Scarlet Wakefield 02 - Kisses and Lies

by Lauren Henderson

  “What?”

  I give Taylor a brief summary of recent events. She’s dumbfounded.

  “Wow. Well, we’ve narrowed the field down a bit, right?” she asks. “We know now it was probably a woman shooting at you.”

  I shake my head. “There are loads more women than men at the castle.” I count off on my fingers. “Catriona: she was in the shower when I got back, but I suppose she could have dashed back before Mr. McAndrew turned up, though it’d be tight. Moira came out of the kitchen, but again, she could have sneaked in through the back entrance and just dusted some flour on her hair to make it look like she was hard at work making bread. (I really don’t want it to be Moira—she’s been so nice to me.) Then there’s Mrs. McAndrew—she came down from upstairs but she could easily have just gone up and come back down again. And Lucy.” I pause. “Lucy wasn’t anywhere around, but she couldn’t have taken a rifle from the gun room, because then it would be missing and Mr. McAndrew would notice. Perhaps she could have brought one from her house.”

  Taylor’s looking at me expectantly. I give her a quick rundown of who everyone is, how they’ve been acting since I’ve come here, and the Polaroids I found in Dan’s room. She nods at the end.

  “So Lucy’s the most likely suspect on all fronts,” she hypothesizes.

  “I guess. She seems pretty angry at me and despises Dan, not surprisingly.”

  “Boys can be so gross,” Taylor says disgustedly. “And girls can be so stupid.”

  Speaking of which, Taylor blows up at me when I tell her that I burned most of the photos.

  “I leave you alone for two seconds and you pull something that dumb!” she exclaims. “You should’ve kept them all, just in case.”

  I grin. “I knew you’d say that, evil genius. But I couldn’t. I felt really sorry for them.” I touch my back jeans pocket, feeling the photos safely buttoned in there. “I kept one each of Plum and Lucy, though.”

  Taylor rolls her eyes. Even in the evening gloom, I see the whites of her eyes gleaming.

  “You’re such a softie,” she says in frustration.

  I can’t help laughing. “I really missed you,” I admit. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  Taylor shuffles her feet. “Cool,” she says gruffly. “ ’Cause I thought you might be really pissed at me showing up like this. You know, sticking my nose in where I wasn’t wanted.”

  I start to say something, but she cuts me off.

  “And I want to say, I get that this is really important to you, okay? I’m sorry that I took over a bit. I can be bossy sometimes.”

  “Sometimes?”

  Taylor fakes a punch at my stomach.

  “I mean it, though. I’m so glad you’re here,” I say sincerely.

  “Me too,” she says, smiling. “Scotland is pretty fierce, and so is this castle.”

  “Oh God!” Taylor has reminded me of another piece to the puzzle. I fill her in on Moira’s comments about Callum being a much better inheritor of Castle Airlie than Dan. Now Lucy has a rival, or maybe a coconspirator, in the most-likely-suspect category.

  “Did everyone in the family think that?” Taylor asks.

  “It sounds like it, from what Moira said.”

  “Huh. So someone could have killed him to make sure it went to Callum, because he’d look after the place while Dan would run it into the ground?” Taylor suggests. “This Moira person, maybe? I mean, a castle must cost a ton of money to run, and keep up. . . . Most people don’t live in theirs anymore, do they? They make them into hotels or something. So you’d have to really love this place not to sell it and make a fortune and then just go party. What if someone was scared that was what Dan would do if he inherited?”

  “Yeah, but he doesn’t inherit till his dad dies, does he?” I say. “It always works like that.”

  “But didn’t you say it’s their eighteenth birthday in a couple of days? Maybe when the heir turns eighteen, he gets a whole bunch of cash to spend, or something, and that’d mean the estate would be bankrupted? Or maybe he gets to be a coowner, and he could sell part of it?”

  I gape at Taylor, even though I can barely make out her features.

  “That’s a really, really good theory, Taylor,” I say in awe.

  She makes a smirking noise. “I’m on fire!” she says smugly.

  “I need to look at a copy of the will, or the deed, or whatever it is that would explain how the inheritance thing works,” I say slowly. “I’ll have to find out where they keep it.”

  “How are you going to do that?” Taylor asks curiously.

  I pull a face. “I don’t know, and I don’t have much time to figure it out either. There’s no way they’ll let me stay longer than Tuesday, not with Callum and Dan’s birthday coming up.”

  “Whatever it takes, Scarlett,” Taylor says grimly. “You’ve gotten this far.”

  I nod, and duck a look at my watch.

  “Oops, I should be getting back—it’s close to dinnertime, and I don’t want anyone coming to look for me.” I swallow hard. “Taylor, thank you so much for coming. You know, I didn’t realize how alone I felt here until you turned up—it means so much to me to have someone here who’s on my—”

  I break off as Taylor pretends to gag and throw up in the bushes.

  “I’m trying to be nice,” I say coldly.

  “Well, don’t. It’s making me want to puke. I’ve got your back, okay? We’re good.”

  We look at each other for a moment. I want to give her a big hug, but Taylor’s not touchy-feely at all: she’d hate that. Instead, I slap her on the shoulder and she slaps me back. It’s tragic—we’re like a couple of boys.

  “See you round,” she says.

  “Will you be okay getting back?”

  “Sure. I should get going too—Mrs. Drummond will yell at me if I’m late for dinner.”

  “Sounds like school.”

  Taylor grins. “The food’s a lot better,” she says happily.

  She heads off to retrieve her bike from where she’s hidden it behind the stables, and I jog back to the main drawbridge. Moira might well be going in and out of the pantry while she’s cooking dinner, and I don’t want to rouse her suspicions by having her spot me coming back in when I’d said I was going for a nap. I cross the moat and push open the door cut into the huge wooden gates, heavily decorated with wrought iron to make them near-impossible to break down, even with a battering ram. The latch lifts easily—this is deep countryside, where people don’t lock up till they go to bed at night. But as I push the door open, it unexpectedly bumps into something, and I hear an “Ow!” as it makes contact.

  Then it’s pulled open from inside, and Callum McAndrew appears in the doorway, glowering at me.

  I guess the shock of him looking like Dan is wearing off, because the first thought in my head here is, God, doesn’t he have any other facial expressions?

  “You hit me,” he says unfairly.

  “I didn’t mean to. I was just opening the door.”

  “Well, I was walking down the corridor. I wasn’t expecting anyone this time of night.”

  “It’s not that late.”

  “What were you doing outside, anyway?” he demands.

  I think about telling him to mind his own bloody business, but somehow I feel we’ve antagonized each other enough.

  “I wanted some fresh air,” I say. “I’ve had a bit of a weird day, so I thought I’d go outside and look at the stars.”

  To my surprise, his face softens, and I briefly glimpse a familiar grin.

  “I do that sometimes, too,” he says. “I’ve got to say, you’re no coward, are you? Going back out in the dark after saying you got shot at this afternoon.”

  “I didn’t say I got shot at,” I correct him. “I just said someone was shooting in the wood, and I was scared I’d be hit.”

  I look him right in the eyes, though I have to tilt my head back to do it. When I met Dan at that party, I was in high heels, practically at eye level wit
h him. Now I’m in my trainers, and Callum’s towering over me. But I hold his gaze even though he makes me nervous—and not in a good Jase Barnes way.

  “Come on,” he beckons. “I’ll show you where you can look at the stars without traipsing around outside in the dark. The last thing we want is you falling in the moat. You seem fairly accident-prone.”

  Callum turns and walks down the corridor, clearly expecting me to follow. While part of me feels like he’s trying to be nice, another part of me wonders if Callum McAndrew may be tricking me into falling into a dungeon under the floor. (I’ve heard some Scottish castles have those—the lairds would listen to the screams of their enemies starving to death while they ate their dinner.) But I doubt it. From what I’ve seen of Callum, he’s not afraid of face-to-face confrontation. He’d be much more likely to throw me into the moat himself than do anything sneaky or underhanded.

  He’s opening a door in the far wall of the corridor and holding it for me. Dutifully, I walk through, noting that when he’s not yelling at me, he has the manners of a gentleman. And then I gasp.

  I’m standing in the middle of the central courtyard, hidden in the center of Castle Airlie. But the word courtyard doesn’t do it justice. It has a wide stone verge, but the center is a grassy lawn, dark and lush in the night air. Lights from the castle windows pool down long gold diamonds onto the grass, and above us the sky is bright with stars. It’s a magical hidden garden.

  “It’s so beautiful!” I can’t help exclaiming. I turn to Callum. “And it feels warmer here, too, or am I mad?”

  “No, it always feels like the air’s softer in here,” he says. “Or it does to me, anyway.”

  Callum rubs his hand over his scalp.

  “I spent lots of time in here when I was younger,” he says. “Just playing games, or telling myself made-up stories about what might have happened here. I read all about the history of Castle Airlie, everything I could get my hands on. It was besieged in 1300 by the English King Edward I, did you know that? That was during the war with our King John.” He grins, seeing my blank expression. “The Braveheart war,” he adds. “Though the film made a lot of stuff up. But Sir William Wallace—that’s the Braveheart guy—wrote in 1300 that Castle Airlie was ‘so strong a castle that it feared no siege.’ Isn’t that amazing? It’s built like a shield, three-sided, and he said it was a ‘perfect shield in design and function.’ And that he’d ‘never seen a more finely situated castle.’ Of course, he meant ‘finely situated’ in the sense of being impregnable, not that it was massively beautiful or anything. But it’s still amazing to be mentioned that far back in history—”

  He breaks off suddenly.

  “I’m being a huge bore, aren’t I?” he says, ducking his head in an embarrassed gesture. “I’m sorry. Girls hate it when I bang on about battles and sieges, apparently. You’d think I’d have learned by now—Dan used to tell me often enough.”

  “I was really interested, actually,” I say, and it’s nothing more than the truth. “I love all that kind of stuff.”

  “History?” Callum asks.

  “Well, yes, but battles and sieges too. I’d have hated to live in those times, though,” I blurt out. “No one would have let me fight. It would be so miserable to be hiding inside the castle watching all the men go out to fight and not doing anything myself.”

  Callum laughs softly. “Oh, you could have organized the defense. Pouring boiling oil on the invaders, pushing their ladders off the walls . . .”

  “That does sound like fun,” I admit.

  To my surprise, I am smiling at Callum, and to my horror, I feel something inside me loosen and melt. Callum doesn’t have Dan’s softness or his approachability. His hair’s cropped closer than Dan’s, so it doesn’t flop enticingly over his forehead, making you long to reach up and push it back. His shoulders are set square, his posture’s straight as a soldier’s; Callum lacks any of Dan’s easy stance, his flexibility. He makes you feel every inch of his height. But in the soft shadowy light spilling through the half-open door and the lit windows overhead, I can see how handsome he looks.

  “Talking of boiling oil, sometimes we light torches here in the courtyard, if we’re having big parties,” Callum says. “It’s fantastic—the whole castle’s lit up, and it looks so beautiful. You should see it like that.”

  Then he realizes what he’s said, and catches his breath. I do too.

  But I don’t want to let him know I’m aware that his and Dan’s joint birthday is coming up, in case it turns out he got Lucy to kill Dan so that he could inherit. This is chilling. I’m actually picturing him as the cold-blooded killer of his twin brother. Right now, standing next to him, that seems really far-fetched. But someone killed Dan, I know that for sure. And so far, Callum has the biggest motive of all that I know about. More than Lucy hating Dan because he’d taken sexy pictures of her. Inheriting a castle that’s worth a fortune—I can’t imagine a bigger motive than that. Though of course, if Lucy killed Dan so Callum could inherit, that would be two birds with one stone for her. But would Callum know what Lucy did? Might he be innocent, or could he have planned the whole thing and stayed away from London and the party to give himself a solid alibi?

  I’m suddenly freaking out that he might guess I know about their eighteenth birthday. If he did kill Dan, and he thinks I suspect him, I could be in real danger. My brain races, thinking of something to say that will change the subject from the potentially dangerous one of parties, but Callum gets in first.

  “I know Mum invited you here so we could talk about Dan,” he blurts out. “That’s what she kept saying. She wants to talk about him all the time, and the rest of us . . . Well, I just leave the room when she starts up because I don’t want to see her crying. I think Dad feels the same, but he has to stay.”

  I’m not really sure how to respond, so I stay silent, just observing him carefully.

  He continues, “Ever since Dan died, she’s been buried neck-deep in books about grieving. I don’t honestly think it’s helping much.”

  “I don’t know what would help, though,” I say, wondering why I’m trying to console him right now. “It’s got to be awful, no matter how you deal with it.”

  I feel Callum’s gaze on me and look up to meet his eyes. A sort of electric current passes between us, and I shiver.

  “How are you doing?” he asks. “About Dan, I mean. It must have been horrible for you.”

  “It was,” I admit, and I can’t help being suspicious as to why he’s finally showing me some sympathy. Even so, I’m also relieved that he’s being nicer to me. “Really horrible. I didn’t realize what was happening, and it was so scary. And I felt awful not being able to help him.”

  “You didn’t know about his allergy?”

  I shake my head. “But I hadn’t known him that long,” I confess.

  “He didn’t tell a lot of people,” Callum said somberly. “He was a bit embarrassed by it. Which was stupid, because it wasn’t his fault, you know? But that was Dan all over.”

  I’m puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh.” He makes a sound that’s like a sigh and a laugh at the same time. “Dan had this thing about not wanting to seem weak. He was always like that, even when he was wee. He had to be the big man.”

  “Everyone at school looked up to him.”

  “Yeah, everyone loved Dan,” Callum says, and as far as I can tell, there’s no bitterness in his voice at all: he sounds sincere, happy that his brother was so well loved. “You did too, right?” he continues.

  Funny—he’s looking away now, as if he’s not that interested in the answer.

  I’m glad that it’s dark so he can’t see me blushing. “I really liked him.”

  “He’d charm the birds off the trees,” Callum observes. “That’s what Moira would always say about him. Not like me.”

  I glance up nervously, but see he’s smiling.

  “It’s okay. Dan was the charmer and I’m the grumpy one,” he says. �
�You don’t need to say anything. I haven’t exactly been that friendly to you. In fact, I’ve been horrible. It’s just that—”

  “I understand,” I cut in, mostly because I feel as though he’s about to say something mushy that will make me want to drop my guard. “You were his twin.”

  “I still can’t believe you didn’t know about that,” Callum says.

  I shake my head.

  “I did try to catch you,” he adds. “When you fainted, I mean. I’m not a complete bastard. Sorry that I was too late. Does your head still hurt?”

  I shake it again. “It’s not too bad. I’ve got some pain-killers if I need them.”

  “You went down slow,” he says, remembering it. “Your knees sort of gave way, and then you fell back a bit, like you were sitting down, and then you just collapsed. I think you sort of sat on your suitcase as you were going down—that probably broke your fall.”

  “I must have looked really stupid,” I say, unable to help being a bit appalled at this vivid description of my theatrics.

  “Not really . . . Well, maybe a little bit. . . .” He’s really grinning now. “You were totally out of it on the drive back. I had to take off my jacket and prop up your head, so you didn’t get too bounced around.”

  “Who carried me up to my room?” I ask, blushing.

  “Me, of course,” he says.

  I writhe inwardly. He knows how much I weigh. How humiliating.

  “I’m sorry if I was really heavy,” I mumble.

  “You’re not at all,” he says, almost flirtatiously. “You’re just a tiny wee thing.” He looks down at me. “You barely come up to my shoulder.”

  Callum puts out a hand and runs it in a line from his shoulder to the top of my head. He’s right—I’m no taller than that. But when his hand grazes my head, there’s a sudden leap of my nerve endings, like a small electric shock, and I see his eyes widen slightly as if he’s felt it too. For a brief moment, his hand lingers on a curl of my hair.