Dust to Dust

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Mackenzie pierced her with a sharp look. Devlin got out his notebook. The surgeon doctor inspected Hilary’s head. “Well, aren’t you the lucky one. Your hair softened the blow.”

  Mackenzie sat down hard on a chair and demanded, “What happened?”

  “I was sitting here drawing,” Hilary said.

  “Don’t try to talk,” Mark told her.

  “Talk,” ordered Mackenzie, ignoring Mark’s glare. “Did you hear anyone come in?”

  “No. I was too intent on my work, I guess. All I know is suddenly something hit me and I saw stars. I didn’t know you literally saw stars.”

  “Excitation of the nerve endings,” said the doctor. “Follow my pen.”

  Obediently Hilary’s eyes followed the tip of the pen. “My back was to the window,” she went on. “Someone could’ve climbed in. There’s no screen.”

  “Screen?” queried Devlin, confused by the Americanism.

  “Or it could’ve been someone in the house. I don’t know.” She nestled into Mark’s lap. Reluctantly he gave up one of her hands to the doctor.

  “Mr. Owen, where were you?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Dennis and I were upstairs trying to fix his cassette player—his James Galway tape was dragging. Adele was in the kitchen defrosting the refrigerator. We didn’t hear anything, not with the music going on and off.”

  “The lady’s no in the hoose noo,” said a constable from the back row. “The fridge is all clean and dry,” Dennis added. “She didn’t go running out and leave it half-done.”

  Devlin asked, “Did Adele do Hilary over for findin’ the ring?”

  Rebecca looked over the papers scattered on the table. The two notebooks they’d had in the crypt were indeed gone. She dumped the portfolio and told Mackenzie about the latest theft. “How will that affect your work?” he asked.

  “I’ve stared at those inscriptions so long I could sit down and write them all out again, even without the photographs. Even without the originals, for that matter.” Mackenzie was waiting. “Losing the notes is a nuisance, sure, but the loss won’t hurt us,” Rebecca concluded. “More power to the jerk, if he thinks he can get any more out of those inscriptions than I have.”

  Another constable came in the front door. “All the expedition members are in the bar—Kleinfelter, Wright, Vavra, and Garrity. And a right mob of other people. Everyone went out to use the loo at least once, sometimes twice. No one can verify anyone else’s alibi.”

  “It’s a dark night,” said Devlin. “With so many of our people watchin’ the priory, any one of the folk in the pub could’ve slipped in here without bein’ noticed.”

  “A lucky killer?” asked Michael. “Or just a damned smart one?”

  Mackenzie sat tapping his fingertips on the table. His face looked like a mask, so tight and still was its expression. Only his eyes moved, glittering obsidian blades flaying each face before him.

  Rebecca stepped back so that she was squarely against Michael’s chest. Her knees were weak, but she wasn’t about to collapse in front of Mackenzie. Devlin opened and shut his notebook. The doctor got up and brushed off his trousers. The distant wail of a siren broke the silence.

  1

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Despite the threatening clouds of the night before, Tuesday morning dawned clear and innocent. “Fooled you!” the bright sunshine seemed to say. By late afternoon the students were mopping sweat from their faces and talking wistfully of iced drinks. “The pub has ice-cold Coke,” Michael told Mark.

  “Yeah,” Mark said with a laugh, “without an ice cube in it!”

  Michael looked puzzled. “But it’s already cold.”

  Rebecca batted affectionately at his back and walked across the priory lawns toward the hotel. Not only did she need to take the day’s printouts to the safe, but also she wanted to see if Laurence would cash a check for her.

  “With pleasure,” he said.

  Rebecca leaned on the reception desk and watched Laurence count out forty-five pounds. From the pub emanated Jerry’s boasts, the equivalent of a gorilla thumping its chest. “How’s Grant?”

  “Fit as ever. Winnie collected him at noon. She’s always accused him of having a hard head.”

  “A Scottish trait,” said Rebecca. Laurence smiled, but only with his mouth. His eyes had dark circles beneath them. She went on, “So Adele was in here last night carrying on about cosmic biorhythms?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid most of the tourists and reporters either run from her or treat her like a performing monkey. Not that she notices. She could’ve coshed Grant and Hilary before she came in here, I suppose.”

  “And Tony, Elaine, and Jerry?”

  “Coming and going all evening. Mackenzie’s threatening to keep the lot of us under close surveillance.”

  “I thought he already was.” Rebecca folded the money into her pocket. “The trap failed. That’s all there is to it. I was hoping we’d catch Jerry and kill two birds with one stone—don’t let Tony hear me talk about killing birds… .” Again they shared a weak smile. “If Jerry wanted to look at my notes he could just ask me for them.”

  “Paranoia?” asked Laurence. “Megalomania?” He slammed the cash drawer and reached for a newspaper. “Have you seen today’s Sunburn?”

  “No. What has Jenkins… .” She saw the headline, “More gold artifacts linked to Rudesburn murder.” “Great. Now we’ll get looters with metal detectors and backhoes. It’ll make Henry’s army look like a Sunday school class.”

  “The last I saw of Mackenzie,” Laurence told her, dropping his voice and looking around conspiratorially, “he was ready to reinstate the death penalty. Devlin says they’re charging Jenkins to the hilt.”

  “Making him a scapegoat? Well, he asked for it, prancing around in that sheet last night. I don’t care if that table knife was only a prop.”

  “But he isn’t the killer.” The phone rang and Laurence answered it. “No, we haven’t any rooms for the Festival. May I recommend the George in Melrose?” He hung up and turned back to Rebecca. “Jenkins wanted your notes for the same reason the killer had done, to find the treasure. Except he claims he would’ve turned it in after he had his story.”

  “Sure,” said Rebecca. She picked up Hilary’s repaired sweater and left the hotel just as a group of tourists came in. Across the street Devlin and Mackenzie stood in the door of the Craft Centre, deep in conversation with a tight-lipped Elaine, Tony taking pictures of all three of them.

  Rebecca went into the toy shop. She paid for the quaich, bought wrapping paper and ribbon, and made a face at the clock in the window. Eight o’clock, it had read the night of the murder. She’d seen Elaine, she’d seen Winnie, she’d heard voices in the Plantagenet van… . Maybe someone had slipped into the shop and changed the time. But why bother?

  From the driveway Rebecca saw Mark and Hilary sitting on the cloister wall. She relaxed against him, her head nestled on his shoulder, his arm snug around her waist. His hand stayed contentedly in place, not using her flank as a base for territorial incursions. Rebecca smiled fondly at them, patted the bonnet of Michael’s Fiat, and went inside the cottage.

  Upstairs Dennis was singing “Greensleeves” to his flute tape. Water ran in the bathroom; that must be Adele. Michael was in the bedroom, sitting on the bed and considering Colin’s notepad.

  Rebecca shut the door, laid down Hilary’s sweater, and looked at him like a child looking at a display of sweets. Shining antennae of reddish-brown hair framed his face. His chest and shoulders were a slender Greek torso above his jeans. His lashes were dark, making parentheses on his cheeks as he looked down at the book. His brows angled upward. “Will I do?” he asked.

  “How are you at backrubs?” she responded, even though she already knew.

  “I took a first in backrubs. Sit you doon.”

  Rebecca sat down. His hands rubbed her neck and shoulders, the touch of one only a bit weaker than the other. His wound was healing fast; no wonder he’d
abandoned the sling today. She luxuriated in his touch, just a simple touch, nothing complicated. “Michael, will we always be friends?”

  “Eh? Why not?” His hands didn’t falter.

  She saw him keeping the silver quaich as Mark kept the silver belt buckle, not in agony, but in dry, distant sorrow. “Why not?” she repeated.

  She was tired. Her head flopped on her neck. Michael embraced her, his breath warm on her cheek. She held his arms tightly around her. Someone knocked on the door, and Dennis called, “It’s your turn to cook.”

  They had no choice but to laugh. They got up and went about their duties, cooking, cataloging, record-keeping, locking doors. Night came. In the wee hours shouts echoed from the priory. Rebecca looked out the window to see the police removing several trespassers whose nervous movements indicated that they’d encountered one of the resident spooks.

  Wednesday morning Rebecca helped Jerry and Michael repeat Francis Kerr’s survey of the crypt. They found a minor reliquary or two hidden in niches, and some coffins in doubtful preservation. Except for the broken brick wall, everything was as Kerr had seen it fifty years ago.

  Mark placed the last of Anne’s bones into the box. “I’ll take them to the Museum,” Michael said, “when we’re ready to close doon.”

  Mark wiped his hands on his jeans, eyeing the large skull and the miniature one as if he expected them to start speaking. “Jerry, I’ll go on out to the infirmary trench and help with the triangulations.”

  “Huh?” Jerry was propped in a corner like a shop window mannequin, scrubbing at his glasses. “Oh, okay, sure.”

  Exchanging tight smiles with Michael, Rebecca and Mark went outside. Three men were inspecting the chapter house, measuring the cracks where tiers of stone had slumped away from each other. Or rather, two men were inspecting the stone; the other shot a keen glance toward Mark and Rebecca as they walked by, then an equally sharp look across the road to where the tents and booths, grandstands and portable toilets of the Festival were starting to sprout.

  “One of Mackenzie’s finest?” asked Mark under his breath.

  “Looks like it. Here, have a tape measure. I’ll do the soil samples.”

  All afternoon delivery trucks vied for space with the tour buses. Tony, with Dennis’s help, maneuvered the Plantagenet van into a choice location. Laurence, Nora, and Bridget ran in and out settling disputes, signing purchase orders, giving interviews. The Johnston children and Winnie hung a banner outside the shop: “Official Borders Festival Souvenirs Here. Open Late.” Grant sat in his garden, ostensibly resting and recovering, but in reality keeping an eye on the various reporters who bounced like badminton birdies from hotel to Craft Centre to Festival field and back. D-Day, Rebecca thought, had been less complicated.

  After dinner she leaned on the railing of the footbridge, watching white clouds like mounds of meringue float in a sky so blue it made her heart ache. I can’t leave here, she thought. But then, with or without Michael, she wouldn’t have to. It was the lack of a job that could drive her away.

  A fast-food wrapper floated down the stream. She frowned. “Slob.”

  “Aye.” Mackenzie materialized at her shoulder, carrying Lancelot in the crook of his arm. The cat was obviously torn between enjoying being chauffeured around the sights and having to act suitably disdainful of humans.

  “Between the murder and Jenkins’s story about the gold,” Rebecca said, “half of Britain is here.” A bobby escorted several young men carrying metal detectors off the lawn. They gesticulated, complaining in voluble French. “And some of the Continent,” she added.

  Banners snapped in the wind, the evening sun intensifying the reds and golds, the blues and whites of the Scottish flags. Mackenzie stroked Lancelot, who abandoned all pretense, closed his eyes to slits, and purred.

  “Michael played at the Festival last year,” Rebecca went on. “There was music, dancing, games—even sheep dog trials.” Lancelot looked dubiously upward at the word “dog”. “The Festival dates to the Middle Ages, to a yearly Lammas Fair at the ford in the Gowan. Even into Victorian times young couples would try to catch a glimpse of the ghost, although I gather the object was not to see her. But she doesn’t curse lovers, we curse ourselves.” The burn chuckled beneath the bridge. The willow branches danced between air and water. “I wish it was over,” Rebecca concluded. “Over for Anne, for us, for the killer. But no one’s even tried to run away.”

  Mackenzie set Lancelot down and said, “Run along”, to the cat or to her, Rebecca wasn’t sure.

  The cat stretched, licked symbolically at the human scent on his fur, then trotted off toward the cottage where Guinevere was sitting on the back porch. On the sidewalk before the hotel Michael and Laurence conferred with a Tshirted man lugging a speaker and a coil of wire. All three heads swiveled to follow a buxom young woman dressed in eighteenth century garb of the “saucy wench” variety. Laughing, Rebecca, too, headed for the cottage.

  She used Mark’s knife to cut the bright-colored paper and ribbon with which she wrapped the quaich. As she folded the knife and restored it to her jacket pocket, she resolved to wear the sweater-vest all day long tomorrow. I owe Michael a decision, she thought. He owes me. Her mouth was sour, as though her dinner salad had been dressed only with vinegar.

  She lured the cats back outside with the remaining ribbon and then searched the cottage. No one was hiding under any beds. She locked both doors and walked up to the hotel, where the nightly ceilidh had spilled down the hall into the lobby. She shut herself in Laurence’s office and finished transcribing the inventory—silver paten, jeweled chalice, wow—until her eyes spontaneously closed.

  That night she dreamed again of silver dishes held aloft by transparent white hands. But the light failed, and hoofbeats rattled the darkness… . She awoke to hear rain on the windows. “The Festival!”

  “All Scottish functions are waterproofed,” said Michael’s sleepy voice from the other bed.

  “Happy Birthday,” she told him. “How’s it feel to be thirty?”

  He groaned. “Watch oot, I’ll be trippin’ ower my long gray beard. If you’d hand me my cane, please… .”

  She threw her pillow at him. The alarm rang. By the time Hilary and Adele washed the breakfast dishes, the rain had stopped, the clouds cleared, and the day was as clean and bright as a child on his first day of school.

  Rebecca looked around at elevenses and realized that like Sherlock Holmes’s dog that did nothing in the night, Mackenzie, Devlin, and their uniformed cohorts were conspicuous by their absence. After lunch, instead of returning to the barricading operations at the infirmary trench—all they needed was for a tourist to break a leg—she detoured to the hotel and caught Laurence between rushing upstairs with a pot of tea and downstairs with clean linen. “Mackenzie and Devlin checked out, said they’d been called to Edinburgh, some argy bargy with a cabinet minister… . Nora, more loo paper, number seven!”

  Oh, so we’re under surveillance, are we? Rebecca thought waspishly. She wasn’t even sure if any plainclothes people were still around. After Jerry called an early end to the day, she asked Michael his opinion.

  He stood on the footbridge looking calculatingly from Law to priory to village to cottage. Tony and Elaine disappeared inside the Plantagenet van, Dennis on their heels. Jerry went into the hotel. Hilary stood outside the shop, clutching loaves of bread and fresh vegetables, while Mark kicked a soccer ball for the children. Adele went into the cottage, rolling up her sleeves. Grant strolled across the priory lawn amid the tourists at last allowed to roam freely there. “Look,” said Rebecca, “he’s wearing one of those radios on his lapel. To keep in touch with Festival security?”

  They looked at each other. Mackenzie was a poker player. Right now he had most of his cards face-down. Rebecca didn’t appreciate that at all.

  “Why,” said Michael, “do I feel as though I had a target painted between my shoulder blades?”

  The sun slipped down the western sky. The
air chilled. No paratroopers or tank convoys appeared with Mackenzie and swagger stick in the lead. They went inside. Michael changed into kilt and sweater.

  They ate Hilary’s fresh-from-the-can spaghetti dinner, minding their manners like children under the eye of a strict grandmother. Afterwards Rebecca piled the dirty dishes in the sink while Dennis and Adele cleared the table. “… business administration,” the young man was saying.

  “But don’t you find history calling to you?” responded Adele.

  Michael produced his pipes. “Want to hold them?” he asked Hilary. “Like this, drones on the shoulder.”

  “They’re heavy!” she exclaimed.

  Adele went on, “My son started out in political science. But when he was at Oxford, he found the cosmic biorhythms so compelling he took some courses in Roman Britain.”

  “The place does get to you,” Dennis admitted, and added teasingly, “I could always minor in otherworldly experiences, I suppose.”

  Rebecca peered out the window. No, that figure striding across the priory lawn wasn’t Devlin but Tony, applying his light meter to the contrast between sunshine and shadow.

  “The pipes are African blackwood,” Michael told Hilary. “They were my grandfather’s. The older ones have much better tone.”

  “Aged, like wine or cheese?” asked Mark.

  “Exactly.”

  Adele and Dennis went upstairs, she saying quite seriously, “I know an ashram in Arizona where you can study the two worlds, the seen and the unseen. I’ll give you the address.”

  “Thanks,” said Dennis, and rolled his eyes toward Rebecca.

  Michael tuned his pipes, trying to play softly, but still eardrums and windows bulged. Within minutes everyone fled. Rebecca hung the towel over the cooker and went into the bedroom. Michael tucked his pipes under his arm and followed. “Are you all right, love?”