Jean exhaled between teeth clenched so tightly her jaw hurt.
Yellow-coat ran into the parking area, still yelling. “Here! You there!” Which seemed a bit contradictory, but she was hardly in a position to criticize. She didn’t recognize the voice, and the figure was too slender to be either Fergie or Rab Finlay. Pritchard, probably.
Below Jean, presumably from the front porch, Diana’s cool voice cut the heat of the male’s. “Mr. Pritchard, Lionel, if you please, there’s no need to shout.”
“Diana, we can’t have the man hanging about. Your own father . . .”
“No harm done. Someone in the village likely told him about—the unfortunate event—and he stopped by on his way home to have a look at the police vehicles.”
His gait as smooth as a hobby horse’s, Pritchard strode to the door. Jean had to lean forward and press her ear to the icy glass in order to hear him say, “We’re hardly on his way, the path runs beyond the garden wall. He had no call . . .”
The slam of the front door echoed upward, vibrating as subtly in Jean’s ear as distant thunder. She sat back on the window seat. Who was “he”? Where was “home”? And was Pritchard’s accent English rather than Scottish?
Well, so was Diana’s. And Fergie himself had been infused with a “proper” accent, as befit the nephew of a baronet, never mind his thistle-strewn Highland ancestry. Although with Fergie, the infusion hadn’t quite taken.
The clock on the mantelpiece chimed six times. She’d promised to be in the library at six-thirty. With one last searching glance out the window—no mysterious figures, no irascible managers, no police people—she pulled herself to her feet and headed into the bathroom.
Her cosmetics bag was wedged between a ceramic lizard studded with fake gems and Alasdair’s nylon shaving kit, which in turn sat next to a Chinese vase holding fresh if odorless flowers. Maybe instead of donning the cap, bells, and motley of a court jester, she should don war paint. She applied eye shadow and mascara, chose a colorful tapestry vest over a basic skirt-and-turtleneck combo, added necklace and earrings, and traded her walking shoes for decorative flats, all the while pondering what Diana had called the unfortunate event.
It was too much to expect the mysterious man in the parking area to be the murderer. Murderers, in Jean’s thankfully limited experience, didn’t stand around looking sinister. Besides, Diana and Pritchard both knew him, or of him, at least. He must be some local character.
If one of the two military dirks in the entrance hall was the murder weapon, then the murderer must have come from inside the house. Or passed through it. Or known someone with access to it. Did that mean the murder had been a collaborative effort, and that there were two killers to apprehend? Great.
In the bedroom, the telephone lay where she’d left it, on one of the tasseled pillows piled on the four-poster bed. Its little screen gazed up at her blankly. No, he doesn’t need you right now.
She tried a telepathic message instead: Alasdair, let everyone else deal with the crime scene. Come get dinner.
Her summons produced only Dougie, who trotted out of the dressing room licking his lips, leaped onto the bed, and snuggled down amidst the pillows. Jean regarded him with a touch of envy. Not so long ago she’d been proud of her hard-earned self-sufficiency, the sort of pride that went before falling in love. Now she was incomplete without a man, if far from just any man.
They had been through more together in less than a year than she and her first husband had experienced in two decades. Alasdair had never met her ex, a man who was all ground and no imagination, but she’d met his, a woman who was all imagination and no ground. All four had promised to have and to hold until death did them part. But it wasn’t death that had parted them, although divorce was a sort of death.
Fergie had lost his wife to disease. And Tina had lost Greg to murder.
Jean jerked to attention as the clock struck six-thirty. Places to go, people to see, clues to ferret out. Tucking the phone into her second-best evening bag, a small leather pouch on a long strap, she gave her engagement ring a quick polish against her skirt and charged out into the hall.
She almost caromed off Scott Krum, who was lifting the lid of an ivory-inlaid chest opposite the door of the Charlie suite. He dropped it with a thud and whoosh that made the Grainne tapestry ripple. His teeth gleamed in a fixed smile framed by his dark—no, what Rab Finlay had was a beard. Scott’s goatee looked like it had been traced on his face by a black marker.
“Oh,” he said. “Hi. I forgot the camera, the girls want snapshots, I came back upstairs—this is your room, huh?”
“Mine and my fiancé’s, yes.”
“Your fiancé is here, too?” He sidled away.
With a suspicious glance at the chest—Fergie probably wasn’t keeping the family silver in there—and another at Scott—she didn’t see any cameras about his person, but a digital one would fit in a pocket—Jean locked the door and allowed herself to be led toward the staircase. “We’re getting married at St. Columcille’s, the Dunasheen chapel, on the third.”
“Great, great. After you.” Averting his eyes from the bedizened suit of armor, to say nothing of the mistletoe, Scott waved her onto the turnpike stair.
Jean stepped past the tripping stane and the chill spot, and at the second-floor landing asked, “So are y’all enjoying the Wallace suite?”
“Heather hasn’t found much to complain about yet, and that’s saying something.”
They walked down the first flight in silence, Jean breathing in the odors of roasting meat and baking pastry. Her stomach’s pitiful grumble reminded her she’d missed tea and Nancy Finlay’s superior baked goods, but then, she’d feasted on them yesterday, so it averaged out.
Safely in the entrance hall, Scott said, “I guess you’re wondering why I was on the third floor.”
“The question had crossed my mind.” Jean turned around to face him.
He’d abandoned the smile for an embarrassed grimace, but his eyes were guarded. “I work for an auction house in Maryland, doing appraisals, estate sales, that kind of thing. You know, Antiques Roadshow stuff. I was curious about what the MacDonalds have tucked away here. The older the house, the greater the chance of something really cool lying forgotten in a closet.”
No kidding, Jean thought, but what she said was, “Something that could be bought cheap and then sold on for a lot of money?”
“I don’t cheat anyone. Reselling is part of the business.” He dropped the grimace as well. “So what do you and your fiancé do for a living?”
“I’m a journalist and part owner of Great Scot magazine in Edinburgh.”
“I’ve heard of that. Pretty good worldwide circulation, right? Both paper and electronic?”
“Yes, we’re blanketing the world with dead trees and pixels both.”
“You think you could cut me a deal on advertising rates?”
“You’d have to check with my partner, Miranda Capaldi. She’s the boss.” And the various departments such as Advertising, Circulation, Editorial, Printing, and Web Design were scattered from Leith to Dalkeith, hardly out of Miranda’s sight, but pretty much out of Jean’s mind. “Alasdair—Alasdair Cameron—is the head of Protect and Survive, the security agency.”
Scott nodded. “Oh yeah, they’ve got a good reputation. I’d like to touch bases with him. Where is he?”
“He’s . . .” She redirected her statement in midstream. “He should be here for dinner.”
“Great. We’ve got drinks first, huh? The library, Diana said. Down this way?” Smile restored, he bowed Jean toward the hallway.
“Yep, this way.” She glanced back at the two black sheaths, establishing that the one on the right was still empty. Scottish regimental dirks were collectible items, but if Scott had decided to help himself, he’d have taken the sheath with its silver fittings and diminutive knife and fork as well.
Just because he was checking the place out didn’t mean he was a thief. Just because Jean’s curious nature had developed a suspicious streak didn’t mean there was anything suspect in an art dealer like Greg and an antiques dealer like Scott turning up in the same place at the same time. They’d both been attracted by the house itself. And Fergie certainly had things to sell, if not actively for sale.
Like books. Passing beneath another stag’s head, this one wearing a Sherlock Holmes–style deerstalker hat complete with an eagle feather, Jean led Scott into the library.
Glass-doored cabinets lined the room, rank after rank of books old and new glimmering behind polished panes like treasure at the sea bottom. The cabinet holding the Fairy Flagon was closed—Fergie was understandably protective of his family talisman. A peat fire burned in the fireplace, with both of the dogs, the lab and the terrier, lying broadside to it and absorbing most of the warmth. New Age interpretations of Christmas classics emanated from hidden speakers. In front of the center window sparkled a Christmas tree, every light reflected in the glass.
Jean tasted the air like she would a fine wine—a trace of smoke, a soupcon of old paper and leather, the sharp odor of evergreen, the silken hint of spices. No wet dog, though. The animals looked as though they’d been blow-dried.
Had they reacted at all to the black-clad man standing alone, wet, and cold in the parking area, looking not at the police vehicles but up at the lighted windows of the house? Or did they know him?
Heather Krum waited in the middle of the room, her arms folded across a beaded and embroidered jacket, her narrow glasses perched below a heavy fall of bangs letterboxing her eyes. “There you are,” she snapped to Scott. “I thought you’d met up with that Diana woman.”
“Our hostess?” he retorted. “I ran into Jane on the staircase, okay?”
“Jean,” Jean corrected, without continuing on to correct Scott’s geographical ambiguity.
Heather’s slitted eyes looked Jean up and down. “Are you here alone?”
“No, I’m here with my fiancé for our wedding on January third.”
“Oh.” Despite her tight ski pants, Heather flounced into a chair.
Jean wasn’t sure whether her soon-to-be married status or her age had absolved her of threatening the Krums’ relationship. She hesitated between being insulted and laughing, but neither seemed appropriate.
Dakota was methodically working her way along the shelves, her head tilted as she considered Fergie’s impressive array of books, not just peeling and yellowed ones dating to generations past, but also contemporary titles ranging from astronomy to crypto-zoology, from archaeology to geomancy, from history to frenzied fringe tomes claiming that alien astronauts had not only built ancient structures from Stonehenge to Angkor Wat to Teotihuacan, but also that alien astronauts were humanity’s primeval gods.
Odd notions, yes, and Alasdair was justified in questioning Fergie’s taste for them, but then, like all odd notions, they were thought-provoking, horizon-expanding, and downright entertaining.
Atta girl, Jean thought at Dakota, and, at the same time, Watch out, you’ll end up like me. Although there were a lot worse places to end up.
“So,” Scott said to Jean, just a bit too loudly, “What about the guy—it’s a guy, right?—who fell down at the old castle? Is he okay?”
“I told you,” said Heather, “we didn’t hear any sirens, so he must be all right.”
Jean was intended to be counselor as well as jester, then. Thanks, Diana. “Ah, um.” She looked down at her feet planted solidly on the faded rug. “I’m afraid there was no need for sirens. No rush. He, ah, didn’t make it.”
“You mean he died?” Heather’s nostrils flared as though someone had just handed her a bucket of muck.
“That’s what ‘didn’t make it’ usually means,” Scott informed her.
Dakota looked around, smooth features crumpled.
“The police are here,” Jean said quickly, “and they’re taking care of everything, and the local doctor’s with his wife. Greg’s wife, that is. The man who—didn’t make it.”
“Good,” said Heather. “I mean, bad. I mean, I’m sorry.”
Dakota turned one way and Scott the other. He stared up at the painting over the mantelpiece. This one depicted Calanais stone circle on the island of Lewis. The glow of a small fire at the base of the tallest, square-shouldered, megalith diffused upward and met a similar glow in the lowering sky, probably the rising moon. Over the fire crouched a figure that would have been human except for wings catching both light and dark in subtle grades of color, like a pigeon’s breast.
Beneath it, on the mantel, stood an olivewood nativity scene, presented straight up. At least, Fergie had tucked the E.T. action figure behind one corner of the stable, not substituted it for baby Jesus in the manger.
Scott made no remarks—or photographs, either, never mind his expedition to retrieve the family camera. Heather inspected a fingernail the same color as the painted sky. Dakota looked at the bookcase, but Jean could see her expressionless face in the glass, while the peppy features of the teen idol on her sweatshirt floated ghostlike below.
She considered injecting the sudden silence with something artificially cheery, such as the suggestion they could all consider the unfortunate event as a real-life mystery weekend. But over and beyond having to expand “he died” into “he was murdered,” this was no game.
A musical rattle from the corridor, like glass wind chimes, fell joyfully on her ears. “The drinks are here!” she announced, probably giving the Krums the impression she was an alcoholic needing a fix.
The door opened, admitting Fergie. He now wore a beautifully cut dark suit over a tartan waistcoat—somewhere a Savile Row tailor was weeping—and pushed a serving cart laden with bottles, glasses, and steaming punch bowl. Not, Jean thought, that the red liquid splashing behind the cut glass had to be particularly hot to steam. Beyond the fire’s aura, the room was cold. The two dogs looked up but didn’t get to their feet.
“Good evening, how are we getting on?” Fergie said with a grin. If St. Patrick had had such an affable grin, he could have charmed the snakes out of Ireland instead of ordering them to go.
Scott essayed a smile. Heather did not. Dakota stared.
“I’m Fergus MacDonald, the poor chap responsible for this castle. And you’re the Krums, from the U.S, like Jean here. Scott, Heather, Dakota. Welcome, welcome.” He was working uphill, but, trouper that he was, went gamely on, “Are the dogs all right for you? No allergies?”
“We’re fine, thanks,” said Scott. “Heather’s got a poodle at home.”
“The lab is Bruce,” Fergie said, “and the terrier is Somerled. Good lads, aren’t you?”
The dogs fluttered their tails against the tile of the hearth and with grunts of satisfaction let their heads fall back down.
“We have several fine single malts, a continental aperitif or two, or—’tis the season and all—we have wassail. My special recipe. And lemon squash for the lass.”
Dakota crept forward. “Squashed lemon?”
“It’s kind of like Seven-Up or Sprite with lemon,” Jean explained. And to Fergie, with a deep inhalation of cinnamon and nutmeg, “I’d love a cup of wassail. Do you make yours with cider?”
“Oh yes, and with wine, fruit, and spices. The latter two used to be quite special, mind you, in these northern climates.” Delicately Fergie pushed aside several clove-studded lemon and orange slices and ladled out a cupful. “Here you are. And you, Mrs. Krum?”
“I guess you don’t do cosmopolitans,” Heather said.
“If that’s what you’d prefer,” began Fergie, “I’m sure I can . . .”
“Let it go, Heather.” Scott extended both hands. “We’ll take wassail, thanks.”
“Very good.” Fergie placed two more cups in his hands, the small, smooth hands of someone who’d only worked with his mind, then gave Dakota a tall glass adorned with mint and a cherry.
Scott drank deeply. After a tentative sip over her protruding lower lip, Heather allowed, “It’s good,” and retracted the pout.
Reminding herself that the drink was full of alcohol and her stomach was full of air, Jean let one swallow of insidious sweetness slide down her throat. Then she cradled the warm cup between her cool hands and pushed aside any comparison of the crimson drink to crimson blood. Nor did she ask if Thomson or Portree had taken Fergie up on his offer of sandwiches in the staff sitting room . . . no, wait, was that a door opening far down the hall and a couple of male voices?
“What’s that burning in the fireplace?” asked Dakota.
“Peat,” Fergie answered, and launched a soliloquy about peat bogs, and wood as a precious resource, and the Yule log in the Great Hall among other observances planned for tomorrow night—his smile was that of a child anticipating Santa Claus—and how the Log represented the Yule bonfire, which was a major observance along the outer rim of Scotland and its islands, the areas heavily influenced by the Norse, as evidenced by the fire festival Up-Helly-Aa in the Shetlands every January.
None of the Krums blinked. Jean edged closer to the door. Yes, her internal sonar detected Alasdair’s voice.
“This is the time of year,” Fergie went on, “when trows or trolls come out from the underworld and carry mortals away. Not to worry, though, we’re protected here at Dunasheen by our Green Lady.”
Not necessarily, Jean thought.
“The Green Lady’s our resident ghost or fairy, a glaistig, green being the fairy color. The story goes that you can hear her singing, in a fashion, when something either bad or good is going to happen. Or you can see her gliding silently toward the house . . .”
The glass wobbled in Dakota’s hand and her eyes expanded to fill half her face. Heather reached out a protective hand, but her slice of a gaze turned toward Fergie. “You’re scaring the kid, Mr. MacDonald.”
“Fergus, please,” he replied, and, “Oh. I’m sorry. Mind you, it’s just a story.”
That wasn’t what he said a little while ago, but Jean had learned with her nieces and nephews to soften the edges a bit. Storyteller discretion advised.
Fergie added, “I’ve never seen or heard a thing.”
Oh. With slightest of prickles between her shoulder blades, like invisible fingertips tracing her spine, Jean realized that she had heard a thing. That low murmuring wail in the drawing room hadn’t been Tina’s voice carried over the moor. The Green Lady had been announcing Greg’s death.
“I’m not scared,” Dakota said. “I saw a ghost while we were driving up to the house, a ghost closing the gate in that tall wall.”
“Did you now? In the garden, was she?” Fergie caught himself. “Erm, likely you saw our manager making a round of the premises.”
Jean doubted that. Pritchard hadn’t been on the premises.
“Dakota,” said Scott, “what did we tell you about saying things like that?”
“I don’t know whether it was a man or a woman,” she insisted. “But it was a ghost. I saw it in the light of the headlights.”
Jean had to bite her tongue to keep from blurting questions. Did the child see someone in a yellow raincoat or even a reflective coat like those worn by the police? Had she seen the man in mottled black, whose jacket had had some sort of shiny, water-repellant coating? Or was the poor child, like Jean and Alasdair, allergic to ghosts? She’d have been better off allergic to the dogs. Her parents would have sympathized with that.
Standing up, Heather seized the girl’s arm and pulled her toward a corner of the room, Scott following. “Dakota, we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you. This is your grade school graduation trip, remember?” Her sotto voce hiss wasn’t sotto enough, and carried over the jazzed-up, dumbed-down version of “Silent Night” that jangled from the speakers.
Dakota’s lower lip, shining with pale pink lip gloss, trembled. “The counselor told you to take a trip together to make up for Dad having to travel so much on business. You brought me along to kill two birds with one stone, you said.”
“We could have gone to Cozumel by ourselves,” Scott told her. “But you wanted ghosts and castles, so we came to Scotland.” And, to Heather, “No wonder she’s seeing things.”
“We bought you a book to read while we had our happy hour at the pub,” Heather said, and to Scott, “She was looking at the ghost stories there at the bookshop. There was a rack of them by the front desk, below the Dunasheen guidebooks.”
One of Jean’s ears twitched backward, dropping an eave or two. An intriguing café-and-bookshop stood across the street from the pub, the Flora MacDonald, in Kinlochroy. The Krums had stopped there, then, to wait until check-in time—a formality that the MacLeods had skipped.
“Dakota, you said if we went on this trip you’d show a better attitude.” Now Heather played the guilt card.
“Never mind,” said Dakota. “Just forget it.”
“We’ll overlook it this time,” Scott told her. “But if this trip is going to work, you need to straighten up and fly right.”
No fair, Jean thought. It wasn’t the girl’s responsibility to see that the trip went well, any more than it was her responsibility to fix her parents’ marriage.
And she thought, so the Krums had been on the premises, more or less, at the time of Greg’s death.
Fergie stirred the punch, pretending he wasn’t hearing the Krums’ mutters, but his crestfallen gaze crossed Jean’s. She sent him an encouraging smile. It’s not your fault. They’ve got issues. We’ve all got issues.
Her other ear twitched forward, hearing soft-soled shoes padding along the corridor from one direction and heels clicking along from the other. With a jingle of tags, the dogs got to their paws and stretched.
The heels arrived first, and turned out to be Diana’s virtuous pumps. Above them she now wore wide-legged white pants and a basic black top set off by a stunning Egyptian collar necklace of lapis lazuli and turquoise beads, the shades of the sea around Skye. An aura not just of class but of perfume hung around her, something fresh, woodsy, and understated. With her own polished version of the MacDonald smile, she announced. “Dinner will be served in ten minutes. I’ve set out place cards and menus.”
And had probably calligraphed each one personally, Jean thought with more humor than envy. Still, she couldn’t help a second look at the white, raw silk pants. She’d never owned a pair of even denim white pants, not with all the hazards of tomato sauce, blueberries, and plain old dirt.
Scott turned toward Diana with a slightly snockered grin. “That’s a great necklace. Have you ever had it appraised?”
“It’s a family heirloom,” Diana told him, which didn’t answer his question.
Heather bristled but said nothing. Dakota looked from parental expression to parental expression and rolled her eyes. After a brief pause, the room filled with classically trained voices singing, “Gaudete, gaudete, Christus est natus, ex Maria virgine . . .”
A man appeared in the door behind Diana and Heather deflated into a snockered smile of her own. Even Jean stared. Skin like milk and honey, large, rich, brown eyes, black hair in thick waves, smoothly rounded cheeks and solid jaw topping a tall, slender body . . . oh. He was wearing a uniform and carried a peaked cap beneath his arm. P.C. Sanjay Thomson, revealed in all his glory.
“Hullo, Di, Fergus,” he said, white teeth shining in a crescent of a smile that showed not the least trace of self-consciousness. But then, he’d probably been causing hearts to flutter all his life. He aimed the smile at the Krums and said, “Hullo again. Saw you at the pub, didn’t I?”
“Oh yeah,” said Heather.
Stepping up beside Thomson, if not exactly basking in reflected glory, Alasdair offered a polite nod to all and sundry. Jean was the sundry, she supposed, since the nod warmed to a half-smile by the time it reached her.
She ran a quick assessment of Alasdair’s face, its pallor beneath the weather-burnished scarlet and the set of each wrinkle, like crevasses in a glacier. His posture was neither more or less erect than usual. If the investigation had made any headway—finding the murder weapon, for example—she saw no evidence of it in his stern expression. He’d been able to do no more than set Portree to work securing the scene and checking out the vicinity.
The dogs tail-wagged their way to Sanjay’s black-clad legs. He squatted down, perhaps warming his hands in their fur as much as petting them. “Hullo there, Somerled, Bruce. Good lads, aren’t you now?”
“P.C. Thomson,” said Diana, with a slight shooing gesture. “We’ve laid on sandwiches and tea in the staff sitting room.”
“Righty-ho, Di. Come along, lads.” The young man and his furry friends headed off toward the kitchen.
Alasdair eyed Diana, head tilted, waiting to see if she designated him fish or fowl.
“Dinner in ten minutes, Mr. Cameron,” she said, and wafted away.
Fergus rubbed his hands together, only the slightest of edges to his smile. “Dinner! Steak pie!”
“Say what?” asked Heather.
“Look at it as a kind of beef Wellington,” Jean said. “Bits of meat beneath a crust.”
“Yes, yes,” Fergie said. “Nancy’s food is to die for, as you Americans would say. Let’s get on down the hall, shall we? Hospitality being a fine Highland tradition and all.”
Yeah, Jean thought with a glance at Alasdair, hospitality, and treachery and betrayal.
A spark in his return glance showed that he was thinking the same thing.