Scotland to the Max

by Grace Burrowes

  Up in the castle’s solar, the agenda was business and all business.

  “Fergus has combined categories, possibly,” Jeannie said, “but I don’t see anywhere that he’s tracking some of the consumables—trash bags, signage, orange mesh barrier fencing—and that stuff adds up.”

  Max was across the room, rifling through an orange crate full of manila folders. “I can’t find a time sheet for Fergus. You’d think that would be the one document he’d keep track of. He puts in long hours, or he has in the past week. Where in flippin’ heck is his time sheet?”

  Gone was the lover of infinite patience and diabolical tenderness. Exasperation and annoyance laced Max’s voice.

  “I see spreadsheets saved at six a.m. and eleven p.m. Friday, Max. Fergus was here when the rest of the shire was out dancing and drinking. We can’t fault him for shirking.”

  Henry was gnawing on a bright blue plastic dispenser that had held white correction tape, though somebody had used the entire roll. On what?

  “This isn’t good,” Max said, cramming a file back into the orange crate. “Some of the time sheets aren’t signed. Some skip a week.”

  Jeannie closed yet another incomplete spreadsheet. “Maybe that’s a week of holiday?”

  “Then we should be tracking the hours as vacation, personal leave, or leave without pay. You don’t just ignore a yawning gap in the data, which any auditor will seize upon as proof of a faulty system, or worse.”

  Henry pitched the plastic dispenser against the wall. Max ignored him.

  “You only just got here,” Jeannie said. “You can’t be held accountable for Fergus’s mucked-up recordkeeping from last month.”

  Max rose and hoisted the crate back onto the empty cable reel where he’d found it. “I am the project manager. Therefore, the systems established to control the project are my responsibility. Fergus started sending me information weeks ago, shortly after we signed the deal with Elias. I was so busy preparing to relocate that I gave the weekly reports a glance and patted myself on the back for doing even that much.”

  That was rank overreaching. “Fergus has been at this castle since spring, nosing about, talking to Zebedee, then getting the work under way before any mention had been made of turning this place into a hotel. He’s had months to get organized and failed to so do.”

  Max brought a file over to the computer, pulled up a smaller empty cable spool to use as a stool, and came down beside Jeannie.

  “Let’s do a little experiment, shall we? Do you have the time log for three weeks ago?”

  Jeannie fished around—Fergus had no file-naming protocol—and found it. “This looks complete. The trades are here, in order—masons, electricians, carpenters, glaziers—plus admin, consultants, civil engineering… the usual lot.”

  Henry was peering over Max’s shoulder at the computer screen, though any minute the baby would demand to get down and move around.

  “Let’s try this,” Max said. “I’ll read off a few time sheets, you tell me if the document matches the data entered. Can you find Dinty?”

  “He’s a mason.” Jeannie found his row on the spreadsheet. “If we go back three weeks, this says he put in forty-eight hours.”

  “His time sheet says forty-six. Look up Hugh Morven.”

  Jeannie paged over to the carpenters. “Also forty-eight hours.”

  “His time sheet says fifty.”

  They went through a dozen time sheets, pulling from all of the trades. Some matched, but most were off by a few hours. The net difference was likely a wash, or close to it, but the perception would be inaccurate records.

  And that perception would be right.

  “My site manager is either computer illiterate or he’s losing his eyesight.”

  “Fergus can use a computer. He might be slow, but he’s not backward.”

  Max waved the file as he got to his feet. “Then what the holy frabjous heck is going on, Jeannie? He’s here at all hours. He’s sent me one report after another. Was he trying to sabotage the project a month before I even took over?”

  “Pah!” Henry bounced in his backpack, his intonation in even a single syllable matching Max’s ire.

  A footstep sounded on the stone stairs leading up to the solar.

  “If that’s you, Dinty,” Max called, “I tossed your stash when I found it on Thursday. You shouldn’t be drinking that rotgut, much less having it on the project site.”

  Fergus loomed in the arched doorway. “Dinty doesn’t drink rotgut. The young Pole working with MacKinnon’s glaziers leaves his spare bottle here so he can have a drink before he hikes down the hill of an evening. I see you’ve been poking your nose where it doesn’t belong, Maitland.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Scotland, Scotland, Scotland.

  Maura’s phone had told her a lot about Scotland. The population was 1,395 people, which didn’t strike Maura as enough for a whole country, but Max had said it was a small country.

  “Are you texting somebody?” Miss Fran asked from across the kitchen.

  “Reading.”

  The lovely scent of bacon and toast distracted Maura, though she kept scrolling. Some creek with a very long name formed one of Scotland’s borders, but they also had a Potomac River somewhere near Scotland, which was odd.

  “Are you going to put jam on your toast, Maura?”

  “Yes. Is there more than one Potomac River?” Max had taken her hiking along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal towpath, which had been pretty, but also buggy. The towpath ran between the Potomac and the canal, though the canal was now mostly a long ditch in the woods.

  The microwave dinged, sounding like a great big phone.

  “I think there’s a North Branch and a South Branch to the Potomac,” Miss Fran said. “The name is pretty, and smaller rivers might be named after it.”

  “Then how do you know which river is which, if they have the same name?”

  “I guess by the rest of the conversation. If you’re not having any jam, Maura, then please put it away.”

  What if Scotland was near the same Potomac River that ran next to Maryland? Why would Max make up all that nonsense about a wide, wide ocean, and the time being different, and airplanes?

  “Maura, it’s rude to sit at the table glued to your phone when you’re in the middle of a conversation with somebody.”

  “I’m not glued to my phone. Somebody is in a bad mood.”

  “Maura!”

  Maura rose. “That is exactly what you say to me. ‘Somebody is in a bad mood.’ I’m trying to use my phone to find stuff out, which you say I should do before I pester you with questions. Nobody else is at the table with me, and I didn’t put the jam on the table, you did. Besides, you lied to me. You said my phone wouldn’t call Max in Scotland, but I heard you talking to him on the phone this week. If anybody is entitled to be in a bad mood, it’s me.”

  Maura had not yelled, but inside, she was yelling loudly enough to be heard in Scotland… wherever Scotland was. She left her toast on the table and marched out to the back porch. If Scotland was not across the ocean, and Max could call her, then Maura was determined to figure out why he’d lied, and to make him stop.

  Max caught Jeannie’s eye. She rose and extracted Henry from the backpack, then helped Max peel off the contraption.

  “What’s going on here, Fergus?” Max asked. “We have a relatively straightforward project less than sixty days out from its official launch, and the bookkeeping is a sh—a shambles.”

  “A shitstorm, ye mean.”

  “Not in front of the baby.” Max and Jeannie spoke at the same time, which had Henry grinning.

  “Beg pardon,” Fergus said, “but the term applies. Shall we sit?”

  Fergus took a bench. Jeannie returned to the chair, Henry roosted in her lap. Max leaned against the granite wall, arms crossed.

  “Tell me what’s up, Fergus, and don’t dodge the truth, because you will not get a second chance to explain.”

  Fergus scr
ubbed a hand over his face, gazed out the long row of east-facing windows, and then stared at his boots.

  “Zebedee was not one for details. That’s not an excuse, it’s context. He’d get an inspiration and act on it. I suspect he knew his health was precarious, because he took off in about eight directions at once. With a project like this, you get the architects crawling about the place, draw up the plans, then assess how to get from the present reality to the architect’s pipe dream. This process should take months, with consultations, second opinions, revisions of plans, and reconsiderations. You bring the locals into the discussion because they know details of the site you don’t, and they have to live with the final result.”

  He stretched out his legs and leaned back against the wall. “The neighbors might have no official say in what’s planned, but if they aren’t supportive of your aims, their children will move the surveyor’s stakes and use them for toy swords. Their dogs will knock over the trash barrels. The ghost stories they’ve been telling with such fond affection for the past century will take a sinister bend, and expensive tools will start disappearing or dropping over the parapets.”

  Max pushed away from the wall. “Ghosts do not falsify time sheets, Fergus.”

  “Watch your word choice, Maitland. I don’t falsify documents.”

  Henry had become determined to grab the mouse, which would invariably result in the mouse flying into a stone wall in the next three minutes. Jeannie tried shifting the chair away from the table, which inspired Henry to fussing.

  Max scooped him from Jeannie’s lap and went to the window. “When the quarterly auditor looks at the disaster you call your project accounting, he or she won’t be half so polite, Fergus. If you want to keep your job, then spare me the Highland temper. You got yourself into this.”

  Max’s tone was mild, his expression was thunderous. He paced along the windows, giving Henry something to see other than stone walls and unhappy adults.

  Jeannie waged a silent war with herself: to offer to help, or to take Henry and return to Perth. She wasn’t being asked to help, the job would be temporary, and there was Max… looking remote, and impossibly attractive with Henry in his arms.

  “That, I did,” Fergus said. “I got myself into this, and I apologize for the lack of consistency between the time sheets and whatever is on the spreadsheets. I can straighten it out, and I was whittling away at it, but this project…”

  He was staring at his boots again, the big, scuffed boots of a working man, not an accountant.

  “This is the most ambitious job you’ve managed,” Jeannie said. “Is that it?”

  “Aye. If I’d had my arms around it from the start, if Zebedee hadn’t been flying hither and yon and then dropping dead. If Elias had taken a hand. If you hadn’t left, lass… I know I should have rung you up, asked what category the blasted trash pickup goes under and where to code a holiday or a day off… but you focused on the contracts, the receivables, the invoices. The labor side of this job has become enormous.”

  “Time and materials,” Max muttered. “I gather you were writing paychecks based on the time sheets, but estimating hours worked for data-entry purposes. How much progress have you made correcting your spreadsheets?”

  Henry was making put-me-down wiggles, which on this cold stone floor would never do. Jeannie had half risen when Fergus crossed the room and plucked Henry from Max’s arms.

  “The wee lad is bored with all this talk. Aren’t you, Henry, my man?”

  Henry smiled enormously and smacked Fergus’s chin. “Bah!”

  “He likes you,” Max said. “Right now, I can’t say the same. Is there a place to start, Fergus? A single week you know is accurate? The first week maybe?”

  Fergus set Henry on his feet, keeping hold of Henry’s hands. This game had only begun for Henry a few weeks ago, and it still had the power to absorb his attention.

  “I had the first three weeks worked out, and then I overwrote the damned spreadsheet. Hours and hours of work. Damned Hugh came in here with his cork-brained questions and some joke about a parrot in a freezer and I saved the wrong bloo—blooming thing under the wrong blooming name. Henry will enter the next Highland Games as a sprinter.”

  Henry was tottering from foot to foot, swaying precariously, but holding fast to Fergus’s callused fingers.

  Max wore an odd half-smile as he watched Fergus with the baby. “Do you like children, Fergus?”

  “I’m the oldest of eight, with three younger brothers. I either learned to like the weans, or I’d have run away from home before my twelfth birthday. But who wouldn’t take to such a fine, bonnie laddie as our Henry?”

  He lifted the baby to his chest and tickled Henry’s belly. A lively little chortle filled the solar, and Jeannie hoped that whatever ghosts walked the castle halls heard that happy sound and rejoiced.

  I should take Henry and go. The words were on the tip of her tongue when Max spoke up.

  “Who among the men do you trust?”

  Fergus left off tickling Henry to scowl at Max ferociously. “I trust every one of them, or I wouldn’t have them on my job site. Goes for the ladies too.” Henry got Fergus on the ear this time.

  “Sorry, lad, didn’t mean to sound cheesed off, but the yon Yank asks foolish questions.”

  “I mean, trust to keep his or her mouth shut,” Max said, “because the pile of sh—doo-doo we have to shovel through will take more than one person’s effort.”

  There it was, the opportunity to speak up.

  “The crews love to gossip,” Jeannie said, which bore no resemblance at all to Let me have a look at the spreadsheets. “Makes the day go more quickly. Then they head down to Fern’s and sit around swilling their poison of choice and gossip some more.”

  “She’s right.” Fergus picked up the blue correction tape dispenser Henry had pitched against the wall. “The lads and ladies love a good natter.”

  “Jeannie?” Max asked. “Anybody on this work site that you’d trust to keep his or her mouth shut about bookkeeping that’s been hosed up by Tropical Storm Fergus?”

  Me—though that wasn’t what Max was asking. “Hugh. He’s a flirt and a tease and never seems to be in a hurry, but Hugh’s sharp and can be surprisingly discreet.”

  “Not Hugh,” Fergus said, pitching the blue plastic into the trash with considerable force. “I just need a wee bit more time.”

  “Fergus, you’ve had time,” Max said. “You’ve had weeks, and you’re only digging yourself a bigger hole.”

  Fergus, with the baby cuddled against his chest, marched up to Max. “I’ve made some headway, but there’s this meddling Yank always peering over my shoulder, hurlin’ thunderbolts about safety officers, hard hats, all-hands meetings, and Fern’s dam—dratted invoices. If he’d leave me in peace for a few days, I might get a bit of proper work—”

  Max’s phone rang. He glowered at the screen. “The Earl of Mischief, whose ears were doubtless twitching.” He swiped into the call, hit a few buttons, and put the phone on the table.

  Which left Jeannie wondering: Why not call Elias back? Why not finish this difficult discussion and let Elias wait for fifteen minutes?

  “You’re on speaker,” Max said. “Jeannie and Fergus and I are having a meeting. Henry’s in charge and you’re up early.”

  “Married life agrees with me,” Elias replied. “Do you know a man named Connor Maguire?”

  Max’s posture changed, his body going still, his gaze unreadable. “He’s one of my investors. Never met him, but flipping country estates into hospitality venues is what he knows best. He was always conferenced in for the investor meetings. Why?”

  “I know him,” Elias said. “The polo community is small, and Zebedee dragged me around to enough matches that Maguire’s path and mine crossed. He’s on his way to Scotland.”

  “Now?”

  “He’ll catch a red-eye to London tonight. What the hell is going on, Maitland? I leave my castle in your hands, and a lot of trust-fund b
uffoons start playing stupid games before you’ve even sighted your first ghost.”

  Max propped a hip on the table. “I’ve never met Maguire, and you expect me to explain his actions to you? He might be jaunting over this way for some polo, for all I know. How did you learn he was coming?”

  “He dropped me an email.”

  “Why?”

  “That, I don’t know. Don’t underestimate him, Maitland. He’s not one of your overfed, overbred, self-impressed rich dunces. He knows castles like Violet knows chickens.”

  “Was that supposed to be a brilliant analogy?”

  “That was a warning. If your project isn’t running like a well-oiled top, Maguire will know, and what he’ll do with that knowledge is anybody’s guess.”

  “I’ve been here a week. No project this size gets organized in a week flat, and a little warning about the doo-doo storm your uncle left in the bookkeeping department would have been appreciated.”

  Fergus had taken the seat behind the desk, Henry in his lap. Henry was again diving and grabbing for the mouse, which had a lovely green light softly pulsing on one side.

  “Doo-doo storm? Have you been nipping from Dinty’s flask, Maitland?”

  “Not yet, but the idea has increasing appeal. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “See that you do.”

  The call ended, and Jeannie stared at the phone, angry with Elias, though she knew he hadn’t meant to sound so… so… impossible. Angry with herself for wanting impossible things. Angry with Max for being Max.

  “So, Fergus,” Max said, tucking the phone away. “It’s not just your backside in a sling if we don’t straighten out the books, it’s mine and potentially that of every person employed on this site. Still think we ought not to enlist Hugh’s aid?”

  At the moment when Jeannie would have spoken up—I’ll help. I’m here, I’m willing, I need a job, and you need me—Henry pitched the mouse against the wall. Batteries, bits of technology, and purple plastic went in all directions, while Henry beamed at all three adults.