Airtight Case (49 page)

“Certainly emotionally exhausting,” said Sharon. “I think Bill and I are going back to our motel. Bill’s going to have to go back to work, so I’m moving back here in a couple of days. I hope that’s all right.”

“Sure,” said Kelsey. “You can room with us again, or in Lindsay’s room. Is that okay with you, Lindsay?”

“Fine. It’s a huge room, and I’m not sure I’ll be in it.”

* * *

Lindsay, John, and Lewis sat on the floor in Lindsay’s room drinking Lindsay’s Dr Peppers, which it turned out was Lewis’s favorite soft drink, too.

“How about you?” Lindsay asked Lewis. “When are you leaving?”

“I don’t know. I feel like now I’ve stuck my hand in a tar baby. Can’t seem to let it go. Probably when I see things are going smoothly and we get some new folks in, I’ll leave it to them. Adam seems to think that some of the people Claire ran off will be willing to return.”

“Claire sometimes seems not to have left us,” said Lindsay.

“When did you last see her?” asked Lewis.

“After the party. After the fire scare. She was already in bed.”

“Why do you think she ran out in the middle of the night? Did you hear anything?”

Lindsay hesitated a moment. Why would she get up in the middle of the night and leave? Did Claire just wake up and decide to go somewhere? It didn’t make sense. Then it hit her.

“No, I didn’t see Claire then. I thought it was Claire, but I never saw her face, just a form, and the rising and falling of the covers. It could have been anyone.”

“What do you mean?” asked Lewis.

“I mean, the fire was not a protest about our digging up the coffins. The whole protest thing was a sham. The only purpose of the fire was to cause a commotion to get everyone out of the house, so they could get Claire. She wasn’t part of the party, and she was the only one upstairs. In all the confusion of running to the fire, someone took Claire.”

“But didn’t Kelsey and Powell see her leave?” asked Lewis.

“No, like me, they thought they did. They saw her car leave. It was dark, 3:00 A.M. Whatever happened to Claire was premeditated. Someone planned to do away with her.”

“Who was in Claire’s bed?” asked John.

“Whoever is in it with Drew and her husband.”

“You believe strongly then that Drew is guilty?” asked Lewis. “And there is another guilty party still here?”

“I don’t have proof of Drew’s guilt, but I’ll get it. And I don’t know who else is involved, but I’ll find out.”

“No,” said John. “No, you won’t. We are going home tomorrow.”

“I need to solve this.”

“Fine. You didn’t have to be on that Spanish galleon five hundred years ago to solve that murder. You don’t have to be here to solve this one. Just think it through back home.”

Lindsay had never seen John so determined. She wondered if just once she should give in. When he was on a job, which, fortunately, was a lot these days, he was away from his kids. Now that he had a moment of free time, he was still away from his kids, here with her, trying to keep her safe. Maybe that could be a gift to him—peace of mind.

She put her hand over his. “Sure, we’ll go home tomorrow.”

He flipped his hand over and grabbed hers and squeezed it. From the look in his eyes, Lindsay saw that her agreement meant a lot to him. Perhaps he was right, perhaps she did have enough information, and all she needed to do was put it together. Besides, if the police could find Mike Gentry, they could make him turn over on the others.

* * *

Lindsay lay awake again, unable to sleep. John, however, was sleeping peacefully beside her. She slipped out of bed and went to the window, looking out at the empty site. Surprising how accustomed to the lights and tents she had gotten. She hugged herself against the cool air and wondered how the hikers’ families were. If knowing what happened made it better or worse for them. When some time had passed, she would have to write them a letter.

As she turned from the window, something occurred to her. The evening of the party—or was it the evening before—she came upstairs and had a vague notion that Claire was coming out of Lewis’s room while he was downstairs with the others. Maybe there was something she could do before they left in the morning. She slipped back into bed and snuggled her back against John, glad for the warmth.

Chapter 41

Can't Argue With Logic

IN THE MORNING John and Lewis went to turn in John’s rental car and gas up Lindsay’s Explorer. Lewis had wanted some time to speak with John alone, Lindsay guessed. He had this idea of building a scale model of the cofferdam in a tank of water, allowing visitors to see through the glass walls of the tank to where the bottom of the dam was anchored to the ocean floor. He’d gotten the notion from John’s telling him about the aquarium he was building. Lewis wanted to stock it with live fish and have the bottom littered with scale models of cannons and other artifacts from the ship. Lewis was never at a loss for expensive ideas.

The crew got a late start to the site as they lingered over breakfast talking about the day’s work ahead. Despite the uncertainty and bad news, they were on the whole in good spirits. Life went on. But not for the hikers, or Claire, or Mary Susan Tidwell.

With Lewis out of his room, Lindsay went in and searched. If Claire was in his room, it was for a purpose. Maybe it was to hide something. She started with the mattress, looking between the mattress and the box springs, under the box springs—nothing. Nor was there anything hidden behind the one picture on the wall. She shone her flashlight inside the fireplace and up the chimney as far as she could see. Nothing. She examined the closet, even the pockets of Lewis’s clothes, in case Claire had stuck something there. They were completely empty. Nothing on the top shelf of the closet, either. The balcony was fragile, but she looked out there anyway, in every place Claire might have secreted something away. She pulled open the drawer to the desk and searched the contents. It contained office supplies, nothing Lindsay could make into a clue. Perhaps she was wrong and Claire hadn’t left a clue, evidence, or anything, after all. The last thing Lindsay did was feel the bottom of the desktop from inside the drawer. There it was, taped in place—a three-and-one-half-inch computer disk.

She raced downstairs to where her bags sat in the living room, took out her laptop, and plugged it in. She slipped the disk in the drive and looked at its contents. There were two graphics files labeled
before.psd
and
after.psd
. She called up the paint program and opened the first file in the directory—after.psd.

Though her memory was blurry, she knew what she was looking at. When she was in her amnesia state, on the way home from Tennessee to Georgia she had described the picture in detail to John. It was of Lindsay and her fake fiancé, Mark Smith—the man she now knew as Mike Gentry.

More accurately, it wasn’t her body, but her face on someone else’s body. She had observed even then that whoever’s body it was, she was shorter than Lindsay, as were her fingers, seen here threaded through the crook in Smith/Gentry’s arm. Lindsay recognized the photograph of her face as one on the Department of Archaeology’s Web site.

She called up the before.psd file from the directory. As it came up on the screen, she stared at it in surprise, realizing for the first time that in her heart she hadn’t really believed it was one of the crew.

The woman on Mark Smith’s arm was Marina. Of course, it made sense. Marina was an excellent artist, had done archaeological illustrations for site reports and a textbook. A workman is known by his—or her—tools. In Marina’s workroom upstairs was everything needed to make a forged document. Paper, ink, tea to soak the paper in to make it look old, coffee grounds to supply foxing, an oven to dry it. Not at all incriminating, not even circumstantial enough to have an impact in court—nevertheless, Lindsay could go in there right now and come out with an old-looking document, a forgery.

Lindsay hadn’t taken note of it at the time, but Marina knew how the writing on the loft floor could be made to look old. And she was the one who looked at photos of the writing on the floor and said it might just be the real thing, and she was the one who quickly said Hope Foute’s diaries weren’t in the same hand as the loft writing.

After reading the book Agent McGillis had faxed her, Lindsay now understood that Hope Foute and her sister wrote in round hand, not in modern Palmer style. Marina had known that. That’s how she knew the writing on the floor was probably authentic. Why hadn’t Lindsay put those little things together before now? These pictures were what Claire had discovered when she thought she had borrowed a blank disk from Marina’s computer supplies.

Lindsay started clicking away at the keys as quickly as she could before calling Sheriff Ramsey. She looked at the gray plastic incriminating disk in her hand as she waited for the phone to pick up.

“Sheriff Ramsey, please. This is Lindsay Chamberlain. It’s very important.”

Ramsey was out so she asked the receptionist to tell him to meet her here, that she had proof of the identity of the killers, as well as of her attackers . . . that she and one of them would be at the house on the Gallows farmstead site.

She slid the disk in the pocket of her jacket and turned around. Apparently, she hadn’t learned from Eric Van Horne’s eavesdropping not to use the telephone in the living room. But then, John had her SUV. Marina stood in the doorway, her arms folded under her breasts.

“So, you know.”

“I’m surprised.”

“Why? I’m very talented. You’ve seen my work.”

“I’m surprised because I liked you.”

“Liked? Past tense?”

“Are you aware of what you’ve done?”

“Are you aware of the money involved?”

“But murder?”

“Claire was a head case. Drew hired her because of her ignorance—and the fact that she could control her. If anything happened, she was to be the scapegoat. It didn’t quite work out that way, but that was your fault. The Tidwell woman was very old. We probably only shortened her life by six months or so.”

“And what you did to me? What’s your rationale for that?”

“You were an accident. They were only supposed to leave you hurt in the woods, to scare you, to make you want to go home. We knew you were coming here to investigate. Drew had read about you and your crime solving in the paper. According to Francisco Lewis, if one Neanderthal conked another on the head, you’d find him out, plus his motive. If it hadn’t been for the hikers, things would have gone different for you—and for them.”

“You blame the hikers?”

“Sometimes people should just mind their own business. That’s why all this happened. If the hikers and you and Claire had simply minded your own business, everyone would be all right.”

“Except Miss Tidwell.”

“She was old and in poor health. She had already had two heart attacks and was waiting around for the next one. She had a much better death than if nature had taken its course.”

Lindsay had confronted murderers before, but never one who denied responsibility with such self-assurance. She had no doubt that Marina believed what she said.

“Do you know what she had?” continued Marina. “She can’t have appreciated it the way Drew, Eric, and I do.”

“What?” asked Lindsay.

“You were right about the Alexis de Tocqueville letter, but that was minor, compared to the other things. On one of her trips buying a pig-in-a-poke, the old lady came away with Thomas Jefferson’s papers.”

“Thomas Jefferson’s papers? His presidential papers?”

“No. You know that he collected Indian vocabularies and excavated part of an Indian mound?”

“Yes, but those papers were destroyed by the thief who stole his trunk when he was moving back to Monticello.”

“They were never found. They found the thief and the trunk, but not the contents.”

“Didn’t they find a few destroyed vocabularies?”

“Yes, but Miss Tidwell happened on a trunk with twenty-seven remaining vocabularies out of Jefferson’s original fifty. The trunk also contained several sketches he had made of the mound he excavated, along with his observations. It also contained a pocket telescope that was listed among the contents of the original trunk.”

“She had Jefferson’s papers? Are you sure?” Lindsay was so surprised, she almost forgot that a murderer was standing in front of her.

“Drew and Eric both authenticated them. The old lady had them and sat on them for over thirty years, waiting for God knows what. Maybe to make one of her descendants like little Erin famous. Can’t you see that those were too tempting not to take and put on the market? Do you know what linguists could do with those? The vocabularies are unique.”

“Murder was a little harsh, don’t you think?”

“Go ahead and joke about it, but she had those things hidden away, not really knowing how to take care of them. Fortunately, much of the eighteenth-century paper is rag and better quality. She even had a copy of the first written constitution adopted by native-born Americans. You’ve heard of the Watauga Compact? It’s absolutely beautiful, written on creamy vellum in a lovely hand, and just sitting there in her safe. Eric admired her as a collector.” Marina gave a little laugh. “Said she’d done a damn sight better than he had. If you could have seen the papers, you’d understand and not be standing here judging me, Drew, and Eric.”

Lindsay was concerned that Marina was telling her so much. That wasn’t a good sign. It meant she was probably going to try to kill her. But why was she waiting? Was she waiting for someone?

“Did Claire discover the doctored photographs and tell Drew?” Lindsay asked, casually edging toward her. She was taller than Marina—and heavier. She could push past her and run to the site. Or, if she backed up carefully, she could run through the dining room and out the back door. Marina kept her hands in the pocket of her jacket. Did she have a gun?

“Exactly. Sneaking around in my things and tattling to Drew. Fortunately she hadn’t guessed that Drew was in on everything. I didn’t know the little witch had made a copy of the disk and hidden it away somewhere. Clever of you to have found it. But that’s the whole problem with you, you’re too damn clever, you know too much, you can figure out too much.”