“That he did.” Devlin drained his glass and set it down with a thunk. “And he said he was sick of bein’ poor. I pointed out that most of us could use a rise in income, but we don’t steal and kill and vandalize. He laughed at me, asked me what I thought Kleinfelter was doin’.”
“Oh God,” Rebecca moaned. “Jerry.”
“In a way,” said Michael, “Tony did kill Sheila by mistake, like he attacked the wrong cat. If Jerry’d been perfectly honest, Tony might never have thought he and Sheila were plannin’ to do him ower.”
“I don’t know whether Jerry came here for the relic heart or the treasure,” Mark said, “but I bet by the time Sheila got her hooks into him, he wanted both, just as greedy for money as for academic glory.”
Hilary added, “A lot of successful men think they’re above the law.”
“Jerry?” said Grant’s voice from the door. “He’s fair potted noo. Had to charge him wi’ drunk and disorderly. He’s sleepin’ it off in the storeroom behind the shop.”
“Closest thing Rudesburn has to a jail,” Laurence explained, and pulled out a chair for the bobby. Grant declined, and went off yawning.
The yawn was infectious. Everyone gaped in chorus, like baby birds begging for food. The cats climbed onto a bench and with many pawings and stretchings went to sleep. Mackenzie pushed back his chair. “Would it help if we charged Dr. Kleinfelter with withholding evidence? He never did tell us Miss Fitzgerald was showing him the coins—afraid we’d connect him with her scheme, I imagine.”
“I’m afraid Jerry is our problem,” answered Rebecca.
“And one we’ll be settlin’ right and proper.” Michael’s smile had the glint of a claymore in it.
“Right.” Mackenzie offered his hand to Rebecca. “I apologize, Dr. Reid, for not taking you into our confidence. Our first trap failed because too many people knew about it. I thought a second trap, which no one knew about, might work. We didn’t expect you to force the issue like you did—we’d simply staked out the grounds, hoping the killer would walk into our arms.”
“And he did,” Devlin added. “Between your and Michael’s work tonight, Rebecca, we now have enough evidence to convict.”
Rebecca returned Mackenzie’s cool, dry handclasp, amused by the satisfaction in his dark eyes. She was too glad to see the end of the mystery to be resentful of being used—not that she was going to let him know that. “The reason I was in danger, Chief Inspector, is because you had taken me into your confidence. Tony couldn’t decide which was more important, that I was a threat to him or the route to the treasure.” She heard, smelled, tasted again those words spattering her face like acid, but she’d expended all her shudders.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” Devlin said. The two detectives strolled away, headed back to Galashiels and the Mount Everest of paperwork awaiting them.
They all stood watching the empty doorway. It was as if Devlin and Mackenzie had been magnets raked through a pile of iron filings, pulling everyone and everything into the same pattern. But now they were gone. For a moment Rebecca was confused, uncertain in which direction to turn. Then Michael took her hand, and she knew.
1
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Michael and Mark opened the lobby doors for Rebecca and Hilary. They stepped out into cool, fresh darkness. Rudesburn dozed. Only the porch lights of the cottage still shone; Dennis’s own exploits must have worn him out. The moonlight enchanted the priory into stone lace. A white shape glistened briefly inside the church and then vanished.
Inside the cottage, Mark and Hilary tiptoed upstairs. Michael and Rebecca stood in their bedroom looking at each other.
“I told you it was a’ quite simple,” he said.
“You did no such thing.”
“It was no so complicated as you had it. You forgot Occam’s Razor.”
“We,” she emphasized, “forgot to be a team. That’s why it got complicated.” She gathered up her toiletries and a towel. “Did you mean what you said, about my never going anywhere without you again?”
“Aye, that I did.”
His brows and mouth were set in the wry, alert angle that defined Michael. His hands rested on his hips, his chin thrust forward. She reached into her dresser drawer and handed him the gift-wrapped package. “We’re lucky, you know, to have almost lost each other. That kind of shock really cuts through the illusion. Happy birthday. I love you.”
She fled into the bathroom, not bothering to turn on the light. Moonlight suited her grainy eyes much better. She brushed her teeth and was gingerly soaping herself in the shower when Michael’s voice asked, “Room for one more?” Before she could invite him in he was standing with her in the warm cascade of water, clasping her tightly to himself from thorax to thigh, his toothpaste-scented breath bathing her face. Her bruises purred instead of protesting. “Thank you for the quaich, love. We’ll share a dram at the weddin’.”
“Our wedding?” she asked.
“Should we have a go at it? We can try tae no be so defensive, eh? A’ we can do is try—naething’s certain.”
“No. Yes. I mean… .” His hands stroked her back. Her nerves weren’t stunned into insensibility after all, but stretched and preened like a cat’s. Common sense fled and she groped after it. “My salary runs out in September. I can cash in my plane ticket, and I have a savings account back in the States, but… .”
“Mmm?” he asked, nibbling her neck.
“Listen to me!” She smeared suds over his chest.
Reluctantly he backed a hairsbreadth away. “Aye?”
“I don’t have a job here. It’s like I told you last winter, if I didn’t get my Ph.D. I didn’t want to blame it on you. If I end up waitressing or clerking in a department store, I don’t want to blame you. I don’t want to be jealous of your job.”
Shadows, no longer threatening, softened his face. Water streamed down his shoulders, glistening in the silvery light. “I’ll talk tae Graham the morn. Maybe we can share the same job.”
“What?” She dropped the soap.
He retrieved it and put it in its dish. “He’ll need two workers tae sift through the data frae this dig.”
“But only one salary?”
“It’s a place tae start. We’ve been cheese-parin’ a’ our lives. If we canna manage, who can?”
“You’re a lunatic.”
“Aye, that I am. For lovin’ you.” He turned off the water and started rubbing her down with the towel, gently, in deference to her collection of aches and pains. “Are you tired, lass?”
“Aren’t you? You’re a whole day over thirty… .”
“Come tae bed, and I’ll show you thirty.”
The house was dark and so quiet Rebecca could hear the breeze in the willow trees and the laughter of the stream. The bedsheets were cool. Michael’s skin was warm. “No, it’s not complicated,” she murmured. “All we have to do is love each other.”
“It’s settled, then,” he whispered against her lips.
“Yes.” Like water running down a drain, fear, pain and doubt spiraled away into the darkness and disappeared.
*
Rebecca swam out of unconsciousness the next morning to find herself entangled not only with the bedclothes but also with Michael. She smiled; their reunion last night had been more tender and more clumsy than their reunion in June. Then they’d been separated only by distance.
Michael pried open an eye. Slowly reality registered. “You’re a’ right then? I didna hurt you?”
“Unorthodox treatment for cuts and bruises,” she told him, “but effective. I feel great. Let’s go get Jerry’s head on a pike.”
“Then, my Amazon, I’d best be gettin’ mysel’ and Anne to Edinburgh.” And get himself to Edinburgh he did, leading the rental lorry with its macabre burden of bones and foam rubber into the clear morning light.
Rebecca went back to the infirmary trench with only part of her mind on the tile floor and connected drain. The future wasn’t as simp
le as moonlit delirium had made it seem. If nothing happened in a vacuum, neither was anything felt in a vacuum. Living on love was a nice beginning, but all too often the wolf at the door delivered reality C.O.D. Even so, Michael was right. They had a place to start. They had to try.
It was almost noon when she carried yet another bucket of dirt to the spoil heap behind the chapter house and glanced toward the cottage. All right! The red Fiat was just turning into the driveway. Rebecca dropped the bucket and ran. Laurence appeared from the church. Grant, wearing civvies as befit his assignment as dig assistant, and Dennis carried an array of cameras around the dormitory.
“Tally-ho!” Michael called. He skirted a group of tourists and nodded to Bridget, this morning’s Little Bo Peep.
“Tally-ho?” Rebecca asked. “What did you get from Graham?”
He pulled a box from his pocket. “Permission to finish this farce and a belt buckle and chape from the dig at Berwick to flush out the dirty fox. Sixteenth century bronze. Jerry’ll fancy these, right enough, but it’s no important enough for him to get the wind up.”
The metal pieces were still encrusted with dirt and their own greenish patina. “A chape?” asked Dennis. “Oh, the hunk of metal that goes on the opposite end of the belt from the buckle.”
“But how… ?” Laurence asked.
“We put the buckle in undisturbed soil in the drain,” Michael explained, “then we plant the chape in that eighteenth century posthole a few inches away where the strata are mucked aboot. An honest man’d swear and moan and admit that no matter how much the pieces look like they belong together, he canna say they do.”
“Because he disna have the stratigraphic evidence tae support a match,” said Grant. “I see. Who’ll be plantin’ them?”
Rebecca took the box and handed it to Dennis. “I think Laurel Matheny’s brother should do the honors.”
First Dennis flushed, then set his jaw. “You bet. When?”
“As soon as Jerry gets his telephone call,” said Laurence. He impressed his face with nonchalance and walked toward the infirmary. “Dr. Kleinfelter? You’re wanted on the telephone.”
Mark and Hilary looked up from the drain. Jerry removed the cigar from his mouth, bent to crush it out on a column drum, thought again, and smashed it on an insignificant rock. He slouched off toward the hotel where he would no doubt find the mysterious caller had hung up.
His complexion was subtly green, his passing stare at Grant hostile. But then, he didn’t even remember the scene at the Festival last night that had forced Grant to jail him. That Tony’s arrest let him off the hook of Sheila’s murder barely seemed to penetrate his stegosaurus-like skull. His attitude suggested that he—the Napoleon of archeology—was insulted to be suspected of a petty crime.
As soon as Jerry was out of sight, the conspirators hurried toward the trench. Mark and Hilary stood aside. Grant photographed Dennis, buckle, chape, and the posthole clearly marked with a flag as an intrusive feature.
By the time Jerry returned sputtering, all was quiet on the infirmary front. Laurence had taken a circuitous route back to the hotel. Michael and Rebecca were dusting the infamous tile floor—”After you, Gaston,” she said. “Oh no, after you, Alphonse,” he returned. Dennis took a picture of Grant laying a meter stick on the surface. Mark and Hilary were back at the drain, the buckle a suggestive shape in the mud.
Jerry stopped. His moustache twitched. He said, “I’ll handle this”, took a dental pick from his pocket, and cleared the rest of the dirt from the buckle. He ordered photographs, drawings, an artifact record sheet, and finally a box. Delicately he poked the border where the different colored deposits of drain and posthole met.
“It’s past lunch time,” commented Michael.
“Then go feed your faces,” Jerry replied.
They trudged obediently toward the cottage. “I wish he’d hurry up and hang himself,” muttered Mark. “I want to go treasure-hunting.”
“We want him properly off the premises afore that,” Grant said.
“After we get Laurel cleared,” asserted Dennis.
Hilary shook her head. “I wonder how long Jerry’s been an alcoholic?”
They ate some soup Adele had fixed, spared a few sighs of sympathy mitigated by aggravation for her and Elaine, and returned to the dig. Jerry was regaling Laurence with tales of scientific derring-do. Laurence rolled his eyes toward the approaching group, his forced courtesy starting to wane.
Mark and Hilary bent over the drain, which was now cleared of mud and neatly edged. Dennis glanced at the posthole. The flag fluttered above a clearly defined, apparently untouched, border. Rebecca picked up the box. The chape lay nestled next to the buckle like a calf next to its mother. “Nice,” she exclaimed. “Do they go together, Jerry?”
“Sure do,” he replied. “No problem working through lunch when you’re on the trail of a display-quality artifact like that. That’s how it’s done, kids—persistence and expert knowledge.”
Rebecca handed the box to Michael. God, she thought. She couldn’t believe he’d really done it. But he’d gotten away with falsifying information too many times. What price glory—a Harington farthing, a silver penny, a belt buckle… .
“Dr. Kleinfelter,” said Laurence evenly, “I’m relieving you of the post of dig director. The RDG will pay you for your work, and Drs. Campbell and Reid will make sure you get credit in the official records. But your job is finished here. Please settle your bar bill at hotel registration.”
“What?” Jerry looked like a fish jerked glassy-eyed and flapping onto the deck of a ship. “What did you say?”
“We put the chape in the posthole,” Michael told him. “You took it out and smoothed over the deposit. You’re lyin’, and this time we can prove it.”
“You set me up?” Jerry lurched to his feet. A fist the size of a leg of lamb swung toward Michael’s face. Michael held his ground. “This is entrapment. I’ll sue. I’ll go to Graham, I’ll ruin your career… .”
“Graham knows all about it,” said Michael. “He suggests you give Grant here a deposition clearin’ Laurel Matheny of all your accusations. Then we can take the buckle and chape back to the Museum instead of suin’ you for falsifyin’ records. We’ll keep the scandal under the table, so to speak. You decide.”
Jerry’s face went an appalling shade of puce. He spat several no-nonsense four-letter words and swung. Michael ducked. Grant seized Jerry’s arm. “Noo, Dr. Kleinfelter, you dinna want charges o’ assault.”
“What the hell business is Matheny of yours anyway?” Jerry shouted. “She was just a cheap research assistant… .”
Dennis stepped forward, shoulders back, chin up. “She’s my sister. I’d take back that ‘cheap’ if I was you.”
Jerry’s moustache went limp and his eyes behind his glasses went blank. He growled, “I have better things to do than waste my time with a rinky-dink hole in the ground!” He stamped off. His stamps were swallowed by the soft grass. Laurence and Grant turned to each other, shook hands, and went to speed Jerry on his way.
“I stood up to him.” Dennis deflated onto the column drum.
“You did what you came here for,” Rebecca told him. There was no need to point out that his lies had compounded Tony’s; too many people had lied.
Dennis’s face crinkled into a triumphant smile.
“Will Jerry still be able to work?” Hilary asked.
“Sure,” Mark told her. “There are always jobs for rescue archeologists, following the bulldozer like seagulls following a plow. He won’t destroy the last of his career by refusing to cooperate.”
“And we were so worried about getting tarred with his brush.” Rebecca sighed and stretched, feeling one more burden lifted from her shoulders.
“Graham was on my side, Nelson on yours and Laurel’s,” said Michael. “Take note, students; a guid reputation’s like a strong kilt pin, it keeps you from embarrassment when the wind’s blowin’.”
He was as pleased with
himself as a child with a good report card. Rebecca wondered what else Graham had said. But they couldn’t discuss finances now. Later she’d sit him down and make him tell.
Soon the silver Jaguar roared off toward the neon lights of the south. Grant and Laurence, reinforced by Nora, Winnie and Bridget, returned to the dig. “We have the deposition for your sister, Dennis,” Grant reported as they started en masse toward the Law. “He admitted fiddlin’ the penny that was wi’ the skeleton, and plantin’ the disc. But he says he didna break doon the wall in the crypt on purpose. He said that’d be unprofessional.”
Amid a valedictory chorus of hoots and groans, Rebecca led the way to the low ruined wall. She looked from the wheel-cross before the church to the ruined cross higher up the hill. “I hope this is it.”
They fanned out, wielding trowels and shovels, carefully turning over loose tiles and scraping at cut stones buried in moss and ferns. The sun slipped down the western sky like a drop of molten gold. The shadows lengthened. People gathered in the Festival field.
At last Rebecca burrowed under a thick growth of heather and found a flat piece of slate. “What’s that?” Hilary asked.
“Too large to be the seat cover of a garderobe, of a medieval loo,” Rebecca replied. “That’d be higher up, anyway, in the castle walls.”
Hilary laughed. “I hope Anne didn’t hide her altar plate in a loo!”
Rebecca ferreted around the edge of the slate. Dirt and tiny heather needles seemed to be sucked away from her trowel. The space under the stone was hollow, and not with fairy caverns. “I need some strong arms!”
She was almost trampled in the masculine rush. Michael took charge, counting, “One, two, three!” The stone turned over with a reverberating crash. Beneath it was a hole. Dennis lifted the video camera and started filming. Grant, ever resourceful, handed Rebecca a flashlight. She flopped down on her stomach and shone the light within. An assortment of hot breaths tickled the back of her neck. “A pit dungeon,” she announced. “Lower me down.”
“Rebecca … ,” someone protested—Michael, she assumed. But it was his hands that grasped hers and steadied her while she slipped over the side and plopped down seven feet or so into damp, musty darkness.
Dust to Dust Page 41
