Death in an Ivory Tower (Dotsy Lamb Travel Mysteries) (6 page)

The form on the stretcher was completely wrapped in a sheet, no head exposed. So he was dead. The woman who had talked to me at the foot of the stairs came out last, then ran around the stretcher and out the front to open the back doors of the ambulance.

When I turned back to the stairwell, I saw Daphne Wetmore and Mignon Beaulieu standing on its threshold. Mignon’s face was red and swollen, loose strands of her long hair were wet and plastered to her cheeks. Daphne’s arms hung at her sides awkwardly, as if they didn’t know what they should be doing.

Approaching Mignon, I said, “I’m so sorry!” I hesitated to hug her because I hardly knew her, but she extended her arms to me and buried her wet face against my shoulder. Her hot breath on my neck, she sobbed. I couldn’t understand her muffled words, but it didn’t matter anyway.

Daphne Wetmore said, “Dr. Lamb, can you help me see her back to her own room?”

“Sure.” I ignored the unearned title she had awarded me. In this group, almost everyone had a title, and doctor was the most common one.

Daphne led us up the staircase to room three, then turned and asked Mignon if she had her room key with her.

Mignon, now standing on her own but shakily, looked at the door and said, “I’d like to go back to Bram’s room first.”

“It’s locked,” Daphne said. She looked at the keys in her own hand. “Never mind. I have a master key.” She led us up two more short flights and opened the door to room four with trembling hands. “I really have to go back to our guests. Do you mind? They’ll be in the lecture hall and . . . oh, dear! The next speaker is Mr. Fitzwaring!” Her eyes bulged. “We have no speaker! What now?”

Before answering, I glanced into the room. Mignon had headed immediately for the student-style writing desk. I saw clothing scattered about, and, on the floor, a mattress and a wall-mounted mirror, smashed. Shards of glass and various papers littered the floor in the vicinity of the broken mirror. I said, “I’ll stay with Miss Beaulieu.”

Thinking that Daphne might, in her excited state, need someone to point her in the right direction, I said, “You need to find your husband. Get him out of the lecture hall and tell him what’s happened.”

“But he’ll want me to tell him what to do next. He’s like that.”

“What to do next?”

“What are we to do with all these people for the rest of the afternoon?”

“Why not simply announce what has happened? Either at the end of this lecture or during the tea break, just tell them. There’s no need to keep it secret. They can do whatever they want until evening. They don’t have to be constantly entertained, you know. They’re grown-ups.”

Daphne looked at me as if I had introduced a revolutionary new concept. Truth. “I suppose you’re right. I’ll ask Harold to make the announcement.” She fiddled with the keys in her hands, then added, as much to herself as to me, “Perhaps a tour. An afternoon tour of the castle. I wonder if I could find John Fish. He could walk them over to the castle and . . . I’d have to warn him to stay off the paranormal stuff. These aren’t the sort of people you’d . . . oh, dear. I’d better be going. I’ll figure it out on my way over.” With that, she turned and disappeared around the bend in the staircase.

“I was right,” I said, as much to myself as to Mignon, “Those noises I heard last night were coming from here. Look at the mattress!”

Mignon turned from her search of the top desk drawer and looked at the mattress on the floor. “Oh. That was already there. Bram was afraid the bed frame wouldn’t hold him so he pulled the mattress off and slept on the floor.”

“But what about the clothes all over the floor? What about the mirror?”

“I don’t know. One of the EMTs suggested he might have had convulsions.”

“I see. Do you think it was hypoglycemia?”

“I’m sure of it.”

Mignon picked up a cell phone from the back of the desk and slipped it into a pocket of her shapeless shift, then extracted some papers from the open desk drawer.

“Is that Bram’s cell phone?” I asked.

“Right. It’ll have numbers for his nearest and dearest.” She heaved a big sigh. “I need to start making calls,” she said, her voice quavering. “This is going to be hard.”

“What about family? Did he have any?”

“His mother and a couple of brothers, I believe. Live somewhere up near Newcastle, I think. Bram didn’t talk much about family. His nearest and dearest are our friends in Glastonbury. We have a lot of friends there. A lovely circle of lovely people.” She paused and took a deep breath. When she spoke again, it was barely a whisper, “Lovely like Bram. Lovely like Bram.”

“Were you and Bram . . . ?” I didn’t know how to phrase it.

“Lovers?” Her eyes caught mine. “Sometimes. Sometimes not. I loved him though, and he loved me.”

“How long have you known him?”

“Oh, years? About five.” She rolled a few sheets of paper into a fist-size cylinder and glanced around the room. “Would you mind if I left now and went to my room alone?”

“Will you be okay?”

“Sure. Close the door when you leave,” she said, and then stepped out.

It felt strange being alone in the room where a man had died such a short time ago, but I reminded myself this wasn’t a crime scene so there was no need to worry about fingerprints or whatever. But how sure was I of that? This room was needling me. It didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like a room in which someone had drifted off into death by hypoglycemia, but I couldn’t think why not.

The tea tray was like the one in my room. Same electric pot, same bowl with sugar in little packets, cream in little tubs, tea bags, and a couple of long paper tubes filled with granulated coffee. Bram had placed his trashcan close to the mattress on the floor, just as I had placed mine near the head of my bed last night. I shivered at the similarity. Had he been nauseated, too? I peered into the trashcan and found three cellophane biscuit wrappers, but these said Chocolate Kreams. The ones the scout had been leaving me were Bourbon Kreams. Same logo and same brand. A couple of soggy tea bags and several empty sugar packs, a disposable razor, some used tissues, a couple of cash register receipts. I pushed the trash around with a pencil from the desk and then dropped the pencil in with the rest.

A blood glucose meter similar to my own lay on the table near the tea tray, along with a couple of used test strips, cotton swabs, and used syringes. These last stood inside a plastic water bottle. I kept a travel-sized sharps container on the back of my sink. I had already noticed his insulin was, like mine, stored in the tiny fridge on the landing outside the loo.

A Celtic cross hung from the gooseneck lamp on the desk. In a metal incense burner, a couple of spent sticks stuck up at odd angles. I spotted one of Bram’s huge rubber-soled sandals atop the bare wooden bed frame, the other one lay under the sink in the far corner.

I scratched through my purse for my cell phone and snapped a few shots of the room from various angles. You never know what will come in handy.

I paused at Mignon’s door on my way down, but decided not to knock. She said she wanted to be alone. I could check on her later. I completed my descent and headed for Smythson Hall, thinking I could slip into the back and hear the last of Claudia Moss’s paper, but I met Daphne coming out as I was going in.

“I told Harold.”

“How did he react?”

“At first he said we shouldn’t tell anyone until after the day’s lectures, but I reminded him that the next lecturer is not going to be there because he’s dead. Oh, I’m sorry. That sounded crass, didn’t it?”

“So what did he decide?”

“Harold? He said he’d tell them what happened and say that he’d have more news at dinner tonight. Until then they were on their own, and he’d make a few suggestions for how they could spend their afternoon.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Aren’t you nice to offer?” Daphne took my arm and looked up at me. She was a good half-foot shorter than me. I’m five-five, so she was under five feet. “I’m going to see if poor Miss Beaulieu is all right, then I’ll sort out what to do next.”

“Actually? I don’t think you should. She told me she wants to be alone in her room for a while.”

“Oh!” Daphne seemed taken aback. We had walked through the archway and into the East Quad but weren’t, as far as I knew, headed anywhere in particular. “Okay, perhaps I’ll wait a bit. Meanwhile . . .” She didn’t seem to have an end for that sentence.

She turned, stopped in front of the bench I had recently vacated, swiped at the seat with her bare hand, and sat. I sat down beside her. This was a pretty good vantage point, I thought, from which to watch comings or goings on Staircase Thirteen and, if a call came into the Porter’s Lodge, they could easily find us.

My bench mate heaved a huge sigh.

I asked, “Did you and Harold know Bram Fitzwaring before this conference?”

Daphne’s neck muscles tensed. “No. I’ve never seen either of them before. They’re from Glastonbury.” She looked at me as if I should know what that meant. “I believe it was your mentor, wasn’t it—Dr. Roberts—who suggested Fitzwaring as a speaker?”

Uh-oh. It might have been me who actually made the suggestion.
I chose my next words carefully. “We, that is, Dr. Roberts and I, did receive email from him in the early spring. I was staying on campus at the University of Virginia while we collaborated on my dissertation topic, and I ended up handling much of his email for him. I remember corresponding with Bram Fitzwaring, but I rather thought he’d already been invited to speak by someone here.”

“Did you know he was from Glastonbury?”

“I don’t recall even being curious about exactly where he lived. I assumed he lived in England.”

Daphne wrung her hands nervously, but said nothing for a minute.

“How did your husband react when you told him Bram was dead?”

“Harold takes things like this in stride. He said, ‘Heart attack?’ and I said, ‘They think it was low blood sugar.’” Daphne’s hands worked constantly with the folds in her dress. “Harold is an academic, Dr. Lamb. His head is always busy with things the rest of us will never understand. My sister calls him a genius.”

“Can you call me Dotsy? I don’t have my PhD yet.”

“All right.” But she didn’t say call me Daphne, so what was I to do? The British are more formal than we are, but I truly would have felt strange calling this woman who was about ten years younger and six inches shorter than I, Mrs. Wetmore.

“How long have you and Dr. Wetmore been married?” I realized calling him Dr. Wetmore was laying the groundwork for further confusion.

“Three years,” she said. “Harold and I were both what you might call late bloomers. Up until the time we met, Harold was totally immersed in his research. He’s written more than thirty papers, and published four books.” Daphne paused while I reacted appropriately to these impressive statistics. “He works closely with archaeologists in this part of the country, because his field is the early kings of Wessex, and so much of what we’re learning now comes from the archaeologists.”

“Yes. I was a bit surprised at his choice of topic this morning. The Tudor period? But he handled it beautifully.”

Daphne blushed. “Harold can speak on any period of British history. He’s amazing. My sister calls him Einstein. I’m continually in awe of that brain of his.”

The porter on duty emerged from his office beside the front gate and trudged toward Staircase Thirteen. I stood as he disappeared into its dark interior. “I bet he’s going up to Mignon’s room. I think I’ll follow him.”

“Me too,” said Daphne, hurrying to catch up.

The porter did go to Mignon’s room, but shook his head at Daphne and closed the door behind him. We kept climbing. When we arrived at the landing between rooms four and five, I saw the door to five, Lettie’s door, was open. Lettie sat on the side of her bed, kicking her sandals off with a flourish that sent one of them spinning across the room. Her shirt was partially unbuttoned. “You can come in, but you can’t stay,” she said. “I haven’t had a wink of sleep and I need to take a nap.”

“Are you all right, Mrs. Osgood?” Daphne’s question was perfunctory. The sort of thing she always asked guests, expecting an affirmative answer. The good hostess. She turned toward Bram’s room, looked down the stairwell, then back at the door to room four, as if she didn’t know where to go or why. “Will you excuse me? I have a million things to do.”

She disappeared down the stairs.

“Who’s with the children?” I asked, knowing that Lettie’s daughter worked at the hospital most days while Lettie babysat. I stepped into Lettie’s room and closed the door behind me.

Lettie Osgood is my oldest and dearest friend. We grew up together, but we now live a hundred miles apart so we see each other only a few times a year. One of those times, for the past several years, has been when we go on vacation together. Lettie’s husband, Ollie, is a building contractor in northern Virginia and he’s busiest in the summer so he can’t take those months off from work. Lettie and I, on the other hand, can. The courses I teach at a small college in Virginia don’t extend through summer session. Lettie is a librarian, and she also finds her summers the easiest time to leave town. We sometimes take a tour or a cruise, but this summer was different.

I had known since March that I was to accompany Larry Roberts to Oxford for this conference. Lettie had no plans to come with me until her daughter, Lindsey, accepted an offer to work at Oxford’s highly respected Radcliffe Hospital in a doctor exchange program with her own hospital back home. Lindsey and her husband are separated, soon to be divorced, and the battle between them has been bitter the last few months. Lettie has called me nearly every night to unload her burden. She takes on her children’s troubles as if they were her own. Her main concern in this matter—and my own, too—is that the young ones be spared the ugliness. Claire, seven, and Caleb, five, obviously had to come to Oxford with Lindsey, but Taylor, the soon-to-be-ex, raised a stink, claiming she couldn’t take them out of the country. Their lawyers went toe-to-toe, and Lindsey won when her lawyer produced photos showing details of the lifestyle to which the children would be exposed if they stayed with their father.