Scottish Rite (Maggie Devereaux Book 1)

by Stephen Penner

  "Hmm," she said aloud with a calm smile, "this one's going to take some time."

  But she was proud of herself for trying and sat back, going over the spell again in her mind. Her thoughts were interrupted by a new sound, directly above her. She looked up.

  The ceiling was made of hard wood beams identical to those of the floor. Indeed, it looked like a hardwood floor hanging over the room. This was noteworthy for two reasons. One, the inn had a pitched roof, which meant some sort of attic or crawlspace existed between her ceiling and the actual roof. Two, the creaking above her head crossed the room in a pattern frighteningly similar to footsteps.

  She listened as the creaks methodically made their way across the room, from over her head to the far corner. Then they faded away. Maggie's heart was beating a little faster, but she supposed there might be a storage area above her. Maybe Mrs. Murdoch was fetching fresh towels. But then the footsteps returned, this time in the hallway outside her door. Now she knew where that little door led to. And she could feel the dump of adrenaline into her blood as the footsteps made their way cautiously up the stairs, their only possible destination her door. What frightened her most was the fact that the owner of the creaking footsteps was trying so hard not to creak. Loud, boisterous stomping up and down the staircase wouldn't have bothered her because the rude, inconsiderate people who would have been keeping her awake obviously would not have been concerned with her. But the person creeping up the stairs just then was taking slow, light steps, pausing to let each faint creak and squeak fade before attempting another step. Whoever it was hoped not to be heard. Eventually, the slow, methodical, creaking footsteps stopped. Right outside her door.

  Maggie had to force herself to look at the doorknob. The bravado she had exhibited before at the rain-spattered window had vanished and she watched the knob with wide eyes, her heart pounding, waiting to see it turn ever so slowly. She hoped the lock was sturdier than she had thought.

  She watched and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Nothing.

  The knob never turned.

  And the feeling of having someone nearby—watching her, sensing her—slowly drained away. After several more minutes passed, Maggie let herself believe that maybe she had been hearing things. It all seemed like watching a movie. Her ears were still ringing from the blood which had been rushing, soaked with adrenaline, throughout her body. But the danger apparently past, fatigue shuddered through her limbs.

  Wow, I am tired, she thought. She set the spellbook down to her side and leaned back on the bed for a moment. I'll just rest my eyes for a sec.

  That's when she heard it. The sound of the doorknob's rusty scraping as it was turned first in one direction, then slowly to the other.

  Paralyzed, Maggie could only look out of the corner of her now wide open eyes to see the knob turning slowly back and forth. To the right. To the left. To the right again. Then it stopped.

  And Maggie could do nothing but wait.

  She strained to hear some telltale noise out in the hallway.

  The door burst open! Maggie's ears were filled with a horrible noise that seared into her very brain. A figure stood in the doorway, black as pitch and entirely undefined within the blinding red light flaring into the room past it. The only thing she could see was that it was large and it was coming at her.

  Maggie grabbed the spellbook, not as a reference but as a blunt object. But the book dissolved in her hands, covering them with a sticky crimson blood. Looking down she realized it was her own. Her white T-shirt was soaked black with blood and she could see more oozing out from under her legs. Pulling up her shirt, she saw not the round little tummy she had gotten used to, but a bloody gutted carcass, empty but for the stained silver pendant that read "BEAIST." She screamed—

  —And woke up.

  Maggie took several deep, desperate breaths, like someone who's made it to surface of the pool just in time. Her lungs clutched at the air as she tried to calm down.

  It was just a dream, she tried to convince herself. Just a dream.

  But it was so real. She looked to her side. The book was still next to her. It had not dissolved to blood after all. Good.

  Looking out the window, she confirmed it was still night. The clock by her bedside table said 12:01.

  Maggie swung her legs off the bed and sat forward, still panting slightly. She was obviously not going to be sleeping that night.

  "Okay," she pushed her fingers through her thick brown hair. "Now that one scared me."

  * * *

  Maggie had in fact been able to sleep restlessly a few times during the night, but only right at the surface and never long enough to dream. After a long night of tired wakefulness, she was grateful for the hearty breakfast Mrs. Murdoch had prepared. As she sat eating the bacon, eggs, toast and fruit, she wondered whether the locals had eaten this well when it was just crofters and fisherman and no tourists. In any event, she was glad for it and soon was out the door for her busy morning.

  The first order of business was to buy a ticket back to Aberdeen. Iain had been right; there was no train station in Glenninver. There was, however, a short bus ride south to Kyle of Lochalsh where she could catch a train to Inverness, then transfer to Aberdeen. She would need to be at the bus terminal by 1:15.

  This left just the morning for the library and so once she had purchased the necessary tickets, she proceeded directly there. The library was small, as most of the buildings in Glenninver seemed to be, and appeared to be housed in what was once a home. The front entry felt just like walking up to a friend's house. Maybe the effect was intentional. Wondering over this, Maggie pushed open the doors and stepped inside.

  She was greeted by the sight of dozens of bookshelves crammed one against the other, each filled to the brim with books. The foyer even had a built-in bookcase with paperback novels lining each shelf. Maggie stopped and pulled one off the shelf. It was in English. Somehow that disappointed her. Even out here in the Gàidhealtachd, the influence of English could not be avoided. She knew she shouldn't have been surprised. Even if every man woman and child who spoke Scottish Gaelic bought a copy of a new book, the publisher would still only sell around 75,000 copies. Compare that with the market available in London—and New York, and Los Angeles, and Toronto, and Sydney, etc. Maggie often wondered whether Gaelic might have fared better had its competitor not turned out to be the single most widespread and economically important language of the last 200 years.

  Maggie replaced the book on the shelf and strolled into the main hall of the library. She seemed to have the place to herself. To her right was a small desk with a fashionably dressed middle aged woman sitting at a computer.

  The woman looked up and smiled. "Madainn mhath. Good Morning."

  She was giving Maggie the choice of which language to use. Maggie chickened out. She was tired.

  "Good morning."

  "How can I help you?" the librarian asked.

  "I was wondering whether you have any old newspapers on file?"

  "How old?

  "Er, twenty years or so?" Maggie smiled apologetically.

  "Hmm," the librarian didn't seem phased. "I believe we should have those on microfiche or microfilm. We don't have every newspaper of course. Which were you looking for?"

  "Oh, I don't know," Maggie tried to think what paper people there probably read. "The Inverness Courier?"

  The woman nodded.

  "And is there any sort of local paper?" Maggie asked. "One that was publishing back then too?"

  "Hmm," the librarian said again. "I believe so. But it's in Gaelic, I'm afraid."

  Maggie smiled. She was being given a second chance. "Oh, that's all right. Tha Gàidhlig agam."

  "A bheil? " the librarian smiled. ""

  In short order, Maggie found herself sitting at the table that hosted the microfilm machine, several boxes of old microfilms stacked up to one side of it.

  "I can get for you,>" the librarian offered kindly, then returned to her desk.

  It took a bit of hunting but eventually Maggie was able to find an article in the Inverness Courier about the murders. It was about the first murder. She recognized the headline from the clipping in Sgt. Warwick's file: Occult Murder in Glenninver. The article was easier to read right side up and Maggie quickly perused it in full. It told of the discovery of the body of young Muriel MacKenzie. The police vowed to catch her killer in short order.

  A second article and then a third revealed the police's promise to be hollow as next Iseabeil Matheson, then Heather Drummond lost their lives. Then Maggie found the article she was really interested in. The one with the name she truly sought: 'Sinclair.' Heather Sinclair, thirteen years old, had been found butchered in the same way as the others, but with one difference: laying across her body was the lifeless corpse of Jared Blake, his neck snapped like a rag doll's. He had not been gutted or in any other way defiled—he was simply dead at the age of sixteen. The two were found in the basement of the Sinclair home on Mara Road. To the best of everyone's knowledge, Jared and Heather were not romantically involved. Jared, the newspaper explained, was simply a friend of Heather's older brother, Devan.

  So it was him. But she wasn't sure what to make of this revelation.

  Maggie searched for more information, but could find none. Assuming Dòmhnall and Sister Màiri were correct, there were no further murders, so it shouldn't have been surprising not to find anything else written about it. In fact, as regrettably happens, the murders seemed to have been getting commonplace, the first murder seizing a headline on the second front page, whereas the last double murder was lucky to gain 100 words on page B17. In any event, further skimming of the Courier proved fruitless.

  Maggie then turned her attention to the Tìm Gleainn Inbhir, 'The Glenninver Times,' a weekly Gaelic language paper with a circulation no doubt approximately the same size as the number of households in the small town. The articles in the Tìm were different from those in the Courier, not just the language, but the focus. Glenninver was definitely a small community, and the reporting focused more on the families involved and the effect the murders were having on the little seaside village. Muriel MacKenzie's parents were too distraught to keep their store open. Heather Drummond's family decided to move to the Isle of Skye to try to forget. And the Sinclairs—they too were crushed by the death of their daughter. But they had decided to stay in Glenninver, for, after all, it was their home.

  Another aspect of the weekly paper which was difficult to overlook was its caustic treatment of the local police working on the case. In truth, 'local' was probably not an accurate term. It appeared that Glenninver had a something like three police officers and two of them were part-time. When these murders occurred, Glenninver called in for help, and received it in the form of a young police lieutenant from Fort William named Robert Cameron.

  Curiouser and curiouser, Maggie thought.

  Apparently the Tìm was not pleased with the general lack of progress in the investigation, a displeasure which flared with each subsequent killing. By the time of the fourth and fifth murders, Heather Sinclair and Jared Blake, Lt. Cameron was essentially run out of town. And then the murders stopped.

  Maggie leaned back in her chair and smiled a satisfied little smile. She had learned more than she had expected on her trip. It was nearing noon already and she wanted to grab a bite to eat before her long trip home. She decided to fast-forward to the end of the microfilm reel but at a slow enough pace that she could see the headlines in case any interesting words should pop out at her.

  Her eyes watched for telltale words: 'mort,' meaning 'murder,' or 'poileas,' meaning 'police.' But the text streamed by in an uninteresting pattern of Gaelic vocabulary.

  Until she saw the word: 'Suinclair.'

  This was obviously an attempt to spell 'Sinclair' in Gaelic convention without translating it completely into its Gaelic equivalent. Sometimes such 'equivalents' looked nothing like their English counterparts, the meaning of the name having been translated rather than its sounds. For example, the Gaelic name for the Clan Sinclair was 'Mac ca Ceardadh.'

  She rewound to the article and started reading. It was dated roughly one year after Heather Sinclair's murder. The Sinclair residence had burned down. Trapped inside were the parents, James and Rebecca Sinclair. The only survivor was seventeen year old Devan, who had somehow made it out of the house unscathed. There was a photograph of him standing near the gutted remains of his home. He was looking at the camera and although he was almost twenty years younger than the man Maggie had come to know, there was no doubt this was the same Devan Sinclair who now owned an occult bookshop in Aberdeen. Even in this early picture, he already bore the same implacable expression she had become accustomed to seeing cloak his visage. The young face in the photograph appeared completely emotionless, despite the death of his parents only a year after the murder of his younger sister. Emotionless except for a single tear. Running down the outside of his left cheek. Exactly where the adult Devan Sinclair sported his untidy scar.

  Maggie stared at the photo for quite some time, lost in examination of its subject. Finally she looked at the clock on the wall. She had just enough time to print out photocopies of the articles she had found before a quick lunch and the bus ride to Kyle of Lochalsh.

  As she walked out of the library, photocopies tucked neatly away in her backpack, she felt confident that the question was no longer whether the two sets of murders were related, but how.

  And she had a whole afternoon of travelling ahead of her to think of her next step.

  37. The Men in Her Life

  Iain had called Monday night to make sure she'd made it home safely. She had, of course, and they made general plans to 'do something' that coming weekend. For the next few days, Maggie wandered around Aberdeen, stopping at her usual spots, but her mind dwelled continually on the subject of the murders—and what she had learned in Glenninver. Obviously Sinclair was connected somehow to the current murders, but how? Was he the killer? She found that difficult to believe based on her contacts with him. He may have been a little reserved at times, but she couldn't believe she had looked into the eyes of a cool-blooded serial killer.

  She knew she only had ten days before the next new moon. She was sure that was the cycle. She had checked the dates of the Glenninver murders against an old copy of a farmer's almanac in the college library. Those murders had also coincided with the new moon.

  By Thursday, she had finally calmed herself enough to spend some time on her school work. Macintyre had not bothered calling her back about the missed appointments. They had not met for a month now, which was fine with Maggie. She didn't like the thought of being alone with him, even less sharing her research with him. Of course, that begged the question: What research? The spellbook would have been a wonderful research project—except that it actually worked, and there was no way she was sharing that knowledge with everyone and his brother. Unfortunately, this meant she had to find some other subject to delve into. The college expected it, her university back in the States expected it, her grandmother had expected it. But most importantly, Maggie expected it. She loved her studies and she didn't want the year to end up being a total waste. She spent therefore the better part of Thursday in and out of the library, toying around with different possible subjects. But it wasn't that easy to just dismiss thoughts of the murders, and her progress was slow and distracted. She went to bed Thursday night exhausted and little closer to a thesis topic then she had been when she'd arrived home from Glenninver.

  Friday afternoon found Maggie back at her favorite pub, The Boar and Thistle, nursing a rootbeer and pouring over several texts containing ballads in Middle Gaelic. Maybe she could still finesse some connection to early non-Christian religious practices and their appearance, although masked, in later Christian-era sagas.

  Maggie yawned.

  She tipped her head side to side to work the kink out of
her neck. She had slept well enough last night—no nightmares—but it had been several days of leaning over dusty old books in the library. She had finally come to The Boar and Thistle just for a change of scenery, finding a table in a back corner and instructing the waiter to keep the rootbeers coming. As she looked around the establishment, her eyes taking a break from the black and white of the printed text, she noticed a man who, from the back, looked remarkably like Iain. She found this irritating because one, Iain was supposed to be at work, and two, the man at the pub was with a rather striking blonde with long legs, too much make-up and no glasses. So it was with relief that the couple stood up and Maggie got a better look at the man's face. Unless he had grown a mustache in the last five days, that wasn't Iain. However as they walked away from their table, Maggie was able to see another couple sitting behind them, and this couple she knew she recognized.

  It was Ellen. And Will Hopkins.

  She hadn't seen Will since that one afternoon several days after Fionna's murder when he walked past her without greeting. She had chalked it up to the fact that they had only met once and he, understandably, had other things on his mind. Watching Ellen and Will from the corner, she wondered how he was doing now.

  They were talking about something, but of course Maggie couldn't hear from the other side of the room. Will put his hand out on the table and Ellen took it in hers. She was looking into his eyes and saying something which was obviously important and heartfelt. After a few moments she reached out her other hand and stroked Will's cheek. He tipped his head into the stroke and closed his eyes. The conversation appeared to continue for a bit until Will finally looked at his watch and stood up to leave. Ellen stayed seated, but Will came around the table, embraced her, then turned to the door, a half-smile hanging on his face.