Charm Stone

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Alasdair’s hand appeared in Jean’s peripheral vision. Patience didn’t necessarily go with cool. She should have insisted he buy his own phone the minute they landed in the U.S. of A. She reached for her bag, and one of the bells in the back of her mind ding-donged.

  She’d almost dropped her bag on a stuffed cabbage in the Palace kitchen, when the cook interpreter had been talking about Thomasina. Then Matt had called, and while she was talking to him one of the visitors asked if the food displayed on the table was real.

  She scooped up the bag, pulled out the phone, and laid it in Alasdair’s hand. He scooted forward in his chair, ready to make a break for the door the moment the music stopped.

  Who was still talking? Jean looked around but saw only silent faces glowing in the candlelight, enrapt by the elegant harmonies. Even Matt’s features eased a bit, his gaze not wavering from his mother and the harpsichord.

  The voices, Jean realized, were coming through the window behind her. Rachel’s mosquito-whine interlocked with a male voice that also sounded familiar, like a variation on a theme . . . And the bells in Jean’s mind pealed in perfect synchrony with music.

  The interpreter had said something about a mouse breaking health regulations by eating the food left out overnight.

  Seizing Alasdair’s arm so firmly she jerked him back in his chair, she leaned over to within a millimeter of his ear. Her nose and throat filled with the scent of his hair, better than that of cookies baking or beer brewing. “When I was here earlier today, the cook said a mouse was eating their demonstration food. We just saw a man sneaking toward the kitchen, not a mouse.”

  He turned his head, the better to send her a quizzical look.

  “Can you hear the voices outside the window?”

  “Aye, it’s Rachel . . . Oh! She’s hiding Dylan here at the Palace!”

  Cat-like, Alasdair slid from his chair and moved swiftly and soundlessly toward the door. Jean followed, taking tiny, tiptoeing steps, and avoided ramming into any chairs or tripping over someone’s foot. The interpreter womanning the main door turned in a swirl of skirts to fling it open. She didn’t speak, but her stern look rebuked them for leaving while the musicians played.

  “Sorry,” Jean hissed from the corner of her mouth as she hurried by.

  In the entrance hall, the light from the phone cast a green glow on the planes of Alasdair’s face, making him look queasy. He didn’t quite manage to get outside before the phone’s reporting for duty trill sounded loud as Jessica’s trumpet fanfare.

  Cringing, Jean glanced back. And through the gap of the rapidly closing door she caught Matt Finch’s gaze, his dark eyes lit with such a sudden, fierce anger that they stayed imprinted on her retina even after the door clicked shut.

  She stood alone in the dark passageway, the music muffled, a staircase running upward into shadow at her right hand. Nothing was there that wasn’t there . . . She double-timed it toward the front door and out into the cold night, another garlic burp taking her unawares.

  Alasdair stood outside the gate, the phone to his head, speaking too quickly for the listening American ear—Stephanie, Olson, someone—to follow. Every time he stopped and repeated himself his voice grew rougher, each rolled “R” a tiny explosion. She couldn’t make out his exact words, but she didn’t need to. Rachel’s been hiding Dylan at the Palace, he’s been eating the food made up by the cooks, they’re just outside the east wall of the ballroom, aye, right smartish now.

  Pocketing the phone, he slipped along the wall toward the gate into the stable yard. Jean caught up with him, whispering hoarsely, “Wait for me!” just as he looked back and said in a hoarser whisper, “Come along, let’s keep them in sight ’til we’ve got reinforcements.”

  She nodded, and stepped carefully over the gravel to the aperture in the wall. No, the gate wasn’t shut, the restrooms were located around this way. But no one was pursuing a call of nature. The stable yard lay deserted beneath the chill light of the stars, and the surrounding sheds were closed and dark.

  Side by side, Jean and Alasdair glided—well, Alasdair glided, Jean winced at every pebble that rolled beneath her feet—between the block of the restrooms and the wall of the eastern dependency, and on into the gardens.

  The ballroom windows were tall rectangles of warm light. But soft, Jean thought, since it had been a Shakespearean day anyway, what light through yonder window, er, leaks? She squinted toward the barely illuminated lumps and bumps of flower beds and manicured shrubs. And were young Mr. Montague and Miss Capulet still standing there?

  “There,” Alasdair said, his voice no more than a skein of mist dissipating in the darkness.

  Yes, a white blob bobbed up and down, a humongous flower, a hovering duck, or Rachel’s mobcap. The high pitch of her voice carried it over the faint strains of harpsichord, viola, and flutes. “. . . turn yourself in, Dylan, please. You’re gonna make yourself sick . . .”

  A muffled sneeze and ghastly sniff were her only reply.

  A siren sounded close by, one squawk and then silence. But that was enough to send a lanky shape leaping away from the side of the building and toward the impenetrable gloom of the main garden. The dark shape beside Jean that was Alasdair leaped in turn, down the faint glow of the white path, oyster shells scattering beneath his feet.

  She stumbled along behind—she now owed Dylan for two blunders through the darkness, except this time it was Alasdair who’d gone haring off—and yes, he had a goal in sight . . .

  Applause inside the palace sounded like the pitter-patter of footsteps. Light gleamed across the shrubs and flower beds behind the ballroom and winked out as a door slammed. A tall humanoid shape ran around the corner and the humanoid shape that was Dylan charged straight into it. “It’s you,” Matt’s voice spat. “I saw Rachel leaving, I saw Jean leaving, I knew it was you. You and your family, it’s your fault, it’s all your fault!”

  “I didn’t do anything,” said Dylan’s congested voice. “Come on, man, lemme go!”

  The white cap bobbed forward, converging with the double-male blotch that now heaved back and forth, grunting and crunching. Rachel’s voice rose both to a higher pitch and a louder volume. “Oh my God, oh my God, Dylan, Dad, stop it!”

  Jean was close enough to make out the three faces, each one contorted in its own way—Matt angry, Dylan desperate, Rachel frightened—when Alasdair shoved past Rachel and forced Dylan and Matt apart. So what if they were each taller than he was, he was the expert. And no matter if he didn’t quite have the authority to take control of the situation, no one was going to argue.

  “Dingwall,” he said, crisp, brisk. “Finch. Stop just there.” One of his large, strong hands grasped each shirt front. He braced himself, but neither man seemed capable of more than a perfunctory wriggle.

  Jean got in close enough to set a restraining hand on Rachel’s cold wrist, its bones fine as balsa wood. Ignoring the sidekick, Rachel leaned toward Alasdair. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “He removed evidence from a crime scene,” Alasdair informed her.

  “What were you thinking?” Jean asked Dylan. “How did you think you could keep that tote bag hidden? How long did you think you could hide out back here? What were you doing, playing hide-and-seek with security, lurking in the trees behind the pond or something?”

  Dylan stared, probably groping through a few too many memories of the last few days to place where he’d seen her before.

  She felt Alasdair’s gaze sweep across her face like a searchlight. Of course she wasn’t going to diss Foundation security, sheesh. What she was going to do was vent all the frustration of the last day. “You came out last night and grabbed some cookies from the kitchen. And Rachel was bringing you food, too—it wasn’t as though her mom was home to ask questions.”

  Rachel jerked her arm away from Jean’s hand. “And who put my mom in jail, huh?”

  “The Dingwalls,” said Matt. “They pretended to be her friends and then they betrayed her.”r />
  “Yeah, right, Jessica thought she could use them, they thought they could use Jessica, there’s a recipe for harmony.” Jean rounded on him. “And what about you? You pretended to be my friend, but no, you steal my laptop!”

  Matt’s glasses glinted. “What laptop?”

  Dylan drooped and swayed. Rachel tucked herself up against his side, dislodging a dank, musty odor from his clothing.

  “Give me a break, Matt! You were seen outside our house!”

  “Well, yeah, I was going to talk to you but you weren’t there.”

  Alasdair adjusted his grip on Dylan’s sweatshirt. “We saw the lad’s folk there as well.”

  A faint steam rose from them all, an elusive ghostly sparkle at the rim of light. Then headlights flared beyond the low roofs and the front wall, and flashlights needled the darkness, and footsteps stampeded forward. Jean stepped back, out of the limelight, but it was too late for the cold air to cool her overheated cheeks.

  Inside the ballroom, harpsichord, viola, and flutes began another lace-like melody, muted by darkness and doubt.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Stephanie Venegas stood at the front of the room, arms crossed, eyes black as jet and malleable as adamant, in her charcoal gray pantsuit looking like a teacher deciding who was naughty and who was nice.

  It had taken only a few moments for her and her minions from the city, as well as the ever-efficient security people, to get everyone sorted into the two meeting rooms in the western dependency, between the kitchen yard and the small front garden.

  Alasdair, teacher’s pet, sat in the front row beside a cold candelabrum. Olson, teacher’s assistant, sat just behind him. Jean, superfluous, sat at the back of the room in front of a colder fireplace.

  That morning she’d sat there with a group of visitors, listening to their interpreter-guide relate the history of the Palace. The old wooden chairs, the huge map of the British colonies in America, the print of Lord Dunmore’s kilted portrait—none of them had changed. What had changed was the quality of the light. Instead of sunshine glinting through the shutters, giving the room an air of shabby gentility, now it seemed as dim and dull as an anxiety nightmare of a classroom, complete with a uniformed cop standing in front of the exit.

  Here we go again, she thought.

  Damp and dilapidated, his pointed jaw shadowed with auburn stubble, Dylan sat front and center beneath Stephanie’s uncompromising gaze. “I wanted to see Rachel at the Courthouse, but her grandmother and her mom were giving me dirty looks, so I chilled in front of the tavern for a while, listening to the music. Then I wondered where my mom had gone. I found her.” He gulped and choked. “I found her beneath the tree. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “Call the police?” suggested Olson.

  “But they, you, you’d do forensic stuff to all her stuff and she was carrying important stuff in her tote bag . . .” He puzzled a moment over his triple repetition, then went on, “You weren’t supposed to see her stuff. I had to, like, do something. So I took it and ran. And Rache had shown me the Palace gardens, lots of little hidey-holes and everything.”

  Was that where they’d gone Friday night? Jean wondered. Tough customers, kids that age, Alasdair had said. Now his head moved left and right, perhaps, like her, thinking how middle-aged lovers defaulted to warm rooms and soft surfaces.

  “So I hid, took some cookies from the kitchen, slept on a bench down by the pond, sort of. Rachel didn’t help me,” he added quickly.

  That was a blatant lie already disproved by the fast-food containers and a couple of blankets Stephanie’s people had found stashed in a shed. Still, Jean awarded Dylan a point for chivalry.

  “It’s no business of yours what my mom had in her tote bag. She was murdered. You oughtta be solving her murder.”

  “We are,” Stephanie said. “And it is our business. Where’s the bag?”

  Dylan didn’t answer.

  Jean inched away from the chill ash-flavored breath of the fireplace, wondering if the sarcophagus-like stone had soaked in macabre tales from the evening ghosts and legend tours, the way the Witch Box had absorbed the unhealthy narratives of its original owner.

  “Where’s the bag?” Stephanie repeated.

  “I wanna see my dad.”

  “We’ve sent for him. Where’s the bag?”

  Dylan sniffed yet again, loudly, and mopped his nose with his grubby fingertips.

  Stephanie’s face puckered in disgust. Even Alasdair quailed. Jean fished a fresh tissue out of her mini-backpack, got up, handed it over, and sat down again, this time on the third row from the front. While she was at it, she found an antacid for herself.

  Dylan eyed the tissue, then wadded it into a pocket without using it.

  Alasdair leaned into Dylan’s line of sight. “Do you not realize, lad, that the photos and all in the bag, they’ll have gone damp, they’ll be sticking together. And the silver bits, they’ll tarnish all the faster.”

  “The silver bits?” Dylan swiveled toward Alasdair.

  “Wesley had the charm stone, didn’t he? He was playing silly beggars . . .” Sending an ice-blue look toward Jean, Alasdair amended, “He was teasing you with it.”

  “Oh yeah, he kept saying he hadn’t picked it up in Scotland, it was all just legend, but he had a pile of stones on his kitchen table. But we tried all of them and the pieces of silver were the wrong shape, so maybe he was telling the truth . . . Aw, shit.” Dylan sank down in his chair, realizing he’d been had.

  Alasdair looked at Stephanie. Stephanie looked at Alasdair. Olson scribbled in his notebook. The chalky, minty flavor of the antacid clogged Jean’s throat.

  “You and your mum,” Alasdair said to Dylan, almost purring now, “you burgled Wesley’s flat. It was your mum, was it, your dad being a wee bit over large for climbing in windows and the like.”

  Dylan stared down at the dusty plank floor. “It was Jessica’s fault,” he said, very faintly.

  “Speak up,” Olson ordered him. “What was Jessica’s fault?”

  “We had a deal with her. We had a deal with Wesley. Then Jessica was all, ‘I want the document myself,’ and Wesley sided with her, saying he wouldn’t make another Box. He gave Aunt Kelly back her deposit and everything.”

  “And your mother was mad?” Stephanie asked.

  “Yeah. And she could get really mad.”

  Mad-crazy, Jean thought, as well as mad-angry.

  “So you broke into Wesley Hagedorn’s flat to get the plans and photos for yourself.”

  “Yeah.” Dylan’s sigh sounded like a tire depressurizing. “My mom had a great idea, let’s pick up some stuff and throw it in the pond, to make it look like a real robbery. She’d read that in a Sherlock Holmes story, she said.”

  Well yes, that bit of business was in a Holmes story, Jean thought, not that her steel sieve of a brain could remember which one.

  “A burglary, not a robbery,” Stephanie corrected. “And why wasn’t it a real one?”

  “Well, I mean . . .” Dylan stammered. “The plans and stuff, they were, like, ours.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  From outside the window came the sound of footsteps and voices. The concert was over. From closer at hand came the sound of “The 1812 Overture.” Alasdair jumped, patted himself down, produced Jean’s phone and shut it off. With an apologetic glance in her direction, he mouthed, Miranda.

  She’d leave a message, Jean assured herself, even as her palms itched for her phone. Right now these interviews took priority.

  “Dylan,” said Stephanie. “Your family’s already in bad trouble. You don’t get a pass on a burglary here and a theft in the U.K. just because your mother was murdered.”

  Dylan sniffled, a resonant gurgle that sounded like a kitchen sink after the application of drain cleaner. “The bag’s in the ice house. I reached in through the bars and propped it up against the side.”

  Olson jabbed a finger toward the cop, who slipped out the door.


  Jean couldn’t help but glance over her shoulder, even though what she was looking at wasn’t actually there. The ice house was a tunnel driven into an artificial hill at the far back edge of the garden, where ice was stored every winter so that the governor could have his sherbets and other cool desserts in the summer. A time or two she’d peered through the iron bars closing the entrance, eyeing the dark, cramped passageway inside with the same slightly pleasurable, slightly off-putting frisson that the audience at a ghost story would have.

  She thought of Dylan collecting Sharon’s tote bag virtually from her dead hands, running through the darkness with it, clambering over the fence or finding an open gate to the Palace grounds, wandering around the dark, misty, deserted passages of the gardens, and finally tucking the bag through those cold, wet bars.

  She’d have been afraid something would grab her and pull her inside. She looked at the back of Dylan’s head with more respect. Not that she wasn’t still irritated with him for running away to begin with.

  It wasn’t so much that Alasdair was spared Jean’s imagination as that he didn’t let it get to him. “You’ve not exactly been playing happy families, have you, lad?” was all he said.

  And Stephanie said, “Dylan, go sit in the other room for a few minutes, while I talk to your dad. I’m sending you back to the hotel with him. Clean up. Rest. Don’t even think of going anywhere, not you, not your brother, not your father, not your aunt. You’ll make a formal statement tomorrow morning.”

  Wiping his nose on the back of his hand, Dylan stood up. “You’re gonna find out who killed my mom? You’re gonna find out it wasn’t, it wasn’t . . .”

  “It wasn’t Rachel’s mother?” Stephanie asked. “No promises.”

  Olson stood up so stiffly, Jean could almost hear his limbs creak. Like Rachel, he’d aged in the last hours, his features glazed with weariness and pasty-pale. He might actually be able to buy alcohol without trotting out his ID, now.

  Olson stepped forward and escorted the youth from the room. Alasdair stood up and stretched. Stephanie sat down in the closest chair, for just a moment, so brief Jean thought she’d imagined it, going boneless. But she hadn’t imagined the arch of Stephanie’s nose sharpening in the last two days, and her smooth olive skin roughening and taking on a flat gray hue.