Lake of Destiny

by Martina Boone

  To Erin and Sandra, without whom this book would not exist.

  Contents

  Band-Aids and Chocolate

  Sheepish

  Disaster-to-Disaster Delivery

  Meet the Press

  Shifting Boundaries

  A Thousand Stars

  Shamed

  Negotiations

  Three-Step Program

  Lord, What Fools

  Dangerous Air

  Glad Innocence

  Heat and Sweetness

  Casting Doubt

  The Hand of Fate

  Sabotage

  Tangled Webs

  Never Loved So Blindly

  Climbing Walls

  Killing Swine

  The Death of Music

  Burning Bridges

  Queen of the May

  Fate’s Steady March

  Dancing with Wolves

  Of Crowns and Cloaks

  Shattered Images

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Apple Butterscotch Pie

  Chicken Bonnie Prince Charlie

  Fruited Gingerbread

  Scones

  Scottish Coffee

  Special Offer!

  Adult Fiction Available Now

  Bell of Eternity

  Acknowledgments

  About Martina Boone

  Young Adult Fiction Available Now

  Praise for Compulsion

  Copyright

  Band-Aids and Chocolate

  Let us go, lassie, go

  tae the braes o’ Balquhidder

  Where the blaeberries grow

  ’mang the bonnie Highland heather

  Robert Tannahill

  “Braes of Balquhidder”

  Anna Cameron had spent too many hours in an airline seat tighter than a respectable dress, and that had done nothing to improve her mood. Used to being impeccably groomed, she felt crumpled, grubby, and even more like a failure as she stepped off the jetway with a wine-stained blouse and naked face. But flying business class was not in her future anymore. As an unemployed lawyer—aka fired with no hope of ever practicing law again—she needed to manage on a tighter budget.

  Honestly, she was lucky to be in Scotland now at all. If her Aunt Elspeth hadn’t been desperate for help with the Beltane Festival and willing to pay her way, Anna would have been stuck in the Cincinnati suburbs instead, hiding out in the kitchen she’d worked so hard to escape, while her mother delivered yet another lecture on the topic of her middle daughter’s many failings. With two broken engagements and a colossal screw-up behind her, Anna was officially a “disappointment.”

  Mostly to herself.

  But enough. She was determined to be positive. Her old life in Washington, D.C.—and Mike and his new fiancée—were three thousand miles behind her on a different continent. She had dreamed of coming to the Scottish Highlands all her life. Now she was here for an entire month, visiting with her favorite aunt. As a bonus, there was the possibility of turning her knack for organizing events into a new career—one she badly needed.

  Shrugging the straps of the four-year-old Louis Vuitton Keepall she’d gotten as a law school graduation present into a more secure position, she set off on long, slim legs toward the baggage claim, her dark tumble of curls bouncing around her shoulders. She even refrained from stopping at the duty-free shop to buy a Toblerone.

  But then it happened. An ocean away, and she still could not escape.

  The television at the United Airlines gate cut over to a White House briefing, and there was the press secretary, the woman who had just announced her engagement to Anna’s ex-fiancé less than four months after he had walked out on Anna. The beautiful and successful woman who, unlike Anna, could apparently focus on Mike and a high-pressure career without managing to sink both in disaster.

  To heck with budgets. And to heck with calories.

  Anna plowed a U-turn in the middle of the terminal and waded back to the duty-free shop to buy that candy bar, almost mowing down a pair of British Airways flight attendants who were walking side-by-side. Bypassing the Baileys Truffles and the overpriced Godiva Connoisseur collections, she snatched up the single candy bar—large size—and queued up at the cash register behind a woman arguing into her cell phone. Which reminded Anna that she needed to let her Aunt Elspeth know that she had landed safely.

  Switching on her cell, she ignored the three new voicemails from her mother and used the cheap-phone app she had installed before leaving her apartment to dial Elspeth’s number.

  “Hello?” Elspeth Murray picked up breathlessly after the seventh ring and spoke with her lilting Scottish accent. “Is that you, Anna?”

  Anna smiled just hearing Elspeth’s voice. “Yes, I’m just heading over to collect my luggage. With a little luck, I should be there to fix your dinner.”

  “Och, don’t you worry about that. Take your time. I’ve had help today, and I’ve had my feet up. You’re the one who’s likely to be exhausted. I don’t suppose you’ve managed to get any sleep since you left, have you?”

  It was so like Elspeth to worry about everyone except herself. During her annual Christmas visits, she’d always wrapped Anna in acceptance like a well-worn blanket, offering up the perfect word of comfort or a plate of fruited gingerbread along with a cup of tea as she took charge of the kitchen for the duration of her stay.

  “You can’t possibly know how happy I’ll be to see you,” Anna blurted out.

  “Likewise, love, but mind you’re careful on the road. You’re sure you’ll be all right driving on the wrong side? I could still send someone to come and get you.”

  “That’s too much trouble. I’ll manage,” Anna said, squashing down a twinge of doubt. But the thought of driving on the left in rush-hour traffic was daunting as she hung up. She still wasn’t sure whether to cut through Edinburgh or try to go around. After four days of little sleep, the long trek to the remote glen where Elspeth lived was going to be hard enough, and Anna didn’t want to add any more time than necessary.

  She was considering redialing Elspeth’s number, so when the phone rang as she sidled up to the cash register, she tucked it between her cheek and shoulder. “I was about to call you back,” she said, plunking a couple of two-pound coins onto the counter. “I meant to ask you, is it worth taking the M8 instead of the M9 at this time of day?”

  “Why on earth would you want to take the long way around?” Anna’s mother asked from the other side of the Atlantic.

  Anna gave a mental groan.

  “Not that I understand why you’re going there in the first place,” Ailsa Murray Cameron continued. “You’ll be bored to tears an hour after you arrive, and don’t get me started on that ridiculous excuse Elspeth gave you about a Beltane festival. Since when does the village need help organizing the Sighting? That stupid superstition has been going on at least a thousand years, and it’s always caused more damage than it’s worth.”

  If there’d been a wall beside her, Anna would have banged her head against it. Instead, she accepted the plastic sack with her candy bar from the cashier and peeled away from the counter. “I told you already. They’re making it bigger this year to pay for the Village Hall reconstruction, and Elspeth’s fallen behind with her knee not healing as quickly as it should. Anyway, I’m looking forward to finally seeing the place where you grew up.”

  “There’s nothing there worth seeing, but suit yourself. It’s not like you ever listen to me anyway. Otherwise you’d be married and gainfully employed like both your sisters. What has your so-called independence and following in your father’s footsteps ever gotten you? Two broken engagements and a Harvard law degree you’ll probably never use again, that’s what. Now, on top of that, you’re running aw
ay to the end of nowhere to take care of the last person on the planet who will ever talk sense into you. Come here instead, Anna.” Her mother’s voice softened, and the faintly Scottish cadence left over after thirty-odd years as an American lawyer’s wife grew more pronounced. “Come home, and let me help you find a way to fix this. That new girl, what does she have that you don’t? You can win Mike back. Compromise a wee little bit, set a wedding date. I’ve no doubt at all he’s marrying her on the rebound because you hurt him.”

  “I didn’t hurt Mike—I delayed him,” Anna said, “which is different. And I don’t want him back.”

  In the brief ensuing silence, she was shocked to discover the words were true.

  She missed Mike. But she didn’t want to marry him.

  She missed his company. She missed his acid wit and sharp intelligence, and the way he smelled of coffee and vanilla and spicy soap. The way his arms wrapped around her and made her warm. She missed the parties they had loved to throw, the way their Watergate apartment had filled with friends on the weekends. The way the two of them had used to cook together before settling down to watch a movie after an exhausting, high-pressure day. The way they used to laugh together. But she’d honestly thought that his leaving was temporary. That they would work things out once her monster of a case had ended.

  And now? Clearly, given his whirlwind engagement, she’d realized he wasn’t coming back, but she hadn’t taken stock of how that made her feel. The shock and humiliation of hearing the news at work had been too raw. Then there’d been the aching, stomach-clenching sense of rejection that had led to her meltdown and the fatal mistake that had gotten her fired.

  Where, though, was the heartbreak and longing that she’d felt after Henry . . . after her first engagement? The sense that her life—the whole world—had lost some of its sparkle, and become, like the first gasp of darkness after the sun had gone but before the beauty of the stars emerged, a place she couldn’t navigate?

  Confused, Anna shook her head. Out in the terminal, the long white corridor was crowded with passengers disembarking another flight, and she slowed to let a young mother rush past, trailing a child and two carry-on rolling bags behind her. The child, a tousle-headed girl of about four or five, wobbled beneath the weight of a pink backpack, half dragging an oversized stuffed rabbit by one ear as she jogged to keep up. Anna knew the feeling, like she was losing her grip on everything that was familiar while the world swept her along.

  “Anna Cameron, are you listening to me at all?” On the other end of the phone, Ailsa’s voice had grown louder and more shrill.

  “What?” said Anna, who—out of habit and self-defense—had succeeded in tuning her mother out. “Of course, I am.”

  Her mother huffed a long-suffering sigh. “I asked when you plan to stop trying to run from your problems. You do this every time. Something gets difficult or awkward, and you give up.”

  Outrage over that statement formed a hard lump in Anna’s stomach. She never gave up. She wouldn’t have gotten through law school if she gave up.

  “Helping Aunt Elspeth isn’t running away,” she said. “It’s fulfilling a family obligation. You aren’t going, and someone needs to help.”

  “If Elspeth claims she needs help at all, much less with whatever she’s calling a festival, you can bet she’s up to something. You’ve always adored her, but trust me when I say she always has at least sixteen different reasons for everything she does. And at least fifteen of them are about what she is going to get out of it. Her surgery was two weeks ago. She’s gotten along fine so far. Why does she need you now?”

  “Do you even hear yourself, Mother? She’s your sister.”

  “Since when have you thought that was important? How long has it been since you last spoke to Katharine?”

  Anna’s throat threatened to squeeze itself shut. This entire conversation was why she needed to be anywhere other than Ohio.

  “Katharine and I are different,” she wheezed. “Aunt Elspeth didn’t steal your fiancé away from you two weeks before your wedding.”

  Shaking, literally shaking, Anna mashed the END button with her thumb and hung up on her mother for the first time in her life. Just thinking about Henry married to Katharine, every emotion she hadn’t felt with Mike suddenly churned in her chest, all the despair and colorlessness and hurt. Which, she couldn’t help acknowledging, were vastly different feelings from disappointment and humiliation.

  She switched off the phone before it could ring again and stared down at it in horror. She would pay for hanging up; she knew that. Soon, and for the rest of her life. Her mother was worse than an elephant when it came to never forgetting. Any. Darn. Thing. And coping with additional stress was beyond Anna’s capacity at that moment.

  What she ought to do was buy herself a local SIM card and conveniently forget to give the new phone number to her mother.

  Hand still trembling, she slipped her cell back into her purse and took a deep, calming breath as she hurried down the corridor. In front of her, the girl with the pink backpack dropped her rabbit. Tugging her small hand out of her mother’s grasp, the child rushed back to pick it up, but a businessman emerging from a coffee shop couldn’t step aside fast enough to avoid knocking into her. The girl landed chin-first on the gray linoleum tiles and, stunned, began to wail.

  The mother had to wrestle the two rolling bags to turn around, so Anna scooped up the rabbit and knelt beside the girl, offering a hand to help her up. “That was some spectacular fall. Good job on saving your rabbit, though. You wouldn’t want to leave him behind. Or is it a her? I had one named Violet when I was about your age.”

  “He’s P-peter, like the s-story,” the girl said with a sob. She took Anna’s hand and climbed to her feet, snuggling the rabbit as if she’d been afraid she’d lost him forever. Her chin bled, and she’d skinned her knees, and while her mother arrived and fussed with antiseptic wipes and Band-Aids, Anna handed the girl a tissue and the Toblerone. Then she took charge of one of the two rolling bags and helped mother and daughter down to the baggage claim carousel, wishing that all wounds were as easy to soothe with a stuffed rabbit and a chocolate bar.

  Life would have been so much easier if that was how healing worked.

  Sheepish

  “My name is not spoken,” she replied

  with a great deal of haughtiness.

  “More than a hundred years it has not gone

  upon men’s tongues, save for a blink.

  I am nameless like the Folk of Peace.”

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Catriona

  Driving without Google maps yielded unexpected benefits. To save on data charges and avoid her mother, Anna kept her phone turned off and used the directions she had hastily written down to navigate. That combined with intermittent bucketloads of rain, and the confusion of driving on the left, led her to make five wrong turns that cost her at least an hour. On the other hand, it was impossible to stay depressed when something surprising and delightful popped out at her everywhere she looked.

  She was finally here.

  The reality of being in Scotland thrilled her all over again. This was Outlander country, Braveheart country, the home of heroes like Robert the Bruce, William Wallace, and Rob Roy MacGregor. The stuff of Aunt Elspeth’s stories, Sir Walter Scott’s books, and Robert Burns’s poetry—along with every adolescent dream Anna’d ever had of men in kilts.

  Not that she was likely to find men in kilts or bagpipers piping out the tune to “MacGregor’s Gathering.” But Balwhither, where Anna’s mother had grown up and Elspeth still lived, had always been MacGregor land, the place where Rob Roy himself lay buried. Anna wanted to take in everything on the way, experience everything. Unfortunately, her eyes kept trying to close, and her stomach growled with growing insistence.

  She tried singing to keep herself awake.

  She opened the window.

  She stopped for coffee and an onion-laced meat pasty in Callander at the border of the
Highlands. The food only made her sleepier.

  Meanwhile, the road grew narrower. She drove more slowly, squeezing over to make room whenever faster cars whipped around her shoebox-sized Chevy rental. By the time the odometer advised her that the cutoff for Balwhither Glen was coming up, she was traveling at a turtle’s pace. Even so, she would have missed the turn if she hadn’t spied the black-and-white signpost for Rob Roy’s grave and slammed on her brakes.

  In the glen itself, a single-track road led past scattered farms and houses, past the ruined church and the cemetery where Rob Roy’s tombstone read, “MacGregor Despite Them,” showing the same defiance with which he’d lived.

  According to Elspeth, Anna’s own family had been MacGregors, too, before the name had been banned for almost two hundred years. Since then, they’d used the name of Murray, and all of them were buried in that graveyard. The thought sent goosebumps over Anna’s spine, but ignoring the impulse to stop, she drove on toward the loch that began at the end of the tiny village.

  Calling it a village was a bit of a hopeful overstatement. Together with a handful of white houses, a smattering of businesses each did double duty: The Last Stand Inn and Tavern, Grewer’s Sweets and Groceries, and a face slap of a pink building with a sign that proclaimed it was the Library and Tea Room. Beyond those, the long opalescent strip of Loch Fàil unfurled, more spectacular than Anna could have imagined. The last spun-silk rays of sunset pierced the clouds and turned the water gold and red as it faded into a diminishing rank of hills.

  Seen like this, Anna could almost believe that the legend about people seeing images of their true loves reflected in its waters at the Sighting was more than a romantic bedtime story. But she had little opportunity to admire its beauty.

  Alongside the loch, the road gave up any pretense of being paved. Or free of obstacles.

  Rounding a bend, Anna found a flock of black-faced sheep milling across the puddle-soaked gravel beneath an overhanging rowan. She wrenched the car to the verge to avoid plowing into them. They scattered, half of them running in front of her, and it took her fifty yards before she got back on the road. The sheep didn’t seem to care. According to the rearview mirror, they were all back in the road again, half of them turned in her direction, watching her taillights fade.