by Josh Lanyon
This was greeted with only a few polite murmurs, proof of how tired everyone was after a day of driving.
“Tomorrow is also the first of our free afternoons. That means after our official tour of the village, you’re welcome to do local sightseeing on your own. I recommend the Highland Museum of Childhood, located at the restored Victorian train station—and, of course, featured in the previously mentioned The Cure for Wellness.”
I happened to glance up at the mirror and caught John’s expression. I nearly laughed. Had he really not read any of the MacKinnons?
Alison continued her cheerful spiel. “This is a wonderful area for hiking. My favorite walk is through Ord Wood to picturesque Loch Kinellan, where you can see the ruins of a fort on the small island.”
The bus turned onto a long shady drive and there were a few gasps.
“Now that’s a hotel,” someone said.
It sure made a change from the Caledonian Inn. Three stories of classic Queen Anne architecture: gray-and-cream stone, cantilevered upper stories with rows of tall, double-hung windows, and—at a quick glance—at least thirteen chimneys. It was a manor house, all right, surrounded by at least five acres of grounds and woodland.
“When’s dinner?” someone else called. Inevitably.
“Seven.”
“Can we push dinner back?” Nedda asked. “It’s six now. We haven’t even checked in. Heck, we haven’t even stopped moving.”
Alison smiled, but there was a steely glint in her eyes. “Unfortunately, not. The arrangements for the ceilidh are pretty much set in stone. If everyone could just do their best to be ready on time, it will make life easier.”
“For whom?” Yvonne inquired tartly.
Alison let that pass, turning away to speak to Hamish, who appeared to be feeling around for the stick shift.
It was a surprisingly long drive from the iron gates to the old manor house, and underlined how far the house was from the rest of the village.
We menfolk helped Hamish unload the bus to speed up the process and give the ladies a fighting chance of doing their hair and makeup before the dinner gong rang. The check-in process was reassuringly swift and efficient, but even before I grabbed my suitcase I could hear wails from overhead.
“What on earth is that sound?” Sally from New Mexico gazed ceilingward in alarm.
“The hotel is supposed to be haunted,” Daya remarked.
I bit back a smile. Maybe the hotel was haunted, but it was hard to imagine ghosts being that upset about no Wi-Fi.
“It’s not just me, right?” John asked, when I found him in our small—very small—twin room a few minutes later. “This room is freezing.”
The elevator was out of service, so I’d had to carry my bag up the two flights of steep stairs. I was panting as I dragged my suitcase the last few feet and let it crash to the bare wood floor. “Well, I don’t think it’s actually thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, but yeah. It’s chilly.”
John said, “I can see my breath.”
“Probably the fried onions you had for lunch.”
He grinned. His teeth were very white and the bridge of his nose crinkled boyishly. It was kind of appealing. “I didn’t have fried onions.”
I grinned back. “My mistake.”
“Your fear is not misplaced. I do like fried onions.”
“I’ll remember to keep my distance.”
John made a noncommittal sound.
Had that sounded like I was flirting? Was I flirting? I’d been pretty sure the breakup with Trevor had knocked every last flicker of flirtatiousness out of me, and yet whether it was the feeling of being on an adventure or something about John himself, I felt almost...playful. Playful in a way I hadn’t felt in months. Would that be a problem for John? I glanced at his left hand.
No wedding ring.
Not all married people wore wedding rings. Anyway, you didn’t have to be married to be committed. Trevor and I had not been married, but I had certainly been committed.
Or should have been.
He said, “I don’t think the heat is on.”
“They probably don’t run it in unoccupied rooms.”
“You’re an optimist. It doesn’t feel like the radiator has ever been on.”
It was a little nippy. John was right about that. I stepped over to have a closer look at the radiator, which was one of those tall deathtrap things positioned right next to the door, so as to make entering and leaving more challenging—as if the precarious landing and narrow stairs weren’t enough to navigate. A wrench rested on top of the radiator.
I held up the wrench. “Great. DIY climate control.”
“Seriously?” John said. “For the money this tour costs?” He was moving swiftly, unbuttoning his shirt and tossing it to the foot of his twin bed. To distract myself from the sight of his surprisingly buff—okay, maybe not washboards or six-packs, but close enough—torso, I called down to the front desk. The girl there assured me there should be a wrench on or near the heater. Even her adorable Scottish accent couldn’t quite defuse the impact of that bad news.
“Yeah, there is. But I’m not a—a plumber.”
“Och. There’s nothing to it.” She cheerfully spilled out increasingly unintelligible instructions—unintelligible, not because of her accent, but the fact that I don’t know a radiator from an accordion.
Just as my eyes were beginning to spin in my head, John poked his head out of the bathroom. “More bad news. The shower doesn’t work.”
I covered the phone. “Doesn’t work at all?”
“The shower head doesn’t work. You could take a bath, I guess. If you had time. Which we don’t.”
I relayed this to the front desk who, sounding sweetly patient in the face of extreme provocation, finally agreed to send the handyman up.
“A brush and a flush,” I decided, as I replaced the receiver. “And a change of shirt.”
“A shave and a splash,” John concurred and retreated again to the bathroom to turn the sink taps on full blast.
A gust of windy rain hit the small window in the corner. It sounded—and felt—like someone had thrown ice tacks at the glass. I opened my suitcase and dug around for the least wrinkled shirt I could find, and ended up selecting a black soft-wash long sleeve crew T-shirt. I remembered enough from my country dance days to know a ceilidh was not a formal event.
The door rattled noisily in its frame as someone banged on it.
“At this point he’s just going to be in the way,” I grumbled.
John leaned out of the bathroom and opened the door.
Trevor stood on the landing wearing a ferocious scowl and the blue cashmere sweater I’d bought him for his thirty-ninth birthday.
Chapter Six
“Hey, it’s for you,” John told me.
I gave him the look that speaks volumes, as we say in the librarian biz.
Trevor too was giving him a look. “Do you mind?” he said.
“Yep. I do,” John replied. “I’ve got thirteen minutes left to get ready for dinner and you’re about to take up way too many of them.” He withdrew into the bathroom once more, though the door remained open.
“Fine. Whatever.” Trevor swung back to me and realigned his glare. “Are you completely crazy?”
Not the question I was expecting—besides being rhetorical, right? I began, “I—”
“How dare you go around telling everybody that Vance tried to shove you in front of a car?”
“Me? I never said that.” There wasn’t time to stop and argue. I hastily kicked out of the blue jeans I’d been wearing all day and pulled on a clean pair of black jeans.
Trevor watched my hurried efforts, still glaring. Weirdly, his glare seemed to deepen when he noted my scraped knees. “Bullshit! Everyone on the bus was whispering about it.”
�
��I can’t help what people saw.” Okay, yes, I probably could have phrased that more tactfully. Trevor’s face got redder. I said quickly, “What they think they saw.”
“You sure didn’t try to correct them!”
I pawed through my suitcase for a clean pair of socks. It wasn’t that I didn’t have plenty of clean clothes, but from the state of my belongings, you’d think Hamish had thrown our bags down a cliffside before stowing them in the bus’s luggage compartment. I threw a harassed look over my shoulder. “How do you know what I did or didn’t do?”
“I know you, Carter. I know how you operate. You’re doing everything you can to ruin this trip for me.”
That got my attention. I stopped digging through my suitcase, and straightened up so fast I’m surprised I didn’t throw my back out. “Explain how I’m ruining this trip for you?”
“Every time I turn around, there you are again with that—that accusing stare.”
“Really?” John said from the bathroom. Trevor jumped. I may have started too. I think we’d both forgotten he was still in the room. I certainly hadn’t thought he could hear us over the sound of running water. We both stared at him, framed in the bathroom doorway, slowly, deliberately drawing the razor across his square jaw. He scraped away another snowy drift of shaving cream and said to Trevor, “Because you’re the one who keeps showing up at our door.”
“Our?” Trevor looked even more taken aback. “How does this involve you?”
“It’s my room. Half my room.”
I think it genuinely threw Trevor. He looked from John to me. “Do you really want to do this here?” he demanded.
“I don’t want to do it at all. Look, I’m not accusing Vance of anything. I don’t know that—don’t think he deliberately pushed me into the road. If you’d—”
“You think that’s helping?”
“It’s the best I can do under the circumstances. Jesus. If you’d shut up about it, people would lose interest in the subject.”
“He’s right,” John said.
“Nobody asked you,” Trevor snapped.
“If you’re going to have this conversation in my room, then I have a right to express my opinion.”
It probably wasn’t funny, but suddenly it seemed funny.
Trevor opened his mouth but I cut him off. “Okay, look, time out. In fact, game over. Trevor, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not leaving the tour. And if that’s going to ruin it for you, sorry. I have as much right to be here as you do.”
“This is just more of your passive-aggressive—”
“Uh, no,” John said, rinsing off his razor. “That’s aggressive-aggressive.”
“Will you keep out of it?” Trevor shouted. “This isn’t any of your business.”
“Sure, it i—”
The lamps flared and went out.
Granted, there hadn’t been much illumination radiating from those antique wall sconces before. But the sudden and absolute total darkness did shut us all up for a nanosecond. The startled silence was filled by the running tap water.
There was a squeak of taps and the water stopped.
I heard Trevor’s breathing get funny. He’d always had a problem with claustrophobia, and this tiny room—the chilly blackness that seemed to press in from all sides—probably flipped his switch.
“The place is supposed to be haunted.” John’s tone, drifting through the darkness, was conversational.
Trevor’s breath hitched. I opened my mouth to say something reassuring—old habits, I guess—but the lights blazed on. I blinked in the sudden brightness.
“Funny.” Trevor glared at John, as though he thought John had played a trick on him.
John raised his hands like don’t look at me.
“Okay,” I said briskly. “Enough.” I yanked open the door. “Go,” I told Trevor. “We’ve got less than ten minutes to get ready for dinner and if you don’t get your ass in gear we’re going to end up sitting together. Won’t that be nice?”
“What would be nice,” Trevor began. “Is if you and Mr. P—”
I shut the door on the rest of it.
“Hey,” John said mildly. “I wanted to hear my nickname.”
“Mr. Personality is your nickname, and to be honest, Mr. Personality, you weren’t helping.”
“No?” John surveyed the reflection of his cleanly shaven jaw with satisfaction. “You know what I think?”
I eyed him warily. “What?”
“I think Trevor’s afraid his boyfriend did try to shove you into the road.”
I stared at him. As much as I wanted to deny it, when I remembered Trevor’s face, that angry, scared glitter in his eyes, I suspected John might be onto something.
“You know what else I think?”
“No.”
“There’s a reason Trevor keeps turning up on your doorstep.”
“Uh, yeah. He’s trying to get me to leave the tour.”
“Try again.”
I must have looked genuinely confused, because John said, “You could probably get him back, if you want him. You’d have to be crazy, in my humble opinion, but you got involved with him in the first place so maybe you are crazy.”
I could see my reflection in the mirror behind him. I was openmouthed with astonishment. Also, I looked pretty good in that black long-sleeve T-shirt. “What are you talking about?”
“The guy’s a prick,” John said almost kindly, like he was breaking it to me.
“That, I know. I mean what’s the rest of that supposed to mean?”
“About getting him back?”
“Yes.”
John shrugged. “Think about it. There’s a reason his boyfriend thinks getting you out of the way wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
“Oh, but that was just—”
“And it’s the same reason Trevor keeps popping up to remind you that you’re supposed to be eating your heart out over him.”
I was surprised at how uncomfortable this conversation was making me. How uncomfortable I was with the idea that Trevor had regrets. “It’s not that,” I said. “He’s mad at me for coming on this trip.”
John’s brows rose in polite skepticism. “I think it’s a little more complicated than that.”
“And you’re an expert on relationships?”
“Yep. You kind of have to be in my line of work.”
“Selling insurance?” I asked blandly.
“Uh...yes.”
“Hmm.” I was doubtful.
John finished buttoning his shirt. He was wearing a cream-colored dress shirt and brown wool-blend trousers, and he looked handsome in a business casual kind of way. “Business casual” had never been my type, but it turns out “unemployable” isn’t exactly the stuff of romance either.
“Anyway. Something to think about.” He headed for the door. “See you at dinner.”
The room was very quiet after he’d left, and his aftershave lingered pleasantly. I finished dressing, waited a minute or two for the handyman—though mostly I was just stalling while I considered John’s troubling theory—and then finally went downstairs to dinner.
There had been a time—not really so long ago—when the idea that there might still be a chance Trevor and I could patch things up would have made my evening. But over the months that had changed.
There are things there’s just no forgiving. In my case, the worst part wasn’t the affair with Vance—devastating though that had been—it was what an asshole Trevor had been during the uncoupling process. Despite having been the one who had the affair and was breaking off our relationship, he had continually treated me like the bad guy, the villain, the untrustworthy one. I didn’t know if that was his way of handling guilt—convincing himself that even his infidelity was somehow my fault?—or if he just really was a complete jerk. He’d fought me over
everything, from idiotic, trivial things like who had purchased a particular green plastic spatula, to bigger things like wanting “his share” of my retirement fund. Thank God, we hadn’t actually married. Legally, he hadn’t had a leg to stand on—which, weirdly, had made him all the angrier and more hostile.
It was strange how you could love someone, but really not know them very well. Or maybe I had known him, but he had changed. Maybe Vance brought out the worst in him. Or maybe the worst in him was what brought out Vance.
I didn’t know. What I did know was that I could never trust Trevor again, and that meant there was no chance in hell we’d ever get back together.
At the same time, I can’t deny I felt a mix of emotions at the idea he might have some regrets. Uppermost was a weird sort of depression because if Trevor did have regrets, what the hell had all that grief and misery been for?
* * *
The dining hall was packed by the time I arrived, and the noise level was more reminiscent of a high school cafeteria than a baronial mansion. Not only was there an unexpected number of independent guests, another tour bus had arrived shortly after our own. Everyone crowded in at the long, linen-covered tables, jostling the tall candelabras and knocking chair backs against each other.
Happily, I was able to find a seat a safe distance from Trevor and Vance, slipping in across from Sally, who I’d yet to spend any time with. She had tried to tame her mop of curls by tying them in a ponytail, but most of her hair had escaped. She wore a bright red blouse printed with studious cats wearing spectacles.
I shook out my napkin and looked around for someone I could place a drink order with.
Trevor studiously avoided looking my way. Not so Vance, who glowered at me across the breadbaskets and water glasses. There was something peculiar about his hair. He was wearing it afro style. Some guys can carry that off, but on Vance the look was more Mad Scientist than Odell Beckham Jr.
Sally slid the breadbasket my way. “Did you hear something about a mysterious death on the last tour?”
I wasn’t sure if this was starting to be funny or not.
