Dressed to Die: A Lindsay Chamberlain Novel (13 page)

"Yes, mostly glass. I have some nice things. I hold
classes, too. I also manage some local artists and occasionally locate paintings and sculpture for buyers. I found the
friezes for the new bank downtown. They're from an old
Greek revival building torn down in New York. Garish
building, the kind Ayn Rand hated in The Fountainhead. The
friezes look good on this building here, though."

"I've seen some of your glasswork in the window.
They're quite lovely."

"I do okay, even without my trust fund."

"You think your brother-in-law killed your sister. Are
there any other suspects?"

"I thought you weren't interested."

Lindsay smiled. "I'm curious."

"Everyone liked Shirl. I don't know of anyone who hated
her enough to kill her. I can't think of anyone besides Tom
Foster with a motive."

"Do you remember the last time you saw her?"

Chris's eyes were suddenly shiny with a film of tears.

"Yes. It was the day before she disappeared. We were
going over the plans for Dad's sixtieth birthday party. It was going to be the next week. Nothing too big, just a few
people at the botanical gardens. Shirl was good at organizing things."

"What about the missing hundred thousand dollars?"

Chris sat bolt upright in his chair.

"What?"

"You didn't know about it?"

"No.

"That's what is missing from her account. With that much
money in her possession, even a stranger could have killed
her for it," Lindsay pointed out.

"Yes. I see. You're right. But so would her husband. What
was she doing with that much money, I wonder?"

"You have no idea?" Chris shook his head. "Do your parents know about the missing money?"

"No. They certainly would have said something. Come
talk to them, please."

"What good would it do?"

"Perhaps none. Perhaps you could at least consult with
Will Patterson. You know, give him some good ideas. Or you
can tell them to their face why you can't take the case."

Lindsay relented. "All right. I'll have to check my calendar."

"Fine." Chris drew a map to the Pryors' home. "Thanks.
Call me when you can come and I'll meet you out there."

Chris had left by 8:15. Lindsay had no idea why she had
agreed to go to the Pryors' home, except that she was curious-about the burning pattern on the bones, about the missing money, about Shirley Foster herself, about a lot of things.
Lindsay doubted it was a stranger who killed her-she was
buried on her husband's family's property. A stranger would
have just dumped her body or put it in a shallow grave. A
stranger might not care whether the body was found or not.
Whoever killed Shirley Foster didn't want her body foundat least, not right away. Who had dug the deep grave in the woods and placed her so carefully in it? And who, Lindsay
wondered, called in the anonymous tip to Will Patterson
about the body being buried on the Foster farm?

Lindsay was jerked out of her thoughts by the sound of
the phone. From the long ring, she knew it was from somewhere on campus.

"Lindsay, Frank here. The police are sending someone
over to get the rest of the artifacts. Can you pack them up?"

"Sure. What are they going to do with them?"

"Harold van Deevers from the University of Kentucky
wants them sent to his office. The authorities have agreed to
allow him to receive them."

Lindsay made a face. "All right. When will they be coming to pick them up?"

"In a couple of hours."

"Very well." She hung up the phone. "I imagine Harold
van Deevers is getting a great charge out of this," she said
aloud as she retrieved the key from her drawer.

The dark storage room had the characteristic dusty smell
of old artifacts. The shelves were filled with boxes containing bags of dirt taken from grid squares inside the structures
of the Jasper Creek site, all waiting to be sorted or to undergo
chemical flotation. All the small things that had accumulated
on the floor of the house structures-bone, sherds, daub,
rock, charcoal-would be classified, labeled, and stored for
later analysis. Now, they sat waiting for students to get to
them. Sometimes it took years. Lindsay coughed and turned
on the light. She didn't even notice all the boxes from the
Jasper Creek site sitting neatly on the shelves, because the
new shelves at the far end were more conspicuous. They
were completely empty.

LINDSAY STOOD STARING at the empty shelves, willing the artifacts to reappear. Maybe someone had just
moved them, she thought. To where? She locked the storage room and walked back through the darkened lab. It was
quiet. She turned on the lights, which brightened the space
but did nothing to dispel her uneasy feeling. The huge sets
of artifact drawers, silent keepers of the treasures, loomed
tall over the worktables. Portions of pottery stood in their
sandboxes, looking like ancient ruins in miniature, surrounded by hundreds of sherds to be fitted into place.
Boxes of half-sorted animal bones waited on another table
for students to come and identify, weigh, and measure
them-a process that would eventually determine the MNI
from the site and provide a good estimate of the amount of
meat protein the inhabitants consumed. Someone had
brought several site reports and stacked them next to the
boxes of bones. Lindsay absently ran her thumb over the
edges, flipping through the pages as she looked around the
room for anything out of place.

The next table contained boxes and boxes of black chert
debris in the process of being measured and categorized-a
tedious time-consuming task. The resulting data would
reveal which stages of flint toolmaking occurred where the
debris was found. These broken bits of rock, bone, and pots
yielded far more information of much greater value to archaeologists than the artifacts that were missing, but on the
collector's market they were worth less than nothing. To
looters, they were objects to be thrown aside, forever separating them from their location-and destroying their value
to the body of historical knowledge. Lindsay closed her eyes.
Papaw wasn't a looter, she thought. He couldn't have been.

She opened her eyes and looked under all the tables,
thinking that maybe someone had, for some unknown
reason, packed the artifacts away and stored them there.
Nothing. She unlocked the faunal lab. Nothing but the
metal shelves and shoeboxes. She looked in Sally's lab
space. The box of old wrapping material was shoved
under Sally's desk. She took it to her office and locked it
in the closet, not that anyone would want to steal brittle
old newsprint.

"Damn," she said as she dialed Sally's number. "Sally,
do you know if anyone moved the Kentucky artifacts to
another location?"

"No. Why?" There was a long pause. "Jeez, are they
gone?"

"I'm afraid so," said Lindsay.

"Oh, no. Who?"

"I have no idea. Maybe someone just moved them. I'll
give Frank a call." Lindsay hung up the phone and dialed
Frank's office phone.

"Frank, did you ask someone to move the Kentucky artifacts?" she asked.

"No. Why`? They aren't missing, are they?"

"They aren't on the shelves."

There was a long pause that was beginning to become
uncomfortably familiar.

"Have you talked to any of the students?"

"I called Sally. She doesn't know anything."

"Damn."

"Yeah."

"Who do you think?" he said. "I hope not one of the
students."

"No. I can't believe it was any of them. We'd better call
the police. They'll be able to tell if the door was forced or
anything."

The same campus policemen who had come the previous
day answered the call regarding the missing artifacts. Fortunately, the reporter wasn't with them this time. They
took the theft seriously, but not with the same concern they
did when the computers in the Political Science Department were stolen-until Frank gave an estimate of their
value to collectors.

One of the policemen whistled. "Did the student workers know their value?"

"Not the exact value," said Lindsay. "They knew the
artifacts had value to collectors, but they work with artifacts all the time."

Lindsay made a list of who was present when the artifacts were unpacked and gave it to the police. "I know all
of these students," she said. She saw the skeptical look in
their eyes, the look that said people are capable of doing all
sorts of things you would never think they would do. "I do
know them," she reiterated. "None are thieves."

"But they may have seen someone," said one of the
policemen.

"Yes, they may have seen someone," she agreed. "We
took pictures of each artifact. Brandon should have them.
I'll ask when he returns."

"Could you and Dr. Carter make a list of the missing
items, including the value of each, and provide a picture?"
they asked.

"Sure," answered Frank and Lindsay together.

The police examined the door and found nothing that
suggested forced entry. "We'll send someone over to check for prints, but don't get your hopes up about that." They put
up crime-scene tape, blocking the door to the storage room.

As the students came in and took up their work in the
lab, Lindsay asked them about the artifacts. Did they know
if they had been moved? Had they seen anyone they didn't
know hanging around?

"The police are interviewing everyone who works
here," she said. "Please try to remember anyone at all who
may have been down here."

"Maybe it was the person who killed the fellow in the
crate," one of them suggested.

"He may have died over sixty years ago," said Lindsay.

"Maybe we should tell the police to check the retirement
homes," said another.

"Seriously," said Bobbie, a graduate student who had just
come in and set down her backpack. "What if the missing
artifacts were in some family's folklore? You know, like stories of great-grandfathers tossing the family silver down a
well. Only, in this case, it was a big hidden cache of artifacts,
and when they surfaced, some family member came to claim
them." Lindsay looked at Bobbie for a moment, pondering
her suggestion. Bobbie's interests lay in family lore-that
was her mindset, and it was an intriguing idea, if a little farfetched. "Why don't you call your family," Bobbie continued, "and see if they told anyone about the find?"

"I will. That's a good idea. Very creative. Thanks, all of
you." Lindsay felt a pang of guilt as she looked at the
earnest faces of her students-that they should come under
this cloud of her family's making. Where, she wondered for
the thousandth time, had her grandfather gotten the artifacts? "I'm really sorry, guys, for all this ..."-she threw
up her hands-". . . this mess."

"That's all right, Dr. Chamberlain. It's kind of interesting," a student said.

"Yeah," said another. "You're always involved in inter
esting things."

Great, thought Lindsay, she had developed a reputation for the sensational. She went back to her office and
sat down at her desk to think. The artifacts had been
stolen; no one had moved them. She hated to admit it.
The phone signaled the distinctive two-ring pattern of an
off-campus call.

"Lindsay Chamberlain," she said into the receiver as
Brandon entered her office and handed her an envelope.

"Lindsay, this is Harold van Deevers. How are you?"

She made a face into the receiver as she took the envelope from Brandon's hand. "The pictures," he mouthed to
her, then he waved and went out the door.

"Harold. I'm fine. And you?"

"That's not what I hear. I just got off the phone with
Frank Carter."

Then why are you calling me? she thought.

"I'm very upset about the disappearance of the artifacts," he continued.

"We all are," she said.

"I don't understand how it could have happened."

"The police are trying to ascertain that right now." Lindsay emptied the contents of the envelope onto the desk.

"In fact, I don't understand what your grandfather was
doing with them."

"If you talked to Frank, then you know that this whole
situation is mysterious." Lindsay picked up the pictures
one by one and looked at them.

"I was hoping you could shed some light on the matter,"
he said.

Stop dancing around and come to the point, Lindsay
thought as she looked at a picture of a Manion Phase clay
pot. "If I had any light to shed, I would have certainly shed it to Frank and the police. I fear I'm in the dark about the
whole thing."

"It would help if you adopted a more cooperative attitude," he said.

"Attitude will not get the artifacts back. I'm taking all
the steps I know to try and recover them." It's behavior, not
attitude, you should be looking at, Lindsay thought. And
that's just what's wrong with your papers-not enough
emphasis on the behavioral meaning of your data. "Exactly
why have you called me?" she asked.

"I'm not pleased with the way any of this has been handled." His voice showed a little more hostility, and Lindsay
wondered if she should have been more contrite. "You should
have notified me immediately after you discovered the artifacts. Your behavior has not been professional in this matter."

"Harold, the collection of artifacts caught me completely
by surprise. The labeling on one of the crates indicated that
they were from Georgia. I identified them as being from
Kentucky by what I thought were Fort Ancient pottery and
assemblages. As you know, pottery is not my forte."

"Do you have any idea what they were doing among
your grandfather's possessions?"

"Not a clue." Strange he didn't mention the skeletal
remains, thought Lindsay. Frank must not have told him
about that. "Frank and I will make a list of the items. I'll
fax you the information as soon as we finish."

"I would appreciate it. Good talking to you, Lindsay."