The glances were pointless, of course. An army could have been following me and I wouldn’t have seen them, unless they happened to stand in the middle of the street during a moonlit interval. Anyone with the sense to keep to the shadows would be invisible.
How did he know? What told him I knew his secret? Maybe I’d given myself away at lunch, acting so upset. Maybe something I’d said, some question I’d asked, had been repeated to him, and he’d understood.
Maybe—oh, dear heaven—maybe I’d told him just now, by running away! I’d done it to myself! If I’d had the sense to respond to his greeting coolly, agree that it was a lovely night but, unfortunately, I was going to church—
It was indeed, I realized as I stopped in a dark doorway for breath, a nice night. Brisk, as befitted late September, but no wind or rain, and the moon was making more and more headway against the clouds. Tomorrow would probably be a beautiful day, if by any chance I should live to see it.
I was cursing the moon, now, every time it showed its full face. The last wispy clouds would soon vanish, leaving the sky to the mercy of that spotlight. I was reminded of a book I’d once read, quoting a legend about goddesses or someone reeling in the moon for two weeks out of every month, gradually making the night dark, safe for anything that was fleeing a hunter. How I wished the moon-spinners were working tonight!
For tonight I was the quarry, and the hunter could find me quite easily.
I heard a step, the crunch of gravel somewhere behind me. I left the road, kept to the grass, and ran as fast as I could.
I’d been a fool, of course. The thought came to me as I ran, raggedly and with panting breath that could probably be heard all the way down to the jetty. If I had only headed the other way, to the church or the Abbey, or taken the footpath up to the hotel, or gone in almost any other direction than the one I had chosen, I would have reached people, and therefore safety, very quickly. It was the instinct to put as much distance as possible between me and Jake that had sent me this way. And this way lay only hills and moors and sheep pastures and, eventually, the sea.
With a great many places where I could fall, or get bogged down in a mire, or twist an ankle.
That thought, and the noise behind me, brought me to a stop. He was following, but slowly now, depending more on hearing than sight. I realized that my dark clothing kept me from being quite as visible as I had feared, and if I could only go quietly, perhaps on hands and knees . . . I dropped down, wriggled as silently as I could into a little depression, and tried to think.
I didn’t know where I was, for sure. I thought perhaps I was on the Machair, the broad, grassy moor. If so, I was in a bad position. Aside from the occasional sand trap set up for the golf course, the Machair presented no hiding places. If I could just get up into the hills, which ought to lie close by, to my left (unless I’d lost my sense of direction completely), there would be a little cover. I could scooch down and pretend to be a rock, or something.
Jake didn’t know the terrain any better than I did; that was one comfort. He could get just as thoroughly lost as I. If I was given any luck at all, I might be able to circle around and get back to the village or the hotel while he was still wandering the moors or getting lost in the hills. I had a chance, not maybe a very good one, but any chance is better than none.
He was getting closer, and my hollow was a poor excuse for a hiding place. It was time to move.
As exercise for the senior citizen, I do not recommend crawling through a Scottish sheep pasture, especially at night. I tried to move when the moon was behind a cloud and freeze when it came out, so I kept finding nice, sharp rocks with my knees, and then having to kneel on them indefinitely until some obliging cloud set me free for a few moments. The Machair, when I had crossed it earlier in the week, had seemed like a lovely, soft, grassy field. In the dark, on all fours, it more closely resembled a gravel pit. I tried hard not to think of the other hazards, left by the sheep, that my bare hands were doubtless encountering.
I was making for a wire fence that ought to appear on my left any time now. The path up to the loch lay next to that fence, if I remembered correctly, and there were, in its vicinity, any number of little hillocks and large rocks that might provide a hiding place.
There were also any number of small rocks, and no grass to cushion them. I wouldn’t think about them, either, not just now. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
Oh, Hattie Mae would be proud of me!
Someday I may be able to forget the terrors of the next few hours. I found the fence without difficulty, and followed it up the hill, in a kind of crouch that caused excruciating pain to nearly every part of my anatomy, but I couldn’t crawl anymore, not with the path simply all rocks. Every now and then a tenacious bog provided a little variety in the dreadfulness; my shoes were soaked with water, and threatened occasionally to be pulled off by some particularly gluey patch. I worried about the noise I was making. A gravelly path scrunches, and bogs squelch, and there’s no help for it. If Jake heard me, I’d just have to—do something else. I prayed I could figure out what.
I was also praying that any dogs at the farm I was passing slept well at night. I hadn’t seen dogs when we passed on our pilgrimage, but there were bound to be some. You can’t run sheep without a dog. And if they barked and woke the farmer, I could be dealing with a double-edged sword. He might believe me, and take me in—but, equally, he might think I was a lunatic and send me packing. In either case, Jake would be quite sure where I was.
I toiled up the hill.
At one point, shortly before I reached the loch at the crest of the hill, I had an inspiration. There was, I remembered vaguely, some sort of small building up here. If I had thought about it at all before, as preoccupied as I had been with Jake’s troubles, I had thought it probably had something to do with the pumping of water for Iona’s supply. Now I thought of it as sanctuary. If I could reach it, and if by some miracle of Iona’s trusting nature, the door was unlocked . . .
I never got the chance to find out. The building was in a fenced enclosure, and the gate was securely padlocked. The moon was shining strongly by that time, and I could just see that the top wire of the fence was barbed. Evidently, trust did not extend to something as precious as water. I bitterly cursed the (presumed) vandals who had made these precautions necessary, and sat down by the fence to consider my next move.
I couldn’t go on much farther. I didn’t know how long I’d been creeping along, but it was too long for my bones and muscles. Every arthritic joint—which included most of the joints I possessed—was screaming at me, and some were near the point of locking up in protest. This was madness. There must be some rock, some niche, something to shelter me until—well, until I could figure out what to do about this ridiculous predicament.
For it was beginning to seem ridiculous, two people of our ages, Jake’s and mine, crawling around on a Scottish hillside in what seemed like the middle of the night. He wasn’t James Bond, for goodness’ sake, and I wasn’t some lithe Russian spy. Exactly what was I afraid of? He didn’t own a gun, or a knife. Oh, all right, I didn’t know that for certain, but Jake? Trying to kill me? No, it was too silly.
I sat and listened. There was no sound in the night, save for an occasional odd crunching that I knew was some sheep having himself a late snack of coarse grass, and the distant crash of the surf against some of the rocks below me.
With a good deal of maneuvering, and a number of little moans and grunts, I stood up.
“Dorothy! So there you are! No, wait—so can I talk to you, already?”
We can’t control reflexes. I was running wildly down the hill before he had finished the first syllable.
I will probably bear some of the scars of that reckless plunge till the day I die. I was lucky, I suppose, that I broke no bones. It’s always foolish to run downhill, and in rocky, unfamiliar terrain, and in the dark, it’s suicidal. I fell, many times, but I managed to scramble up again each time and keep go
ing. I had no idea where I was, and I didn’t care. I had to get away from that voice that kept calling me.
“Dorothy! Hey, slow down! Dorothy!”
I was gaining ground. He sounded farther away now, and his voice sounded strained and breathless.
He shouldn’t be doing this, with his heart condition, I thought, and then shook myself, mentally. He killed a man, remember? He maybe tried to kill Teresa, and for sure he’s trying to kill you, Dorothy Martin, so stop feeling sorry for him.
But the thought had taken my concentration away from what I was doing for just that crucial moment. I took a step into nothing, tried to shift my balance, fell, and went rolling down a steep slope, striking rocks as I went, grabbing at weeds that tore away in my hands.
When I came to a stop, pained and dizzy, it took a few moments to realize I was still alive. Checking everything I could, I decided I was more or less intact, though bleeding gently from a hundred cuts and scrapes. For a wonder, I was sprawled on something relatively soft and smooth.
The moon was directly overhead, and when I was able to sit up and look around, I realized where I was.
I was lying in a small grassy hollow in the one place on Iona I had decided I would never visit again.
The marble quarry.
“Dorothy, where are you? Are you all right? Answer me, can’t you?”
It was over. The infirmities of age had caught up with me, I couldn’t run anymore. I probably couldn’t even stand up. I sighed and shifted to a slightly more comfortable position. Might as well not die sitting on a sharp rock.
“I’m over here, Jake.”
21
MY VOICE WAS steady as I called out a few more times to help Jake find me. Now that the game was lost, why not cooperate?
He slithered down the bank and collapsed by my side, panting. I waited with a certain amount of interest to see what form my demise was going to take. Fear was gone; I was simply too tired. In fact, it occurred to me, as I sat and listened to Jake’s breathing slow down to normal, that I had never before in my life actually comprehended what the word “exhausted” meant.
Even after he seemed to have recovered, he was slow to speak, and when he did, his voice was sad and his words were the last ones I expected to hear.
“Why did you run away from me?”
I turned and stared at him. His face, white in the moonlight, looked unutterably weary and bleak.
“Why are you afraid of me?” he asked again.
This time I could answer. “You killed Bob Williams.”
“I did what?” He sounded as though he had simply misunderstood me.
“Oh, I understand why. I even—well, you probably thought you were justified, and maybe—”
“What did you say I did?”
“Oh, Jake, I don’t want to say it again!”
“Say it again. So maybe I didn’t hear you right.”
“You murdered Bob Williams.”
“And how did I do that, when he was alone? You saw what happened. He fell.”
“Yes, but—the water. You spilled the water on the rocks, and left him to fall.”
There was a very long pause. My heartbeat drummed in my ears.
“So you maybe thought I was going to kill you?” Jake said finally, with that ironic intonation I had gotten to know so well. “Why?”
“Because you knew I knew! Teresa had caught on, somehow, and you tried to keep her quiet . . .”
This time the silence went on even longer.
“All right,” he said, in a voice with all the life gone out of it. “You think you know so much about what happened that day, maybe I’d better tell you all of it.
“It started the night before, the Monday night. There was a lot of activity going on in that quiet, respectable little hotel Monday night, did you know?”
“I heard about some of it.”
“Yeah, well, did anybody tell you that my room was straight across the hall from Chris’s?”
“Yes. When I learned that, I knew what did it for you.”
“Yeah, well. I was in bed, and I tried not to listen, believe me. At my age I need my sleep. But he would’ve waked the dead, he and Chris, going at it hammer and tongs, in whispers, but the kind that can carry to the third balcony.
“The names Chris called him I won’t repeat to a lady, but they were enough to give me the idea. Chris said—”
He stopped abruptly, apparently to rephrase his thoughts.
“Chris implied that Bob was—maybe a little too fond of some of the children he worked with, and I tell you, that woke me up. I spent the rest of the night trying to piece the thing together, and I came up with a whole picture every time. So the next day I went after him. I had some questions to ask.”
“In the cave.”
“In the cave. I didn’t plan it that way, it was just the first time I could get the bastard by himself. He might be innocent, see? I couldn’t see how, but he might be. And it wouldn’t be fair to accuse him in front of other people.”
“And he said . . . ?”
“Oh, at first he denied the whole thing, of course, said I had a filthy mind and I was a disgrace to my calling, and like that. And then I told him a thing or two about what I’d heard the night before, and who was calling who a disgrace, and he turned, like a cornered rat. He said, okay, what did I think I could do about it? And he was going to die, anyway, from his disease, and was I going to blacken the name of a dying man? And more of the same. Ah, I tell you, it made me sick to my stomach, the way he’d bluster and then whine, whine and then bluster. So—” there was a pause, and I could just see one of his elaborate shrugs “— so I left.”
“After you’d dumped water on the rocks.”
“No. I don’t know what you’re talking about, wet rocks. The rocks were dry.”
So was my mouth. “But . . . but, Jake, they were wet when I saw Bob fall. That’s why he fell! Maybe you didn’t do it on purpose—”
“I didn’t have any water with me in the cave. I’d drunk it all. I wished I had some, to take the taste of Bob Williams out of my mouth. And I don’t know what you’re talking about, with Teresa.”
It was a flat denial, and it had the ring of absolute truth. “But . . . but then . . . oh, dear God!”
I sat in an appalled silence. What had I done?
I had met a man, a good man who had been dealt unbearable blows by life. We had become friends; he had confided in me. And I, with my interfering nature, my love of prying into other people’s business, had drawn a superficial conclusion and accused him of murder.
“Jake, I . . . I’m so sorry . . .”
I stopped because there were no adequate words. I’m sorry I was afraid of you. I’m sorry I thought you were a murderer. I’m sorry your life was destroyed by someone who really was a monster. I’m sorry you’ve gone through hell.
“Yeah.” Jake sat, hunched into himself. And the night grew colder.
After an eternity, Jake stood up. “We should maybe go back, huh? We’ll freeze out here.”
“I don’t think I can,” I said drearily, trying to keep my teeth from chattering. “It’s so far, and my knees . . . and the moon is about to set. We could get lost . . . but you go. You’ve got a compass, and you can move faster without me. I’ll be all right until morning.”
“No, you won’t,” he said flatly. “Okay, I’ll see what I can do.”
He tossed me his jacket and walked away before I could protest. I wrapped the coat around my legs, which were wet from all the times I had fallen into bogs, and prepared to wait out however much of the night I had to, until Jake could bring help.
He was back in five minutes. “I’ve found something. Can you get up?”
“I guess so, but what—”
“Over there.” He helped me to my feet, his arm as steady as the top of a fence, and as impersonal.
He had found, a few feet away, what amounted to a little cave. Or hardly that, just a recess in the rock wall, one of the sides of
the grassy depression we were in. What made it especially good was that there was a slab of rock, marble quarried years ago, presumably, leaning at a slant in front of it, like a door.
“We’ll be warm in there, with that slab cutting off the wind. Have you got any matches?”
“I don’t think so.” I patted myself down and finally came up with a box in my pants pocket. I must have dropped them in when I lit the lamp. “Yes, I do. There won’t be any dry wood, though, after the storm.”
“Not wood, peat. This whole island is peat, and that stuff’ll smolder, even wet. I’ll be right back.”
And so it was that, an hour or so later, we had a small fire going. It emitted a great deal more smoke than heat, but it showed no signs of going out, and it did help take the chill off the night. I settled down with my back to the stone wall, and when Jake thought the fire no longer required his attention, he joined me.
“Jake, I—there’s nothing I can say to make up for—”
“Sleep,” he said wearily. “It won’t be long till morning. We’ll be warmer if we stay together.” He put that dispassionate arm around me, and I tried to follow his advice.
I didn’t sleep well. My mind was in turmoil, I was cold and in pain, and I kept waking up to wriggle into a new position that might simulate comfort. Every time, Jake was there, cushioning my head, holding me close for warmth.
Toward dawn I fell into a sounder sleep. My last thought was to wonder how I could ever have supposed this man a murderer.
SOMEONE WAS SNORING, very loudly. I wished they would be quiet so I could sleep. And this was an awfully hard bed, and where were all the covers—
I woke, shivering, sore all over. The snoring noise was getting louder.
It was a helicopter, and it was landing—I craned my neck—surely it was landing just on the other side of the hill. Who? Why?
And where was Jake?
I called, but I couldn’t be heard over the beat of the rotor, so I stood up.
Holy Terror in the Hebrides Page 19