Ghosts of Culloden Moor 28 - Hamish

by L. L. Muir

  HAMISH

  The Ghosts of Culloden Moor (No. 28)

  By L.L. Muir

  KINDLE EDITION

  PUBLISHED BY

  Lesli Muir Lytle

  www.llmuir.weebly.com

  Hamish © 2017 L.Lytle

  The Ghosts of Culloden Moor Series © 2015 L.Lytle

  All rights reserved

  DEDICATION

  To my friends in The Box…

  for proving I’m not the only one

  foolish enough to write

  in the middle of the night,

  and for your willingness to stay up

  until dawn, if necessary,

  to cheer me on.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  EPILOGUE

  About the Author

  HAMISH

  PROLOGUE

  Near Killiecrankie Pass, present day

  Walking through the doors of Atholl’s Restaurant for the third time in two weeks, Samantha MacKord forced one foot in front of the other and tried not to let paranoia get the best of her. Mary, the woman from the maid service and currently her only friend in Scotland, kept insisting she keep going back. In order to become part of the community, and not be thought of as a tourist, she would have to dig in—whatever that meant.

  All she ended up digging into, however, were some deliciously pricey meals in the formal restaurant. She’d already invested a hundred bucks into the place, and if this time didn’t gain her some traction with the locals, she would just have to be content to be That American Woman who now owned the cottages above Killiecrankie Pass.

  The first time she’d come to Atholl’s, she’d arrived too early. They didn’t open for lunch until 12:30. The second time, she’d come too late, since they closed at 2:30 in the afternoon. She’d begun to feel like Goldilocks, and wondered what she might get wrong this time.

  The young maître de, or maybe just a well-dressed bartender in a black vest and bow tie, greeted her with a stiff smile and gestured for her to follow. As he’d done the last time, when she’d returned at the appropriate time for dinner service, he led her to a single, low orange chair in front of a small coffee table. Again, eating would be awkward because she’d have to lean far forward to keep from spilling on herself.

  Maybe they were punishing her for coming alone since the rest of the tables, with place settings for two or four, were still empty.

  The guy pretended to pull out her chair, but it didn’t move while she slid her knees into the tiny space between the cushion and the table. Then he put down the menu with a flourish and asked what she’d like to drink. While she thought about it, he suddenly frowned.

  “Back again, eh? Perhaps ye’ve rented a cottage for the entire summer then?”

  She shook her head. “Inherited a cottage, actually. I…um…live here now.”

  “Live here? Ye mean here?” He was obviously offended.

  She was reconsidering the whole “dig in” thing. In fact, maybe living anonymously wasn’t such a bad idea after all if the locals didn’t appreciate new faces. Or maybe they didn’t appreciate American faces…

  She took a deep breath and forced herself to answer. How could she expect to get along with her new countrymen if she hid from them?

  First, a patient smile. “There are two cottages up in the canyon above Killiecrankie. One is a vacation rental—”

  “The Auld Witch House!”

  She smiled tentatively. “You know it?”

  He rolled his eyes, made a funny noise in his throat, and plucked the menu out of her hands. Then he grabbed the back of her awkward orange chair and gestured for her to get out of it. He pulled it away easily and gave her the leg room he hadn’t before.

  “Come away in, then.” He stomped off toward the front of the restaurant, expecting her to follow.

  Come away in? What did that mean? Was he kicking her out?

  Fine.

  She picked up her purse and trailed along. She almost wished other customers were there to witness his horrible manners. Halfway to the front door, he waited for her to catch up. She tried to think of the perfect way to tell him off, but he suddenly grinned and stepped back through an open doorway.

  “Welcome to Atholl’s, Miss MacKord,” he said warmly, though she had no idea how he knew her name. “We’ve been hoping ye’d stop by.” With an outstretched arm, he led her into a large, sparsely populated pub just a little smaller than the restaurant itself. He pounded on the bar. “Paddy! Alison! Come see what the cat’s dragged in!”

  A woman came out from around the tall bar. A man emerged from the back with a big grin on his face, though it fell a little when he noticed her “What is it, then?”

  The waiter pointed at her, all his stiff manners gone. “May I present the Yank from the Witch’s Cottage? Miss MacKord—”

  “Samantha,” she said. “Sam, actually—”

  “Sam MacKord, meet yer cousin, Padruig MacKord, and his wife, Alison.”

  “Cousin?” The idea of having another relative in the world, anywhere in the world, made her chest feel all warm and bubbly. Tears gathered in her eyes, but that might have been due to her relief at not getting kicked out.

  She hadn’t known her grandfather had been alive all those years until she got notice of his death and her inheritance. Her dad had never mentioned him. Otherwise, she would have sold everything she owned to come see the ninety-eight-year-old before it was too late. But she never imagined she might have some Scottish cousins.

  No matter how she resisted, she couldn’t contain an incredibly sappy grin. “Are you sure?”

  The man hurried around the bar and smothered her with a giant bear hug. He smelled like beer, cigarettes and fried food. It was heavenly.

  “Am I sure? Well, just look at yer face, then.” Paddy turned her toward the bar to face a mirror on the back wall nearly hidden by whiskey bottles. “Same classic bone structure. Same glint in yer eye.”

  Sam laughed. There wasn’t the slightest similarity between them, and the only visible bone on his body was the one that covered his brain. “I guess we’re both kind of tall…”

  “Well then, didn’t I tell ye?”

  They set her up in a u-shaped booth against the wall and declared her their special guest for the evening, and they introduced her to every man, woman, and child who came through the pub that night. She didn’t know if the massive crowd had come to get a look at her, or if their number was only due to the weekend, but they made her feel incredibly special.

  And to think, she might have eaten dinner and gone home again, not knowing that the other half of the building was the favorite watering hole for miles. With the pub’s main entrance on the side, she had assumed Mary was simply sending her to a restaurant.

  “Go to Atholl’s and ye’ll find a way to dig in.” Atholl’s, the pub.

  No matter how many times she tried to refuse, people kept buying her drinks. She explained that she was a little short on drinking experience and needed to go
slowly, but they just laughed and told her she’d catch on soon, what with her MacKord blood and all. Eventually, she realized they continued to buy her whisky, hoping she would turn it down, so they would have no choice but to drink it themselves.

  “Sure now, ye’ll come back tomorrow night, cousin,” Paddy said, nodding sideways at the crowd. Then he laughed and started loading up empty glasses.

  “Maybe,” she shouted over the noise. “I may not ever wake up.” She played with a shot glass still half-full, then pushed it toward her cousin. If she drank any more, she was pretty sure she’d puke.

  Paddy gave her a wink and downed it himself. “I’ll give ye me promise, Sammie darlin’. If I happen to wake and ye do not, I shall have Alison come check on ye whilst I’m soakin’ me head.”

  For another two hours, the room was a swimming, colorful blur just beyond her focus. Faces came and went but not a name stuck in her memory. And as soon as the tingle began to leave her blood, the volume lowered all around her like dozens of balloons deflating slowly, and in unison.

  The restaurant closed up and the waiter from earlier, Dixon, came to help in the bar. Paddy, Alison, and their waitress moved sharply between their more sluggish patrons, two of whom were a couple of old men who wobbled against each other as they made their way to Sam’s table and slid into the seat to either side of her.

  “Bertram MacBeadle,” one said, “at yer service.”

  “Ye may call me Rob Roy,” the taller one suggested. “‘Tisn’t me name, but ye can address me as such.” They both laughed at what she suspected was an often-repeated joke.

  The men started giving her the history of the region, starting in the 1600’s when Rob Roy himself was held prisoner in the jail to the south. They gave a long and tortured account of the Jacobite rebellion that ended with the famous Battle of Something-or-other. It seemed important to them that she understand the history of her new home, and the home of her grandsire, whom they both knew personally before he was carted off to the horse farm.

  She figured the farm to which they referred was some sort of retirement home. A rental management company had been handling the cottage business for nearly a decade. Surprisingly, all their records were simple and clear, giving the impression that no one had taken advantage of Keith MacKord, even though no relative had been watching out for him.

  “And straight up the mountain from the Auld Witch House, at the top, is Odin’s Helmet. ‘Tis a high round cairn with impressive crags sticking out the sides. From across the glen, they are just the image of the god’s winged helm.” The tall one, who finally admitted his name was Robert Menzies, ordered three fresh pints and waited, ominously, for them to be delivered to the table before saying anything else.

  When Paddy brought the tray, he narrowed his eyes at the old boy. “What’s this, then?”

  “Wheesht! Wheesht.” Bertie waved his hand like he thought he could shoo her cousin away like a fly. “Rob’s tellin’ the lass about her property. So, if ye care to stay and listen, ye must bite yer tongue or go.”

  Paddy nodded like he understood perfectly and flipped his bar towel over one shoulder. He snatched an empty chair, turned the back of it against her table, and straddled it with no regard whatsoever for the rest of his patrons.

  “I’ll say it straight out, shall I?” Rob looked at Bertie, who nodded permission, then he leaned toward Sam and knocked his knuckles on the shiny wood surface between them. “The Auld Witch House…never housed a witch.” His spine snapped straight like he’d just made some chess move and was surrendering the play to his opponent.

  Everyone watched her, but she had no idea what they expected.

  “Okay,” she said. There was no need to argue. They probably knew the place pretty well. “I’ll take your word for it. Are you saying I need to change the name?”

  Bertie wrinkled his nose. “Nay, lass. He’s no’ accusin’ ye of false advertisement.” Rob barked something in Gaelic at him and they began arguing fast and furious. She never caught a word, but due to the laughter of the others, she soon realized the exchange was part of some routine meant to entertain anyone who did understand the language.

  She tried to keep a straight face while she waited for them to switch back to English. Rob finally noticed her and apologized.

  “I suppose I should get on with the tellin’, aye?” Rob wagged his eyebrows at Bertie, who also apologized, then gave his buddy the go ahead. “As I was tryin’ to tell ye, lass, it is not witches ye must fear upon yer mountain.” He leaned close and knocked again. “‘Tis ghosties.”

  “Ghosties?” It was a childish-sounding term, but there was nothing funny about it. “You mean the cottages are haunted?”

  “Not a’tall. Not a’tall,” Bertie assured her while patting her hand.

  Maybe she’d gone as pale as she felt, thinking about going back up to those cottages alone, in the dark.

  “Yer cottages have neither witch nor ghostie, lass.” He gave her a wink. “‘Tis yer mountain.”

  She wished someone would laugh already, and when no one did, she looked across at her new cousin for help. He grimaced and gave her a single solemn nod. Beyond the booth, most of Paddy’s customers had been listening, and they weren’t laughing either.

  She swallowed her smile. “Okay. So, tell me. What is haunting the mountain?” She wasn’t ready to call it her mountain. Being responsible for two dilapidated buildings and a potentially viable business—at the age of twenty-three—was responsibility enough.

  “For starters,” Rob said, “a young lass by the name of Willa Farquharson. For a long while after the Battle of Culloden, when the Highland pipes were banned, she would climb to Odin’s Helmet and play outlawed tunes on her fiddle.”

  “The wind would toss the music about, ye see,” said Bertie, “and the government troops could never tell which direction it came from. No doubt she supplied a great solace to all those Jacobites hiding in the hills. And the clever lass hid her instrument on the mountain and came down empty-handed, so she couldn’t be caught with it.”

  “But they did catch her, eventually, more’s the pity.” Rob hung his head and shook it slowly. “And the bastards pulled her to pieces. They draped bits of her clothes on their bayonets, strummed her broken instrument as they marched back down the hillside, then presented it to The Butcher himself.” Rob cleared his throat and shifted in his seat, and when all eyes were on him again, he looked back and forth around the room, then settled his attention on Sam once more. “At times, ye can hear Willa playing still.”

  Sam smiled and tried to lighten the mood a little without being insulting. “Well, if you’ve heard anything lately, it was probably me.” Everyone sat up a little straighter, like their drinks had suddenly worn off. “I play the violin. And I’ve been playing it almost every night since I got here. I didn’t know I might be upsetting people, making them think it was a ghost.”

  “Uh…” A man stood up a few booths down and waved to catch her eye. “Just how long have ye been on yer mountain, Miss MacKord?”

  “It’s Sam. Please.” She shrugged. “Just over three weeks.”

  “Three weeks, she says.” Bertie snorted and everyone chuckled along with him. The solemn mood was finally broken. Or so she thought.

  “Three weeks,” Rob repeated. “Well, then, perhaps ye can tell us who else has been playing…for nigh on three hundred years.”

  Alison pushed her way through bodies to stand at Paddy’s shoulder. She gave Sam a sympathetic smile that made her feel like she wasn’t the only sane one in the room. “Go ahead, lads. Tell her the rest and be done with it. We wouldn’t want to send her back up the mountain with her willies still up, now would we? So, tell her about the children and let’s get her drunk again. She can return to her mountain in daylight, tomorrow, when there is nothing to fear.”

  “I don’t know,” Sam said. “That Willa story was pretty rough. Maybe you’d better tell me the rest another day.” She tried to laugh but sounded more like a nervo
us goat. A ghost story about children couldn’t be a soothing bedtime story.

  Bertie patted her hand again. “Alison’s right, lass. And we shouldna send ye back without telling ye the rest. ‘Tis for yer own safety, aye?”

  She swallowed hard enough for the whole room to hear. “My own safety?”

  “Aye, lass.” Paddy spoke up and she hoped he, at least, would sound reasonable. “There are three children. Their parents were hunted down after Culloden, but the children got away. Word spread and Redcoats came back in droves to find them. They’d become laughing stocks, ye see, for being bested by the wee trio—one of them still in nappies, mind. The taunting only got worse when some soldiers disappeared. Legend has it the children lured them off cliffs or into bogs, never to be heard from again.”

  “And years later,” Alison said lightly, “when everyone was convinced the children had frozen in their beds, hunters began to disappear as well. Those who believe in such things say it’s their wee ghosties leading men astray now.”

  Bertie scoffed at the woman and shook the salt shaker over his shoulder. “Dinna say ye don’t believe in such things, Alison MacKord.”

  Alison rolled her eyes. “Did ye hear me say I didn’t?” She collected glasses and moved away again, but paused to give Sam a serious look. “If ye enjoy playin’ that violin, Sammie girl, I say ye go ahead and play it all ye like. It will give these bored souls something to gossip over…” She grinned to one side. “And it might just let the children ken ye’re not a bloody Redcoat.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Culloden Moor, after midnight…

  After teasing the ghost of Simon McLaren a bit, then sending Finlay Robertson into the atmosphere, the young Muir witch rubbed her hands together as if eager for another go. Though Hamish did not wish to appear too enthusiastic, he stepped forward smartly as if he’d already been invited to stand before the white fire to begin his own quest away from the battlefield. He only hoped Soni wouldn’t deny him.