The Burning Glass (6 page)

Jean saw the archway of the main door gaping
atop a flight of wooden steps, and the glass in the irregularly
spaced and unevenly sized windows shimmering with distorted
reflections. What she didn’t see was the cozy caretaker’s cottage
she’d been anticipating. Maybe it lay farther down the slope
leading to the river, along a path that disappeared into the trees.
Through dappled shadow, Jean could just make out more gray
walls.

She pulled in beside the bus. Its side was
painted with the words “Mystic Scotland” written in lavish
imitation-Celtic script. Was Ciara Macquarrie here as well as Keith
Bell? Fine. The more the merrier, she told herself briskly as she
climbed out of the car. She’d put on her reporter’s fedora and get
in some work before the castle closed at seven-thirty. Before she
and Alasdair were left alone together.

First she had to get everything stowed in . .
. The cottage. There it was, not a free-standing building at all
but a flat tucked into the lower left corner of the castle. Its
modern wooden door, gleaming with white paint, and its two modern
windows, hung with lace curtains, seemed to huddle together,
compressed by the bulk of the keep looming beside and above.

Now that, she had not anticipated. That,
Alasdair hadn’t bothered to mention to her either. Eating, talking,
sleeping with darkness gathered just on the other side of the wall,
ghosts eavesdropping on intimacies as though envious of warm
flesh.

Get a grip
. The castle was, and had
always been, a place of refuge. She and Alasdair had dealt with
ghosts before. Ghosts were emotional videos, without awareness or
even the will toward awareness. Alasdair was treating her with
respect by not thinking this was something she should be warned
about. What accessories did she need to set the scene, anyway? A
Jacuzzi shaped like a champagne glass, like in the tacky honeymoon
hotels by Niagara Falls? Give her—give them both—historical truth
as the strongest foundation for stories personal or public.

Jean opened the back door of the car and
reached for the cooler. A breeze made the leafy branches above her
plunge and rustle and brushed cool kisses across her cheekbones.
Crows, the corbies of many a grim Scottish tale, called from the
stained black slate of the castle roof.

Alasdair stepped out of the shop.

His solid, compact body stood to attention,
head thrown back, as though he was a scout listening for voices and
watching for movements in a building under siege. How odd he looked
wearing not his detective’s uniform of suit and tie but canvas
pants and a light sweater over an open-collared shirt. How odd that
he’d stand there turned away from her. The man had eyes in the back
of his head and could hear a needle falling into a haystack. He had
to know she was there.

He turned around.
Oh yes,
Jean
thought, her heart dropping like a cannonball. He knew she was
there. He’d been steeling himself to face her. His eyebrows were
drawn so tightly together a vertical crease ran between them. His
blue eyes were glints of sea-ice. His mouth was tightly closed,
crushing the elegant curve of his lips. She’d tasted those lips,
and knew them to be supple and sure.

Jean straightened, bracing herself. Maybe she
should ask for a cigarette and a blindfold.

Alasdair raised his hand toward her, palm
open, and then closed it into a fist that fell heavy as a
battle-axe back to his side. “Jean,” he said.

“Alasdair,” she replied.

Behind his back, in the main doorway of the
castle, appeared two people. The cadaverous young man with the long
dishwater brown hair, the stooped shoulders, and the somber, sallow
face was dressed in a polo shirt and khakis. The camera bag he
carried over his shoulder made him list to one side.

The woman with the dazzling smile had that
gorgeous British complexion, all soft fair skin and rosy cheeks.
She might have been plump, but it was hard to tell—her flowing
skirt and top of many colors made her look like a piñata, an effect
enhanced by the scarf holding back her mop of red curls. Keith Bell
and Ciara Macquarrie, no doubt. Quite the odd couple.

Jean tentatively returned Ciara’s jolly wave
and looked again at Alasdair.
What?

His body jerked as though a steel-tipped
arrow had just pierced the armor between his shoulder blades. His
voice was rough. “I didn’t know it was her buying the place. I
didn’t know she’d be coming here. Not ’til you said her name on the
phone.”

“Who? Ciara Macquarrie? Why . . .”

His gaze was steady, uncompromising, sparing
nothing. “Oh aye. Ciara Macquarrie. My ex-wife.”

Jean didn’t feel as though she’d been punched
in the stomach. She didn’t feel as though the rug had been pulled
out from under her. She didn’t feel anything at all. From some
remote place, Death Valley probably, she watched herself watching
Ciara stroll across the courtyard. Keith Bell slouched along
behind, appearing more like her shadow than her companion.

A farm tractor rumbled down the road outside
the gate, startling the crows on the battlements into harsh
complaints. An ache in Jean’s chest nagged her into breathing.
Shuddering, she inhaled. And her thoughts plummeted downward and
shattered against the jagged stone of fact.

Alasdair was in full lead-shielded,
locked-down mode, his face less expressive than the stark facade of
Ferniebank. But she could read the set of his broad shoulders all
too well. She herself had pared away his defenses, bit by bit,
leaving him vulnerable to this surprise attack. Once she had gotten
the vapors at the thought of Brad perhaps talking to Alasdair on
the phone. Now here was Alasdair having to introduce woman past to
woman present. He and Ciara made such an odd couple that Keith and
Ciara looked like Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee.

The dratted woman was grinning as though this
unfortunately not-likely-to-be-brief encounter was the best joke
she’d heard in years. She’d known Alasdair was here. She was
enjoying the heck out of surprising him. . . .

No. She wasn’t gloating. What she was doing
was extending her hand toward Jean. “Jean Fairbairn, I presume.
Ciara Macquarrie. I’m your predecessor with this po-faced specimen
here”—she nodded toward Alasdair, who took a short step
backwards—“or so I’m hearing from my local contacts. No worries,
though. I come in peace.”

Jean managed to lift a paw, allow Ciara to
clasp it, and drop it back down to her side. The woman’s hand was
soft and rather damp. Around her hung the thankfully faint aroma of
one of those perfumes—lotus, patchouli, gardenia—that was a
molecule shy of bug spray.

“Hi.” Keith had a surprisingly deep voice
considering the circumference of his neck. “We talked on the
phone.”

Jean opened her mouth but nothing came out.
She could see herself reflected in his aviator-style glasses like
in twin mirrors, her eyes and her mouth both wide, dark
blotches.

“Poor lamb, she’s had a bit of a shock,”
Ciara said to Keith. With a toss of her head that set her dangling
earrings to tinkling as gaily as wind chimes, she shooed him toward
the path that ran from the parking area to the river. The lilt of
her voice drifted back into the courtyard. “If we come back after
nightfall we’ll see the ghost walking from the castle down to the
chapel, trailing her shroud behind her like the wedding gown she
refused to wear. Could you not feel the disturbance on the upper
floor, where she died?”

“Nope,” said Keith.

“She’s there, right enough. The vibrations
were rattling my teeth. How sad that she’s lingering so near a
place of power like the chapel, and yet cannot let go. Wallace now,
he’s gone on to the next plane.” The motley pair disappeared into
the shade of the trees.

Oh, Jean thought. Those gray walls down that
way, they were the chapel’s. Those shadows that lay long across the
courtyard, they indicated that the day was dying. That man standing
beside her, face shielded, eyes impenetrable, that was Alasdair.
Her Alasdair. He had expressionlessness down pat, oh yes, but
“po-faced” implied arrogance as well. Jean had thought him
arrogant, once. What? Had Ciara never broken his shell? Or had she
reinforced its thickness?

He wasn’t a po-faced specimen, Jean thought,
any more than she was a poor lamb. Mutton, maybe, but then, Ciara
wasn’t daubed with any mint jelly herself.

Ciara, that was a pretty name. Not
plain-jane, like Jean. The woman was pretty, taller than Jean—which
wasn’t saying much, most people were taller than Jean—and
pleasingly plump beneath her layers of fabric. She was the sort of
woman who lived large, speaking her mind, laughing loudly, enjoying
rich food and drink without fearing the sort of dyspepsia Jean felt
stirring in the depths of her stomach at that very moment.

No need to do a compare-and-contrast. No need
to torture herself with jealousy. Manifestly, Alasdair had moved
on. A long way on, to end up with Jean. But speaking of letting go
. . . The words came in a rush. “
She’s
your ex-wife? She’s
not what I—I mean I wasn’t expecting anything, the way you’ve
avoided talking about her. Why didn’t you tell me?”

The rumble of the tractor stopped and the
soundless void was filled by Alasdair’s slightly hoarse voice. “Why
should I have told you?”

“Well, it would have made this moment a hell
of a lot less awkward!”

He didn’t blink, let alone flinch. He turned
his head so that he was facing her. Still his gaze was steady and
uncompromising. Even the short-cropped strands of his hair were
clenched, like his jaw when he at last squeezed words out between
his teeth. “Oh no, lass, there’s nothing could be making this
moment less awkward.”

From the road came a whistle, followed by a
gruff male voice shouting, “Hector! Jackie! Come down by me.”

Sheep dogs, Jean assumed. Or cattle dogs.
Whatever. A whiff of peat smoke tickled her nostrils.

“I knew she’d started up a tour company,”
Alasdair went on. “I didn’t know it was her buying the property.
Not ’til you said her name. Then I had a look at the small print on
P and S’s papers and there it was, several pages in. I’m thinking
she meant to surprise me, here.”

“As an attack?”

“As a joke. She’s never vindictive. That
would mean taking notice of others.” He turned away. Any other man
would have cursed until the air was blue, or thrown his fist
through the stone wall, or made it all Jean’s fault. Alasdair said,
“Let’s be getting your things into the flat.”

It’s only a flesh wound
.

She wanted to reassure him with a hug or a
soft word. But to try and scale his defenses right now would make
things worse. She turned toward her car. Groceries. Suitcase. Cat.
Flat. The cat in the flat. Alasdair pulled the pet taxi from the
back seat and returned Dougie’s suspicious gaze through the bars,
two males, each sizing up the other.

Ciara’s merry laugh echoed from the woods.
Quickly, efficiently, Alasdair strode off toward the apartment
inserted into the lower corner of the castle. Jean followed,
lugging the cooler.

When he opened the door it glided on oiled
hinges, with no horror-movie groans. He placed Dougie’s carrier
inside and turned back toward the car, leaving Jean to inspect her
temporary home.

Breathing in the odor of cleanser with
nuances of frying food, she eyed a kitchen separated by a table and
chairs from a living area provided with the usual furnishings. A
television sat next to a medieval stone fireplace fitted with an
electric fire, across from, Jean was pleased to see, a shelf of
books and magazines. A desk held an aging telephone/answering
machine combo and an analog clock but was otherwise bare except for
a thick padded envelope, addressed to Alasdair from Protect and
Survive. His marching orders, no doubt.

Only the fireplace, an original feature, and
the two-foot-deep sills of the large and in no way original windows
on either side, revealed that the flat was nestled inside the stony
exoskeleton of a medieval keep. Judging by the florid wallpaper and
fabrics and the air of benign shabbiness, the flat dated to the
nineties, when the triple attraction of castle, chapel, and well
had been stabilized and opened to sightseers.

Jean set the cooler on the dining table,
wondering whether the reading material or anything else in the
place had belonged to Wallace Rutherford.

From the far end of the living room, a short
hallway led past a bathroom almost large enough to swing a cat
in—not that Jean had any intention of doing so—to a bedroom. A
double bed, wardrobe, and chest of drawers almost filled the room,
but then, togetherness was the point of the exercise, wasn’t
it?

The tall bedposts were set against the
whitewashed stone wall separating the flat from the main building .
. . Don’t start that again, she told herself. There was already a
ghost haunting the bedroom, its earrings tinkling.

A large window pierced the wall opposite the
bed. Just as from the two big windows in the living room, Jean saw
a hillside sloping down to the river, textured with stones,
saplings, shrubbery, and bracken resembling giant Boston ferns.
Here was the original fernie brae or bank of the castle’s name.
Jean remembered the words of Thomas the Rhymer:

And see ye not that bonny road,

That winds about the fernie brae?

That is the road to fair Elfland,

Where thou and I this night maun gae.

Although just because you took the road to
Faerie didn’t mean you weren’t as likely to end up in Podunk . . .
She was lowering her expectations about Alasdair. Hoping he didn’t
expect too much of her. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him. It
was, as they’d been reminded a few moments ago, that they had only
so much emotional capital to spend trying to assemble a
relationship out of two reclamation projects. But then, hoarding
their emotional capital meant nothing but bitter loneliness, like
Scrooge before that visit from his own ghosts.