The Loch Ness Legacy (22 page)

Alexa was happy that she and Grant were alone again. She enjoyed spending time with him and making him uncomfortable. She’d always found him attractive, and her new self-confidence in her body made the teasing even more fun. But she’d reined it in when she saw that he was crabby and a little haggard looking.

Shortly after Ashburn took off, Alexa was surprised to see the texted photo from Brielle because the foot next to a ruler was bronze, not the marble she was expecting. While Grant adjusted the size of the photo on a borrowed computer, Alexa leaned in next to him.

“Tyler’s not answering,” she said.

Grant fidgeted in his seat, as if he couldn’t find a comfortable position, but he kept his focus on the screen. “From the look of the photo, Brielle was in the middle of a fountain when it was taken. Maybe his phone got wet and shorted out.”

“Still, it bothers me.”

“Don’t worry about Tyler. He can handle himself.”

“You’ve been through a lot together, haven’t you? He’s told me a bit about his adventures with you, but I get the feeling he’s leaving out the good parts in some brotherly urge not to scare me.”

“I don’t know if they could be called the good parts. He does what he needs to get the job done, and he always puts others first. When things get hairy, he’s the guy you want on your side.”

“Of that I’m sure,” Alexa said. “I may not have gone through what you have with him, but I’ve known him a lot longer. He’s always stood up for people. I remember one time when he took me to a car race—you know how into racing he is. Since I made him ride horses, much to his regret, Tyler got to introduce me to his passion. I was fourteen and he was sixteen. We were walking through the concourse at the race track, and two older teens started harassing me. Tyler told them to back off, and he received a punch in the nose for his efforts. He got right back up off the ground and went at them until track security arrived and took the boys away for beating him up.”

“Sounds like the Tyler I know,” Grant said.

“Except now he looks the part. He wasn’t always the man’s man that he seems to have become during his time in the military. He was as skinny as a flagpole in high school.”

Grant finally took his attention from the screen. “You’re kidding.”

“You didn’t know?”

“We’ve never whipped out his old photo albums from childhood.”

“Oh, yeah. He couldn’t even do a push-up. He didn’t build any muscle until he reached his full height in college. His metabolism was through the roof. I was so jealous.”

“Why?”

“Because he got all the good genes. Smart, tall, good-looking in a geeky way, the ability to gorge himself on Big Macs without gaining an ounce. I’ve always been pudgy.”

“You’re more like him than you think,
Doctor
Locke. And you definitely aren’t pudgy any more. You look…very fit.”

“Aren’t you sweet?” She rubbed his arm, and he turned away. “Thanks, but it required two-hour workouts and a steady diet of cottage cheese and rice cakes to get rid of the fluff.”

“Well, it worked.” He pursed his lips as if considering his next line, then said, “Listen, I’m sorry I barked at you earlier. That wasn’t called for.”

“That’s all right. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

“You didn’t. I’m just…not myself right now.”

Alexa stared at Grant as he went back to resizing the photograph. “We should go out when we get back.”

The mouse stopped moving, and Grant sighed, with more dejection than exasperation. “Alexa, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why? Because Tyler’s my brother?”

“No, because he’s my best friend.”

“Then we won’t tell him.”

“That’s an even worse idea.” The mouse started moving again.

“Oh, come on. The guys I meet in university biology departments or at conferences are so dull or gay or married or dorky or insecure. I know you like me. You may have been a good pro wrestler, but you’re a terrible actor.”

“There’s no point, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“We…we don’t have time.”

“I don’t mean this minute. I’m talking about when this whole business with Loch Ness is over.”

Grant shook his head. “Believe me, Alexa, you’ve set your sights on the wrong guy.” He hit PRINT, and a page spooled into the printer.

“I don’t know,” Alexa said. “I have pretty good aim.” She grabbed Grant by the cheeks and pulled him to her, kissing him softly on the lips. At first, he kissed back but then drew away.

“Alexa.” He hesitated. “Ask me again next week.”

She smiled and winked at him. “I knew I could be convincing. Now let’s find us a manuscript.”

She took the printout from the tray and laid a white sheet of paper over it, tracing the outline of the bronze foot. When she was done, she laid Laroche’s numbered sheet over that. The big and little toes were perfectly aligned with the chromosome numbers for harp seal and polar bear.

Alexa circled all the numbers and letters that touched the outline. She wrote them out in order starting with the big toe and going clockwise starting at the three as Laroche instructed.

3 74 c 91 32 5 6

“Type this into the catalogue,” Alexa said.

When the computer returned no results, Grant said, “Are you sure that’s the number?”

“Positive. No other letters or numbers come close to the outline of Apollo’s foot.”

“Well, nothing in the library matches it.”

She peered at the screen. “If this is a catalogue number, it looks like the last set of digits is too long. Let’s try truncating it.”

“How?”

“Try 374.c.9.13.”

Grant typed it in. Still no result. He tried a few more combinations. 374.c.91.325. 374.c.9.1. It wasn’t until he input 374.c.91.3 that they got a title.

Practical Taxidermy: The preparation, stuffing, and mounting of animals for museums and travelers
by Henry Bosworth, pub. 1935.

“Taxidermy?” Grant huffed. “Laroche sent us to find a book on stuffing animals? Does he think Nessie is mounted on someone’s wall?”

Alexa jotted the number on a note card. “Let’s find out.”

They made their way up to the fifth floor and found the book in the stacks. The cover had a picture of a rhino on display in an exhibit with a child pointing it out to his father.

“What are we looking for?” Grant asked in a low voice.

“There were three digits left over from what we used in the catalogue identifier. Two, five, and six. I think that’s a page number.”

She flipped the book to page 256. The header atop the page read,
Taxidermy Through History
. The section was labeled
John Edmonstone
.

“This has to be it,” Alexa whispered.

“It is? How do you know?”

“John Edmonstone was a taxidermist in Edinburgh in the early eighteen hundreds. He was a freed slave from Guyana.”

“A brother in Scotland?”

“Darwin was friends with him during his medical school training. He even took some lessons in taxidermy from Edmonstone, which not only fueled his interest in biology, but also taught him valuable information about animal preservation that would come in handy during his voyage on the
Beagle
.”

“So we’ve got our Darwin link. What does it say?”

Alexa skimmed down the page until she saw a paragraph with the words she was searching for. “Listen to this. ‘One story that was passed to me is especially interesting given the recent photo of a creature in Loch Ness taken by surgeon Robert Kenneth Wilson and featured in many newspaper articles in 1934. During an interview with noted Scottish taxidermist Ewan Stewart, I was regaled with a tale that he alleged had originated with John Edmonstone. Edmonstone claimed that he and a college student had been attacked by a fantastical beast on an outing to Loch Ness and speculated about why it had been drawn to them.”

“So Edmonstone had a Nessie hunting call?” Grant asked.

“I doubt he would name it that if he was attacked by Nessie.”

“True. It would be like having a grizzly bear whistle. Not something you’d want to use again.”

“The rest of this is even better,” Alexa said, and continued reading. “‘An unnamed companion was said to have cut off a part of the beast, which can only be supposed to be an ancestor of the creature photographed by Mr. Wilson. Although we can’t attest to the veracity of Edmonstone’s story, Mr. Stewart also claimed that the entire account was recorded in a journal that Edmonstone kept secreted inside a mounted stag head that adorned his flat, accessed by a latch cleverly hidden under the fur at the base of the stag’s neck. No one knows what happened to Edmonstone’s possessions upon his death, so we may never learn more about his tall tale.’”

“No problem,” Grant said sarcastically. “Assuming the story is true, all we have to do is find a two-hundred-year-old stag head that may not even exist any more and hope that no one has already removed the journal. What could be easier?”

“There has to be a way to find it or Laroche wouldn’t have laid out all of these clues. He must have read this book and begun a search for the stag-head trophy. He might even know where it is. Stop being so pessimistic.”

“Well, we’re not going to be able to ask Laroche. Last I heard, he was still in a coma.” Grant knocked his knee against the bookshelf, and his face contorted in pain. He held his leg for few a moments until he relaxed again.

“You don’t look so good, either. Are you all right?”

“Just a little joint soreness. Probably got it from all the plane travel in the past week.” He wasn’t very convincing, but before Alexa could probe, he went on. “Tyler and Brielle are coming back to London tonight. We’ll put our heads together at the hotel and see if we can make sense of this.”

“Are they a thing? I got a weird vibe when I saw them together.”

“It’s complicated. She’s Jewish.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem for Tyler. We were raised Presbyterian by our grandmother, but neither of us has been much of a church-goer since we were kids.”

“I think it’s more a problem for her.”

Alexa frowned. “That’s too bad. Even though she’s kind of gruff, I like her. She seems like a good match for him.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t work out like you want it to,” Grant said, looking intently at Alexa. He took out his phone. “I’ll call Ashburn to pick us up.”

Alexa stuck the note card in the page as a bookmark. When they got to the lobby, Ashburn was waiting for them and checked out the book. Alexa wanted to read it more closely to see if there were any other clues. She tucked the book in her purse, and they got in his car for the two-minute ride to the engineering lab. Ashburn assured them that they wouldn’t miss their return train to King’s Cross.

They pulled into a gated car park and Ashburn swiped his card to lift the barrier. Once they were parked, Ashburn escorted them to a garage-type roll-up door. Alexa could make out all kinds of equipment inside the lab where two students were working, but Ashburn waved his arm at four go-karts lined up in front of the open door. Each one was painted in a different color: black, red, green, and yellow, with wraparound black rubber bumpers.

As Grant and Alexa approached, the students dropped what they were doing and gathered at the door.

“Lawrence and Penelope,” Ashburn said, “I would like to introduce you to senior Gordian engineer Grant Westfield and Dr. Alexa Locke, the sister of Gordian’s founder, Tyler Locke. Lawrence and Penelope are two of the students responsible for developing the HydroSpeed project for which Gordian has so generously provided funding. Unfortunately, the rest are in class at the moment.”

The students smiled and nodded.

“You may not be aware, Alexa,” Ashburn continued, “but the intent of HydroSpeed is to perfect a simplified hydrogen fuel cell vehicle that would be affordable enough for emerging markets. It was your brother’s suggestion that we put our ideas to the test using go-karts before we move on to a full-scale car.”

“Are they operational?” she asked.

“Absolutely. A full twenty horsepower. We expect a top speed of fifty miles per hour. They’ll be put through their paces during an endurance race at a local track tonight. We’ll be loading them onto the transport lorry within the hour. I do wish you could stay to watch.”

“I’m afraid we don’t have time,” Grant said.

“Of course, of course.” Ashburn clapped his hands. “I know! Perhaps you’d like to take one for a short jaunt around the car park.”

“I don’t know…”

“We test them out here all the time. It’s really very simple. The accelerator pedal is on the right and the brake on the left. To reverse, you hold back the lever in the center.”

“Aren’t I a little big to fit in one?”

“Nonsense,” Ashburn said, patting his considerable belly. “You can’t weigh more than I do, and I’ve driven them myself.”

“Come on,” Alexa said to Grant. “Take it for a spin. I want to see what these things can do!” While she had never developed the passion for competition Tyler had, racing go-karts with him as a teenager had given her a taste for speed. As an adult, she drove a Mini Cooper, the closest she could get to a street-legal go-kart.

“All right,” Grant said. “Just once around the lot.”

“Excellent,” Ashburn said. “We’ll put you in the red one. Lawrence, please fetch a helmet for Mr. Westfield. Penelope, please keep an eye on the gates to make sure we don’t have anyone drive in during the run.”

The students scattered, and Grant eased himself into the seat of the go-kart, the stiff suspension groaning under him. Grant buckled himself in as Ashburn switched the engine on. Unlike the noisy gas-powered karts Alexa had raced before, the fuel cell on this one merely hummed like a fan.

Her phone chimed. She looked at the display and saw an unfamiliar number.

“Hello?” she answered.

“Alexa, it’s Tyler.”

“Where have you been? We’ve got some incredible information to—”

“Tell us tonight. You need to know something. Zim was here.”

“Zim? At Versailles?”

Grant looked up at her when she mentioned the name.

“Yes,” Tyler said. “I don’t know how he knew we’d be here, but we have to assume he knows you’re in Cambridge as well.”