by Jill Jones
But if they were not a hoax…
And if they belonged to no one…
And if they were authentic…
Robert Gordon leaned back in his chair and rested his hands on his vest. It could be that upon her death, Lady Agatha Keith had contributed substantially to his retirement fund.
Manhattan
Sweat trickled down the valley of her spine and pasted locks of straight blonde hair against her face. The odometer said she had skied three-point-two miles over the non-snow, across the country of her living room. One-point-eight to go, she grimaced, swinging her arms against the resistance of the machine and heaving for breath.
Why couldn’t she have been born thin? she grouched silently. She always had to work so hard to keep in shape. Taylor Kincaid hated artificial exercise, although she didn’t mind the real thing, like racing on long skis across a snow covered countryside with a cold, bracing wind stinging her cheeks, or scuba diving in the temperate waters of some Caribbean bay.
But her busy schedule did not allow for the luxury of such vacations, and unfortunately, her diet consisted mostly of fast food eaten on the run. So at thirty-three, with a career that demanded both peak performance and a celebrity’s good looks, Taylor had no choice except to do all she could to keep the pounds off, and twenty minutes a day en route to nowhere aboard the ski machine had proven to be the least offensive option. At least this way, she consoled herself, she was able to work out in privacy at home, where her leotard-clad body was unavailable to the lecherous stares of the muscle bound mashers at the gym.
And while she exercised, she could catch up on the news of the day. A very efficient use of her time. She watched the anchor woman recount from CNN’s newsroom the latest events of today’s world…a train wreck in South America, a bombing in Asia, yet another snag in the Middle East peace process…
How did that woman do it? Taylor wondered. How could she announce all those horrible things and still maintain a hint of a smile in her presentation? Taylor wiped a drip of perspiration from her eyebrow, glad that her own reporting style did not require such demanding theatrics.
Glad, too, that her stories were not on-the-scene reports of wars, murders, sensational trials and such.
She’d stick to what she was good at…debunking the ridiculous myths and legends of the world, tales that perpetrated fear and ignorance, and proving that the so-called paranormal was just the normal dressed in superstition.
Combining a travelogue format with a touch of sensationalism and a dash of dry humor, she had developed an outrageous television series, “Legends, Lore and Lunatics.” Her audience was eating it up, her ratings sky high. The show was so popular, in fact, that the network was on her back to produce thirteen more episodes.
She grimaced. If only she had thirteen more good ideas.
The odometer clicked to four-point-zero, and Taylor checked her watch. Just a few more slides of the faux skis and she could head for the shower, after which, she would spend the evening in her dining room, which she had converted into a library-study-office, perusing the mountain of books she had brought from the library.
She had to come up with some story ideas. And soon. For while she reveled in her success, she was also beginning to feel tense and pressured. She’d been warned early on in her career, by veterans in the business, that it was difficult to sustain the interest of fickle viewers, who weekly had ever more program options in the TV Guide listings. She was learning that they were right when they’d told her, “you’re only as good as your last show.”
Despite this recent disillusionment at these overwhelming demands, she was determined she would adjust and keep on going, because she’d made a lifelong commitment to her career years ago when she’d learned that for her there was no option of ever having a family.
It was freak of nature, an odd birth defect, the gynecologist had told her. She couldn’t bear children because she’d been born without a womb. He’d said she was totally normal in every other respect, and that this one deficiency should not prevent her from having a healthy sexual relationship as an adult.
But even as a maturing teenager, young to consider the ramifications of such problems, Taylor had been filled with grief and rage, for she was close to her family and had always wanted children of her own. So with her typical headstrong intensity, she’d vowed to follow another life path instead, one that meticulously avoided marriage, one that replaced the wife-and-mother role she had once longed for with that of super-achiever career woman. Nature may have taken control of this aspect of her body, but she’d sworn she would retain control of her life.
Maybe the glory of motherhood was just another highly overrated myth, she told herself from time to time when the stress of her career left her wishing wistfully for a “normal” life, with a husband and family. Maybe it was just a myth, a legend, like the rest of the foolish notions she dealt with in her series. Maybe that’s why she disdained them so intensely.
Her workout almost concluded, Taylor’s breath came in sharp, painful gasps, and tiny pinpricks of light sparkled behind her eyes. She heard a buzzing in her ears and thought for a moment it was from the exercise, until she recognized the sound of the doorbell.
“Thank God,” she uttered, happy to have an excuse to end the torturous ride a little early. Sliding to a stop, she stepped onto the polished hardwood floors, her knees only slightly more solid than Jello from the exercise. She clicked off the TV with the remote control and grabbed a towel.
“Just a minute,” she called toward the front door. The buzzer sounded again, the noise grating irritably on her nerves. “Jeez.” She wiped her arms and face and padded toward the intercom. “Who is it?”
“FedEx.”
“Hold on.” She peered through the tiny peephole in the door to ascertain that it was a legitimate delivery person. She wasn’t expecting anything. But fan mail and hate mail had begun to arrive in equal measure daily at the network to compliment or complain about her controversial show. Had the lunatics found out her home address?
She unlocked the door to the restored brownstone and signed for the overnight letter. The young man making the delivery stared at her, smiling awkwardly, but his light blue eyes admired her unabashedly. “Are you…uh, the Taylor Kincaid?” he asked, his cheeks edged with crimson.
Taylor returned his smile. “Depends on who the Taylor Kincaid is that you mean,” she replied lightly. She was still unused to her status as a television personality. Until “Legends, Lore and Lunatics,” she had remained behind the scenes on her film projects.
“I’ve watched all your shows,” he continued eagerly. “You keep me on the edge of my seat. What are you going to do next?”
Taylor returned his pen and took the package. “The series still has a few weeks to run,” she said, forcing a smile. “I’d spoil it for you if I gave away what I have coming up.”
The young man grinned knowingly. “Right. Thanks, Ms. Kincaid. You can count me as one of your fans. Keep it up. There aren’t many good shows left on television.”
Taylor rewarded him with a sincere smile, then closed the door and leaned against it.
What, indeed, was she going to do next?
Stonehaven, Scotland
Cold weather seemed disinclined to go away this year. It was early May, but gales still blustered, peppering the air with frigid rain, turning the North Atlantic into a frenzy of angry gray swells whipped by vicious white caps.
Duncan Fraser shivered in the upstairs room of the small house that overlooked the twin harbors of Stonehaven and hastily threw on several layers of clothing. He was a big man, brawny and muscular, a marine petroleum engineer and sea captain who respected the fact that seasons did not always come and go according to dates on a calendar.
That they were, in fact, as unstable and unpredictable as life itself.
He reached for his wallet and keys on the bureau, then turned to go, hesitating just long enough to catch a glimpse in his mind’s eye of this room in
other, happier seasons, when he was first married and had awakened on that bed not as eager as now to head off to his harborside office and the dangers of his work.
Duncan shook his head and left the room, closing the door sharply behind him. Maybe he ought to move. This house was too empty. It harbored too many memories. He couldn’t bring himself to even glance at the door that closed off the room across the hall. The one that had belonged to Peter and Jonathan. That door had been shut for four years.
With a glance at his watch, he hurried down the stairs, grabbed the yellow foul weather jacket from the hall tree, and left the house, glad to be gone from it.
To all outward appearances, Duncan was a normally functioning human being. He went to work every day, came home every night, didn’t bother his neighbors or make demands on his friends. Occasionally, he shot some billiards at the pub or played golf. But in reality his life functioned almost by rote. He performed with integrity if not enthusiasm his work as a consultant to the oil companies who operated the offshore rigs in the North Sea. He was the best troubleshooter in Scotland and was willing to be on call twenty-four hours. His office overlooked the harbor, where he also served as part-time Harbormaster. But the duty that gave his life meaning, if he could find any, was as head of the local Royal National Lifeboat Institution, Britain’s team of volunteer rescuers on the sea. Although he shunned the accolades that often came his way from this work, he had been responsible for saving many local seamen from death in the icy ocean.
But when he laughed, the joy never quite reached his eyes. And he never cried, for he had no tears left. He’d spent them all.
For although Duncan Fraser was good at saving the lives of others, he’d failed miserably at saving those he’d loved the most.
Chapter Two
Aberdeen, Scotland
“Wait here,” Taylor directed the two young men who lounged at the airport bar, “and don’t overdo it on the local brewskis, okay? I should be back in an hour or so. Surely our bags will have shown up by then.”
“Sure, boss.” Barry Skidmore raised a half-empty pint glass to her.
“You got it,” said the other, Rob Johnson, who at twenty-two knew quite a lot about everything.
Taylor turned and left the pair, appalled that these smirking, barely-post-adolescents were the top camera and sound graduates in the country. Still, they were good kids and fun to be around.
Flagging a taxi, she showed the driver the address she was seeking and settled into the rear seat of the vehicle with a weary sigh. It had been a long day.
Actually, it had been a long week, she decided, since the strange letter had shown up at her doorstep.
She hadn’t known she had any relatives in Scotland, never heard of Lady Agatha Keith. Certain the law firm had the wrong Taylor Kincaid, she had placed a call to Robert Gordon, Esquire, but he had recited her family history accurately, at least as far back as she knew it, and together they’d decided that the old lady must indeed have been Taylor’s great-great-aunt.
However, the lawyer had not seemed overly eager for Taylor to come to Scotland to claim her inheritance. If anything, he had downplayed the whole thing, explaining that Lady Agatha had been an eccentric, and that other than the mansion that was mortgaged to the hilt and would likely have to be sold, there was nothing left in the estate except some old papers.
The whole thing seemed at first so preposterous to Taylor that she had thanked the lawyer politely, saying she’d get back to him, and laid the letter aside. The incident served, however, as a catalyst to spur her research in a new direction.
Scotland.
She’d never done a show about Scotland, but surely such an old and trampled upon country would have a wealth of myth and folklore just waiting for her to set straight.
She spent the next several days poring over books on Scottish history and traditions, still ignoring the letter that beckoned every so often from under the stack of paperwork on her dining table. She skimmed biographies of major Scots personalities, from William Wallace and Robert the Bruce to Rob Roy, from Mary Queen of Scots and Bonnie Prince Charlie to Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott. But other than the continuing mystery of Queen Mary’s complicity in the death of her husband, and the on-going debate as to the existence of the Loch Ness monster, she found little material that suited her format. Tales of Scottish witchcraft remained possibilities, as did the origins of the ancient Pictish standing stones that dotted the barren northern landscape.
But, she wondered, were these folk tales controversial enough to sustain a thirty-minute show?
Several times she came close to giving up on the Scottish idea entirely, but the letter continued to demand her attention. At last, Taylor decided she would make a trip to Scotland. She was intrigued, she admitted, by the idea of being descended of Scottish nobility, even if her inheritance was worthless, as the lawyer had assured her. And even though she did not have a solid story angle, she felt like she might come across something once she arrived.
She’d better, she thought as she gazed out the window of the taxi en route to the lawyer’s office. It was expensive to hire a crew and fly them to Scotland without a predetermined story line. But maybe they’d get lucky and come up with something quickly.
If only she believed in luck.
Everything about the offices of Robert Gordon, Esquire, was old. The building in the oldest district of Aberdeen had likely been there since Rob Roy was a lad, Taylor decided when the taxi pulled up to the front door. The reception area of the law firm was illuminated only by the light of a single lamp and the rather morose day that filtered its grayness through the windowpanes. It was furnished with equally morose shabby chairs and run-down tables. These were not, she decided, the digs of a high-powered law firm, the type she would have expected someone like Lady Agatha Keith to retain.
The lawyer himself was an aging gentleman who appeared suddenly from a darkened doorway. He wore a nondescript brown suit and yellow tie. Huge brushy brows overhung thick, black-rimmed glasses that magnified his dark eyes into grotesque, bulging orbs. “You must be Taylor Kincaid,” he said politely enough, but Taylor discerned beneath his heavy Scottish accent a distinct note of disappointment.
“Mr. Gordon?” Taylor extended her hand, which he shook briefly.
“I apologize for the lack of a secretary,” he said, knocking tobacco from a pipe into a metal ash tray, “but I only work part-time these days. I keep trying to retire,” he added with a hint of dry amusement, “but some things, like this business of Lady Agatha’s, seem to keep me tied to this place.”
Taylor was unsure whether or not to be sorry for the elderly fellow. He seemed somewhat pathetic, and yet, she sensed he could be putting on an act for her benefit. At any rate, she smiled.
“Thank you for letting me know about my great-great-aunt,” she began. “I must say, I am still quite surprised. And curious, too.”
Gordon motioned for her to precede him into the next room, which was equally disheveled, but which took on a warmer, cozier glow from a series of a lamps scattered around the chamber. “Please, sit down. Would you care for coffee? I know you’ve just got off the overnight flight from the States, and you must be tired.”
That was a major understatement, Taylor thought. “I would love some coffee. Black, please.”
The brew was bitter and lukewarm, as if he had made it hours ago. Or yesterday, and rewarmed it in the coffeemaker, a possibility for a man who had no secretary to tend to his needs. Taylor didn’t much care. All she wanted was caffeine in her veins.
Polite formalities completed, Robert Gordon settled into the large chair behind the paper-strewn desk, and Taylor sensed a hesitation. She leaned forward expectantly, but did not speak. At last, the brow-incrusted Scotsman picked up one of the papers from his desk and handed it to her.
“I suppose this is as good a place to begin as any, Miss Kincaid. It is a letter Lady Agatha gave to me the day before she died.”
Taylor took the lett
er and began to make her way through the unsteady handwriting. It was written to Robert Gordon and was comprised mainly of a recitation of Lady Agatha’s attempt to locate her distant relative, a surprisingly savvy effort for an eccentric centenarian thought by many to be mentally unsound, Taylor decided. It was the conclusion of the letter that was most astounding, however:
“I began this search after I came across some items in an old file I had completely forgotten about. They were passed along to me late in my own life by my mother, who received them from her father’s mother. I believe them to be both authentic and valuable, although they could be forgeries and worthless, a joke played by a prankster upon a long-ago ancestor. Of these things I know not and care little. But I promised to pass them to my descendants should I decide to take no action upon them, which of course I never did, not knowing what action was to be taken.
Now that I have discovered that I indeed have an heir, I wish for you to locate her and give these things into her keeping, with the same directions as I was given. I have also revised my will, for I now wish to leave what little there might be left in my estate to this descendant, Taylor Kincaid. As you will see, Robbie, I have made provisions for you as well, although I am enough of a traditionalist to believe the heir of my bloodline is the appropriate benefactor of my worldly goods.”
It was signed in an almost illegible scrawl—
Lady Agatha Keith.
Taylor gazed at the letter for a long moment. She understood now the reason for the lawyer’s near antipathy toward her—she had taken his place as beneficiary of Lady Agatha’s “worldly goods.” But other than the mysterious articles that had provided the old woman the impetus for finding her long lost heir, Taylor wondered what other “worldly goods” she might have inherited that the lawyer had thought would be his own. A debt-laden mansion didn’t sound like much of a prize for an old man like Robert Gordon. Rather, it sounded like he’d be stuck with liquidating the estate and be lucky if there was anything left over.
