Finding Fraser (20 page)

“Gi’e ‘er here,” said Alec, and without
missing a beat he grabbed the map. To his credit, the cab wavered not at all
while he squinted at the tattered page.

He thrust it back at me as we careened
around a sharp curve.

“Cattle thievery,” he said, firmly. “Though
cattle thane does make a bit o’ sense, as the lairds around these parts are
known as thanes, sometimes. It was a title—kinda like an Earl, ye ken?”

“Right,” I muttered, trying to hold my head
steady. The narrow roads and great speeds, not to mention the whole
driving-on-the-wrong-side thing was reintroducing me to my good friend nausea.
“I remember a Thane in MacBeth,” I said, to take my mind off my shaky stomach.
“The Thane of Cawdor?”

Alec slapped the seat between us
delightedly. “Righ’! Righ’! And there still is a Thane up in Cawdor, for all
tha’! But I reckon in this case, yer friend wrote ‘thief’ or ‘thieven’.”

I thought back to the story. Cattle stealing
made up the background behind a lot of scenes in the book. The opening scene,
where Jamie is wounded and requires Claire’s medical expertise—he was
with his uncle Dougal and his men, who had definitely been up to no good.
Stealing cattle may have been a part of that.

I also remembered how large a part cattle
thievery had played in Jamie’s rescue from the evil clutches of Black Jack
Randall.

The car took yet another corner on two
wheels. “There has to be a reason,” I said, teeth clenched to keep the contents
of my stomach down. “If Gerald marked it, it has to be important.”

“Y’er sure ta freeze,” Alec said, as I
stepped out of the cab onto ground beside the dirt trail that passed for a
road. “I’ve a rug in the boot—can I please jes’ leave it with yeh?”

I glanced down at my watch again. It was
nearing six o’clock and the sun was almost down. “I just need an hour,” I said.
“I only want to be here until dark. I’m sure I won’t freeze in that time.”

I pulled up my hood and jammed my hands in
my pockets.

“Well, at least take my torch, then. And
mind ye don’t walk too near the far side. The drop’s steep and it’s straight
down into a damn cold loch.” He thrust a flashlight into my hands.

“Thanks. I’ll wave it at you when you come
back so you can see me.”

“Righ’, then. I’ll jes’ nip inta Mallaig for
a dram an’ be back for ye by seven, latest,” Alec promised me. “Stay away from
any wee ghosties!”

Mallaig was the last tiny, seaside village
we had passed through, following the notes on Gerald’s map. It was a testament
to my newly acquired faith in the Scots constitution that I didn’t even blink
at the thought of the driver hitting the road after a ‘wee dram’. I just
clutched my copy of OUTLANDER to my chest and nodded.

As soon as he pulled away, the truth of his
assessment of the weather became clear. I thought fondly of the extra sweater
I’d pulled out of my pack at Auntie Gwen’s place, to lighten my load on the
walk to the hospital. Susan hadn’t stolen that one from me, as I’d been wearing
it the day we went to Culloden.

I wished I was wearing it again.

As I watched the cab bump off up the road,
the insanity of the situation settled in my brain. It was Gerald who was
searching for ghosts, not me. I was looking for a flesh and blood Scotsman. And
I’d just had a very nice one
right beside
me
in the car
.
The chances of meeting
another in this windswept corner of nowhere were below calculable.

“You need to focus, Sheridan,” I muttered to
myself.

A thin line of yellow reflected off the top
of the mountains to the West, but the last of the sunlight rode atop a bitter
wind. Above me, a castle stood on a rise of land, perched like a tall box on
the back of a turtle hunched by the sea.

Alec—who was appearing more fetching
in my memory as every moment passed—had given me a brief history. The
castle had been built in the fourteenth century, long before Jamie’s time. As
castles go, it was pretty tiny. I’d seen bigger mansions on Hollywood reality
television.

When it was built, the rise of land it was
on had served to protect it from the enemies of its Laird and people. Alec
assured me that four hundred years ago the tide did indeed sweep in and cover
the road twice a day, cutting the castle off from the mainland.

“But these days, the roadway has been silted
up. Now it jes’ serves as a route in for the Laird tae shoo his sheep along,” Alec
had explained. In his handsome Scottish way.

I kicked myself mentally, and kept walking. The
place was entirely deserted. Above the castle, the craggy peaks in the distance
were all snow-topped, and the wind carried every frozen degree down with it. I
tightened the cord on my hood and started across the causeway.

The tide was out, but Alec had declined to
drop me along the pathway closer to the castle. “It’s protected passage,
against motorized vehicles,” he’d said. “Not to mention private property. I’ll
just leave ye here, and be back in a tick.”

From the direction I faced, at least, the
wind was behind me, and it pushed me along toward the old building, now haloed
in light from the setting sun. The castle was much tinier than any castle had a
right to be, but perhaps this was as big as they could make them in the
fourteenth century. It stood sentinel on its small tidal island, with the loch
lapping the far shore. The line of the high rock wall was tessellated, and
unbroken even by arrow slits. There were two triangular-shaped protrusions at
the very top that may have once supported a roof, which probably would have
been made of wood. But it was long gone, and all that remained were the bones
of the place, cast in ancient, gray stone.

As I approached, the corona of the setting
sun rested briefly on the curtain wall of the castle, and for a moment, I was
entirely bathed in golden light. With the light … came clarity.

“Leoch,” I breathed. “Gerald, you devil—you
thought this might be the Castle Leoch.” Dougal’s home. Home, in fact, to
Jamie’s mother and her politically astute brothers, who together had ruled the
entire MacKenzie clan.

Book in one hand and Alec’s torch in the
other, I began to climb the slope toward the old monument.

Walking briskly, I circled the building in
under five minutes, at least the parts of it that did not hover on a cliff above
the water. Along that side, as Alec the winsome cabbie had noted, the curtain
wall rose three stories above the cliffs, most of it constructed with carefully
placed rocks. Very little, if any, mortar was in evidence, and I had a sudden
pang of sympathetic vertigo for the young stonemasons who climbed those
long-ago heights and had put this jigsaw puzzle of a wall together.

One corner of the curtain wall was covered
in vines that were lush green even in the teeth of the icy weather, and which
crept down the cliff face to intertwine with the heather below. I stepped into
the shelter of the castle wall. The sun had sunk below the line of the
mountaintops
,
and the sky had taken on a particular color that I’d only
ever seen in the Highlands. It was an otherworldly combination of purple and
blue and black, bringing thoughts of kelpies and other more malevolent Highland
faeries somehow nearer.

The path wound around behind the castle, but
still in sight of the road. I figured I still had at least ten minutes of
twilight left, so I continued on, keeping a close eye on the ground so as not
to stumble. Craning up on my toes, I looked over at the castle to see fingers
of fog beginning to wrap around it from the loch-side.

I turned and scanned the roadway. Still no headlights
in sight. The blue light on my watch showed 7:10. My cabbie’s dram had kept him
late, and strongly reduced any appeal I’d felt earlier. A decent man doesn’t
leave a lady—or anyone for that matter—waiting. I shivered and
cursed the Scots predilection for drink, and cabbies in general, and turned to
walk back toward the roadway.

That was when the moaning started.

If it had come from the castle it would have
been bad enough. But the fact that it was coming from right under my feet would
have caused me, under any other circumstances, to pretty much jump out of my
skin, my coat and all my underclothes before dying of fear on the spot.
Fortunately, it was too cold for that, so I kept everything on and decided to
get the hell out of there, instead.

Forget waiting. It was less than a couple of
miles to the nearest village, plenty of time to work up a speech guaranteed to
sear that cabbie’s ears right off his pleasant-faced, dram-drinking head. I had
his torch. I could make the walk.

Years of ankle-wrenches and knee-scrapings
had given me a certain inner caution against
 
running along any path, so instead of a
full-out bolt in the nearly total dark, I limited myself to a barely-contained
hysterical scurry, muttering a mantra of “Don’t-run-its-not-a-ghost-don’t-run-it-can’t-be-a-ghost-don’t-run-you’ll-trip-and-kill-yourself,”
or something along those lines.

Which is why I saw the hole in the ground
open up at my feet before I could fall into it. I stopped so suddenly, the toes
of my Converse sneakers kicked pebbles into the darkness. And squinting up
through the hole, into the beam of my flashlight was a face I could not quite
believe I recognized.

“Jack?” I said into the pit. “What the hell …?”

“Aye,” came a puzzled voice from beneath me.
“How d’ye know my name?”

I dropped to my knees and shone the light
into the hole.

It was Jack Findlay, all right. I could see
his face, pale and a bit squinty in the light, looking up at me. He was wrapped
in what looked like a sheet of tin foil, sitting on the rocky floor of the
strange little room beneath me.

“It’s me, Emma,” I said. “What are you doing
down there?”

“Emma Stuart?” he said, holding up a hand to
deflect the light. “Or … Emma Angus? Whichever one of you it is, can ye please
no’ shine the light ri’ in my eyes?”

I flipped the switch on Alec’s torch, and
Jack and his small room were immediately swallowed by darkness. “Emma
Sheridan,” I said. “You know—from the floor of the hotel bar last month?”

Shit.

“I—I mean—we shared a cab in
Philadelphia. I’m the one with the blog?”

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “Emma Sheridan of
the blog. I can’t believe it. I’m still readin’ it, y’know. Every time ye post
somethin’ new. Ye got robbed!”

I smiled a little to myself. It pleased me
more than I could have expressed that an actual human was following my blog,
but it was definitely the wrong time for basking.

“Never mind that, now. How’d you get down
there? Are you hurt?”

I could hear his sigh echo in the darkness.
“Through the hole yer hollerin’ down, o’ course. And yes—I’ve hurt my foot.
Cannae walk, anyway.”

I felt a moment of smugness, not having
fallen through the hole myself. But the seriousness of the situation won out.

“I—I don’t know if I can climb down to
you,” I said. “I don’t have a rope or anything.”

“Oh, ye needn’t climb down,” he said, his
voice indicating shock at the very idea. “Jes’ walk round the way ye came. Here—flick
the damn torch on again and I’ll show ye.”

With the light carefully aimed away from his
eyes, I soon saw what he’d meant. The small room held nothing but Jack, and a
large charred patch of ground in the center of a pebbly floor. But just to one
side of him was a full, doorway-sized opening in the stone. I got to my feet,
followed the path down the side and was sitting beside him in under a minute.

His face was creased with pain, so I
directed the flashlight away.

“Fact-checking,” he explained, when I asked
again why he was there. “It’s an old sentry station. They’d keep the fire
burning low here, in the hearth, while they watched the loch for sea-borne
enemies. That’s why the path rings round to the doorway.” His voice dropped in
embarrassment. ”The bit I fell through was the chimney hole.”

I felt shame wash over me at my earlier
smugness. If it hadn’t been for Alec the cabbie’s flashlight, I would likely
have taken the quick route down into the hole, too.