Paying the Piper

by Sharyn McCrumb

  The island sparkles in the sunshine, its green meadows just visible across the blue of the sea. I will go in on the cliff side this time. I do not have an hour to waste clambering over the mountain path, and the sea is calm. I can anchor the launch out beyond the rocks if need be. I have come prepared for that.

  I have made myself ready to go ashore now, and as I look down at myself, I think that she has found her legend after all, for surely I look like a seal-man: shiny black skin covers me from head to foot, and flippers have become my appendages. I put the breathing apparatus in my mouth, adjust the air tank, and throw myself into the sea. My Celtic woman is waiting.

  She must have been watching the sea from the rocks near the hut, for as I look up while I swim, I see her hurrying down the cliffs to meet me. She is wearing her tapestry skirt and the blue wool shawl from Princes Street. Surely this is not her everyday attire for the island. No, perhaps that is the point. It is the only thing she has not worn, which means that it is clean—the closest she has to safe.

  The seal is no longer on the rocks. She has frightened him away now, this will change his daily pattern, and also in a small way the results of my study. I fight the current a bit to keep myself clear of the rocks and find myself in water shallow enough to stand in. She is on the beach now, but she does not come toward me, and I keep the mouthpiece in place. I am on the beach, but I am breathing air from the tank on my back. I cannot speak to her.

  "Don't come any closer!" she calls out to me. "I'm not sick yet, but I may carry the infection." She half smiles, pleased with her own cleverness. "I see you understood my message."

  I nod once and raise both hands to make a question, whatever question she wishes.

  She sits down on the rock against the cliff, with fifteen feet of pebble-strewn beach between us. She has to speak much more loudly than usual, and it makes her American Southern accent much more noticeable. Or perhaps she reverts to mat speech when she is distracted and afraid.

  "Owen is dead, Cameron. Callum rowed over to the little island on Monday and found him. Callum died this morning. Marchand is very sick, and we are trapped here because Tom Leath took the rowboat. But he was sick, too. Did you pass him when you were coming here?"

  I shake my head no.

  "Denny is coughing badly, but he seems less affected than the others, and I still have the cold I had Saturday, but the deadly part seems to be the cough, and I don't have that. We found some cold capsules and made everyone take them, but it hasn't seemed to help."

  I made the questioning gesture again.

  "What is it? I don't know. It isn't typhoid or cholera. Callum had been immunized against those. And it isn't really bubonic plague, because I know the symptoms of that . . . ring around the roses ... No one has pustules or swollen lymph glands. I used the plague years because it was the only way I could think of to warn you about disease. My Morse code is limited to numbers, and I only learned those by osmosis when Bill was in Scouts."

  I applaud her silently and nod for her to go on.

  "I thought that we were being poisoned, but I couldn't think of any way to poison everyone. We've been eating tinned food for the last two days as a precaution, and it hasn't helped." She twists a strand of hair and looks pleased with herself again. "That's when I thought that maybe we were infected with something here on the island, but no one did any digging except me."

  I shake my head and kneel down to pick up a handful of coarse sand.

  "You're right,'' she says, watching the sand trickle through my gloved fingers. "Alasdair did soil sampling. I remembered mat this morning, and I tried to find all the places he'd taken samples." She paused for effect. "On one of them, in one of the meadows near the village, I found quicklime!"

  How to show her that I understand? I make the sign of the cross and bow my head.

  "Yes, Cameron. A layer of quicklime under topsoil means a mass grave, either human or animal, but always from a contagious disease. The quicklime is to prevent the germs, or whatever, from getting into the soil and infecting crops or livestock. Archaeologists are told that if they come across quicklime in an exploratory trench, they must cover it up,

  and tell everyone on the site where the place is, so that it can be avoided."

  I am a biologist. She has put me on familiar ground. Now I know more than she. I mime the opening of a small bottle, swallowing a pill.

  She frowns. "I told you, the cold capsules didn't work."

  I shake my head a vigorous no and point to her bandaged finger. Again, I mime the pill-taking.

  "My finger is fine. That's not important. Yes, I'm taking the pills for it, so that I can die of plague instead of tetanus.''

  I pull the oxygen mask out of my mouth. "You're not going to die at all, dear," I tell her, flapping awkwardly across the rocky beach with my arms outstretched. "You have prevented yourself from getting the disease."

  We are back in the boat now. Together we hauled it into shore and got Marchand and Denny aboard. Denny is a bit shaky on his feet, but he'll be fine. Marchand may pull through with luck. I have given them all double doses of Denny's antibiotic, which is a form of penicillin that can both cure and prevent. . . anthrax. I took the same dose myself.

  I decided that it would be best to leave the bodies of Callum and Owen where they are. The medical authorities will have to come to this island anyway to make their investigation and to see that the plague pit is sealed and marked. I can only hope that they will find Leath in his open boat before it is too late. We haven't time to look for him; Marchand and Denny must go to the hospital at once. I shall make Elizabeth go as well, just as a precaution.

  Denny and Marchand are sleeping in the cabin, and Elizabeth is sitting on the deck with me, watching for land to appear on the horizon so that we will be safe.

  "How did you know it was anthrax?" she asks suspiciously.

  "That's what plague pits are in these islands. Bubonic plague didn't get here. I know a lot about anthrax, actually. Have you ever heard of Gruinard?"

  She shakes her head. World War II is too recent in history to have caught her attention.

  "During the War, British Intelligence took a Scottish island called Gruinard and deliberately contaminated it with anthrax. They were trying to develop something for germ warfare. It's still contaminated, after all these years. It will be for centuries, in fact, if they don't reverse the process, because anthrax is a spore-forming disease, which means that the organisms don't die. They simply hibernate there in the ground until conditions are favorable again."

  "And how do you know so much about it?"

  "We were afraid that seals might get it, because Gruinard is in the area they inhabit. They do get it, by the way. I was still in grad school when Hanley did that project, but I got to know quite a bit about the disease during the study, since he was one of my professors."

  Elizabeth nods. "Alasdair found the plague pit, and of course he knows what it is. He knows it's still dangerous. And he decides to kill us all?"

  "Yes. We'll come back to that. I want to know how he did it."

  ' T want to know why.''

  "He was a medical student. He'd know to scoop up the soil under the quicklime and to put it in a jar of water. After an hour, the sediment would settle to the bottom, and the water itself would contain the anthrax spores. To infect someone, you would have to put the spores in a substance that would make them grow. A sort of culture. Jam perhaps. Or honey."

  Elizabeth looks up, trembling. "What about honey and hot wax, poured into the bag of a bagpipe?"

  "Oh, God, nothing better! A damp moist place. The spores wake up. You blow into the pipe and disturb the air. You inhale it, and you have pneumonic anthrax. That explains the cough."

  Elizabeth is shaking. "It explains everything. Callum played Owen's bagpipes after he found him dead."

  "That was stupid!" I say without thinking. "He was infected by that, and from then on, he breathed contagion with every word he spoke. No wonder the rest of you g
ot it. Two days of flulike symptoms, and unless you treat it with penicillin, death comes in a matter of hours.

  "So Denny's pills protected me," she murmured. "And if he hadn't been so slack about taking them himself, he wouldn't be sick at all."

  "It lessened the severity for him. We can be thankful for that."

  Elizabeth takes a deep breath and rubs her eyes. "Now can we get to the why?"

  I get up and go into the cabin, where I have left my mail. The newspaper is still folded to the article in question. Silently I hand it to her.

  PAROLED POISONER DIES IN HOSPITAL

  Alasdair McEwan, better known as Alexander Evans, died in hospital at Inverness on Sunday, from injuries sustained during a fall on the island of Banrigh.

  The victim's true identity was not known until his guardian, Dr. Philip Sinclair, came forward to claim the body. Sinclair, who had been Evans's prison psychiatrist, thought the young convict was a gifted youth, and he determined to give him a new life once he had served his sentence, even sponsoring the boy to medical school under his new name.

  Evans was sentenced to indefinite juvenile detention at the age of fourteen for poisoning his entire family with thallium. After . . .

  Elizabeth lays the article aside. "Owen was right. How he would have rejoiced!"

  "Right?"

  "Yes! The murder at the Witchery tour. That was Alasdair. The reporter was doing his story on the new lives of convicted murderers. Alasdair couldn't afford to have that get out. It wouldn't have done his medical career any good.''

  "I suppose Owen was playing detective. And he got too close?"

  "Yes. And the rest of us—perhaps he didn't know that we'd be infected, too."

  "He guessed, Elizabeth. Otherwise, why stage an accident so that he could get himself and Gitte safely away before the contamination started?"

  She looks troubled. "It was a real fall!"

  "It had to be in order to be plausible. I suspect that it went wrong. Alasdair must have meant to break an arm or even a leg in his fall from the cliff. Instead, he hit his head—in just the right place to kill him. Bad luck."

  "Unless you consider the alternative. After this poisoning venture, there wouldn't have been another parole."

  I see a dark shape ahead of us on the line of the sea. The island will be visible soon. I reach out to hold Elizabeth, and it is only when she shivers that I realize I am still in the black wet suit I wore to the beach.

  She smiles up at me, still pale, though. "Seal-men only stay with their mortal lovers for seven years,'' she says lightly.

  I smile back and pull her closer. "Seven years is a lifetime if you're a seal. Will you settle for a lifetime?"

  We stand on the prow of the launch and watch Scotland rise out of the sea to meet us.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sharyn McCrumb is an award-winning crime novelist and short story writer. Her first mystery featuring Elizabeth MacPherson was SICK OF SHADOWS; that novel was followed by LOVELY IN HER BONES (named "the outstanding work of fiction for 1985" by the Appalachian Writers Association) and HIGHLAND LADDIE GONE. Ms. McCrumb also wrote the Edgar Award-winning comic whodunit, BIMBOS OF THE DEATH SUN. Her short fiction has been published in Crescent Review, Appalachian Heritage, Central Appalachian Review, Harvest from the Hills, and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. She lives in New Castle, Virginia.