Bonnie of Evidence (6 page)

Erik flashed me an anguished look. “My ancestors were part gorilla. Seriously. But at least they weren’t albino.” He lowered his gaze to Alex’s legs. “He looks like he’s descended from a family of popsicle sticks.”

Erik Ishmael’s modeling days had probably ended a decade ago, but I could see why he’d been able to make his living in front of a camera. His face was sharply angled, as if the underlying bone were chiseled from granite, creating hollows and rises that a camera lens would have adored. His eyes were dark and almond-shaped, his hair long and purposefully tousled, his complexion a warm café au lait color that seemed a blend of every exotic ethnicity from Spain to the South Pacific. I didn’t know how many covers he’d posed for, but if women chose books for their covers alone, the ones featuring Erik Ishmael had probably sold a bazillion.

“Why don’t you do what the Scots do?” I suggested, nodding toward a mannequin that boasted full Scottish regalia, from jacket and brooches, to hose and leather brogues. “Buy yourselves some knee-length socks. They even come with nifty little tassels. How cute is that?”

They stared at me. They stared at the mannequin. They stared at each other. “Socks!” they echoed in perfect unison, as if the ability to predict what the other was going to say was second nature to them. “Group hug, group hug.” They surrounded me like two slices of marble rye around a half-pound of pastrami, giving me a heartfelt squeeze before hurrying to the mannequin for a closer look.

“Love the socks,” said Erik. He bent down to smooth his fingers over the ribbing. “Feels like wool and poly blend. You think I can wear them with my sandals?”

Alex shook his head. “Not if you want to be seen with me, you can’t. How much are the shoes?”

“Doesn’t matter. They’re ugly. I wouldn’t wear them if they were giving them away.” They were black, tongueless oxfords with lacings that crossed the top of the foot and wrapped around the leg to tie at mid-calf, kinda like what a business exec might buy if he were looking for just the right shoes to wear with a tutu.

Alex sighed woefully. “You’re right. Ugly
and
impractical. I wouldn’t wear them either.”

“How about modified hiking boots?” I piped up. “That’s what our local guide wore yesterday, and I thought he looked rather fetching.”

Delight flitted across their faces. They looked at me. They looked at each other. “Shall we keep her?” asked Alex.

“I’d love to,” Erik said in a conspiratorial tone, “but I think her husband might notice.”

“The cad. So, Emily,” Alex inquired, eyes leaping with excitement, “what else would you recommend to complete our ensembles?”

“
Whoa!
I’m not an expert in—”

“Scottish fanny pack?” asked Erik. He toyed with the tasseled pouch that hung from the mannequin’s belt and rested at groin-level, like a furry cod piece. “The Scots call this thing a sporran. Or how about a Scottish bread knife?” He tapped the sheath of the long-bladed dagger suspended from the mannequin’s waist. “Or a Scottish shawl?” He fingered the length of tartan cloth that was draped neatly over the mannequin’s left shoulder.

I looked from Erik to Alex. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather eat lunch?”

Alex regarded me, wide-eyed. “Eat, rather than shop? Are you insane?”

I smiled involuntarily.
Wow
. That clinched it. I loved these guys.

_____

We made it back to the bus just in time for both men to receive their coordinates from Mom and traipse off into the great unknown for ten short minutes with their individual teams. Much to my astonishment, each team finished its search within the allotted time, without any pouting, sniping, or name calling, so we were able to reload the bus and head for Inverness right on schedule. I figured this had to have been an easy find, because everyone seemed to be in a good mood. They were lending their voices to Wally’s singalong, chatting each other up across the aisle, and talking to family back home on their cell phones. I guess success bred contentment. Even Isobel Kronk, who’d gone ballistic about Bernice’s GPS failure yesterday, seemed happy.

And not just happy.

As she exchanged quips with Cameron Dasher across the aisle, she looked absolutely exuberant.

Almost too exuberant.

And for whatever reason, that worried me.

FOUR

D
AD WAS FIRST OFF
the bus at our hotel, so he made good use of his time by videotaping everyone else getting off, just in case Mom happened to miss it. I paused in front of him, mugging for the camera like a six-year-old, because seeing Dad wield a piece of photographic equipment reminded me of the silly pictures he’d shot of me on the last family vacation we’d taken together, when I was six years old.

Dad loved travel. He just preferred that other people do it so he wouldn’t have to do it himself.

“Hi, Dad.” I waved idiotically.

“Hi, hon.”

“Having a good time?”

“Yup.”

“Are you getting geared up to shoot some jaw-dropping footage of Nessie?”

“Yup.”

Our hotel was perched on a grassy hillock overlooking the shores of Loch Ness—a family-owned-and-operated boutique hotel that was undergoing extensive renovations, which explained why we’d been able to scoop up every room in the place.

With sawdust you got a discount.

The advertisement touted the building’s importance as a historic landmark dating back to the sixteenth century, but we’d been assured the rooms had been upgraded and indoor plumbing installed since then. The stone exterior gleamed chalk white, with an authentic thatched roof overhead and flower-glutted window boxes adding splashes of color. Loch Ness lay at the bottom of the hill, its rock-ribbed shores surrounded by ancient forests and spotty patches of barren earth, its frigid waters slicing through the glen for twenty-two miles, like a long, severed finger.

“Line up at the front desk to receive your room assignments,” announced Wally as we crowded into the lobby with its exposed half-timbers, cozy furniture groupings, and wall plaque claiming that
Mary Queen of Scots Slept Here
. “Dinner is scheduled to be served in the dining room at seven, so let’s plan to meet in the library at six-forty-five so Margaret can share today’s geocaching results with you. Keeping you in suspense throughout dinner might be hard on your digestive systems. Any questions?”

Cameron Dasher raised his hand. “Does this place rent out watercraft? Canoes? Rowboats? Something that would let us explore the lake on our own?”

“
Uhh
—” Wally shot a questioning look at the clerk manning the front desk.

“Mrs. Dalrymple considered boat rentals,” the young woman informed us in a lilting burr, “but decided against it. Ye wouldn’t believe the cost.”

“What about inner tubes?” asked Dolly Pinker. “They’re all the rage at indoor water parks. Floating down a concrete canal in a giant inner tube gives you such a wonderful sense of what the great outdoors can be like without insects flying up your nose.”

Isobel Kronk snorted her disdain. “Inner tubes are for sissies. I want horsepower between my legs.” She sidled a provocative look at Cameron. “Jet skis are the only way to go.
Vroooom!
”

“Pills Etcetera is having an End of Summer Clearance Sale on waterwings,” Margi added helpfully. “Aisle six, if anyone’s interested.”

“The boats weren’t the difficulty,” confessed the clerk. “It was the pier. There’s a drop-off so near the shore that a dock can’t be anchored without using deepwater equipment. Mrs. Dalrymple said if that be the case, they might as well drill fer oil, but of course, she wasn’t wanting ta do that.” She made eye contact with every guest before lowering her voice to a dramatic whisper. “As ye might imagine, she was leery of whit she might be disturbing at the bottom of the loch.”

A hush fell over the lobby. Hearing tales of the Loch Ness monster was one thing; standing near the creature’s legendary domain was something else entirely.

“How deep is that drop-off ?” Dick Teig inquired.

“Around seventy-six meters.”

“What’s that in English?” he asked.

“Approximately two hundred-fifty feet,” said Etienne.

Whistles. Gasps. Eye-widening.

Dick Teig was disbelieving as he glanced out the lobby windows toward the manicured lawn that swept toward the loch. “You’re telling me that a few feet from the end of the lawn down there, the water is two hundred-fifty feet deep?”

The clerk smiled enigmatically. “It’s one of the more shallow spots. Mrs. Dalrymple is fond of telling her guests that Loch Ness is so deep—eight hundred feet in some places—that the entire population of the world could fit into it three times over.”

More gasps. Collective jaw dropping.

Lucille waved her hand in the air. “Does that calculation take into account the population of the United States? It might not be all that obvious to you foreigners, but we Americans tend to be a bit … bigger boned than folks in the rest of the world.”

“She means we’re fatter,” said Bernice.

“It’s not important how many bodies fit into the lake,” Wally interrupted in his tour director’s voice, “as long as none of the bodies belong to any of you. I’ll caution you to heed the warning though. If you wander down to the loch to take pictures, be sure to watch your footing near the water’s edge. The grass can be slippery, and that first step is a doozey.”

As the desk clerk began dispensing room keys, I sauntered over to the lobby’s enormous picture windows for a better view of the infamous lake. A brick walkway zigzagged down the hill from the hotel’s patio to the shoreline, where umbrellaed tables and Adirondack chairs awaited guests hoping to catch that once-in-a-lifetime glimpse of Nessie. But I saw no cleverly disguised guardrails, no quaint fences, no neatly clipped hedges to prevent people from tripping over their shoelaces and stumbling headlong into the lake, with its two-hundred-and-fifty-foot plunge to the bottom.

Unh-oh
. This wasn’t good.

I guess the hotel felt obliged to keep the view from the Adirondack chairs unobstructed for visiting tourists, just in case Nessie decided to rear her much celebrated head.

My stomach executed a slow roll as I considered the potential for disaster. My only saving grace was that the wind had picked up and the blue sky was being devoured by billowing, soot-gray clouds that threatened an evening of mist and unrelenting rain.

Hallelujah.

_____

I arrived at the library fifteen minutes early to find most of the group already there. Several optimists idled at the windows with binoculars pressed to their eyes, apparently trying to convince themselves that the loch was visible through the fog, while others staked out spots in front of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, perusing titles whose leather spines looked to have been bound about the time Gutenberg invented the printing press. I didn’t see Mom, but Dad was here with his camcorder, capturing the heart-pounding action of people staring at fog and old books. Nana, George, and the rest of their geocaching team were gathered in a far corner, locked in heated discussion over something that was causing Bill Gordon’s already florid cheeks to grow even redder. Etienne and Wally were still in the lobby, kibitzing with the front desk clerk about where we should go tomorrow should our Loch Ness cruise be canceled due to foul weather.

“Hey, check this out,” Isobel Kronk instructed us, apropos to nothing. She hovered over an over-sized tome that she’d set on one of the room’s many reading tables, her forefinger stabbing a line of text halfway down the page. “According to this
History of the Scottish Clans
, the chieftain of my family’s clan became the Duke of Argyll. Pretty impressive, huh? Wait ’til my kid hears there’s royalty in the family. He might have to switch from drinking beer to something more snooty, like wine coolers.”

“Is the Duke of Argyll the fella who started that nice line of clothing and accessories for both men and women?” asked Margi. “I love his socks.”

“The Duke of Argyll?” Bill Gordon’s voice boomed out from the corner, prompting all eyes to swivel in his direction.

He was ruggedly built in an “over-the-hill” kind of way, with a bristly red beard, chest as broad as a beer barrel, and a head full of coarse, ginger-colored hair that was shot through with silver. His brows stretched in wild disarray above his eyes, like thorns in an overgrown thicket. His fists were big as mallets. His body language hinted that he was long on pomposity and short on patience, which probably explained why he looked as if he were about to set his hair on fire.

Breaking away from his team, he strode to the center of the room, where he drilled Isobel with a menacing look. “That would mean your clan name is Campbell.”

Stella Gordon plopped onto a settee and tossed her head back, offering the heavens a mournful look. “Here we go.”

Margi gasped. “Are you the soup people, too? Oh, my goodness. I
love
your new cheeseburger chowder with loaded baked potato flavor.” She squinted thoughtfully. “Or is that the generic brand?”