“Find her,” Alasdair was saying. “Get McCrummin from the incident room—Nicolson’s off duty, damn and blast—find Rab and Nancy as well. Here’s Jean.”
Thrusting the phone into Jean’s hands, Alasdair threw open the door of their car and had the engine started before she’d scrambled in beside him.
From the phone in her hand came Fergie’s breathless voice, “Nancy’s upstairs, Rab’s round the back . . . Is it Rab, then? How could—oh God, when I came into the kitchen to get help with Greg he was just taking off his coat, breathing hard—I thought he’d just come from the pub—oh God, it was Rab, wasn’t it? Oh God.”
And the phone went dead.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Jean let go of the phone, hung onto her seatbelt with both hands, and watched with slitted eyes and gritted teeth as the mist-covered landscape sped by on either side of the car. Thank goodness it was Alasdair driving, hands locked on the wheel and eyes hotter and brighter than the headlights he’d switched on.
Thomson’s vehicle and then Diana’s followed close behind. The one time Jean glanced in the side mirror she saw them rising and falling along the narrow, winding, bumpy road like ships on an angry sea. She winced, swallowed a rush of nausea, and didn’t look again.
Ahead, a sheep stood on the very edge of the pavement. Alasdair hit the horn, a bleat like that of a super-charged goat split the air, and the sheep looked around. The passing car almost shaved him more closely than the best shearer and he scrambled away.
The sparkle in the sunlight was fading, and the light itself growing gray and dull. How did people live in this part of the world before artificial light? Jean wondered. They must have developed huge eyes, like amphibians living in caverns.
And she wondered what they’d find back at Dunasheen—surely not bodies scattered all over, like in the last scene of Hamlet. Please, no, no more bodies. “Fergie just dropped the phone is all,” she said.
“Right.” The dashboard lights sketched Alasdair’s features in harsh shadow and shine.
Suddenly the houses of Kinlochroy leaped from the gloom. Two or three people watched slack-jawed from the sidewalk and a couple of others lifted their window curtains as the cars sped through the village and, brakes squealing, stopped in front of Dunasheen’s gates.
They were closed. And, Alasdair and Jean discovered when they bailed out of the car and pushed at them, locked. Thomson ran up and trained his flashlight on the black ironwork, revealing a massive padlock and a length of even more massive chain.
Where were Scott Krum’s lockpicking skills when you needed them?
Here came Diana, Colin at her side. “Father told Pritchard, and Rab as well, to lock the gates if there’s no constable on duty.”
Colin threw his weight against them. They rattled as forlornly as the shackles on transported prisoners. Beyond the iron tracery, through the darkening, thickening mist, the house seemed no more than dense shadow, not showing even the one lighted window of a Gothic novel.
Alasdair went right, to where the wall enclosing Dunasheen ended at the sea strand. Colin went left, toward the driveway leading back to the chapel. Thomson said, “I radioed Orla . . .”
“Who?” asked Diana.
“W.P.C. McCrummin when she’s at home.”
She wasn’t at home, thought Jean. She’d been called out on a murder case.
“She’s saying the generator packed up,” Thomson went on. “Fergus’s phone is a portable with a base unit, eh? That’s why he was cut off, I reckon.”
I hope, Jean thought for everyone.
“Orla’s got a torch, she’s searching the place for Dakota and for Fergus as well. Have you got a key to the gate, Diana?”
“I went off without one, they’re huge, Victorian slabs . . . Half a tick. Your aunt’s got one on display. I’ll knock her up.” Diana sprinted into the village, her hair streaming back from her face so that she looked like a ship’s figurehead.
“Right.” Stowing his flashlight in his jacket, using the decorative curlicues as foot and hand holds, Thomson clambered up the gate, straddled the top, and dropped down on the far side. “Haven’t done that since I was a lad,” he said and raced up the driveway.
Jean, the fifth wheel, stood alone in the dusk. Her own breath wasn’t just visible, it was audible in the sudden silence . . . Footsteps scrabbled along the shore. Far away, like the report of a gun, a door slammed. Alasdair reappeared inside the gate just as Diana pelted back from the village. “Brenda answered my knock straightaway, she’s coming as well, here you are.”
Diana handed the massive, ornate key through the bars of the gate to Alasdair. Metal scraped metal. The chain rattled to the ground. Skreeling, the gates swung back.
Diana and Jean jostled each other through the opening and hustled up the driveway behind Alasdair—the house loomed ahead, every window a blot of nothingness—someone bolted from the shadow of the trees—oh, it was Colin, breathing hard, stumbling, and yet outpacing Alasdair to the front door. Which was also locked, but this time Diana had a key.
The wooden panels flew back against the wall. “Father!” shouted Diana.
“He said he was in the library.” Jean charged off across the entrance hall. There was just enough light that she avoided barking her shins on the kist or caroming off the corner into the corridor.
The door to the drawing room was closed, the one to the library open. The Christmas tree blocked most of the—hardly light, more of a phosphorescent glow—leaking through the tall windows. The pale stone of the fireplace gleamed like a spectral trilithon. Something moved . . .
Two shapes hurtled out of the shadows and Jean reeled back against someone too slender to be Alasdair. The dogs barked and leaped and shed, doing their best “Timmy’s down the well” routine.
Diana dropped to her knees beside the mounded form sprawled across a chair. “Father? Father!”
“I’ll fetch Dr. Irvine.” Colin said, and his steps thumped away down the hall accompanied by the patter of furry feet.
“Di,” said Fergie’s wheezing, whispery voice. “There’s my wee lass.”
A bolt of lightning bounced through the door, and another one, and the lights flashed off the glass doors of the bookshelves and bits of tinsel on the tree—Thomson and McCrummin, with beautiful police-issue flashlights the size of truncheons. Thomson said, “The incident room door was unlocked—Orla’s not yet found the lass . . .”
“Her mum and dad didna answer my knocking ’til I’d pounded my knuckles raw,” said McCrummin, “and even then would not open the door, just shouted, right shirty at first, saying the lass’s not with them, she was told off to sit here in the library . . .”
“Is that Fergus?” Thomson asked.
Alasdair leaned over the chair to support Fergie’s head and shoulders while Diana kneaded his hands. Even in the dubious light Jean could see the color and texture of his face, like sour bread dough. Despite the icebox-chill of the room, beads of sweat trickled down the furrows of his jowls.
“Is he injured?” asked McCrummin, reaching for the radio riding her shoulder.
Diana’s voice caught and cracked. “It’s his heart. All this has been too much for him.”
Jean wasn’t placing any bets on her own heart right then. It was bouncing up and down between her throat and her chest like a paddle ball. She grabbed a floppy cushion and a lap blanket from another chair, then helped Alasdair place the cushion beneath Fergie’s head and Diana arrange the blanket over him.
McCrummin retired to the hall, exchanging mutters with a staticky voice—ambulance, Dunasheen.
Been there, Jean thought. Done that. Déjà vu all over again.
“I’m perfectly fit,” Fergie said slowly, his words slurred. “Just had a bit of turn realizing Rab was, well—the gloves are there on the table, Alasdair, Sanjay.”
Thomson concentrated his light on something that looked like a squashed squid, two leather gloves crumpled together, fingers stiffened with rust-brown
stains.
“Where’s Rab?” asked Alasdair. “Where’s Nancy?”
Fergie licked his gray lips. “The lights were dimming and blinking. He went to see to the generator.”
Thomson muttered, “The power plant, aye, in the west tower,” and slipped out the door. From the hall came his voice, “They’re in the library, Auntie. Irvine’s where? Ah, good . . .”
Brenda O’Donnell ran into the room, fell to her knees beside Diana, and opened a bag. “I’ve got hot tea and cold compresses, whichever you’re needing.”
“Nancy’s in the attics,” Fergie wheezed, “took a big torch with her, there’s no lights there in any event. The lass, Dakota. She was sitting here, reading. I walked by and saw her, then I walked by and she wasn’t here at all.”
Jean looked frantically around, but saw no notes, no maps—she went thataway—only a book lying on the table beside the chair. The cover of Mysterious Castles of Scotland still sported a price tag reading “Kinlochroy Heritage Museum.”
Dakota had wanted to come to Scotland, Scott had said, for ghosts and castles . . .
Two pairs of feet pounded down the hall and Heather burst through the doorway. “Where is she? Where’s my baby?”
Scott pounded behind her. “We told her to stay here. We just went back upstairs for a few minutes, didn’t mean to fall asleep . . .”
Jean assessed the state of their clothes, disheveled, their hair, mussed, and their faces, flushed. Heather’s glasses skewed across her nose. She and Scott had been groping each other during the party last night, in a confirmative marital way, of course. But alcohol subverted male performance—or so Jean had heard. Maybe that’s why Scott had defaulted to business concerns in the middle of the night, trying to save some face. Maybe he and Heather had retired upstairs to take care of other unfinished business, leaving Dakota safe and sound here in the library.
If you couldn’t be safe in a library, where could you be safe?
Alasdair was saying, “She’s wandering about the house having a look at Fergie’s whimsies, I reckon—there are torches in the cloak room . . .”
“Torches?” demanded Heather. “You’re going to have travel agents marching up to the gates waving torches when we get done with you, you got that? One-star reviews on every Internet . . .”
“Dakota!” Scott bellowed, and charged back out into the hall.
“Dakota!” Heather shrilled, if not beside him, then not far behind. Their cries resounded through the house, setting the dogs to barking again.
“And they do not know the half of it.” Alasdair turned back to Fergie. “Was Greg MacLeod offering to invest in Dunasheen, build a golf course, convert the place into luxury condos? Was he offering to buy the place, lock, stock, and barrel?”
“No, he was . . .” Fergie’s eyes goggled. “Was that what he meant by making a grand offer, not for the Coffer, for the estate itself? No, no, I’d only sell up over my dead body!”
That won’t be necessary, Jean beamed toward him. Nor had it been necessary making Greg into a dead body, never mind how desperate Rab was to stop the march of—if not progress, at least change.
Alasdair’s face in the failing light glinted like an ice sculpture. “Rab. Nancy. Perhaps she was offering to show Dakota the attics. No good going with strangers, the lass is too canny for that, but Nancy’s no stranger.”
“Neither is Rab,” Jean replied.
But Alasdair was already out the door, saying, “You’re with me, McCrummin.”
Brenda’s round face registered first concern, then confusion, then concern again, but she said nothing, only wiped Fergie’s face with a soft cloth.
“I’ll stay with Father.” Diana smoothed Fergie’s gray ponytail on the cushion.
His lips crimped in a crooked smile. “Di, I’m sorry about Colin, you, he, have my blessing . . .”
“Hush,” said Diana, her voice now calm as a mill pond. “We’ll deal with that later.”
At some point, Jean thought, Diana had looked at Dunasheen, at Fergie, and at Colin. She’d thought, “This will never do,” and taken them all in a firm hand. But Diana couldn’t help find Dakota. She couldn’t apprehend Rab and Nancy, not now . . . Jean twitched left, jerked right, then gave it up and ran after Alasdair.
She skimmed the corner into the entrance hall. The front door stood open on a rectangle of smeared landscape and the feeble glow that was Kinlochroy. Shouts, barks, and footsteps echoed down the densely shadowed coil of the turnpike stair. If they’d all been running in a clump they’d be imitating the Keystone Kops, but no, they’d fanned out, and she’d been left alone in the dark. Setting her jaw, she grasped the cold, slightly prickly rope handrail with both hands, felt for each misshapen step, and repeated her mantra: Nothing is here that isn’t here in the light.
But there was plenty that was there in the light.
Like the door to the second floor. A dim light washed over the steps, then faded as Jean worked her way further upward into the chill, the cold, the icy air—a tremor surged from her hand up her arm and amassed on her shoulders. Seonaid.
Shadow upon shadow, shape upon darkness—the ringlets, the dress, the shawl—an otherworldly light in two staring eyes. A faint rustling sound . . . oh. That was the draft from the open front door moving Seonaid’s tapestry, nothing paranormal about that, the tapestry was cloth and thread and depicted Old Dunasheen as a backdrop for dramatic events.
Old Dunasheen. Dakota was reading Mysterious Castles of Scotland. Dakota had wanted to go out to the old castle. Without lights, she couldn’t read about it, so she’d gone to see it. She wasn’t lacking courage, to go out there in the dark, alone.
Jean prayed that she was alone.
She turned her back on Seonaid’s ghost, shrugging away the cold fairy fingertips brushing the nape of her neck. She felt her way down the stairs, then picked up speed into the back corridor, only to stop abruptly at the library door. “Diana, Brenda, how’s he doing?”
“He’ll be right as rain.” Diana’s voice in the darkness brooked no debate.
Again Jean accelerated, shouting back over her shoulder, “I think Dakota’s gone out to the old castle. Tell the others—wait, I’ve got the phone.”
She patted herself down as she fumbled along the corridor. No, she didn’t have the phone. It must have slipped off her lap in the car and was now between the seats, probably ringing its little electrodes out. She’d lose valuable time going back outside and searching for it.
She was in the cloak room. Where was the cabinet? There. Gloves. Scarf. The cold cylinder of a flashlight. In the sudden, bright beam she scanned the hooks on the wall—was Diana’s raincoat gone? Dakota’s own coat would have been in her room.
Jean scooted out the door, down the steps, and across the courtyard. After the gloom of the house, the light outside seemed bright. She partly ran, partly stumbled down the path—heather roots like grasping hands, boulders like trolls crouched, reading to spring forward—the walls of Old Dunasheen materialized from the mist before her as the walls of New Dunasheen faded into the mist behind her. The sky and the horizon, a very close horizon, blurred into one uncanny gleam tinted the pink of blood-tinged water and the gold of a dying fire. Sunset, and a hint of smoke hanging in the turgid air. She imagined the old church burning, the cries of the wounded and dying, the indifferent calls of seabirds . . .
She really was hearing voices, Irvine’s perhaps, from the front of the house, and in the distance the rising and falling bleat of at least two sirens closing in on Kinlochroy.
Her shoes thudded on the damp planks of the footbridge. Was that a light behind the enceinte wall? Two days ago, two sunsets past, she and Alasdair had seen Greg’s red jacket vanish behind that wall.
“Dakota!” she shouted. Then her already ragged breath caught in her throat—she’d just given herself away. But she didn’t know whether Rab was here, too. Alasdair and Thomson could already have him in custody. “Where are you, Dakota?”
Jean
fought her way up the path leading past the enceinte into the keep, splashing through ice-rimmed, peaty puddles, feeling her coat catch on brambles and weather-roughened rims of stone. Unless it was being caught by bony fingertips reaching through time and space.
She’d never before met a ghost with substance. Then she’d met Seonaid. Seonaid, who’d stitched Rory MacLeod’s falling body.
She stepped between two bulwarks of stone, through the gaping gateway into the cage of the tower. Her light flashed across gouges, hollows, lumps of brush, dragging shadows behind it. “Dakota!”
A rustling noise might be a bird disturbed on its nest. But no bird would have said, in a small, trembling voice, “Here. I’m here.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Her voice came from the dungeon, the cellar—Jean couldn’t remember now what Alasdair had called it. But she remembered where it was, behind a buttress and down a set of steps subsiding into bedrock. Tucked in beneath the weight of the tower’s remaining walls.
“Sit tight, Dakota. I’m coming.” The beam of her flashlight probing ahead of her—tumbled cobblestones, mud, lichen—Jean started down the steps, one at a time, her left hand braced against the cold grit of the wall.
The doorway was still mostly rectangular. Beyond it, her puny light no more than pricked the darkness. The stench of mold, mildew, and decay clotted in her nostrils and her throat. Every nerve in her body thrilled. The hair on the back of her neck squirmed. She forced herself to walk on. “Dakota?”
A sudden light blasted her eyes and she recoiled, her arm across her face.
Rab Finlay said, “I’m telling you, no guid will come of this, any of it.”
Squinting, Jean peered over her sleeve. There, on a stone that might once have been a headsman’s block, sat Rab. His cap was pulled down low over his eyes. His beard stuck out in a dozen directions. One gnarled hand held an industrial-strength flashlight. The other rested a kitchen knife, also industrial-strength, on the knee of his yellow raincoat.
The Blue Hackle Page 33