by L. L. Muir
Jack
The Ghosts of Culloden Moor Book 44
L.L. Muir
Green Toed Fairy
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
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License notes…
Prologue
Culloden Moor, ten days in the past…
Jack stood close to the witch’s ungodly fire and tuned his ear to the conversation between the ornery ghost and the young lassie. Besides the ever-present Simon McLaren who always hovered close to the lass, Jack might have been the only spirit near enough to hear their conversation, to witness Rhys Lumsden threaten Soncerae if she came looking for him.
If the wee witch would have shown any apprehension, Jack would have found a way to make the troublesome ghost pay for it—even if it meant personally leading the man down into Hell by the ear.
Soni shrugged off his words so Jack had to assume she kenned much more than he did. But the truth remained—Lumsden thought he could flee far and fast enough to elude their wee witch, so when his two days of mortality were over, she couldn’t send him on to the next life.
Interesting.
That night, Soni sent away three Highlanders, all told, Lumsden being the last. And when she was finished and her pale white fire sputtered and died, Number 79 led her aside for a private word, not knowing Jack had a sharp pair of ears.
“Get word to yer uncle, Soncerae. I must speak with the man. Will ye tell him?”
Soni narrowed her eyes at him. “He’ll not be swayed, Simon. What has started will be finished, do ye hear?”
Simon shook his head slowly, then quickly. “It is nothing to do with yer bargain, lass. But when ye fell ill…” He grunted. “Just send the man to speak with me. There is something he must know.”
“But ye’ll not tell me?”
“Aye. I will, when yer uncle is standing beside ye.”
Lying in his deathbed in the wee hours, Jack determined to watch Soni carefully when next she returned to save more souls. Surely, if Lumsden thwarted her plans, her demeanor would tell him.
And if Lumsden was able to go his own way, perhaps he could do the same.
Chapter One
The States, present day…
I should have packed darker clothes.
If I’d have known, that night, when I was throwing things into my suitcase, that I would end up hunting a man half way around the world, I would have dug out my black sweater and boots. But no. I left with loud white tennis shoes, tiffany-blue cotton jacket, and an old, striped rugby shirt. Since I was finally headed home to Montana, maybe I felt like I was twenty again. Or maybe I just hoped to feel that way when I got there.
Unfortunately, home wasn’t where I’d left it.
There is no excuse for missing your own mother’s funeral. But I did. And so did my sister. Savanah had a kid in the hospital, getting his tonsils out, when someone finally let the two of us know our mother was gone—a whole twenty-four hours before the funeral. Of course, my sister would have tried to make it, but Tucker ended up back in the hospital.
It was just as well. Savanah lived in Utah and couldn’t have afforded the airfare, so she would have dragged her big family across two states in a van, had Tucker not taken a turn for the worse.
I, on the other hand, was in the middle of one of the biggest breaks in my career. For ten years, my business partner and I had been slinging some very tasty hash in Astoria, Oregon, and the Food Channel was coming to film an episode in our little café.
No, they couldn’t reschedule. Yes, I asked. So I clung to Savanah’s assurance that Mother would have understood.
You know who else I expected to understand? My mom’s friend, the pastor’s wife. Could they wait four or five days so her actual daughters could be there? Maybe have a hand in the planning?
Of course not.
Miriam Broadbank had planned her own service, the woman told me. Besides, the obituary had already gone out. It was like all her friends had forgotten she had any family.
And so it was that four days after the missed funeral, I drove through Bozeman in a rental car and was surprised how much I’d forgotten about the place. I turned down the wrong road and ended up passing behind Bozeman High, where all my youthful memories were contained like so many lazy zombies that wandered the hall and never tried the doors.
I pulled into my old driveway and stared at the house that defined my childhood. The wood siding had been painted a more modern Provincial Blue, but the white bricks hadn’t changed. In our monthly phone calls, Mother hadn’t mentioned painting the house, or pulling out the shrubs and planting a zero-scape garden under the big picture window. But our phone conversations had grown briefer in the last year.
I pulled out the key I’d kept in my jewelry box for sixteen years, just in case, and I prayed Mother hadn’t changed the locks on the doors since I’d left home. A twenty-year-old with an associate degree in my pocket, I had once believed I had all I needed to start my real life—which I refused to live in the cold and snow of Montana. I’d come home exactly twice in the last sixteen years.
For Christmas, when I was 22 and homesick. And two years after that, for my father’s funeral—which they would never have held without me. He was buried in Wyoming, but since the woman who’d called hadn’t said anything different, I figured they were burying Mother in Bozeman. Unless she’d asked to be, I might have to have her moved.
While I fumbled with the key, I waited for emotions to rise, for my eyes to water, but I was distracted by the fact that the key didn’t fit. I slapped the door and cursed in frustration. Then I wondered if I was too big to crawl through the bathroom window at the back of the house. Maybe I could find a neighbor kid…
While I scanned the street, the door opened behind me and I turned in surprise, half-expecting my mother to be standing there.
“Hello,” said a young pregnant woman who pushed the storm door open with one hand and held her belly with the other. “Can I help you?”
“Um, yeah. I’m Callie Broadbank. One of Miriam’s daughters.”
She frowned and shook her head, then light seemed to dawn. “Miriam who used to live here?”
“Used to?”
“We bought the place almost a year ago.” Then she gasped. “Didn’t she tell you?”
My head was still spinning but I kept my cool. “No. She didn’t. And no one told me she died until after the funeral,” I lied. I didn’t need this woman judging me, and I wasn’t going to defend myself.
“That explains this, then.” She stepped back into the house, then appeared again with a large planter basket hanging from one hand. A handful of intense red blossoms stared up at me from the middle of the dark green jungle. “This was delivered last Saturday. The card must have gotten lost, so I had no idea where to take it. Looks like you’re not the only one who didn’t know she’d moved.” Her eyes widened. “And you’re her daughter?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Obviously, we weren’t close.” At least, not as close as I had thought.
“Well, you’re family. So this is yours.” She lifted the heavy basket, but I took a step back.
“Keep it,” I said. “I can’t very well take it on the plane.” I tried to take a peek over her shoulder, to look inside and see if there was anything of my childhood memories sitting on a shelf or something, but noth
ing familiar caught my eye. “Thanks for your help,” I said, and headed back to my car.
“You want to take a look around?” She’d stepped out onto the porch and held the screen door open. “It’s not very tidy, but you’re welcome to walk through—”
“No. Thanks anyway.” The Callie that grew up in that house was gone.
I knew from the brief obituary which mortuary had handled the funeral, so I went there to ask where my mother was buried.
“Your mother was cremated,” the thin funeral director said, sitting behind his desk. The white and gray marble top matched the man—his hair, his suit, his skin. “Her husband has possession of the remains.”
I shook my head. “No. My mother was Miriam Broadbank.”
He opened a drawer, fingered through some file folders, then produced a small program with my mother’s photograph on the front. It was an old picture. She’d been maybe thirty years old when it was taken. Younger than I was now, but the high hairdo and seventies clothes made her look older.
“Miriam Broadbank Macpherson.” The man frowned at me. “You’re her daughter?” He opened the program and skimmed. “What did you say your name was?”
“Callie Broadbank. I was in the obituary.”
“And your sister’s name?”
“Savanah Hanson. And I’ll tell you right now, Savanah didn’t know Mother got remarried, either. Maybe this guy was lying.”
The thin man shrugged his pointed shoulders. “I’m sorry, but that is all I can tell you. It was a…small service.”
I wasn’t about to explain that I’d had to choose between attending the funeral or getting nation-wide exposure for my business—something I couldn’t afford to turn down. Instead, I vented all the frustration I’d felt since that pregnant woman opened my mother’s door.
“I smell a rat. Did you know this guy? Macpherson? Obviously, they couldn’t have been married long—if he even knew her. He had to have been after her money. If she sold her house, she would have had a lot in the bank.”
The man stood up abruptly. “If there’s nothing else, then…”
“Oh, yeah. There’s something else. I’m going to need all the information you have on my supposed step-father.”
“I cannot give out personal informa—”
“Then you call him up and let me talk to him. But it would be better if you just helped me find him. He might run, right? Obviously, he’s got something to hide. We didn’t even know about the funeral until the day before it happened. And we were told it couldn’t be postponed long enough for us to get here. If he had her cremated, we can’t prove how she died, can we?”
The guy closed his eyes for a few seconds as if he were praying I’d shut up. “If you suspect foul play, ma’am, you need to go to the police. I can give Macpherson’s information to them. Although…” He swallowed hard, like he regretted that although.
“Although?”
“If I remember correctly, we had to package the urn for an international flight.”
“To where?”
“Where else? The man was clearly Scottish. I believe she wanted her ashes sprinkled at a specific place in Scotland.”
I was dumbstruck. “She’s never been to Scotland.”
His nose curled to one side. “Are you sure about that?”
I finally got sick of him and stood up. “Can you at least tell me where you picked up her…body? I at least need to find out where she lived, so I can collect her things.”
He rolled his eyes, sat down at his computer, and angled the monitor away from me an extra inch before clicking his mouse a bunch of times. “Terrance Acres.”
“What is that, an assisted living center?”
The guy gave me the first look of pity he’d been able to muster. “Hospice.”
Chapter Two
I was under strict orders to call Savanah the second I got to the house. But since it hadn’t been our house any longer, I figured I didn’t technically have to call her yet.
I dreaded that conversation and figured I’d just wait until curiosity got the better of her and she called me. And while I drove out to Terrance Acres, I carefully considered what horrible consequences might befall me if I just lied to her. Savanah’s life was hard enough with six kids and only her husband’s income. By the time she could afford to come back to Bozeman, she would expect to find strangers in the house and all traces of Mother to be gone anyway. If she knew there was no grave, maybe she wouldn’t come at all.
How much did she really need to know?
I just hoped that somewhere, there was a little money left to send her—if Mother’s so-called husband hadn’t found every penny.
Was there a chance he was a nice guy, who’d really loved her? Sure. But if that were true, why keep their marriage a secret? And why hadn’t Mother told us she was sick?
But hospice? That wasn’t just sick, that was—
“Lymphoma,” the nurse told me. “It was stage four before they found it. John, her husband, came three days ago and cleaned out her room. He left a note, in case anyone came asking.” She dug through a drawer and handed over a small white envelope.
“Younger man, right?”
The nurse tilted her head back and forth, considering. “Yeah. I guess he was a bit younger than Miriam, but then again, she wasn’t very old herself, was she?”
“Fifty-eight.”
“No wonder he was so broken-hearted. He was here every day, by the way.”
I shook my head. “I would have come, if she’d have told me.”
We both stared at the envelope in my hand, but I wasn’t ready to open it yet. The silence grew awkward, then the woman suddenly brightened. “I saw a picture of grandkids once. Were they yours?”
A little short of breath, from that punch to the uterus, I finally whispered, “My sister’s kids.”
“Two daughters? Wow. I wonder why she never said.”
“Probably because her young husband kept her distracted.”
The nurse choked. “I suppose.” Then, wide-eyed, she walked away from the counter, leaving me alone to see myself out. I stepped into the large, open area and looked around, trying to see the place through my mother’s eyes. But the plants of the atrium and the gurgling water fountain couldn’t camouflage the sad silence of the place. Or maybe I was just imagining it, knowing that, behind any door, someone might be fighting for their last breath.
As I hurried to my car, a young woman came out of a different door. She scurried just like I had, then she opened her car door and paused to give me a knowing chin bump. I nodded and got in my rental, turned on the heater, and wondered why, on earth, anyone had ever come up with a place like Terrace Acres.
I hung my hands on the top of my steering wheel and leaned my face against them. “Mother,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me? I would have come,” I insisted, wishing she could hear me.
Wishing it was true.
The last few months had been intense at the café. If she’d have said something—anything, I wanted to believe I would have found someone to cover for me and gotten my butt on a plane.
For the hundredth time since I’d heard the news, I tried to think back through our phone calls. Had she tried to tell me and I’d missed it? Or had she listened to all the projects I had going and figured I was too busy and shouldn’t be bothered?
Or had Creep Macpherson told her to keep her illness a secret?
I tore open the little envelope and hoped against hope that the tiny thing could hold a whole lot of answers. But I couldn’t have been more disappointed.
The note was not from my mother. It was from him.
To Miriam’s daughters—sorry I missed ye at the funeral. I’ve sent all the sentimental bits to Savanah’s address in Utah. The bank account is closed. All bills paid.
Instead of a signature,
She deserved better.
I didn’t need a lecture from the guy who bilked Mother out of her money and took her ashes. Why did he have to take her
ashes?
It was like he’d wiped my mother off the face of the earth with a wet paper towel. No headstone and no grave to visit, not that I could do it that often. In fact, now that Mother was gone, I didn’t see much point in returning. But I would have!
The nurse had given me the address of Macpherson’s apartment, where my mother had lived before Terrace Acres. It took me about five minutes to get up the guts to knock on the door. I had my cell phone poised to dial 911 if things got ugly. But no one answered.
It took a minute to convince my heart to stop racing, then I tracked down the apartment manager.
“Gone gone? Already?”
The woman nodded. “Yep. Gone gone. To Scotland, apparently. Here’s the forwarding address.”
Fort William. If it was an army base, I could get the guy in trouble with his commanding officers—if the laws in the U.K. were anything like ours. And getting the guy in trouble was my newfound reason to live.
If he hadn’t made my mother’s life better, he was going to wish he had.
Chapter Three
It was in the midst of a foul snow storm when next Soncerae came to visit Culloden’s 79. Shortly after midnight, a large black SUV pulled into the car park but drew no attention from the guards who monitored the grounds from inside the Visitor’s Center that night. Jack could only assume that their cameras were layered with snow or else the Muirs had enchanted the wee things to turn away.
Muirs—plural.
Soni was not the only one to climb out of the dark vehicle that night. And her uncle, Wickham, was not the last. A matching pair of grandmothers were followed by another pair of women, of possibly thirty years. And as the host of six headed onto the battlefield and toward the memorial cairn, Jack realized two things.
