Scottish Rite (Maggie Devereaux Book 1)

by Stephen Penner

  Maggie just nodded and sipped at her coffee. Still too hot.

  "And God forgive me, Maggie, but better you than me. That's horrible, I know, but I can't help it."

  "That's okay, Ellen," she assured her friend. "That's totally understandable. I'm scared too. And I know you don't mean it like that. Better no one at all, right?"

  Ellen's eyes widened even as her brows knitted together. "Aye, but that's just it. Somebody's going to be next. He's not going to stop. And the police haven't any idea what they're doing."

  "Come on, Ellen," Maggie tried to comfort her friend, but to no avail.

  "And what if—" Ellen grimaced. "What if the killer's someone we know?"

  Maggie cocked a skeptical eyebrow. "Like who?"

  Ellen shook her head and looked down. "I don't know. Just someone." She looked around to ensure no one was listening, then in a low voice, "What about Prof. Macintyre?"

  "Macintyre?" Maggie's voice was noticeably louder than her friend's and Ellen cringed slightly. But even as Maggie asked the question, her voice full of incredulity, she could hear Fionna's warning from their chance encounter in the reading room.

  "I'm just saying, 'what if,'" Ellen protested. She looked around again, then decision hardened in her features. "You didn't know this, but Kelly and Macintyre were sleeping together."

  Maggie's jaw dropped. She hadn't expected that little tidbit of information. But after a moment's consideration, she had to admit that it explained a lot about Kelly's opinion of men, and her demeanor in general. Maggie took a pensive sip from her coffee; it had cooled just enough to drink.

  "And more importantly," Ellen again checked for eavesdroppers, "he stole her research."

  The jaw dropped again. But then she could hear Kelly's drunken laughter. 'Don't let him read your notes.'

  Ellen went on. "Last year—almost the entire year—they were working together on some project. He kept promising her she'd get co-author credit when it was published. She was so excited. But she only told me and a couple of others. Macintyre had told her to stay quiet until the article was published. He said it was because of their affair. His wife would get angry that he was helping her. And the other students would be jealous. But then he just went and published under his own name. He took all the credit even though Kelly did almost all the work. He even got to give a lecture on it at some stupid conference in Amsterdam. Kelly was so angry!"

  Maggie took the story in silently. She noted the feeling of satisfaction she was experiencing as this totally unexpected story filled in so many gaps of her appraisals of both Kelly Anderson and Craig Macintyre. It made sense. To a point.

  "Wow. That's amazing," Maggie admitted. "I had no idea. —But murder?"

  "Well, that's not all," Ellen continued in hushed tones. "Kelly wasn't going to put up with it. She'd threatened to tell the dean. Or his wife. Macintyre was worried. He knew his career was over if it got out that he'd stolen the article from a student he was sleeping with. He kept trying to sweet-talk Kelly. Kept making all kinds of promises. But Kelly told me last week that she was finally going to put her foot down. She was going to give him an ultimatum. And a deadline."

  Maggie was still skeptical. "But what about Fionna? And the first girl, Annette? Was he sleeping with them too?"

  "Of course not. At least not with Fionna." Ellen seemed offended by the suggestion. "But Fionna knew about the plagiarism too. I'm not saying I have all the answers. I'm just worried. If he killed Fionna because she knew too much, well, then..."

  She didn't need to finish the sentence.

  "I'm sure you'll be all right, Ellen," Maggie reassured. "The police will catch him soon enough—whoever he is."

  "I know. I'm sorry." Ellen put her face in her hands. "It's just—It's just too much. I'm not handling it very well, I know." She sighed and looked up. "And exams are coming up soon. I just want to leave Aberdeen and go back to Inverness. But I have to finish the semester. I need these credits and they won't offer the same courses again until next fall. But right after exams I'm heading back to Inverness. Three weeks."

  "Good idea." Maggie's coffee was almost gone.

  "You should get away too," Ellen smiled weakly. "Go travel or something. Just get away."

  "Maybe I will," Maggie smiled over her cup. "But what I really want to do is help the police catch this lunatic."

  "Well, of course," Ellen swirled her coffee in her cup. "We all want to see him caught. But what can you do?

  That's what I'm trying to figure out.

  "Yeah, I don't know," Maggie said, looking down at the last of her coffee. "Nothing, I guess. "But I want to."

  She paused and then finished her drink.

  "Ellen, if you thought you might be able to do something that could help, would you? Even if it might be dangerous?"

  Ellen paused and looked her friend over carefully, obviously trying to decide whether she was still speaking hypothetically, or actually had some half-baked plan in mind. Apparently deciding on the former, she replied, "I don't know. I'd like to think I would, but I can't say for sure. I scare rather easily, I'm afraid. I don't know that I'd be brave enough."

  Maggie nodded thoughtfully.

  "But we can't do anything," Ellen concluded. "So I'm just glad I don't have to face that decision."

  Maggie smiled into the bottom of the bone-white porcelain cup. "Yeah."

  * * *

  After coffee with Ellen, Maggie spent the afternoon in a secluded study carrel on floor B-3, studying the divination spell she'd found until she could recite it by memory—in the Hamilton-Devereaux Old Gaelic. After studying, she met Iain for dinner. Following the disastrous ending of their first date, they had decided to get together for a quiet, and hopefully serial-killer-victim-free evening meal. The restaurant Iain had chosen, Venezia, was simple and pleasant and seemed to hold the promise of an uneventful evening.

  "That's too bad about Ellen," Iain said as he passed Maggie the basket of dinner rolls. "I hope she feels better soon."

  Maggie took a roll gladly. Having just coffee for lunch had not been a great idea. "Me, too. But I'm not too hopeful. She and Kelly were pretty good friends, I think. And she was friends with Fionna FitzSimmons, too."

  "Mmphm," Iain agreed, swallowing a bite of roll. "I can't imagine what it must be like to lose two close friends. And in that way."

  "Yeah, I know," Maggie replied. "I think she's just really scared. I mean, the police don't seem to be getting anywhere. The whole thing is just so frustrating. You feel so helpless."

  "Aye. But I'm sure," Iain tore off another piece of roll, "the police are doing all they can."

  "I know," Maggie picked up her own roll, then set it down again, unbitten. "But it just seems like they can't figure out where to start. I mean, there must be someone who saw something. Someone who knows something."

  Maggie paused while Iain chewed thoughtfully.

  "If you know something," Maggie continued, her gaze relocating from Iain's face to somewhere in the middle of the table, "or even just might know something ... you should tell the police, right?"

  Iain's eyes narrowed. "Maggie, do you know something about the murders? Something the police should know?"

  "No," she insisted even as the images of Clava Cairns and Kelly's body overlapped in her mind. "It's just— I don't know. I just feel so vulnerable."

  Iain greeted this shift in the conversation with some alarm.

  "Surely you're not in danger?" His voice held genuine concern.

  "Who knows," Maggie spun the roll absently around its small plate. "It hasn't escaped my notice that each of the victims so far has been a visiting female graduate student in languages. I knew the last two victims."

  She stopped herself from saying, 'and I'm living with the blackmailed mother of the first victim.'

  "I'm probably not really in any danger," she concluded, "but that doesn't mean I'm not worried."

  Iain nodded and extended his hand across the table. "Well, don't worry overmuch.
I'm here now. I'll watch over you."

  Maggie frowned and shook her head. "It's not that," she said without taking his hand. "I just feel so helpless and so useless. I want to help catch this guy so it'll all be over. But—"

  "Now, don't go doing anything rash," Iain admonished as he pulled his hand back, the concern again surfacing in his voice.

  "No," Maggie looked up with a half-smile, "of course not."

  "Besides," Iain picked up the last bite of his roll. "What can you do to help?"

  That's the question, isn't it? Maybe nothing. Maybe something.

  She didn't answer the question, but instead just sat quietly for several moments.

  "Iain?"

  "Yesff?" He swallowed the last of his roll.

  "If you could help," Maggie asked earnestly. "If you thought there was something you could do to help catch the killer, would you do it? Even if it were dangerous?"

  "Hmm," Iain exhaled audibly as he drummed his fingers on the table. "Even if it were dangerous, eh?"

  He thought a bit more, then answered, "Well, I suppose you'd have to, wouldn't you? I mean, it's only the right thing to do. Some poor girl's going to be next if they don't catch this lunatic soon. I think maybe you'd have that girl's death on your head a bit if you could've helped, but didn't."

  Maggie nodded, then picked up her dinner roll, bit off a sizeable piece, and chewed on that for a while too.

  31. Do You Believe in Magic? (Reprise)

  "Thanks for the ride home," Maggie opened the car door and climbed out. "And thanks for dinner."

  "My pleasure," Iain replied with a smile. He leaned over to be able to see Maggie where she stood outside the car. "I had a very good time."

  Maggie smiled, suddenly self-conscious. "Me too."

  A moment of awkwardness followed as Maggie contemplated the obvious rudeness of just slamming the door in Iain's face. It seemed the only option, however, other than leaving the door ajar and walking away.

  "Can I walk you to the door?" Iain asked at last.

  "Oh no, that's all right," she protested. "I'll be fine."

  "Are you sure?" Iain insisted, partially opening his own door.

  "Yes, it's all right, really. Just wait for me to make it inside."

  Iain closed his door again. "All right then," he said with a weak smile.

  Maggie smiled again too, but her eyes were suddenly distant as she waved goodbye and took hold of the door to close it.

  "Maggie—" Iain interrupted her movements.

  "Yes?"

  "Er, well," Iain stammered. "I—I just wanted to tell you that you look very pretty tonight. And I enjoyed spending the evening with you."

  Maggie smiled broadly, her eyes no longer distant. "Thank you, Iain. I had a good time, too." And she closed the car door gently.

  She walked up the dim walkway to the well-lit front door under the porch light. She unlocked the door and opened it just enough to let Iain see that she had indeed made it inside. Turning back to Iain, she waved one last time, watched him drive away, then pushed the door all the way open. As she walked inside, she could hear Iain's soft voice in her mind:

  'Some poor girl's going to be next if they don't catch this lunatic soon. I think maybe you'd have that girl's death on your head a bit if you could've helped, but didn't.'

  * * *

  Maggie closed and locked her bedroom door behind her.

  She closed and locked each window and drew the shades closed on each.

  She closed the door to the adjoining bathroom.

  And finally, she closed the trap on the vent in the floor, closing off the sounds of the television her aunt and uncle were watching in the living room, where just minutes before, upon her return from dinner, she had informed her relatives that it had been a lovely evening, assured them that she was doing fine despite the recent unpleasantness, and then excused herself to her room for an early bedtime.

  Having thus sealed off the room to the best of her knowledge and ability, Maggie grabbed her large purse off the floor by the door and strode resolutely over to the desk. She quickly cleared the writing surface of its papers and books and set the purse on the desktop with a dull thud. She had bought a larger purse that afternoon before dinner with Iain. She knew she wouldn't be able to explain the need for a backpack at an Italian restaurant. But she knew just as well that she was not going to just leave it sitting at home where anyone could find it, or it might be damaged or destroyed. Maggie opened the choke-close neck of the purse and extracted from it the black leather-bound spellbook.

  She set the book down on the desk and tossed her otherwise mostly empty purse onto the seat of the nearby reading chair. A smallish piece of paper stuck out from the pages of the Dark Book, tucked neatly between the pages, except for its top portion which had been crumpled and generally roughed up inside the depths of the handbag.

  Maggie didn't have to open the book to know that the piece of paper was her crude attempt at a sketch of Kelly's murder scene, her lifeless body with its organs so carefully arranged around it. She also didn't need to open the book to know that the sketch marked the page of the divining spell. The spell that might enable her to learn the truth about her friends' murders.

  * * *

  Maggie sat quietly at her desk, the spell book before her open to the divining spell. Her eyes rested softly but unfocused on the black ink script of the pages as her brain tried to convince itself that what she was contemplating was not completely insane. In truth it didn't seem as ridiculous as it should have. The concreteness of her proposed course of action reminded her of the police psychics she had seen various times on television. Psychics who were used by the police to try to find the bodies of lost and murdered children. In fact, some departments even had psychics on the pay-roll year round, didn't they? And the levitation spell she had tried earlier—was that so different from the Japanese monorail trains which floated above their magnetic tracks? And the transmutation spell she had seen—wasn't that the dream of the ancient alchemists, the precursors to modern chemists? In fact, the atom bomb, wasn't that just changing uranium into a few new elements—and a whole lot of energy?

  Maybe, Maggie let herself think, there's something to this.

  * * *

  Maggie paced back and forth across the hardwood floor by the foot of her bed. In front of her face she swung the silver clan crest her grandmother had left her. It was dark outside; she could tell that even with the shades pulled. She wasn't sure how long she'd been home and she didn't really care either. Her mind was occupied with other thoughts.

  The crest filled her eyes. 'BE TRAIST,' it said.

  "What is that supposed to mean anyway?" she asked aloud. "Be true to whom? Myself? My clan? My ancestors? What?"

  Her thoughts traced her ancestry, the mothers upon mothers with the middle name of 'NicInnes.' The family tree her grandmother had taught her. The tree that ended with Brìghde Innes Gordon—the 'healer.' And Brìghde's daughter, Maggie's namesake, Margaret NicInnes Gordon Wilkie—burned as a witch and buried outside of the kirkyard's boundaries.

  Maggie's eyes focused beyond the clan crest and rested on the books her grandmother had given her, lying haphazardly on the floor next to the desk. Those books with their Old Gaelic epics were filled with magic and wizardry. Indeed, the entire Celtic world seemed to have been filled with magic, from howling banshees to the little people. The world of the old Celts was permeated with magic the way other societies were preoccupied with trade, the sea, or invading hordes.

  The ancient Celts had believed in magic.

  Her ancestors had believed in magic.

  Should she believe too?

  Maybe, Maggie thought, there's something to this.

  * * *

  Maggie sat at her desk again. She wasn't sure what time it was, but she was sure her aunt and uncle were asleep by now. It must have been late. Looking down at the desk, her eyes were focused quite clearly on the papers before her. On the one side was her sketch of Kelly's body
. On the other was the ancient diagram in the spell book of some poor victim of a fertility ritual. The arrangement of the bodies and the organs was not identical, but it was similar. Too similar. The conclusion was inescapable: Kelly's killer believed in the magic.

  "Believes in the magic," Maggie corrected with a whisper.

  There is something to this, she decided.

  And Iain was right. If she didn't do something when she could have, she would be partially responsible for the next murder.

  She knew she at least had to try.

  ''

  Maggie turned to the levitation spell.

  * * *

  Maggie stood before her desk. The room was dark except for the light of the candle which stood by atop the desk, unsuspecting what Maggie hoped would befall it. The room held the same atmosphere as the last time she had attempted the magic. When she had failed. She had no intention of failing now, and a certain charge filled the room.

  "" she recited in the ancient Gaelic. ""

  The candle did not move.

  ""

  The candle did not budge.

  Maggie closed her eyes. She was tired. She was frustrated. She was going to make this work, damn it.

  One more try, she thought. But not one more try like last time. Not one more try before giving up. Not one more try just to confirm it wouldn't work. No, this was one more try, because it would only take one more try. This would work. She was sure of it.

  She cleared her mind. She steeled her thoughts.

  ""

  * * *

  Maggie stood like a statue in the middle of her room. She had no idea what time it was. It didn't matter.