The Murder Hole (8 page)

“Hi!” said the woman. “We saw you from our
window when you checked in.”

Yes, Jean informed herself, windows were
two-way. “Hello. I’m Jean Fairbairn.”

“Dave and Patti Duckett,” said the man, “from
Moline, Illinois. I work for John Deere and Patti runs a day care
center. This is our first time across the pond. Where are you
from?”

“Originally Dallas, but I live in Edinburgh
now. I work for
Great Scot
Magazine. History and travel and
. . .” she insisted, “. . . innocuous stuff like that. I’m here to
interview Iris Mackintosh and Roger Dempsey. Not at the same time,
though.”

Patti glanced at Dave, then back at Jean. “We
saw that TV show last night. No love lost between those two, is
there? Although we don’t know Dr. Dempsey personally.”

“I only know his public face. And I haven’t
met Iris at all yet. It was Kirsty who let me in.”

“Isn’t she a pretty little thing?” asked
Dave.

“So nice to see a young girl without a ring
in her nose or a tattoo,” Patti added.

Beneath her clothes, thought Jean, Kirsty
could well be tattooed with the map of Scotland, with a navel ring
marking the site of Glasgow. If so, that was her own business.

Dave went on, “She’s off with her boyfriend
tonight. I saw them walking down the driveway.”

“Cute couple,” said Patti. “He’s one of the
boys from the boat, you know, Dempsey’s assistant.”

“Oh?” Jean asked, but before she could get
any more gossip, let alone pole-vault to any conclusions, the child
Elvis shot around the corner of the house, careened across the
terrace, and stopped dead in front of the three adults.

“Hello there, sonny,” said Dave. “How old are
you?”

Elvis peered up at his inquisitors from
beneath his sheaf of flaxen hair. “Six,” he allowed cautiously,
like a witness wondering whether his testimony would be used
against him.

The cadaverous form of his father
materialized from the twilight, Dracula-like, and ambled down the
terrace. “Oh, hullo. Martin Hall. The lad’s Elvis. Ah, drinks.”
Martin’s amble sped up fractionally, to a mosey. He picked up a
bottle, then asked over his shoulder, “Here, have you seen a
corkscrew?”

“No, sorry,” Jean answered, although it was
the darned elusive Iris who should be apologizing.

Thwarted, Martin set down that bottle and
chose another, a creamy liqueur with a screw-off top. He filled a
small glass with it and a large one with what the locals called
lemonade—citric-acid soda—adding, extravagantly, one ice cube from
the bucket provided.

“Ta!” Elvis clasped the fizzing glass with
both hands and gulped. A moment later he produced a loud belch.
Martin muttered some reprimand. Jean pretended she hadn’t heard.
The Ducketts laughed.

Elvis set his glass on the edge of the cart
and ran off across the terrace. Martin sat down to nurse his
liqueur. His thick glasses and distracted air confirmed Jean’s
impression that he’d been forcibly removed from a library or lab
and was going through withdrawal. She could have initiated a
conversation by asking where Elvis’s mum was, but Martin, if not
obviously strong, seemed to be the silent type. She commiserated
with the need for silence, even though its corollary was sometimes
loneliness.

Dave and Patti, though, did not. After
various dithers—“Is that Drambuie? How sweet it that? Is Lagavullin
one of those smoky ones?”—they chose their respective poisons.
Settling down between Martin and Jean, they started chatting about
their travels, the loch, and how they’d picked up some Omnium
brochures from the Water Horse boat and wasn’t underwater
exploration the wave of the future—wave, get it, wave?

Jean returned the conversational birdie with
a few remarks about Dempsey’s theories and technical prowess.
Martin offered that he, Elvis, and Noreen-the-wife had toured the
Water Horse boat. While the lad had been right chuffed, Noreen, he
added in tones so weary they approached contempt, had developed a
migraine and was now having a lie-down.

Tracy had been right about people tramping
through all day long, Jean thought. Maybe Jonathan’s belligerence
was evidence that he hadn’t appreciated being on show. Was he out
with Kirsty tonight, or had she gone with Brendan?

The sound of bagpipes, part swagger, part
lament, drifted up from the Festival field. That was why armies
marched with pipers—the sound carried for miles. Jean’s nervous
system quivered with awe and delight and regret.

Then the fine hair on the back of her neck
stirred, ever so slightly, as though a chill breeze had blown
across her skin. Her irritating hypersensitivity to the paranormal
was picking up an allergen—a ghost, walking the gardens of
Pitclachie House . . . No. The subliminal tickle was gone. It
hadn’t been sweat. It hadn’t been the wind. It hadn’t even been a
probing insect. Something perpendicular to reality—however she
defined reality—had come within range of her senses and now was
gone.

She hadn’t realized how the sounds of music
and voices had faded until they returned, harsh against her ears.
No one on the terrace had skipped a beat any more than the drummers
at the Festival. No one here shared her sensitivity to ghosts.

Goosed to her feet, Jean stood up and paced
down the flagstones into the twilight. She sensed nothing except
the wind stirring the bushes clustered along the outer rim of the
terrace. Leaves dipped, flowers nodded, tiny yellow broom petals
whirled away and vanished. There might be a ghost here, but ghosts
weren’t dangerous. Living people, they were dangerous.

Beyond the grounds the dusk—the
gloaming—lingered on, the light growing thinner and more delicate
and, in that alchemy peculiar to these northern climates, more
polished. The opposite bank of the loch drew a black horizontal
line between the faint obsidian glow of the water and the Prussian
blue of the sky, clear and taut as a membrane . . . A solitary
spark shot up from the field above the castle.

“Look!” Elvis leaped up on the low wall
surrounding the terrace. Martin followed, steadying him with a firm
paternal hand.

The spark burst into bright red and gold
blossoms. Another spark, and another. Red and green and gold sprays
of light reflected in the water of the loch. In the village, the
band reached a crescendo, the high, clear skreel of the pipes
punctuated twice by the muffled booms of the explosives, once as
they went off and again when the crump echoed from the opposite
shore. Nessie probably thought she was being depth-charged.

Grinning, Jean ordered herself to turn down
her emotional thermostat and enjoy her bit of a holiday. After all,
if she’d been a set of pipes, her drone would be anxiety, but her
melody would be anticipation.

The adults oohed and aahed appreciatively,
and Elvis laughed and clapped his hands. “Look at that one! Look at
that!”

Sparks drifted slowly down toward the bay,
faint trails of luminescence, like fireflies. Then a sudden spurt
of flame roiled up and out, larger and brighter than any spark.
Jean’s heart lurched against her ribs. “What the . . ?”

“Brilliant!” Elvis shouted.

Dave Duckett exclaimed, voice shaking, “Oh my
God!”

A detonation rolled into the night, rattling
the windows of the house. Bits of fire fell back to the surface of
the bay, some winking out, others bobbing up and down. A flurry of
movement came from the other boats, and a cry went up from the
shore. Patti’s wail of dismay was much louder. The music squealed
and, raggedly, stopped, but the shouts did not. A siren began to
whine.

“Oh,” said Elvis, his small face crumpling.
“That wasn’t right.” Martin picked him up and carried him
inside.

Jean gasped for air. She shut her eyes and
opened them. But still she could see that where the expedition boat
had been anchored was now only black water, surrounded by burning
debris. An accident. The explosion was an accident . . .

Roger had received anonymous letters
reminding him that the loch was dangerous, that men died there.

Jean sank down on the wall and slumped
forward, dully, heavily, as the dark, cold, peat-stained water
seemed to close over her head and suck her down toward
nightmare.

Without exchanging more than a polite murmur
with the Ducketts, who looked shell-shocked—much like she did, no
doubt—Jean slunk back to the cottage. Slowly, methodically, she
prepared for bed, and slipped between the chilly duvet and a bed as
hard and cold as a marble slab.

And lay there. Behind her eyelids the boat
exploded again and again, in real-time, in slow-motion, in
animation. Each spark that extinguished itself in the unforgiving
waters of the loch left a trail of questions like bright
after-images across vision and memory alike. She knew she couldn’t
answer any questions now. She knew she couldn’t even ask any. And
yet the sparks swirled on and on . . .

The noise of a shutting door jerked her out
of a merciful doze.

Had she forgotten, under the circumstances,
to lock the outer door? And if so, who had just come into the
house? Jean put slippers on her sock-clad feet and a robe over her
flannel nightgown and listened at the bedroom door. Nothing. She
called, “Hello?” Nothing. Turning on the hall lights, she stepped
cautiously down the stairs. The front door was locked. Several
yellow broom blossoms lay on the floor of the vestibule. She’d
tracked those in herself, right?

She’d been half-asleep when she heard the
sound. She’d probably misinterpreted the slam of a car door or
traffic noise from the road below.

She trudged back upstairs and checked the
bathroom and the mystery room across the hall from the bedroom,
bracing herself in case its door flew open when she turned the
knob. It, too, was still locked. Less puzzled than resentful, Jean
left the hall light on, locked the bedroom door, and lay down on
the bed. By sheer force of will she at last slipped into stupor . .
.

Again she spasmed into alertness. This time
she heard not only a door shutting, but also footsteps and the
creaking of the hall floor. Slowly she swiveled her head toward the
bedroom door. The light-slit beneath it wavered and steadied, as
though someone—something—had come out of the locked room and walked
down the hall. The fine hairs on the back of her neck prickled like
feelers on the pillowcase, and the air condensed around her
shoulders, pressing her against the mattress.
Resistance is
futile
.

She lay quietly, every sense extended and
shrinking at once. The rich aromas of coffee and pipe tobacco
filled her nostrils and then dissipated. The steps stopped. Voices
murmured, a man’s voice and a woman’s, rising and falling
simultaneously, like dissonant chords. Then the woman screamed.

Jean jerked in horror, then reminded herself:
They’re ghosts. It’s a memory-video. I can’t do anything to
change it
.

The scream either ended abruptly or attained
such a high note Jean could no longer hear it. But she could feel
it, a raw, chill bite in the air and along her nerves. What she
heard was the crashing and thudding of a body falling down the
stairs. And then silence, a silence so deep that her own breath,
her own heartbeat, seemed to reverberate in the night.

Nothing else happened. After a while she
managed a long exhalation. She pulled the duvet up to her chin,
thinking that if she lived to be a hundred and fifty, she would
never get used to sensing ghosts. And now she’d sensed two at
Pitclachie House. The first one, the one outside in the shrubbery,
had been only a wisp of feeling, a trace of dismay and dread. This
one, though, had real power, searing emotion, behind it. There had
been if not a murder here, then a sudden and unexpected death.

To say that Ambrose had spent so many years
shut up in his study that even death couldn’t pry him out was to
evade the real issue. His spirit was lingering here in the Lodge
because it had some unsolved business. Was it too great a leap of
extrapolation to think that business was the death of his wife?

Had Eileen fallen down the stairs? By
accident? On purpose? Had Ambrose hidden her body? Or had this
particular scene happened long before her death? Who knew?

Those questions found space on the already
crowded carousel in Jean’s mind, and spun round and round until at
last, in exhausted self-defense, she fell into a doze and stayed
that way, drifting in and out of a restless sleep, until she woke
suddenly to a ray of sun streaming through an inch-wide gap between
the curtains.

Birds were caroling. The clock showed eight
a.m., hours past dawn. Groaning, Jean crawled from the bed and
padded across the icy floorboards, her skin prickling with natural,
not paranormal, gooseflesh.

That must be why the Bouchards had moved into
the main house. Not that they’d necessarily sensed or even scented
the ghost. She’d met few other people cursed with an allergy as
strong as hers, one of whom, through fate’s fiendish sense of
humor, happened to be Alasdair Cameron. But the Bouchards could
have felt uneasy. Plenty of people could feel a tickle in the
nostrils without ever succumbing to the full explosive whiplash of
a sneeze.

Blowing a raspberry at the blank facade of
the still-locked door, she went downstairs and straight to the
kitchen, where she fired up the coffeepot and assembled cheese
toast. Miranda was paying for her to eat breakfast in the main
house, but neither fretful speculation nor greasy bacon would sit
too well on her stomach just now.

Hmmm
. Her rear echelon. Miranda.
Michael and Rebecca. Hugh Munro, who should have gotten into
Drumnadrochit last night. Not that she needed to make any phone
calls just yet. It wasn’t as though she’d had anything to do with
the explosion.