Call of Glengarron

by Nancy Buckingham

  Someone was bound to find me soon, I reasoned. Even if no one else passed by, Craig would come looking for me when I didn’t turn up at our rendezvous. Wouldn’t he? He might decide to return to the castle first, and that would make it longer. But eventually he would find me. He must find me.

  At the very most, I promised myself, it will be no more than a couple of hours.

  My arm was twisted above my head and by an odd chance I could see the face of my watch without moving. The hands seemed to stand still. But after an agonizing lifetime, when they had covered a full forty minutes, I heard—I thought I heard—the faint sound of voices.

  I stifled the shout that rose in my throat. Dare I cry out? Dare I risk dislodging the precarious pile?

  While my whirling brain calculated the danger, the voices drew nearer, quite positive now. I prayed that whoever it was would have seen the collapsed pile of logs.

  “Help,” I cried in a carefully controlled shout. “Help.”

  “My God! Is that you, Lucy?” It was Craig’s voice.

  The next second he was close alongside. “What’s happened? Are you badly hurt?”

  “No, I think I’m all right. But I’m scared it will all start shifting again.”

  “Stay exactly as you are,” he commanded urgently. “Don’t move an inch. It won’t take us long to get you out. Try not to worry.”

  He started rapping out brisk instructions to his companion, who was, I now realized, Lambert Nairn. The two men grunted with effort as they lifted the heavy tree trunks, picking them off me with delicate care. And having lifted them with such precision, Craig and Lambert Nairn flung them aside carelessly. I could hear the thumps as they rolled away, crashing through the undergrowth.

  It went on like that for a long time, but at length there were only half a dozen trees left, propped up around me like a wigwam.

  Craig knelt down and peered through at me anxiously. “You mustn’t move yet, Lucy—it’s still dangerous. We won’t be long now.”

  I was watching Craig, but I got a glimpse of Lambert Nairn’s face. His expression betrayed great anxiety. I had a feeling, though, that it was not me he was worrying about, but himself.

  It wasn’t the moment for seeing into another person’s mind, but I thought I understood. Nairn was concerned that I might show undue recognition—more, that is, than I would naturally display toward a man I had met only once, and very casually, at a dinner party. He was afraid that our previous meeting on this very path might come out. And a whole lot more besides!

  As a married man—and even more as a neighbor of Craig’s—Nairn was desperately anxious that his affair with Margo should be kept secret.

  He need not have worried himself. I hadn’t the slightest wish to blacken my cousin’s name still further in Craig’s mind.

  With a last combined effort the two men heaved at the few remaining logs, pushing them clear of me in one swift movement.

  In a curious way I felt naked and exposed. I longed to jump up and reclaim a proper dignity, but I found I couldn’t move. My legs were numb, the muscles utterly without power.

  Craig crouched over me, stroking back the hair from my face.

  “Are you quite sure you’re all right? No bones broken?”

  I shook my head weakly. “I... I don’t think so.”

  With gentle competence he swiftly ran his hands over me, probing. I felt his fleeting touch on my legs and arms, and then a deliberate pressure against my ribs,

  Craig appeared to be satisfied. “Let me help you up.”

  But it wasn’t mere help he gave me. Craig seemed to take my whole weight, lifting me in his powerful arms. As my feet touched the ground, pins and needles started prickling fiercely, first in one leg and then in both. I toppled against him uncertainly.

  “Sorry,” I said with a feeble smile. “I expect it’ll pass in a minute.”

  Now that the crisis was over, Craig turned on Lambert Nairn. The violence of his voice contrasted with his tenderness toward me.

  “My God, Nairn, you’ve got a devil of a lot to answer for.”

  “Me? Why should you say that?” Nairn was blustering, but he looked very white-faced.

  “What a way to run an estate. Allowing your men to stack timber in that slovenly fashion.”

  Lambert Nairn stiffened in sudden anger. “That’s bloody ridiculous. Those logs didn’t start rolling all by themselves.”

  “Oh, don’t be a fool. How else d’you think ..?”

  “Miss Calvert must have been climbing up on the stack, or something.”

  “But I wasn’t,” I protested.

  “Of course she wasn’t,” Craig snapped scornfully.

  Nairn pressed his lips together, and shook his head stubbornly, refusing to accept any measure of blame. Was his attitude genuine, or was it merely a cover for discreditable inefficiency? I couldn’t decide.

  Craig scowled blackly. “I shall have more to say about this later.” But when he spoke to me again, his voice was caressing. “Do you think you could manage to walk if I help you? I can’t bring the car up this track—it’s too rough. And it would take some time to get a jeep.”

  With Craig’s arm around me, supporting me, I took the first few tentative steps. It wasn’t really so bad, after all. In fact, as my calf muscles got used to the rhythm of walking, it became easier and easier.

  Lambert Nairn ambled along a yard to one side of us. He looked sulky, very much on the defensive.

  I almost pitied him. I’d once seen Craig in a full fury. I’d heard him bursting in upon his aunt, raging because she’d schemed to send me away. I’d heard his explosive anger through the stout sitting room door, as I stood hesitating on the stairs.

  If the same sort of fury was going to be turned upon Nairn, the man was in for a rough time.

  In a little more than ten minutes the track joined a narrow road. Mr. Lennox’s black Daimler was pulled up on the grass verge, beside a whitewashed stone barn.

  Nairn refused a lift. His attitude was still defiantly surly, though before he strode away he did manage to mutter some conventionality about hoping I’d feel no ill-effects as a result of my accident.

  Craig stared after him angrily. “That man’s a criminal lunatic, allowing those logs to be stacked so carelessly. Still, I suppose it was damn lucky I happened to run into him. I’d have had a job to get you out of that shambles by myself.”

  Before we drove off Craig poured me a dram from a flask he took out of the glove compartment. It was Scotch, smooth and silky and very potent. It warmed me, and soothed my aching limbs.

  When we arrived back at the castle, Fiona was coming across the hall. At the sight of us she stopped in astonishment, and for the first time I was made aware of my bedraggled appearance. No doubt she also noted that Craig’s arm was closely around me.

  “You two are back early,” she said after a slight pause.

  “It’s nothing serious,” I assured her.

  Fiona didn’t reply, merely raising her eyebrows in supercilious derision.

  Craig glanced at his cousin sharply. “I thought you were going out this afternoon. You said you wouldn’t be able to look after Jamie.” »

  She flushed a bit, but that girl certainly had an admirable control over her emotions. “Well, I changed my mind. As it was fine I decided to take a book down on the beach.”

  “But surely—” I exclaimed. Hadn’t I seen Fiona crossing the causeway? That flash of blue.

  Fiona was looking at me—through me—with absolute calm. “Surely what?”

  “Oh ... nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Come on now, Lucy,” Craig said, urging me forward. “It’s bed for you.”

  “Oh no, Craig,” I protested. “There’s no need for that. I’ll just go upstairs and change.”

  “You’re going straight to bed,” he repeated flatly.

  “But—”

  “Do I have to carry you up?” he growled.

  As we turned toward the stairs, I gla
nced back. Fiona hadn’t moved. The expression on her face had become so fixed there was something malevolent about it. Behind the rigid, half-smiling mask I saw a glint of pure hatred.

  Craig escorted me right to the door of my room.

  “I’ll come in to see you presently,” he said softly, as he left me.

  Some minutes later, undressing clumsily and a bit painfully, I began to wonder about Fiona’s entire lack of interest in my accident. She hadn’t even asked where it had happened, or what had caused it.

  Chapter 10

  A hot bath did an awful lot to restore my morale. In bed I lay with my head turned towards the window. Through the glass I could see fluffy clouds floating gently past, pure white against the blue blueness of the sky.

  Considering everything I felt remarkably calm. Though I’d just been through a terrifying experience, Craig’s profound concern for me had largely offset the horror of those falling logs.

  It was only slowly that my thoughts drifted back to the details of the accident. Lambert Nairn had been emphatic that the sawn tree trunks could not have started falling spontaneously. I was ready enough to accept that. Since he regularly used the forest track himself, it was hardly likely he’d permit any danger of being injured by carelessly stacked timber.

  He believed that I must have been climbing onto the log pile. But I hadn’t. I hadn’t so much as touched it as I bent to look at the primrose nestling shyly in the grass. If some positive force was necessary to bring the stack crashing down, and it hadn’t been applied by me ...

  The logical conclusion came stabbing at me. My pulses raced. Whoever was responsible must have known. I was there, directly in the path of the falling logs.

  I remembered the slight noise I’d heard just before the pile collapsed. A cautious footfall, I’d thought—a twig broken under a shoe.

  I lay back in bed, shivering, the sheets suddenly icy cold. Into my mind sprang a picture of Fiona’s face as she’d watched me going upstairs. I remembered the hatred in her eyes.

  For Craig’s benefit Fiona adopted a surface gloss of charm. But to me, in the way some women have toward others, she made no effort to hide her dislike—a dislike that had soon turned to positive malice.

  She wanted Craig—I had known that almost from the moment we met here. It was a comparatively small thing for a woman like Fiona to distort her image in a man’s eyes in order to make him want her. But this ... was it possible that Fiona would go to such fantastically evil lengths to get rid of an imagined rival?

  Maybe she’d been goaded beyond endurance by Craig’s unmistakable interest in me this last day or two. Margo’s death had presented her with an unexpected opportunity. But she would have seen me as a scheming rival who was cashing in on a closeness to Craig’s son, and a physical likeness to his dead wife.

  Reason came clamping down on these crazy fancies. Hatred was one thing. Murder for it was quite another. And yet I hadn’t any doubt now that whoever started those tree trunks rolling must have intended my death. I had been saved by the sheerest fluke—by the fact that somehow the logs had locked in precarious balance.

  But hadn’t Fiona already tried to get rid of me another way—a less violent way? Yesterday her mother had asked me to leave Glengarron and go back to London.

  Such unkindness, such a brutally direct manner of speech, was quite alien to Isabel Lennox, and I should have realized at the time that she had been put up to it. Someone stronger, someone more ruthless, was behind that crude dismissal. Someone who wanted to remain in the background.

  But this cunning scheme had failed because Craig refused to let me go. Could it be that Fiona had then been goaded into trying a more desperate solution?

  It made a horrible sort of sense.

  There was a tap on the door. I jerked up in bed, startled. Fiona was so much on my mind that I thought it must be her.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s me, Craig.”

  It was such a relief. “Oh, come in, Craig.”

  Dimly I could make out another figure standing behind him in the corridor.

  “Lucy, the doctor’s here. May I bring him in?”

  “Oh ... but I don’t need a doctor.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Craig said calmly. He could so easily adopt an air of final and absolute decision. “Please come in, Doctor.”

  He was an elderly man, tall and gaunt, with iron-gray hair and humorous brown eyes.

  Craig introduced us. “Lucy, this is Dr. McGregor.”

  A long arm extended in my direction. “Good afternoon, Miss Calvert. I hear ye’ve been in a spot of bother.” But the eyes were not so casual. They were shrewd, looking me over expertly for outward signs of inner trouble.

  “I’ll be around if you should want me,” said Craig as he left the room.

  “Aye....” The softly lilting Highland voice breathed the word and let it linger.

  Dr. McGregor proceeded to give me a thorough examination, occasionally nodding to himself in satisfaction. “You will survive, young lady,” he said at last. “One or two of the bruises might look a wee bit alarming, but fortunately they are all in places that will not show.”

  I nodded, grinning sheepishly. “Can I get up now, Doctor?”

  “You may leave your bed when Mr. McKinross tells you, and not one moment before. I will have a word with him about it.”

  He put away his stethoscope in the little black bag, smiled and bade me good afternoon.

  Craig appeared again some five minutes later. “The doc says you’ve had a severe shock—and no wonder. It’s the rest of today in bed for you, at the very least.”

  “But I feel fine.”

  “Good. Staying in bed will make you feel better still.”

  He was carrying a small box. “Do you play checkers?” he shot at me.

  “Checkers. Well, I haven’t played for years,” I said cautiously.

  Craig was already bringing over a small table. He opened the checkerboard and started putting out the pieces.

  “Dr. McGregor said I should keep your mind occupied with something quiet and undemanding. You might call it occupational therapy.”

  My mind was certainly kept occupied, but I found it difficult to spare much attention for the checkers. I was far too conscious of Craig’s close presence, sitting there on a low chair drawn up to the bedside. I had a fierce, almost overwhelming desire to reach out and lace my fingers through that springy dark hair.

  I was amazed that Craig should be dancing attention on me like this. I guessed he felt responsible to some extent because my accident had occurred while I was a guest here. Even so, it would have been more natural for Mrs. Lennox or Fiona to come in to sit with me. Thank God it wasn’t Fiona.

  After a couple of games of checkers, both of which I lost dismally, Craig rang a service bell which I hadn’t even noticed before.

  “We’ll have some tea,” he announced cheerfully. “And then if you feel well enough perhaps Jamie could come in for a little while.”

  “Yes, I’d like that.” Now that Jamie was beginning to accept Craig as a friend as well as a parent, I enjoyed seeing father and son happy together.

  Jamie was very subdued. Obviously he’d had strict instructions not to romp about or make a noise. He peered at me earnestly, and then asked in an awed voice: “Were you nearly killed, Lucy?”

  The naked question came as a shock until I remembered that a child viewed dying so differently from an adult. Even after his own tragic loss, Jamie still had little idea of the finality of death.

  I tried to answer him just as unemotionally. “I’m all right, darling. I just had some logs tumble on me, that’s all.”

  He gazed at me with round solemn eyes. “It’s a good thing you weren’t killed. I wouldn’t want you to be dead, like my mummy .”

  “Neither would I, Jamie,” said Craig quickly. “Now let’s talk about something else. What have you been up to this afternoon?”

  “Auntie Is’bel read me one of your old story
books, Daddy. All about a little red engine.”

  Craig smiled. “Oh yes, I remember. Did you enjoy it?”

  “Yes, it was super. But Auntie Fiona said it was a stupid book.”

  “Auntie Fiona?” I queried, trying to hold in my surprise. “I thought you went down to the beach.”

  Jamie nodded. “So did we. Auntie Is’bel and me.”

  I had decided Fiona’s story about going down to the beach was merely a smokescreen, because I’d seen her crossing the causeway. But now it looked like her alibi was established.

  I longed to question Jamie further, but with Craig in the room I didn’t dare. I couldn’t voice my suspicions about Fiona to him—not until I was certain.

  An opportunity came quite soon, when Craig excused himself. “I must go and clean up—I haven’t had a chance since we got back.”

  The moment the door closed behind Craig I asked as casually as I could manage: “When exactly did you go down to the beach, Jamie?”

  “After you’d gone,” he said simply.

  “Yes, darling, but what I meant was—how long after I’d gone?”

  His little face screwed up, puzzled. “Just after.” Then he brightened. “We could see you up on the path—where the trees aren’t.”

  It was an odd way of putting it, but I knew the place he meant. There was a clearing not very far along the forest track. At that point I would have been plainly visible. I’d have seen them too, if I’d looked back.

  So they’d gone to the beach within minutes of my leaving the house.

  Now came the sixty-four dollar question. “And when did Auntie Fiona come down?”

  Jamie’s answer shook me. “She came with Auntie Is’bel and me. She said she might as well ‘cause there wasn’t anything else to do.”

  It sounded so exactly like Fiona.

  But that meant the figure I’d seen crossing the causeway couldn’t possibly have been her. It must, I supposed, have been one of the maids. Unless ...

  I tried again. “I expect Auntie Fiona only stayed a little while, didn’t she?”

  He was bored with this conversation. Forgetting his father’s instructions to stay quiet, he began trying to stand on his head in the middle of the floor.