Holy Terror in the Hebrides

by Jeanne M. Dams

  Which brought up a point. Was Bob the intended victim, or simply an unfortunate bystander?

  That, I decided, was a byway I didn’t intend to explore at the moment. The task was going to be hard enough without bringing in impossible complications. If I had to figure out which of six people had reason to murder any one of the other six, I had a problem which, in its sheer mathematical proportions, was to all intents and purposes unsolvable.

  No, stick to what happened. Bob died. Any one of his traveling companions could have murdered him. So I was, once more, down to what was traditionally the least important of the three big questions, but was in this case the only definitive one: Who had a motive to kill him?

  Although my poking around of the last few days—it didn’t deserve to be called an investigation—had been inefficient in the extreme, I had, in fact, gleaned a few facts about a few people. I began the list-making. After a good deal of memory-searching and head-scratching, the first small page of the pad read:

  Hattie Mae

  Disliked Bob. Thought he was ineffective as a youth leader, and “had a bad feeling” about him. Said the kids laughed about him behind his back, and implied he was, simply by his naïveté, encouraging the kids’ use of drugs. The mother of teenagers; feels passionately about drug influence.

  Was there a motive for murder there? Just possibly, I supposed, if she felt that Bob had directly threatened her own two boys. The lioness protecting her cubs, et cetera. But there was absolutely no indication that any such threat had existed, or even that Hattie Mae thought it had, which was the point. I sighed, flipped to the next page of the pad, and adjusted the wick of the lamp so it burned a little more brightly. I wished I could likewise adjust my mind.

  Grace

  The only things she’s said about Bob are positive, except that she called him a young twit, or something like that. But she’s an odd sort of woman. Superefficient, but very cold. Remember, “When something can be done about a problem, I act.” Or words to that effect. She, of all the group, has the personality to commit a cool, impersonal murder.

  Which, however, did not constitute a motive, I scolded myself. I certainly wasn’t accomplishing much, and besides, the room felt chilly and I was getting hungry. Maybe if I fed my stomach, my brain would operate a trifle better.

  Hester had brought me, among other things, a large jar full of potato soup. Surely I had once known how to light a camp stove?

  It took me a while to remember how to pump the thing up, but once I got it going, it heated the soup in only a few minutes, and a large bowlful not only warmed me through, it had a positive influence on my mood, as well. There is something homey and solid and genuine about potato soup. When I had finished, I felt once more in possession of my right mind and a certain amount of my self-confidence.

  I went back to my list, promising myself some blackberry crumble when I was finished, accompanied by, for once, all the cream I wanted. A few more coals and some earnest blowing brought my fire back to life, and I settled myself, well wrapped in the afghan, to productive thought.

  Chris

  Chris didn’t like Bob. No reason given, but Chris is a quiet sort who doesn’t talk about his feelings much. He’s also gentle, more interested in his music than anything else, I think. Remember his plaintive cry when he realized he was marooned on Iona: “Never see my church again, the choir, the organ . . .” Somehow I can’t see him as a murderer.

  But if he were to kill someone, I mused, he’d probably do it in just such an indirect, chancy way. And that was pure speculation, and utterly irrelevant. I sighed again.

  Janet

  Now that’s a murderous personality if ever there was one. Janet’s mad at the world, for good reason, perhaps. It has treated her rather shabbily. And she disliked Bob with a passion, because he had interfered with the one love of her life, her gardening. But I can’t make it seem like a motive for murder. She’s been preoccupied, anyway, with her search for family in Scotland.

  Teresa

  Another hothead. Teresa’s temper is all Italian, and it doesn’t seem that being a nun has modified her basically ballistic approach to life. But she’s not the Borgia type, to plan and scheme against an enemy. If she’s mad at you, she tells you about it now, in no uncertain terms. She could probably flatten somebody, if she got mad enough. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn she’s good at karate. But I can’t imagine her doing murder. She has an active conscience, for all her fire.

  And besides, I thought, shifting a little, if there was anything in my theory that Teresa was—well, somehow damaged a little further during one of those long watches of the night, then she was out of the picture as first murderer. The only motive for hurting her would involve something she knew, something the murderer couldn’t afford to have get around.

  Which left me with:

  Jake

  A nice, warm man who’s had a tragic life. He’d already lost his wife and daughter when his grandson, the light of his life, committed suicide because he had the AIDS virus. The poor man’s an atheist now, or says he is.

  I pondered this. That could, I supposed, mean Jake didn’t subscribe to the same moral code he used to. I wished, I thought fretfully, that I had any idea how Aaron had been infected. He was involved in sports, had played against some of the teams that Bob coached. I wondered if Jake had ever asked Bob; he might have seen some interaction—

  The idea hit me with almost physical force; I think I actually reeled back a little. Could it have been Bob himself? All those kids he worked with, such long hours—what if he were a child molester?

  Once the idea presented itself, I wondered why it hadn’t been obvious before. The room seemed very cold suddenly. I wrapped the afghan arnund me more tightly. Perhaps it was time for a cup of coffee, if I could figure out how to make coffee without an electric coffee-maker. How spoiled I was! I began to unwind myself from the afghan.

  You’re delaying it. You’re afraid to face it. Coward!

  I put some more charcoal on the fire, quite unnecessarily, and sat back down, pad in hand.

  What if Jake had found out, somehow, that Bob was a pedophile? I don’t think he could have suspected before they all came on this trip. But suppose something had happened to make him suspicious of Bob. And then suppose someone had told him, when he first arrived on the island, about the rocks on Staffa being dangerous when they were wet.

  No, that wouldn’t work. Suspicion wouldn’t have been enough. But certainty, now. If he knew Bob was the one who had ruined his life . . .

  Would he have risked the lives of other people, though? Anyone who had happened into the cave before Bob did?

  Or—it could have been another way. Suppose he sought Bob out, on Staffa, and they went into the cave together. They could have had an argument, or Jake could have accused Bob, and Bob might have admitted something—enough. Then could Jake have poured out the water and—just left?

  I stopped writing. What I was picturing was horribly plausible. I could see him doing it, pouring water on the rocks like—like a libation to the ancient gods. And leaving matters, in a way, up to them. Bob might fall or he might not. If he did—I could see Jake shrugging his shoulders. In the hands of the gods. In the hands, maybe, of the Jahweh he said he didn’t believe in, but who was reputed to exact swift and terrible vengeance.

  The room wasn’t really cold. It was cozy and warm. The lamplight was just as soft and golden, the couch just as comfortable. Then why was I so cold and miserable?

  I didn’t want my dessert, after all.

  18

  THE NIGHT PASSED, as even the worst nights do. Untwisting the bedclothes once again, at three in the morning, I was aware that the rain had stopped, and resented the fact; its soothing sound had helped lull me to sleep for brief periods.

  But morning came, eventually, a gray, cheerless morning that was only slightly less gloomy than the darkness of night. If it wasn’t raining, it might at any moment. I got up because there seemed to be
no point in staying in a bed that had offered no rest, and struggled with lighting the camp stove and making coffee because I hoped that acting normal might make me feel normal. There was no way to make toast, short of holding it on a fork over the gas flame. That might once, at a campground, in another lifetime, have seemed like fun. It didn’t now. I ate something cold without noticing what it was, made my bed, tidied up the cottage. Act normal.

  There is a merciful numbness that takes possession of us in times of great pain. I had experienced it when my beloved Frank had died. Suddenly my world was shattered, my whole life was without shape or meaning, and yet I kept on, writing the thank-you notes that had to be written, buying groceries, preparing meals for myself, going on automatic pilot until the numbness wore off and the pain took over, agonizing, but a little easier to bear because I had already established new habits.

  I knew, as a kind of academic abstraction, that the dazed apathy I was feeling now would wear off soon. Facts, horrid, ugly facts would batter again at the now-closed door of my mind, clamoring for admission, for action. Meanwhile, what I felt (I decided as I sat and sipped coffee and coolly considered the question) was, astonishingly, a kind of peace.

  For I had finally admitted, and accepted, what I had at some level known for some time. That, my detached mind informed me, was what I had been running away from for the past several days. Not from a group of people who were no worse than any other people anywhere, but from the certain, if unconscious, conviction that Bob had been murdered. Coldly, deliberately, with malice aforethought—and, I was now dreadfully afraid, by someone I liked a lot.

  The coffee tasted awful. The pain was coming closer. It was lurking, just around the corner. It was—here.

  “No!” I wailed aloud. “Not Jake—no!”

  My anguished cry seemed to echo. It took me a moment to recognize the sound that persisted, and when I did I bounded up from the table to open the back door.

  “Stan! Of all the wonderful—come in! Come here!”

  Stan was a patient, good-natured cat. He allowed himself to be scooped up, and lay quietly purring in my arms while I sat and wept into his soft, stripy gray fur. Only when I began to sniffle and reach for a tissue did he wriggle his eagerness to be put down.

  “Yes, all right. You want some ham, don’t you? Or at least that’s all I have to offer you. And you can have as much as you want, as a reward for turning up when I needed you.”

  He had restored my balance. I chopped ham for him, and poured him a little cream for dessert, and thought, with infinite sorrow, about what to do.

  I wanted sleep quite desperately, but I knew it wouldn’t come. The peace of a deduction reached, a dreadful idea accepted, had been a transient illusion. There was no real peace for me with so many questions left unanswered. I was sure I was right, but I hadn’t the slightest iota of proof. I wanted to know what had happened between Bob and Jake to bring matters to their appalling conclusion. I wanted to know if the others had any suspicions. Especially, I wanted to know about Jake and Teresa.

  She had been in his care, with everyone else asleep or at least elsewhere, when she’d taken a turn for the worse. And she had kept talking about water. That must have terrified Jake. Would he—could he—I didn’t want to think so, but then I didn’t want to think he had killed Bob, either.

  He was such a decent man, such a warm human being! I pressed my head between my hands, hard. Was I making this whole thing up?

  No. I wished I were, but no, it was real enough, and horrible enough. And what, to get back to where I started, was I to do about it?

  I couldn’t call the police with no telephone. Or at least, I realized suddenly, I could, if I were willing to broadcast my whole story over David MacPherson’s radio. Not the most private of communications, was it? It was my legal duty to communicate with the police, but I could be jeopardizing myself or others if Jake somehow got wind of it.

  Furthermore, the police had shown me what they thought of my ideas. With no clear evidence, they would do nothing.

  “So there’s no point, is there?” I addressed Stan, who blinked and continued to lick cream from his whiskers.

  If only I could talk to Alan! He’d listen to me, and act. But he was hundreds of miles away. Not that it would have made any difference if he had been home in Sherebury; I still couldn’t have talked to him with no phone. But a part of me felt obscurely hurt, resentful that he was out of the country—in Belgium, of all ridiculous places!—when I needed him so badly.

  “The fact remains, cat, that I’m in this all by myself, and will be until the phones are repaired. So there’s really nothing I can do, is there?”

  Stan considered the matter before strolling to the door and looking up at me.

  “You want to go home, do you?” I got up to open the door, and then had a sudden thought. Yesterday, before I had climbed aboard my morbid train of thought, I had decided to go back to the hotel and help with their cleanup. What was to prevent my doing just that? I’d have to be careful what I said to Jake, but I could manage to avoid him, I thought, with all the work there was to be done. What’s more, if I kept my eyes and ears open, or could think of some clever questions to ask, I might just learn something.

  It sure beat sitting around brooding.

  “Wait till I get my jacket on, cat. I’m coming with you.”

  I didn’t, of course, exactly “go with” Stan. A human is obliged to keep to the paths. But we ended up, more or less at the same time, at the hotel, which was alive with activity.

  I waited in the road until I had spotted Jake, leaning rather precariously on a ladder and dealing with a shutter that was hanging by one hinge. I faltered, then. There he was, helping out, acting like the decent person he was. How could I . . .

  That is not a productive thought, old girl. Stick to the program. I went around to the back of the house, where Chris and Janet were on their hands and knees in the garden.

  Chris hailed me. “Dorothy! Join us, won’t you? I can offer you potatoes, turnips, a few late carrots, or some particularly repellent parsnips.”

  I walked over. “Goodness! What a muddy mess!”

  “Isn’t it? That’s why we’re not trying to salvage any of the plants; they’re goners. We’re just gathering the roots for Hester and Andrew. We’re all one big happy family now, fellow survivors, you see.”

  “You’re in good spirits, I must say.” I creaked to my knees, hitched up my jacket, and started sorting through lumps of mud for anything edible. Chris had helped me down with a considerate hand on my elbow; Janet had merely grunted, but at least she’d moved to make room for me.

  Chris sobered. “Whistling in the dark, actually. We heard from Teresa’s doctor this morning. They operated to try to relieve the pressure on the brain, but she’s still not responding very well. We’re trying to keep from thinking about it too much.”

  Well, I could understand that attitude only too well. There were a few thoughts I would rather avoid, myself. I shook my head and bent to the turnips.

  I was glad when Janet finished up with what she considered to be her allocation of mud and went to another corner of the plot. It left Chris and me alone, nobody else within earshot, and as I dug I had worked out just what I wanted to ask him.

  “Chris, you’re going to think this is an odd question, but—do you know if something happened Monday night? With Bob?” Of course I had to leave Jake’s name out of it, but I could reasonably ask about a murder victim, couldn’t I?

  Chris turned so pale I thought he was going to be sick. “What do you mean?” he asked with an unconvincing attempt at a smile.

  So something had happened. “I don’t know. I just—got the idea Bob was somehow involved in something peculiar. Can you tell me about it?”

  “How did you know?”

  It was almost a whisper, and I looked at him sharply.

  “Chris, don’t ask me, please. I can’t tell You. And there’s no reason why you should tell me anything at all, excep
t that—well, it would be a very great help to me.”

  “It’s your policeman friend, I suppose.”

  I sat back on my heels. “Now you’ve lost me. I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

  His color began to come back. “Oh. I thought—well, I suppose there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. There wasn’t anything to it, really, except that it made me mad, and I wasn’t eager for it to get around.”

  “I won’t tell anyone who—who doesn’t have to know.”

  It was an ominous way to phrase it, and Chris went pale again, but he sighed.

  “I guess it had to come out sooner or later. Bob made a pass at me, that’s all. And I told him what I thought of him, him and his little boys, threw him out of my room, and slammed the door in his face. We probably woke Jake; his room’s right across the hall. And that’s all there was to it, and you can think what you like!”

  I think I would have fallen if I hadn’t been on my knees. “Little boys?” I managed to say, in what I hoped was an ordinary voice.

  Chris was too upset to notice. “Yeah, those kids he had around all the time. If his interest was all fatherly, I’ll eat this parsnip, mud and all.”

  “He was gay, then?”

  Chris caught my tone, that time. He looked at me oddly.

  “Not exactly. Or not exclusively, I should say. And he wouldn’t admit it. At least that was the word in the gay community. He’d never come on to me before; I couldn’t stand the guy. And that’s why . . .”

  I got it, finally, and looked at him with pity. “Oh, Chris. You think I think—I mean, were you afraid I was going to accuse you of having something to do with Bob’s death?”

  He looked relieved, and very, very young. “You mean you don’t think so? I—I’ve been worrying every since it happened. He’d been acting funny all day, moody, and I was scared—”