Hard-core? Jean could hear Alasdair’s laugh. She didn’t say anything about real writing and exclamation points but repeated, “Dedicated and intelligent. So when will Lords of the Lie be released?”
“It’s not quite finished. We—ah—we’re arranging financing—a second mortgage . . .” Tim cut himself off, judging correctly that the delicate state of their bankbook was none of Jean’s business.
“We need to finish studying the Witch Box and the charm stone,” Sharon said in a rush. “We need to consult Francis Bacon’s papers.”
“Do you know where they are? Do you know where the charm stone is? You must have some source for the theory, the story, that an indentured servant stole it and brought it here. A name, a place, something.”
Sharon’s face went as blank as a shuttered window. Tim leaned over his cookie and delicately unfolded its wrapper. Yes, they were keeping something secret. Perhaps they didn’t want their campaign to peak too soon. More likely, they didn’t know where either papers or charm stone were.
Jean went on, “All you’ve said was that there was an inventory proving Charlotte brought the Box here to Virginia, and from that you inferred she was looking for the stone.”
“Yes, yes, the inventory was written up by a clerk here in Williamsburg named—” Tim paused for effect, “—Robert Mason.”
They expected her to react. React she did. “There’s George Mason of Gunston Hall, who signed the Declaration of Independence. There’s the Mason of the Mason-Dixon line . . .”
“Exactly,” said Sharon. “That just proves our point. Q.E.D.”
Prove was a word being thrown around altogether too freely, even if she did buy that the inventory proved Lady Dunmore had the Witch Box—the Museum itself cited that fact. “The names are another coincidence. Synchrony, even. That sort of thing happens all the time. The official in charge of the Dunmore exhibit is named Lockhart, like the Scottish family who once owned another charm stone, the Lee Penny. The Lees were an important family in Virginia, with houses here in Williamsburg. Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, is descended from them. How many people do you encounter on a daily basis whose names are not appropriate to . . .” She stopped without concluding, “. . . whatever bee you have in your bonnet?” and said instead, “So do you know, or think you know, where the charm stone is?”
Tim and Sharon’s eyes lit up. “Lockhart! Lee! We missed those!” said Sharon.
And Tim said, “Thank you, Jean. It’s good to see you’re sympathetic to our work.”
Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t. Give me strength, Jean pleaded to her guardian angel, even as her guardian devil murmured about Great Scot and circulation figures approaching those of The Sunburn, Britain’s answer to The National Enquirer. Although she’d rather do without the circulation than emulate The Sunburn.
Jean glanced at Jefferson again. One of his mentors had been a Scottish minister named James Blair. Synchrony.
Tim finished his cookie, then seized and crunched into Sharon’s pickle. His phone warbled again. With a glance at his wife, again he let it go to voice mail. Sharon frowned, probably at the telephone rather than at the pickle, which was just going to waste along with most of her sandwich.
The bits of chicken salad lay on the bread slices like a body on an autopsy table. Like Wesley Hagedorn’s drowned body. Bludgeoned body. Strangled, stabbed, shot—if he’d been shot, surely someone would have heard, but then, maybe someone had, which was Venegas’s brief.
Jean closed her eyes. When she opened them, she saw Hugh Munro heading into the Kimball Theater with a fiddle case in one hand and a guitar case in the other. Collecting her wits, such as they were, she waved. “You made it! How was the flight from Edinburgh?”
“Why do some folk have children, and others have malignant homunculi? And the adults are worse. But I’ve survived to tell the tale, in song and story.” Grinning, Hugh threw his arms as wide as he could without casting guitar and fiddle to the wind, indicating his delight at being armed with musical instruments.
“Where are you playing tonight?”
“Chownings Tavern. A chorus or two of ‘Allison Gross’, I’m thinking, to accompany Mary Napier’s trial at the Courthouse next door.”
“Not that Mary Napier was actually a witch,” Jean returned, and then stopped with her lips still parted and her teeth still closed on the “ch”. This time around, the name “Napier” rang a far and distant bell, signaling more synchrony, no doubt, but darned if she knew where it was jangling.
With another wave, Hugh disappeared into the theater. Jean looked back at Sharon and Tim to see them looking at her like a couple of hyenas considering a carcass. “Who’s that?” Tim demanded. “Why was he coming in from Edinburgh?”
“He’s Hugh Munro, the musician I was telling you about last night. He lives in Edinburgh. He’s my next-door neighbor. He’s here this week as a sidebar to the Dunmore exhibit. You should hear his version of ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’—scurrilous rather than patriotic.”
Sharon’s face puckered with doubt. “Can he be trusted? Odd people, artists and musicians.”
Jean opened her mouth, shut it, and looked down at her notebook and her idiosyncratic shorthand. Listen. Ask questions. “So if you find the charm stone, then what? And Francis Bacon’s papers? How can you consult them when they’re, ah, hidden?”
“We shall find them,” Tim said, chin set. “We have . . .”
His phone warbled. Sharon swept it into her bag, where it kept on warbling forlornly for a moment and then fell silent.
Tim smiled shamefacedly at his wife and mumbled, “Her plane was due to arrive in Richmond at eleven-thirty. I have no doubt that she needs transportation from the airport.”
“She can rent a car,” Sharon muttered back again.
“She’s a member of our family,” Tim hissed.
Something in Sharon’s glare at her spouse reminded Jean of the thin ends of wedges and camel’s noses in tents. Was Kelly as much an irritant as an in-law?
And more to the point, what had Tim been about to say? “We have a map? An old manuscript? Inside information?” But now he was staring at Sharon and she was staring at her plate.
Jean took advantage of the awkward silence to drain the rest of her tea. It was too sweet, too flat, and left a plastic coating on her teeth. She said to Tim’s pleading and Sharon’s stony faces, “Okay. You find Bacon’s papers. Then what? How does proving he wrote Shakespeare’s plays bring about world peace?”
Tim straightened. “Proving his authorship of Shakespeare’s body of work confirms Bacon’s brilliance. It’s his other papers that prove the secret underground stream of history, the conspiracies of the ruling class. Once those conspiracies are exposed, the population of the West and hopefully the world will no longer allow themselves to be used as pawns. Knowledge is power. You shall know the truth and the truth will make you free. Freedom is the cornerstone of American civilization. We should never give it up for comfort. Never.”
A strand of Tim’s comb-over came loose in the breeze and waved like a banner above the dome of his head. A chocolate crumb flecked the corner of his mouth, his thick lips set too firmly to take it in. Sharon huddled in her dun-colored cardigan, obviously chilled, and her dun-colored curls—if they’d ever been red as Dylan’s, the color had drained away—stirred only limply in the wind. Still, her huge eyes blazed up at Jean with fierce sincerity, unfazed by discomfort or middle-age.
Doggedly, Jean wrote everything down. They were pathetic, weren’t they? And yet they were sympathetic, too. She felt a pang of guilt at exploiting their delusions. Their idealism. And it was idealism, of a sort, even if it was hidden amidst their creative lunacy like Bacon’s papers—well, no, Bacon’s papers didn’t exist. As for the charm stone, the Dingwalls were evading her questions about that, never mind their repeated calls for truth, justice, and the American way.
Franklin had said something about people who gave up freedom for comfort and sec
urity deserving neither. Jefferson had written about the blessings of liberty extending to everyone. Tim and Sharon would say those forefathers had both been part of the conspiracy and part of the solution to it. Where did the evasions and delusions end?
Not in the churchyard of Bruton Parish Church, that was for sure.
The chill from the metal of Jean’s chair radiated upwards, tightening her lower back. It was like and yet unlike that ectoplasmic trickle of chill that all too often tautened her shoulders, her mortal flesh alerting to the presence of the past. Would she be discredited if the Dingwalls knew she saw dead people? Would Alasdair be less of the tough cop in their eyes if they knew he did, too?
Funny, when Alasdair went oppressively rational on her, she slipped toward the intuitive side. But when she was dealing with people to whom rationality resembled a Gordian knot—it might hold together, but more for the quantity of its strands than the quality of their interweaving—she edged back toward Alasdair and his version of Occam’s razor, that the simplest explanation was likely the correct one.
Setting down her pencil, she flexed her fingers and glanced at her watch. It was noon. Wave after wave of people flowed through Merchant’s Square, intent on lunch. In fact, there was Matt Finch standing at the side entrance of the Cheese Shop, watching the Dingwalls’ backs while they watched Jean. The moment she registered his presence, he offered a cramped wave and slipped through the doorway.
Tim looked around. “Your musician friend again?”
“Another acquaintance,” Jean said, and picked up her pencil. One hour of Tim’s bloviating and Sharon’s smug smiles was enough. “I’ve got all I need for now. Can we schedule another interview tomorrow, after I’ve had time to, ah, organize my notes?”
“Well,” Tim said ponderously, while Sharon said quickly, “It depends.”
She needed to close with something innocuous, to lull them into another interview. To pull their strings. “One of your sons is here with you. Dylan?”
“Yes,” said Sharon, settling back in her chair with what Jean would swear was relief. “Quentin’s in the U.K. He’s starting with The Sunburn in London this week. Prestige job, as an investigative reporter.”
Jean’s pencil looped the loop. The Sunburn specialized in junk news, not prestige, but a job was a job. “And the Kelly who just got into Richmond?”
“She is my older sister,” Tim answered, “She was good enough to take Quentin on a tour of the U.K. as a graduation gift. We brought Dylan to Williamsburg with us for the same reason.”
Dylan might think he was getting the short end of the stick, except Jean hated to call Rachel a stick—even if she resembled one.
Sharon sat up again, slowly, eyes flashing. “That’s right, you’re with the Cameron guy, aren’t you? You already know about Blair Castle and the copy of the Witch Box and everything.”
“Yes, I do. I’d like to hear your side of the story.”
“Police harassment, pure and simple,” declared Tim. “Quentin expressed a wish to see the copy, since he would not be able to join us here and see the original. Kelly very kindly conducted him to Blair, but lo and behold, Scotland’s finest descend to picking on a Yankee who was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or perhaps I should say Scotland’s worst. Cameron is one of them, a real prick, I say without fear of contradiction.”
No, she wasn’t going to contradict him, but not for the reason he thought. Sputtering faintly, Jean hid her face by leaning over her notebook and drawing more loops.
“He told you about picking on us last night, didn’t he?” Without waiting for an answer, Sharon went on, “We needed to get a core sample from the churchyard. The church will let us dig once we prove there’s a secret vault holding Bacon’s papers.”
“People have dug in the churchyard before,” Jean pointed out.
“Not in the right place, beside Robert Mason’s gravestone.”
“Who? Oh, the clerk who did Charlotte Murray’s inventory.”
“He was employed as a secretary for Governors Gooch, Dinwiddie, Fauquier, Botetourt, and Dunmore,” Tim told her. “He spent over thirty years in the service of the Crown, hearing myriad secrets, writing multiple confidential letters, and then he died on the eve of the American Revolution. That’s more than a little suspicious.”
“He had to have been pretty old when he died, if he’d been working for more than thirty . . .”
This time it was Sharon who leaned forward intently, her sincerity brightening into fanaticism. “Bacon’s relationship with the Stewarts, with the Dunmores, is the keystone of our work. His papers will prove the secret underground stream of history that leads from the Pyramids, through the life and death of Jesus, through King James and Francis Stewart and Francis Bacon and Nathaniel Bacon to the present day.”
And they were pulling her strings, too. They needed publicity—just as long as they could control the variety. “So who do you think stole the replica Box? And why steal a replica?”
“Who cares about that?” Tim waved dismissively, almost knocking a canned drink from a passerby’s hand. “The replica’s not even a very good one. The real Witch Box is here, there’s no question of that.”
“The real one is here, yes, but . . .” Everything was related to everything else, through plot and via conspiracy that made the highway interchanges outside D.C. look like Roman straightaways, and yet the theft was inconsequential? “Did you know Wesley Hagedorn, who made the copy?”
Sharon’s bag erupted with the Mission Impossible theme. Cursing, she dived into it, throwing manila folders onto the table. One spilled newspaper clippings. From the second peeked photocopies—pictures of the Witch Box, with red marker circling the space where the charm stone had supposedly rested.
With another four-letter word, Sharon grabbed the photocopies and stuffed them back into the folder, leaving Tim to dig into her bag. He found his own cell phone, then came up with Sharon’s. She snatched it from his hands and flipped it open. “Kelly, we’re busy right now!”
“No, I do not believe we are,” Tim said. “Miss Fairbairn here has drawn the interview to a conclusion. For now, at least.”
“All right, all right,” Sharon snapped to her sister-in-law. “I get the message. You’re jet-lagged and don’t want to drive. But it’ll take us a while to get to Richmond. Work on the cipher or something, okay?”
Jean’s ears pricked. Cipher? And Tim had said something, too, what was it?
A digitized female voice emanated from the phone. “. . . playing the patsy over Hagedorn’s Box, just because I’ve got the bankroll . . .”
Jean’s ears positively twitched. There was a bit of information for Alasdair—if Kelly had told the Perthshire Constabulary that she knew nothing about the Witch Box, then she had lied.
Emphatically, Sharon switched off the phone and gathered up the envelopes. “Sorry about that,” she said to Jean, while her glower was directed at Tim.
Tim’s ingratiating smile was directed at Jean. “We shall talk again soon, okay?”
“How about some time tomorrow?” she asked.
They were standing up, Sharon shaking out her skirt, Tim picking bits of brown cardigan fuzz from his jacket. He collected the last of the cookie, she her tote bag. “It was nice talking to you, Jean,” Sharon said, and they zigzagged between the tables toward the main sidewalk.
“Nice talking to you, too.” Jean considered their retreating backs, their casual present-day stride. Casual. Like their brushing off the theft of the Witch Box replica . . .
That’s what Tim had said. “The replica’s not even a very good one.”
And she asked herself, How do they know that?
Chapter Eleven
Jean propped her elbow on the edge of the table and her forehead on her hand. In her mind’s eye she saw the photos in Sharon’s bag, photos of the replica or the copy or both, with a red puddle like a bloodstain indicating the vacant spot.
Where had they gotten those photos? From Wesle
y Hagedorn? But surely his replica had been exact.
In her mind’s ear she heard Tim’s words from the night before. “Exact is as exact does.”
Does? Did the Box do something? The Dingwalls didn’t expect it to emit avenging spirits, like Indiana Jones’s Ark of the Covenant. Their fantasies were based on historical revisionist puzzles, the sort of puzzles where, if one piece had a protrusion and the other piece had a recess, the fit was close enough to be proof. But they had something on their devious minds. Some reason why they were searching for the charm stone. Some reason to assume it was here in Virginia. Some reason they weren’t telling Jean.
As though playing a word-association game, Tim and Sharon had used the words cornerstone, gravestone, keystone. One of them had said something about the supposed codes carved into the fabric of Rosslyn Chapel, medieval symbols bewildering the modern mind—like the symbols carved on the Witch Box, their meaning lost as the charm stone was lost.
Tim had told Kelly to work on a cipher. Previous searchers for Bacon’s vault had treated the graveyard at Bruton Parish Church like a giant cipher, making plans of the graves and anagrams of their inscriptions. Maybe that’s what Kelly was supposed to be doing, deciphering a secret message recorded on Robert Mason’s gravestone.
Yeah, Jean had encountered the whole grave-inscription-as-secret-message ploy before. Believers in clandestine history came in a variety of flavors, but they all left the same taste in her mouth.
She realized a couple was hovering nearby with their sandwiches and drinks, looking for an empty table. She slapped her notebook shut, thrust it and her pencils into her bag, and lunged to her feet. Waving the couple toward the table, she, too, headed for the street, only to find Matt waiting for her beside a planter box.
“Hi,” he said, and gestured toward the retreating Dingwalls with a paper bag no doubt holding his lunch. “Get anything coherent out of them?”
“Yes and no. They’re all for asking questions, but answering them, not so much.”
Charm Stone Page 11
