Death and Daisies

by Amanda Flower

  I shivered as the image of Minister MacCullen’s face in the body bag returned. I wished I’d never looked at the body. I would have preferred not to have that image to carry around for the rest of my life.

  “You’re cold.” Raj clucked his tongue and sounded like the cafeteria lady back in my middle school lunchroom who always went out of her way to tell me I was too skinny. She had clucked her tongue just like that and then tried to foist food on me, as I knew Raj was about to do. “You need a hot meal. That will make everything much easier to face.” He placed a hand on his clean-shaven chin and rubbed it back and forth. “You need my chicken marsala. It will warm you through. That’s what I’m prescribing for you. And I have news!”

  Chapter Eleven

  Raj grinned. “You will like my news because it does not involve the minister or his death.”

  I slid into the empty barstool next to my sister. “I’ll take that kind of news. What’s up, Raj?”

  He clasped his hands together in front of his chest. “Carver Finley has agreed to come here and examine my foundation. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  I blinked at him. Twice. “Are you speaking in code?”

  “Oh, you are as silly as Presha. Carver Finley!”

  “Sorry, I’m still not following.” I looked to Isla for help, but she merely shrugged and sipped from her pint.

  Raj threw up his hands. “Fiona, Carver Finley is the foremost authority on Aberdeenshire history. He knows all that there is to know about the county.”

  I pictured an elderly man with reading glasses at the tip of his nose and a tweed jacket with elbow patches. Not that I had ever seen an authority on Aberdeenshire history before.

  “He has been here for the last week assessing the chapel. You do know that St. Thomas’s is raising money to save it? He’s been in the pub a number of times for his meals while he’s been working on his assessment, and when he was here, I just happened to mention my history of the pub.”

  “You just happened to mention your project?” I smiled, even though the mention of St. Thomas’s brought the minister and his death to mind again.

  “I could not let this opportunity pass me by. He wrote Aberdeen, Then and Now. I am sure you have heard of that title.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “It wasn’t on the recommended reads list at high school in Nashville.”

  “Oh, I do appreciate your American sarcasm.”

  I laughed. “I’m glad to hear that he will be looking at your project.”

  “My sister told me all about your opening. I am very sorry that I was not able to be there with you.” He waved his hands in the air. “As you can see, the Twisted Fox keeps me very busy.” Raj set another glass of water in front of me without asking. I thanked him. “I gave you the water, but surely you need a beer after the day you have had,” he said.

  “He has a point,” Isla said. “I’ll have the marsala too, Raj. I’m starving.”

  “I’ll have the cook start on your meals right way.” He turned and went into the kitchen.

  The door swung closed after him.

  After he was gone, I glanced around the pub. I was on the lookout for Seth MacGregor. For some reason, I felt it was important that I speak to him for Hamish’s sake. I needed to know if he was just visiting the village or was there on a more permanent basis. Because if he was back in the village permanently, what did that mean for medical school or the money Hamish had sent to Seth for his schooling? I scanned the room for Seth a second time. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t anywhere in the room. He might already be back in Aberdeen.

  “What’s gotten into you?” Isla asked.

  I glanced at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Ever since you got back to the flower shop this afternoon, you have been looking around like you are being followed or something.”

  Before I could answer her, Raj reappeared with two plates of steaming chicken marsala in his hands. He set them in front of Isla and me. The steam coming from my dish clouded my vision for a moment as the strong spice pushed away any other scent in the crowded pub.

  I smiled, grateful that I didn’t have to answer my sister’s question. “Raj, have you seen Seth MacGregor lately?” I took a sip of water.

  Isla jumped off her barstool and made a yip sound like a small dog whose paw had been caught in a door.

  I sprang to my feet. “What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

  Isla’s blue eyes were twice their normal size. “Um, I—I thought I saw a spider.”

  “A spider?” I asked in disbelief. “You sounded like someone pinched you.”

  She shook her head. “No, it was a spider. A big one, close to the size of a hamster.”

  Raj grabbed a newspaper from the end of the bar and rolled it into a cone. “I can’t have hamster-sized spiders running around my pub.” He came around the bar with the paper cone in strike position.

  “You’re going to scare the spider away if you stomp around like that, Raj. Then you will never catch him,” Popeye said from his post by the fireplace.

  Popeye’s pals, who were always with him, it seemed, laughed.

  Isla looked at her feet, and I did too. There was no spider of any size to be seen.

  “Um,” my sister stammered, and made a show of looking under the bar a bit longer. “I guess he got away.”

  I felt my eyes narrow. For as girly and delicate as my sister portrayed herself to be, she wasn’t afraid of spiders. She’d grown up on the same farm in Tennessee I had, she’d done the same chores, and she’d walked through spider webs with as much regularity as I had. She’d never once freaked out over a spider, whatever the size, and there had been some doozies back on the farm. In fact, if I remembered correctly, her favorite book as a child had been Charlotte’s Web.

  “What’s going on with you?” I whispered to my sister

  She blinked at me with her big blue eyes. When she did that, I knew she was doing her best to mimic a Disney princess and I knew she was up to something. “What are you talking about, Sis?” she whispered back. All the while, Raj walked up and down the bar with his rolled newspaper.

  I waved my hand under the bar. “The spider thing. You and I both know you aren’t afraid of spiders.”

  “I am afraid of spiders. Is that a crime?”

  I rolled my eyes. “You never were before.”

  “Well, this one was different. It was the size of a hamster, Fi,” she hissed. “I think even the toughest person on earth would have been afraid of that. You would have been afraid of a hamster-sized spider. He looked me dead in the eye. He wanted to take me out. I could tell!”

  Raj lowered his makeshift weapon with a disappointed sigh. “You see him again, you tell me.”

  Isla nodded, and her smooth blonde locks fell over her face. “I will.” She glanced around the bar. “I’m so sorry to have made such a fuss.” Her voice came out in a southern-sounding purr. It was so like our mother’s when she was trying to convince our father to do something he didn’t want to do that alarm bells went off in my mind.

  Raj still had his head under the bar in search of the spider when a rich male voice said, “If you are trying to determine the age of the bar, it is not nearly as old as the rest of the building.”

  Raj jerked backward and whacked the back of his head on the underside of the bar. He dropped the rolled newspaper onto the floor.

  As I jumped off my seat to avoid knocking into Raj, my back pressed up against the firm chest of a man. Strong arms spun me around, and discerning green eyes looked me up and down.

  Chapter Twelve

  I stepped out of the man’s grasp and bumped into my sister, feeling like the ball in the middle of a pinball game.

  Raj placed a hand on his cheek. “Mr. Finley, I wasn’t expecting you so early. You said you were coming to look at the pub’s foundation tomorrow. I did not expect to see you today, but I’m quite pleased that you are here.”

  This was Carver Finley? He was nothing like the elderly, elbow patch�
��wearing historian I’d conjured up in my head when Raj first spoke of him. This historian was handsome in a contrived way that I suspected took a good amount of work to maintain. He had sparkling white teeth, a thick swath of blond hair that was brushed back from his forehead in precise waves, and just enough scruff on his face to look like he didn’t care about his appearance, though I presumed he cared quite a bit.

  I peeked at Isla. “Close your mouth,” I whispered out of the corner of mine to my sister.

  She snapped her mouth closed and wiped away a bit of drool that had gathered at the corner.

  Carver gave Raj a winning smile. “I’m here for a meeting on another matter, but I am looking forward to my visit tomorrow. From what I can tell, this is a fascinating building.” He cocked his head to peer under the bar. “I wonder what was so fascinating under there to gather your attention and the attention from these two beautiful ladies?”

  Raj’s face turned a deep shade of red. “Isla thought she saw a spider.”

  “He was the size of a hamster,” Isla said, somewhat breathlessly.

  The smile widened across the historian’s face. “A spider. Well, we can’t have that in a place where people eat, can we?”

  Raj and my sister shook their heads mutely. I stopped myself from rolling my eyes at their reactions to Carver Finley.

  “Raj was just telling us about you.” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m Fiona Knox of Duncreigan, and this is my sister Isla.”

  He took my hand and gave it a professional shake before letting go. “It’s a pleasure to meet you both. I’ve heard of Duncreigan—the garden there is supposed to be magnificent. I would love to see it before I leave the area.”

  I smiled but made no promises. There weren’t many people I let inside my garden. However, I would keep a visit with him in mind. It would be interesting to hear a historical authority’s take on the menhir. As far as I knew, the menhir hadn’t been dated. Maybe if I could pinpoint exactly how old the stone was, it might tell me from where the magic had originated.

  “What meeting brings you to the Twisted Fox?” Raj asked.

  “Minister MacCullen,” Carver said as he brushed a piece of imaginary lint off his sleeve.

  I leaned back against the bar for support. I hadn’t expected him to say that.

  “What a tragedy that was!” Raj pressed his hands together as if in prayer.

  “Indeed,” Carver agreed. “I imagine that everyone in the village is wondering what brought the minister to his end.”

  “I’m sure the police are doing everything they can to find out. I don’t know if you know Chief Inspector Neil Craig, but he is a good man and will get to the heart of what happened to the minister in no time at all.”

  “I’ve met him,” Carver said with a slight curl to his lip.

  Clearly Craig had spoken to Carver, and I would hazard a guess that it had not been a pleasant encounter.

  “Yes, the minister’s death is a tragedy for the village,” Carver went on. “I was very sorry to hear about it. He was the driving force in favor of the chapel restoration project.”

  “Will the project go on now that the minister is dead?” Raj asked. I leaned forward, desperate to hear the answer to the question I’d been dying to ask.

  Carver smoothed an imaginary wrinkle in his sleeve. “It’s hard to tell. I’m uncertain that the congregation would have pursued it without his persistence, and what a shame that would have been. It is a lovely structure, or at least what is left of it. It will do wonders in telling us what religious faith looked like in Aberdeenshire back in the twelfth century. It is important that history like that be preserved for future generations.”

  He said all of this like it was a well-practiced speech on the campaign trail. And perhaps it was. Carver Finley was campaigning to save Aberdeenshire’s rich history before it was completely pushed aside by the modern world. He deserved credit for that.

  The front door of the Twisted Fox opened, and golden light from the setting sun poured into the large room.

  “There you are, Carver!” Emer Boyd smiled broadly and hurried toward us. “Thank you so much for meeting here to talk over next steps.”

  Her husband, Douglas, followed a few paces behind her. He dragged his feet as if he’d rather be anywhere else.

  “I hope we didn’t keep you waiting very long,” Emer said. “We were over at the church checking on everything. The sexton has done a good job of keeping the show running, and we found a pulpit supply minister to fill in for Sunday services until the presbytery sends us an interim minister. And of course, there is the minister’s funeral to plan. It must be befitting of such a great man. As you can imagine, it’s been quite a scramble. Both Douglas and I are exhausted.”

  I peered around her at Douglas, who was staring at the top of his shoe and obsessively scratching at his right arm. The man had either a terrible case of poison ivy or a nervous tick.

  “When will the funeral be?” Raj asked.

  She glanced at him. “We don’t know yet. We can’t set a date until the police release the body.” She grimaced when she said this, but then brightened. “That’s why we have to do all the planning that we can now. I have several leaders in the presbytery set to preach and serve communion. I think it all will be well.”

  I nodded thoughtfully. I wasn’t sure yet if I would attend the minister’s funeral. It seemed hypocritical in a way, after the many rocky encounters he and I had had.

  She smiled at Isla and then me. “I see you’ve met Carver Finley, Fiona. I’m very glad to see that.”

  I smiled in return, unsure why she was so happy that Carver and I had met.

  Emer seemed to read my thoughts by what she said next. “I’m glad that you have met because we will all be working at the church together soon, of course. Just as soon as we make arrangements for you to provide the flowers, Fiona.”

  Before I could respond to that, Carver said, “And I was very happy to meet Fiona, since I hear she is from Duncreigan, which I have heard so much about.”

  She tightened her grip on the handle of her designer handbag. “I’m sure Duncreigan is fascinating, but as you know, the chapel ruins are really the historical wonder in Bellewick.”

  I raised my eyebrow. I hadn’t realized we were in a competition.

  Emer cleared her throat. “I know you have much work to do on your assessment of the ruins, so Douglas and I don’t want to keep you. Shall we begin our meeting?” She pointed across the pub at a couple who were leaving a table by the window.

  “I’ll send one of my waitstaff over right away to clear the table and take your orders,” Raj promised them both.

  “Thank you.” She blushed. “I know it might seem crass to be getting on with the restoration, but this project is what Minister MacCullen cared about most. Saving this church will be his legacy. The church has already changed the name of the chapel restoration fund to the Reverend Quaid MacCullen Chapel Fund in his memory.”

  Before anyone could comment on that, Emer looked to Raj. “Coffees please, Raj, to start. Mr. Finley, will you follow me?”

  Carver nodded, then smiled at Raj. “I am looking forward to assessing the pub. It will be an interesting project for me, and I do enjoy interesting projects. I hope you remember that, Miss Knox.”

  I frowned.

  Raj puffed up his chest and beamed from ear to ear. There was nothing else in the world that the famous historian could have said to make the pub owner any prouder. “Those coffees will be right up.”

  Carver nodded as he and Emer wove around the table in the crowded pub with Douglas following in their wake.

  I wanted to ask Raj about the odd couple, but the cook appeared from the kitchen with two steaming plates of chicken marsala, and I was immediately distracted by my growling stomach.

  Raj personally took the tray of coffees to Carver’s table. When he returned, he was grinning from ear to ear. “He said the pub has history,” he said dreamily.

  I glanced at I
sla, who was blatantly staring at the handsome man across the room. I was on the lookout for more drool on her lips. Thankfully, there was none to be seen.

  I smiled. “You’ve already discovered a lot of it, Raj. I’m excited to see what Carver will be able to add to your research.”

  “Me too.” Raj began putting away a tray of clean beer steins. “Now what was your question again, Fiona, before the spider sighting and Mr. Finley’s arrival?”

  I sipped on my glass of water. “Seth MacGregor. When was the last time you saw him?”

  My sister spun back around in her seat and began digging into her dinner as if it was the last meal she might ever eat. Maybe I hadn’t been doing a great job of feeding her since she came to Scotland.

  He cocked his head. “It’s been over a month since I’ve seen Seth. As soon as the coastline was saved from that developer, he left. As far as I know, he’s living in Aberdeen.”

  I frowned. “Are you two still in contact?”

  “Somewhat. We are like-minded when it comes to environmental issues, so we move in the same circles online, if you count that. But I haven’t been personally in touch with him since he left for Aberdeen. Why do you ask?”

  “I thought I saw him in the village yesterday across the street from your pub. It was in the evening right before the storm hit. I assumed he was in the village to see you.”

  Raj placed two more glasses under the bar. “He never came in, and I was here all night. I kept the pub open after hours so that those who were here during the storm didn’t have to venture out into that mess of weather.”

  “That was nice of you,” I said absently. I had been positive Seth was back in the village to see Raj, and I couldn’t think of another reason for him to be here. “Are there any environmental causes in the village that Seth would be interested in participating in now? Anything that would draw him back?”