Jerry would stonewall. How could Rebecca have thought Michael had an ego when she was confronted daily with Jerry’s brass plated gall? Scowling, she headed toward the infirmary.

  Grant was stationed by the spoil heap, supervising every shovelful of dirt that went back into the trenches. Tony and Elaine sat cozily on Battle Law; he was letting her look through his video camera. Adele and Hilary were turning out a very nice vertical baulk that revealed a jumble of broken pottery. Rebecca ran out of profanity and bent to help.

  After a time Mackenzie and Devlin came strolling through the slype. With casual greetings they passed the infirmary trench and approached Tony and Elaine. Despite Elaine’s quivering outthrust lower lip and Tony’s head-lowered stare, like a bull considering a charge, they were both hauled off toward the Plantagenet van.

  They were still there at lunch time, Mackenzie evidently insisting on seeing every foot of tape and every frame of film shot since the beginning of the dig. By the time the detectives finally emerged, Elaine’s face was as red as her lipstick, and Tony’s was ashen.

  In the afternoon Mackenzie and Devlin talked again to Dennis. At quitting time they cornered Laurence and Nora. Jerry climbed in his Jaguar and roared off in a cloud of gravel. Michael looked up from helping Rebecca collect the day’s printouts. “They’re no lettin’ him go, are they?”

  Devlin and Mackenzie calmly climbed in a police car and followed. “I wonder where Jerry’s been hiding that disc,” asked Rebecca.

  “I’d like to say the same place he’s been hidin’ my sgian dubh.”

  “But can you really see Jerry killing Sheila?”

  “No. But then, I canna see anyone killin’ Sheila.” He tucked the printouts under his arm. “Will they be tellin’ Jerry who Dennis is?”

  Rebecca shook her head. “Would Dennis be safe?”

  “Aboot as safe as any of us.” The creases beside his mouth deepened. With a sigh Rebecca took the computer and headed for the cottage.

  The clear afternoon slipped subtly into a clear evening. After dinner Mark and Dennis compared the original site recording sheets with the computer records, Hilary touched up her drawings, and Adele went over the budget for the Archeological Network. Rebecca, deciding she couldn’t watch everyone at once, went into her bedroom and stood with her back against the door.

  Michael was sitting on his bed, writing something in Colin’s notepad. “New information,” he said to her questioning look. “Besides Hilary seeing Jerry and Sheila at 7:30. The ring and the brooch have gone missin’—Tony or Bob Jenkins suspected. Dennis is unmasked. The nets are closin’ aboot Jerry.”

  She settled down beside him, took the book and flipped back a few pages. “Monday, July Seventeenth. God, it’s only been a week since…”

  “Sheila died.”

  “Eight o’clock. Mark takes a dander along the B6359, Hilary through the fields. Tony takes photographs from the Law, then goes to the camera van. Dennis goes to the camera van. Yeah, that’s right, I heard their voices in there when I left the house. Jerry, Elaine, Adele… . Michael searches the hotel attic, and Rebecca sulks in the cottage.”

  “Colin didna say that.”

  “Just adding color commentary. Eight-fifteen—look, Colin tried to catch Adele out. He has in parentheses, when Adele walked through the village she noticed the toy Queen was gone from the store window. And here, he asked Jerry what time Hilary got to the bar… . You’re sure Colin doesn’t have a secret urge to be a policeman?”

  “He’s always liked detective novels.”

  A pattern, Rebecca thought. The pattern she was looking for might be right on that page, but she couldn’t see it. She was too close to it. She was too close to Michael. They leaned together cautiously, not speaking. A valedictory pose, like Bogart and Bergman on the runway in Casablanca. Neither of them had broken the dignity of the moment by blurting, “Talk to me, tell me what you feel, spill your guts.”

  A knock on the door heralded Mark, reporting that Jerry was back, and that the police car had lingered in the street until he’d gone into the hotel, there to be shadowed by Grant, unless it was Grant’s duty tonight to shadow the students.

  After the ITV Scottish news—nothing about the Rudesburn murder—everyone went silently and separately to bed. Rebecca tossed and turned, not quite dreaming, not quite remembering, and finally lay in a stupor as sunlight leaked into the room. But she heard no bells, no singing, no doors shutting. It was only when Michael turned off the alarm the instant it rang that she realized he, too, had been lying awake.

  At least Monday promised to be another clear and sunny day. The
herd of reporters diminished and the number of tourists increased, as did that of police shepherds. Mark and Michael started prying boards and heaving blocks of stone at the crypt door while Jerry wandered from church to infirmary and back wafting cloying clouds of smoke. He seemed sure that the person who had turned him in yesterday had been the same one who had revealed his assignation with Sheila, and his bellicose remarks to Elaine left no doubt who he thought the culprit was. Elaine responded in kind. Tony looked on, dryly amused. Hilary and Dennis ignored all three.

  Rebecca set up shop on a warm stretch of the southern cloister wall, by the broken doorway of the refectory. From here she could keep an eye on the infirmary trench and the door of the transept. No way was she going to sit alone in the cottage, trapped in the sights and sounds of another era. “Come and pull me out in an hour,” she told Michael.

  “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din,” he said with a salute.

  She took a deep breath, like a scuba diver going off the side of the boat, and opened the portfolio.

  At first there was only the parchment dry and dusty on her fingertips and the spiky script crawling before her eyes. The seal of Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. The seal of somebody Douglas, a half-hearted ghost of an imprint. The seal of a Salkeld, a descendent of the Salkeld done so cruelly to death on this very spot. The seals of Howard and Sadler, English nobles.

  The script writhed, words like worms burrowing deep in her senses. A cloud passed over the sun—no, the world darkened into night. Torches burned in the corners of Rebecca’s eyes. The odors of sweat and ale filled her nostrils. Anne, prioress of Rudesburn, come into the court.

  The slender figure was clothed all in white, her face paler than her garments, only the dark eyes alive, frightened but too proud to show fear. Anne Douglas, prioress. Thomas Elliot, commendator, tried in absentia. Unlawful carnal knowledge—aha, Adele was right. If Anne and Thomas didn’t have something going, then they were suspected of it. Convenient, that Thomas had disappeared, that he couldn’t testify either for or against his lover.

  Summoning spirits. Witchcraft. The holy spirit of Marjory, first prioress. Demons, perverted woman, lies, all lies. Committed to close questioning… . Rebecca felt her head moving in a gesture of negation. Close questioning. They’d tortured the woman. Pigs.

  Relics of superstition and idolatry—St. Margaret’s veil, St. Aidan’s cross, a finger bone of St. Kentigern. A relic of the traitor de Brus. Church plate and jewels. Where are they, they must be commended to His Majesty… .

  The traitor de Brus… . To the English, Robert the Bruce would have been considered a traitor. It was here. It really was here. The parchments quivered in Rebecca’s hands. She knew she was crouched over the papers, pencil and notebook clutched in her hand. She knew she was in the chapter house, roof complete, columns whole, torches burning smokily and smearing the eager faces of the men. Men in the convent, the white-clad figures banished to the kitchens except for the one, Anne, swaying weakly but facing her tormentors, chin up, eyes pools of shadow and pain and pride.

  Did any of the men step forward to support her? Even the one named Douglas? There was his name. Alexander Douglas, cousin to the defendant, at first standing among her accusers and then gone, wiped from the record. Rebecca felt her teeth grinding. Coward. But what could he have done?

  Her neck hurt. Her whole body hurt. Since Anne withstood questioning she was possessed of demons. She was proved a witch. She wouldn’t give them the relics or the treasure. Inventory attached. Did that mean they found it and took it anyway? Anne—what did they do to Anne? What was the verdict of the court?

  “Rebecca!”

  “Ah, sweet Jesus, spare me!” Sparks swirled from the torches. The convent burned. Women screamed, and horses stampeded through the cloister.

  “Rebecca! Wake up! Graham just rang with news from London.”

  Michael sat on the wall beside her, hands clenched on her arms. Other faces hung blurred in the sunlight behind him. “Oh,” Rebecca croaked, and cleared her throat. “Oh, hi.”

  “What the hell is her problem?” Jerry demanded.

  “Reality displacement,” explained Michael.

  “Hmph,” said Jerry.

  Adele nodded understanding. Hilary looked as if she’d just seen Rebecca sprout an extra head. Mark’s brows angled up his forehead. Dennis’s mouth hung open.

  “London?” asked Rebecca. “Thomas Elliot?”

  Elaine gazed into the distance, bored to tears. Tony raised his camera. Great, Rebecca thought, she was being immortalized like this. She straightened her hair.

  “Aye, Thomas Elliot,” replied Michael. “The assistant at the Library couldna find any record of him workin’ for Edward VI.”

  “Then it was him in the cellar!” Jerry chortled.

  “No so fast. The story aboot Edward’s a flannel for the folk at home. Elliot’s in other records—those of Newgate prison. He was hanged in 1548 for highway robbery.”

  “What?” Rebecca exclaimed. “The same Elliot?”

  “He rated a mention because he was a minor Scottish noble reduced to robbin’ coaches in Surrey. You ken the story—barbarian Scots, raise the drawbridges. It’s our Elliot, right enough.”

  “So he ran for it, apparently without the treasure,” Rebecca mused. “I’d almost wondered if Anne had killed him herself, for collaborating maybe, or for ripping off the goods, or simply for doing her wrong.”

  Adele frowned, shaking her head, no doubt wondering why her psychic receivers had fuzzed out on her.

  “The night afore he died,” Michael went on, “Elliot confessed to his jailer that he’d killed a man in a convent.”

  A ripple of aha! went around the group. “He didn’t bother to give the man’s name, did he?” asked Dennis hopefully.

  “No, more’s the pity. And he didna bother to explain why he left his ring on the corpse’s hand. If he did.”

  “Restitution for a sudden death? That ring reminds me of the coins on Miss Fitzgerald’s eyes.” Mackenzie sat down on Rebecca’s other side and signaled Tony to put away the camera. “Tell me about the treasure.”

  “The priory plate, mostly, and probably the odd jeweled reliquary,” answered Rebecca. “Although Hertford and crew did put on a show of wanting the relics—to destroy them, I bet. Among them something I assume was the heart of the Bruce. Anne wouldn’t give them up even when they tortured her. I don’t know whether the English got them in the end or not. There’s supposed to be an inventory… .” Warily, with only her fingernails, she flipped through the sheets of parchment.

  “Did Anne die under torture?” Adele asked faintly.

  “There’s a page missing,” Rebecca replied. “This one ends in mid-sentence, and this one, with the signatures, is just legal formulas. No inventory. No verdict. I don’t know how or when she died.”

  Now Adele looked worried. Tony held his camera on his hip like a woman holding a child. Michael leaned back, his fingers enlaced around his knee, and exhaled through pursed lips. “A page missin’. Back to the attic, then.”

  Rebecca folded the trial records into the portfolio, added her embarrassingly messy notes, and asked Mackenzie to put them in Laurence’s safe. “No more today?” he asked.

  “I got the heart out of them. No pun intended. No more today.” She stood. Her knees wobbled in separate directions. “I wonder if the body in the cellar is Alexander Douglas.”

  “Who?”

  She explained, concluding, “Just a hunch. He disappears awfully abruptly. And Elliot confessed to a murder. Maybe Alexander attacked first.”

  “Understandable, if he caught Elliot scarperin’,” said Michael. “Well done, lass. Come on, I’ll help you wi’ lunch.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and they headed toward the kitchen.

  Mackenzie and Devlin sat with Jerry on the porch of the church while the afternoon sky filled with white and gray thunderheads. At last, worn away by the spate of inconsequential braggadocio, they dism
issed him and invited Adele to join them. She was released unperturbed at quitting time, and proceeded to fix smothered steak and rice for dinner. Devlin and Mackenzie skulked around the ruins until the first shower of rain drove them away. Michael and Mark spent a fruitless hour in the hotel attic. Rebecca wrote yet another report for the Archeological Network, tempted to conclude, “So far no students have been murdered, but stay tuned.”

  That night the soothing sound of rain on the roof put Rebecca right to sleep; she didn’t even lie awake weighing the significance of Michael’s neither perfunctory nor enthusiastic good night kiss.

  She dreamed she was standing at the altar of the church. The whole, undamaged altar, swathed in a richly embroidered cloth. The Monymusk reliquary lay amid a dazzling display of silver plate, salver, paten, chalice… . She awoke, blinking, in pitch blackness. The inventory might be in the attic. Everyone had heard her say so. The attic should be watched.

  The clock read one-fifteen. The rain had stopped. Rebecca padded cautiously through the house. From the kitchen window the priory was invisible. From the dining room window a few lights gleamed in the village. A gusty wind tossed the branches of the trees. Raindrops spattered on the roof like a throw of dice. No, all was quiet… .

  Wait a minute. Those weren’t car lights reflecting in the attic skylights. No cars were passing. Someone was up there with a flashlight. The bastard moved fast. She caromed off the doorway and catapulted into the bedroom. “Michael, wake up! Someone’s in the attic!”

  His bleary look indicated she had bats in her attic.

  “Michael, I can see a flashlight in the skylights. Someone’s up there looking for the missing page!”

  That roused him. Again they threw on shirts and jeans and rushed outside, this time into darkness. Puddles ambushed them on the driveway and the gutter beside the call box ran with water. Rebecca was so hot with anger at the unseen culprit that she was surprised the water didn’t turn to steam around her boots. “Every time I’ve turned around this week I’ve fallen over a cop,” she hissed, “and now there’s not one in sight.”

  “You knock up Grant. I’ll go on up, catch them afore they leg it.”