“Sorry about the scene at the reception last night. You’d think Jessica could keep her mouth shut in front of the local A-list, but no. That’s Jessica, never spouting off when you want her to, always spouting off when you don’t.”
“Is that why Sharon’s suing Jessica, because she called her a babbling woman who slanders and scandalizes her neighbors? That seems pretty slight to cause all the trouble and expense of a lawsuit.”
“I’m sure there’s more to it than that. They’ve been at each others’ throats since just about the time Jessica moved down from Charlottesville and Sharon came to her for help with this whole Francis Bacon thing. There’s no honor among thieves.”
“Say what?”
“I used to joke that they were thick as thieves, so I was just playing on words.” He raised his free hand in a stop right there motion and shook his head so vehemently his whole body shuddered. “Never mind. The Dingwalls turned up here just about the time Jessica and I broke up, so I associate them with, well, you’ve been there. It’s a bad time.”
“Yes, it is. It was.”
“You’re totally, legally divorced, I guess?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we’re still, you know, working things out. Speaking of trouble and expense.”
“I’m sorry,” Jean told him, and, both to change the subject and because she wanted to know, “Do you know of any lists of indentured servants who came here in the seventeenth century?”
Nothing like asking about a man’s academic specialty. Matt perked up. “Sharon wanted the same lists. I sent her over to the Rockefeller Library, they’ve got ship’s manifests, contracts—a very fine reference collection. Something specific you wanted to know?”
“Yeah. What did Sharon specifically want to know?”
“You’re right, she and Tim are better at asking questions than answering them, but I do know she was trying to track down one particular woman who was born on the east coast of Scotland and shipped out from London. Whether she found the one she was looking for, I don’t know—there were thousands. She wouldn’t even tell me the name. I bet Jessica knows. Not that I’d ask.”
Jean nodded understanding, and not just of Matt’s reluctance to ask Jessica. Sharon was looking for the woman who had supposedly stolen the charm stone. Speaking of thieves. Speaking of sources, for that matter . . .
Her train of thought ran off the rails when Matt turned away and said, “Well, I’ve got to get back to the office. I saw you with the Dingbats and thought I’d just say hello.”
And pump her about what they had said? She might as well pump him in return. She grabbed the sleeve of his jacket—tweed, like Tim’s—and the wiry arm beneath. “Matt, did you know Wesley Hagedorn?”
“Yeah,” he replied quickly. “Oh yeah. I missed Lockhart’s ‘tragic accident’ announcement last night, didn’t hear about Wes until Rachel mentioned it—kids, they think it’s all a video game—Mom, now, she took it pretty hard.”
“I’m sorry.” Jean allowed him a moment of silence, then asked, “Wes made the replica Witch Box, didn’t he?”
“Oh yeah,” Matt said again, more slowly, and turned back around. His dark brows that contrasted with his hair, both cranial and facial, knotted over the bridge of his nose. “He was a good guy. A first-class craftsman. My mother owns a harpsichord he made.”
“Is that the one in the picture in the magazine article?”
“With Jessica standing over him like a vulture? Yes. She and Rachel were at the cabinetmaker’s shop checking out Mom’s harpsichord. Mom never really liked Jessica, and vice versa, but they tried to get along—they still do—for Rachel’s sake.”
The ties that bind and strangle, Jean thought. “Wesley played the harpsichord, the article said. Your mother does, too?”
“What doesn’t she do? Retired academic, musician, aerobics instructor, volunteer in a half-dozen different charities—all of which she’s trying to organize to her own standards. She had a minor stroke a couple of years ago, but the only way that affected her was that she gave up smoking. Cold turkey. My father died in Vietnam when I was nine years old. Mom learned to be self-sufficient.”
And you learned to do without a father. Jean remembered Alasdair’s comment about Matt being trapped by three strong-minded women. No wonder the arm she still held quivered slightly, as though he was wound like a watch spring, ready to break free as soon as the tension was released.
She let him go. “Any speculation as to what happened to Wesley yesterday afternoon?”
“No. Not from me, anyway. You’re the one who’s into crime solving, now, you and your Scot.” His expression wavered between a frown at Wesley’s name, cutting the furrows in his face almost to the bone, and an asymmetrical smile, no doubt intended to let her know he wasn’t criticizing her. “Sorry, Jean, I’ve got to go. I’ve got classes, until the end of this semester, at least. Then it’s decision time—sell out or starve. Why don’t you stop by the office when you get a chance, get back in touch with your academic side?”
“Thanks. I’d like that.” Again she offered him a smile of mingled sympathy and rue.
His smile leveled out in response even as something both hunted and haunted lingered in his eyes. “Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For understanding. You know, the divorce, the job.” With a firm I’m all right nod, he turned west toward the college. Jean considered his departing back—you could tell he was an academic, his shoulders were comfortably rounded from years spent in the gravitational pull of books and manuscripts—and then turned east toward the Historic Area.
It was time to compare notes with her Scot. Heck, it was time to organize her notes and perhaps try some word-association of her own. For one thing, someone other than Tim Dingwall had recently used the phrase “smoke and mirrors.”
She crossed Henry Street and headed up Duke of Gloucester, pulling her phone from her bag. She’d ask Alasdair to meet her at the churchyard for a daylight recce of last night’s misdemeanor scene and to see what it actually said on Mason’s tombstone. Then they could grab some lunch. Brain work should, by rights, use as many calories as legwork.
Her thumb on the keypad, she remembered that since his phone didn’t work on this continent, he’d left it behind. Unlike Rebecca, Miranda, and Jean herself, until now he hadn’t had a reason to get the equivalent of a universal translator.
No problem. She was already halfway to the church—a quick look and she’d catch up with him.
Assuming he was back at the house. Surely he’d exhausted the possibilities at the cabinetmaker’s shop by now. Maybe he was strolling around the Historic Area, storing up questions to ask her about the history, the architecture, and the ghost stories. He was one of the most self-sufficient people she’d ever met, but self-sufficiency only went so far.
The sky was the color of Alasdair’s eyes, ranging from clear blue overhead to hinting of gray cloud on the horizon. Despite the noonday sun, the air was cool, scented with woodsmoke, horses, and baking bread or cookies. Flanked by gleaming red and gold leaves, the long vista of the street narrowed into the distance and came to a point at the tidy, rational facade of the Capitol. Visitors ranged back and forth like single-celled creatures, combining, dividing, drifting away from the group to make solo stands in front of shop windows. An interpreter trotting along on horseback doffed his tricorn to the ladies whether they were wearing long skirts or tight jeans.
Jean skimmed along beside the brick wall separating the churchyard from Duke of Gloucester and into the gate at the side of the church. The Dingwalls hadn’t been poking around the table tombs and monuments rising from the terrace outside the western doorway, the one beneath the bell tower. They’d taken their sample from a grass-covered grave protected by trees and shrubs at the far side of the enclosure.
The low railing was meant to discourage casual passersby from wandering off the paving. Still, an elderly man was taking notes at a monument several paces p
ast it. She too, was on a mission. Jean lifted her foot to step over the rail.
From her bag burst “The 1812 Overture”, that staple of July Fourth celebrations which had nothing to do with American Independence Day. Lowering her foot, Jean retrieved her phone and checked the screen. “Hey, Miranda.”
Nearby, a siren whined and then stopped abruptly, timed just right to blank out Miranda’s words. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you,” Jean said, and strained to look over the eastern wall. The sound had come from that direction, hadn’t it?
“How are you getting on, Jean?” said her partner’s voice, smooth as single malt.
“So far so good. The Dingwalls are weaving an awfully tangled web, and so far I can’t say how much of it is fact and how much imagination. Or even who all is involved. There’s Tim’s sister Kelly, fresh from taking the rap at Blair Castle, there’s Jessica Evesdottir, ex-Finch, who might have been working with Wesley Hagedorn and who was certainly working with Sharon Dingwall.”
“Jessica and Sharon exchanged a few words last night, did they? Sorry to miss that, but then, Rodney and I had a lovely blether over a fine meal, if with the ghost of poor dead Wesley Hagedorn occupying a place at the table, like Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth.”
“What’s Lockhart’s take on the man’s murder? And it was a murder.”
“That it was. And here’s Rodney thinking there’s something doing with the Witch Box, it being Wesley who studied the original at Blair and then made the replica.”
“Alasdair already guessed that.”
“Well done, Alasdair! I reckon he’s not guessed, though, that Jessica was working with Wesley on the Witch Box project, oh aye, and more—they were by way of being a couple, if keeping it under wraps, so to speak, with her still being married and all.”
“Oh boy. Speaking of tangled webs.” Jean made a face. Did Matt’s slow oh yeah mean that he knew about Jessica’s attachment to Wesley? Who he called “Wes,” familiarly. Matt would have found that an embarrassing triangle. Jessica might not. As for Wes, he wasn’t going to be offering any opinions, not now.
Had Jessica known he was dead when she was lecturing Rachel about love and conquest? Or had it been a love affair at all, or merely a connection of convenience?
“. . . mind you,” Miranda was saying in Jean’s ear, “I was hearing this from the waiter who brought my breakfast this morning. If Rodney’s knowing, he’s not saying. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
“Jessica and Wesley got together at the Inn?” Expensive surroundings for a bit of afternoon delight—or an all-nighter, even. But Jean didn’t need to tell that to Miranda, who was probably staying in the same suite the Queen of England had occupied for the Jamestown anniversary celebrations.
“That they did,” said Miranda. “Eric the waiter, he knew Jessica from a luncheon speech about witchcraft—right interesting, he was saying, if hardly credible—and just now recognized Wesley from the photo in the newspaper. They tipped him very nicely when he delivered a meal to their room a few weeks back, so he was keeping an eye out for them.”
Eric, Jean thought. And there she could have been pumping him for all sorts of information.
People were hurrying across Palace Green and down Nicholson Street, lured by the brief wail of the siren. What was going on?
Miranda said, “I’ve just phoned Rodney asking him if the investigation’s any further forward, but he’s Historic Area Duty Officer the day, his folk are telling me, and he’s left his office to go putting out some sort of fire.”
“I bet I know where the fire is.” Jean headed out the back gate of the churchyard, where she and Alasdair had confronted the Dingwalls, and across Palace Green.
“Eh?” asked Miranda.
With eighty-eight original buildings lit by open flames, fire was always a danger. But Jean smelled no smoke. She stopped beside the massive tree whose shadow had concealed Rachel last night. It was an oak, she saw now, its limbs writhing almost to the bare ground below and its canopy a vibrant rusty orange and gold. But she was more interested in the vista past the Tucker House, past the lawn behind the Court House, past the Randolph House.
“Jean?”
There, where the street dipped in front of the cabinetmaker’s shop, the way was blocked by a clot of jacket-clad backs and jeans-clad bottoms. Beyond the kibitzers, lights pulsed, harsh against the autumn glow of the trees, as crude beside the period houses as a finger in the eye. “Great. Something’s happening at the cabinetmaker’s. Call you back.”
“Oh aye, you do tha . . .” Miranda’s voice evaporated as Jean thrust her phone into her bag and ran.
Chapter Twelve
Okay, she thought, the jar of her feet against the pavement shooting rationalizations through her mind, maybe one of the craftsmen had cut himself or dropped a chunk of wood on his foot.
The flashing lights couldn’t have anything to do with Alasdair and his questions, could they?
Jean pushed her way through the onlookers, muttering apologies, to see two police cars, one belonging to the city of Williamsburg, the other to the Foundation. Her peripheral vision registered several other vehicles, including a horse and carriage driven by a liveried driver.
The central part of her vision recorded the burly, black-haired man, dressed in eighteenth-century shirt, apron, and breeches, who was climbing into the city squad car. Or rather, was being put into the car by two uniformed officers. He might not have been handcuffed, but he was obviously, in the British euphemism, helping the police with their enquiries. His scowling face was wedged into a thick neck above a broad chest puffed resentfully, indicating that he wasn’t volunteering.
Samuel Gould, Wesley Hagedorn’s apprentice.
Rodney Lockhart stood with Stephanie Venegas in the doorway of the cabinetmaker’s shop, matching black suit for black suit, black gaze for black gaze. He gestured toward Gould, hand open, palm up. What do you think you’re doing? She folded her arms and raised her chin. My job. Get over it.
On the graveled shoulder of the street, between one of the squad cars and the path leading down to the shop—between a hard place and a couple of rocks—stood Alasdair. His chin was tucked and his hands braced on his hips. His eyes no longer gleamed the peaceful blue of the sky, but were as crisp and cold as a glacier calving icebergs into a northern sea.
If Jean could read Lockhart and Venegas by their body language, she was downright telepathic when it came to Alasdair. Venegas had arrived to haul away Hagedorn’s colleague. She’d found Alasdair there asking questions. She’d sent him outside and he’d gone quietly—there might not be honor between thieves, but there certainly was between law enforcers.
He had something to say. If necessary, he’d stand there until those icebergs drifted into the shipping lanes, but he was going to say it.
The squad car and its prisoner drove away down Nicholson Street and past the sleepy, spooky hollow where the eighteenth-century jail nestled in the trees. One of the security officers began shooing away the bystanders while the other muttered into a radio and was muttered back at. The stream that ran beneath one end of the shop burbled cheerfully.
Venegas made some conciliatory remark to Lockhart, who made some politic remark in return. With a wary handshake, they parted, him to the interior of the building, her through the gate of the shop and up the slope, her polished black flats grating on the gravel.
Alasdair blocked her path. She’d have better luck pushing through a stone wall, Jean thought. But Venegas didn’t try to dodge around him. She had something to say, too. “You forced my hand, barging in here and asking so many questions. What if Gould had made a run for it?”
They would have stood nose-to-nose, except in her low-heeled shoes she was an inch the taller. Unimpressed, Alasdair pointed down the street toward the squad car decorously turning the corner onto Waller Street—the same route once taken by carts carrying the condemned to the gallows. “It does not follow from Gould finding Hagedorn’s body that he murdered the man. Someone had
to be finding the body.”
Deja Déjà vu, thought Jean, inching forward. That’s how she and Alasdair had met, when she’d been the someone. Even though there’d been more to it than that.
“There’s more to it than a stramash over a missing chisel,” Alasdair went on.
“A what?” Venegas demanded. Now it was her arms braced on her hips.
“An argument. I’ll credit Gould making threats against Hagedorn three days since, and Hagedorn threatening to sack him, but the other craftsmen, they’re saying the two reconciled, filled with brotherly love and all.”
“There’s more to it than that. Yeah. I get it. What do you know about it, Mr. Protect and Survive?”
“The theft of the replica Witch Box from Blair Castle is tied to Hagedorn’s murder.”
She did him the courtesy of not saying sarcastically, Really?
“Hagedorn visited Blair in May. He made photos and drawings. He returned here and made the replica. A week since, all his measurements, photos, plans, and all, were stolen from his flat.”
Really? thought Jean. Coincidence? Or were the Dingwalls up for housebreaking and theft?
The onlookers were drifting away. The horses and carriage clopped by. One of the horses cocked its tail and made a steaming deposit on the asphalt, to the delight of a couple of little boys. Jean had to hand it to Williamsburg for letting the chips, so to speak, fall where they might, providing a lesson in why period domestic decor only included carpets in rooms without heavy foot traffic.
Jean dodged the kids, the pungent pile of authenticity, and one of the crowd-control cops. “Hey!” he called after her.
“I’m with him,” Jean returned, pointing at Alasdair. At his back, which was not as straight as that of a soldier on inspection, but as that of the regimental sergeant major who was making the inspection.
With a shrug, the cop desisted and Jean tiptoed closer.
“Yeah,” Venegas was saying, “Hagedorn reported the break-in. Thing is, there were some valuables taken, too.”
Charm Stone Page 12
