Moon Cursed

by Lori Handeland

  “Secret recipe from my great-grandmamma in Kingston.”

  Kris lifted a brow.

  “If I told you what it was, I’d have t’ kill you.”

  Kris almost said that she’d need to get in line. But Kris really didn’t want to have that conversation. However, there was one she did want to have.

  “What nice young man?”

  Jamaica peered into Kris’s face, then at her burn, then into her eyes again. “You don’t know him?”

  Kris spread her hands. “Hard to say since I have no idea who ‘him’ is.”

  “American. ’Bout…” Jamaica lifted her hand to indicate a height near six feet. “Not heavy, not thin. Brown hair.”

  “Streaked?”

  “He wore a cap.” Jamaica narrowed her eyes as if looking into the past. “Boston Red Sox.”

  “Dougal did say this guy was from the East Coast.”

  Jamaica started. “Dougal? Dougal Scott?” Kris nodded. “How you know dat man?”

  “I went to his museum, and … out for drinks and dinner at The Clansman.”

  “You dating him?” Jamaica did not appear to approve.

  “Just friends.” Kris had a bad feeling. “Why? Are you dating him?”

  Jamaica laughed. “Dat would not happen.”

  “You don’t think he’s attractive? Those light eyes and the dark hair. He’s got great hands, and his legs aren’t so bad, either.”

  “If he’s so wonderful, why you don’t want him?”

  Why indeed? Kris didn’t plan to elaborate on that. Instead, she prevaricated. She was getting pretty good at it. “I won’t be here long enough to get involved. I’m not going to start something I can’t finish.”

  Jamaica’s lips curved. “I bet he finish pretty quick.”

  This surprised a laugh out of Kris. “You don’t like him?”

  The other woman shrugged and didn’t comment.

  There was something else going on here, and Kris really wanted to know what. She liked Dougal. She planned to spend more time with him. Unless there was a good reason she shouldn’t.

  She kept her gaze steady on Jamaica, waiting, and eventually Jamaica gave in.

  “He’s new to Drumnadrochit, but he t’inks he should be accepted just like he been here since de Kingdom of de Picts. People in Drumnadrochit dey take a little time to warm up to outsiders. Dey like de tourists fine, but to really be from here you must be here more dan a minute.”

  “I thought his family lived in the village.”

  “His grandpapa.” She waved a hand as if shooing a lazy fly. “Don’t mean nothin’. You must be accepted on your own for who you are and not who you came from.”

  “Okay,” Kris said. Sounded like a good policy to her.

  “He just pushy. T’inks he’s special. He don’t like it dat I’m accepted and he’s not. Gets a little angry ’bout it. Me, I t’ink he should just chill.”

  Kris’s lips twitched at the hip comment uttered in an accent as old as these hills, but her amusement died at the idea of Dougal being angry over something so silly. She’d known people who got worked up over things they couldn’t control, over imagined slights and foolish desires. They were usually prime candidates for “snapping” and doing something violent.

  Uh-oh, she thought, remembering that last night someone had.

  But last night she’d been with Dougal, watched him drive away toward Drumnadrochit; then very soon after she’d been attacked. He wouldn’t have been able to double back that fast, would he? And why bother when he could have killed her anywhere on the road to The Clansman and tossed her into the loch?

  “I do not like dis.” Concern tightened Jamica’s lips and creased her brow.

  “I won’t go out with him again.”

  “Dat’s not what I mean. Dougal is harmless. What I do not like is a stranger asking for you by name. Here, dere.” She lifted both arms and tossed her hands outward. “Apparently everywhere.”

  Kris had to say she wasn’t a fan of that news, either.

  “Did you tell him where I lived?”

  “He did not ask.”

  “What did he ask?”

  Unease filtered over Jamaica’s face, and Kris felt cold all over again. “If you were happy.”

  Why did Kris find that more sinister than if he’d asked for directions to her front porch?

  *

  Kris hung around, finishing one cup of coffee and then another while she assured Jamaica that she’d be careful out there.

  “You tell Alan Mac about dis weird happy-man or I will,” Jamaica insisted.

  “All right,” Kris agreed, but what would she say? Some guy, whose name she didn’t know, who was of average weight and maybe six feet tall, with brown hair and a Bo-Sox cap, was asking about her.

  Big whoop.

  Since Alan Mac already thought she’d invented one imaginary man, she didn’t relish him thinking she’d dreamed up another. Sure, she could have him talk to Jamaica, and Dougal for that matter, but what had the guy done? Asked if she was happy. Sure it was freaky, but it wasn’t a crime.

  Kris decided to keep the info to herself. She needed the constable to take last night’s attack seriously. It could very well be a lead to whoever had killed that poor girl Kris had found near the loch and the other one, too.

  Stopping at the bank, Kris exchanged Mandenauer’s money for currency she could use, then moved on to the police station. Alan Mac stood out front. She might not have recognized him dressed in street clothes—a jacket, slacks, and white shirt—if not for the orange hair.

  Must be his day off. If chief constables had such things.

  Kris would have hurried over, except he was already talking to someone.

  “She was walking home from work last night,” the woman said, her shrill, frightened voice carrying. “From Drumnadrochit to our place is not so far. She’s walked it a hundred times. And now she’s gone. I ken ye found another strange girl, drowned just like the first one.”

  “Shh.” Alan Mac glanced around, saw Kris, who waved, and winced. “That’s not to be bandied aboot, Janet. Ye know that.”

  “I don’t care about the damn tourists. I want my daughter. So do the McCoys.” She tilted her head, her silver-flecked dark hair sliding across the shoulder of her Fair Isle sweater. “The Brodies maybe no. That Kelsie of theirs was a real handful. But I’m sure they’d be happy to know where she got to. Even if it is dragged to the bottom of the loch.”

  “She wasnae dragged to the bottom of the loch,” Alan said.

  “And how do you know that, Alan Mac?” The woman set her fists on her ample hips. “We have five girls missing.”

  An icy finger traced Kris’s neck. This was the first she’d heard of anyone gone missing. Of course Alan Mac appeared to operate on the less-is-less theory of police work. Less information for everyone meant less trouble for him.

  “I want that loch searched.” Janet put a finger in Alan’s face. She had to reach up quite a bit to do it, since Alan Mac towered over her by at least a foot. She didn’t seem to care. She’d probably known him since he ran “aboot” in diapers.

  “Ye know we cannae,” he said.

  “Willnae,” she corrected.

  “She’s too big and too deep.”

  “So ye’ll just wait for the bodies to appear?”

  “Ye know as well as I, Janet, that the loch never gives up its dead.”

  “The loch?” she asked. “Or the monster?”

  Then she put her nose in the air and walked away with more dignity than Kris would have been able to muster if her daughter were missing.

  Kris quickly took the space Janet had vacated. “Why does the loch never give up its dead?”

  Alan Mac sighed. He seemed tired already, and it wasn’t even 9:00 A.M.

  “The cold and the peat make everything sink like a stone. The water temperature means the bodies don’t bloat and come back up.” He shook his head. “If anyone was ever to get a camera down there it’d be a re
gular boneyard.”

  The disturbing image of dozens of skeletons dancing in an underwater ballroom filled Kris’s head. Where the hell had that come from?

  “If the loch never gives up her dead, how do you explain the body I stumbled over yesterday?”

  “‘Never’ might be a wee bit of an exaggeration,” Alan Mac allowed. “Sometimes the bodies get caught on logs or rocks. They might be held close enough to the surface, then they’d drift in. Or someone could find them and not want to be involved. So they leave them on the shore for wandering writer women to trip over.”

  Kris lifted her brows at the last, but he did have a point. Weird things happened, and around here they seemed to happen a lot.

  “You never told me girls were missing.”

  “Why would I? Did ye take them?”

  Kris didn’t bother to answer. “I found a body. A second body,” she clarified, in case he’d forgotten. “And now I hear there are five girls missing. Shouldn’t you call—” Kris was going to say the FBI, then remembered where she was. “Scotland Yard?”

  “We’ve got no proof any of those didn’t just leave on their own. No proof, either, that the dead girls were killed. People drown in Loch Ness all the time.”

  “All the time?” Kris repeated. “Seriously?”

  “Aye. The world is composed of fools.”

  She couldn’t argue with him there.

  “They fall either out of a boat,” he continued, “or into the drink. Within minutes, at that temperature, the whole body shuts down. Yer done for.”

  “I have a hard time believing that all these women fell out of boats, or tripped off a cliff and into the loch.”

  “Stranger things have happened,” Alan Mac muttered.

  “And what might those be?”

  He shook his head as if shaking off memories of those stranger things, then rubbed a hand over his face. “Is there something I can help ye with?”

  Kris stared at him for several seconds, but his stoic cop mode was back; the tired man she’d glimpsed, the one who might have told her something worth hearing, was gone.

  “I was attacked last night.”

  “When ye say ‘attacked’—,” he began.

  “Knocked over the head and dragged to the loch.” Skepticism filtered into the constable’s expression, and Kris lifted her hair away from her temple. “See?”

  His gaze narrowed on the goose egg, then shifted back to hers. “Ye better come inside and give me a statement.”

  *

  “Ye saw no one?” Alan Mac frowned at the sheet of paper on which he’d been taking notes as he asked and she answered questions. “Heard nothing?”

  “Until I came to and Liam Grant was there.”

  The constable looked up, and his frown deepened. “Who?”

  Kris decided not to mention that Liam was her imaginary friend. There was only so much she could take, and she’d taken it.

  “He said his name was Liam Grant.” He just hadn’t said it last night.

  “I dinnae know a Liam among the Grants of Drumnadrochit. Although…” His gaze drifted past her shoulder and upward. “There are some with that name in Dores.”

  Dougal had said the same thing. Perhaps Kris needed to take a trip to Dores. If she could discover Liam Grant living in an apartment, working a job, doing something normal, out in the world where people, other than her, could see him, she’d feel a helluva lot better.

  “What time was this?”

  Kris considered. She and Dougal had gone to dinner: then they’d watched the sun set near the loch, talked awhile, and driven back.

  “A little after nine o’ clock.”

  “That fits,” Alan Mac murmured.

  “What fits?”

  He glanced at her as if he’d forgotten she was there, and his lips pursed in annoyance. At himself or her Kris wasn’t sure and didn’t really care.

  “Carrie went missing shortly afterward,” he said.

  “You think whoever conked me and was interrupted trotted down the road and found her?”

  He spread his big, hard hands. “As I said, it fits.”

  Guilt flickered, but Kris shoved it resolutely away. She wasn’t at fault here. Whoever was snatching women and drowning them was. That person should feel guilty, although he or she wouldn’t. Because people who did such things didn’t feel.

  “The two you’ve found dead,” Kris began, and Alan Mac cast her a quick glance. “Do you know who they were?”

  He lowered his gaze to his notes. “Not yet.”

  “Not local then.”

  “No.”

  “What’s your next step?” Kris asked.

  Alan Mac had removed his jacket and sat at his desk in his shirtsleeves. Understandable. In sharp contrast to the nip in the air outside, inside was stuffy and hot. He leaned forward, placing his elbows on the desk and his head in his hands. “I don’t know.”

  The sleeve on his left arm pulled up. A black line encircled his biceps. It appeared to begin, or perhaps end, much thicker than it ended, or perhaps began, and did not resemble any of the tattoos she’d seen encircling biceps in the states. Those usually had thorns, stars, feathers—his was just a line.

  Of course she wasn’t in the states and Alan Mac wasn’t an American. She had no idea what was common in Scotland. Perhaps such a line indicated membership in whatever military service they had here.

  She very nearly asked, but Alan Mac straightened and his shirt slid back into place. “We’ll search,” he said. “We have searched after every disappearance.”

  “But you haven’t found.”

  He shook his head. “You’ve seen the terrain around the loch?”

  “Some,” Kris agreed. She really needed to see more. But not right now. There were going to be constables all over the place.

  “Mountains. Forests. Villages. Roads. It’s a searchers’ worst nightmare.”

  “With five potential bodies,” Kris began, then paused.

  “What?” Alan Mac asked.

  “Five have been reported. I’m thinking, since you know about them, that they’re local?” Alan Mac nodded. “But you weren’t looking for the dead girls, because you didn’t know.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “You have five locals missing and two dead strangers. What about tourists? Students? Hikers? It could take weeks for people to figure out they’ve gone missing and where. What if your victims were missing, but you just didn’t know it yet?”

  Alan Mac groaned. “Yer just a ray of sunshine, aren’t ye now?”

  Kris shrugged. Truth was truth, and she couldn’t help but say it.

  “On the bright side,” she continued, “I can’t see how that many bodies could be hidden regardless of the terrain.”

  “I doubt anyone’s been hidin’ anything,” he muttered.

  “You think they’re all in the loch, don’t you?”

  Alan Mac’s eyes met hers, and he nodded.

  *

  After that, there wasn’t much left to do. Alan Mac said he’d be in touch. Kris said he knew where to find her. He strode off barking names, and officers scurried toward him as if a five-star general—or whatever the equivalent rank in the Highlands—had summoned them.

  “Definitely military,” Kris muttered. The underlings practically saluted him.

  Alan Mac seemed capable. So why then were there so many missing? Why did he seem not to have a clue as to a culprit? And how many more would disappear before this was through?

  Kris made one more stop before she returned to Loch Side Cottage. Unfortunately, Dougal wasn’t in.

  “He’s off to…” The young girl left in charge of the front door scowled mightily as she tried to remember. “Belgium?”

  “Why would he go to Belgium?”

  “Maybe it was Bordeaux.” She cocked her red head. “Bolivia? Somewhere that starts with a B.”

  Terrific.

  “Again I ask ‘why?’”

  “Ach.” The girl waved her han
d. “He travels all over the world.”

  “Because…?”

  “I thought ye said ye knew him.” The girl put her hands atop the plaid that draped her hips.

  “I do.”

  “Well, if that’s the case, then ye’d know he goes on these trips a few times a year. Gotta buy bric-a-brac and the like for the gift shop.”

  “Isn’t the gift shop full of Scottish gifts?”

  “Not all of them are made in Scotland, ye ken?” Kris shook her head, and the girl leaned over, lowering her voice. “China.”

  “The gifts are made in China?”

  “Most of the plastic and the toys. Ye think anyone in this country would make inflatable Nessies for a competitive price?”

  Probably not.

  “He also likes to offer wines of the world in the restaurant,” she continued. “He’d never serve anything he hadnae tried first himself.”

  “When will he be back?” Kris asked.

  “Before the weekend. We’re too busy for him not to be here then.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Kris found it odd that Dougal hadn’t told her he was leaving for Belgium.

  Or Bordeaux.

  Maybe Bolivia.

  Then again, they were friends. The kiss and their shared lack of belief in the unbelievable aside, they had barely gotten past the acquaintance stage. Why should he?

  She returned to Loch Side Cottage. Several law enforcement officers stared dispiritedly at the tramped-down mud and grass near the loch.

  “Good luck with that,” Kris muttered, and headed inside.

  Had her attacker known there would be a bus arriving with the dawn, the footprints of the tourists obliterating any and all evidence? Seemed far-fetched, but what didn’t these days?

  Once in the front door, Kris paused. Something wasn’t right.

  She scanned the room. Everything appeared to be where she thought she’d left it.

  Maybe.

  This wasn’t her house. Had that lamp been so near the edge of that table? Had she neglected to close the cabinet over the sink? Or was it one of those that popped open by itself?

  The doors to both her bedroom and the bath were flung wide. No one in there that she could see. Of course why would she see them? Anyone in her cottage when she wasn’t would not want to be seen.