Charm Stone

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

“Sooner rather than later, you mean? Thanks for the tip.”

  Okay, Jean thought as she popped the phone back into her bag, she’d done her duty as a public-spirited citizen. Although going straight to Stephanie without passing go and collecting Alasdair’s two hundred—pounds—might not help the events that were running through her own fingers.

  The sound of bagpipes filtered faintly into Merchant’s Square.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  At first Jean thought she was hearing the music backgrounding the tumble of her own thoughts. Then she decided there must be a program in progress.

  Well yes, there was, sort of. Hugh’s band was rehearsing inside the Kimball Theater. She’d recognize those rhythms anywhere, just as she’d recognize the brushed velvet of Alasdair’s voice.

  She darted into the Cheese Shop, bought a bottle of orange juice, and went back to the theater. The front door was unlocked. She tiptoed into the main auditorium and sat down beneath the glowing chandelier, whose light gleamed on chaste white walls and red velvet curtains alike.

  Hugh’s colleague Billy stopped playing his pipes, adjusted his drones, changed the reed in his chanter, started again. Jamie plinked a few experimental notes on his guitar and joined in. Donnie swayed back and forth behind his keyboard, hands moving like a priest’s performing a blessing. None of them was young—combined with Hugh, they had the experience of more than two centuries. No wonder the music resonated with such feeling it brought a lump to Jean’s throat.

  And they were playing “Lochaber No More,” a song Robert Mason would have known. Lochaber, in western Scotland, land of craggy mountains, deep lochs, lush green fields, whose beauty could catch at your heart and whose harshness could stop it. Lochaber, where she and Alasdair had first met. Thanks, guys.

  Hugh stepped out of the wings, fiddle in hand. But he didn’t tuck it under his chin. Instead, he began to sing, his clear voice filling the hall. “Farewell to Lochaber, farewell to my Jean . . .” A heartsick young soldier dutifully leaves his girlfriend to go to war, for without honor he would be unworthy of her, but if he returns home, then his heart will be filled with love.

  Honor cut both ways. Jean gulped her juice, the thoughts pinging back and forth through her head like the ball in a pinball game, hitting bells, lighting up lights, disappearing into black holes.

  If Matt was an example of a sensitive contemporary guy, then she liked the strong silent type. Whether the strong silent type was good for the long run, as Jessica had put it, well . . . She might as well grab one of Barbara’s chrysanthemums and pluck off its petals to the litany of he loves me, he loves me not like a schoolgirl. Although, as an adult, her litany was more likely I love him, I love him not.

  Neither she nor Alasdair had ever used the word “love,” not that she could remember. Which proved only that they’d been heart-burned. He was right—why ask why, show don’t tell . . .

  The song over, Billy went back to fussing with his pipes. They emitted the indignant squawk of a man encountering a proctologist. Hugh waved at Jean, and turned around to confer with the lads and a disembodied loudspoken voice recommending sound levels and tone balance.

  One song they wouldn’t be singing was the one about love and marriage going together like a horse and carriage, including the steaming piles of authenticity. A second marriage, Jean had once told Alasdair, back when the conversation became personal, was a victory of hope over experience. Which summed up the Dingwalls’ approach to history. Not a good recommendation, there.

  Hugh stepped down off the stage and strolled up the aisle toward her. Once again Jean packed away her behind-the-scenes concerns and turned her face outward, to duty, honor, and the war against crime.

  Sitting down, Hugh asked, “How’s the investigation getting on? Jamie was saying the polis have made an arrest. Not Kelly Dingwall.”

  “No, but she’s still a person of interest, as Alasdair would say.”

  Hugh didn’t ask where Alasdair was. He’d known Jean before she knew Alasdair, and was under no illusions about them being joined at the hip. “I’m booked for a chat with the polis this afternoon. Now I’m after minding just what Kelly was on about in mid-Atlantic airspace. If I’d known what she’d been getting up to at Blair, and what would be happening to her sister-in-law, I’d not have been so quick to cover my ears with a pillow.”

  Had I but known, Jean thought. The motto beneath the coat of arms of the human race. “Can you think of anything at all that would help? Other than Kelly promoting the movie as a finished product while Tim’s still searching for Francis Bacon’s mythical papers.”

  “And the best of British luck to him,” said Hugh. “One thing—the Dingwalls have themselves a copy of the Witch Box, do they?”

  “No, there’s only the one copy, the one Kelly and Quentin—ahem—allegedly stole from Blair.”

  Hugh’s genial yet acerbic face rumpled in a frown. “Kelly was going on about the Box being a centerpiece of the film, with actors playing both the Francis, Stewart and Bacon, doing scenes with it. She was naming names, although I’m not minding them. Not A-list actors, in any event.”

  “This only a few hours after swearing to the Perthshire police she’d never heard of the Box, let alone stolen it?”

  “Oh aye.”

  “They’ve actually signed actors? That suggests they’d been planning to steal the replica for quite some time, and assumed they’d succeed . . .” One of Jean’s tiny light bulbs flickered into life. “Or maybe they’d planned to have Wes make them one, too. If they fell out with him the same time they fell out with Jessica—heck, if Jessica asked him not to work with them—then they might have been motivated first to steal the plans from Wes’s apartment, then to steal the replica itself.”

  Hugh’s bright blue eyes glinted. “I’ve got no idea what you’re thinking there, but it’s always right amusing watching the steam puffing from your ears. Better you go driving that train of thought past Alasdair. Or the American detectives.”

  “Preferably both.”

  “Me, I’d best be earning a living.” Hugh stood up. “Concert’s at half past seven the night.”

  “I’m afraid you’ve been bumped from my schedule. There’s a concert at the Palace in honor of Wesley Hagedorn. Sorry. Maybe we can make the show tomorrow.”

  “No problem, you’re hearing us most every day,” he replied. “Oh, I was meaning to say, have you spoken with Agnes, your other neighbor?”

  “Not recently, no. Her side of my flat has been the quiet one since she got hearing aids and stopped turning the TV set up to supersonic levels.”

  “Well then, I was having a blether with her son whilst I waited for the taxi yesterday morning, and he’s telling me Agnes is away to a care home come the new year. He’s after gutting and renovating her flat and then selling up.”

  “Really? I’ll miss those gorgeous flowerpots on the stoop, although I won’t miss her accusing Dougie of using them as litter boxes.”

  “A fine discreet cat, Dougie. Right!” Hugh called to Donnie’s beckoning finger, and with an encouraging thumbs-up at Jean, went to rejoin the lads.

  A bell dinged in Jean’s belfry—someone had said something, somewhere—but with the clamor of bells and whistles on the main floor, she couldn’t begin to single out one particular note.

  She tilted the rest of the cold, sweet juice into her mouth, then pulled her notebook from her bag. Quickly she jotted a rough transcription of her conversation with Hugh. Maybe if Stephanie plied him with copies of People or Us Weekly he’d key on the names of the actors. No matter. Each of the Dingwalls was making his or her cameo appearance in the interview room’s hot seat.

  To the inspiring strains of “Johnny Cope,” commemorating one of the few battles Bonnie Prince Charlie had won, Jean returned her notebook to her bag—and knocked the green plastic sack from the bookstore onto the floor. She glanced guiltily toward the stage, but the band in full cry would cover the sound of a falling anvil.

  Extract
ing Witches and Wenches from the bag—no damage done—she flipped it open to the index. As Barbara had said, Jessica analyzed not just Mary Napier’s story but those of other Virginia witches, or women accused of being witches: Katherine Grady, Elizabeth Dunkin, Grace Sherwood—whoa, there was a man’s name, William Harding. Not quite William Hathaway, Jean thought, although she wouldn’t put it past the Dingwalls to find some relationship.

  A quick flip through the text revealed passages on immigration from Scotland and healing practices, material that Jessica might, or might not, have cribbed from Matt’s and Barbara’s work . . . Innocent until proved guilty, Jean reminded herself, applied to Jessica and Matt both.

  Since Thomasina Napier had never been accused of witchcraft, she rated only a footnote. She’d dressed herself as a man and worked as a sailor until the other sailors saw that her male apparatus was vestigial at best. The authorities had then forced her into women’s clothes. Whether she had female apparatus at all was unrecorded—the feminine pronoun was applied from the outside in, not from the inside out.

  So much for the land of the free and the home of the bravely unconventional.

  Jean turned several pages back to the account of Mary Napier’s trial. She was swum in a pond at Middle Plantation that for years afterward was called Duckwitch Pond, but, said another, much shorter, footnote, was renamed in the nineteenth century and was now known by the fine old English name of . . .

  Dunwich Pond, Jean repeated silently. Where Wesley Hagedorn died. That’s what Jessica had said in her lecture about the artifacts of witchcraft, the lecture Jean had heard two years ago. That Mary Napier had been tortured at Duckwitch or Dunwich Pond.

  A waspish voice said in her ear, “Don’t waste your time with that. Recycled material, a silk purse from a sow’s ear.”

  Jean jumped, told herself she really needed to moderate that startle reflex, and looked around to see Louise Dietz. Her smug smile reminded Jean of Sharon Dingwall. Her live-wire hair did not.

  “Sorry,” Louise said, “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you. I should have realized you couldn’t hear me over the music.”

  Hugh was now playing the soulful “MacPherson’s Lament,” Jamie and Donnie noodling around the edges. When Billy chimed in, the wave of sound set the chandelier to tinkling.

  “No problem,” Jean told Louise, and took a deep breath—see, I’m still functioning—which filled her nostrils with a faint mustiness and a not-so-faint aroma of musky perfume. She assumed the former was generated by the theater, not Louise’s bulky, probably homemade, sweater. She turned sideways in her seat, the better to tackle this new quarry.

  “I hear they arrested Jessica,” Louise said. “I’m no fan of hers—she’s gone a long way on dubious references—but I never thought she was capable of murder. If it’s any help, she was her usual obstructive self when I was talking to her in the lounge at the Lodge last night, then went white as a ghost when someone walked in and said Sharon Dingwall had been murdered.”

  Not correcting Louise’s misapprehension about the color of ghosts—some of them appeared in living color, “living” being relative—Jean said, “You may be the best alibi she’s got.”

  “Great.” Louise rolled her eyes.

  Jean had beat around enough bushes the night before. “Jessica’s no fan of yours, either. She said you were trying to get information from her about that new source of hers.”

  “No kidding. She’s spent enough time trying to get information out of me. Tit for tat, I told her. Tell me what this miraculous new source is. Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.” The pile of papers, folders, and booklets in her lap slipped sideways and Louise grabbed for them. “Okay, to be fair, the reason I’m here helping stage Macbeth is because Jessica went off to Berwick in Scotland last spring . . . Whoa, I’m not supposed to say the name of the play, am I? Bad luck.”

  The bad luck, Jean thought, was that she herself knew more about Jessica’s source than Louise did. Still, witnesses, even casual ones, tended to know things they didn’t know they knew. “‘The Scottish Play’ is based, sort of, on the trial of the Berwick witches, right?”

  “Oh yes. When Jessica came back she asked me a lot of questions about the play and its history. I was looking for a student project, so here I am. Nothing like blood, thunder, and sex to get the kids’ attention. Plus some toilet humor on the side.”

  “When I was teaching history, I learned early on to present it as gossip—what were they thinking?” Jean grinned, then asked, “Who do you think wrote Shakespeare?”

  “A guy named William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon. There’s no evidence that he didn’t. Bacon, Marlowe, Oxford, whoever—that’s all just as much wishful thinking and creative extrapolation as the Dingwalls’ vault in the churchyard.”

  “One, two, three, four!” shouted Hugh, and the band launched into “Mairi’s Wedding.”

  Jean’s feet tapped, even as she raised her voice. “You’re doing an eighteenth-century version of the play?”

  “Who’s to say what an eighteenth-century version is? Shakespeare wasn’t a sacred text then. Heck, he wasn’t a sacred text in his own day. The folios that were printed right after his death were typeset from prompt books, transcriptions, notes, who knows what all.”

  “With typos and other mistakes.”

  “Oh yeah. No wonder that by the eighteenth century they had no qualms about not just cutting scenes but re-writing the plays, giving Romeo and Juliet a happy ending, for example. Even people you’d think would know better, like Alexander Pope, the poet, bowdlerized the text.”

  Jean nodded, knowing full well how creativity colored historical as well as literary transmission—the story would be so much better if only . . . Like the trial of the Berwick witches, which Shakespeare conflated with the blood-soaked ambitions of a king from another time period and presented to a patron who had a supernatural bee in his bonnet almost as big as the Dingwalls’ conspiracy hornet, no thanks to his cousin, Francis Stewart.

  Louise went on, “Then there were the people who forged texts, or cut up original documents for souvenirs. Dodd, Malone, Collier—I’ll tell you, some of the eighteenth-century Shakespeare scholars were pretty shady characters.”

  “But they get students to sit up and pay attention,” Jean said, even as she wondered what a shady—or at least dappled—character like Jessica Evesdottir had found in Charlotte Murray’s note. A mention of the role her ancestor’s trial had in inspiring Macbeth? The Dingwalls would—well, Sharon had sold her soul to get her hands on something relating Francis Stewart to Shakespeare and thence, however discursively, to Francis Bacon.

  A young man appeared from the back of the theater. “Ms. Dietz? Justin’s car broke down and he’ll be late, but I saw Mandy heading this way.”

  “I’m coming,” Louise told him, and, still juggling her papers, stood up. “Well, good luck with the investigation and everything.”

  “Thanks,” Jean told her.

  Louise escorted the young man into the lobby, where they were greeted by the helium-inflected voice of one of the ladies or one of the witches.

  Jean imagined a contemporary re-write: “Is this, like, a dagger which I see before me, dude, its handle, you know, toward my hand?” Muffling a groan, she once again pulled out her notebook and pencil and in her own peculiar shorthand transcribed her conversation.

  Hugh segued from playing his fiddle to singing a lusty protest song. Right on, Jean thought. Never give up, never surrender!

  And yet compromise was what made relationships, from public to personal, work.

  Packing everything away, she let the wake-the-dead cadences rouse her weary body from the theater and move it down the sidewalk to the Cheese Shop, where she bought a sandwich. She caught the bus at the corner and, trying not to think, turned her face not up to heaven but toward the smooth ceiling of cloud. The overcast was breaking up, revealing hints of blue sky behind the swags and drags of gray.

  Bucktrout and Bushrod
sat on the brick sidewalk outside the Dinwiddie Kitchen, poised to capture the first ray of sun. She petted each cat, then went inside to discover that the beds were made and the dirty dishes gone. Everything was in its place, including the Bellarmine bottle on the mantelpiece.

  She picked it up and set it back down without sensing any resonance of Thomasina. You could call all the ghosts you wanted, but they appeared on their own schedules.

  Just as she sat down with her sandwich and a cup of tea, her bag began to play “The 1812 Overture.” She was going to have to change the ring tone to something less assertive, although “Lochaber No More” was not on her short list.

  The number was Stephanie’s. “Hello?”

  “Jean.” The voice was Alasdair’s at its most polite. “I’m having a look at Dunwich Pond. I’ll drive by and collect you, shall I?”

  “Yes, please. Have you eaten?”

  “I had elevenses of sorts, a doughnut. If that’s what American police departments are depending upon for nourishment . . .” He let that sentence taper away diplomatically.

  Diplomacy didn’t stop Jean from saying, “And you count that Scottish delicacy, the deep-fried Mars bar, as health food?”

  “Don’t be daft,” Alasdair said. “Ten minutes, then.”

  Daft is what I do, Jean thought. Take it or leave it. And she thought, his first wife was certifiably daft, and they’d left each other.

  She set aside half the sandwich for him, and heated water for another cup of tea. It was boiling when he walked in the door, good as his word. “Ah, thank you kindly,” he said, and laid a manila folder on the table as he sat down. “You stopped by Matt’s office, did you?”

  His voice was still polite, if not casual. She saw no lipstick on his collar, not that she expected to. His tie was still knotted precisely against his throat and the frost in his eyes indicated, if not iron in his soul, then armor encasing his psyche.

  “Yes,” she answered, sitting on her hands to keep from reaching for the folder. “He wants us to make sure Jessica isn’t charged with murder. Either murder.”