She didn't feel like shouting back from the circle. Somehow it would be disrespectful. She stood up, walked to the center of the circle, and waved, unsmiling.
He saw her then, and he did not smile, either. She saw that he was pale, and his hands were clenched into fists.
"What is it?" she called out even before he reached the circle. She wished she didn't have to hear—whatever it was going to be. She had never seen Denny so solemn.
"So, you're all right," he said when he reached her. He peered into her face, as if he would decide that for himself. She nodded. "Everyone was still asleep, and I just wanted to get out for a bit. I took the bucket to the burn, in case you were looking for it."
"I looked there first. I thought ... I don't know."
She stared at him wide-eyed. "Did you think something had happened to me, Denny?"
He looked away. "Not exactly. I thought you might have taken the boat ..."
"What? And left all of you?"
He shrugged. "I wouldn't have blamed you. I thought of it myself.'' Seeing her bewilderment, he took a deep breath and shut his eyes. "Listen, you silly git, Callum is dead. He woke up coughing and he couldn't breathe, and as I sat there trying to figure out what the hell to do about it ... he just died."
Elizabeth shook her head in disbelief. "He had the flu!" she whispered.
"I don't know what he had," Denny said softly. "But Leath and Marchand have it, too." Holding his fist up to his mouth, he began to cough.
CHAPTER
15
Elizabeth followed Denny back to the burn and scooped up a bucketful of cold water. Denny knelt down on a flat rock at the water's edge and cupped a handful of water, smelling it carefully. He shrugged. "You don't think it's poisoned, do you?"
Elizabeth shook her head. "Haven't we all had typhoid shots?"
"I was thinking about some kind of manmade stuff. Arsenic or some such thing."
"I don't think you can poison a fast-flowing stream. And I wash the bucket with boiling water. Look, Denny, maybe we were just being edgy. Alasdair had an accident; Owen died of who-knows-what; and the rest of us are coming down with the flu."
"Callum was twenty-three and strong as a horse. Do you think he died of the flu?"
"Well, if one of us is a poisoner, he's an idiot. We're all eating the same food and drinking the same water. If one of us is committing murder, I don't see how he can expect to survive."
Denny looked at her carefully. "You're not sick."
"No. But I'm terrified. I'm miserable. Denny, be reasonable. Not charitable, just reasonable. If I were going to kill anybody for fun, would Gitte have walked off this island under her own power?''
He smiled. "Good point."
"And besides, I don't think many murderers like to watch people actually die. I suppose Owen would know. I wish we could ask him ..."
Denny stood up and brushed his wet hand against the leg of his jeans. "I suppose we ought to get back. Leath isn't bedfast or anything, but Marchand seems pretty hard hit. We have to do what we can."
"How do you feel, Denny?"
He shrugged. "Bit short of breath. Scratchy throat. It does feel like flu, now you mention it." He smiled. "I took my clap pill this morning, like a good fellow. Stupid, isn't it, to worry about a minor infection when you may be dying of something else altogether?''
"You are not dying!'' Elizabeth snapped. She felt the chill again in the pit of her stomach. What would be worse? To feel herself falling sick like the rest of them, or to be the only one left healthy, and to watch them all die? Please, she thought, looking up at the bright blue sky, let the weather hold.
They took turns carrying the bucket back to the Nissen hut. All was quiet. Even the sea was silent in the August sunshine. As they neared the hut, Elizabeth shrank back, suddenly remembering what might be inside. "Is Callum still in there?" she whispered.
"Yes. I didn't know what else to do. I realize that he could contaminate us by staying, but I might also get contaminated by touching him to move him."
"I'll help you," said Elizabeth. "I think if we zipped him all the way into a sleeping bag and put him in one of the tents—that isn't too terrible, is it?"
"No. It's bloody sensible." He eased open the door and peered into the semidarkness. "Leath! We're back. How are—"
Elizabeth saw him stiffen. "What's wrong?" she demanded, thinking: he's dead, too.
Denny closed the door and leaned against it. "He's not there."
"I don't blame him," Elizabeth said. "I don't really want to go in there, either. I'm glad he's well enough to go out walking."
Denny grunted. "He didn't look well enough to me. Go in and make the tea, hen. I'll be back soon."
"Go in and make the tea," he'd said, making it sound so easy. The sort of task women were always assigned in times of crisis. But Elizabeth felt considerably undomestic at the prospect. She was to walk in to a dimly lit tin hut containing a corpse and a dying man—and make tea. Never mind the risk of contamination . . . never mind the horror.
She pulled open the door and went in. It couldn't be worse than labs with Milo. As a forensic anthropologist, she had done her share of work with bodies in every stage of decay. Lord, she dreaded hunting season, when the deer stalkers would stumble across an old person who had wandered away from home the spring before and died of exposure. The remains would come to the university in a green plastic body bag, waiting for the forensic anthropologists to utilize their skills and to tell them who this lump of flesh had been. It couldn't be worse than a ripe corpse from a southern forest. It was only that this time she knew the deceased personally.
"Hello, Mr. Marchand!" she said, trying to sound cheerful. "I've brought some water."
She hauled the bucket over the doorsill and carried it with two hands to the wooden table near the gas stove. She wouldn't look at the still form in the corner . . . Callum.
Derek Marchand coughed, a dry, raspy cough that went on too long. "I'll try a bit of tea," he said. He sounded out of breath as he spoke.
Elizabeth dipped some water into the red saucepan. "I'll just heat a bit right now, so that it will boil quicker. Have you had your cold capsule?"
"No. I've been dozing off, I think. Have you seen Tom?"
"Denny has gone to look for him. Now, here's your capsule. You can take it with your tea." I almost called him ducks, Elizabeth thought to herself. I sound like an English girl in a head scarf. For some reason this did not please her.
"We have been having some very bad luck, I'm afraid," Marchand remarked.
Elizabeth nodded, busying herself with tea things. "You must feel like Howard Carter," she remarked, thinking of the King Tut curse.
Marchand had a coughing spasm of almost a minute's duration. Without a word Elizabeth passed him a tin cup of cold water. When he could speak again, he said, as if nothing had happened, "You know, I was thinking about the Carter expedition just this morning. They picked up some sort of lung virus from the stale air in that Egyptian tomb, and it was fatal in several cases."
Elizabeth nodded. "I read about that. But we weren't doing any excavating of tombs.''
Marchand looked searchingly at her. "You dug an exploratory trench, as I recall."
"But I didn't find anything!" Elizabeth protested.
"I thought not. Certainly none of us found anything like a burial chamber."
"Unless Alasdair ..." she shrugged. Alasdair wasn't sick, only clumsy. "So you don't believe in ancient curses protecting sacred sites?"
"I am an engineer, young woman, not a guru."
Elizabeth smiled. "The tea is ready," she announced, pouring the water from the saucepan into the china mugs. Would you like to take it outside? It's a fine sunny day."
She helped him out of his sleeping hag and waited through the spasm of coughing that this provoked. "I think the sunshine will do you good," she said in a faltering voice.
Marchand cleared his throat, "Well, at any rate, it won't do me any harm."
&nb
sp; They settled themselves on a rock in full sunshine, overlooking the sea. Elizabeth and Marchand took their cold capsules together, making it into a toast, but Elizabeth had tried to swallow both it and her antibiotic at the same time, and, before she succeeded in keeping them down, she succumbed to a fit of coughing. She was wiping the tears from her eyes and still catching her breath when Denny reappeared.
He looked at her suspiciously. "You've not got it as well?"
"No," she said. "I swallowed the wrong way. Where is Tom Leath?" Denny frowned. "He's gone. The boat's gone as well." Elizabeth stared. "I thought you said he was too sick!" "So he is," Marchand said thoughtfully. "I think he must have been very frightened. Illness takes some people that way, particularly if they are not used to it. He must have felt it was a desperate chance."
"You don't think he caused all this?" "No. Not as ill as he was. He coughed all night." "But suppose he gets sicker out there?" Elizabeth asked. Marchand shrugged. "Then he will die at sea." "Meanwhile,'' said Denny, stifling a cough, "we are stuck here on this rock." He sank down beside Marchand. "God, I'm tired. That bit of rock climbing to the beach and back has taken the wind out of me."
Elizabeth looked thoughtfully at him. He is sicker than he lets on, she thought. And he is in no shape to do anything to help. But if something isn't done, he may die, and Derek Marchand surely will. Aloud she said, "Stay here with Marchand, Denny. You have everything you need. I'm just going to have a look around for myself." "I tell you, Leath is gone ..." "Yes, I believe you. I'm looking for something else." Denny looked scornful. "And what are you looking for?" "I don't know."
The midmorning sun was warm. Elizabeth pulled off her navy-blue sweater and tied it around her waist. She would be warm enough in her T-shirt, she thought. She looked at her finger. She had forgotten to change the bandage that morning. Peeling the adhesive away from the cut, she looked at the red slash above the knuckle, wondering if it was too late for stitches. Still, there was no swelling, no telltale red line of blood poisoning. At least she had avoided that mishap. She wondered if a curse had been flung at her and had missed.
She took the path along the edge of the mountains that would lead to the other side of the island. Suppose the villagers had died of some disease long ago? But they hadn't. They had moved off the island a few at a time, until finally a handful of elderly folk became too tired to hold out anymore and moved away. Besides, no one had disturbed their cemetery. She couldn't even remember having seen it. As Marchand had said, no one had done any digging on the island except her, with that one exploratory trench, which was shallow and had turned up nothing.
Except Alasdair. He had been taking soil samples. She remembered noticing one such place near the hut. Fortunately, Alasdair had not been particularly neat with his sample-taking. His test areas should be easy to spot. She began to pay careful attention to the ground as she walked, looking for evidence of disturbed soil.
Why am I doing this? she asked herself. If Alasdair found anything, Alasdair would have got sick, and he didn't. That we know of, she told herself. His symptoms might have developed in the hospital, where they could find out what was wrong with him and treat him. Lucky Alasdair.
This last thought took a moment to sink in, and she nearly stumbled on a rock in the road when its significance hit her. Very lucky Alasdair. He has an accident at the one time that there is a boat available to take him off the island. The radio is put out of order so that no one else can get off the island. And then people start to die.
At first she had thought Alasdair might have found a treasure that he wanted to conceal; but now she knew what he must have found. The question was why he would have used it, and the answer to that did not lie on the island.
CHAPTER
16
Cameron Dawson was not particularly interested in the state of the weather. He had spent much of the past few days in the laboratory monitoring blips from the radio collars of seals that had been banded earlier by other marine biologists who were still maintaining their own tracking stations on Skye and the mainland. He drank endless cups of coffee and watched his screen. It was a week of routine and monotony. The weather was all one to him, except that it had delayed the ferry that brought the mail. He had a letter from home and a newspaper still folded in front of him. He always saved his mail to read during lunch, as a distraction from his unappetizing sandwich.
Occasionally he thought of Elizabeth, whom he would be seeing in three days. They must be very busy, keeping late hours at the dig site in the long summer evenings, because he had been unable to reach them by radio. Or perhaps the rainstorm—the one that had delayed the ferry, now that he thought of it—had hampered their reception. It did not really matter, as he had no news. Alasdair had been taken to Inverness by emergency medical helicopter, accompanied by his stone-faced girlfriend, and Cameron had heard no news of him. He kept delaying his own trip to the mainland for supplies. He would have to go before Saturday, though. There were supplies he had promised to take to Banrigh, and of course they would want news of their injured friend. Cameron knew that he had an unfortunate tendency to get caught up in a project to the exclusion of everything else. Elizabeth had mentioned it often enough. He must try to spend some time with her before the end of their time in Scotland.
A break in the sound pattern in the room caught his attention. He had been switching frequencies to check on the transmissions of the radio collars of the various seals when an odd sequence made him stop. He switched back to mat frequency and listened.
It was not making the uniform sounds he had been accustomed to. The sounds were coming at regular intervals . . . intervals of varying duration. Perhaps the animal had been injured. He kept listening. There was a familiar regularity about it.
Cameron took a long gulp of black coffee. Hell! He hoped it wasn't what he first suspected. Some sailors had killed the seal and were playing games with its collar. He checked to see where the animal had been. At last monitoring it had been on shore. In fact, he thought it might be the one Elizabeth had told him she'd seen on Banrigh.
Elizabeth . . .
With half a smile he remembered what she'd said about not being able to talk intimately on a shortwave radio. So she had snatched a seal collar, silly git! Still, he was rather flattered. He hoped he could make out the message.
With pencil in hand, he began to note the sounds. One dot. Four dashes. Four dashes! Morse code, of course. Numbers, then. They were the easiest to remember. A one was one dot, four dashes; two was two dots, three dashes—it always added up to a sequence of five. Five was five dots, and at six the process reversed, with dashes preceding dots, so that six was the reverse of one: one dash, four dots.
Nearly half an hour later, he had narrowed the signal down to eight symbols, separated at midpoint by a long pause, as if to denote a word break.
He looked at the sheet of paper. 1-3-4-8 (long pause) 1-6-6-5. Now, what was that? He tried substituting letters, and got A-C-D-H . . . A-F-F-E. It made no sense. C-D could be his initials, but he could not find any logical meanings for A andH.
He tried the sequence backward. H-D-C-A . . . E-F-F-A. It wasn't English. He was pretty sure it wasn't Gaelic. And it couldn't be much of a love message, if it was that hard to decipher. Cameron looked at his watch. Why would Elizabeth be sending him messages in the middle of a sunny day when she ought to be working? Would she really remove a seal collar for such a frivolous reason?
He began to worry without understanding why. Was this connected to their radio silence?
He stared at the sequence again. 1-3-4-8 . . . 1-6-6-5. Suppose you took it as numbers, not letters? 1348-1665.
It made sense. But it was insane. It was a joke.
He looked again at his watch. Nobody would tap out dots and dashes with a radio transmitter for nearly an hour for a
joke. They might make such an effort for a signal for help. But then, why not tap out S-O-S? That was easy enough. Everybody knew three dots, three dashes, three dots.
He considered the numbers, and he thought he understood. Signaling S-O-S would not convey enough information, not if you were concerned about your rescuer.
Suddenly he knew that it was Elizabeth—and that she was in trouble. But he could not signal that he had received her message. She would have to take it on faith that he was coming. Cameron flipped off the machines and snatched up his mail as he went. He would need something to read on the long trip to the island, something to divert his mind from worry.
Just now, though, he had to scrounge up some diving gear.
CHAPTER
17
CAMERON
It seemed that for all the searching she had done, through Scotland and through folklore, for bits and pieces of the past . . . Thomas the Rhymer . . . Bonnie Prince Charlie . . . that now the past had reached up out of the peat bogs and seized her. For that is what the two numbers were: designations of the past, the years 1348 and 1665. Was she lucky that I had paid attention in history class, or did she simply assume that I would know, since it is my country we are speaking of? Or perhaps I understood because I know her, and those dates would be in her repertoire of folklore. The nursery rhyme "Ring Around the Roses" came out of 1665; it's the sort of thing she would remember. And being logical and scientifically trained, I put the pieces together: 1348, the first year of the great epidemic of the Black Death, and 1665, the last terrible outbreak of plague in Britain. Taken together, those numbers could mean only one thing: plague. It is like her to gamble on a warning that might be misunderstood, when a simpler one would have brought certain help, but risk to the rescuer. Myself. There was more love in that message than I had thought.
Plague, she says. Be careful.
But she knows I will come for her, and because she sent the message, I know that she is at least alive.
I read the letter from my mother, my lips moving over the words, and I was unable to say what it contained when I finished it. The newspaper provided little more distraction, except for one brief article that I feel must be connected to what I will find on Banrigh.
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