“Thank you for letting us look around,” Jean said.
The others chimed in with appropriate courtesies. Alasdair handed the box with the glass disc off to Jean, who tucked it into her bag. “Just one more thing,” he said.
Picking up her purse, Minty looked sideways at him, making it clear the interview was at an end and he was overstaying his welcome. “Yes?”
“Did both Wallace and Angus participate in the dig at Ferniebank?”
“They stopped by from time to time to supervise.” Minty walked briskly to the entrance hall, her footsteps sounding like the rat-tat of a snare drum, only to stop dead beside the pram. In her black clothing, she resembled the bad fairy leaning over Sleeping Beauty’s cradle. And yet her posture wasn’t malicious, but drooped like a wilted plant . . . With a snap of her spine she straightened, lunged for the staircase, ripped aside and then replaced the barrier rope. Her steps beat time up the stairs, dwindled across the ceiling, and were gone.
Chapter Twenty-five
Jean discovered that Minty had not monopolized all the air in the room after all, and inhaled. “It’s almost two. I’ve got to go interview Ciara.” For my sins, she added only to herself.
“Stopped by the dig from time to time.” Alasdair repeated Minty’s parting words and frowned.
“You’ve seen the ghost of Isabel, have you?” asked Michael. “The one in the drawing?”
“Oh yeah,” Jean said. “Ironic that all three of the Rutherford men are dead but the ghost of Isabel is still walking. Running, rather.”
“You’re dead a wee bit longer than you’re alive,” said Alasdair.
Rebecca was looking at Queen Mary’s letter. “Cool!”
“You’re the expert,” Jean said. “Does that say what that label says it says?”
“Or is it the sort of secret message smuggled about in musical instruments?” asked Alasdair.
“Can’t tell you a thing, can I?” Jean whispered, and smiled at his bow of acknowledgment.
Rebecca leaned closer to the glass encasing the letter. The lamp came on, illuminating her blooming complexion, a contrast to Minty’s sucked-dry-of-blood coloring. “This looks like Mary’s writing. She was known for her Italian hand, as it was called.” Under her breath she murmured, “ ‘. . . it is esie to be judgeit quhat was my countenance . . . I declarit unto him my seiknes . . .’ Yes, she’s thanking the Sinclairs for their hospitality while visiting the sacred well, a queen not staying with the hoi polloi in the hospice. Here’s something about a relic, but that’s where the paper is torn. Maybe she handed over a relic as a bread-and-butter gift.”
“Any Catholic monarch worth their sacramental oil would have a cartload of splinters from the true cross,” said Jean, “enough bones to build a dinosaur, shreds of clothing . . .”
“And apparently Jesus had multiple foreskins,” said Michael.
Rebecca made a face at him. “I’m sure there were relics aplenty at Ferniebank, for healing purposes and all.”
“Now the faithful stop by the shop and buy refrigerator magnets.” With one last quizzical look at the inscription, the drawing of Isabel, and the empty case of the harp, Alasdair led the way toward the entrance hall while Jean turned off the lights. The artifacts winked out, swallowed by shadow. The TV screen glowed silver, then faded. Leaving the shutters open, she skimmed toward the door, wondering if Isabel’s painted eyes shifted to watch her go by.
Alasdair, Michael, and Rebecca were standing next to the reception desk, eyeing an array of photographs. Some were antique and others fairly recent, although the fashions of just twenty years ago looked almost as odd as bustles and dinghy-sized hats.
Jean gazed up at ranks of soldiers, a suffragists’ parade, groups of barefooted children. A picture featuring a row of school-uniform-clad teenagers had their names printed at the bottom, including some familiar ones. A svelte Noel Brimberry stood between a positively willowy Polly Elliot and a rather punkish Valerie Trotter, all three posing with the adolescent self-absorption they were now decrying in their own children, such being the cycle of life.
The woman standing with them was Minty Rutherford, as unchanged as though she’d whisked through a time tunnel to the present. She’d said that teaching the local schoolchildren domestic skills became a career. As for the man beside her . . . Ah. Jean recognized him from the photo on Minty’s mantelpiece. Here was Wallace in his role as headmaster.
Above the group photos, Angus’s long face gazed down from a formal portrait, not smiling but looking almost startled, as though caught in some sort of act. Next to him hung a portrait of his uncle Wallace, a jowlier, gravity-ridden variation of the same face with a smile that was both knowing and mischievous. A third man was similarly equine-featured, but wore the slicked-down hair and high stiff collar of a century earlier. A thin brass plaque on the ornate frame of his photo read, “Gerald Rutherford. 1862–1919.”
“Look at him,” Jean said. “He’s all very sober and respectable, but there’s something about his eyes—you know, a sort of bulge, like the top of a can that’s spoiled.”
“He could see ghosts,” said Alasdair. “So can we. Are we a bit off, then?”
“I’ll not be answering that,” Michael said.
Rebecca collected the pram. “Gerald lived in an era of mediums and spiritualists. Actually having that supernatural tickle must have given him entry to many a party.”
“He was a recluse, though. Alone with his ghosts and his fancies.” Alasdair opened the door.
“In a way, he’s haunting Ferniebank as surely as Isabel is.” Jean turned away from the photos. “First Gerald and then Wallace holed up at Ferniebank—the crazy uncles keeping themselves in the attic. Gerald had at least one son to be Wallace’s father, but did Wallace have kids?”
Michael shook his head. “Noel was saying that the Stanelaw branch of the Rutherfords died out with Angus.”
Footsteps clipped across the floor upstairs. A sudden screech made everyone jump. . . . Oh. They were hearing a paper shredder, its banshee shrieks starting and stopping abruptly. “What’s she destroying up there?” Alasdair demanded with a frown.
“Hopefully nothing more than Angus’s love letters,” said Jean.
Logan came up the outside steps. “All finished here? I’ll be locking up, then.”
“Constable, you might consider mentioning to Mrs. Rutherford . . .” Alasdair’s words bounced like popcorn off Logan’s bulldog face. “Ah, never mind.”
With Alasdair’s help, Michael lifted Linda’s magic coach down the steps to the sidewalk, Rebecca gesturing like a traffic cop alongside. Jean looked back through the open door just as darkness fell over the museum—Logan had closed the shutters in the main room.
So the burning-glass wasn’t what it seemed. Instead of focusing and illuminating the story of Ferniebank, it simply reflected its viewer’s own desires. As with the original story of Isabel and the squiggle on the inscription, perception was reality. And for all her professed pragmatism, even Minty was not at all immune from wishful thinking. Go figure, Jean told herself. What else was new?
Alasdair called from the sidewalk, “Jean, it’s gone two.”
With a sigh, she abandoned her cogitations—not unlike abandoning a mine-working, leaving an open shaft the unwary could fall down—and joined the others crossing the street. “Gerald’s time, with its mediums and everything, wasn’t much different from our own. People are still yearning for meaning and explanation.”
“Even if they’re holding their hands over their ears and humming when you give them the real thing,” added Alasdair with a glance toward the garden gate, but Ciara was no longer holding forth.
“Ah,” Michael said, “but what’s the real thing, eh?”
In answer, Linda emitted an indignant cry. Rebecca turned the pram toward the Reiver’s Rest. “Time for a change and a feed. Let me know the next installment of the breathtaking serial.”
“I’m holding out for ‘and they lived happily ev
er after,’ ” Jean told her. “See you later.”
“I’d best be activating my pipes,” said Michael, and opened the door of the pub.
The interior of the Granite Cross seemed even less ventilated than when they’d left, steam substituted for air. Michael reclaimed his bagpipes from Noel and took them outside. A moment later the wails of bag-inflating and drone-tuning echoed from the garden. Several people gathered up their provender and headed outside for the show, but not before Ciara made her entrance, swimming upstream as usual. “Ah, Jean! Bang on time—very good!”
Alasdair made a dance step sideways and back, trying to slip away into the crowd.
Too late. Ciara graced him with her sweetest smile. “Alasdair, I said it was my shout. Name your poison.”
Flinching visibly at her choice of words, he returned, “Thank you just the same. I’ll—” He stopped, staring at the front door. “Later, ladies.”
Jean looked around to see Delaney just inside the room, peering around myopically. Alasdair wove through the crowd to his side and started speaking before Delaney could open his mouth. Delaney listened, scowled, and pulled Alasdair back through the doorway. Jean glimpsed three uniformed constables on the sidewalk outside before the door swung shut.
“Good. They’ll keep each other busy whilst we have ourselves a bit of a chin-wag,” Ciara said. “Beer? Lemonade? Cider?”
Oh, to be in two places at once. Resigning herself to obeying Newton’s laws, Jean found her notebook and pen in her bag. “Nothing for me, thanks. Where would you like to sit?”
“In the snug, back this way—it’s a wee bit noisy in here, isn’t it? Not the pipes,” Ciara amended, as the bravura peal of “Blue Bonnets over the Border” burst through the back door. “They’re the instrument of the country. Along with the harp, of course.”
“Val’s got a harp tattoo. Is she a musician?”
“I don’t believe so, no,” Ciara said over her shoulder. With a sigh, Jean followed her prey and nemesis into an alcove in the far corner of the pub, an intimate enough setting to merit the designation of “snug.” Two young men were playing billiards, spending as much time balancing their pint glasses on the edge of the table as lining up their shots. To one side sat three small tables, one unoccupied. “Here we are.” Ciara deposited her glass of white wine on the table, her woven shoulder-bag on the floor, and herself on a chair.
Jean took the seat providing a view that squeaked past the corner to the front door. “Is this where you had your dinner with Angus and Minty and everyone last night?”
“Oh aye,” said Ciara, not asking how Jean knew about that. “All the usual suspects, eh?”
Jean didn’t retort, “So you think murder is a joke?” Ciara simply wasn’t leaping to the same conclusions a cynical journalist and an even more cynical ex-cop were leaping to.
“Minty, Angus, Noel, Polly, and Keith,” Ciara counted off. “Val was working in the kitchen, behind the scenes so to speak, and Zoe and Shannon were rushing to and fro, and Derek . . . Well, Derek has a bit of a jumbled aura just now, but he’s a good lad.”
A good lad with a habit of sneaking around Ferniebank, Jean thought.
“Polly and Noel were popping up and down—Saturday night in the pub, mind, and the local musicians playing in the front room. Minty was getting at Noel to upgrade his catering, though, just between us, Jean, I’m finding it hard to trust a cook who’s that thin. Doesn’t eat enough of her own food, does she?”
The issue of trust went beyond body shape. “Her luncheon was tasty enough, haggis and all.”
“She had Polly cooking, just as she once had Helen cooking. Minty, she stands on the bridge and gives orders whilst the oarsmen—oarswomen—do the heavy lifting.”
Jean did not disagree. “You’ve known everyone here in Stanelaw for a long time?”
“A few years, aye.”
Tempted as Jean was to ask again about Valerie, who had not been in Stanelaw for a few years, that would come too close on the heels of Alasdair’s admonition to Ciara to ’fess up. Right now she was playing good cop. “Last night, did Angus say where’d he been?”
“He tours about to get away from Minty. Brussels, London, the Yorkshire Dales. She means well, but she’s treating him like a dog or a horse, not a husband.”
Without commenting on Ciara’s use of the present tense, Jean jotted down the particulars. “He was with you at Ferniebank Saturday morning, before Minty knew he was back.”
“That’s hardly the sinister plot Alasdair’s making it out to be.” Ciara’s laugh echoed the clatter of the billiard balls. “I didn’t know whether Angus meant to make his reappearance just yet is all. I should have organized myself better, so as not to put Shan on the spot, poor lass. But you mind what they say about discretion and valor—and working with Minty takes a wheen of both.”
No kidding. “You and Angus, ah, must have seen eye to eye on your plans for Ferniebank.”
“We got on well enough, Angus and I.”
Saturday morning they weren’t getting on too well. There was another evasion, which, as Alasdair had said, left Jean to make assumptions. And what she assumed was that yes, Angus had been put out at some aspect of Ciara’s schemes, but Ciara had dismissed his concerns.
“As for the plans,” Ciara went on, “they’ve been finalized and construction’s beginning next month. Keith has it all in hand, though Minty was that, well, we’ll say interested, she kept after him for the details. If we all vanished the night, Ferniebank Conference and Healing Center would still be rising from the ruins.”
“Angus did vanish. So did Wallace, less than two weeks ago.”
Ciara looked down at her soft white hands, idly rotating a ring formed like a dragon holding its tail in its mouth. “As the prayer says, in the midst of life we are in death. Unless it’s the other way round, in the midst of death we are in life. I never can remember. It’s a shame folk are frightened of dying, when it’s no more than translation to another plane.”
Jean bit her tongue before she could ask, “Would you feel that way if your skirts were on fire and a gang of brutes was coming at you, swords raised?” Instead she tried, “How did you find Ferniebank to begin with?”
“I once worked for a company specializing in wee booklets for tourists. Several included the story of Ferniebank’s ‘gray lady.’ Whilst I was setting the tours for Mystic Scotland, I stopped by and found that Wallace was an old soul like me. One who’s aware of other dimensions.”
Does that mean, Jean wondered, that Alasdair and I are antediluvian souls? She tried another leading question. “You said Friday that you and Keith would have to come back after nightfall to see Isabel’s ghost. A shame you didn’t make it that night. You might have caught—er—whoever chipped away the inscription. And last night you might have been able to help Angus.”
Ciara toyed with her ring, her springy red curls curtaining her profile. “Well,” she said at last, “you and Alasdair, you didn’t need eavesdroppers and trespassers just then, did you? With him being so meticulous and all.”
Jean felt her tongue cleave to the roof of her mouth and her face flush.
“Though meticulous can lead onto pernickety. See Minty.” Ciara looked up, her blue eyes, a more luxuriant shade than Alasdair’s, dancing. “Birds do it, bees do it, you and Alasdair do it, Keith and I do it—nothing embarrassing about it. A bit of rumpy pumpy is all to the good, isn’t it? Like music and a good meal. Gather your rosebuds.”
Jean thought of wispy Keith, needing his food to keep his energy up and his client happy. She thought of Valerie gathering rosebuds and coming up with the thorn that was Derek. She thought of Alasdair as meticulous, even fussy—yeah, he and Minty did have a few traits in common. She thought that Ciara maybe had gone on the offensive to deflect uncomfortable questions about coming and going surreptitiously at Ferniebank.
A drop of sweat trickled down her back beneath her blouse, drawing her follicles erect like the delicate touch of Alasdair’s f
ingertips. Or like the ectoplasmic tickle of a ghost. She cleared her throat to recall the meeting to order, and realized too late that was Alasdair’s trick. Ciara acknowledged the reference with a smile of such surpassing sweetness Jean wanted to ask for a shot of insulin on the side. She said, “Ferniebank. You’ve made some major discovery, it sounds like. Something about the Sinclairs? Or the Saint Clairs, rather?”
“You’ve heard about the book, then? Your sources are good as Minty’s.” Ciara’s eyes went from dancing to glinting, humor sharpened into something between glee and zealotry. “That’s why I asked everyone to dinner last night, to celebrate Wallace’s and my grand discovery and the book deal. Although, if the truth be told . . .”
If only, Jean thought.
“ . . . I let the news slip to Shannon on the Friday, whilst we were planning itineraries—that girl should be sitting her exams again, she’s a bit dyslexic is all. I’m sure Shan told her family and I myself told Angus and Minty earlier the Saturday, with them being investors and the like.”
“The discovery and the book will make their investment pay off, right?”
“As a side effect, aye. Not that I’m turning away money—useful item, money. But the bottom line is nonmaterial. Folk are yearning for spirituality and connection. For meaning. You’re writing about that yourself, aren’t you now?”
“In a way, yes.”
“My life’s journey brought me to Ferniebank, where I met Wallace, a fellow traveler. Now his journey is ended and his part in the story is over. But he’s passed on to me the responsibility of moving the story toward harmony and away from the tyranny of the religious thought-police. I’ve organized a press conference for the day we break ground at Ferniebank.”
If Ciara wasn’t perfectly sincere, Jean would eat her notebook. “You can go ahead and tell me. My magazine’s a monthly. Anything I write up now won’t be published until January.” She didn’t add that she could call Miranda’s contact at The Scotsman and have the story in tomorrow’s paper—she was in this business out of curiosity, not competitiveness. And Ciara was obviously bursting with the news. She probably couldn’t keep Christmas and birthday presents under wraps, either.
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