Alasdair stowed Dougie’s carrier in the back seat of his car and stood aside while Jean strapped the cat in. Again? Dougie’s disgruntled expression demanded. We just got here.
“Call it a strategic withdrawal,” Jean told him.
“No, that’s implying defeat,” corrected Alasdair. “We’ve not been defeated.”
He was wearing his kilt, a declaration of intent. His green sweater shaded his eyes with the turquoise of the western sea. When he slammed the car door, the thud echoed from the face of the castle more like the pop of a balloon than like the report of a gun. In the blush of morning sun, the dour old building looked almost cheerful, like a dowager’s seamed cheeks touched by rouge.
The courtyard teemed with people and vehicles, with O. Hawick at the gate sorting the admittance-worthy sheep from the goats of the media. Police personnel were breaking down the incident room. Their supervisor, D.S. Kallinikos, leaned against the Mystic Scotland van chatting with—or chatting up—Shannon Brimberry. Her flock of tourists was wandering around the chapel all but baaing, and yet her blushes had nothing to do with her role as Little Bo Peep.
Jean grinned at Alasdair. Shaking his head in mock despair, he headed toward the emptying incident room. She stood savoring the alluring sway of the kilt above the tall socks called hose, nicely filled by the braw Cameron calves. He’d laugh if she told him he swashed a buckle with the best of them.
Her phone trilled. She hauled it out of her bag, checked the screen, flipped it open. “Hey, Miranda. About time you returned my call.”
“What’s this I’m hearing? Minty Rutherford? Poison, knives—well, I’m thinking I’ve done well to survive the odd luncheon, then.”
“You never threatened her. Let me call you again in a few minutes, okay? Alasdair and I are bailing out of Ferniebank. Enough is enough.”
“Oh aye, as a honeymoon cottage the place is lacking romance. As a feature article in Great Scot, well, I’ll be standing by for the particulars.”
“To say nothing of a pack of glittering generalities. Bye.” There was romance, Jean thought, and there was romance. . . . The phone burst into melody again. This time it was Hugh.
Same verse, different soloist. “Up to your old tricks, I hear, courting danger as well as policemen. The lads renting your flat are right chuffed at brewing up in a daring reporter’s teapot.”
“The last thing I want,” said Jean, casting a sharp look at her bolder brethren outside the gate, “is to be daring. Can I call you back? We’re just leaving Ferniebank for healthier climates.”
“No worries.”
That’s the idea. Stowing her phone, Jean crunched over to the door of the castle, which was just emitting Rebecca and Michael, the latter carrying Linda strapped to his chest like a wiggly breastplate. “So you’re away?” Rebecca asked.
“Yep. One of Alasdair’s cousins had a cancellation at a self-catering cottage overlooking Skye, so we’re taking the place over. Peace, quiet, ocean views, blooming heather.”
“The Gray Lady, Isabel, I think she’s away as well. I didn’t pick up so much as a blip.”
“That’s what I thought.” Jean peered through the doorway to the no-longer-intimidating gloom of the interior. “Maybe when I held off an attack in the same room, that broke the pattern. Maybe my breaking the glass broke the pattern. If you can’t explain where ghosts come from, you can’t explain where they go.”
Keith Bell shut the door of the flat, galloped down the steps, and bounded up the steps of the castle. “The sooner we get this place gutted and re-wired and everything, the better. With all the publicity, the punters are coming out of the woodwork. You gotta give them an authentic experience without giving them the real authentic experience, if you know what I mean.”
Jean knew what he meant, but didn’t have time to say so before Keith pulled a tape measure from his pocket and plunged into the building, intent on tailoring not cloth but stone. “Good luck,” she called after him, and to Michael and Rebecca said, “Tourists come to see a place, but their coming changes its nature, so it’s not what they came to see.”
“Catch-22,” concluded Michael.
“Thanks for returning my car,” Jean told him. “I called the rental agency to let them know to expect you.”
“No worries,” he returned. “I’ll hand in the car, stop by the museum with the box and all, bask in the acclamation, then catch a ride back to Stanelaw with a pair of customers.”
“The letter is Mary’s hand, I’m sure of it,” said Rebecca. “I guess Isabel’s family kept the letter in the harp as a talisman for so many years it stuck to the wood and tore when Gerald removed it. No telling where that cross has been all this time.”
“Other than passed down to the Rutherfords along with the harp,” Jean said. “Did you ask Ciara about letting the museum keep the artifacts until the bureaucrats decide who they belong to?”
“Oh aye,” said Michael, with a quick jiggle to soothe his tiny bobble-headed parasite. “A lot depends on Gerald’s will, and whether the jewels and all were abandoned, and whether Stanelaw Museum is secure . . . Well, speak of the devil herself.”
Now it was Ciara who left the flat and strolled toward them. Jean could only assume her relationship—of convenience or otherwise—with Keith had survived the last few days. Perhaps getting arrested together provided the same sort of glue that solving a case together did.
“See my new earrings?” Ciara said, one plump hand lifting her curls to reveal dangling Celtic interlace. “Suits the Mystic Scotland logo, I’m thinking. Those little stars, my goodness, they turned out more trouble than they were worth.”
Jean smiled, and told herself, this too shall pass, and soon.
“Michael, thank you for seeing to the artifacts. And to restoring the glass. That cross is a stunner, and no mistake, but the chart’s the important item just now. I’ve faxed copies to London and New York. My publishers are over the moon.”
“Chart?” asked Jean, with a wary glance at Rebecca, who passed the glance on to Michael.
“The drawing on the back of the letter. It’s an amazing treasure, obviously the result of Henry Sinclair’s voyages. Keith and I have worked it out. It’s clearly a lost navigational system.”
Alasdair strolled up and assumed a position at Jean’s side that made a guardsman in front of Buckingham Palace look animated.
“The grid measures longitude and latitude,” Ciara explained. “The diamonds are based on the shadows made at the solstices, different shapes at different degrees of latitude—the Mediterranean, Rosslyn, Orkney. The cup shape, the arc, is astronomical orbits, as relating to alchemy, as relating to the Holy Grail. The harp was the key, just as I said, the music of the spheres, eh?” Ciara’s hands waved, building her castles in the air.
“Henry Sinclair’s chart? That’s going to be hard to prove,” Jean ventured.
“You cannot prove it’s not true,” returned Ciara with her most brilliant smile. “This is just the sort of validation folk are searching for. Well done, Jean. And Alasdair. And how clever of you to appoint me caretaker of Ferniebank ’til I can take over as owner.”
Alasdair’s lean smile rejected any plaudits. “We’ll be obliged to meet in Edinburgh to deal with the paperwork. Especially now that Angus is dead and Minty’s in jail.”
“That’s true,” said Michael. “Noel’s called an emergency meeting in Stanelaw—there’ll be repercussions from all this for years to come.”
“And it’s the lawyers who’ll come out ahead,” Rebecca concluded.
No one contradicted that. Even Ciara sobered, then recovered her smile. “Well, what happens, happens. Just as it did this weekend. I’ll be getting on. Keith’s working out a ghost’s gallery on the top floor—poor Isabel, still walking, I sensed her there myself not two hours since.”
Jean didn’t contradict that, either, although Rebecca hid her face by adjusting Linda’s position in the baby carrier.
“Jean, Alasdair, have a properly invigorating honeymoon.” Ciara shimmered on into the castle, trailing the scent of cloves and cinnamon and a musical murmur about “home again.”
Home. Ciara had found herself a home, and a community, just as she’d intended when she and Valerie got tattoos of the clarsach. Community was the goal of tales of explanation and meaning, after all. If anyone could exorcise Ferniebank, it was the unsinkable Ciara.
“What do you want to bet,” Jean said, “that Ciara’s chart is a sketch of the Borders mapping properties, or loyalties, or even troop movements from some past battle? Mary simply re-used a piece of paper.”
“That’s one bet I’ll not be taking,” said Michael.
Jean glanced at Alasdair, who pointedly glanced at his watch. “I’d better get on out to the Western Highlands and write something to earn my keep. Not this sort of keep,” she added, with a look up at the gap-toothed parapets of Ferniebank. “This one is Ciara’s, and she’s welcome to it.”
“You’d best get my jumper knitted before the snow flies,” Alasdair told her. He shook hands with Michael, unbent far enough to give Rebecca a small, reserved hug, and even tweaked Linda’s cheek.
“Bye,” they replied as one. “See you back in Edinburgh—safe journey.”
Jean settled herself in the car, belted herself in, and after an inventory of her body decided that trading mental aches for physical ones wasn’t a bad bargain, considering. She took one long look back at the castle, the chapel, the surrounding trees, the ever-moving river. Then she turned her gaze on Alasdair. The reflection of his keen profile overlaid the facade of the castle.
Last night they’d talked, and washed, and eaten, drank, slept and woke, talked and made love and slept again—nothing like a cocktail of danger and whiskey to loosen tongues, in more ways than one. If a relationship was a do-it-yourself project, then they were doing it themselves, the hard way, one pebble, one grain of grit at a time. She smiled.
“Aye?” Of course he’d sense her smile against the side of his face.
“If I’m the grit that provides traction to your mental machinery, then you’re the grain of sand beneath my shell. You know, the irritant that makes a pearl.”
He turned his head toward her. A tiny flame flickered in the depths of his eyes, sunlight on the surface of a fathomless ocean, but whether that indicated affection, impatience, or both, she couldn’t tell. And it didn’t matter.
“Never mind,” she said. “Let’s go. And I do mean ‘us.’ ”
* * * * *