by A. L. Knorr
I pulled him into a hug and he squeezed me so tightly I felt like I might pass out. A sliver of jealousy that had nothing to do with romance pierced my gut. Jasher had warmed up to me once he saw some similarities between us, namely that we could both see the faeries that were hatching in his greenhouse, and we’d even shared some passionate kisses. But even so, he’d always seemed guarded. I guessed Evie had something special.
Jasher pulled back and looked down at me. The lines around his mouth deepened. “I’m worried sick about her.” He took my hand. “You might be the only one who can help her. Promise me you’ll keep trying?”
I swallowed hard and nodded. “Of course.”
I could feel the weight of expectation and helplessness settling over my heart. And what if I couldn’t help her?
Chapter 17
I had yet to finish my breakfast the following morning when Ainslie called to me from the hall outside the kitchen. Leaving my coffee and almond croissant sitting on the table, I made my way toward her voice at the front of the castle.
I paused as the front foyer came into view. Ainslie stood at the entrance with one of the broad doors swung wide. In the open doorway, and blocking most of it, was Inspector Hamilton. My stomach did a slow, nauseating forward roll. Keeping my expression neutral, I crossed the foyer and came to stand beside Ainslie. The housekeeper had question marks in her eyes.
“The Inspector would like a word.”
“Good morning, Inspector,” I said coolly. “What can I do for you?”
“Would you mind stepping outside with me for a moment, miss?” The inspector backed out of the doorway and stood to the side.
“Sure.” I was wearing a thick woolen cardigan, which had become my morning staple. I loved it because it had pockets, but there were no buttons or anything to fasten it. I pulled it shut around me and crossed my arms to pin it closed. Stepping out onto the landing, I gave Ainslie a confident smile as she swung the door shut. I didn’t miss the look that said, ‘Don’t be making trouble for us, I have enough on my plate.’
“I understand you made an anonymous phone call to the funeral home in Inverness yesterday?”
I felt like he’d hit me in the face with a polo mallet.
The inspector was waiting. “Was that you?”
I nodded, seeing no way around it. I’d mentioned Blackmouth Castle, I had a Canadian accent I didn’t do a good job covering up. Why hadn’t I gotten Jasher to call? Then again, he had an Irish accent, so…we might have ended up here anyway. I began to piece together a story, frantically, while hoping he couldn’t hear my heart racing.
The inspector stared at me and the silence grew heavy.
“It was,” I replied, lifting my head, my arms tightening around my torso. I wondered how it was that I could feel so incredibly uncomfortable in the presence of this man and yet feel so the opposite when I was with Lachlan. In this case, the apple fell extremely far from the tree.
“Could you please explain why?” The inspector asked. There was a twitch in one cheek just below his right eye and every so often, his upper lip twitched just beneath his left nostril, giving hints at a sneer. This man did not like me, and I was trying his patience further.
“Sure, just that some kids––teenagers––came by the castle asking if they could see the body that had been found in the walls. I told them they couldn’t, that it was going to be buried. As they were leaving, I heard one of them say to his friends that they should break into the morgue so they could see her.”
“Her?”
“The body.”
“You know it’s a her?”
“I ran into the osteoarcheologist in Inverness not long after the body was taken in for research.” The ‘I’ in this case was intentional. I’d been with the inspector’s son, but preferred to keep Lachlan out of things given that I didn’t know how much Lachlan had told his father, and his father clearly mistrusted me. “He told me the body was female.”
“I see. And these kids…” The inspector’s gaze picked me apart. “Did anyone besides you see them?”
“I don’t think so.” I pulled myself up to my full height. The inspector and I stood eye to eye, though he was probably double my weight. I hadn’t done anything wrong, and damned if I was going to allow him to intimidate me.
“Did they come here? To the front door?” he asked.
“No, just into the parking lot.” I couldn’t have imaginary teenagers knocking on the door. Ainslie almost always answered the front door and the inspector would most certainly be questioning her when he was done shredding me up.
“So how did you know they were here if they didn’t come to the door?”
“I could see them from the window up there.” I gestured to the second-story parlor. “I do my homework from there most mornings. I came out to see what they wanted because they were kind of loitering there.”
“How many were there?”
“Two.” I tried not to pause or shuffle awkwardly as I answered. What I really wanted to do was stare at the ground, mumble, and ask him if we could be done now.
“Both boys?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you get any names?”
“No.”
The inspector clasped his hands behind his back. “Could you pick them out of a line up?”
“Sure, of course.” I tried to exude some level of annoyance. “Inspector, may I ask what this is all about?”
He gave a cough, for the first time looking more uncomfortable than I felt. “The body is missing.”
I gaped at him. This time there was no acting. Laec’s article had predicted the truth. “Were the perpetrators caught on camera?”
“No,” the inspector bit out in irritation, but I knew it wasn’t me who was annoying him, for once. “No, even though you’d warned him, Mr. Brown still did not turn on his CCTV.” Muscles in his jaw popped. “Regrettably.”
I rubbed a hand across my forehead and let out a sigh. “There must be other evidence. How did they get the body out? And why would someone take an old mummified corpse?”
“I was hoping, Miss Sutherland, that you might be able to lend some insight where those questions are concerned. You’re the one who warned Mr. Brown. You’re the one who found Evelyn. You have to admit, your relationship to these events might appear more than coincidental.” His deductive eyes bored into mine.
“Well, I can’t. I have no idea why anyone would want to steal some old body.” I gave him an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful. If you have any suspects, I’d be happy to look at their photographs.”
That was never going to happen. There were no boys. I didn’t know if the inspector knew it or not, but my lies were as thin as tissue paper. Whatever was going on here was supernatural, but he didn’t want to hear that and I sure didn’t want to say it.
“May I go inside, Inspector? It’s chilly out here and I have work to do.” Chilly was an understatement. It was freezing. Our breath hung in front of our faces and my fingertips felt like little ice-cubes.
He waved a hand toward the door. “Certainly.”
Ducking inside, I crossed the foyer at a brisk walk. Ainslie appeared and went to talk to the inspector herself. I smiled at her as we passed and got that same questioning look from her. I hoped my face said that everything was normal, everything was fine, but the moment I was out of sight, I bolted down the stairs and jammed my feet into my boots. I yanked on my coat and headed out the back door toward where Jasher and Lachlan would be working.
Crossing the yard at a forced walk so I didn’t alarm anyone, I passed through the maze and made my way to the work site.
After saying good morning nonchalantly to the men, I asked Jasher if I could talk to him for a second. He put down his tools and followed me into the trees.
The moment we were out of sight and far enough away, I turned and grabbed his arm, panting. “The body’s gone, just like the article said. There was a break-in last night. The inspector w
as just here, might even still be here questioning Ainslie. He was questioning me and man does he seem suspicious. I told him I overheard some teenagers talking about wanting to see the body.” I let out a forced breath. “That guy does not like me. Considering how things look, I can’t really blame him.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Georjie.” Jasher put his hands on my shoulders. “Take a breather, love. You’re talking so fast I can hardly understand you.
I nodded and sucked in a deep breath. “Sorry. Let me be clear. The body is gone.”
Jasher released my shoulders and let out a long, slow breath. “What now?”
I paused, processing. I’d been thinking about that as I scampered around the castle and through the maze. “The only lead we have is what Lachlan found about that missing woman.”
“Daracha?”
I nodded. “He said she went missing from the jail. If I can find the original location of the old jail, surely I’ll be able to see something in a residual that might reveal an answer.”
Jasher nodded. “Okay. Well, Mr. History can help you with that, too. He hardly ever shuts up about this place, not to mention his collection of books, articles, blah, blah, blah. I know more about highland battles and even medieval gossip than I ever wanted to. I’m sure he’ll have an old map of this place.”
I nodded. I hated the idea of bringing Lachlan into this mess. It would be a lot harder to lie to Lachlan than it was to lie to his father, but what choice did I have? Evelyn’s life was at stake.
That evening after helping Ainslie with the dishes, I wrapped up and wandered toward town. Jasher had left already to spend the evening at Evelyn’s bedside. He’d taken to reading her stories from her collection of Jane Austen novels. Having completed Northanger Abbey, he’d moved on to Sense and Sensibility. Just the fact that he was dedicating time to reading to Evie aloud in his evenings revealed a lot about his feelings for her. Jasher wasn’t the type to sit and read; he was more the type to brood and play guitar.
The temperature was not so low for an East-coast Canadian, hovering just above zero, but the damp slowly worked its way through my layers and when it reached my skin I shivered and tightened my scarf around my neck. If Jasher had paused his international travels somewhere a little further south, we would have enjoyed a break from a brutal winter. The temperatures even so close as Edinburgh were a whole five degrees warmer.
By the time I reached Lachlan’s cottage, I felt certain a thin layer of ice had formed across my face. Knocking on the door, I tucked my gloved hands into my armpits and pulled off my gloves. I lay my slightly less frozen hands on my cheeks to warm them.
That was how Lachlan found me when the door swung open.
He grinned and stepped aside. “Georjie! What a lovely surprise. Come on in.”
“Sorry, I should have texted to let you know I was coming.”
He waved away my apology. “I’m just happy I get to see you. You’ve been busy.” He closed the door behind me and helped me out of my layers. “How’s school?”
“Fine.” Truthfully, I’d barely managed to skim a B on my last paper. Distractions had a price. “I was hoping I could get your help with something.”
Lachlan hung my coat in the tiny closet behind the door and turned to me, straightening. “Anything.”
“I’m curious about where the old jail of Blackmouth was, and I thought you might have old town plans in your collection of historical goodies.” I rubbed my hands together to warm them.
“Sure, I do. Can I make you a cuppa?”
I nodded, blowing warm air onto my fingers.
While Lachlan made us tea, he prattled on about the build project and his latest obsession––the history of Stirling Castle, which was purported to be haunted by the ghost of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Blowing on our tea, we sat in Lachlan’s cozy sitting room, where a tall bookcase jammed from top to bottom with spines was only the start of his collection. He got up to put a log on his fire before slipping into an adjacent room and returning with a few cylindrical cases.
“I’ve several maps of the Blackmouth.” He selected one cylinder and lay the others on the coffee table in front of our knees. He tapped a finger on one of the discarded ones, neatly labeled with a small, handwritten sticker stating C.1596. “This is the oldest one I have, produced by a Dutchman named Mercator. There is an older one out there, but I’ve yet to get my hands on a copy.” He flashed me another sweet grin, his eyes sparkling. “One of the many items on my wish list.”
“You’re either the easiest guy in the world to Christmas shop for, or the hardest,” I said with a laugh. “Are those all copies?”
He nodded. “These are, but I have a couple originals, too. I keep them in a humidity controlled safe until I can find the right buyer for them.” He popped the plastic cap off the cylinder.
“I didn’t know you sold artifacts,” I replied, catching a dizzying whiff of his scent, a mix of aftershave and cedar. “I thought you just collected them.”
“I do collect them, but I try to sell the most important ones to museums so they can be enjoyed by the general public. I only ask for enough to cover my costs. Maps this old are far too important to be kept by a nobody like me.”
“You’re not a nobody.”
He shrugged. “You know what I mean. A regular civilian.” He upended the cylinder and a sheet of paper slid into his hand. Setting the cylinder aside, he unrolled the map and lay it on the table. I moved aside our mugs to make room.
To my untrained eye, the map was a mess. The notations were barely legible and the only real markings that clearly represented anything to me aside from the roads was the ocean on the east side, and a church marked with a cross. From the ocean, roadways fanned outward, meandering back and forth and crisscrossing over top of one another like a heap of spaghetti. Circular splotches and tiny drawings of what might have been buildings peppered the roadways and paths.
Lachlan squinted at the map, leaning over.
“Here’s the castle.” He pointed to a drawing on the north side of town, a spot beyond the rest, with doodles of trees surrounding it.
“That helps me orient a bit,” I replied, “but the rest of it looks like something a five-year-old drew.”
Lachlan chuckled, skimming the map intently. A moment later, he pointed. “Voila.”
Squinting at the tiny smudge next to his fingernail, I could barely make out the word, phrìsan.
“Freesan?”
He threw back his head released a belt of laughter so genuine that it made me laugh, too.
“What?” I asked, still smiling.
He wiped his eyes. “Prison, Georjie. It’s the Gaelic word for prison.”
My face heated and I put a hand over my eyes. “Duh. I was looking for j-a-i-l. Blond moment.”
“I get those all the time.” But his grin was teasing enough for me to whack him on the bicep.
I cleared my throat and sent my attention back to the map. “But the original ‘freeson’ isn’t there anymore, right?”
“Well, depends what you mean by ‘original.’ There is a jail here that’s pretty damn old, mid-eighteenth century, but it’s not the one Daracha would have been kept in because it was built well after her time.” He tapped the little drawing marked prison on the map laid before us. “This would have been the one she’d’ve been kept in.”
He didn’t miss much. It was the first time Daracha’s name had been mentioned, and I hadn’t brought her up. “So, where was this one? I don’t know Blackmouth well enough to make out that location in the modern-day town.”
“For that, we’ll need a newer map.” Lachlan went to his bookcase and retrieved a more modern looking publication. Returning to the couch, he sat next to me and paged through what looked like a tourist information book.
“Blackmouth,” he muttered, referring to the index and locating a page number. He flipped the book open to the chapter concerning Blackmouth and found a modern aerial view of the town, not unlike the one
s Gavin had in his office. It was small, but the image was sharp. Laying the book flat on the coffee table next to the map, he scanned the two back and forth.
“Best bet is here.” He pointed to a small green patch between two of the roads fanning out from the sea. Blackmouth’s main roads hadn’t changed much since the seventeenth-century, but there were a lot of residential streets now and it was difficult to make out which of the arteries on the old map were consistent with the profusion of throughways of today.
I stared for a long while at the two maps, switching back and forth and trying to overlay the new over the old in my imagination. “Are you sure?”
“Not one hundred percent,” Lachlan admitted, “but if you use the castle as one main point, the main thoroughfare running north/south as another, and the water’s edge as a third, it makes the most sense to me.”
I triangulated the way he suggested and agreed; the location he’d chosen was the most likely.
“Thanks, Lachlan.” I smiled at him before realizing I really had been a noob. “Shoot!”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m an idiot. I can’t believe I forgot my cell phone. I could have taken a photograph of these.”
“Oh, no problem. Just take them both,” he offered.
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. I can also photograph them for you and text them to you, if you like.”
“Actually, that would be great. I don’t think I’ll need to take these if the images are good enough.”
Lachlan nodded, and I could now see the curiosity burgeoning in his eyes. “Can I ask what you’re planning to do with this information?”
My lips parted, and my brain scrambled like a hamster on a squeaky wheel. “I…I’m just trying to paint a picture in my mind, you know?”
“Right.” But Lachlan’s gaze suggested that he didn’t buy it. I wanted too much detail for simple curiosity’s sake.
“Okay,” I said as embarrassment once again heated my cheeks, “I’ve caught a mild case of your obsession with Blackmouth’s history. I’m thinking of writing a paper for my history class on it.”
