necessarily, Jean thought.
“The Green Lady’s our resident ghost or fairy, a glaistig, green being the fairy color. The story goes that you can hear her singing, in a fashion, when something either bad or good is going to happen. Or you can see her gliding silently toward the house…”
The glass wobbled in Dakota’s hand and her eyes expanded to fill half her face. Heather reached out a protective hand, but her slice of a gaze turned toward Fergie. “You’re scaring the kid, Mr. MacDonald.”
“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,
