Airtight Case (35 page)

“What?” Lindsay was incredulous.

“She told them flat out that she didn’t really know if there was a second one. The geologist and some of the others were mildly alarmed. I tried to explain about it being a cemetery, but . . . they aren’t archaeologists, and antique flowers, berms, and the like aren’t persuasive to them. Drew’s not been particularly helpful.” He glanced in her direction. “However, she seems to be getting better.”

“You think she’s the one who called Maxine?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Luke told me it was an anonymous call that got the protesters, such as they were, here.”

“Sounds like she wants to stop the project, doesn’t it?” said Lewis.

“It does. Why do you think she might want that? By the way, Luke’s going to stay a couple of days, if that’s all right with you.”

“John send him to look out for you?”

“Yes. John’s worried about me.”

“Sure, he can stay. He can room with the guys.” Lewis stopped and put his hands on her shoulders. “Lindsay, if
you
know anything about what’s going on, tell me. I don’t like surprises.”

“I’m still fitting pieces together.”

“Then you have pieces? You know I don’t want to hand Keith a scandal.”

“I’ll be as discreet as I can.”

“What does that mean? You think Drew really is involved with this Tidwell thing?”

“You tell me. Look at the way she’s been acting.”

Lindsay reminded him that Drew was an authority on historic documents and that her husband was a collector. She also told him about her interview with Trent and the lies he said Drew had told Claire.

“It could be something else entirely,” defended Lewis. “She may have simply wanted to discredit you, in case you were here to check up on her. She could simply be worried about her career.”

“Yes, that could be it. Accusations of murder and theft would definitely stand in the way of her getting a position at a top university. Would you hire her under those circumstances?”

“That’s what I mean. She could just be caught in a bad situation. But I sense that you think she was involved in stealing the papers.”

“That and other things.”

“Do you think she was connected with what happened to you?”

“I don’t know, but . . . let me continue to investigate. And quit worrying about Keith.”

“Make sure you have an airtight case before you accuse anyone of anything.”

“Trust me.”

“I’m trusting you with a lot of things. Like there really being a second coffin. Do you know how I’m going to look if there’s not one?” He looked at his watch. “It’s about suppertime. I need to talk to Stagmeyer and Mrs. Laurens.”

The presence of a second coffin had been the least of Lindsay’s worries. But, standing amid the bustling enterprise, the expense of the operation dawned on her.
If that’s all there is, one coffin will have to do. Why does Lewis put that much faith in me anyway?

Lindsay went looking for Erin and found her with the other archaeology crew outside the perimeter. They were complaining about the newcomers. Luke was with them, enjoying himself, judging from the smile on his face.

“You’d think we’re amateurs,” said Adam. “Did you hear what that guy said to me?”

“He was trying to explain to me how to dig without damaging the coffins,” complained Joel. “Me!”

“Hi, guys. Talking about Peter?” Lindsay asked.

“Is that his name?” said Adam.

“He just told me not to touch the bone measuring equipment.”

“Who does he think he is?” Adam punched his hand with his fist.

“According to Lewis, he’s a nervous graduate student who is really counting on a good sample of air.”

“We have to have ID tags now, just to work on our own site,” said Byron. “I’m not used to working like this. It’s like we’ve been taken over by fascists.”

“The equipment is very expensive,” muttered Bill.

“It could be worse,” said Kelsey. “Trent could be here.”

“And Claire,” said Joel.

“One thing about Claire, though,” said Adam. “She’d tell that little pissant where to get off.”

“Or steal one of their fancy trucks,” said Dillon.

Everyone laughed, and Lindsay felt a pang of dread. Where was Claire? She hoped very much that she just ran away.

Suddenly, the sound of a bell ringing in the compound grabbed everyone’s attention.

“What the heck is that?” asked Joel.

“I imagine, the dinner bell,” said Lindsay. “Let’s go eat. I think Mrs. Laurens got her entire family to help with supper tonight.”

Supper was homemade beef stew in deep cooking pots, mountains of cornbread muffins, bowls of fruit salad, and sheets of blackberry cobbler and coconut cake for dessert. Almost everyone went back for seconds and thirds. Still, Mrs. Laurens was apologetic. Lewis hugged her and kissed her cheek.

“Wonderful job, Mrs. Laurens. Wonderful job. You can be proud.”

He can be so charming,
thought Lindsay. Amid all the clamor of dining with that many people, Lindsay did manage to get Erin apart from the others and ask her if they could go to her great aunt’s house after dinner.

“Sure. Why?”

“I need to look around.”

“Uncle Alfred and Mom will want to be there. I hope that’s all right.”

“No problem. I was going to suggest that. I need to know if anything else is missing.”

“I’m not sure they would know. Aunt Sugar might.”

* * *

After dinner, Lindsay, Erin, and Luke—who insisted on accompanying Lindsay—drove to Mary Susan Tidwell’s house.

“Everybody is sure on edge at the site,” said Erin. “I think it’s exciting.”

“As soon as they start the digging, they’ll come around,” Lindsay told her. “Right now, the crew’s feeling displaced. I don’t blame them, but we don’t know how to hook up the equipment, much less use it. It’s mostly the environmental scientists’ show right now.”

“Archaeology isn’t like I expected.”

“You expected it to be exotic and romantic?”

“I guess I did. It’s better without Claire. Even Adam’s nice to me now. We went into town together yesterday to get supplies.”

Yesterday. Lindsay had forgotten. Adam’s vehicle was the only one with the warm motor. “Where all did you go?”

“Hardware store. Adam stopped at the bank. He got several rolls of new pennies. He said Lewis asked him to get them for the site. I wanted to ask him what for, but I was afraid that was something I should know, and I didn’t want him to make fun of me.”

“They’re to put in the postholes after the new fence is removed,” said Lindsay.

“Why?”

“When archaeologists are leaving behind holes that in the future might be construed as features that belong to the site, they often mark them in some way. For example, some archaeologists put an empty drink can in the bottom of a survey pit so future archaeologists will know the hole wasn’t contemporaneous with the site. We’re doing block excavations of the structures at the farmstead. Someone later might want to look at the space between the structures. We’ll drop a penny in the postholes before we cover them up, so if they’re ever cross-sectioned, they’ll know the postholes are an artifact of a past excavation process.”

“I’d never have thought of anything like that.”

“Lewis is a stickler for marking features left by the archaeologists. Early in his career he thought he had found a palisade around a village of a people not known to have them. He even published a paper on it with an elaborate hypothesis about the transitional nature of that culture. In the next issue of the journal, another archaeologist wrote a letter to the editor explaining that he had done testing at the site years earlier and had dug postholes to fence off a portion of it. It was his postholes Lewis had found. It was very embarrassing.”

“I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s made mistakes."

“No, we all make them. When you and Adam were out yesterday, did you stop by the diner?” Lindsay hoped her question sounded casual.

“No. We had sandwiches back at the house.”

Erin’s family was waiting when they arrived. Lindsay had expected the house to be more isolated, but there were three neighbors across the way. However, there was no one on either side of her house.

It was a beautiful house—a Queen Anne Free Classic style sitting on a cut stone foundation, with an asymmetrical complex of roofs and gables, turned columns on wooden piers, and a large porch. Lindsay pulled into the drive, and Erin directed her to the rear, which was completely isolated. Even if Mary Susan Tidwell had neighbors on each side, they would not have been able to see through the shrubs and trees around her enormous yard. She had several outbuildings—some metal, some wood—a barn, and a corral that was now empty, but Lindsay smiled remembering Broach Moore and the story about the goat. There was also a driveway into the back.

“Where does that lead?” she asked Erin.

“It eventually goes to the main road. Aunt Susan preferred it. She didn’t like the neighbors to see her come and go.”

They got out of their vehicle, and Lindsay introduced Luke to the Tidwells and to Bonnie Blake.

“Thanks for letting me come take a look,” she said.

“We appreciate your doing something about this,” said Alfred Tidwell.

Alfred unlocked the door and disabled the burglar alarm and they all followed him into an old-fashioned country kitchen. It was very tidy. Lindsay wondered if that was the way Miss Tidwell kept it, or if they had cleaned it after she died. Lindsay was hoping for some clue that would give Lewis the airtight case he was insisting on.

Erin touched the table by the window. “Aunt Susan and I used to have tea here. She’d tell me about the places she’d been looking for her finds, as she called them.”

“See,” said Bonnie Blake to Alfred and Sugar. “I told you she liked Erin.”

“Now, don’t start that, Bonnie,” said Alfred. “We know she liked Erin. We all do.”

“Aunt Susan was a health nut.” Erin ignored her family’s squabbling. “Any food she read about that’d help you live longer—orange juice, green tea, broccoli—she’d eat it.” Erin continued. “She wanted to live as long as possible. I just don’t believe it was her time.”

“She lived here in the back of the house,” said Sugar. They led Lindsay from the kitchen past the bathroom. Lindsay went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet.

“We’ve taken out most of her perishables,” said Sugar, “medicine and all that.”

“Mostly, just drugs for hypertension,” said Bonnie.

“Hy
po
tension,” said Alfred. “She had hy
po
tension. If you paid as much attention to her as me and Sugar, you’d’ve known that.”

“Her bedroom is in here,” said Erin.

The bedroom was as tidy as the kitchen. The bed was made, the dresser tidy, even the mirror was sparkling clean.

“I cleaned up after the funeral,” said Sugar. “We didn’t know it might be a crime scene.”

“The safe is over here,” said Alfred, opening a door that looked like a closet but had a tall black safe behind it. He opened the safe to show Lindsay that it was indeed empty.

“You say she lived in the back here. What’s in the rest of the house?”

“Her finds,” said Bonnie. “The whole house is taken up with them.”

“I’d like to know if anything is missing. Would any of you be able to look around and tell me?”

“Sugar might be able to,” said Alfred.

They walked down a short hallway into the parlor. “She certainly had a lot of stuff,” said Lindsay, on seeing the wall-to-wall shelves of possessions.

“Yes,” agreed Alfred, “she did that.”

“Junk, mostly,” said Bonnie. “Just look at these old comic books. She even put them in separate bags. What was she thinking?”

“She was thinking about protecting them,” said Alfred.

Lindsay glanced through the stack of comic books—old
Superman, Green Hornet, Batman, Archie.

“Mrs. Blake,” said Lindsay, “these are very old and probably very valuable.”

“Those? You’re not serious.”

“She’s right,” said Luke. “There’s a good possibility these might be worth several hundred dollars apiece.”

“Comic books?”

“Yes, Mother. They’re very collectible.”

“I don’t know what that means, ‘very collectible.’” Mrs. Blake sounded as if her own unfamiliarity with things was a plot to annoy her.

“It means that these are things that a lot of people collect. Like these toys.” Erin pointed to the shelves of toys, most still in their original boxes.

The room contained many obviously valuable things that could have been removed easily. Lindsay was beginning to doubt that anything had been stolen.

“She was open Fridays and Saturdays,” said Sugar. “After her first heart attack, Alfred or I stayed with her while she was open, to help her keep an eye on the place. But she mainly advertised in collectors’ magazines and sold things that way.”

“She was thinking about starting up a shop on the computer,” said Alfred. “She said some kind of virtuous store. I don’t exactly know what that is.”

“A
virtual
store, Uncle Alfred. It’s a store on the Internet,” said Erin. “I was trying to talk her into that. That way, she could just take photos of her stuff and post it. If anyone wanted it, they’d just click and pay by credit card number and Aunt Susan could mail it to them.”

“Erin is so clever,” said Mrs. Blake. “She really should be a lawyer.”

“Internet stores aren’t my idea, Mother. It’s the way things are done now.”

“Erin, don’t hide your light under a bushel. You’re a smart girl.”

Erin’s shoulders sagged. “I may be, Mother. But the Internet shop isn’t evidence of it. That’s just what people are doing nowadays.” She walked off to another room before her mother could say anything.

Miss Tidwell didn’t collect many pieces of furniture. There was the odd humidor, chair, trunks, and carousel animals. Most of her collections were things that would have fit in her station wagon. The rooms, both upstairs and down, contained things like old lanterns, glass insulators, bottles and jars, coffee grinders, radios, moldings from old houses, music boxes, snow globes, baskets, magazines, books, carvings, paintings, records, toys, porcelain bric-a-brac, and many things Lindsay had no idea what the purpose was. There could be a fortune contained in the rooms, or it could be mostly junk.