Plaid and Plagiarism

by Molly Macrae

  Janet took the tin and grabbed the two garbage bags, then ushered Rosie ahead of her into the bookshop and on out the front door. Rab and Ranger were no longer in sight, up or down the street. Blast the man and his disappearing tendencies. And where had Christine gone? Janet did a quick check of the shop, nodding to several customers, much the way Ranger had nodded to her. The old woman had pulled yarn and needles from her bag and now sat knitting. Summer was straightening a spill of books in the children’s area, no doubt a result of the three youngsters being herded by their parents toward Tallie at the sales desk.

  “Christine?” Janet asked Tallie.

  “Office.” She hooked her thumb over her shoulder toward the closed office door. “Something up?”

  “What else is new?” Janet asked. “Knock if you need me.” She stood at the door, hesitating, wondering what had upset her friend, not sure she should intrude. Behind her, Tallie greeted the family and offered bookmarks to the squabbling children. Seamless customer service might be tough to achieve sometimes, Janet thought, and who knew it would be so hard to maintain in the midst of a murder investigation, but everyone is doing very well. Time to make sure my best friend is still holding it together. She knocked on the door and, without waiting for an answer, went in.

  Christine sat in the same chair she had when they’d spoken with Pamela. Most of the envelopes sat in a neat stack on the desk at her elbow. One envelope lay in her lap, its letter in her hand. She appeared calm and as though she’d been waiting for Janet. Janet closed the door.

  “Do you think it’s presumptuous of us to call what we’re doing an investigation?” Janet asked.

  Christine’s only reaction was to press her lips together more tightly. She stared at a point on the floor beyond the top edge of the letter.

  “I’ll answer for both of us,” Janet went on. “It isn’t presumptuous, because it’s human nature to give names and labels to objects and situations. I’m sure it has something to do with giving us a sense of control. Tallie came up with an idea to give us a little more control. She created a cloud document for the investigation that we can all access. We can add notes, questions, answers, theories. If we make entries as we learn things or as anything occurs to us, we’ll be able to stay up to date in real time. No one will be left out of the loop. And this way we won’t risk distorting whatever facts or near facts we come up with through repetition, because a game of telephone won’t help the investigation.”

  Christine twisted her pressed lips and continued to stare.

  “So,” Janet said, “here I am, investigating. What’s going on? What are those envelopes?” She dropped the garbage bags and set the recipe tin on the second desk. “What’s in the letter you opened?”

  “I don’t know what the others are. I haven’t looked at them. But this one—” Christine held the letter up but didn’t hand it to Janet. “This is to the father of a child who’s being well cared for, no thanks to that father, and despite his neglect. It starts out, ‘Dear Curtis.’”

  Janet’s first word was lost in her outrage. The next three were crystal clear. “That bloody rat.”

  15

  If we’re sticking to facts, then we don’t know for certain that this letter is written to your Curtis,” Christine said. “Or typed to him, to be completely accurate.”

  “That abominable rat,” Janet said.

  “There are enough details, though, to be reasonably sure it is him. It mentions the university. And a specific mole on his . . . back.”

  “Putrescent rat. Who wrote it?”

  “Believe it or not, the two of you—you and whoever did write it—are on the same wavelength. The rat’s ears would fry to a crisp if we read this out loud.”

  “Then we should,” Janet said. “And the louder, the better. Let me see it.” She snapped the letter from Christine’s fingers and scanned it, turning it over and back again. She ended by waving it. “Unsigned? Who writes a letter like this and then doesn’t sign it?”

  “Or doesn’t send it?” Christine said. “What’s the point?”

  “There’s no date. No other names at all. How are we supposed to know who this child is, or how old he or she is? Or who the mother is? Oh, my God, what if it’s someone I know? What if it’s someone I run into in the fresh vegetables at Tesco’s?”

  “The mother?” Christine asked.

  “Mother or child. Oh, my God, what if this other woman is Jess? Holy, holy cow. Rosie could’ve found the letters in Jess’s office, read them, and then brought them here, playing her silly psychic game.”

  “You’re getting worked up,” Christine said.

  “Tell me why I shouldn’t get worked up.”

  “We don’t know if the letter is true.”

  “It’s believable, though, given the rat’s recent history. And you believe it, or you wouldn’t have left the tearoom like that. But you’re right.” Janet made an effort to slow down, calm down. “We don’t know who wrote it. We don’t know if either the mother or the child even lives in Inversgail.”

  “Although if neither one of them does, then why is the letter here in Inversgail?” Christine asked. “More specifically, why is it here in our business, in a tin that was empty the last time anyone looked? And what does Rab ‘Pandora’ MacGregor know about all this?”

  “Stop it. I’m trying to be rational, but you’ll send me right over the edge if you ask me to be rational about too many things at once. Okay, we don’t know when this . . . affair happened. Ten years ago? Twenty? And we don’t know if it really did. But if it isn’t true, then why write the letter?” Janet pointed at the stack on the desk. “What’s in the rest of the envelopes? Are they all letters to Curtis?

  “Can you handle it if they are?”

  “Hand them over and watch me.”

  There were eight more envelopes. Christine gave half of them to her, and Janet sat down at the other desk. She opened them one by one, took out and unfolded the sheets of typewritten paper they contained, and laid them side by side. Christine did the same with her envelopes.

  “Each one to a different person,” Janet said. “This one is two pages. This one’s three.”

  “Here’s one that’s five.”

  “Good Lord. And all . . . not something I feel right reading. Are yours signed?”

  Christine shook her head. “So is this someone with an unusual hobby? It’s someone with an unusual mind, anyway. Who are yours written to?”

  “Moira, Sharon, Scotty, Emma. No last names.”

  “I have Agnes, Ian, Kenny, and Tristan. They could be anyone.” Christine, her lips thin and tight again, rocked slightly while she thought about that. “We might know some of them, but without surnames there’s no reason to believe we do.”

  “Sharon isn’t such a common name here, though, is it?”

  “Not so much for our generation. More so for younger ones, I think. Do yours all start the way the Curtis letter does?”

  “‘Dear Moira,’ or whoever, ‘If you’re reading this, it’s too late.’”

  “Same here,” Christine said. “But too late for what?”

  “Forgiveness? They look like lists of grievances.”

  “The Curtis letter has only that one grievance.”

  “Because his complete and utter rattiness left this person otherwise speechless.”

  “And that was no mean feat,” Christine said, “because this is a person who doesn’t seem to have any trouble finding words.”

  “Or Curtis’s letter might be short because we stopped coming to Inversgail. Without Curtis here in the flesh—”

  “And apparently nothing but his flesh, at least a time or two.”

  “Thank you for that visual, Christine.” Janet closed her eyes for a moment. “Anyway, with him gone from the daily landscape, the letter writer would have lost a wellspring of inspirational irritation.”

  “One is out of sight and the other one’s possibly out of her mind?”

  “Or his. There’s nothing per
sonal about the writer in Curtis’s letter. It might not be from the mother. Maybe an angry uncle. There’s personal trivia in some of the others, though. Listen to this. ‘You borrowed my copy of Sunset Song and never gave it back. I don’t care if my name isn’t in it; the book on your shelf is mine.’”

  “I thought you didn’t feel right about reading the others.”

  “I don’t,” Janet said, “but they’re right here in front of me. It’s like finding a diary marked Keep Out. That was in the letter to Scotty, so now we know three things. The writer knows someone named Scotty. The writer is missing a book. And the writer knows how to use semicolons.”

  “A gift so rare.”

  “Is it? Anyway, here’s a complaint to Emma. ‘You lied about having other plans for Easter Monday.’ If Emma’s been getting that kind of feedback, I can see why she’d say she had other plans. Here’s a rap on the knuckles for Moira. ‘You took credit for the Rural’s fund-raising flyer and you had practically nothing to do with it. Shame on you.’ But Sharon is the worst kind of wretch. Listen to this. ‘You purposely gave the wrong amount of baking powder in the lemon butter biscuit recipe.’” Janet looked up from paging through the letters. “Do you think Sharon the librarian would do that? Do we care if she’d do that? Emma’s letter is two pages long, single-spaced.” She let the letters fall from her hands onto the desk.

  “Tristan’s is the five-pager. He’s a huge disappointment. Says so right here. Poor devil.”

  “Most of this doesn’t sink to the same level as being an unconscionable rat and fathering an out-of-wedlock child, but sabotaging recipes? Who cares and keeps lists like this? These aren’t major sins. They’re minor disappointments and pet peeves. Or that’s all they should be. What makes them nasty is the person who wrote them.”

  “They aren’t even pet peeves. They’re more like stray mongrel peeves, and some of them couldn’t get any more random or banal.” Christine read as she flipped through her half of the letters. “‘It was your fault I missed the exit for Inverness in October.’ Or, ‘You thought my mispronunciation of Laphroaig was funny, but you went ballistic when I laughed at your mismatched socks.’ Or, ‘When I needed a shoulder to cry on, you turned yours away.’ Well, that last one is sad, if overly dramatic.”

  “This one’s less straightforward. ‘Recycling isn’t a sin unless there’s an originality issue.’”

  “Someone needs to have ‘suck it up’ tattooed on one arm and ‘get over it’ on the other. That or years of therapy.”

  “Maybe this is a form of therapy. It’s a lot of work, anyway, keeping lists like this and updating them. And there’s a big fat clue staring us in the face—they aren’t printed from a computer.” Janet looked up from the page she was examining. “When was the last time you saw something typed on a typewriter?”

  “When was the last time you saw a typewriter ribbon for sale?” Christine leafed through the letters again. “It does look like they’ve been rolled in and out of a typewriter more than a few times, though. The spaces between some of the lines are wonky—probably where the writer put the sheet back through to add another line of whine. How old does that make these things?”

  “Hard to say. It probably varies from letter to letter. But some of the details are current. Listen to this one. ‘You promised to Skype with me at the weekend and didn’t.’ Or, ‘You purposely misread my response to your email about the Referendum and told people I was a traitor.’ The Referendum—that was the vote for independence, wasn’t it?”

  “In 2014.”

  “How old is Rosie?” Janet asked.

  “You don’t think she wrote them, do you? I’d guess late teens or early twenties at most. Surely you don’t think she’s the mother.”

  “No! And that thought makes me absolutely sick. But could she be the child? We’d owned the house for close to ten years by the time she would’ve been born, and we were here almost every summer.”

  “It was kept awfully quiet, if she is,” Christine said. “And that goes against the reputation small towns have for wagging tongues. But if she is, do you think she knows the connection between you and—”

  “Her father the rat?”

  “Janet, we still don’t know if it’s true that he had this child. All of these pages and pages might be imagined slights.”

  Janet held up her phone. “The easiest way in the world to find out.”

  “What a wonderful idea. Go ahead and make his day.”

  Janet hadn’t spoken to Curtis in months. Or to be fair, she thought, I haven’t answered his calls or texts for months. That’s what a good, expensive lawyer is for. She took a deep breath, swiped her phone into action, and put it to her ear.

  “Hello—”

  She cut in before he could say more. “Curtis. It’s Janet. A quick question—”

  “Janet—”

  “Don’t interrupt. Just answer. Did you . . .” It was harder to say than she’d thought it would be. “Do you have a child by a woman other than me? More precisely, by another woman here in Scotland?”

  “Janet—”

  “Yes or no, Curtis.”

  “It’s five a.m. Can we discuss this later?”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.” Janet stabbed the disconnect icon and slammed the phone onto the desk, making herself jump. “Oh, dear.” She peered at the phone. “I hope I didn’t break it.”

  “I’m sorry, Janet.”

  “I’m not.” Janet put her hand to her mouth, then took it away and made an effort to relax her shoulders. “This is simply a good test of my ability to face things with a positive attitude. Another test. But I’m up for the challenge, and here’s the takeaway from this situation. It reinforces, once again, that I made the right decision when I took that rat to the cleaners.”

  They sat in silence for a few moments, and then Janet asked Christine if she’d known what time it was in Illinois when she made the call. Christine said she had but that she saw nothing wrong with waking Curtis from a sound sleep.

  “Thank you for that, Christine,” Janet said. “Your attention to detail is one of the reasons I like you so much.”

  “I’m a firm believer in taking pleasure in small things. Who are you calling now?”

  “I forgot to ask him who the mother and child are.” Janet swiped the phone into action again and waited. She crossed her legs and swung a foot. Then she disconnected. “He isn’t picking up. How rude. On the other hand, I’m glad to find out that I didn’t break the phone.”

  “You should’ve left him a message,” Christine said. “I will, if you’d like. How would this sound? ‘Curtis? Christine here. I need to know who you’ve shagged in Inversgail, and when. Approximate dates will do. Details not necessary.’ Shall I? Or shall I call the new wife and ask her to find out for us?”

  Janet shook her head. “She has enough on her hands just being married to him. We can find another inconvenient time to call.”

  “What are you going to tell Tallie?”

  “This might be wrong, but for the time being nothing. When it comes right down to it, we still don’t know for certain that it’s true. As far as I’m concerned, Curtis answered by not answering. But it is just barely possible that being waked at five a.m. befuddled him.”

  “Who are you protecting with that evasion, Curtis or Tallie?”

  “Maybe myself, for now. If it’s true, then this is another part of my life that’s changed without any input from me. When I know for sure, and whether it’s true or not, then I’ll tell her and call Allen.”

  “Fair enough,” Christine said. “Here’s another question. How worried do you think we need to be about finding the letters here?”

  “Don’t you think that depends on who wrote them, who left them, and who’s going to come looking for them?”

  “Or maybe it depends on what’s behind that phrase, ‘If you’re reading this, it’s too late.’”

  16

  Janet tucked the letter to Curtis in her back pocket and hel
ped Christine put the other letters back in their envelopes. They took the recipe tin, envelopes, and bags of garbage to show Tallie and Summer—to bring them up to date and get their insights. Although not too much insight, Janet thought, because the letter in her pocket was making her feel less than honest. She hoped if Tallie noticed that she’d developed a case of nerves, she would assume it came from their own growing list of far from normal goings-on.

  “Got enough stuff there? Tallie asked.

  “Come to think of it, there’s more,” Christine said. She went back into the office and came out with the bottle of whisky and the tartan fabric. “Parting gifts from Pamela and Kenneth.”

  Summer took the bottle from her and cradled it in her hands. “This is a nice Laphroiag.”

  “Is it?” Janet asked. Possibly too sharply; she’d earned a look from Tallie.

  “Nothing to laugh at in her pronunciation,” Christine said.

  “Everything I know about whisky I learned at the Scotch Whisky Heritage Centre in Edinburgh. The only thing I didn’t learn is to like the taste. Such a shame.”

  “But more for the rest of us, then,” Tallie said. She took the fabric from Christine and unfolded it. It was almost as wide as she was tall. “If we don’t mind cutting it, we can make it into two lap throws. Put them on the backs of the chairs near the fire.”

  “A wonderful idea,” Christine said. “I’ll see if Mum still has her sewing machine somewhere in all their accumulated detritus.”

  Tallie handed the fabric back to Christine and nodded at the garbage bags. “Were the garbage bags a shop-warming present from Rab? They’re the ones he brought into the tearoom, aren’t they?”

  “You have a good eye for garbage bags, dear. Christine’s going to fill you in on . . . everything new.”

  “Uh-huh,” Tallie said, and Janet could see her antennae quivering. “What will you be doing?”

  “I’ll just run these upstairs so they’re out of the way. Oh! And the meeting at the library—I nearly forgot. I’d better grab the blasted contest materials and scoot.”