“Mmm hmm. Are you getting enough to eat?”
Emmie’s foot began to tap impatiently. “Plenty. Lamb takes good care of me.”
“Lamb?”
“He’s the butler here. A really nice old man. You’d love him.”
“I’ll take your word for it. And how is the work going?”
“It’s just a lot of cataloguing and researching right now. Nothing terribly thrilling— Oh, I forgot to tell you. There’s a crew here filming an episode of Digging Scotland. They have a team of archaeological excavators out in the east field. And there’s a camera crew, too, that shows up every once in a while.”
“Is that so?” Grace’s pitch rose a notch. “What channel’s it going to be on? I’ll have to watch it, see if I can find my little girl.”
“Don’t try too hard. I’ve been avoiding the cameras. Plus, the excavators told me I’d have to sign a waiver for the producers to use any footage with me in it, and I’m not going to do that.”
“Oh, Emmie! Such a shrinking violet. What are they digging for?”
“They—they’re digging… for…”
Emmie’s throat suddenly constricted, and she couldn’t get the words out. Didn’t want to get the words out. Like what was beneath that field was not everyone’s business. Not yet, anyway, not until the episode aired at least.
“Just… you know, household stuff. There were outbuildings on the property at one point. So they’re looking for artefacts. To tell them how people lived back then, you know?”
“You make sure to keep us in the loop. Let us know if they find anything really extraordinary.”
“I will. So… anyway, I’d better go. The long-distance must be costing a fortune.”
“Oh. Oh, yes, of course.” Grace’s disappointment was audible. “Well, sweetheart, you take care of yourself out there. Make sure you’re getting enough to eat, and drinking enough water. Are you sleeping well?”
“I’m sleeping great. Everything’s great. Nothing for you to worry about.”
“And you’re not working too hard?”
“No, I’m not. I promise.”
“Okay, then. I guess, good bye. Don’t wait so long to call next time.”
“I won’t.”
“All right. You take care, Em. I love you.”
“Love you too… Mom.”
Emmie cradled the receiver and slumped against the backrest. For a long while she sat, staring into space.
“Pardon me, Emmie,” came Lamb’s soft voice from around the corner.
Startled, she leaned forward and poked her head out of the alcove. The old butler was standing off to the side, looking slightly uncomfortable.
“What’s up?” She gave him her best disarming smile.
“I didn’t mean to intrude, but I’m making hot chocolate and biscuits. I wondered if you wanted some.”
“That would be lovely. Thank you.”
Lamb hesitated, his feet shifting indecisively.
“Tell me to mind my own business,” he said, “but I was wondering if I might ask you something.”
This was unlike Lamb. Emmie raised an eyebrow. “Of course you can ask.”
He fidgeted, clasping his hands in front of him, and fiddling with his wrinkled fingers. “It’s only that… well… and I know this is none of my affair, but it sounded like you were uncomfortable calling your adoptive mother ‘Mom.’ I probably only noticed it because you did say you were adopted. And, well, I was curious.”
Emmie was touched. His concern for her never ceased to warm her heart.
“That’s fine. I don’t mind talking about it. You’re right, I guess. I’m not sure I’m really okay with calling them ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad.’ When I came to live with them, Grace invited me to call her ‘Mom,’ and I didn’t have the heart to turn her down. She wants so much to be a real mother to me.”
“And that makes you uncomfortable?”
Emmie tilted her head. “It… it doesn’t feel natural, you know? I came to them when I was six, so it’s not like I grew up knowing her as ‘Mom’ until that point. Ron, he’s better about it. I don’t often call him ‘Dad.’ Neither does Chase, come to that. We usually just call him ‘Ron.’”
Lamb nodded, contemplating. He was a man of few words. But then, he didn’t need many words. He was one of those rare individuals, she was coming to understand, whose silence spoke volumes.
“You’re a sweet man, Lamb. I probably say that too much, and I’m sorry if I’m making you uneasy. Tell me to stop if I am.”
He inclined his head, his white hair catching the glow of the wall lamp behind him. “I suspect it’s much like your mother. Your adoptive mother, that is. It may make you uneasy to receive her open and unabashed affections, because it is no’ something that feels natural to you. But you would certainly be sorry if she ever ceased to offer them.”
He was right. Of course he was right. Grace loved Emmie with her whole heart. And just as Lamb was not entirely comfortable with Emmie’s display of affection for him, it would hurt terribly if Grace ever stopped telling her that she loved her.
“I’ll be off to fix that hot chocolate, then.”
“Thank you,” Emmie echoed, after he’d left.
Later, when she was full of warm milk, cocoa and sugar, Emmie climbed the stairs to her bedroom. She made no attempt to change out of her wool slacks, shell-pink blazer and wedge heels, into her pyjamas. Instead, she sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the photograph of her mother.
It was the only photograph she had, the only one her real grandmother had given her before she passed away. After she passed, Emmie was too late. Her grandmother, her last living blood relative that she knew of, died three months before the Tunstalls found out. By that time, all her possessions had been sold, given away, or destroyed.
Ron and Grace had tried. For Emmie’s sake, they tried desperately to recover something. Anything. But there was nothing left to recover. Every last piece of evidence that proved her mother had existed at all, had been on this earth, was gone. Except for the photograph that smiled back at her. And, of course, Emmie herself.
“Am I like you at all?” she asked the image. “On the inside, I mean? I don’t think I look like you. I’ve tried so many times to find the similarities between myself and your face, and I never can. Sometimes, I think it might be there in the smile. Other times I don’t see it.”
The woman continued to smile enigmatically from behind her glass frame.
“Do I look like my father? Do you even know who he is? Does he know I’m alive? Is he alive?”
They were all questions she’d asked the photograph before. There were no answers this time. Just like every other time.
“Did you even care about me?”
Every now and again these stirrings of self-pity would surface. Emmie never had anyone she could talk to about it. Chase was the closest option, but even he couldn’t empathize. Not truly. He’d come to the Tunstalls as an infant. He didn’t have the six years that she did of knowing another life, another existence.
Chase was also in touch with his birth family. He’d found them when he was eighteen. It hadn’t been the reunion he’d hoped for, but it was something. He learned the story of his conception from his mother, the daughter of a CN Rail engineer. When her father was transferred to an outpost in the Yukon, he dragged his reluctant, teenaged, city-reared daughters with him. Bored by the lack of entertainment, Chase’s mother, then fourteen years old, had made her own entertainment with the local Aishihik boys. Chase’s relationship with his mother now was strained, polite, distant. But it was there.
He’d found his father, too, and every now and then he’d travel north and stay for a few days. What they had in common other than DNA, Emmie couldn’t imagine. But through his father he found grandparents and cousins and uncles and aunts. They enveloped him in their Aishihik community and culture. And while Chase was not legally able to claim First Nations status, since the lineage did not follow the maternal line,
his father’s family were the anchor that kept him connected to his heritage.
Emmie had nothing like that. From what she did know of her mother, it was unlikely she’d find her father or any of his family. Not in this lifetime.
She was lonely. It was overwhelming. And she was desperate for a friend. A kindred spirit that would understand the very depths of her soul.
“Countess?” she called into the empty room, which was dim with only the gentle glow of the bedside lamp. “Countess, are you here?”
Her call went unanswered. If the countess was here, she was not making herself known.
She probably wasn’t here, anyway. Hauntings didn’t work like that.
THE EXCAVATING WAS starting to become a bit too much for Emmie. In fact, it was damn near doing her head in.
Day after day the team came in from the village, driving their two white-panel Renault Kangoo vans which the studio rented for them. Wherever she was in the house, as soon as she heard the crunch of those tires on the gravel outside, Emmie stopped what she was doing and scurried up to the nursery.
It was not that she didn’t like the team, or didn’t want to see them. She couldn’t explain what it was, really, except that their constant presence out there, digging away at the Scottish soil, made her anxious. Uneasy.
Occasionally, their voices would waft in through the open window. Their friendly conversation, Adam and Dean’s perpetual bickering, a shout of excitement when something of particular significance was unearthed—on these occasions, Emmie would feel the urge to shut the window and retreat to her bedroom. Then she’d stop, rub her face, and ask the question that had become a daily mantra.
“What is wrong with me?”
In the few short weeks they’d been at Tullybrae, the team had unearthed a number of utility items, broken pottery, rusted gardening tools and the like. But so far, they’d all been from the last hundred years. It was encouraging, yes, but not the find they were hoping to make. Although, just yesterday, they’d made a breakthrough when Ewan and Sophie uncovered the outline of the old kitchens which went back to the time the house was built.
Emmie’s avoidance of them didn’t seem to bother her new friends much. In fact, it hardly seem to register with them. Ever since their night at The Grigg, they pulled her into their folds. It was no matter that she never came outside to see them, they were perfectly comfortable seeking her out in the house. With every discovery, they ploughed into her sanctuary, full of enthusiasm. And Emmie, not wanting to put a damper on their excitement, would force herself to adopt an air of eagerness, and follow them outside to see what the fuss was about.
Really… what was wrong with her?
This particular morning, she woke up feeling very off. The kind of “off” where there was an edge of the surreal to everything, like when a fever first makes itself known. Except that she was not suffering from a fever. On the contrary, she was fighting fit. Physically, at least. Her temperature was fine, she had no aches or chills. Nothing.
She just felt spacy. Unaccountably, inexplicably… off.
An early morning gloom had cleared, and a tentative sunshine struggled through the haze of fresh fog. Cool, dewy moisture pillowed the hills and the house. Emmie threw open the windows of the nursery and pulled in several deep lungsful of the Highland autumn air (an act which went against her curator’s instinct to preserve the house and its artefacts from moisture damage). It not only had a scent, the air, it had a taste, too. It was clean, restorative. Invigorating.
She couldn’t get enough of it.
She was still there at the window, absorbing as much of the Highlands as she possibly could, when Dean’s voice, then Adam’s, brought her back to the nursery. They were in the house, barreling down the corridor.
Good Lord, please let them have wiped their boots this time.
Not wanting to let them find her with her head hanging out the window, Emmie flung herself across the room and into her desk chair. She had just opened her laptop and was pretending to type furiously when they burst through the door.
“Em, we need you.”
She looked up into the flushed, beaming face of Dean. “What’s up, guys?”
“We’ve found something,” exclaimed Adam, shoving Dean out of the way, even though the latter was a head taller and substantially less scrawny. “We need your opinion. None of us are sure what it is.”
“Um… yeah, sure. I’ll be down in a bit. Give me a half hour?”
“Nuh-uh. We need you now.” Adam grabbed her hand across the desk and gave her arm a tug.
They ushered her out, pulling her along the narrow hallway nearly three abreast. Adam held tight to her hand, and Dean kept his hand on her lower back. Neither of them wanted to give an inch to the other in the battle for her attentions. She tolerated their overtures with humour. Adam was more overt than Dean. To hear Sophie tell it, the man was a hopeless flirt by nature.
“It drives Kim nuts,” she said, referring to Adam’s girlfriend. “She’s so insecure and clingy. It drives her crazy to let him go off by himself like this, not knowing what he’s getting up to.”
“That’s… sad,” Emmie commented. “Do you think I should put a stop to it with me? I never bothered before because I thought he wasn’t serious.”
“He’s not serious. You could try putting him in his place, but you’d be wasting your time. Adam flirting is like dogs pissing on trees. He can’t help himself.”
“I feel bad for his girlfriend, though.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Sophie pursed her lips. “She’s really nice, too. Not quite sure how those two ever got together in the first place, though. Don’t tell him I said so.”
As for Dean’s overtures, they were more disconcerting to Emmie than Adam’s. For the most part they, too, were innocuous. But every now and again, she detected in them the underlying hope that she’d return his subtle advances. He was a nice enough guy, but not her type. Too down-home redneck… in a charming way, of course. Besides, it wasn’t the right time for her. She dreaded the day she would have to come out and say it for certain. She’d regret having to disappoint him.
Adam and Dean led her out to the east field. Their original trenches had expanded and deepened. A truck from the University of Edinburgh came out daily to cart away their finds for examination and storage. Laid out on a long, plastic workbench that was set up beneath the tent were today’s artefacts, those that had been found since morning.
There were only four small pieces. Emmie gave them a cursory glance, but they were so encrusted with dirt, she couldn’t tell what they were.
A heavy churning had begun in her belly at some point after leaving the nursery. It had started off slow, like a huge turbine struggling to pick up speed. Now that she was out at the dig site, it was turning steadily, and had spread to her legs, weighing them down.
It was as though her body instinctively knew that, whatever it was they’d found, she did not want to confront it.
“Emmie.” Famke waved enthusiastically. Emmie waved feebly back.
Ewan was farther beneath the tent. He came to the edge of the table when Adam and Dean ushered her by the elbows to the things they’d pulled from the ground.
“Sorry to disturb you,” he said, “and I say that on behalf of Thing One and Thing Two, here, because I know they didn’t bother to apologize for strong-arming you away from you work.”
“I was going to,” Dean insisted, letting go of his grip on her.
“Not me, mate,” Adam countered, throwing an arm around her shoulder and pulled her close for a cheeky kiss on the temple. “Didn’t even occur to me. Sorry to bother you, Em. Shoulda said.”
Ewan shot Adam a disapproving look. “If you’re willing, we’d love to get your opinion. We’re not sure what it is, exactly, but it’s intriguing.”
Emmie hadn’t noticed that Ewan was holding something in his hands. When he thrust his palm forward, the object on it made her wince.
It was small, only the size of her in
dex finger. A slender, silver protrusion was topped by a dirt-crusted ornament the size of a dime. They were right to be excited about it. The moulded design was elaborate. She couldn’t quite tell what it was, but it was Celtic. Probably dated to before the time of the Jacobite rising in the early seventeen hundreds, if she had to guess.
“Have you ever seen anything like it?”
Emmie swallowed thickly. “It’s a kilt pin.”
Famke, who had drifted closer, peered over Emmie’s shoulder. “A kilt pin? What’s that?”
“A pin to keep your kilt together,” Adam scoffed. “You know what a kilt is. Them funny skirts blokes wear in Scotland?”
“Oh, yes. A kilt. I thought she said a killed pin.”
“Look at that detail,” Dean pressed. “Is that a clan ensign, do you think?”
Before she could say anything, he had snatched the pin from Ewan’s palm and tossed it at her. Emmie reacted without thinking, catching the pin in both hands. She barely heard Ewan say, “She should be wearing gloves, Deano,” before she was hammered by a wave of emotion.
It was the strongest rush she’d ever experienced. Rage. Pain. Grief. Anguish. It all rolled over and through her, constricting her lungs, her heart, her throat.
Sophie was the first to notice something was wrong. “Hey, Em. You okay? Your hands are shaking.”
“Emmie?” Famke repeated when she didn’t answer.
“Yes—I… I just haven’t been feeling well lately,” she forced herself to choke out. Her voice was strained, hoarse. “I think I need to go back inside.”
“I’ll help you,” Dean, insisted. Ewan stopped him.
“No, Deano. You stay here. Emmie, let me help you.”
He took the pin from her trembling hand, and put it back on the table. Taking her gently by the elbow, he led her back to the house. He was patient, letting her walk at her own pace, and Emmie was immensely grateful that he didn’t try and talk to her. What would she say?
He stopped at the front door, and looked into her face. His eyes, which Emmie hadn’t before noticed were a clear green with gold flecks, searched her face beneath that full, brown beard.
The Ghosts of Tullybrae House Page 8