Finding Fraser (43 page)

In a bit of a daze, I stepped forward and
she thrust the lamb into my arms. I couldn’t come up with any words, but there
was no question Morag was right. I guess I had found Fraser, after all, though
he was not exactly the one I was looking for. I nuzzled its soft wool a moment
before it lurched its head back suddenly and bashed me in the chin.

“Whoah there, Fraser—careful now. Ye dinnae
want tae hurt the lady who helped ye into the world, do yeh?”

I set the lamb down on the grass and handed
his harness back to Morag. “You’re very sweet, but I think it’s best if you do
the presentation. I’ll cheer you on from the audience, okay?”

Morag shrugged. “Suit yerself. Ye know where
tae find me when ye return, aye? Or yeh could drop me a line sometime—I
jes’ had them put in the router this week. Got mah own Wi-Fi channel now, and a
new MacBook tae boot.”

“I’ll do that,” I said, and rubbed my sore
chin as she and her two woolly little charges hurried over to the stage.

The sun set over the main platform as the
final presentations wrapped up. The winner of the caber toss that’d I’d seen
behind the main tent turned out to be Geordie, and I had a minute to
congratulate him as he stood afterwards, holding his trophy. He told me Hamish
had said he was never coming back to Nairn.

“He were full o’ some nonsense about sun and
fun. But I’ve no doubt he’ll be back.” He took a long drink from the cup of his
trophy, and I realized he’d filled it with beer. “Really thowt yeh were the one
fer him, there. But that blondie he ended up with? Yowza!”

He leered blearily at me until a tsking lady
organizer walked by. She grabbed the trophy cup from him, dumped the beer into
the grass and led him away.

In the final act of the evening, a small
child stepped on stage, tugging the lambs along, and presented them in turn to
the guests of honor. I cowered, watching behind one of the heavies in the
crowd. And then in a flurry of smiling and thanks, it was all over. The crowds
streamed toward the exits and to the overflowing beer garden that had been set
up nearby.

In a moment, Jack was beside me again.

“Would yeh like to meet her?” he said,
catching me peeking up at the stage. “We can go up now, before her car comes.”

I shook my head. “No. I—I can’t bear
facing her again.”

We walked along toward the exit. “What
happened, Emma? You wouldn’t tell me that night in Philadelphia. And you’ve
never put anything on your blog.”

“I swore to myself I’d never mention it
again. And I haven’t.”

His voice dropped a little. “What could be
so terrible? Did you vomit on her or something?”

I paused beside a blue-striped tent near the
exit.

“Nothing like that. It’s just—I’d
waited in line for her the whole day, and when I finally got up to speak to
her, she was so kind. She smiled up at me, and I wanted to tell her everything.
To confess what I was about to do, and to ask her where—where she thought
I should look to find my Fraser.”

I had to stop for a minute and catch my
breath. I was ashamed to realize my eyes were tearing up, just at the memory.

“In the end, there were just too many
questions. I opened my mouth to speak to her, but instead of saying anything, I
just burst into tears. She handed me a tissue, very kindly, of course, but I
still turned and ran away.”

Jack gave me a bit of a strange look. “Emma,”
he said. “I thought
writers
were bad
about living inside their own heads! You worry too much. Listen, people cry
about my characters all the time.”

I sniffed a little. “Really?”

He paused a minute. “Well, not really. I
can’t say anyone has actually burst into tears over my writing. But I get it.
As a fellow author, I really get it.”

I took a deep breath. He was right. It was
time to find my way past it.

“Anyway,” he went on, “she’s marvelous.
You’ll love her. Please let me introduce you.”

Looking up at him, something else surged in
me. The hero worship that had haunted me for so long would never really leave,
but for the first time, I was conscious of feeling something else in its place.
I thought back to the kiss—the kisses, really—he’d given me at the
bookstore. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure I wanted to share any of the time we had
left with someone he thought was so lovely.

Even if I thought she was lovely, too.

“No—no, I don’t think so,” I said, and
turned and walked toward the exit gates.

To:
 
[email protected]

From:
    
PCAlthrop@l*thianandb*rders.p*lice.uk

September 13

Miss Emma Sheridan,

This is to acknowledge receipt of your
email, including your booking number and itinerary for your return to Chicago,
Illinois, United States of America on September 14.

We have been in touch with our Stirling
colleague PC Doris Potts, and appreciate your timely follow-up with our office.
With receipt of this email, you have met all requirements as outlined by that
precinct.

Please remember to check in with one of
our officers at the Edinburgh terminal prior to your departure. Failure to do so
will result in a permanent notation to be placed on your United Kingdom
immigration file.

Thank you for your cooperation,

Police Constable Lawrence Althrop

Jack
had let me use his phone to check my email.
I’m
pretty sure he was as relieved as I was when I read it out to him, as we drove
into the dark. The soft warmth of the summer afternoon had given way to a cool
wet evening with an edge to it that I recognized. A swirl of leaves blew across
the windshield as the car pulled out. It would soon be fall. I realized with a
jolt that it would be the only season I’d not lived through in Scotland.

I had no idea when Jack’s flight was due to
leave, but my flight was scheduled just before noon the following day. However,
the celebrations after the Games had gone late into the night. We’d been
stopped at the gates at our first attempt to leave, and dragged into the Beer
Garden tent by Geordie and a collection of the winning tug o’war team.

Every time we’d tried to head out, Jack had
been drawn back into the merriment again, to raise a glass to someone’s triumph
on the present-day Highland battlefields. That Jack was drinking Irn-Bru (Scotland’s
other
national drink, according to Geordie), was our saving grace, in
that it allowed him to finally elude the grasp of the scotch- and beer-slowed
revelers sometime after two in the morning. The sounds of the celebration
roared on in one of the tents behind us as we slipped away at last.

When we got to the car by the Castle, he’d
apologized for the late start.

“We’ll not have time to stop home at this
hour, I’m afraid. It’s a bit of a journey all the way down to Edinburgh. I can
make up a wee bed for yeh in the back seat, if ye like,” he’d said, but I waved
the offer off and sat beside him. The chances were I’d snore less sitting up,
anyway.

Not that I did.

The car’s engine was the only sound as the
miles rolled away under our wheels. It turned out that my snoring worries were
all for naught anyway, since I didn’t sleep a wink.

I spent the drive thinking over all the
mistakes I’d made, beginning way back with my first boyfriend Campbell. I
realized I had been casting men in roles they didn’t suit; trying to make them each
fit my image of what a boyfriend should be, all the way through to Egon. Sure
he was a philanderer, and that was entirely his to own, but hadn’t I secretly
known that part of him existed? Hadn’t I thought I could make him change? And
because Hamish reflected some of the physicality of my ideal mental image of
Jamie, I had pretended the other parts of him didn’t exist until it blew up in
my face. I needed to learn from all these bad choices. These were choices
Claire would never have made.

For a long time, when sleep wouldn’t come, I
looked over and watched Jack driving the car. After all my time in Scotland,
and all the friends I had found, it was he who was the one I had come to most
depend on. And even though in the dark I could see there was no ring on his
finger, the fact that there was a Rebecca in his life meant that I needed to
learn from all the bad choices I’d made in the past. I turned and stared out
into the darkness as the road took us away from everything I had grown to love.

Sometime just before dawn, the car shuddered
a little as we pulled onto a side road. I’d been drifting—thinking again about
Jack’s kindness since I’d met him. Before my arrest, and especially after, he’d
gone out of his way to make sure I’d felt safe and comfortable. And now he was
driving all night to make sure I didn’t get arrested again.

The car slowed a little with the change of
roadway and I lifted my head to see he was looking at me. His face appeared a
little worried in the lights from the dash.

“Ach, I’m sorry Emma,” he said, his finger
tapping against the steering wheel. “I dinnae mean to wake yeh. It’s just—there’s
somethin’ I thought ye might like tae see before you catch your plane.”

I sat a bit more upright, and
surreptitiously wiped the side of my mouth. “I wasn’t asleep,” I said. “Where
are we?”

He turned a sharp corner and then pulled the
car to a stop.

“When I was growin’ up, my cousins had a
place near here. We used to come as children, to play on the stones.”

He peered out the window at the sky. A thin gray
line showed the shape of a dark hillside looming above us. “I believe it’s
stopped raining,” he said. “Would yeh like to step out with me?”

The circle of stones stood silent in the
near-darkness. I was still panting a little from the climb, but it was much
easier to see now than it had been when we’d left the car. Leaves swirled
underfoot and around our ankles as we walked up the path. Jack had taken my
hand and held it through the long climb in the dark, but he dropped it then and
stepped forward into the circle.

“Holy smoke,” I breathed.

The dark gray stones seemed to materialize
out of the air around us—solid but somehow out of time. The air was
crisp, and a curled brown leaf skittered across the dew-studded grass in front
of me. We were in a clearing that had no right to be where it was—a flat,
sort of oval space somehow carved out of a wooded hillside. Unless you stumbled
upon this place, I don’t know how anyone could have known it was there.

I spun around, trying to take it all in.

“Is this more like the place you were
looking for?” Jack said, his voice hard to hear above the wind.

“Yes. Definitely.”

Unlike the earlier circles I’d visited, this
one had no cairn at its center. There was a collection of eight small stones
forming a sort of ellipsis, encircled by a group of twelve much larger, more
evenly-spaced stones. A single stone connected the two groups.

I walked over to look more closely. Of all
the stones, this was the only one that had the same cup marks on it as the
cairned circles at Clava and Drumnadrochit. I traced one of the marks with my
finger, wondering.

The trees above us were rimmed in pink. I
looked up to see Jack watching me as I walked around the ancient, sacred
space.
 
I could see his face clearly
for the first time since the car. He looked anxious and—something else I
couldn’t read.

“This is amazing,” I said. “I’m so happy I
got to see it before I had to leave.”

“I’m glad,” he replied. “When I read the
post you’d written about your search for the circle, I remembered this place. I
hadnae thought about it in years.”

I lay my hand against the cool stone with
the cup marks. “Do you know what these mean?”

He shook his head. “No. We mostly used this
place to hide from the adults when I was young. We’d play cowboys and Indians
from the programs we loved on American television. Not terribly politically
correct these days, but the coolest thing ever, back then.”

He walked over beside me. “I’ll wager this
is the sunstone, so maybe whoever placed it here marked it this way as an
indicator. We used to lie on the grass and watch the sun move over it, as I
recall.”

I looked up into the lightening sky. “Do you
think the sun will rise over it this morning?”

He leaned against the rock. “Maybe, though
I’m fair certain it marks the midsummer sun, somehow. Or—it might be the
moon.”

“The moon was out the night I saw the ghost
warrior, but I didn’t really notice where it rose. Too busy chasing phantoms.”

Jack cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Ah—yeah.
About that night …”

He folded his arms across his chest and
stared somewhere into the distance over my left shoulder. I looked at him
expectantly.

“I believe I have a confession to make,” he
said, at last.

 
I pushed my glasses firmly up my nose,
but it didn’t really help me read his expression any better. So I just waited.

“I think it’s possible—I’m not totally
sure, mind—but it’s slightly possible … thatImighthavebeenyourghost,” he
blurted.

“Pardon?”

He shot an anguished look at me. “I didn’t
actually put it together for quite a while, but one night when I was reading
over your back blog posts …”

“You read over my back blog posts?” I
interrupted. I felt so completely thrown by the direction the whole
conversation had taken, I grabbed onto what I could. “I don’t think even
Genesie does that, and I’m pretty sure she’s cyber-stalking me.”

He shrugged. “Hey, I’m only one of your
followers. In my case it’s—well, maybe just a bit more literal.”

I thought about how grateful I had been to
see him at the Wallace Monument. “Okay, never mind. You were saying …?”

He took a deep breath. “Well, I was at a
cairn one night in March—the one near Culloden. It was late. I always go
late to avoid having to deal with the tourists, same as with Ainslie Castle.
So, I think it may have been me you saw. I know I left as soon as I heard
voices.”

I leaned back against the cool silvery rock
and felt a little shiver tingle up my spine at the thought of that night. “But
why—why were you there?”

He crouched beside me, staring into the
circle of stones, silent for a long moment. In the distance I heard the cry of
a bird, clear against the dawn sky. He looked up then.

“A golden eagle,” he said, and turned round
to search out the source. “There!”

When it became clear I couldn’t see
anything, he stepped behind me and turned my shoulders. His arm reached around
me, pointing high above the woods behind the center of the circle. “Right there—can
you see her?”

And I could. The eagle glided high on the
morning wind and then stalled abruptly and shot downwards. I lost sight of her
against the trees.

“Breakfast for the wee ones,” he said, with
a smile of satisfaction. “Full Scottish breakfast, if I’m not mistaken.”

With the eagle gone, he stepped away, and I
shivered again as the warmth of him against my back disappeared. But he’d
crossed his arms and leaned against the stone beside mine.

“I was there to pray,” he said, abruptly.
“Or rather, to find a spot where Wallace might pray. I’d taken him through the
fighting and anger. The war years—the deep triumph at Stirling Bridge and
the sorry rout the following year. He had been a man on top, but over time, it
had all burned to ashes in the flames of politics and deception. I’d finished
writing the book, but Rebecca wasn’t happy with it. I was …”

“Just a minute,” I said. “Rebecca wasn’t
happy with it?”

He shrugged and smiled a little. “Aye. I’m
so lucky to have her, y’know. She’s a tough critic, but she’s honest. Ye need
that in an agent, aye?”

I held up my hand again. “Wait a sec.
Rebecca—is your agent? Not your girlfriend?”

He laughed aloud. “Well, she’s sixty, and
has been married herself for thirty-some years, so no, she’s not technically my
girlfriend.”

A warm glow that I could not attribute to
the weather began to work its way through my body from somewhere south of my
sternum. Jack had stopped telling his story, and was looking at me with a
curious expression.

“A—about that circle,” I said, not
really caring any more at all.

A gust of wind swirled Jack’s hair around.
“Right. Well, I was reworking a scene not long before the end—or before
the betrayal that led to the end, anyway—and somehow, I couldn’t find
Wallace any more. I knew the fighter and the tactician, but I’d lost the man.”

I jammed my hands deeper into my pockets.
“When you talk about the story, you get this inward look. It’s like you can see
it all playing out inside your mind.”

He grinned at me. “Well, that was the
problem, y’see. Because I could see it all so clearly. Until the final days—his
final days. Then it vanished. He was totally gone from me. I wrote it anyway,
but when I handed in the final draft, Rebecca called me on it.”

“Rebecca,” I said again, not even caring
that I sounded like an idiot. “Rebecca, your agent.”

He grinned at me. “Yes. Rebecca my agent
called me on it. So I headed to the circle. It wouldn’t have been one Wallace would
have found—I was too far north, writing near home, but it was of a
similar look to those down south. The problem was all the damnable tourists, of
course. So that’s why I left, in the end.”

“Yeah —I hadn’t expected to find that
bus there, either. Or Gerald, for that matter.”