Fortunately, when I woke up in the B&B the next morning, I could remember all of the night’s events, and I didn’t think I’d done anything embarrassing like declare my undying love for a librarian I’d only seen twice in my life.
Unfortunately, my crush did get the better of me at breakfast when I told my best friend I was excited about the double date we’d planned. She rolled her eyes and said, “You do remember we live in the States, and these two men are fully grounded here in Scotland, right?”
I did remember, but I had been trying to forget. “Of course,” I said, “but stranger things have happened.”
“In Hallmark movies, Poe. Hallmark movies. Unless you’re planning on opening a Scottish-themed soap shop back in Virginia, I think it’s best we consider tonight an evening with new friends.” She sounded adamant, but I could see the shadow of disappointment on her face. “Right?”
“What if we thought about it as a date but just a casual one?” I suggested. “Friends but with flirting.”
This brought a smile to her face. “I like that plan. But now, we need to get serious. What are we trying to find out from Davis MacDonald?”
Now, it was my turn to get serious. “Well, it sounds like he may be contending with some mental struggles, so I’m trying to keep my expectations reasonable. But I’d like to confirm how much he sold the book to Stovall for, and I’d like to know what he paid for it, if he’ll share. I’d also like to hear more about this curse, from his point of view, see if that might provide a bit of a tool we can use when we go back to the table with Stovall.”
Beattie nodded. “Hopefully, he’s forthcoming,” she said with not a small amount of skepticism in her voice. “But just in case, let’s fortify with a little tea and shortbread on the way.”
I looked down at the plates we’d just cleaned of an entire English breakfast, rubbed my belly, and said, “Sounds good.”
With directions to a local bakery from our host, we headed out into the busy streets of Inverness. I was always curious about the way cities held different energies. There was a similar frenetic undercurrent everywhere, but in New York, for example, the energy was pointed, focused with everyone intent on where they were going. Our small city, Charlottesville, was airier and more open and forward-looking but with an undercurrent of arrogance bred by a long history. Inverness, though, felt more staid in its history, confident about itself without having to prove anything. She reminded me of older women I knew who were kind but brokered no fools and who carried themselves with a quiet dignity that flowed through everything they did. A staid, strong, graceful lady. Maybe this was why I was falling in love with the city.
Well, that and the shortbread. Seriously, shortbread is a great gift to the world.
With our cups of tea and scone-size pieces of shortbread in hand, Beattie and I made the walk across town and up into Dalneigh and used our phones to locate MacDonald’s street. It was beautiful in a sort of midcentury European way. Not to my taste as much as, say, the Cotswolds in southwestern England, but still charming and just different enough from the midcentury suburbs of America to feel new.
MacDonald’s house was sort of moderate in size for the street, and when we opened the gate at the front garden, I grinned at the beautiful array of flowers and shrubs he had in place instead of a yard. The space was a perfect “cottage garden,” and, not for the first time, I found myself wondering if I could do that with my little apartment yard back in Charlottesville. Then, I wondered what my neighbors, who were staunch lawn mowers and herbicide sprayers, would think.
I didn’t have much time to weigh my options there, though, because Beattie was striding toward the door with a grace I was never going to master in heels. She’d tried to teach me, but Danskos were always going to be my preference over anything that elevated the back of my foot far above my toes.
She stepped onto the small sandstone stoop and raised her hand to knock, but as she did, the door swung open of its own accord. I stepped up behind her and peered down the long hallway lined with dark wood paneling of a craftsman style. It was beautiful, and I was tempted to just walk in. But Beattie put her hand on my arm and held me back. “Poe,” she whispered as she directed her gaze just to the right of the front door.
There, framed in an opening, was a pair of fine leather loafers with the toes pointed upward, which I could tell were the ends of a pair of legs in tweed. I sucked in my breath and said quietly, “We need to see if he’s alive.” I strode into the room, even as Beattie hissed at me to stop and pointed out that I might be disrupting a crime scene.
I realized that, but if this man was still alive, I wasn’t going to just stand at the door and watch him—or at least his feet—die. I stepped beside him and saw an older man with silver hair and a very impressive mustache thick enough to make Wilford Brimley jealous. He wore round glasses, and I imagined that before the gray pallor of death had settled over him, he’d had rosy cheeks.
Now, though, he was quite gray. Before I even put my fingers to the part of his neck where I thought I might feel his pulse, I knew he was dead. The clammy skin beneath my pointer and middle fingers confirmed it. He was dead, very dead.
I quickly backtracked to the front door and said, “We need to call the police.”
“No need,” a deep voice said from behind us. “Would you like to tell me what you’re doing here?”
Beattie’s and my eyes met, and I could see panic that matched mine in her eyes. But we both turned and looked at the barrel-chested man dressed all in black and with close-cropped brown hair and deep brown skin behind us. “We were just coming to visit Mr. MacDonald,” Beattie started. “But I’m afraid he’s dead.”
The police officer studied us for a minute. “Did you open the door?” he said as he peered behind us.
“No, sir,” I said in a far squeakier voice than I would have liked. “When we went to knock, the door swung open.” I swallowed hard. “I did step inside to check on him. He’s definitely dead.” I braced myself for a scolding or, worse, handcuffs, but the officer gave one crisp nod.
“Please wait here,” he said and strode past us to the front door, where he looked inside with a studied gaze and then walked slower to where the body lay.
As the officer knelt down, Beattie had the wherewithal to suggest we step back a bit, so we moved to a small bench just off the walkway. If I hadn’t been so unnerved by the events of the last few moments, I might have enjoyed looking at MacDonald’s fine garden. As it was, I could barely register that he seemed to have a penchant for lilies.
Beattie and I sat close together, completely quiet, even as neighbors began to gather on the street, apparently drawn over by the combination of the police car at the curb and the presence of two strange women in MacDonald’s yard. No one spoke to us, though, which I appreciated and chalked up to another thing that the Scots had over the Americans. If we’d been at home, at least three people would have already asked us what was going on. I preferred the Scots’ quiet nosiness to the more abrasive American version.
After a few minutes, another police car arrived, and two women went inside the house after giving their own brisk nods in our direction. Beattie looked at me and said, “Odd how trusting of us they are, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “Maybe we just look trustworthy.”
“I rather think it might just be that it’s fairly easy to track down two Americans in Inverness,” a woman from over the fence said with a gentle smile. “I heard you were in town yesterday.”
I smiled at her and nodded, figuring she was right. “You may have a point there,” I said, hearing the tiniest bit of brogue slip behind my Southern American accent. I knew I’d hear about my tendency to pick up accents from Beattie later. She always teased me about it, although I couldn’t help it. I chalked it up to the theater classes I took in college and all the coaching the dialect expert had given me when everything I said had a slight Virginia drawl.
The first officer came back out and headed for us. “You were right, Miss, Davis is most definitely dead. Thank you for checking on him, though. Poor fellow didn’t deserve to die that way.”
Before I could think, I said, “What way is that, Officer, um—?” I found myself stumbling over both the man’s rank and his name.
“Inspector Scott,” the officer said, “and I’m afraid I will have to refrain from further comment on Davis’s death, Miss—?” He raised an eyebrow.
“Baxter,” I said, “Poe Baxter, and this is Beattie Andrews.” I started to tell him why we were there but thought better of it when I remembered Uncle Fitz’s caution about revealing more than necessary.
“You’re staying downtown, I understand,” said Inspector Scott, and I caught the eye of the woman beyond the fence again as she gave me a small nod. “May I call on you there later if I have further questions?”
I hadn’t had a lot of formal conversations with police officers in the US, but I could not imagine any of them asking permission to question us later. “Sure. Would you like our number?” I asked.
“No need. If it suits you, I’ll plan to meet you in the lobby of the hotel at four for a cuppa and a chat,” the inspector said.
“Perfect, Inspector,” Beattie said as she stood and stretched out her hand. “We’ll see you then.”
Following her lead, I stood and walked beside her to the sidewalk, where the neighbors stepped away to let us pass without a word.
After we had walked a couple of blocks, Beattie said, “We might need to get our story straight about what we’re going to share and what we’re not.”
I stopped walking and turned toward her. “You’re thinking of not telling him something about the book?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “He seems trustworthy enough, but we don’t know why Davis MacDonald was killed. But given the curse—”
“Are you serious?” I said far too loudly. “You actually believe in that thing?”
Beattie tilted her head and looked at me like I’d just suggested she actually eat fast food. “No, Poe, I don’t. But it isn’t about what I believe. If that inspector believes in the curse, it will affect how he investigates, now won’t it?” Her tone was just the teensiest bit patronizing, but I saw her point.
“Fair enough, so how do we play this?” I asked as we resumed our walk back downtown. “Do we act like we believe or act skeptical?”
A twinkle came into Beattie’s eye, and she said, “How about both?”
I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. “Only if I get to be the true believer.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she said.
A few hours later, after we’d both had lunch from a local takeaway place and had succumbed to a nap on the very soft beds in our room, Beattie and I made our way down to the hotel lobby and waited for Inspector Scott. As I watched the people come in and out of the hotel, I thought of how “on the nose” the inspector’s name was, a Scott from Scotland, but then I remembered that the renovation celebrities Drew and Jonathan were also named Scott and wondered if it was common, like the way Smith was a named derived from blacksmith.
My mind began wandering even further afield as I thought about whether the Scott brothers might ever come to Charlottesville for a job. Then I supposed that if they did, that salvage expert from nearby Octonia, Paisley Sutton, might get to be involved, which would be awesome since I loved her newsletter and her stories about her young son.
Soon, my mind was constructing an elaborate story where Paisley became the newest member of the Scott family, perhaps by marrying Jonathan, and they moved to Charlottesville to begin renovating all the old buildings around town and making them affordable for low and middle-income people. I had gone into full-blown fantasy mode when Beattie elbowed me hard in the side and said, “Poe, stop daydreaming. He’s here.”
I followed her gaze to where the inspector was striding purposefully in our direction. He looked pleasant enough about the face, but something about the length of his stride made me think he was all business. “Ladies,” he said as he sat down on the bench perpendicular to ours. “Thank you for meeting me. This shouldn’t take long.”
We had nowhere to be, but I hoped he was right. I didn’t really love being questioned about a death into which we could give no insight.
“So let’s begin with the obvious. Why were you at Davis MacDonald’s house earlier?” he casually said as he drew a small notebook out of his pants pocket.
Beattie took that first question. “We were going to inquire with Mr. MacDonald about a book he had recently sold. We are book buyers, you see.” Her tone matched the inspector’s, and I hoped he didn’t take the way she shifted in her seat as a sign of duplicity, especially since she was telling the full truth.
“And what book was that?” he asked.
“It’s a collection of sea monster stories,” I said. “Forgive my Gaelic, but it’s something like Finseal Oilfist.”
The inspector’s face broke into a wide smile. “That was very good, lass. The Finscéal Ollphéist, a famous book indeed.”
“You’ve heard of it?” Beattie asked with far more innocence than she actually possessed.
“Well, of course, I have. It’s cursed, you know.” He winked at Beattie then.
She nodded with exaggeration and said, “Of course it is.”
The game was afoot. “You don’t believe in the curse,” I said, trying to sound a little upset by the idea.
“I don’t believe in anything I can’t see with my own two eyes, be that sea monsters or curses,” the police officer said. “But I take it you do.”
I shrugged, trying to look like I was feigning disbelief. I found it a psychological challenge to pretend to be disinterested in something I was pretending to be interested in but not really interested in. “Maybe?” I said.
“Why is that?” the inspector said in what seemed like an innocent and polite tone but, I suspected, was a much deeper question than appeared on the surface.
“So many people who have owned the book have died, and now the curse has taken Mr. MacDonald, too,” I lowered my voice to a half-whisper. “It would suit me just fine if we couldn’t buy the book and just headed home without it.”
“I see,” he said and shot a wink to Beattie. “So you think the curse killed Davis?” He looked back at me.
“Well, I don’t think the curse actually killed him, if that’s what you mean. That kind of magic only happens with the darkest witches.” I was leaning hard into my role now. “But someone under the curse’s influence might have.”
“So you think it was murder?” he said as he looked down at his notepad and then up at me from beneath his eyebrows as if his question was not quite casual.
But as soon as I said it, I knew I was right. I wasn’t sure how, but I’d known since the moment I knelt over his body that Davis MacDonald had been murdered. “I do,” I said, figuring at this point honesty was better than role-playing.
“Well, you’d be right,” he said. “Any idea how he died?”
I studied the inspector’s face, and he kept his eyes on mine. “He was hit in the head,” I said, surprising myself. I hadn’t realized I’d deduced that, but I knew it as soon as the words left my mouth. “I saw the blood and the damage to the side of his skull, I think.”
“Good, lass,” he said. “If you hadn’t mentioned that, I would have had reason to be suspicious.” He smiled. “You had me a bit worried when you asked about the cause of death earlier.”
This time, I was puzzled. “But you gave me the benefit of the doubt anyway?”
“Sometimes it takes a bit for these things to sink in past the shock. Seems that’s the case here, too.” He looked over to Beattie and then back at me. “Anything else you’ve remembered? Anything at all that seemed out of place?”
I looked at Beattie, and then we both shook our heads. “Not that comes to mind, Inspector,” Beattie said. “But of course, we are not from here, so it would be hard for us to know what was out of the ordinary.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “Anyhow, how did you know to talk to Davis about this book of yours?”
I briefly explained our conversation with Stovall and his desire to obtain far more for the book than we had been prepared to pay. “We had hoped to get some clarity on the book’s value from Mr. MacDonald.”
“Ah, very good.” The inspector stood up. “I think I have all the information I need, but in case I come upon anything about the book that might be of interest to you, will you be here a while?”
“We’re heading out to the Isle of Skye tomorrow, but you have our numbers, and we will be back in Inverness by the weekend,” Beattie said before adding, “Anything, in particular, we should see out that way?”
“Well, given your project here, you’ll definitely want to visit the Loch Ness Museum and see if you can spot the old girl herself, but personally, I’d recommend Eilean Donan Castle. Bonny bit of landscape that one.” He gave us a quick two-fingered salute. “Safe travels.”
As we watched him walk out the door, I felt a growing affection for the inspector. “I like him,” I said to Beattie.
“I do, too,” she said. “He doesn’t miss a thing, but he also doesn’t assume a thing either. I like that in a person.”
With our business concluded and a couple of hours to kill before our dinner reservations at another quaint restaurant Beattie had found, we headed back to our room to pick up our traveling companion and take him out for a bit.
Most people don’t think of hamsters as good travelers, and I can’t speak for others. But BB travels like a seasoned voyager. He’s quite adaptable to any environment and loves sightseeing, especially from the translucent plastic bag that Beattie had custom-made for him. It had a sheepskin floor, several ventilation holes for oxygen flow and temperature control, and a small water bottle suspended in one corner. Every time I put BB in it, I thought of the Pope and his Popemobile. I knew it was sacrilegious, but I was seriously thinking of getting BB a white cassock and one of those pointed hats that the pope wears for formal occasions.
This afternoon, the sun had come out on what was apparently a rare event in Inverness if the comments and looks of awe and delight on the townspeople were to be believed. Several people were walking around with their hands out and their faces turned up to the sky as if they’d been living in an underground community for decades. It was pretty fun to see.
BB was similarly excited, but his joy took the form of sprinting back and forth across his bag so that he could see everything from every angle. As usual, he was also the source of much amusement, and Beattie and I spent the better part of our quite short walk answering questions about the hamster and pointing out that it would not be wise to take him out to hold him on the open street since he might fall.
What we did not say was that Butterball was quite likely to bolt for the closest scent of food that he could find. Every time we took him outside, I feared he’d be able to pull back the zipper, bust open the snap, and leap from his bag to let himself into a restaurant kitchen, where the chef would find him making his own food a la Ratatouille.
Today, we made it about two steps at a time as people caught sight of our chubby brown critter and asked everything from his name to where they could acquire one. My knowledge of pet stores was fairly limited, even in the US, so I had nowhere to direct them. One woman seemed particularly put out that I could not recommend a reputable shop in Inverness for her, and I made a mental note to ask our concierge about options before we took BB out in the Highlands. I didn’t want to be the cause of such pet-related scorn again.
While I was flummoxed by the attention, Beattie became, as usual, more graceful and charming. With each stop and query, she seemed to become more and more like the 1920s Hollywood actress I secretly thought she must have been in another life. She’d slow down her speech and get more languid in her movements, even as her radiant beauty got more and more noticeable, as if the sun was turning just to get her into the perfect light. I’d told her about this phenomenon on several similar occasions, but she just laughed and suggested I be a little less dramatic. She was one to talk.
We were just about to head back to the hotel and return BB to his travel cage so that he could nap away the excitement when a tall, reedy woman with a thatch of dark hair and a sort of awkward gait approached. Given that we had just spent the last hour as the spokeswomen for our hamster, I figured this woman was going to want to see him up close, so as she approached, I lifted his bag higher so she could get a better look.
But instead of focusing her eyes and the requisite cutesy voice on our tiny companion, she met my gaze and thrust out a hand. “Ma—Andrea MacDonald,” she said. “I wanted to thank you for finding my father and calling the authorities this morning.”
I started to correct her and tell her we hadn’t, indeed, called anyone and wouldn’t have even known how to do so, when the weight of Beattie’s hand on my arm made me hold my tongue.
“I’m so sorry for your loss, Ms. MacDonald,” Beattie said before stepping forward to hug the surprised woman.
Ms. MacDonald extricated herself from the clearly unwanted display of sympathy and, straightening her denim vest, said, “Thank you. But we weren’t close.”
Now, I’d heard people say this on movies and TV shows before, and I’d always chalked it up to a bit of poor writing since it seemed like a sort of shorthand for letting the audience know that the two characters didn’t have a good relationship. Now, though, I found the declaration remarkably disturbing because it was profoundly callous and completely unnecessary.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Beattie said. “But he was your father all the same.” I could hear the slight reproof in Beattie’s voice, but I wasn’t sure it got through to Ms. MacDonald.
“He was, and well . . .” Ms. MacDonald’s voice trailed off before she finished her sentence. I got the impression she’d thought better of finishing it. “Might I ask why you were visiting him today? He hasn’t been well for quite some time, and I am under the impression that he didn’t receive many guests.”
I wanted to ask how she might have come to that impression if she wasn’t speaking with her father much, but I decided to simply pin up that query for a later day. “We wanted to speak with him about a book he recently sold,” I said instead.
Ms. MacDonald’s entire posture stiffened, and it took her a minute to pull her poise together and ask, “Oh, he sold a book recently? I wasn’t aware.” She tossed the ends of her not-really-tossable hair and said, “Out of curiosity, which book?”
Beattie spoke over me as I started to tell her the name. “I’m afraid we’re not at liberty to discuss that with anyone but our client and their approved list of parties,” Beattie said. “You understand?”
Given the shade of pink that spread up Ms. MacDonald’s face, I didn’t think she understood at all, but she had the grace not to say so. “Very well, then. Again, I just wanted to thank you.” She shook each of our hands briskly and then turned on her heel and headed back the way she came, her walk even stiffer than it had been when she arrived.
Beattie, BB, and I made our way back to the hotel as briskly as we could, with BB tucked under my arm to protect him from his adoring fans, and once we were back in our room, I said, “Okay, that whole Ms. MacDonald thing was weird, right?”
“So weird,” Beattie said as she placed BB in his cage so he could collapse in the corner from exhaustion. “She was definitely fishing for information.”
“Definitely, and did you see her reaction to the fact that we wanted to talk to her dad about a book?”
“If he was even her dad,” Beattie said.
I gasped. “You think she was an impostor?” As if murder and a cursed book weren’t enough, now we had spies. “Do you think she was wearing a disguise? Like maybe that wasn’t her real nose?”
Beattie, once again, rolled her eyes. “I think we should tell Inspector Scott about our encounter. Let him do his work and investigate.”
I sighed. She was right, of course, but also, where was the fun in doing the right thing? “We should have followed her,” I said.
Beattie didn’t even dignify that idea with an eye roll and instead simply went into the bathroom and closed the door. When I heard the shower start, I knew she was taking one of what she called her “shut out the world” showers, and I was fairly sure that I and my desire for adventure were part of the world she wanted to shut out.
A half-hour later, a cloud of steam escaped from the bathroom, and Beattie came out in a robe with a towel on her head. She had some sort of facial mask, and she was carrying a full kit of beauty supplies. “I left your mask on the sink. Open your pores first, and then we’re doing a full regimen.”
“Um, all right,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“I am, and you’re going to be okay, too. We just need a quiet night, so I’ll get room service and cancel our reservation. We’ll do our nails and such, and then we’ll fall asleep to some British murder mystery. Sound okay?”
Something shifted in me, and I realized just how exhausted and overwhelmed I was by the international travel, the complications in our buying mission, and now the murder of Davis MacDonald. “Sounds perfect.”
I stepped into the still-warm bathroom and turned the shower on as hot as I could stand. Beattie had not only put a clay mask on the side of the tub, but she had also left her expensive bath wash for me to use with a brand-new, natural loofah. That woman was pampering me, and I needed it.
I savored my shower and let the hot water soften up the muscles I hadn’t even realized had tensed into tight knots. Then I turned off the water, put on my mask, slipped into the robe on the back of the door, and stepped out into the room . . . only to find Inspector Scott standing at the foot of my bed.