Plaid and Plagiarism

by Molly Macrae

  “Had to give it up,” he said. “Brought in the tourists.” He used the same tone of voice for “tourists” as he had for “riffraff.”

  The pub was full of people either unwinding after another day’s work or in for an evening of catching up on stories and gossip. It wasn’t a raucous group, but convivial and comfortable, with friends calling to each other, some sitting, some making the rounds with a sashay or a backslap, and some staring into their glasses. When Janet, Tallie, and Summer made their way toward Christine’s table, an elderly trio stood up from the next table over and offered their chairs.

  “We’ve been keeping them warm until you came,” one of the women in the group said. “We’re up next for darts. Great to see you out, Helen,” she said, speaking louder for Helen’s benefit.

  “Always lovely,” Christine’s mother shouted back. “Oh, it takes you back, doesn’t it, David?” she said after the trio had gone into the next room. “Do you remember when she lived next door?”

  “She still does,” Christine said to Janet from behind her hand. She got up and went around the table to lean down between her parents and speak nearer their ears. “Mum, Dad, you remember Janet Marsh, don’t you? And her daughter, Tallie? And this is Summer Jacobs. We’re all in the book and tea business together.”

  “Isn’t that lovely,” Helen said.

  David raised his glass. “A toast to our minds and memories. May we never lose either, or only to drink.” He took a sip, declared it delicious, and then reached over to hold Helen’s hand.

  “Thanks for the round, David,” Janet said. “The next one’s on me.”

  “Unless the first puts us under the table,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t that be lovely,” Helen said. “And two daughters, Janet, that’s lovely, too.”

  Christine sat back down near Janet. “I phoned some folk and let them know Mum and Dad would be here. They used to come down of an evening, but that’s been a while now, and a decade at least since Tony and I stepped inside. The place hasn’t changed, though, except for no smoking. Danny hasn’t changed.”

  Janet followed Christine’s gaze to the barman.

  “I pushed him off the harbor wall when we were eight. High tide and he couldn’t swim. Had to rescue him. I think that might be what led me into social work. I seem to be a natural helper.”

  “Obviously born to it,” Janet said.

  “I can’t believe you and Dad never came here,” Tallie said.

  “We had a couple of wild children at home, with whom I enjoyed spending my time, most of the time. And books for when I didn’t. If you’d tried harder, though, maybe you could’ve driven me to drink. Christine, we came with a plan for sleuthing this evening. A plan with a pub-worthy acronym: CLARET. It stands for circulate, listen, ask, record, enjoy, text.”

  Elizabeth II regarded Janet. “I’ll let you remember it. But it’s good to see you back in the spirit of things. I knew you wouldn’t stay down in the dumps for long. And I saw all the new material in the cloud. I floated up there after I gave Mum and Dad their tea, and that’s why I made my phone calls. This way, whilst the oldies are occupied with friends stopping by the table, I’ll be free to circulate.”

  “Speaking of which,” Tallie said, “Summer and I are going to circulate on into the other room to watch the darts. We’ll text if we hear anything or have any news.”

  “Check in anyway, in an hour or so, so I know where you are,” Janet said.

  “The place isn’t that big, Mom.”

  “Humor your mum, Tallie,” Christine said.

  “Righty-oh.”

  “See?” Christine smiled at Janet. “Always helping. Now, shall you and I stick together or split up for maximum coverage?”

  “I won’t get much on my own.”

  “True enough.”

  “We could also sit here and glean what we can from your mum and dad’s friends.”

  “Or we can do a bit of both.” Christine leaned closer to Janet. “It’ll give Mum and Dad a chance to complain about me if I’m not a permanent fixture at the table.”

  James Taylor’s sweet voice finished singing “You’ve Got a Friend” on the jukebox, and Johnny Cash galloped in with “Ghost Riders in the Sky” to take his place. A woman sitting nearer the unused stage turned to speak to someone at the table behind her, giving Janet a view of her profile.

  “Is that Jess? It is. I wonder if she thinks I’m some kind of jinx at this point.”

  “She’s waving,” Christine said.

  “And her glass is empty. Shall we take her another?”

  “Yes, and perfect timing. Mum, Dad, look who’s just come in.” Christine waved to a newly arrived couple—and their dog, a standard poodle. “You have a nice visit with Nancy and Bob. Dad, if you need me, I’ll be right over there, and I’ll check back in a wee bit.”

  “Sophie,” Helen said, holding her hand out to the poodle. “Who’s a lovely girl, then, eh?”

  “That’s fairly remarkable,” Christine said as she and Janet went to the bar.

  “A poodle in a pub?”

  “No, Nev’s has always been a dog pub. Remarkable that Mum remembered her name. That really is Sophie, and she is a lovely girl.”

  “Dog pub, eh? I wonder, then . . .”

  While Christine asked Danny the barman for another of what Jess was having, Janet glanced around the occupants of the tables more carefully. Christine took the glass from Danny, and as they moved between the tables toward the stage, Janet’s phone buzzed.

  “It’s Tallie. Ha. I wonder if Rosie would like a couple of psychic pals. Tallie says Rab and Ranger are playing darts.”

  “And the dog’s predicting the winners, is he? Otherwise there’s nothing psychic about it. Rab’s one I phoned earlier. He and Mum are old mah-jongg mates.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Only about the mah-jongg. Mum and his mum worked together years ago. Sometimes old memories are easier for her. Hello, Jess. Anyone joining you? Mind if we do? We’ve brought you a refill.” Christine put the glass down in front of Jess, and she and Janet sat down.

  “Cheers.” Jess swallowed a fair portion of the fresh drink. “I was hoping to see Rosie. She comes in some evenings.”

  “If she comes, we can move on,” Janet said. “Did she come back to the office today?”

  “She might have. I didn’t. I tried phoning her but she didn’t answer. I need to apologize for shrieking at her like a banshee.”

  “She’s young,” Christine said. “She can probably take it.”

  “Maybe. But can I? I need to get myself right in the head. Do you know what I did after running out of your bookshop? Ran straight home, put my head under my pillow, and cried myself to sleep like a bairn without her mum.”

  “Did it help?” Janet asked. “Sometimes we need that.”

  “You found me sitting alone in a pub. What does that tell you?”

  “You were waiting for a friend,” Janet said. “That tells me all I need to know.”

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if that were true? It doesn’t ease the guilt, though. But here’s to absent friends.” She raised her glass, and they clinked theirs against it. While she drank, Janet and Christine exchanged looks.

  “What do you feel guilty about?” Christine asked.

  “Let me count the ways. Janet’s house, for one. That’s why I came into the bookshop today. Did I hear right, that you’re not back in it yet?”

  “There’s been a delay,” Janet said.

  “You’re taking it awfully well. I feel terrible about all of it.”

  “None of it is your fault, Jess.”

  “Extraordinary circumstances,” Christine murmured.

  “But Ug never would have been there. She never would have gone there at all except. Don’t you see? It’s the rubbish. She came back to do it again.”

  Janet hadn’t thought of that. Could it be? Does it come back to the garbage? But, no.

  “There’s drug crime everywhere thes
e days,” Jess was saying, staring into her glass as she swirled it. “One of the lowlifes we get coming through must’ve been looking for an opportunity and Ug got in the way.”

  “I don’t know,” Janet said. “She wasn’t found in the house, Jess, and there was no garbage in the shed. Do you know anything about her children?”

  Jess found a crumb on the table. She played with it, then flicked it away, and shook her head.

  “I saw Lauren Pollard today,” Janet said.

  “She loved that house.”

  “She told me that she wished she’d never set foot in it. She said Una turned her life into a hell.”

  “Good old Ug. Always a helping hand in the community.”

  Christine winced. “Jess, what about the cleaning company that cancelled? Which one was it?”

  “Cosy Cleaners. I’ve used them before. Not for jobs here in town. Other properties, elsewhere. They’ve always been reliable. When I spoke to them about the cancellation, all they could tell me was that I phoned them, that I’m the one who cancelled, and their excuse is ‘how were we to know it wasn’t you?’”

  “Who do you think it was?” Christine asked.

  “Ug, of course. She liked a good ‘joke.’ Thought she was funny with her accents and voices. She dumped the rubbish. She thwarted my efforts to get it cleared away.”

  “And she picked the lock to get in the house?” Janet asked.

  “As I told you before.” Any mellow edge several glasses of ale might have given Jess disappeared as the furrows between her brows deepened. “She used to show off when we were girls. Learnt it from her brothers. A dodgy family all the way around.”

  “That would be how she got into the shed, then, too,” Christine said.

  “Of course it is,” Jess said. “All of it. It all comes down to Ug.”

  “Not all of it,” Janet said.

  “Of course it does,” Jess repeated.

  “Not her death, Jess. She didn’t kill herself. And she didn’t dump more garbage behind the bookshop this morning.”

  “More?”

  Janet watched Jess process that news, its progress reflected in the movement of her eyes and in the whitening of her knuckles as she gripped the table.

  “That changes things.” Her eyes had settled on staring into the corner beyond their table, but Jess was still thinking it through. “That means all that rubbish wasn’t Ug. It was someone else. Someone else making a statement.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “It could have been the murderer making a statement about Ug. About Ug’s muckraking. Oh, my God. It might have been the murderer all along. In your house. I might have been in your house with the murderer.”

  “Jess?” Janet called her name. It didn’t get her attention. She tried tapping the table in front of Jess. She didn’t dare touch her for fear of startling her. “Jess?”

  Jess, still staring into the corner, scraped her chair back, bumping into a woman sitting behind her, and taking no notice. “I’ll phone Norman.”

  “Will you be all right, Jess?” Christine asked. “Would you like someone to walk you home?”

  “I’ll phone Norman. Then I’ll put my head back under my pillow.”

  Jess bumped into the woman behind her again, and then pushed her way past people who greeted her or asked her to watch it as she made her way to the door. Danny at the bar bade her good night, but she ignored him.

  “That was an example of going off the extrapolation deep end,” Christine said. “We should use her as a cautionary example.”

  “And yet the police still have my house. Something was going on there.”

  “Oh. Good point. And here I thought she was just a bit of a ninny. Strike her off our suspect list?”

  Janet sipped her ale. “Maybe not.”

  “Gut feeling?”

  “My gut doesn’t know much about crime solving.”

  “Do you want another round?”

  “Not really.”

  “Neither do I, but I want a word with Danny.”

  “I’m going to sit here for a few minutes. I’ll meet you back at your mum and dad’s table.”

  Janet’s phone had alerted her to incoming texts while they’d talked to Jess. She’d glanced at her phone each time, looking for key words like “Help!” or “SOS.” But not seeing anything suggesting an emergency, she’d read no further and put her phone back in her lap. When they’d made their plan, she hadn’t realized how hard it would be to make herself constantly interrupt a conversation in front of her to read about a conversation happening somewhere else. She read the texts while she finished her Selkie’s Tears.

  From Tallie: ian sometimes drinks here. barely tolerated.

  From Tallie: kenneth kicked off darts team after haggis incident. much lol, no details.

  From Summer: una ace at darts. not surprised.

  From Tallie: haggis inc. involved ranger. rab not lol.

  From Summer: no news from u?

  Then a new one arrived from Christine: una a regular. Danny no useful info.

  Janet could have dropped by the darts room on her way to rejoin Helen and David, but decided to be more with it by sending her own texts while listening in on conversations at nearby tables. The music made overhearing difficult. Probably the intent of the music, she thought. The couples at the closest table seemed to be talking about Doctor Who, but then Queen started singing “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and she gave up eavesdropping to hum along. She sent Tallie the name of the cleaning firm in Fort William. She texted Summer, admitting they’d muffed their chance to ask Jess what she knew about Rosie. She texted Summer again, letting her know that Christine was talking to Danny at the bar. Before she could send a second text to Tallie, she had one back from Summer.

  christine not w/dan, throwing darts.

  Irritated at missing a piece of real life in real time, she texted Tallie, asking her to catch Rab and officially offer him the part-time job, which she still hadn’t done. Another text arrived immediately.

  Rab & ranger gone.

  She slapped her phone on the table, then picked it up and went to sit with Helen and David—where Rab and Ranger sat, too. Sophie the poodle and her couple had left. Helen and David were sharing a bag of prawn crisps. Ranger looked interested, but Rab shook his head. Janet didn’t bother texting that information to anyone.

  Chatting with Helen and David involved a lot of shouting and repetition. But Christine had been right that there might be an advantage to that and to having her parents there. People were happy to see them and happy to add their own shouts to the hubbub. Rab and Ranger held out for a short time, but Janet could see that shouting and being shouted at wasn’t their thing. When she caught his eye, she waved him closer so they could speak at a normal volume.

  “We haven’t really discussed the part-time job yet. If you’re willing, we’d like to hire you.”

  “Oh, aye. I assumed as much.”

  Janet didn’t quite know what to make of that answer. While she puzzled over it, Christine came back from the darts room. Her mother shouted that it was lovely to see her, and then asked when she’d got back from Panama. When Janet looked again for Rab and Ranger, the front door was closing behind them.

  “Why don’t you steer the conversation,” Janet said into Christine’s ear. “I’ll be the recording secretary and the lookout, in case people of interest come in.”

  Christine gave her a thumbs-up and settled in for a good natter— a loud natter—and Janet settled back, ears, eyes, and thumbs at the ready.

  The talk was necessarily wide-ranging and disjointed as people joined in or drifted away. Christine did her best to nudge it toward hopeful topics or pull it back when it strayed too far beyond their interests, but there was only so much she could do. Arthritis and the recent flu season kept creeping in. Politics reared its head more than once. David had been a keen fisherman, and Christine couldn’t deny her father the pleasure of the latest fish stories.

  But David did remember Rosie and knew her pa
rents—her father the minister and her mother a piano teacher. Janet logged into the cloud to make a note that Rosie was not Curtis’s child, when Helen brought a twenty-year-old memory into clarity.

  “They said they were blessed when they were given that child to love. I always thought the child was blessed when she was given to them.”

  “She was adopted?” Christine asked.

  “Who?” her mother asked.

  Janet entered the question of Rosie’s adoption into the cloud with a note to have Tallie or Summer verify it.

  Christine used the topic of children to bring talk around to Una. She asked after Una’s family and heard that her husband, if they were married, which they might not have been, was long out of the picture. The children were grown and gone, a woman at the next table said. Someone standing behind Helen was surprised to hear she’d had children. Those who’d known didn’t know their names. Someone passing the table to get another round thought the grown children had emigrated. One and then the other, someone agreed. Maybe Australia? No one rightly knew. The family had lived somewhere other than Inversgail while the children were growing. Somewhere else was all anyone knew or remembered. Couldn’t have been far. She had her column. Came to town. Came to Nev’s.

  The door opened and Janet saw James Haviland limp in. He waved at someone, and someone else asked if he’d fallen off anything lately. He laughed and stopped at the bar to get a pint from Danny. Janet, with a private flourish of her fingers, texted Summer. Not thirty seconds later, Summer and Tallie came out of the darts room. Summer did a credible job of being surprised and pleased to see James. She introduced him to Tallie. Tallie, in turn, introduced him to Christine.

  “And you met my mother, Janet, at the bookshop,” Tallie said, maneuvering a chair for him so that it would be awkward if he didn’t sit down next to Janet.

  “So good to see you again,” Janet said. “And how nice to have you join us.”

  If James felt waylaid, he didn’t show it. Christine ably brought him into the conversation, at the same time herding it in a direction to suit their needs.

  “We were wondering if there’s a service planned for Una,” she said, “and how far her family might have to come.”