Another crack of thunder shook the cottage, and Isla moaned in her hiding place. The wind howled outside and the windows rattled in their frames. The fox head–shaped knocker on the forest-green front door banged against the weathered wood over and over again.
I patted the lump that was my sister. “Are you going to come out of there?”
“No,” she said in a muffled but defiant voice. “Not until it’s safe. I’m too young to die, and we haven’t even made our shopping trip to Edinburgh that you promised me we would take before I went back to Tennessee. It’s so not fair! I could have at least passed on knowing I had bought the perfect outfit on Princes Street! It’s just not fair.”
I was about to console her when Ivanhoe, my gray striped Scottish Fold cat, jumped onto the bed and on top of my sister.
Isla screamed.
Ivanhoe hopped off her and walked the length of the bed until he was sitting next to me. The cat tilted his head as if to ask, “What’s wrong with her?”
“The storm,” I whispered to him.
He gave me a slow blink, which I knew meant he understood me. Like all cat lovers, I believed my feline was particularly brilliant.
“Are you talking to the cat about me?” Isla demanded from the recesses of the blankets.
“Isla, he’s worried about you and wants you to come out from under there.” I patted where I thought her head might be.
The cat meowed as if to reinforce my statement. I smiled at him and gave him a thumbs-up sign in return. I appreciated the support.
The lump in the bed began to wiggle again, and finally, after what seemed like forever, Isla’s sweaty head appeared from under the covers. She glared at me. “I can’t believe you got me to come all the way out to the middle-of-nowhere Scotland only to die. What kind of big sister are you?” Her honey-blonde hair stuck up every which way, like she had taken a balloon and rubbed it all over her head to see how static electricity worked.
“First of all, if I remember correctly, I didn’t make you come here. You just showed up on my doorstep and yelled, ‘Surprise! I’m going to live with you for the summer!’ ”
She threw back the blanket. “You don’t want me here?”
I sighed and pushed my wavy black hair out of my face. “I never said that. Of course I want you here, but you can’t blame me for you being here. It was your idea.”
“What did you expect me to do, stay at the farm with Mom and Dad? And wasn’t I a good surprise? I’m your sister. Your only sister.”
I tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear, just as I had when she was a little girl. Because Isla was so much younger than me, I was much more like a favorite aunt than a sister to her. “You were a good surprise,” I said. “It’s been hard to be this far away from home. It’s nice to have someone from my old life here.”
“Old life?” she asked. “You sound like you never plan to go back home.”
I didn’t, at least not permanently, but I wasn’t going to confirm her fears when she was already upset by the storm.
Bang! Bang! Bang! The fox knocker thudded against the front door, but the rhythmic knocks did not sound like they had been caused by the howling wind.
Isla screamed again and made a dive back under the blankets.
I caught her before she could fully submerge. “If you go back under there, you will suffocate. It’s just the knocker hitting the door in the wind.”
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“That’s not the wind, Fi!” Isla shrieked.
I stood up and started toward the bedroom door.
Isla shot up in the bed and grabbed my wrist. “You can’t go out there! It could be a madman, a mad Scottish man, think Braveheart—not in a hot kind of way but in a he-could-kill-me kind of way.”
“Isla, seriously, get a grip. There is no Scottish madman at Duncreigan,” I said.
Ivanhoe walked up and down the bed with his gaze fixed on the open bedroom door. If I hadn’t been sure someone was outside the cottage before, my cat’s reaction convinced me.
I extracted my hand from my sister’s death grip. “Ivanhoe, stay here with Isla.”
Isla moaned and slid back under the blankets. As I was leaving the room, her arm snaked out from under the covers and pulled Ivanhoe under the blankets with her.
There was a meow and hiss in protest, then nothing. I entered the main room of the cottage, which was a living room, dining room, and kitchen combination. The largest feature of the space was the stone fireplace. Above the mantel, the painting of Uncle Ian’s ancestor Baird MacCallister, the merchant sailor who had washed up on this land, hung. Some days, I wasn’t sure how I felt about Baird, since he was the one who had tied the MacCallisters and now me to Duncreigan all those centuries ago.
At the moment, the view of the hearth was obscured by a stack of boxes that came up to my waist. There were similar piles in every corner. After I had decided to move to Scotland permanently, I’d asked my mother to ship my clothes to Scotland. It seemed that my mother had gone to my storage space in Nashville and shipped as many boxes as she could afford. I had yet to find an actual box of clothing, though.
The banging on the front door intensified. I grabbed a poker from the fireplace and approached the door, keeping my stance wide and grounded as if I planned to hit a home run at SunTrust Park. I didn’t agree with my sister that it was a madman at the door. The poker was merely a precaution. “Who’s there?” I called.
There was a howl in response. Whatever words there might have been were lost in the storm. I adjusted my grip on the poker. “What do you want?”
Again, the wind grabbed the words and took them away.
There was only one way for me to find out what was on the other side of the door. I took a deep breath, unlocked the door, and pulled on the handle with my right hand. The poker was in my left hand, raised and ready to strike.
I cracked open the door.
“Miss Fiona?” A tired voice asked.
I dropped the poker onto the worn wood floor. “Hamish, oh my God! What are you doing out there on a night like this?” I grabbed the wet sleeve of his raincoat and pulled him inside. After Hamish was safely in the cottage, I slammed the door closed and locked it.
Hamish MacGregor, Duncreigan’s caretaker, stood in front of me dripping on the floor. Hamish was a stout, elderly man with a puglike nose who had worked for the MacCallister family for as long as anyone could remember.
He removed his yellow raincoat and specks of water went flying every which way, including on me. It was as bad as a dog shaking out his coat after a bath. “Miss Fiona, you are all right?”
I wiped water from my face. “I’m fine, Hamish. What are you doing here?”
He removed his yellow rain hat. “I came to check on you and Miss Isla. This is the worst storm we’ve had since you’ve come to Duncreigan. I was worried sick about you, so Duncan and I came here to check.” Hamish reached into his fisherman’s sweater and came out with a damp-looking red squirrel. Duncan blinked at me, then scrambled to the top of Hamish’s shoulder.
Isla stepped out of my bedroom with an unhappy-looking Ivanhoe tucked under one arm and a curling iron in the other. Clearly she was approaching the situation armed and ready should the need arise.
Duncan’s tail puffed up as soon as he saw the cat. The two animals were always at odds, mostly because Ivanhoe wished to eat the squirrel and spent a large portion of his lazy days plotting a strategy to accomplish that life goal.
“As you can see, all three of us are fine,” I said.
Hamish nodded. “Good, good. Now that I see you are all right, I had better be back on my way home.”
“You are not going back out into that storm,” I said. “You can stay here tonight if you don’t mind bunking on the couch. Isla and I can share the bed.”
He started to argue, but I held up my hand. “Please, Hamish.” I picked up the poker and put it back on the stand beside the fireplace. “I’ll gather up sheets and blankets and make you up a nic
e bed.” I turned to my sister. “Isla, can you make Hamish a warm cup of tea? That will help get the chill off from the rain.”
She hoisted Ivanhoe onto her shoulder. “Sure, but I’m going to need something harder than that to recover from tonight.”
“A nip of whiskey would do me better, miss,” Hamish said.
Isla grinned. “I knew that I liked you, Hamish.” She set the cat on the floor and made a beeline for the kitchen cabinet where I kept provisions for just such a time.
I shook my head and went into the bedroom for the extra sheets and blankets. When I came back into the front room, Hamish and Isla were sitting on the moss-green couch sharing a nip of Scotch.
Hamish sipped from his tumbler. “We used to say on a night like this that the sea wants a life, and she will take it.”
Isla’s mouth fell open. “You mean like someone is going to die?”
“The sea always gets what she wants. Always.” Hamish stared into his drink as if he were considering the ocean itself.
Another bolt of lightning lit up the cottage, followed closely by a crack of thunder. Isla whimpered.
I dropped the load I was carrying on the arm of the couch. “Hamish, please don’t tell my impressionable sister any ghost stories tonight. Save them for a sunny day.”
He nodded, but his brow stayed furrowed in worry. “The sun will come again in the morning. We should all get some rest.”
We finished our whiskey to that.
Later, when I lay on the bed next to my sister, I chewed my lip and worried over whether or not I should tell Hamish I’d seen his great-nephew Seth in the village. Seth and Hamish had a complicated relationship and as far as I knew were the only family either of them had. Hamish had promised his dying brother that he would care for his grandson. Duncreigan’s caretaker had taken that vow to the extreme and even gone to drastic measures to support Seth through medical school. However, Seth had dropped out of school to follow environmental pursuits and used Hamish’s money to support his gambling habit. Hamish had been hurt when he learned the truth. But when Seth had promised to return to school, Hamish had yet again agreed to support him. At that moment, Seth was supposed to be in medical school in Aberdeen, the capital of Aberdeenshire.
The county seat of Aberdeen was only thirty minutes away. It was an easy trip. There was no reason for me to suspect Seth was up to something or cheating Hamish again. Maybe I was just projecting my own trust issues left over from my broken engagement onto Seth. Hamish believed his grandnephew when he said he would go back to school, and the wisest thing for me to do would be to stay out of it.
I pulled my phone out from under my pillow. There was a text message. That was odd; not many of my friends back home in Tennessee had my new UK number.
The text said it was from Chief Inspector Neil Craig, and my heart fluttered. I had met the police officer the day I arrived at Duncreigan and discovered a dead body in my godfather’s magical garden. Craig had wrongly assumed my guilt in the murder but had eventually come around to see I was innocent after a little sleuthing by yours truly. Since the incident, I had seen him around the village off and on. BAD STORM, the text said. CHECKING IN TO SEE IF YOU ARE OKAY.
The text had been sent over an hour ago, and Craig had been waiting all that time for a response from me? Or he hadn’t. Craig was chief inspector in Aberdeenshire working out of the city of Aberdeen. As an officer of the law, he must have been hard at work on a night with such a terrible storm. It would be all-hands-on-deck at the police station in Aberdeen to make sure everyone was safe, but he had still texted me to see if I was all right. He had texted me.
I stared at the screen for a long moment, trying to craft the perfect response that would sound interested but not too interested. If Isla were awake, she would have accused me of overthinking again. Isla never overthought. That’s how she had ended up in Scotland. She’d bought a plane ticket with her college graduation money and had been on the flight eastward the next day. There were very few times in my life when I had done something without weighing all the pros and cons, and that included texting a handsome Scottish chief inspector.
“Get it together, Knox,” I whispered to myself.
Before I could change my mind, I texted, ALL IS WELL AT DUNCREIGAN. THANKS.
The immediate response back was GOOD. And that was all. The simple GOOD left me feeling slightly disappointed, and I worried what that GOOD meant all night long as the rain and wind pelted the slate roof of my cottage.
Chapter Three
Before dawn, while my sister was still sleeping, I slipped out of bed. In the main room of the cottage, I found Hamish and Duncan gone. The pair must have left sometime in the middle of the night when the storm died down. I wasn’t surprised—Hamish would have been so uncomfortable with the idea of sleeping on my couch that I doubted he’d gotten a wink of sleep all night, and Duncan was never at ease in Ivanhoe’s vicinity. Speaking of the cat, the Scottish Fold wove around my legs, requesting breakfast even though it was much earlier than when I normally fed him.
“Since I’m up, you think that I should feed you, don’t you?” I asked.
The round-faced cat looked up at me and meowed. As if to say, “You got that right, Human.”
I sighed as I opened a can of cat food and placed it in his dish. “Sometimes, I feel like little more than a human can opener for you.” I set the dish on the floor.
Ivanhoe didn’t bother to reply. He already had his flat face buried in the bowl of food. I left the cat to his meal.
Outside the cottage, the fir tree that stood by the cottage was upright. The fox-head knocker that had rapped against the door all night long remained intact, and the area immediately around the cottage seemed to be fine. Leaves and branches were scattered over the grounds, but a little raking would make short work of that. I was relieved to see that the cottage was also in one piece, but the house wasn’t my primary concern. The garden was. The garden always was.
I was careful not to step on any of the granite rocks that peeked out from the glen that separated the cottage from the garden. Over the last several weeks, I had learned I could make the trek from the cottage to the garden without stepping on a single one.
I glanced behind me and back at the cottage and stared. A man walked behind the cottage and away from the garden. It wasn’t uncommon to see hikers wander through Duncreigan. There was a hiking path through the mountains only a half mile from here, and from time to time, hikers would wander off the path. But I didn’t think it was a hiker.
The person faced away from me, as he was going in the opposite direction, but I couldn’t help but wonder if it was Seth MacGregor. He was the right build and height. Was I thinking that just because I had seen Seth in the village the evening before? And was he on his way to speak to Hamish? Part of me wanted to go after him and ask him what he was doing there. In the short time I had lived in Scotland, Hamish had grown very dear to me, and I hated to think how his great-nephew had hurt him.
I shook my head. It was up to Hamish and Seth to figure out their relationship. I had nothing to do with it. Seth—if it was Seth—disappeared out of view and I turned back in the direction of the garden.
While I stood there in indecision, dampness soaked through my sneakers and into my socks from the wet grass. I should have thought to wear my puddle boots to visit the garden, but I had been so eager I’d grabbed the first pair of shoes I could find.
My toes curled in from the cold, but there was no way I was going back to change my footwear now as the stone wall that surrounded the garden, eight inches thick and seven feet tall, came into view.
Lush green ivy crawled along the wall’s length in every direction. The round, centuries-old wooden door that I knew was there was completely blocked from view by the ivy. When I reached the garden, I removed the skeleton key that was my entry into both the cottage and the garden from my pocket. Pushing my hand and the key through the tangle of vines, I searched for the lock and fit the key into plac
e. I turned my wrist to the left, once, twice, and pushed the door open.
I ducked my head under the ivy and stepped into my garden.
The first thing I noticed about the garden were the colors. The English-style flower beds that grew in complementary bunches around the garden were bursting with colors. My eyes were assaulted with pinks, purples, yellows, oranges, blues, and so, so much green. The garden shimmered with green. The large willow tree, which marked the halfway point in the garden and was the overseer of all the other growing things, glistened with raindrops on its millions of tiny drooping leaves.
This place took my breath away, just as it always did. When I had visited Duncreigan as a little girl, my godfather had taken me into the garden, and I had fallen in love with it and all its flowers. It was his magical garden. Now, it was mine.
As much as I had thought the garden was magical when I was a child, I hadn’t known that it actually held magic until recently. Now I had the burden of caring for the garden and using the magic that it contained to help others. Unfortunately, except for a brief letter from my godfather telling me that I was the Keeper and a list containing a handful of guidelines, the magic and the garden didn’t come with an instructional manual. It seemed that I would have to figure out how to use the magic on my own. I hoped I was up to the task. My godfather seemed to believe I would be, but I wasn’t so sure. I’d had a string of failures that were constant reminders of my shortcomings. One was my failed flower shop in Nashville. The second was my failed engagement, the one where my wannabe country music star fiancé left me for our wedding cake decorator. I’d had a strong aversion to cake after that incident, and there would be no cake at my flower shop opening.
After observing the garden’s beauty, I noticed minor damage from the storm. Flowers bent on their thin stalks, some with their blossoms touching the ground, and tree branches and leaves had been thrown every which way. It might be a magical garden, but it was still a garden in the truest sense of the word, a living entity that had to be cared for as such. My godfather had been very clear on that in the few instructions he left me.
Death and Daisies Page 2