The Blue Hackle (11 page)

“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.

Jean finally felt warm again. Nothing like a
good meal cooked and then served by Nancy Finlay to reset the
internal thermostat.

She folded her napkin and smoothed it down
next to her dessert plate, empty except for a strawberry stem.
Maybe it was a sign of desensitization, but murder or no grisly
murder, child or no put-upon child, she’d consumed the delicious
soup, fish, meat and veg, trifle and fruit, with good appetite and
moderate sips of a less than sophisticated but good-natured
Burgundy.

So had Alasdair, no doubt needing fuel after
his outdoor vigil. Now he, too, lingered at the table, toying not
with his napkin but his watch. Surely it was eight-thirty by now.
Waiting for Gilnockie was like waiting for Godot.

Diana’s elegantly lettered cards had placed
Fergie at the head of the table—if you defined “head” as the seat
closest to the door—and Diana at the foot, with Jean next to Scott,
Alasdair next to Heather, and Dakota between, close enough to her
mother that Heather could indicate the proper fork and insist on
the child eating at least one Brussels sprout.

Each patch of dining territory was generous
enough to make Jean acutely aware two places were missing, one for
Tina, one for Greg. But even their chairs had been whisked away,
out of sight.

Alasdair had greeted the Krums with his usual
grave courtesy, answered some of Scott’s questions about security
issues, and held up his end of mostly Fergie’s conversation about
history, language, myth, and culture. In the spirit of soldiering
on, Jean had contributed anecdotes along the lines of the past
being another country, one that you probably wouldn’t want to
visit. But mostly she watched her thoughts playing billiards,
clacking from who, to where, to when, to why. Even Fergie’s genial
expression occasionally grew vacant and his face turned to the
windows, blank sheets of black ice facing the coastline and the man
lying cold if not neglected below the even blanker windows of the
old castle.

Now Diana rose from her chair, initiating a
general movement upward. “We have a library of films available in
the drawing room, and satellite television as well. I’ll be serving
coffee or cocoa.”

“Is the single-malt still on tap?” asked
Scott.

“Yes, it is,” Diana said.

Heather said, “Scotch isn’t on tap. Beer,
that’s on tap.”

“It’s just an expression,” Scott retorted,
adding in an audible mutter, “Jeez.”

As Diana eased the Krums toward the hall
door, the door of the butler’s pantry and back passage to the
kitchen swung open. Inside stood a youngish man with a wiry frame
who had to be Lionel Pritchard, Dunasheen’s manager. His small
head, eyes like buttons, sleek brown hair edging a receding
hairline, and sleek brown moustache edging an almost lipless mouth
reminded Jean—unjustly, she informed herself—of a snake.

His beckoning finger drew Fergie from the
table to the doorway, where he said in a rasp of a whisper Jean
could barely overhear, “The phone’s going again and again,
reporters asking questions.”

Shaking his head, Fergie replied in a hoarse
whisper of his own, “Tell them we don’t know anything and refer
them to the police.”

In the front of the room, Scott asked Diana,
“Does the satellite feed include football? Not your soccer,
American football. It’s that time of year, the college bowls, the
pro play-offs . . .”

“Only you,” said Heather, “would come all the
way to Scotland to watch football. Let it go, already.”

“This way,” Diana said, her gesture that of a
traffic cop—
move along, move along.

In the back of the room, Pritchard hissed,
“I’m sure the police are saying what they can. But the reporters
are making a meal of it, talking about ‘the stately home murder.’ I
expect Dunasheen will be on Page One of
The Sunburn
tomorrow
morning. Although there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Just as
long as they spell ‘Dunasheen’ correctly, eh?”

What? Jean thought. Was he clueless or did he
just have a crass sense of humor?

Fergie neither corrected Pritchard nor
laughed. He wilted, covering his face with his hand. Alasdair took
a step toward him, then, apparently thinking twice about offering
hollow platitudes he might have to recant, sat back down in his
chair.

Pritchard oozed back into the pantry and
Fergie stumbled behind, leaving the door swinging.

Dakota made her way to the hall door,
inspecting every photo and print she passed on the way. Jean
smiled, remembering the words of one of her own cousins: “I bet you
read cereal boxes, too.”

Why yes, she did.

She had to talk to the child about ghosts in
general and what she’d seen tonight in particular, without going
behind her parents’ backs. Although if Gilnockie decided Dakota
needed to help the police with their inquiries, all bets were
off.

With a last look at the portrait hanging at
the head of the table, and a last glance over her shoulder at
Jean—did she sense a kindred spirit, or was she just wondering why
the older woman kept smiling at her—Dakota followed the others into
the hallway, and that door shut, too.

Alone at last, but this was no time for
billing and cooing. Just one thing . . .

Jean had been looking at the portrait all
evening. It depicted a blond woman wearing a moss-green dress with
a satin shawl collar, a locket at her exposed throat. Her features
were clumsily drawn, but with such affection that her smile beamed
from the painted canvas like the glowing fire in the Calanais
fantasy. “Is that Fergie’s portrait of his wife—what was her
name?”

Alasdair looked up at it. “Oh aye. That’s
Emma MacDonald. Mind you, I only met up with her two, maybe three
times, having nearly lost touch with Fergie during those
years.”

“I see the resemblance to Diana,” Jean said,
without employing any adjectives such as “cool” or “smooth.” “He
hung the portrait at the head of the table so she could still be
the lady of the house. Although I don’t suppose she was ever the
lady of this house.”