MacPherson's Lament

“Not in my park. Now get going before I have you arrested for trespassing.”

An expression of holy joy lingered on Powell Hill’s face for a moment as she looked up at him, but then she remembered Tug Mosier’s trial, and she realized that she couldn’t indulge herself to fight this moron. With a look of utter defeat that was not entirely sincere, A. P. Hill allowed herself to be marched summarily back to her car. Before she drove away, she made a note of the park ranger’s name and description.

Edinbugh

In haste

Dear Bill,

I am taking the next plane over. Arriving Dulles via British Airways; Danville by puddlejumper. Don’t bother to meet me.

Elizabeth

“War is hell.”

– GENERAL WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN

CHAPTER 7

“DO YOU HAVE anything to declare?” the customs man asked me as I shuffled past him with my one old suitcase.

“Yes,” I said, stifling a yawn. “It’s past midnight.”

He consulted his watch. “Seven-fifteen, ma’am.”

“Not according to my body,” I told him wearily. Easy for him to proclaim this the shank of the evening. He hadn’t climbed aboard a plane in Scotland at two in the afternoon and winged his way across the Atlantic in a seat the size of a panty-hose egg to arrive hot and thirsty ten hours later, in what my body damn well knows is the middle of the night, only to have twenty minutes to hustle through customs to make my flight connection: an airborne Dixie Cup bound for sleepy little Danville. Things had been pretty peaceful in rural Virginia since the Late Unpleasantness in 1865, but my family seemed determined to make up for more than a century of uneventfulness.

I ignored the whole situation for as long as I could. When Mother wrote me a cheery little letter bomb announcing that she and my father were thinking of “going their separate ways” (after nearly thirty years!), I hoped for the best, but decided that I should stay out of it, assuming that they could resolve their differences on their own. Surely, I thought, with a decades-old relationship at stake, they won’t do anything hasty. When I heard from my brother that Dad had a girlfriend (who is probably named Bambi, and whose IQ probably equals her bust size), I will admit that I became somewhat more concerned about the situation, but I coped. (No matter what my husband says, I feel that throwing chairs is an excellent way of channeling stress into physical exertion; the incident had nothing whatever to do with feelings of rage or frustration.) Which reminds me that while I am over here, I must see if the Thomasville Gallery is having anything in the way of a sale on new dining room chairs. Perhaps in oak, which has a reputation for being a very sturdy wood. Cameron can say what he likes, but throwing things is a better reaction to stress than eating, which is temporarily comforting, but only creates more stress in the long run, when one begins to break chairs simply by sitting in them.

Despite the strain I remained firm in my resolve to stay out of the family crisis. Even Bambi or whatever her name is could not induce me to cross the Atlantic, leaving home and husband, though. Least said, soonest mended, they say. But I did check to make sure that my passport was up-to-date and that my luggage tags had the correct address in Edinburgh. Just as well that I did, because yesterday my brother contacted me with the news that he is suspected of mass murder and accused of stealing a fortune. That was too much.

I decided that I’d better fly home before my demented relatives decided to take over an air force base and start the War all over again. Even Cameron had to admit that things seemed out of hand with the stateside branch of the family; so he didn’t try to talk me out of going. But he couldn’t take time off to come with me. I suppose it’s just as well that I haven’t yet found a job in Scotland; there was no telling how long I was going to have to stay in Virginia. With a funeral, you just attend, settle matters concerning the estate if you must, and then return to your regular life, but no one in my family had the decorum to die. I suppose I’ll feel very guilty for making that wisecrack, but I’m angry now-and my family is being particularly exasperating. They’re probably doing this just to drive me crazy and get the inheritance.

I took the new scandalous royal biography with me on the plane for reading matter. It was comforting to be reminded that no family is immune from turmoil, but even the tale of a princess’s drinking problem couldn’t hold my attention. I kept thinking of Aunt Amanda’s reaction to my parents’ breakup, assuming that anybody had been fool enough to tell her. “I knew it wouldn’t last,” she’d sniff. “They eloped.”

And then I’d think about poor old Bill, who seemed to have drifted into law school because a college degree wasn’t enough anymore for ambitious middle-class parents. It wasn’t enough for the modern job market, either. Fast-food restaurant managers had college degrees these days; everybody else needed an extra piece of paper to move upward.

I remember my brother, Bill, as a towheaded kid captivated by magic acts on television. He’d use his allowance to buy simple tricks, and then he’d inflict them on the family and the Scout troop at the slightest lull in conversation. Our enthusiasm hadn’t been exactly unbounded, and after a few years of saying, “Pick a card, any card,” to the backs of a stampeding audience, he gave it up and retreated into his schoolwork. He’d graduated Phi Beta Kappa from William and Mary, and had been accepted into law school without much difficulty. But I never saw him talk about law school with anything like the glow he used to have for his hokey magic tricks. Sometimes I wondered if his interminable stay in law school had been a postponement of his inevitable humdrum fate. That made me sad. For all the teasing I go through for my career (grave-robbing, as my cousin Geoffrey puts it), I genuinely enjoyed forensic anthropology, solving death’s little puzzles based on the clues left behind in the human body. I wished that I could be sure that Bill was as happy in his expensively acquired profession.

One thing I was sure of, though: Bill MacPherson was not a crook. And there was absolutely no way that he could be a murderer. Even as a kid, he’d been a halfhearted squabbler, generally losing the last piece of cake or the new toy to me not because he was unselfish, but because he didn’t really care enough to make a fuss about things. I couldn’t imagine him beset with any of the aggressive sins, like avarice or larceny. I could, however, envision his being careless in detail or overly trusting of other people (when we were kids, he used to let me divide up the ice cream), but there is no way that my brother could have done what he stands accused of. No way.

“Give me something with an air bag,” I told the car-rental people at the Danville airport. I’d been driving in Scotland for so long that I didn’t trust myself to make an uneventful transition back to the right side of the road, especially when I had so many other things to worry about.

Bill would have picked me up at the airport, but I didn’t want to be dependent on him for transportation. I didn’t know Danville very well, but a city map came with the car, and Danville isn’t large enough to get lost in. It’s the kind of place where people read the newspaper to see who has been caught. I knew that my brother’s office and his apartment were in the same downtown building, so the chances of finding him at this hour seemed excellent. I wasn’t ready to go to my parents’ house yet. The thought gave me chills.

I crossed the Dan River on the old bridge that led downtown and found a parking place just outside the law office building. The street was deserted and the sky had a haze of reflected light from the city, hiding the stars. I wondered if I should have picked up a pizza on my way in. When he’s worried, Bill forgets to eat. I never have that problem.

I hurried up the stairs, knowing that if I stopped to think about what to say, I might turn around and run. The door to the office was closed, but the light was on. I looked at the frosted glass, emblazoned with the names