skeptical retort of the alpha female. “Alasdair promises no territorial disputes this time around. I think he’s finally accepting he’s in another business now. And he told me Gilnockie’s a good cop.”
“You’ll be keeping me up on events, then. I’ll try asking about among my Ozzie contacts, but with the holiday and all, they’re more likely hanging about Bondi Beach than answering e-mail.”
It always seemed odd to Jean that Christmas and New Year’s were mid-summer events Down Under. But that was her own cultural bias. “Thanks. I’ll talk to you again before I see you on the second.”
“You’re still holding the wedding, then?”
“Oh.” Jean looked around the room, from the painted dragon above the mantel to the sleeping moggie on the posh chair, but neither was offering any advice.
Maybe she and Alasdair should cancel the festivities. Maybe holding a wedding under the shadow of an unsolved crime would taint their marriage. Or maybe she and her equally stubborn beloved shouldn’t let some bloody-minded person control their destiny any more than various bloody-minded people had already done.
“Jean?” Miranda asked.
“Yeah, we’re still holding the wedding.”
“That’s the spirit! Keep your pecker up, eh?”
“I should hope so.”
“It’s not too late to be organizing a release of doves. Saw it done once at a wedding in Hampshire, just lovely, off they flew into the blue sky…”
“. . . and were probably picked off by hawks. Thanks anyway, Miranda.” Jean shook her head, round-filing Miranda’s dove idea with her other ones: arriving at Dunasheen chapel in a horse-drawn carriage draped with roses, exiting while military re-enactors formed an arch of swords, champagne fountains and a cake shaped like Edinburgh Castle at the reception.
“You’ve got no taste for bells and whistles, do you now,” Miranda said sadly.
“No. And neither does Alasdair. Talk to you again soon.” Jean hit End and leaned against the stone bar separating two windows. It felt like a cold finger tracing down her back.
Her smile ebbed. Her ears echoed with the absence of Miranda’s familiar voice. With the absence of any sound at all except for the eerie whistle of the wind in the chimney. The shadowed room in front of her seemed to fade away, and she saw the lights of Edinburgh and the crowds jostling along the sidewalks, fireworks over the Castle and rock bands playing.
No lonely beaches there, just the occasional lonely alley, and all the agitations of the city. There was something—there was a lot—to be said for mountains, sea, and sky, even a clouded one. Caledonia, stern and wild, harsh and beautiful. She’d committed herself to Scotland before she’d committed herself to Alasdair.
Sitting up, she looked into the darkness, at the lights of the village blurred by the mist and rain, at the fluorescent stripes on the police cars shining in the lights of the house, at the man standing—
The chill on her back surged through her body, tightening every follicle. A human shape stood below the window, so still she’d have thought he was one of Fergie’s sculptures, if there’d been a sculpture in the parking area. The posture, feet planted wide apart, hands thrust into pockets, indicated a man. But it wasn’t Pritchard, the manager. He’d been wearing a yellow raincoat. And why would he stand there when he had a nice warm cottage or even nicer, if cooler, castle to go to?
This man wore mottled black, boots, pants, a long jacket with a hood. A hood pulled so well forward that it encompassed only shadow, like one of Tolkien’s ringwraiths or a specter of Death.
Then he moved, tilting his head back so that the light revealed his face, white as old bone. He spotted Jean in her window, outlined against the dim light, and his body straightened from a merely cautious pose to an alert one.
She didn’t move. She didn’t breathe. She returned stare for stare with those hollow eyes.
Did he slump slightly? Or did he hear the front door opening? Just as light gushed outward and ran off his jacket like water, a yellow-coated figure ran up the driveway and a male voice shouted, “You there!”
The dark figure faded into the night.
Chapter Seven
Jean exhaled between teeth clenched so tightly her jaw hurt.
Yellow-coat ran into the parking area, still yelling. “Here! You there!” Which seemed a bit contradictory, but she was hardly in a position to criticize. She didn’t recognize the voice, and the figure was too slender to be either Fergie or Rab Finlay. Pritchard, probably.
Below Jean, presumably from the front porch, Diana’s cool voice cut the heat of the male’s. “Mr. Pritchard, Lionel, if you please, there’s no need to shout.”
“Diana, we can’t have the man hanging about. Your own father…”
“No harm done. Someone in the village likely told him about—the unfortunate event—and he stopped by on his way home to have a look at the police vehicles.”
His gait as smooth as a hobby horse’s, Pritchard strode to the door. Jean had to lean forward and press her ear to the icy glass in order to hear him say, “We’re hardly on his way, the path runs beyond the garden wall. He had no call…”
The slam of the front door echoed upward, vibrating as subtly in Jean’s ear as distant thunder. She sat back on the window seat. Who was “he”? Where was “home”? And was Pritchard’s accent English rather than Scottish?
Well, so was Diana’s. And Fergie himself had been infused with a “proper” accent, as befit the nephew of a baronet, never mind his thistle-strewn Highland ancestry. Although with Fergie, the infusion hadn’t quite taken.
The clock on the mantelpiece chimed six times. She’d promised to be in the library at six-thirty. With one last searching glance out the window—no mysterious figures, no irascible managers, no police people—she pulled herself to her feet and headed into the bathroom.
Her cosmetics bag was wedged between a ceramic lizard studded with fake gems and Alasdair’s nylon shaving kit, which in turn sat next to a Chinese vase holding fresh if odorless flowers. Maybe instead of donning the cap, bells, and motley of a court jester, she should don war paint. She applied eye shadow and mascara, chose a colorful tapestry vest over a basic skirt-and-turtleneck combo, added necklace and earrings, and traded her walking shoes for decorative flats, all the while pondering what Diana had called the unfortunate event.
It was too much to expect the mysterious man in the parking area to be the murderer. Murderers, in Jean’s thankfully limited experience, didn’t stand around looking sinister. Besides, Diana and Pritchard both knew him, or of him, at least. He must be some local character.
If one of the two military dirks in the entrance hall was the murder weapon, then the murderer must have come from inside the house. Or passed through it. Or known someone with access to it. Did that mean the murder had been a collaborative effort, and that there were two killers to apprehend? Great.
In the bedroom, the telephone lay where she’d left it, on one of the tasseled pillows piled on the four-poster bed. Its little screen gazed up at her blankly.
