Charm Stone

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Again she dozed, and heard rocks hitting the side of the house and window glass tinkling down onto the bed.

  She woke with a gasp, but couldn’t move. Smothered beneath a prickling cold pall, she listened to the slow footsteps from the other room, smelled yet again that rich, sweet, smoky scent. Maybe she should drag herself out of the bed and ask the ghost to bring her that cup of cocoa. But ghosts were only memories made perceptible.

  A pallid shape walked by the living room door, white cap, white apron over a big belly, white face bland and blank. Yes, it was the same apparition they’d seen in the street.

  Even though Alasdair was lying two feet away from her, Jean sensed his rigidity and the chill radiating from his flesh. He was awake. He was feeling the ghost, too. That was something they had in common, a sixth sense. And less than a year of intense mutual experience, including some knock-down, drag-out fights.

  They could just as well have had another of those this evening. But no. By all means, she thought, let’s be civilized. Ice wasn’t as dramatic as fire, but it could be just as final.

  The tactile cold, the elusive odors, ebbed, and the house slipped into silence. The Bellarmine bottle sat on the dresser, unmoving if not immovable—the small face was now turned away from the bed.

  Alasdair exhaled, long and slow. Jean closed her eyes again and started counting sheep, and big-footed rabbits wearing dirty socks . . .

  She woke up with a start at a brisk knock on the door. After a fuzzy moment she realized it was morning, if a dim one. She was lying alone in the bed, stretched out flat as a grave effigy an inch from her own edge. The rest of the covers were so smooth she wondered if she’d imagined Alasdair sleeping there at all.

  “Thank you kindly,” said his voice from the living room.

  Eric’s voice replied, “You’re welcome.”

  “You’ve spoken with Detective Venegas, have you?”

  “With Sergeant Olson. Not much I could tell him, just that I’d delivered breakfast to Mr. Hagedorn and Miz Evesdottir. I only recognized her at the time, not him. A real shame about Mr. Hagedorn and then Miz Dingwall last night.”

  “Oh aye. A right shame.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Eric said, presumably for another tip—Alasdair was nothing if not punctilious about observing foreign customs—and the door shut.

  Breakfast, Jean thought, her stomach no longer clenched but flaccid. Breakfast signaled a new day, even if it began burdened with the old.

  By the time she dressed, the ambrosial aroma of coffee filled the house. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs salivating at the dinner bell, all she had to do was anticipate caffeine and the lint clinging to her brain began to dissolve.

  She found Alasdair seated at the table, a plate of bacon and eggs and a newspaper before him. He looked up at her over his reading glasses. “I organized an omelet for you.”

  “Thank you.” She sat down, poured herself a cup of coffee, doctored it with milk, and drank. After a few bites of her everything-but-the-kitchen-sink omelet, she felt strong enough to try some talk so small it was infinitesimal. “American cooks put tomatoes and mushrooms in an omelet, but not on a plate with eggs and sausage.”

  “No accounting for tastes.” He turned the page of the paper. Reading upside-down, Jean saw a story about the sudden rash of murders, footnoted with soothing quotes from Foundation officials. She, civilian, hanger-on, whatever, knew more than any of them.

  “You know,” she said, “a few historians would be interested in a message written and sketch drawn by Charlotte Murray, but there’s nothing in particular at stake. I don’t see why that document’s a motive for murder. If it is.”

  “Jessica’s hiding the truth.” Alasdair smeared jelly over a piece of toast.

  “I noticed. Do you think she killed Sharon? Or Wesley, for that matter?”

  “If Jessica was trying to keep first Wesley and then Sharon from grabbing the document and the glory as well, then . . .”

  “But she came to us.”

  Crunching the toast, Alasdair said thickly, “She’s got neck, Jessica.”

  Nerve. Yeah. And ambition. “The Dingwalls claim that Charlotte manipulated her husband’s posting to Virginia, so she could come here and search for the charm stone. I’m sure Tim will extrapolate her mentioning it at all into proof Francis Bacon’s papers are hidden here, original Shakespeare manuscripts, plans to split the atom, whatever. You know, Mary Napier stole them from inside the Witch Box and brought them to Nathaniel Bacon.”

  “There’s a house of cards, and no mistake.”

  “More of a palace of cards.”

  That drew a hint of a smile from his lips, even as dark circles cradled the ice blue of his eyes beneath his glasses. His skin was even fairer than usual, the white of bog cotton or sea foam, indicating that his blood supply had been diverted to his brain. Motive. Opportunity. Suspects. Alibis. Now more than ever he had to prove his competence.

  So did she, damn it.

  He paralleled his knife and fork across his empty plate and pushed back from the table. “I’ll be ringing Ian, then, Sunday or no Sunday, with the latest developments. And then I’ll be driving myself to the press conference. Fancy joining me?”

  There was a rather bedraggled olive branch. A shame she didn’t have one of her own. “No, thank you, I have to do some research in the Historic Area.”

  “Very good then.” He paced into the bedroom. She heard him using the bedside telephone to make his call, when her phone was . . . Probably still on. Carrying a second cup of coffee to the desk, she found the phone in her bag and checked it over. It was still juiced despite its busy day yesterday, which was more than she could say of herself.

  She booted up her computer and listened to Alasdair’s voice outline the facts of the case. Then it was Ian’s turn. Jean, pretty good at extrapolation herself, filled in the news from P and S.

  The CCTV system at Blair didn’t have a camera focused on the corner where the replica Witch Box had been sitting—Ian might should have a word with Blair about that—but the tapes showed that Quentin had most certainly been there. Notch up one lie to Quentin’s account.

  Kelly had had herself a right good look-round before opening the alarmed door, nothing casual about it. Notch up suspicious behavior to Kelly’s.

  Since the replica hadn’t turned up on the British antiquities market, or on a rubbish tip, for that matter, come Monday Ian was hereby delegated to make inquiries of the different shipping companies. And whilst he was chatting with Blair, ask after an eighteenth-century document missing from the muniments room. Just now Alasdair had better be getting himself to Williamsburg Police headquarters.

  Desultorily, Jean checked her e-mail—nothing interesting—and indulged herself by scanning the message boards at The One Ring.net.

  Unlike the Dingwalls’ fantasies, Tolkien’s were good and solid. They were fantasies to live by, ones to explore, ones that didn’t melt away like cotton candy and leave a bad taste in your mouth. Tolkien had given one of his heroes, Elessar, the high king, a green stone set in a silver brooch, a charm stone in a way, intended to bless and heal.

  Last May, when they had first met, it was when Alasdair had made a Tolkien reference that she’d noticed him again. Now she noticed him bustling through the bedroom and across the living room, clad in a sports jacket and Celtic-interlace tie, professional and personable at once. “Well then, I’m away.”

  She held out the car keys. “Here you go.”

  He plucked them from her hand.

  “Alasdair,” she said, at the exact instant he said, “Jean, I’m not so sure . . .”

  What? Not so sure about the relationship? Or not so sure about driving, or Jessica’s testimony, or whether Wesley’s and Sharon’s deaths were related—well no, he couldn’t be wondering about that.

  He’d better not be reading pathetic neediness in her expression. But then, she could read no more in his than the firm mouth of duty and the steady gaze of first-things-first.
This was a man who’d made opacity an art form.

  Don’t ask, don’t tell.

  “See you later,” was all she said, with the best smile she could summon, touched as it was with rue.

  And he was gone. The car was parked in the lot next to the Inn. She waited long enough for him to reach it, and longer, but she heard no squealing tires or crumpling metal. It was only a few blocks to the police station, after all. If he was versatile enough to change jobs and take on an outlander, he was versatile enough to drive on the right.

  She no longer felt a hammer thudding on an anvil inside her head. Now she was hearing a sound like the drone of bagpipes, a low reverberation that was both discordant and harmonic, underlying every lilt and lift of thought, of speech, of movement. Alasdair . . .

  Duty called. First things first. Jean opened the website for Bruton Parish Church. Aha. The first church on the site, when the area had been Middle Plantation, had been built in 1674, just about the time Mary Napier was deciding to try her luck in the colonies—perhaps because her luck had run out at home, where officials took a fatal view of thievery.

  The present church dated from 1715, the year of one of the Jacobite Rebellions in Scotland that had failed miserably to put the Stewarts back on the throne. No matter how precarious life had been on what was then a frontier, life wasn’t any more secure back in the Auld Sod.

  She read for a few more moments, then switched off the computer and tucked it away in its nylon carrying case. With a mutter of “Sit, stay,” she replaced the Bellarmine bottle on the mantelpiece, and marched off into the cold, hazy, cat-free morning. Bare tree limbs made black cuneiform against a moist, matte sky. The reds of bricks and leaves were softened by the uncertain light and the voices of visitors and interpreters were hushed.

  Averting her eyes from the tree behind the Courthouse, Jean made it as far as the Greenhow Store before realizing she could have stayed at the house and watched the press conference. But her investigations on behalf of Great Scot would help solve the murders.

  That was her favorite excuse and she was sticking to it.

  Cars were ranged outside the church. Not only was it Sunday, it was All Saints’ Day, the calm after the Halloween frenzy, when the ghosts and goblins had been swept back under the carpet. She strolled in through the side gate and across the wet-leaf-strewn brick pavement, considering the monuments and tombs beyond the low barricade. The buried citizens of Williamsburg had no doubt worn as many shades of gray, ranging from unblemished saintliness to villainy of the darkest dye, as the people of any locality.

  Tim and Sharon hadn’t been using their primitive corer inside the footings of the 1674 church, to the northwest of the present-day structure, even though those foundations had been uncovered by some of their Baconista ancestors in 1938 and disturbed again by their Baconista cousins in 1991. No, the Dingwalls must have felt that particular mine was played out.

  They’d have as much luck locating Shangri-La or Middle-earth as a secret vault in Bruton Parish’s much-studied cemetery.

  From the church came the voices of a choir, practicing for the nine o’clock service, no doubt. They were not singing “When the Saints Go Marching In” but something slower and sweeter, about gold crowns and white robes, alleluia.

  She stepped over the railing onto the wet grass and sodden leaves. Robert Mason, Robert Mason, come out, come out, wherever you are . . . She would have avoided walking on graves, except the churchyard was filled with them, mostly unmarked, the turf no more than a skin atop a jumble of bones and coffin fittings. And yet she felt not one prickle, nary a shudder, only the sad certainty of mortality.

  There. Mason’s monument was a modest stoop-shouldered slab, stained and eroded by time, wind, and rain. The tidy eighteenth-century printing incised on its face read: Here lies, in hope of a joyful Resurrection, all that was Robert Mason, late of this city. 1706-1775. I cannot sigh and say farewell, where thou dwellest, I will dwell. Frances his wife 1710-1781. Stewart his son 1734-1737. Betty his daughter 1731-1753 and her husband William Hathaway 1731-1776.

  A winged skull, symbolizing the flight of the soul, and a simple garland decorated the rounded top of the stone. Both were carved in folk-art style—clumsy but appealing.

  Poor Frances Mason, Jean thought, surviving not just her husband but her children. Scant comfort that she’d seen her daughter Betty married—and respectably, otherwise why would Hathaway be included on the monument? Frances could have used a healing stone. Or some antibiotics.

  Tim had told Kelly to work on the cipher. Technically a cipher was a key to a code. But he might not have been using the word in its exact definition, never mind that exact is as exact does.

  “William Hathaway,” Jean muttered. If William Shakespeare had taken his wife’s last name instead of vice versa, he would have been William Hathaway. Despite William being a very common name—look at the name of the town, for heaven’s sakes—Tim and Sharon probably thought that was significant.

  Jean craned back and forth, but saw no cracks or chips that suggested alternate meanings. And there were no alternate spellings to the words and names, either, unless you counted “Frances” with an “E”, for a woman’s name, as distinct from “Francis” with an “I”, for the man’s name. “Stewart” wasn’t a common man’s name of the time period, not like Robert or William. Perhaps the Masons had latent Jacobite tendencies—the poor little boy had arrived and then departed during a period of considerable Jacobite plotting, as the Dingwalls no doubt found significant.

  Pulling her notebook from her bag, Jean copied the inscription and made a drawing of the flying skull. Its broad forehead and pointed chin made it look like one of Roswell’s aliens with their almost triangular faces, and the wings might just as well be leaves . . .

  Maybe they were leaves. Leaves surrounding a triangular space, like the slot for the charm stone on the Witch Box. Mason had included the Witch Box on the inventory he did for Lord and Lady Dunmore—perhaps this image was intended to evoke that one.

  She tried one of the conspiracy theorist’s favorite games, an anagram. “Robert Mason” deconstructed into “treat no mobs”, which at least summed up Dunmore’s policy toward the people he perceived as rebels, the people who perceived themselves as freedom fighters.

  But Alasdair was right, the simplest explanation was the best. The letters “F”, “B”, and “S” were carved on the Witch Box. It was the names Frances and Stewart, with Betty to provide the “B”—and William Hathaway and Mason for lagniappe—that had drawn the Dingwalls’ attention to this stone. The names and the evocative frame of the flying skull. Part coincidence, part Mason’s associations, whatever, the combination would be proof to a dyed-in-the-wool conspiracist.

  Just “B” and “S” summed up Jean’s opinion of conspiracy theory, but then, she was feeling particularly cynical this morning. Go figure.

  Stuffing her notebook back in her bag, she turned toward the church and almost tripped over a small stone at the foot of the Mason family plot. She glanced at it, then stopped and took a good hard look. The weathered letters read, “Thos Napier 1775”.

  Thomas Napier? Mary’s son? If she’d had an illegitimate child, he would have her name, not his father’s. So when had he been born? Even if Mary had given birth at age forty or so, around 1700, he would have been relatively long-lived.

  The wind sighed through the branches overhead and sprinkled Jean’s head with cold rain, an ad-libbed baptism. With a sigh and a command to her already frayed nervous system to start processing the data, she picked her way back to the low railing and the pavement.

  Chapter Twenty

  People were gathering at the tower door as overhead the bell pealed a summons.

  She might as well attend the service, too. The glorious language of the Book of Common Prayer both soothed and uplifted. A prayer to ease Sharon’s spirit, and Wesley’s, too, wouldn’t hurt—the souls of murder victims were as uneasy as those of their murderers. And while she hopeful
ly had the ear of the Almighty, she could ask forgiveness for all her snide remarks about Sharon, whether vocalized or not, and request a free pass for continued snide remarks about Tim and now Kelly, ditto.

  She tried to scrape the mud and grass from her shoes as she walked toward the door—and then stopped on the threshold, spotting a familiar tuft of white hair just beyond the churchyard wall. A person of interest, Alasdair would say. Someone who’d been in the vicinity last night.

  Dodging upstream, Jean walked out the southern gate to find Barbara Finch distributing vases of flowers to two other women from the back of a monstrous black SUV, an old hunk of Detroit iron that would squash a Japanese vehicle like a Japanese beetle. Today she was wearing a lime green double-knit pants suit, a size too large, over brown shoes that looked like cut-down hiking boots.

  “Good morning,” said Jean, trying to look more casual than inquisitive.

  “Well hello there,” Barbara returned. And, to one of her minions, “Sorry I’m late, take these right up to the altar.”

  “Those are beautiful.” The bronze and yellow flowers burst exuberantly from their greenery, symbolizing rebirth as surely as a spring bunny bearing eggs. “These are chrysanthemums, right?”

  “I have no idea. You’d have to ask the florist. Here.” Barbara thrust the last vase into Jean’s hands and slammed the hatch with a thud that resounded off Jean’s eardrums.

  “I’ll take them in for you. They’re heavy.” Jean tightened her grip of the vase.

  Barbara whisked it away, every wrinkle of her face set. “I may be old, but I’m not weak. There are few epithets as bad as ‘old woman’, you know. That implies not just weakness, but incompetence and even invisibility.”

  Barbara and Jessica, Jean reflected, were matched better than either would admit. “I’m sorry I missed the concert here last night. Bach, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, it was. Come to the free concert at the Palace. Seven tonight. I get to dress up in period clothing like an interpreter and play one of Wesley Hagedorn’s harpsichords, in memoriam. May his killer rot in . . .” She stopped, her thin pink lips snapping shut on a word Jean guessed was not “peace.”