“They found me. They’ve paid for the privilege of mucking about in medieval Scottish mud, remember. Don’t criticize. Even if Dennis is only here because he needs a liberal arts course to get his bachelor’s in business.”
“Business graduates get higher salaries than we poor sods of historians do,” Michael conceded. “Just as long as he can use a trowel.”
“The other two students might not be as—er—startling. But I’ve never met them before, either. They’ll be here tomorrow.”
“We’ll let the morn take care of itsel’.” Michael stopped by a red Fiat with a “Made in Czechoslovakia” sticker on the windshield and opened the trunk. Boot, it was called here. Wellies, calf-high rubber boots. She had to get a pair for that medieval mud.
Her mind was still a jumble. Rebecca yawned, her jaw creaking. Now I get sleepy, that figures. But it’s all right now, I’m here, Michael’s here, everything’s okay, I can rest… . I have to warn him about the dig, she reminded herself. It’s American gossip, he won’t have heard.
She stowed her overnight bag, opened the car door, and confronted a steering wheel. Oh, of course—they drive on the left here. With a chuckle, Michael escorted her to the passenger side, tucked her in, and climbed behind the wheel. They regarded each other gravely, alone at last.
Tomorrow, Rebecca told herself, swimming a lazy backstroke in the deep blue of his eyes. We’ll talk business tomorrow.
“I missed you,” he said. His forefinger touched her cheek.
She tilted her face against his hand. “I missed you, especially when I was working with copies from the Dun Iain collection.”
“There I was, unpackin’ the artifacts I’d brought back, and I’d catch mysel’ holdin’ something and thinkin’, ah, Rebecca packed this.” He mimed Hamlet considering the skull of Yorick.” I’ve been makin’ a proper gowk oot of mysel’ ower you.”
“If I had a nickel for every time I caught myself staring at my typewriter and seeing you, I’d have had enough to buy myself a first class ticket.” She leaned over the gearshift to kiss him.
A tentative nibble, and then a firm kiss, and then an exploratory expedition that made Rebecca glad she’d brushed her teeth. She came up for air. No doubt about it, it was a lifetime of burred ‘r’s and rounded vowels had made his lips and tongue wonderfully flexible.
His face swam, not quite focused, before her. She’d never known a man who could steam up her contact lenses. As her vision cleared she saw, several yards beyond Michael’s back, the parking lot attendant leaning on his windowsill and taking in the sights with a broad grin.
“Worked yoursel’ to a bone,” Michael said disapprovingly and released her rib cage. He started the car and caught the eye of the attendant. His brows saluted cheerfully. The man laughed, and when they pulled alongside his booth he waved them on without accepting payment.
The Fiat swung out of the parking lot onto the main road just as another car swung in. Rebecca gasped, certain it was going to hit them headlong. But it passed by smoothly to their right. With a sigh of relief, she settled against the seat. The tendons in her neck and shoulders were slowly unknotting, and her eyelashes were gaining weight. She watched bemusedly as the streets of first Prestwick and then Ayr unfurled themselves, lined with sturdy stone buildings. Only the passing cars, the advertisements, and the dress of the pedestrians—an occasional punk strutting like a peacock among pigeons—assured her that she hadn’t dropped into some time warp where the last two centuries co-existed.
To her right she caught a glimpse of the sea, shining blue gray in the full light of the sun. A pretty day—how fitting. She sighed happily. “And where are you taking me, young Lochinvar?”
“To a hotel in Ayr. A B&B would’ve been cheaper, but less private.”
She turned her head against the headrest and looked appreciatively at his profile. His features were even, unremarkable except for the animation of mouth and brows. Thank goodness he hadn’t altered his bravado haircut, short brown strands framing his face, long ones down the back of his neck. He looked like a rock star, an intellectual, and a swashbuckler all in one.
“I booked a room wi’ two beds,” he went on, “if you dinna want to start quite where we left it last winter.”
They’d been colleagues for three months, lovers for only a week. It was almost a matter of starting over. “I intend to start where we left off. But if I don’t get some sleep soon, you’ll be starting without me.”
“Oh, take a snooze, by all means. I dinna have a taste for necrophilia.” He shifted gears. The car plunged into a traffic circle, which in the morning rush hour resembled a miniature version of the chariot race from “Ben Hur”. Flung by some kind of centrifugal force, the car whizzed out the other side right under the fender of a huge truck.
Rebecca blanched. She’d have to learn to drive all over again.
Unperturbed, Michael shifted again. His wrist caught the hem of his kilt and flipped it up his thigh.
“Just a quick nap,” said Rebecca with a slow smile.
He glanced at her expression, down at his leg, and laughed. The car followed a residential street to the driveway of a sprawling red sandstone building that had been new in Victoria’s reign. “Here we are.”
Rebecca hovered, firmly convinced she’d left something behind. She counted her two suitcases and overnight bag, his suitcase and garment bag, a battered attaché case that looked as if he’d used it as a football and a long tartan bag with a handle. Golf clubs? He didn’t play golf. Then she realized he’d brought his bagpipes. All right! It was Michael’s music that had first touched her heart.
At the registration desk Rebecca declined breakfast with a polite mutter. She sleepwalked up the stairs, then into a large bedroom and across it to a dressing table, where she plopped down and took out her contact lenses. That was better, even if she did see the garden below the broad bay window as a smear of green, pink, and yellow.
Michael was looking at her indulgently. “I’ll do some shoppin’ whilst you evolve yoursel’ back into a higher species.”
“Something higher than a slime slug, anyway,” she said with a laugh.
He ruffled her hair, kissed the tip of her nose, and left.
Rebecca stood basking in the lingering heat of his smile, still mesmerized by the swing and sway of the kilt above his knees, its movement like the lilt in his voice. Then, with a wry smile at herself, she washed and pulled on a flannel nightgown and a pair of socks—it might be June, but it was also Scotland. She crawled beneath the covers of one of the beds, reached behind her and pulled one of the thick pillows like a sack of cement from beneath her head. There. She could sleep now. Sleep.
The plaster dadoes surrounding the ceiling light reminded her of the ceilings of Dun Iain, plastered as intricately as wedding cakes. What if she woke up and discovered she was still there, that she’d dreamed the intervening six months, that Michael was leaving for Scotland tomorrow and their ordeal by separation was still ahead of them… .
The roar of the jet engines reverberated in her bones. Her body felt weightless, pressed into the bed by the heavy covers. She was in the airplane, ensconced regally in first class, watching the attendant spread a tablecloth over her tray table. No, she was lying across the table. Michael approached. The sgian dubh glittered smooth and hard in his hand… .
Rebecca jerked back into wakefulness. Good grief, Dr Freud, I’m not that nervous about seeing him again! Thank you Adele, for talking about ghosts and murders.
With a snort she turned and burrowed into the covers. She would deal with Adele and Rudesburn and their ghosties and ghoulies tomorrow. Tomorrow would be sufficient unto the evil thereof, or however that phrase went. Rebecca smiled. Today was sufficient unto joy.
1
Chapter Two
A strange noise pulled Rebecca floundering from a dream as deep and dark as water cut by nameless predators. She groped for the eyeglasses she’d left on the bedside table. What she grabbed was her watch.
Almost noon.
She was in a sunny room, bed linen crisp and white, the polished oak of dresser and armoire tortured into Victorian opulence. The room would have reminded her of her grandmother’s house, if her grandmother hadn’t lived in a pink and lime condo in Tampa.
There was the noise again, a kind of trilling gargle. Her eye fell on the telephone on the wall between the beds. That was the culprit. She reached for the receiver. “Hello?”
“Good mornin’. Is this Rebecca, by any chance?”
The warm smile in the man’s voice elicited one from her. “Yes, it is.”
“Colin MacLeod here, from Fort Augustus. I daresay Michael’s mentioned me to you a time or two, if not nearly so much as he’s mentioned you to me.”
“Oh hello, Colin! Yes, he’s mentioned you quite a bit. Even showed me a snapshot of the two of you out hill-climbing. I hear you helped him do the geophysical survey at Rudesburn.”
“The North of Scotland Hydroelectric Board doesn’t mind my doin’ a wee bit of consultin’ on the side.” He hesitated. “I’m sorry if I woke you, but I need to speak to Michael.”
“He’s not here. I’ve still got my days and nights mixed up, so he went out shopping. I’d be glad to take a message.” Rebecca perched on the edge of the bed, her sock-clad feet swinging, and smothered a groan. Now what?
Colin emitted a sound that he might have intended to be a laugh, but which didn’t quite achieve humor. “Sorry, but it’s a right awkward bit of muck, and no mistake. Laurence Baird rang me from Rudesburn, lookin’ for Michael. Just to let him know what to expect. Laurence doesn’t realize the implications, of course. And it is quite a bargain for them.”
“Yes?” prodded Rebecca.
Colin took the plunge. “You already know about the American archeologist, Jeremy Kleinfelter.”
Oh, lord. Had that unsavory rumor washed up on British shores already? She replied cautiously, “I’ve never met him, but I know people who know him. By all accounts, his ego matches his brilliance.”
“It’s the latter that caused the RDG—the Rudesburn Development Group, the villagers—to hire him. To direct a quick excavation before doin’ some preservation work and buildin’ a museum—right?”
“Right. Like what’s been done at Jedburgh, just down the road.”
“Well, Kleinfelter’s made a bargain with a production company to film the dig. For a record for the Historic Buildings and Monument lot and the Museum. The film crew’ll work for free—if they can also make a program for the telly about…” He cleared his throat and assumed a sonorous announcer’s voice, “… the haunted convent and the lost treasure of the spectral nun.”
“Oh, I see,” said Rebecca. “The ghostly Prioress and the convent treasury looted by Henry VIII. They’ll say Henry uncharacteristically left something behind.”
“When reality fails,” Colin said, “make something up.”
“Great.” Adele had certainly come to the right place. Rebecca was beginning to wonder if the woman was clairvoyant. As for Kleinfelter—well, publicity was a necessary part of any excavation, but she’d expected the man to be keeping a lower profile after the scandal on his last dig. “I’m sure Michael won’t be thrilled at their sensationalizing the dig. But a film for free—you can’t beat that.”
“You maybe could, Rebecca, when I tell you that Kleinfelter hired Plantagenet Productions, chief producer Sheila Fitzgerald.”
Rebecca’s brain lurched. The line hummed in her ear. In the garden, a bird sang lustily. Someone banged down the hall outside the door. “You mean,” she said between her teeth, “the same Sheila Fitzgerald Michael knew in London two years ago or else you wouldn’t be calling to warn him. Me. Us.”
“So he owned up to that one.” Rebecca couldn’t tell whether Colin were amused or relieved. “Aye, the very same. She left her job as publicity director at the British Museum to form the film company.”
“Sheila-bloody-Fitzgerald is what Michael called her.”
“I’m not surprised. It’s you he… .” Colin managed a genuine laugh this time. “Well, you know your own business.”
Rebecca took a deep breath. “I certainly hope so. I’ll break the news to him. That’s not the only thing I have to warn him about.” Rebecca collapsed back onto the bed, still holding the receiver, and changed the subject. “You’re not quite what I expected, Colin.”
“Eh?”
“Your accent isn’t as thick as Michael’s. I mean, he speaks perfect BBC Oxbridge when he wants to, but he does tend toward broad Scots, especially when he’s tired, or upset, or tipsy.”
“I’m a Highlander,” Colin replied. “A teuchter, Michael calls me—just takin’ the mickey out of me, mind you. A country bumpkin, you’d say in the States. My ancestors gave up Gaelic for English only two hundred years ago, during the English occupation. Michael’s ancestors come from all over—Moray, Argyll, Galloway; the Lowlanders among them spoke Scots, not English.”
“So he’s a good generic Scot, if you’ll pardon the expression?” Rebecca asked.
“More self-conscious, I’d say. Some of his vocabulary is deliberately old-fashioned. He never spoke so broadly until he came back from London. His mates there kept slaggin’ him off for bein’ a yokel.”
“So while some people work hard to lose their accents he broadened his.” Rebecca grinned indulgently. “I always said he had a wee tartan chip on his shoulder.”
“Tenacity is one of Michael’s more endearing traits,” Colin said with a laugh.
“I’d call it stubborn, myself.” She yawned. “Thank you for taking the time to call, Colin. I think.”
“You’re welcome. Do get our Dr. Campbell to bring you up to Fort Augustus. Anjali—my wife—makes a wonderful curry.”
“I can’t wait to meet you both. Good bye.” With Colin’s laugh still warming her ear, she hung up the receiver and pulled up the bedclothes.
Jeremy Kleinfelter. Sheila Fitzgerald. Adele, the missionary to The Other Side. At least Dennis was normal. A normal nerd. The Haunted Convent. Whatever had happened to good old-fashioned scientific research?
Nothing. The concept of dispassionate science was a modern one. Historically, legend preceded science, alchemy preceded chemistry, and magic preceded philosophy. Every science had skeletons in its closet. So did everyone. She herself had just broken an engagement when she’d met Michael. Then she’d almost let herself be swept off her feet by a smooth-talking lawyer, instead of homing immediately in on her thistle-covered colleague.
Rebecca sank into the pillow, drifting into a dream. She wandered through a ruined church, lost and alone, calling for Michael. He wasn’t there. No one was there. It was raining and cold, and she was frightened.
Someone touched her. She jerked awake. Michael sat on the edge of the bed. “Here, sleepyhead, it’s past two, time to be up and aboot. Did you have a good snooze?”
Her mind was fuzzed by the lint of her dream. She catapulted into his arms, almost knocking him off the bed. “No. I had nightmares.”
He rocked her, making soothing noises into her ear, and slowly her mind cleared. Her nightgown matched his kilt, she saw, both in blue-green Campbell tartan. He’d given her the gown for Christmas, a reminder that a spouse’s tartan counted as one’s own. She smiled, straightened, and stretched. “My biorhythms must be scrambled. Sorry.”
“For needin’ a hug? You’re entitled, lass.” Michael offered her a quick kiss and then indicated a plastic sack lying on the foot of the bed. “I stopped by Safeway’s and got some things for a picnic. It’s a bonny day, seventy degrees. A real scorcher. The sunlight’ll clear away your cobwebs.”
“When I lived in Houston seventy was cool.” Rebecca crawled out of the bed and staggered around the room collecting her clothes. “A Safeway? Here?”
“You’ve no fallen off the edge of the world.”
“I’d rather thought I’d come to its center.”
Grinning, he hoisted a bottle of mineral water in one hand and
a bottle of whisky in the other. “I own Safeway’s brand of Scotch is no temptation, but I lost my head and bought a bottle of Cragganmore. Single-malt. There’re two things a Scot likes naked…”
“His knees?” Rebecca asked from the bathroom door.
“Dinna step on my punch line. There’re two things a Scot likes naked, and one o’ them is whisky.”
Rebecca laughed. She was tempted to rush across the room and push him down onto the bed, but the anticipation was part of the pleasure. And she didn’t want to repay his attentions with a growling stomach. “Just a minute,” she called, and whisked into a skirt, blouse, and tapestry vest. She inspected herself in the mirror. Her color was better, but her hair was beyond redemption. She hoped she wouldn’t detract from Michael’s sartorial splendor.
She said to the mirror, “Colin called”. That came out just fine. It was the rest she had trouble with. Rebecca stuck out her tongue at her image in the glass. Damn Sheila.
*
Michael was standing by the door jangling his car keys. This time Rebecca went to the correct side of the car. “Where to?”
“Culzean Castle, a few miles doon the coast. The gardens are open ‘til sunset. Past ten in these airts.”
He guided the car out of town, following the coast highway. Rebecca looked around so intently she felt like a dog hanging out the window of the car, the clean air ruffling her hair, the colors and textures—green grass, gray stone, blue water—washing over and through her. Michael pointed out more than one ruined castle, crumbling untended into oblivion like abandoned gas stations in the United States. Rebecca shook her head. “At home—I use the term loosely—any one of those would be tarted up with hot dog stands and park rangers. But you have so many you can’t save them all.”
“Bluidy waste,” Michael agreed. “At least the Rudesburn folk realize what a treasure they have. I’m convinced the priory was done by Jean Moreau. John Morrow, whatever his name was.”
Treasure? Rebecca rolled her eyes. “Rudesburn was a daughter house of Melrose, not surprising they’d have the same master mason.”
Dust to Dust Page 2