The Murder Hole (7 page)

Then there was Tracy, who posed gazing off
over the loch. Now here was a woman who was not aging gracefully,
but was fighting every step of the way. Jean could sympathize with
that. She herself felt as though she were being frog-marched into
middle age.

Still, didn’t Tracy realize that her linen
pants and cotton sweater were so tight they gave the impression she
was plump when she was merely woman-shaped, like Jean, not
girl-shaped like, say, Kirsty? And while her designer-cut hair
showed not one gray strand, the bronze color didn’t look natural
next to her fair skin. Assuming “fair” was her actual skin tone—her
complexion was smooth as porcelain, and as liable to crack at any
moment beneath its layers of foundation, blusher, and shadow. Jean
had never been able to wear foundation without feeling as though
she’d dipped her face in Crisco. But to each her own.

According to Dempsey’s biography, he and
Tracy were both in their late forties and had been married for
twenty-five years, with no issue except a corporation. They gave
the lie to Jean’s theory that after a while man and wife would
start to resemble each other. If Tracy was trying out for
Vogue
, Roger was ready for the special
Popular
Mechanics
issue of
National Geographic
.

Tracy turned to Roger. Her thin, miserly
lips, meticulously lined to make them seem full—and therefore
making them seem hard—kept on smiling, while a flatness in her eyes
informed Jean that the woman was not. “I’m off to the hotel. You’ll
want a wash and brush up before the Tourist Authority dinner, won’t
you, dear? And we’re opening the Festival.”

“I’ll get there, I’ll get there, give me a
chance.” Roger replaced his cap, leaving several tufts of hair
sticking out at odd angles, like horns.

“Where are you staying?” Jean asked
Tracy.

“The Cameron Arms Hotel, the new one working
with Starr to sponsor the Festival. And to sponsor us as well.”

“So it’s not exactly a blinding coincidence
that y’all happened on the scene just in time for the hotel opening
and the Festival?”

“Marketing and promotion. It’s all part of
protecting one’s investment.”

“And the anonymous letters haven’t
discouraged your work?”

The corners of Tracy’s mouth dropped abruptly
and her lips tightened to a red slit. Her smile may not have been
reflected in her eyes, but her anger certainly was. “Iris sent
them, mark my words. She may think Loch Ness is her private
preserve, but she won’t interfere with Operation Water Horse. You
won’t keep Roger much longer, will you now, Jean?” Without waiting
for an answer, let alone adding, “There’s a good girl,” Tracy
headed toward dry land. The high heels of her impractical but
handsome strappy sandals tiptoed across the gangway and tapped up
the pier. A moment later the deep-throated roar of the sports car
rolled across the water and faded toward town.

Okay
, Jean told herself. Roger might
dismiss the letters, but Tracy, spousal minder and manager, didn’t.
Did she know about the Nessie-hunting expedition that had been
fire-bombed in the eighties? Did Roger? If not, it wasn’t Jean’s
place to fan the flames—so to speak.

With a jaunty wave after Tracy, Roger turned
back to Jean. “I’ll get Brendan to set up another interview once we
start the land part of the expedition.”

“Where on shore are you going to look?” Jean
set her half-empty mug down beside her chair—she’d reached the
day’s complement of caffeine—and picked up her pen.

“Pitclachie Farm, to begin with. ‘Pit’ is an
old Pictish prefix, and ‘clachie’ is probably the Celtic ‘clach’ or
stone. In other words, the place was named after the Stone.”

Oh yeah
. Roger’s theory about the
Stone. He was digging at Pitclachie?

“Pictish animal carvings are perfectly
recognizable as eagles, bulls, boars, whatever. Except for the
‘beast’.” Roger indicated the logo on his T-shirt. “Maybe this
symbol is from the life, too, huh? What if the horse’s head on the
Stone is Nessie’s head sticking out of the water? Some witnesses
say the Loch Ness monster looks like a horse. You know, water
horse?”

Jean, expressing no opinions, kept on
writing.

“And maybe the broken part had a gripping
beast on it, which is a representation of the creature out of the
water, on land!” Beaming, Roger saluted the loch with his mug and
then took another gulp.

Jean kept her opinion of that flight of fancy
to herself. She was going to be the combative one if she wasn’t
careful. She had yet to learn the art—the trick—of just letting her
interview subject run on and on until he’d revealed more than he’d
intended.

She realized she wasn’t smelling Earl Grey
tea, she was smelling whiskey. No wonder Roger’s tea was the dark
brown of the water surrounding the boat, not caramel-colored like
hers. She remembered how he had been the first in line at the
conference cash bar. When it came to alcohol consumption, he was no
amateur. But then, he was no drunk, either. Or hadn’t been,
then.

“Pitclachie Farm?” Jean asked. “Iris
Mackintosh isn’t a big fan of yours, whether or not she sent the
letters.”

“Iris is kind of a nut, yeah, but in ways
she’s the opposite of Ambrose. She isn’t imaginative enough to
think of sending anonymous letters, and too straight-arrow to do
it.”

That was pretty much Miranda’s assessment.
“But she gave you permission to search her farm, even though she
doesn’t believe in what you’re doing?”

“Yes, she did.” Roger swirled the liquid in
his mug, his cap hiding his eyes, contemplating the drink, or the
deck, or a coil of wire at his feet—anything that was not Jean’s
face.

Her own personal remote-sensors blipped,
although she didn’t know why. If he didn’t have permission from
Iris to search Pitclachie, he wouldn’t be announcing to all and
sundry—Jean being the sundry—that he did. But it seemed a bit
Quixotic, even for Dempsey, to search for Nessie on land. She
tried, “Maybe Iris intends for you not to turn anything up, then
she can say she was right all along.”

“Let her. It’s no skin off my nose if she
won’t see what’s right beneath hers.”

“And if Iris didn’t send the letters,” Jean
persisted, “who did? Who doesn’t want you here? Who’s harassing
you?”

“How could searching for Nessie threaten
anyone? Some dork’s just playing a stupid joke.” Roger picked up
one of his electronic gadgets and inspected its tiny screen.
“Nessie can run, or swim, whatever, but she can’t hide. We’ll find
her, or evidence that she exists.”

End of interview. “Well, you have places to
go and things to do,” Jean said to the button on the top of Roger’s
cap. “I’ll leave you with it. When’s the press junket—er—cruise
tomorrow?”

“Ten a.m. I’ll save you a seat.” He offered
her another ingratiating grin, this one from under his brows,
warily.

“Thanks. I’m looking forward to it.” Jean
stowed her notebook and pen and stepped across to the pier. The
gangplank disappeared from behind her heels the moment she gained
terra almost firma.

Roger dropped the gangplank onto the deck
with a crash. “Brendan! Jonathan! Let’s get the boat anchored in
the bay. We don’t want the local fuzz to give us a parking
ticket.”

The two young men jostled each other like
brothers confined to the back seat of the family car. A moment
later the throb of the engines made the dock vibrate beneath Jean’s
feet and filled the air with exhaust. Water churned and splashed,
and a cold droplet landed on her hand. She turned toward the shore
with a friendly nod at the local fuzz. He glanced at his watch.
Time for him to close down the sentry post and proceed to happy
hour at the pub. Once the boat was anchored in the bay, it would be
protected by a natural moat.

Funny, she thought as she strolled up the
drive, how she found herself not just tolerating Roger’s ego, but
actually liking his goofy charm and shameless enthusiasm. Exactly
as he’d intended. Several times he’d delivered himself of a
statement and then paused, like a stand-up comic revising his
routine to suit the audience’s reaction.

Well, if so, then so what? She was probably
the twentieth reporter today to ask him the same questions. Even if
she’d been the first to challenge his assumptions about Nessie,
he’d handled himself well. His agenda was open for inspection.
Nothing shady about Roger and Tracy building on his previous
acquaintance with her. Nothing shady about them sucking up to her.
She’d come here to tell Roger’s story. To promulgate his myth.
Because doing so would entice readers to
Great Scot
. Scratch
my back, I scratch yours. Right?

Jean paused at the top of the road, frowning.
So why was her curiosity about the Dempseys and their agenda
leavened with so much skepticism it expanded into suspicion?
Because Roger seemed to have a history with Iris? Because he and
Tracy had checked up on Jean herself? Because of the threatening
letters?

She looked back, past the pier, to Dempsey’s
boat cutting a white furrow in the surface of Urquhart Bay. Beyond
it, the open water of the loch glimmered like a great teasing eye,
in on the joke . . . No, Jean told herself. She wasn’t going to
assume anything—not Roger Dempsey, not the letters, not Nessie
herself—was only a joke.

By the time Jean had eaten dinner and whiled
away several hours in the town and at the Festival, the sun had
sunk far enough to cast Pitclachie House and the bay below into
delicate shadow, although light still gleamed on the mountains to
the east, across the loch. The waves close to the far shore emitted
a furtive gleam or two, although not, so far as Jean could see, any
flippers, prehensile necks, or proboscis-sprouting horse heads. She
was disappointed. Considering the power of suggestion, she’d fully
expected to see a corps of Nessies performing water ballet.

Inside the Lodge, there was enough light to
find the switches without having to grope for them. Who knew what
she might touch, feeling around in the dark? She stowed the food
she’d bought in the village, freshened up, and glanced
inquisitively at the locked door.

Jean strolled back outside and around the
corner of the main house, brushing at a tickle along her hairline.
Ah, good, the wind on the terrace side was strong enough to keep
the midges at bay. The infuriating biting gnats played a much
larger and less benign part in the Highland psyche than Nessie did,
and there was no controversy at all about their existence.

The expanse of the terrace was deserted. No
Kirsty, no Iris, no Bouchards. Jean imagined the honeymooners
sitting on a window seat, draped in dressing gowns and Gallic
insouciance, pretending they weren’t looking forward to the
fireworks.

In a window on the ground floor sat the
calico cat, grooming itself, its eyes glinting eerily. Faint lights
glowed in the tower, shining not only through the arched windows
but also through each of the mock murder holes spaced beneath the
overhang of the topmost story, so that they looked like a string of
tawny diamonds. Was Iris up there, watching over her domain? She
was hardly boiling up oil—or less evocatively but more probably,
water—to repel invaders. These murder holes, like the spires and
arcades and ginger breaded gables, were all for show, part of the
nostalgia game. At least, thought Jean, one of the re-enactors
taking tea at Culloden was stained with the red of blood.

A rolling cart was parked just outside the
French doors of what Jean assumed was the dining room, its array of
bottles and glasses twinkling with all the glamour of a jeweler’s
window. A small, neatly-printed sign read, “Please help yourself.”
Not one to turn down a formal invitation, Jean poured herself a wee
dram of the wine of the country and took the most comfortable
chair.

Her dinner of venison casserole redolent with
herbs had scoured her mouth of the taste of bilge, while the crème
brulée and unleaded coffee had cleared out the flavor of diesel
exhaust, leaving her palate available for further stimulation . . .
Ah, yes. The malt whiskey conjured the tea-colored water of the
River Spey and its surrounding hills with their fields of
sun-ripened grain.

Rolling the stinging fragrance around her
mouth, she tried to situate herself in the present, to be there
now. But a relaxed and meditative state was about as easy for her
to attain as sainthood. She realized she was tapping her foot,
stopped herself, and a moment later was tapping again. No, she
wasn’t nervous. She was just very, very alert.

On the surface of the bay below, the
different boats rose and fell. The windows of the Water Horse barge
were fitfully illuminated, as though by a firefly. Were the
intermittent lights reflections, or was someone was still on board,
one of Roger’s assistants detailed to burn the midnight oil in the
never-ending quest for truth, justice, and the technological way—or
however those sentiments had been expressed in the Omnium
brochure.

Jean had nothing against technology, within
reason. But she couldn’t help but think that while Roger’s
technology might extend the ordinary five senses, it was useless
when it came to the odd—very odd—unquantifiable, unrepeatable,
sixth sense, like her own ability to perceive the emotional
emanations called ghosts.

Maybe Nessie was a ghost. Maybe that’s why
some people sensed her but couldn’t get photos of her. Jean could
imagine Miranda’s reaction to her starting her series of articles
with that sentiment. Better a straightforward, “Two great mysteries
meet at Loch Ness. The Picts are the greatest puzzle of Scottish
archaeology, like Nessie is the greatest puzzle of Scottish . . .”
What? Biology? Psychology?

The sound of a door opening and shutting
derailed her train of thought. Two people came walking down the
terrace. This couple did look alike, round of cheek and hip,
considerably more comfortable with middle age than Jean was. But
then, they’d had more time to get used to it. They wore
plastic-rimmed glasses, jeans, loose shirts, and thick-soled, white
athletic shoes that proclaimed them to be Jean’s fellow Americans.
The massive shoes seemed to be the only things keeping them from
floating away like helium balloons.