Riddle in Bones: An Abishag’s Third Mystery (The Abishag Mysteries)

by Michelle Knowlden

  “Dressing for the occasion as befits a professor’s wife,” I said with mock seriousness. “Since you weren’t born in a barn, you know that dress was ruched, not wrinkled.” I smirked. “You should see what I have planned for the soiree.” Before his frown solidified, I added, “No worries, Sebastian. I only brought clothing suited for the lab, so I started raiding your sister-in-law’s closet.”

  His face cleared. “I should have thought of that. I might meet my mother for lunch next week. I could stop by your place and pick up some things.”

  Sebastian was the best step-grandson ever. “That would be great. I’ll ask Heather to pack me a bag.” I could use a better nightgown than that old nightshirt. If Henry hung around, I should add a couple of Donovan-approved outfits. To maintain his strict dress standards for the agency.

  Practically skipping into the hall, I almost ran into Elaine and Chris arguing at the front door. Elaine dried up when she saw me.

  “Problem?” I asked politely. I don’t know why we hadn’t interviewed Elaine. She would know dirt on Chris Mayfield. I still thought the shooter was Frankie DiToro—not Mayfield—but Kat might be interested while she explored useless investigation threads.

  “No problem,” Elaine growled and slammed out of the house leaving a furnace blast of desert air in her wake.

  At that moment Kat and Dog exited their bedroom, and Kat looked with interest at Mayfield and me standing tentatively by the vibrating door. Dog looked with interest at the table set for lunch.

  Dèsirèe re-positioned a soupspoon as we slipped into our seats: Dog and Kat at either end of the table, Chris and I facing each other. A small bowl of chilled soup sat on chargers before each of us.

  “Creamy golden gazpacho,” she said. “I return with the cheese crostini after I bring Sebastian his tray.”

  I tentatively sampled the gazpacho as I had only eaten the red, chunky version where you could see all the ingredients. It only took one taste for me to fall into its thrall. Afterwards there was only silence as we madly gulped it down.

  Knowing our time limits, Kat used the break between courses to refill Chris’s lemonade glass while I occupied Dog’s attention with the platter of carved summer fruits.

  “Chris.” Kat’s brow wrinkled slightly. “Sebastian regaled us with the most extraordinary story about you.” Yes, Kat said words like “regale.”

  He choked slightly on the lemonade. “About me?”

  Kat nodded, eyes widening, her voice dropping furtively. “About the exam. The one with the shoebox bones.”

  Unheeding, Dog seemed doubtful about the fruit. I shoveled a good portion onto his plate.

  Chris shifted uncomfortably. “We had to pledge never to talk about the bones. Because, you know, the students have to come up with the answers on their own.”

  “Not anymore,” Kat said promptly. “Considering the professor’s condition, your seminar will be the last one ever given.”

  He seemed struck with her words. “I hadn’t thought about that. I wonder if that means they’ll be posting which were fakes and which were not.”

  I decided we needed to move this along. “We heard that you pretty much nailed the saint’s heel bone.”

  From the different compass points of the table, I was aware that I had probably botched the interrogation. Mayfield gaped at me in confusion, faintly saying, “I did?” Kat glared at me while Dog tapped his throat and said, “Was that a nectarine you put on my plate? You know I’m allergic to nectarines.”

  “No, you’re not,” Kat said shortly. She turned to Chris, mustering an encouraging smile. “What Leslie meant to say was that the test answer was written with authority.”

  “Fruit?” Dog said, passing him the platter. “Those may be nectarines next to the strawberries. I’m just saying.”

  Without looking at the platter, he did what most college guys did. He scraped half the platter’s fruit onto his plate.

  “Professor Telemann retrieved the tests after you saw the grade and his comments, right?” Kat asked.

  “Yeah,” he said warily, inhaling tablespoons of berries. “I did okay. Grade-wise, I mean.”

  “More than okay,” Kat said. She shot me a quelling look before I opened my mouth. Not sure what her deal was, but I knew how to interrogate a suspect. With a sigh, I settled back in my chair. Dèsirèe whirled in with a plate of crostini, set it in front of me, and whirled out again.

  I reached for one heavily laden with diced tomatoes, basil, and garlic as Kat said, “Professor Telemann was startled by the detail in your answer.”

  “In a bad way?” Chris looked troubled. “Usually they like detail, whether it’s right or wrong.”

  Around my mouthful of toasted baguette and Italian salsa, I mumbled, “Was yours right?”

  His lips compressed. Did that mean guilt, grief, shame, or irritation? “I don’t know,” he said. “With the grade I got, I figured it was mainly right. What do you guys care anyway?”

  Chris’s tone had grown steadily so strident that even Dog took notice. “None of our business,” Dog said agreeably.

  Kat shot him a dirty look, which he missed entirely as his gaze lit upon the crostini. “So you just guessed?” she asked.

  “Couldn’t have been a guess,” I said. “The test answer showed either a detailed imagining or the truth.” I stared at him critically. “You don’t look capable of imagination, so I’m guessing you know the truth.”

  “Les,” Dog and Kat said unison.

  “What’s the deal?” he demanded. “What do you care about some shin bone anyway?”

  “Heel bone,” I said.

  “Because you fought with the professor over it,” Kat said.

  The dining room atmosphere electrified while Chris stared at Kat. “Because I…” he sputtered. “What are you talking about?”

  “Sebastian heard you,” I said, nabbing another crostini and passing the plate to Kat.

  Chris’s face cleared. “Not about the test. He thought I’d gotten help, which wasn’t strictly forbidden. He wanted to know who I had talked to.”

  “So what did you say?” Kat asked. “Who talked to you?”

  He stared at the plate of crostini in Kat’s hand. “I didn’t tell him. I mean I told him that no one helped me. That I figured it out myself.”

  “But someone did help you, right?” Kat said.

  Which seemed the most amazing thing to me. Not surprising because cheating happened all the time. In large seminars like Doc T’s, technology made it even easier. I had spent my first year in college observing all the ways one could cheat, devised some improvements to the methods, and created a couple of my own. Not that I would ever cheat—not in my nature. Even when my GPA could have used help in those odd soft sciences.

  Why would he have sought help for a test where no one was expected to know the answers? In my eleven days working with Doc T, I had discovered that though persnickety about data, he was gracious about theories.

  As the silence lengthened, Kat nudged him. “Who helped you, Chris?”

  His chair scraped back. “It doesn’t matter, and I gotta go.”

  “Chris, it’s okay…” Kat started after him, but with long strides, Mayfield disappeared in a contrail of crumbs and paper napkins.

  Kat turned on me. “Are you serious? You scared him off.”

  “Me?”

  Disgruntled, she flopped into her chair. “He’s scared of something. But at least we know one thing.”

  “What?” I couldn’t think of one thing we had learned.

  “That he didn’t take that test.”

  As I gaped at her (how had she made that leap in logic?), Dog looked inquiringly around. “I’ll be eating his share of crostini if that’s okay.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I sat with Henry while Sebastian took a bathroom break, and then he headed for the kitchen to refresh his glass of iced tea. Dog disappeared into the middle bedroom for a nap and Kat took her laptop to the living room for further
research and nefarious internet security breaches.

  She seemed peeved with me. I wasn’t sure why.

  Beneath the bandages covering his wounds, Henry’s face looked more drawn. Had he been affected by first Elaine, and then Chris storming from the house? In my first duty as an Abishag wife, I had failed to maintain an atmosphere of serenity and comfort for my husband. I took his hand and tried to concentrate. A falling leaf. A trickling stream. A gentle breeze.

  Maybe his few surviving synapses fretted over past misdeeds. I thought about Mayfield’s test answer about the adulterer’s stigma branded on the heel bone. Had Doc T broken trust with the president of his college and seduced his wife? Had he loved Jennifer Eaton so much that he had compromised his honor?

  I couldn’t believe it had all been about sex, but I knew wars had been fought over such things. Helen of Troy and Guinevere had been party to bloody consequences of their own betrayals. My gaze drifted again to the gauze wrapped around Henry’s head. Another bloody consequence?

  Hearing Sebastian’s return, I released Henry’s hand and patted his cheek. My gaze momentarily snagged on a picture of my first husband Thomas and his first wife Carol.

  Ice clinking in his tea, Sebastian settled the glass on the nightstand and cracked the vertical blinds on the patio sliders. The early afternoon light relieved the gloom.

  “You think Henry’s fine with spending his last days in a stranger’s bedroom?” I asked.

  Sebastian glanced at the picture of his grandparents that had caught my attention and then to his professor. “I don’t think he knows where he is.” Although his hand brushed against Henry’s bed, his sympathetic attention rested on me. “But if he does know, he’d be okay with it. Home was where he worked. His apartment was where he went in-between.”

  “Isn’t this an in-between time?”

  “Maybe. Or could be his last great journey.”

  I picked up the picture of his grandparents, thinking that the genial man smiling with his arm comfortably around his wife was a stranger, not my first husband Thomas. “I asked Kat to find a picture of Henry’s Guinevere, Jennifer Eaton. I thought he’d like it here, but maybe Henry would prefer mules bones.”

  Sebastian laughed. “He probably would. He hadn’t seen Eaton in what—20, 25 years? His current passion was definitely mule bones.”

  My thoughts returned to lunch, thinking that Sebastian knew Doc T better than anyone. Abruptly I decided he should know what we had discovered. “Kat doesn’t believe Chris Mayfield took the seminar test on the shoebox bones.”

  Sebastian’s eyes narrowed. “Then who did?”

  “You were there. Did you see Mayfield?”

  “There were over two hundred students in that class.” He frowned as if trying to recall but finally shook his head. “I can’t remember seeing Mayfield. I remember Dez meeting me at the student union before class. She had an appointment with Henry that morning. A bunch of us went to a Mexican restaurant after the test including Mayfield, and Dez showed up after we ordered. I remember Elaine Didderly at the restaurant, because she complained about the pineapple in the salsa.”

  “Why? Pineapple is great in salsa.”

  “That’s what I told her,” he said. We grinned at each other, and then something he said niggled me.

  “Why was Dèsirèe seeing Doc T? I thought she’d left college the previous year.”

  He blinked. “I don’t know. You’re right—she’d already moved to Palm Springs by then. Maybe something to do with the work when she was an intern?”

  Feeling the need for answers, I said, “You okay here? I should ask Dèsirèe about the appetizer thing we’re doing this afternoon.”

  A flash of irritation crossed Sebastian’s face. Maybe the comings and goings in a dying man’s house bothered him, but if he knew Kat and I were investigating again, he would be more than irritated. He only said, “Don’t forget your afternoon nap.”

  As I walked through the living room, I saw Kat’s laptop but no Kat. I did find Dèsirèe rolling out pastry dough. When I entered the kitchen, she said, “I hung a dress in your room that will dilate your guests’ eyes.”

  I tried not to laugh. Her language mistakes sometimes rang true. “Thanks. May I ask you a question?”

  She nodded.

  I wished Kat could witness my interrogation technique. Never was I so adroit. “I understand you met with Doctor Telemann late last Fall.”

  She cocked her head. “That is so. I had time off, and he often pestered me to visit.”

  Pestering was an odd word, a potentially suggestive word. “You had a relationship with him?” Again I was pleased at my careful turn of phrase. Kat may have thought me too direct, but perhaps the French preferred a direct approach.

  She stalled momentarily, suspending her deft manipulation of pastry. “Relationship? Not an intimate one, but friends, yes. He wanted refreshment on matters of our research at the Institute. He planned a similar project for this summer.” She carefully cut the pastry into triangles.

  “You worked on mule bones?” I couldn’t picture the French girl carting boxes of mule bones into the lab.

  Wrinkling her nose, she shook her head. Of course she hadn’t. “I read many journals and records of land grants. Professor Telemann wanted me to explain my notes. He not always comprehend my English.”

  I bet he had not.

  Time to get sneaky. With my most wide-eyed look, I said, “So you weren’t there because Christopher Mayfield paid you to take the seminar shoebox bones final for him?” Thinking it couldn’t hurt, I innocently batted my eyelashes.

  “Pardon?” She sounded confused, but it could have been an act.

  I smiled kindly. “Saying you took the test for him doesn’t make you guilty of shooting Doc T. It dramatically increases the probability of it, but we’d still have to prove a whole train of events to make it so.”

  A smile lit her face, and Dèsirèe picked up the cookie cutter. Not in a threatening way. “I’ve never been suspected before. It is quite entertaining.”

  I leaned alertly forward, thinking a confession would pour forth. Her smile faded. “Professor Telemann was darling. I would never hurt him.”

  With verve, she finished stamping out the triangles. “As for this Christopher Mayfield, I do not know him. I know it is sometimes done, but me, I do not take tests for others.”

  Although I had not seen Dèsirèe’s writing, I suspected there would be the odd French phrasing that Doc T would have recognized. There had been none in the test we had.

  One last detail. “That was Christopher Mayfield at lunch today. Sebastian says he was there at the Mexican restaurant you all lunched at last fall. You don’t remember him?”

  Spooning a mushroom mixture onto the pastry crescents, her brow furrowed. “I do not remember that lunch well. Perhaps ten or more of Sebastian’s friends were there. I have no recall of faces or names except his.”

  Which only seemed to prove that Dèsirèe and Sebastian had a relationship whether or not they would admit it. I felt an odd pang, but she continued, “I may have been distraught. Who can say? My appointment with Doctor Telemann did not end well.”

  Startling us both, Kat jumped into the kitchen, pulling a notepad from her field vest. “What happened?”

  “I was saying good-bye to Professor Telemann, when someone I knew rushed into the office.”

  She pinched the pastry turnovers closed. “Doctor Telemann tells me to leave and shut the door. But I hear this man threaten Doctor Telemann, so I leave the door open just so and stand close in the hall.”

  “Can you describe the man who threatened him?” I thought Kat’s question of lesser importance than knowing the nature of the threat but didn’t interrupt.

  “I can do more.” She set the crescents in precise formations on a parchment lined baking sheet. She gave us a doleful look. “It was Frankie DiToro.”

  Simultaneously, Kat and I sucked in our breaths. On the exhale, I blurted, “Why didn’t you say y
ou’d seen DiToro again when Detective Salinger was here?”

  She shrugged. “It would put Frankie in a bad light, and I do not think Professor Telemann would mind so much.”

  “If he killed Henry…” I said heatedly, but Kat shook her head at me.

  “Frank DiToro’s coming for wine and appetizers.” Kat said.

  Dèsirèe blinked and deftly refrigerated the baking sheet. “You think Doctor DiToro shot the professor?”

  Kat looked doubtful, but I said confidently, “He on the top of my list.”

  “Then I will serve less appetizers till it is determined whether an arrest will be made.” She shot me a sage look. “I have chosen you a good dress for possible newspaper coverage. If the detective is to come, then I should change too.”

  Looking disgruntled with the conversation shift to couture, Kat asked, “What did you hear? In that meeting between the two professors last fall.”

  “Doctor DiToro tell the professor not to say what happened when the president was shot that day. Or, he says and my flesh goes cold remembering: Or I will make you sorry you were ever born.”

  Dèsirèe spoke with relish, but worry etched her face. “I try to think which president he speaks of. The only one that has sense is President Ronald Reagan, but why would Professor Telemann assassinate him?”

  “DiToro was talking about shooting a college president,” I said. “It happened decades ago.” As she still looked bewildered, I added, “Over a woman.”

  Her face cleared. “But of course.”

  “Go on.” Kat leaned against the counter, spinning her iPhone impatiently. “What else did they talk about?”

  She shrugged. “I hear Professor Telemann say that it no longer matters since the president’s wife is dead. He say it is over, but Doctor DiToro interrupts him, saying the story has not ended.” This time she adds with dramatic intensity, “He say Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I don’t know much about literature, but Stanley often used that quote. It’s a Klingon proverb, he said, from The Wrath of Khan.