Dressed to Die: A Lindsay Chamberlain Novel (5 page)

Lindsay made copies of the articles and left the library,
then wondered to herself as she climbed into her Rover
why she had bothered looking up anything on Shirley
Foster. As soon as she finished with the bones, her part in
the case would be over.

Lindsay drove home to meet Edgar Dante, John Booth's
cousin. He looked enough like Booth to be his brother,
except for the lighter shade of skin color, a thin moustache,
and amazing green eyes. He brought with him a drilling
machine, a truck loaded with pipe, another cousin, and two
other helpers.

"Know where you want it?" he asked.

"I don't suppose there's any way you can tell where
there's water?" she said.

Edgar grinned.

"Do you have a suggestion?" Lindsay looked at the land
close to her house for a good place, which was hard, not
knowing what a good place for a well looked like.

Edgar Dante also studied the terrain around her house,
finally pointing to a spot. "I'd start there, if it was my well."

"Start?"

"I can't guarantee we'll hit water. I made that clear on
the phone."

"Yes, you did."

"It's eight dollars a foot for the first hole. If it's a dry
hole, the next one is six dollars a foot. I'm giving you a discount 'cause you know John."

"I appreciate it. How deep do you think the water will be?"

"Can't tell. Probably deeper than your other one. Is it
drilled or bored?"

"Bored. It's thirty feet."

"If it's as little as thirty feet you're going to have yourself a real deal. But I wouldn't count on it. I dug a well for a guy
about five miles from here." He pointed in the direction of
her gate. "It was a hundred feet. That's not too bad, but it
don't say nothing about your well. You never know what the
rock formation is doing under the ground, which way it's
going to go. I've got enough rods for a thousand feet." Lindsay winced as she multiplied. "We probably won't go that
deep. Probably start another hole before we go that deep. I'll
tell you if I think it's a dry hole. I won't go just running up
the bill on you, even if you are a friend of John's."

Lindsay smiled weakly and watched as they connected
the equipment and began to drill. At a little over a hundred
feet they paused, inspected the bits of ground rock and dirt
coming from the drilling, discussed among themselves,
shook their heads, and continued drilling. At a hundred and
fifty feet and no water, Lindsay began to get nervous. She
bit her lower lip as she watched them work, glad now that
she had accepted the consulting job from Will Patterson.
She had just acquired the land next to hers, though it was
mostly deep gullies and thick woods, because it was the
source of the stream that ran through her property. The
income from the Patterson job was to help restore her savings to good health. But now-

The sound of the drilling was so loud she didn't hear the
truck drive up and was surprised to feel someone lay a hand
on her shoulder.

"Well gone dry? Sony, didn't mean to startle you."

"Leigh-no, I'm sorry, I forgot you were coming today.
And yes. It went dry."

"Lot of people building houses in the area, lowering the
water table," he said.

"I irrigated the back pasture from the old well, too. I'm
sure with the dry weather and everything else, it just put too
much drain on it. I think the noise may have Mandrake a
little upset," she added.

Leigh Bradley was Lindsay's vet, here to give her horse,
Mandrake, his annual physical and round of shots. Lindsay
had been suspicious of Leigh when she first saw him. He
wore cowboy boots and a western shirt, giving her the feeling that he might be the kind of guy who has the attitude
that you have to show a horse who's boss in order to control
it. In Lindsay's eyes, this attitude did not make for a good
vet and could ruin a good horse. She'd seen her mother
send several vets with such an attitude packing. Over half
of them wore cowboy boots. It didn't help that he was
good-looking, either. Men that good-looking are often
spoiled. Leigh, however, had discredited all of Lindsay's
prejudices. He knew how to deal with horses gently, and he
was very good with Mandrake.

"This is Brooke Einer," he said, introducing a petite,
brown-eyed blonde in black jeans and a pink blouse covered by a black denim jacket. "She's interning with us."

"Hi," Brooke said, holding out her hand. "Leigh tells me
you have a beautiful horse."

"I think so," said Lindsay, shaking Brooke's hand. She
started to lead them to the stable when Edgar Dante came
over to her.

"We're down another hundred feet. We're going to
break for lunch now." Lindsay saw the men bring out
brown bags and Thermoses. "Okay if we eat here?"

"Of course," Lindsay told him. "Can you stop the
drilling while you eat? My vet's here to examine my horse
and the noise has him a little upset."

"Sure, we can do that," said Dante.

She led Leigh and Brooke to the stable where she had
put up Mandrake while the drilling was going on. The
stable was her father's portion of her birthday present. He
had sent a check to help her build it. It was larger than her
house, with three stalls on either side of a wide throughway
and a loft on one end for hay. One stall was a tack room, another was a small bedroom in case she needed to stay
with her horse some nights. The other three were for visitors. Occasionally, Susan or another friend brought a horse
over and they rode together.

"He is beautiful," said Brooke, stroking his nose.

Mandrake pawed the floor of his stall and moved his
head up and down. Lindsay went into the stall, talked to
him in a low voice, stroking his black velvet neck gently.
She clipped a lead to his halter and led him out.

"He does seem a little edgy," said Leigh, brushing the
horse's nose with his hand and rubbing his neck before
feeling his legs.

"He doesn't like being put up, either," said Lindsay.

Leigh deftly examined Mandrake, explaining to Brooke
what he was doing and why.

"He's fit, as always," pronounced Leigh. "Brooke, if
you'll get the vaccines, we'll finish up." Brooke went to the
truck and brought back the shots for Mandrake, who
stamped his hooves and gave a long whinny. "Don't like
what's coming, do you, boy?"

"Should I get the twitch?" asked Brooke.

"No," said Leigh.

"My uncle's a vet, and he says that with an unruly horse you
have to make it clear who's the boss, especially with stallions."

Lindsay looked at Brooke's feet. Running shoes.

"I'll tell you who's boss: Dr. Chamberlain here, and if
she finds us twitching her horse there'll be hell to pay."
Leigh measured the dosage into the syringe and gave Mandrake his shots. "There, that wasn't so bad," he said, rubbing the spot. "Mandrake never gets unruly. Do you, boy?"
He patted his neck. "He's the best-trained horse I've ever
seen. You want to show Brooke how he does on his imaginary longe?"

Lindsay led Mandrake outside to the paddock area and
unhooked his lead. She held out her arm as though she were holding a longe line attached to Mandrake's halter and
clicked her tongue. He began trotting in a circle around
Lindsay as she turned so that she always faced him.
"Canter," she said in a low voice. Mandrake sped up into a
canter for a turn around Lindsay. "Change," she said, and he
changed leads, from his right to his left, and cantered one
more time around before she gave him the command to stop.

"That's amazing," said Brooke.

"Yep," Leigh said. "As you can see, Mandrake is not an
unruly horse. With all due respect to your uncle, you never
need to show a horse who's boss. It's all in knowing how to
interact with them. Some people can, and some people can't."

Lindsay was surprised at the sharp edge to Leigh's voice.
Apparently, he was fed up with Brooke and her uncle. Lindsay would be surprised if Brooke was offered a position at
Leigh's clinic when she graduated.

They drove away, and Lindsay returned Mandrake to his
stall just as the well drillers started up again. They were at
300 feet and still drilling. She stood and listened to them
talk about such and such a well where they had to go 600
feet. She wanted to groan. At 320 feet, they struck another
vein of granite, and gray rock dust bubbled up from the
ground with mud from the water they used in the drilling
process. At 350 feet, she paced. At 360, she stopped and
watched, holding her breath as they put on another rod.

AT 370 FEET water came gushing out of the ground like
a geyser, wetting all of them. Lindsay let out her breath in
a big sigh of relief and watched them take a bucket and
stopwatch and measure the flow. Dante came over to Lindsay, grinning.

"Good news is you've got about thirty gallons a minute.
That's more than the pump will handle, so water pressure
should never be a problem."

"Don't tell me there's bad news," she said.

He held out a glass jar with rust-colored water. "You
need to have it analyzed. It looks like you have an iron problem. It's common all through this part of the country. I can
give you the number of a place that installs water filters."

Lindsay took the jar and stared at the water. "That deep,
you'd think it would be pure," she said.

"It's good water. Just has some minerals that need to be
filtered out. Right now, we'll put a sleeve down to the rock
and drop the pump and wiring down the well-" He
stopped and listened to one of his men who had yelled
something to him. "Looks like the water level is up to forty
feet," he said. "That's some pressure behind it. That's good.
We'll drop the pump about 150 feet."

Somewhere, Lindsay thought, the water level for that
aquifer is a mere forty feet under the surface. She wondered
where that was.

Lindsay went inside and looked up the address of the
place on campus where she could get her water analyzed.
When Dante finished, he knocked on her door with the bill.

"You can pay it in two installments, if you want," he said.

Lindsay glanced over the bill: 370 feet of drilling, water
pump, wiring, sleeve, and labor. She took a deep breath and
wrote out a check for $2,100.

"The next installment due next month?" she asked, half
expecting him to say no, tomorrow.

"Next month will be fine. I'd see about getting a filtering system before you run the water though your pipes, if I
were you," Dante said.

Before going to campus Lindsay dropped off her water
sample to be analyzed. Then she drove to South Campus
where new, modern multicolored brick buildings were popping up like dandelions after a rain. She stopped at the
Ramsey P.E. Center to shower and change her clothes.

When she arrived at Baldwin Hall, home of the Archaeology Department, Lindsay encountered Reed Cavanaugh
and Kenneth Kerwin, two Archaeology faculty members in
the faculty break room. She poured herself a cup of coffee.
Reed was nursing his own cup, and Kerwin was reading the
latest volume of the Journal of Historical Archaeology.

"Been reading about you in the paper," said Reed. "Looks
like we're in for several more weeks of speculation about
Shirley Foster." From his expression, Lindsay felt as though
he would like for her to come sit down and tell him about the
case. Reed was not a person who acted out of idle curiosity,
and she realized that he had probably known Shirley Foster.
In fact, probably several of the faculty had known her.

"I imagine there was a lot of publicity when she disappeared," said Lindsay.

"Oh, you can't imagine it. It made it scary for a lot of the
girls on campus at that time, too."

"Did you know her?" asked Lindsay. She took a sip of
coffee. As usual it was awful.

Reed nodded. "Nice lady. I liked her."

"She didn't have a very good opinion of archaeologists
here in the U.S.," Lindsay said.

Reed laughed. "You must have been reading one of her
interviews. I remember one in the Observer." He chuckled.
"Shirley was just tweaking our noses. She was like that."
He laughed again, shaking his gray head. "We never
minded, though. She was a very playful girl."

"How about you, Kenneth? Did you know her?"

Kenneth Kerwin waited until he finished reading a paragraph before he looked over the top of the journal. "Not
really. Academically, of course. She was interested in textiles, and she occasionally asked me questions about old
mill sites in Georgia. She was a good scholar. A loss for the
university." He went back to his reading.

"What can you tell us?" Reed asked Lindsay.

"Nothing, I'm afraid," she answered.

"Well, can you confirm what's in the newspaper?" he
asked. "It said she had been burned in a curious manner.
That wasn't the way she died, was it?" Reed looked as
though he wanted Lindsay to tell him, "No, she really died
peacefully in her bed."

"There was some burning. The sheriff believes it was an
attempt to dispose of the body. It's an exaggeration to call it
curious." The only "curious" elements were the intensity of
the heat, the burn pattern, and the careful burial. Not a lot,
but it nagged her just the same.

"What killed her?" asked Reed.

"Will you people please!" Kerwin said. "Reed, we did
know the woman, for heaven's sake. It's bad enough that
Lindsay spends her time doing this. Don't encourage her to
bring in the grisly details to us." He got up from the sofa
and left the room with his journal.

Lindsay and Reed watched Kerwin's retreating back.
"Exactly what did you ever do to him?" Reed asked.

"Oh, I kind of gave him a hard time about the way he handled the media during the Ferguson business," said Lindsay.

Reed chuckled. Lindsay got up and poured her coffee in
the sink. "Who made this stuff?"

"I did. Don't you like it?"

"It's awful." Lindsay started out the door.