What had happened to Wesley Hagedorn, exactly? Why had it happened? And, perhaps most importantly, who had made it happen?
Jean read on, her stomach grumbling under the weight of breakfast and dread.
Wesley Hagedorn had been forty-three, the same age as Alasdair. Never married, no close relatives remaining, built fine furniture and other replicas, including harpsichords that he also played in the occasional concert. The Foundation’s official statement expressed shock and regret and stated that Wesley would be sorely missed.
She scrolled on, and found an article on fine woodworking that Hagedorn himself had written for a magazine. Of the photos, all but two were of his work. Jean ran her gaze appreciatively over the curves and curlicues of a set of chairs and a desk. He had been a fine craftsman. Replicating the rough-and-ready designs of the Witch Box wouldn’t have been at all difficult after the delicacy of his other work.
Wesley’s right hand—the one with the cunning, according to the Bible—was pictured demonstrating its craft to a black-haired, sallow-faced twenty-ish man identified as Samuel Gould, apprentice. While Gould’s fingers looked like hot dogs sprouting strands of dark hair, Wesley’s were preternaturally long and delicate, with pearly, sawdust-covered nails. They were applying an engraving tool to a wooden surface and producing coiled shavings fine as Linda Campbell-Reid’s reddish-blond curls.
Jean knew very well indeed that the size and shape of a man’s hands had nothing to do with the delicacy of their touch. And Gould did have a vague Neanderthal charm. Was he the colleague who had discovered Wesley’s body?
Wesley himself occupied the center of the last photo, both those remarkable hands depressing the keys of what Jean assumed was a harpsichord. He wore the usual eighteenth-century waistcoat and shirt over a slender body. His salt-and-pepper hair was pulled back from a long, sensitive face, all forehead and chin and slightly watery—from years of sawdust?—hazel eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses.
Jean had seen photos of drowning victims. Imagining Wesley’s face blanched and swollen and those fine instruments of hands reduced to sagging meat made her hope that he hadn’t drowned after all. Or been drowned, rather, if he’d been murdered. Death in any form, natural or otherwise, was not kind to the physical shell.
Hurriedly she clicked back to the search queue, then stopped—wait a minute. She returned to the picture and its legend: “Wesley Hagedorn plays the newest product of the cabinetmaker’s shop, a harpsichord similar to that played by Governor Dunmore’s wife and daughters.”
This time Jean considered the person standing partly beyond the edge of the photo, a woman, turned three-quarters away from the camera, wearing a featureless black coat. With little more than the angles of her elbow and shoulder in the frame, she looked like a raven crouching over Wesley’s inoffensive—okay, maybe he’d had the vocabulary of a sailor, he looked inoffensive—back. But no raven had blond hair with a streak of silver, like crumpled tinsel, flaring down one side.
Jessica Evesdottir.
So what? Jean asked herself. The woman was entitled to walk around the Historic Area just like anyone else. And her study of colonial history gave her impeccable motives for doing so. Just because she was standing behind Wesley didn’t mean she even knew him, only that she’d been there when the photo was taken.
However, if he’d been researching and then reproducing the Witch Box, Jessica would have been interested. She might even have been working with him.
However again, Alasdair might come back from his mission with another take on the situation entirely. Or Ian might call from Edinburgh with new information. If so, ex-detective Cameron was honor-bound to share it with the inconsiderate but very much active-duty detective Venegas. Despite the mud on her shoes last night, she wasn’t letting the grass grow beneath her feet.
With a thump on her touch pad, Jean closed the photo and tried to settle her slightly queasy gut with some affirmations. Wesley Hagedorn’s alleged murderer could have had any number of motives—money, jealousy, blackmail. His work on the Witch Box might not have had anything to do with his death. This particular case was none of her business.
Right. Telling herself something was none of her business was getting to be a less effective exhortation all the time. And it wasn’t as though her curiosity had ever killed any cats. What it had almost killed was her.
Wincing a la Matt Finch, Jean glanced across the room at the clock sitting on the mantelpiece between a black iron ladle and a brown ceramic bottle. Ten-fifteen. Almost time to set out for the interview, which was her business. She turned back to the computer and skimmed the file with the notes she’d taken from various writings of the Dingwalls’. Then, bracing herself, she clicked on the link to their website.
This time she didn’t duck and cover at the sudden flare of rotating graphics and portentous music, but she did congratulate herself on talking Miranda out of having “Scotland the Brave,” pipes and drums and all, come up with the Great Scot website.
Navigating the Dingwalls’ site was like piloting the Starship Enterprise, alarm klaxons screaming, exclamation points flying like photon torpedoes. The secret plot to control human destiny! Hidden history! What they don’t want you to know!
There’s always a they, Jean thought. She closed the window and the music stopped. In the abrupt silence, a chill like a trickle of cold water ran down her back—and it wasn’t a trace of froth from the website. She looked around.
The clock and the ladle sat on the mantelpiece. The brown bottle wasn’t there.
Okaaay.
Warily, she stood up, but the chill had dissipated before it became that all-too-familiar wet blanket. Still, something or someone had moved the bottle. To where?
She found it in the pantry, next to the chrome and plastic of the coffee maker, looking out into the living room. Literally. On the mantelpiece, the bottle’s back had been turned to the room. Now Jean saw the medallion of a bearded face affixed to its neck.
It was a Bellarmine bottle, a type of wine bottle named after a fierce anti-Reformation cardinal whose face had resembled the stylized ones on the jars. Inhabitants of an earlier age had occasionally used such bottles as witch bottles, filling them with iron pins or nails, human hair or even urine, and then hiding them around doorways or beneath the household hearth. The idea was to protect the house and those who lived there from a witch’s curse—like the role of the hidden shoes Jessica had once lectured about.
Jean wasn’t sure when Bellarmine bottles had been manufactured, but was under the impression their era bracketed not only Lord and Lady Dunmore’s relatively enlightened period, but also Francis Stewart’s twilit one, when witches and demons, and the prevention thereof, had been taken seriously and often fatally.
What had been in this bottle? Picking it up, she tried a tentative sniff at its mouth but sensed only a vague, damp, sweet muskiness. Her former husband had worn more assertive colognes.
The bottle’s cool dimpled glazing, like a reddish-brown orange, felt innocuous. The ghost whose incorporeal hand had moved it was probably harmless, too. He—she?—was just repeating his normal daily round in life, cooking, pouring wine, protecting himself against witches.
She replaced the bottle next to the clock. Time had leaped forward to ten-thirty-five. Now she was going to have to hustle.
Swiftly, but not so swiftly she fell over her own hands and feet, she turned off the computer, called about the dirty breakfast dishes, dabbed on some make-up, collected her mini-backpack, and made sure she had the tools of her trade and her key to the door.
Outside, Bushrod and Bucktrout were settling down on the sun-warmed sidewalk. She stepped around them just as Eric pushed open the gate. Aha, her ploy to attract the knowledgeable young man had worked in the nick of time. “Hello again,” she said. “I have another question.”
“Yes, ma’am?” He bent to tickle a feline ear.
“That bottle on the mantelpiece.”
“The one with the Dumbledore face embedded into it?”
There was an example of being over-educated. Knowing the face was Bellarmine’s, she’d seen it as sinister, not benign like that of Harry Potter’s headmaster. “Yes, that one. Do you know if it was found in the house?
“Yes ma’am, I do—the restoration people were real nice about showing us around. They found the bottle below a loose stone in the hearth. Funny place for a wine bottle, but maybe the folks back then, they were using it to bury their valuables. There wasn’t anything in it except pebbles, a couple of old coins, and nails. Metal nails, not fingernails,” he added with a grin. “The wax cap was all dried out and broken.”
Tempted as she was to keep on pumping him for information, he and she both had places to go and people to see. All she said was, “You know your stuff, Eric. Thanks! Do you need for me to unlock the door?”
“No problem either way, ma’am.” Detouring around the reclining cats, Eric pulled a skeleton key from his pocket and applied it to the door.
Jean heard the rumble of an approaching bus. Another nick of time! It was beneath Great Scot’s dignity for her to arrive for the interview sweaty, puffing, hair flying and glasses askew, not to mention late. Sprinting across the street to the bus stop in front of the Lodge, she clambered onto her natural-gas-powered chariot and whipped out her notebook—a paper notebook, with a pen or pencil, was a less fussy and demanding accessory than a PDA.
“Bellarmine bottle beneath the hearth,” she wrote, her pencil jerking as the bus swung around the corner and past the entrance ramp to the Colonial Parkway. “Must have been hidden after the house moved from the Palace grounds in the 1750s. A bit late to be practicing preventive magic, but . . .”
But what? she wondered, tucking her notebook and pencil back into her bag. Was the inhabitant of the house an older person clinging to the ways of his youth? Or was he simply someone less sophisticated than Franklin, Jefferson, and other paragons of the Enlightenment? Maybe she could ask Jessica’s opinion before or after her lecture.
The bus paused beside the Public Hospital Building and then paused again at the corner of Henry and Duke of Gloucester, where Jean hopped off.
In the sunlight, the red brick, Federal-style buildings at Merchant’s Square and the college across the street glowed the same sunset hues as the trees. The air was cool, but not so cool she and Tim and Sharon wouldn’t be able to sit outside, all the better to see who was sneaking up on them. Snorting in something between impatience and indulgence, Jean eyed the patio outside the Cheese Shop. A few people sat at the wrought-iron tables, but none of them were Dingwalls.
It was straight up eleven. They weren’t even fashionably late yet. Jean strolled on to the Kimball Theater and inspected a poster mounted beside the front door.
November 1! it proclaimed. Hugh Munro and his band, traditional Celtic music with a contemporary awareness. The photo showed Hugh, his fiddle poised for action. The fringe of white hair around his head looked like the halo on a cherub, assuming the cherub also had a white beard and an impish smile. Behind him stood the lads—Billy on pipes, Jamie on guitar, Donnie on keyboard—ready to either light your fire or douse it with tears, depending on the mood of music that split the difference between sentiment and rock ’n’ roll.
Thank goodness Alasdair had a good ear for music and no problem with hearing Hugh, individually and with his group, through the adjoining wall of Jean’s flat. But then, thank goodness she—they, now—didn’t live next door to the leader of a heavy metal band.
She stepped across to the far side of the door to see another poster, this one advertising a play. The Scottish play, to be exact—Shakespeare’s Macbeth. This photo showed an actor presumably portraying the Thane of Cawdor himself, wearing the red coat and tartan kilt and plaid of one of George III’s Highland regiments. Beside him his infamous spouse hitched up her billowing dress, lifted her heaving bosom, and held a dagger before him, the hilt to his hand. It was his own dirk, probably, trimmed in silver. They leered at each other, their expressions drawing subtexts that would have intrigued Freud if Shakespeare hadn’t gotten there first.
Behind the two actors stood the weird sisters, three modestly gowned and visaged witches—not a hooked nose or wart among them—speaking incantations over a cauldron decorated with a scowling face not unlike that of the Bellarmine bottle.
“Hello there, Jean!”
Jean spun around, shedding bits of imagery like water droplets.
Tim Dingwall stood in the doorway of the Cheese Shop. “We’re waiting for you. You said eleven o’clock.”
No, they hadn’t said they’d actually meet her on the patio, she’d just made an assumption. Not the first time she’d been wrong. With her best ingratiating smile, Jean wove her way among the tables and up the steps into the shop.
Tim held the door open for her. As she brushed past, she caught a whiff of stale sweat from his tweed jacket. It seemed as much a costume as his admiral’s outfit, Jabba the Hutt playing the respectable academic. Inside, Sharon was inspecting a rack of chocolates, her long brown skirt, fuzzy brown cardigan, and big brown tote bag blending right in. “Not a bad selection,” she stated, turning to Jean. “There’s no table service?”
“Afraid not.” Jean indicated the “Place order here” sign over a counter at the back of the shop.
Sharon and Tim planted themselves in front of a student-age server and barraged her with questions—were the cheeses made locally? Were they kept properly refrigerated? Were the meats fresh? Were the breads whole-grain or gluten-free? Were the chips fried in transfats and were the cookies made with cane sugar or high-fructose corn syrup? After every answer they paused to reflect, as though the fate of the free world hinged on their decisions.
Jean hovered, increasingly aware of the line starting to snake between the shelves of crackers, teas, and wines. She couldn’t pretend she wasn’t with them. She tried Alasdair’s ploy of holding up her arm and staring at her watch, but neither Dingwall noticed.
At last they placed an order, then transferred their attention to the long, refrigerated case holding chilled beverages. There they read labels and debated the merits of different drinks while the slightly shell-shocked server handed two food baskets across the counter to Jean.
By the time Tim and Sharon finalized their choices, and Jean paid for their lunches and her own bottle of flavored tea—what Alasdair didn’t see her drinking wouldn’t hurt him—she was ready to buy a cup of ice, too, just to put down Tim and Sharon’s backs. Instead, she joined them at a table tucked into the outer corner of the patio and told herself to just sit back and think of Great Scot. This was going to make a fine article.
“You should have something to eat,” Tim said. “You must watch out for your blood sugar.”
“I had a big breakfast. Besides, I need to take notes.” And she was still digesting the word murder. Jean opened her notebook to a clean page and inspected her collection of two-and-a-half pencils. Yep, nice and sharp.
Sharon eyed the blank paper. “Can’t Great Scot afford a PDA? That was a really expensive dress Miranda was wearing last night.”
“Entering my notes on the computer gives me a chance to get started on the article,” Jean told her, which was almost the truth and didn’t make her sound like a Luddite. “You began as journalists in California, right?”
“We met each other at the Los Angeles Alternative News.” Tim took a huge bite of his pastrami sandwich and went on, words muffled, “Was in Los Angeles we discovered patterns behind major news stories.”
On cue, Sharon presented the official Dingwall platform: “The establishment-controlled media and their obsession with junk news keep the public distracted from the truth about the secret societies whose collusion has shaped religious, economic, and political history and controls our lives today.”
“Puppet masters,” added Tim, still chewing. “Junk news opiate of people.”
Being media herself, Jean knew that the entities pulling the strings and jerking the chains were marketers, accountants, and stockholders chasing the almighty dollar. Pound. Euro. Yen. Rupee. “ ‘Opiate of the people’. That’s Karl Marx, isn’t it, writing about religion?”
“Good heavens, we’re not communists!” Sharon started dissecting her chicken salad sandwich. “Dark meat. Just doesn’t sit well. I bet that’s where the growth hormones and other chemicals collect. Agribusiness, you know.”
Yes, selling meat, like selling stories, was a time-honored capitalist enterprise.
Tim washed down his cud with a swig from his O’Doul’s. Alcohol-free beer. What was the point? Alasdair would have asked.
“Religion is no opiate,” said Tim. “Religion is prejudice fomented by the ruling classes in order to keep the rest of the world’s population from uniting against them.”
“I see.” Nothing like throwing the spiritual baby out with the fanatic bathwater, Jean thought, but then, that was a popular pastime these days. She glanced back at her notes. “Then you lived in Roswell, New Mexico, investigating the UFO phenomenon. Do you believe the media is hiding the truth about UFOs?”
“The truth about UFOs is that they do not exist. All the stories about them, no matter how popular, are merely smoke and mirrors. They provide yet more distraction from the real issues.”
Sharon reassembled her sandwich, leaving half its components behind, and took a tiny bite. “There’s no such thing as the supernatural. No UFOs. No angels, no devils. No ghosts, no vampires, no witches. The witchcraft craze in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was engineered by the ruling societies. Their demagogues, their agitators, stirred up fear in order to keep the ordinary people from asking important questions. People should pay attention to the real world and stop chasing after supernatural chimera.”
Well yes, Jean thought. And no. Demagoguery didn’t limit itself to supernatural foes—look at the Cold War and the Red Scare not long before her own birth, or the fevered paranoia of the present day. She was all in favor of asking questions. “Francis Stewart, Lord Bothwell, was ruling-class, but he was tried for witchcraft. He got off, of course, unlike some of his associates.”
“Exactly as we said. The events of world history are controlled by money and power,” Tim said, and chomped down the rest of his sandwich half.
Well yes, Jean thought again. That she hadn’t expected these people to make any sense at all revealed her own prejudices. Even if the Dingwalls’ definition of “sense” was one of the issues. “Now you’re living in Rosslyn, Virginia.”
“Yes.” Sharon chewed another tiny bite with her front teeth, like a rabbit. “We’re right across the river from D.C., where we can monitor all the clandestine activity. Rosslyn’s an appropriate name for a center of undercover power, isn’t it?”
Trying to keep the groan from her voice, Jean replied, “You’re thinking of Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland.”
“Yep. An entire building composed of cryptograms and codes. Of course the-powers-that-be won’t let anyone dig there and open up the crypts.” Jean noted the unintended pun—cryptogram, crypt, Kryptonite—but Sharon plunged on. “You’re doing an article on the hidden history of the Scottish borders, aren’t you? The one about Ferniebank that’s under ‘coming soon’ in the latest Great Scot?”
Jean couldn’t pry her teeth far enough apart to answer. Ferniebank. Rosslyn. Been there, done that, had the disease and built up an immunity. Or so she thought. Tim and Sharon were carrying a mighty big virus. She herded the conversation back to Virginia, more or less. “If you don’t believe in the supernatural, paranormal, whatever, then why are you so interested in the Witch Box and the charm stone?”
“As sociological artifacts.” Sharon spoke to Jean, but her gaze locked with Tim’s. “As evidence. Because of their connection with Francis Bacon.”
“Are they connected to Francis Bacon? The letters ‘F’ and ‘B’ might be carved on the Box, but with the ‘S’ they could refer to Bothwell just as well. It was his charm stone, right?”
This time Tim’s gaze locked with Sharon’s, and for a long moment his jaw stopped moving. Then, with a convulsive gulp, he swallowed.
They were hiding something. Great, Jean told herself, now she was suspecting a conspiracy.
As if to punctuate her thought, a tinny, electronic version of the theme from The X-Files suddenly filled the air.