The Avalon Chanter by Lillian Stewart Carl

infectiously good-natured, she now backed
away toward the door without demanding further conversation.
“Breakfast is at eight unless you’d rather have it earlier. There’s
a bit of a menu just there on the desk. Ta ta for now.” And the
door shut.
    Jean glanced not at the list of foods on the
menu but at the name at its top. “Not only did I say Angler’s Rest
to Lance, when I first booked the place I read it as Angel’s Rest.
You’re always seeing ‘angel’ for ‘angle’ and vice versa.”
    “ You and your proofreader’s eye.”
Alasdair opened his suitcase.
    “ Angles. Saxons. Jutes. And later on,
Vikings and Danes. Some people called them pirates, but they saw
themselves as bold explorers, opening up new lands, never mind
people were already living there. Kind of like Attila and his
Huns.”
    “ Eh?”
    “ Saint Genevieve supposedly saved Paris
from Attila the Hun in the fifth century. That was a time of
barbarian invasions into the old Roman Empire, the era of a
historical King Arthur . . . Well, Maggie’s got to have more going
for herself than a connection that slender, I don’t care how
ambitious she is.”
    “ Eh?” Alasdair repeated, a little
louder.
    Jean started pulling items from her suitcase,
beginning with her tablet computer. “Earlier you were wondering if
it was a coincidence Maggie moved back to Farnaby to help her
parents and still managed to make a brilliant discovery.”
    “ Oh aye, coincidences happen, but it’s
her finding a grave worth presenting a press conference, in her own
garden or so nearly as makes no difference, that’s making me
itch.”
    “ You and me both. Farnaby isn’t the end
of the Earth, Pen to the contrary, but Maggie still might feel as
though her career’s been put on hold here.”
    “ There you are, motivation for—well,
I’m not suggesting she’s salted the dig, just that she’s making a
mountain from a molehill.”
    “ So far she hasn’t presented any
evidence one way or the other. All she’s discovered is a dead body,
and she sure didn’t plant that.”
    “ No, that she did not. Consider her
timing reporting the body, though.”
    Jean spread her toiletries out on the
bathroom counter, marveling that this bathroom had a counter,
unlike many. She could only assume that Brits were capable of
making their hygiene and beauty aids levitate beside the sink.
    Her image in the mirror made her grab for her
hairbrush—the wind had caused her naturally surly auburn locks to
become openly hostile. “No surprise she’d put off calling
Crawford,” she said toward the other room, “until access to Farnaby
was closed. She’s lucky she’s in a place she could keep outsiders
away and the situation under control. Not that you and I aren’t
outsiders, but we got here after the other reporters had left—that
was a serendipitous shortcut making a long delay, wasn’t it?”
    “ We’re owning to good credentials, to
say nothing of Miranda’s good word.”
    “ Miranda’s magic tongue could open the
gates of Fort Knox, no doubt about it.”
    “ Still,” Alasdair replied, “Maggie
could not be keeping the truth under wraps forever.”
    “ Couldn’t she? She could have replaced
the slab on the tomb and gone on her way. Especially if Tara wasn’t
there this morning helping her out and she had no witnesses. The
hue and cry from the double-crossed media would die out eventually.
Loony Lauder . . . Hmm .” Jean
walked out into the room. Alasdair had turned off all the lights
except for a dim bedside lamp and now peered out of the right-hand
window.
    The view swept down to the harbor and out to
sea. Crawford’s small boat bobbed up and down next to a fishing
boat, but Jean saw no sign of any other official forces staging a
landing.
    “ Too soon,” he told her, and went on,
“If Tara’s Maggie’s daughter, she’s not making a reliable witness,
one way or the other.”
    “ We’ll have to take their word for
it.”
    “ You’ll have noticed the