Death in an Ivory Tower (Dotsy Lamb Travel Mysteries) Page 13

  * * *

  I knocked on Mignon’s and Lettie’s doors as I passed by on my way up the stairs. Nobody home. In my room, I found myself pacing with the same nervous energy as before. I moved the fresh towel the scout had left me from the foot of my bed to the radiator beside the basin. I threw a plastic shopping bag and a couple of receipts in the trashcan. I checked my blood sugar, found it too low, and ate the Chocolate Kream cookies the scout had left on my tea tray. It was too early to dress for dinner so I kicked off my shoes, sat on the bed with my back against the wall, opened my iPad, and googled “saxitoxin.”

  Over the next hour I learned:

  1. Saxitoxin is one of several poisons produced by a few marine algae and it is the most potent non-protein poison known. A mere 0.2 milligrams could kill a person. (Doing the math, I found that one gram, the weight of a paper clip, could kill 5,000 people.)

  2. It is specifically a sodium channel blocker, and as such is proving to be a valuable tool in neurological studies (as St. Giles Bell had already told me).

  3. It is unaffected by heat, so cooking tainted fish or shellfish does not make it safe to eat.

  4. It has been a subject of study by the United States CIA and is rumored to have been given to spies as suicide pills.

  5. Saxitoxin poisonings, worldwide, are not uncommon.

  6. After receiving a lethal dose, death usually occurs in two to twelve hours.

  7. There is no cure, but if the person suffering from the effects of saxitoxin can be hooked up to a respirator in time, he can survive. Death usually comes from lack of oxygen due to the fact that the breathing muscles are paralyzed.

  8. It may be possible to detect saxitoxin in the brain of a victim. (But not if the victim, like Bram, has already been cremated.)

  All this dove-tailed nicely with what I’d learned in Bell’s lab, but I still wondered how Bram could have received a lethal dose. If it was from the mussels at the party before dinner, wouldn’t he have felt the effects by the time he joined me on the bench in the quad? That was at nine o’clock. One of the websites listed numbness of the lips as an early symptom. A feeling of constriction in the throat and incoherent speech might follow. Bram certainly was talking crazily, asking me if I wanted to go out for pizza when we’d all just had a huge dinner. But that wasn’t incoherent speech. He wasn’t slurring his words. I needed to talk to a real doctor. Lettie’s daughter Lindsey was a real doctor.

  I already had Lindsey’s number in my cell phone. I called it and immediately wished I hadn’t because if Lindsey was still at the hospital, the call might interrupt something important. My next thought was that if she was doing anything important, she’d have the turned the phone off or switched it to vibrate.

  “Hello?”

  Lindsey’s voice surprised me and for a minute I stammered around trying to explain why I’d called. Lindsey told me I’d caught her eating a very late lunch in the hospital cafeteria. I explained in as few words as possible, then asked, “How hard would it be for someone to filch a bit of saxitoxin from Dr. Bell’s lab?”

  “Impossible.”

  “You mean difficult. Nothing’s impossible.”

  “And it’s possible the NBA will draft me next season. No. Impossible. You would not believe the security around St. Giles’s tiny stash of saxitoxin. First of all, he doesn’t have that much on hand at any one time. He has a system of labeling that would make it impossible for anyone but himself to know what was what. He stores it in several different concentrations, some so weak they’d be harmless to humans. It’s all kept in a time-lock safe so anyone sneaking in after hours couldn’t get to it if they were holding a gun to St. Giles’s head. There’s an electric eye on every door and a motion detector that covers the whole lab.”

  “Okay. One more question,” I said. “I know that people can die from eating shellfish tainted with saxitoxin, and that cooking doesn’t make it safe. But what about an injection? Could it be injected?”

  “Oh, sure. It probably wouldn’t take as much if it were injected. It would probably work faster, too.”

  “How fast?”

  Lindsey laughed. I could tell by her voice her mouth was full of food. “You’ve got me there. Would you like to talk to St. Giles again? Mom told me you’re like a bloodhound when you sniff something rotten.”

  “I miss your mom. I’ve hardly seen her for a week.”

  “Sorry about that. Did you say you do want to talk to him again or not?”

  “I don’t know, Lindsey. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Daphne Wetmore was leaving the college as I walked across the quad on my way to dinner. She stepped out from a side door of the porter’s station swatting at a drooping tendril of wisteria that encircled the door, her face slick with sweat. The breeze I’d felt earlier now departed, the quad was sweltering under a hot, heavy blanket. Daphne was always in a dither it seemed, but this was the first time I’d seen her without makeup and with her baby-fine hair in disarray. She had the kind of hair that had to be washed and fluffed daily, otherwise she would look like a wet cat. Without mascara, her eyes almost disappeared beneath her heavy auburn brows. Her skin was splotchy and flushed.

  “Oh, Dr. Lamb! I’m glad I caught you. I’ve told the porters, but they may forget to tell Harold. I have errands to run and I don’t know exactly when I’ll be back so I’ll probably miss dinner. Will you tell my husband not to worry? I’ve taken the car, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “No problem,” I said. “Car? I didn’t know you had a car. Where do you park it?” I hadn’t seen any places nearby where you could park a car without paying by the hour.

  “We keep it in a resident’s parking lot just off St. Cross Road. Oh! One moment!” Daphne scrambled through her purse, dropping a lipstick, a cell phone, and a spray of loose change onto the grass. “There’s something else I have to tell Harold, but . . .” Her hands shook as she pulled out a notepad with a short ballpoint attached to one side and turned, searching for an appropriate writing surface. “It’ll be better if I write it. You’ll never remember . . .” I offered my back as a writing surface but, after scribbling a few words, her pen quit due to its inverted position. “Oh, damn!”

  I handed her a pencil over my shoulder.

  She finished writing, ripped the note off the pad, folded it twice, and handed it to me. “Give this to Harold.” She scrambled through her purse again and pulled out a key ring with the college’s magic button attached. “He needs it before dinner. Do you mind? Thanks ever so much.”

  The note she handed me was wet with perspiration, partly hers and partly mine, I suspected. I could feel my shirt sticking to my back. I unfolded the note carefully to avoid tearing. It said, “His name is Malcolm. Tell him you’re sorry for his loss. His wife died last week.”

  I believe I could have remembered that.

  I had some extra time before dinner and I considered checking the SCR to see if there was a pre-as well as post-dinner gathering. I suspected there might be, but looking around the East Quad, I thought of something else. Perhaps, in the daylight, I’d have better luck figuring out where the Grey Lady had gone that night. The last I’d seen of her, she was dashing through the north archway while I hopped on my good foot, giving way to my twisted ankle. I walked through and turned left, as I had done that night, into a dead end. The late afternoon sun poured gold across three roofs, their weathered gargoyles leering down at me from the overhangs. Ahead stood a solid brick wall, some three stories high, and flanked by two ancient stone walls. To the left, the backside of the wing that housed the rooms of Keith Bunsen and several other faculty members. The one on the right incorporated bits of the ancient city wall, much repaired over the last eight hundred years. Behind me, the Master’s Garden and a door to the Wetmores’ lodgings.

  White curtains fluttered out from an open window in the second floor of the building on my left. I imagined a fan in the room beyond, because there was no moving air to produce any cross ventilation. Voices,
so low I couldn’t make out the words, slipped out as well. This window would be at about the same place as Keith’s rooms on the staircase closest to the northwest corner of the building. I listened for another minute, hearing an angry or perhaps excited voice and a deeper, calmer one. I heard a long scrape, as if someone was pulling a chair across the floor. Then, quite clearly, perhaps because the speaker had moved closer to the window, a girl’s voice said, “If looks could kill, I’d be dead right now!”

  Not wishing to be caught eavesdropping, I turned right and stepped into the archway where I felt the Grey Lady must have gone. At the far side stood the small door cut into the gigantic wooden nail-studded gate. Then I saw it. An iron railing to the left of the door sloped down, disappearing into the cobbled stone floor. Stepping across and peering over the rail, I spotted a door below ground level, at the bottom of a stairwell so dark I could hardly read the sign on the black, water-stained door. “No Admittance.” Whatever lay beyond the door must run beneath the wall itself.

  If the Grey Lady had slipped down these stairs I would have missed her, whether she went through the door or not. She could have hidden in the stairwell in her black, hooded cape and I wouldn’t have seen her. I checked my watch and decided there wasn’t enough time to visit the SCR, so I wandered around the Middle Quad, admiring the borders. The gardeners stuck small brass plaques, with common and scientific names, in the ground beneath some of the more exotic plants. I stopped at a huge black flower with a plaque that read Aeonium arboreum and wondered if I could raise one of those in my garden back home. If I saw a gardener before I left I would ask him; that is, if the gardeners hadn’t quit following Daphne’s verbal harangue.

  “I’ve tried to grow those with a singular lack of success,” a voice behind me said. I turned and found Claudia Moss.

  “Claudia. I need to talk to you.” Still studying the flower border as we both moseyed in the general direction of the dining hall, I said, “Have you talked to Larry Roberts this afternoon, since, say, three o’clock?”

  Claudia hesitated as if she might be revealing more than she should by answering, then said, “I had tea with him at the Randolph at four.”

  “Did he mention my presentation? He came in, but left soon after. He was angry with me. Furious would be a better word.”

  “He did mention it.” She paused again and her next words seemed to have been carefully weighed. “He said you were being taken in by our visitors from Glastonbury. He’s adamant, you know, that history must be done scrupulously and objectively.”

  “I know. He and I have had these discussions before, but what I said in my presentation was not the least bit controversial. I was careful in the way I worded my one and only reference to Arthur in Glastonbury, and none of the others thought anything of it. Once I got the Oxfordian squared away, and after Larry stormed out, we had a nice discussion.”

  “I knew this sort of thing would come up as soon as I heard the topic they’d selected for the conference.”

  “Who selected it, by the way?”

  “I don’t know. Dr. Wetmore, perhaps?”

  “I doubt it. Did Larry also tell you he said I could forget that PhD?”

  “Give him time to cool down.” We had reached the doors to the dining hall. “Would you join us for dinner?”

  “I think not. He needs more time to cool down and so do I.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  * * *

  A small group of diners waved me over, and I was ever so glad for their invitation because otherwise I would’ve had to sit by myself or go up to someone I didn’t know very well and ask, “May I sit with you?” A perfectly normal thing to do in America, but here? Not always. And you might find yourself with a group speaking another language, although all the conference attendees spoke English well enough to understand the lectures and discussions.

  I recognized two of them as participants in my breakout session today. We introduced ourselves all around. “Your presentation today has given me so much to think about. I took three pages of notes,” one said.

  “I’ve never fully appreciated the fact that historians in Shakespeare’s day were no more writing from personal knowledge than we are today,” another added.

  “Correction. We may be writing from personal knowledge when we write about recent events,” yet another said and looked at me. “As an American, do you remember the assassination of President Kennedy?”

  “I was in high school, but yes, I remember.”

  “You were there. You could write that story from personal knowledge.”

  “But I wasn’t in Dallas. All I know is what I saw on TV.”

  “Exactly! Just my point!”

  We paused while the server straightened out our first courses, two of our group having ordered vegetarian and unwilling to accept the salads with prosciutto.

  “That man who stormed out! It was Dr. Roberts, wasn’t it?”

  I explained as quickly and calmly as I could.

  “What’s his problem? If I were you I’d find another mentor to work with.”

  “And the man who brought up the Earl of Oxford! There’s always one in every crowd.”

  Having established ourselves as moderate historians, we had a lively discussion through the rest of the meal. We were starting on dessert, which the English call “pudding” whether it’s pudding or not, when I looked up and saw Lettie standing in the door, looking around the room.

  I stood to get her attention and pulled out a chair for her.

  “I’m not eating,” Lettie said, grabbing my coffee spoon and helping herself to my cake.

  Introductions complete, Lettie said, “Lindsey is staying home tonight—for a change. I felt like I should introduce her to her own children.” To the others, she added, “I’ve been babysitting my two grandchildren while my daughter works at the hospital. Don’t get me wrong. I love to spend all the time I can with my grandchildren. They are the sweetest things. But enough’s enough, you know? Children need their mothers, as well, don’t they?” She paused for breath and looked at me. “Sorry. I’m running off at the mouth, aren’t I?”

  “I understand,” said the man sitting across from me. “You haven’t talked to an adult all day, and the freedom makes you feel quite giddy.”

  Lettie purchased a bottle of Merlot from our server and we took it with us to the SCR. She wasn’t sure she was allowed, but I assured her this wasn’t part of the history conference and she had as much right to relax in the faculty room as the rest of us.

  The air had turned chilly while we were at dinner, from hot and still to a cool breeze and that eerie change in pressure that you can’t exactly feel, but register, somewhere deep down. The city’s lights reflected off low-hanging clouds and archway lanterns began creaking on their chains.

  Someone had raised all the windows in the SCR. As if responding to the change in weather, most of us took chairs and bunched them around the unlit fireplace. The last time I was in this room, with Robin Morris, the occupants had wandered about the room or gathered in little conversation pods.

  “Poor Harold. Did anyone else notice how shaky he was tonight?”

  “Daphne wasn’t there. That’s why. He needs her to tell him when to stand up and what to say.”

  “Where was she? She’s always there.”

  “I can answer that,” I said. “I ran into her about a half-hour before dinner and she was leaving to run some errands. She gave me a note to give to Harold and I did give it to him, but all it said was that his guest tonight was named Malcolm and Malcolm’s wife died last week.”

  “Harold called him Martin when he introduced him.”

  I threw up my hands. “Hey, I did my best! I gave him the note.”

  The man who had challenged me on the authorship of Shakespeare’s works spoke up. “I hope I didn’t offend you today, Mrs. Lamb. The debate over the authorship of the plays and poems is a long-standing one. It’s ground we’ve all been over a hundred times, but to an American perhaps it
seems like a minefield.”

  “No offense taken,” I said. His apology sounded sincere but with a touch of arrogance.

  “Too bad we had no Baconians,” said the woman who had invited me to sit with them at dinner. “We could have had a right jolly row.”

  “I’m glad we didn’t. I wouldn’t have had time for my prepared remarks.”

  Lettie, sitting on the settee beside me, had a bewildered look on her face so I said to the group, “This is my lifelong friend, Lettie Osgood. She’s a librarian, but her own interests are not especially along the lines of British history. I doubt she knows what a Baconian is.”

  “A Baconian, Mrs. Osgood, is one who believes Sir Francis Bacon wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare.”

  “And then there are the Oxfordians, who believe Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays.”

  “All perfectly silly of course,” said a thin woman with a deep voice and black hair cut in what they used to call a Dutch boy style. “Because it’s all based on the idea that a working-class man couldn’t possibly have written so intelligently.”

  “And the idea that a common man couldn’t possibly have known so much about the places where he set his stories,” another added.

  All eyes seemed to be on Lettie, the lone pupil in a room full of tutors. Lettie shifted uncomfortably in her chair, clasped her little hands tightly in her lap, and straightened her back. “Does it matter? After all, somebody wrote those wonderful plays, and whoever did deserves the name Shakespeare.”

  I threw my arm around her shoulders and laughed, letting the others know they could too, but not too much. Lettie didn’t get it. I looked beyond her bewildered face and saw Larry Roberts as he stepped through the door, surveyed the scene, turned, and left.

  We heard voices, then rhythmic, hollow, thumps wafting through the open windows on either side of the fireplace. No one spoke for a minute while we listened. Drums? Then a high-pitched voice singing something that sounded like classical church music broke through, alternating with the drumbeats. I, sitting closest to the right-hand window, jumped up and looked out while the Oxfordian man dashed to the other window.