by Molly Macrae
“I could say something’s come up and I only have time for five miles this morning.” Janet unlocked her bike and turned it toward the garden gate.
“That’s believable and reasonable. You can call it the Forfar Bridie Five.”
“But I’m not out to prove anything to anyone except myself,” Janet said. “Again and as often as I can. I don’t plan to ride for speed or glory, but when I finally ride in the Haggis Half-Hundred, I will finish the route, no matter what banks and braes I’m asked to climb.”
“Braes are for climbing,” Tallie said. “Banks are where you’ll want to take a break and dangle your feet and soak your aching knees in the cold, cold water of a burn.”
“Precisely why I’m planning ahead. Think how good I’ll feel when I do ride fifty miles.”
“And celebrate with haggis?”
“There’s nothing wrong with haggis. Or goals, or getting in shape.” Janet looked down at herself and poked her midsection. “Nothing wrong with working at it, anyway. You want me around for a few more years, don’t you?”
“Decades, at least,” Tallie said.
“Good. Nothing wrong with seeing what Isla’s like within the context of a different group, either.”
“That’s what gives me pause,” Tallie said. “But it’s an opportunity, and at least it’s a group.”
“So far she’s just prickles.” Janet straddled her bike. “It shouldn’t take me more than an hour. Add another half to shower and change and I’ll see you at Yon Bonnie before we open. We’ll call this the Treacle Tart Ten.”
“Be safe,” Tallie said.
“I’ll ride with the utmost care and sanity.” Janet rapped her knuckles on her helmet. “High-impact polycarbonate and impact-absorbing polymer foam.” Neither she nor Tallie brought up that a helmet hadn’t saved Malcolm.
The Stevenson statue was downhill from Janet’s house. A coast to the coast, she thought, enjoying the breeze from the harbor brushing her face. It was another morning that reassured her they’d made the right decision coming to Inversgail. She didn’t need bright sun and brilliant blues. Seas and skies the color of seals and smoke were just as appealing. When the statue came into view, only Rhona and Isla stood with their bikes at Robert Louis’s feet.
“Let’s go, then,” Isla said when Janet braked to a stop.
“What about the others?” Janet asked.
“You were going to let them know, Isla,” Rhona said.
“Was I? Sorry.”
Janet wondered if the breeze might oblige with a sudden bucket of rain. It seemed to be scouring some of the gray away, though. A patch of blue had opened.
“Come on, Janet. We’ll make it an easy ten,” Rhona said.
I can still back out, Janet thought, but aloud she said, “It looks like I’ll be the slowest, after all.”
They took a wending way into the hills, Isla in the lead, then Rhona, then Janet. Isla occasionally spurted ahead and then turned and rode back toward them to take her place in the lead again, not looking bothered by the extra effort or miles. The colors of the morning changed around them to a tartan of browns and greens with highlights of blue. Janet thought it should smell like wet wool. As they climbed another hill, she knew the real essence would be sweaty Janet. The backside of that hill took them down toward the Beaton Bridge. When they reached it, Isla and Rhona stopped.
Janet reluctantly stopped, too, and looked along the burn to where she’d found Malcolm. She could still imagine the air smelled of wet wool, but this was a tweed landscape. Gray sky, gray stone bridge, brown thistles, brown tweed.
“We haven’t been back since the Half-Hundred,” Rhona said.
“I want to go down there,” Isla said. “To where you found him.”
“I don’t,” Janet said.
“Nor do I,” said Rhona. “We all have places to be. Come on.”
“He had places to be, too, but all right.”
Rhona and Janet started away. Rhona looked back toward the bridge, and Janet chanced a look over her shoulder, too. Isla, still on the bridge, dropped something over the side into the water.
“What did she drop?” Janet asked.
“Her good sense,” Rhona said. She shouted at Isla, “Littering! What are you doing? You know better. What was that?”
Isla pedaled calmly toward them. “A memorial.”
“Christine did the same thing with a bit of juniper,” Janet said. “Badge of clan Murray.”
“Aye, that was it.”
“It didn’t look like juniper from here,” Rhona said.
As Isla rode past them to take the lead, she said, “I can’t help what things look like to you from a distance.”
“From a distance,” Christine said after Janet recapped her ride at their morning meeting. “I don’t like the way that reminds me of Ian’s mistaken-identity theory. Malcolm from a distance might have looked like Gerald. I don’t like that Isla thought to throw juniper off the bridge, either.”
“If it wasn’t juniper, I’d love to know what it was,” Summer said. “Any point in going out there to see if we can find it?”
“I doubt it. The water’s fairly wide and flowing fast,” Janet said. “Where do we go from here?”
“On a business day? About the only place we can go,” Tallie said. “The cloud file. Make sure it’s up to date. Add your questions and if you have any thoughts on someone else’s note, add those, too. Maybe we’ll be lucky and one of us will have a flash of brilliance.”
Janet leaned against the door frame and rewarded her hill-riding knees and thighs with an almost soundless groan. Not soundless enough.
“I shouldn’t have said ‘again,’ should I?” Tallie pulled her glasses to the end of her nose.
Janet did the same. “Christine says I don’t look as severe as you when I do this.”
“She’s right, but for the moment I’m being sincere and apologetic. When I said ‘again,’ it just egged you on.”
“Your ‘again’ isn’t why I rode up two dozen hills and only seemed to come back down one of them. You don’t have that kind of power over me. I am the captain of my own bicycle. Tenacious enough to complete my inaugural Treacle Tart Ten.”
“In honor of which—” Christine flourished her hand toward the tearoom.
Summer had momentarily disappeared into the kitchen, and now came back with her hand behind her back. “Your well-earned reward,” she said. The plate she brought forward held a wedge of treacle tart.
Business was brisk that Monday—good for their bottom line, but difficult for sustained detecting. Janet was glad when she heard the bell over the door and saw Maida come in. Maida waited patiently while Janet finished with a customer and then stepped up to the counter and told her she’d been to see Florence.
“She’s more peculiar than I thought,” Maida said. “I heard she was looking after Malcolm. That might have been, but she did not look after the house. You could stir some of the rooms with a stick. Stoor and oose under the beds so thick you could make yourself a whole warren of dust bunnies. It was probably like that when she moved in. Malcolm never had a cleaning service that I know of, and when would he have had the time to clean?”
“But he expected her to clean it up?”
“I don’t know that. I don’t know anything about their ways,” Maida said. “But what has she been doing with all her time since she’s been there?” She left with a dour sniff.
Tallie came to the cash register with a customer. Janet stepped back to check the cloud for the hoped-for brilliance. It looked more like a collective brain fizzle and an accumulation of dead ends. She added a note about Isla dropping something, possibly juniper, off the bridge. Then she went to straighten the shelves where two small children had entertained themselves while their parents browsed. Some people will always have Paris, she thought, but I will always have books.
Hobbs found her mourning a ripped page in a book of fairy tales.
“It happens,” she said, tucking the bo
ok under her arm. “Are you here for the box?”
“Sorry?”
“Now that Florence says the books are stolen. You did read the update I sent, didn’t you?”
“I did, but Mrs. Jones has not called or otherwise made a report, so no, I’m not here to take the box.”
“Huh.”
“Aptly put,” Hobbs said, “but as you’ve noted, she appears to be confused from time to time.”
“Kindly put.”
“I came to give you answers to some of your questions.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“The Maclennans’ neighbor claims she only noticed the rammy when she heard the objectionable language. She did not hear what it was about. It was a believable statement. As for the missing item, as you call it, the Road Policing Unit says it is most likely something that fits an inside coat pocket.”
“Like money? An ID? Sensitive information?”
“They don’t know,” Hobbs said. “It remains missing and unidentified.”
“But it’s something he carried in his pocket. Interesting.”
“They used the pocket for scale. They didn’t say it was in his pocket.”
Janet nodded and waited, expecting more, but Hobbs had started browsing the shelf beside him.
“That’s it?” she said. “Norman, that wasn’t some answers. That was two.”
Hobbs sighed and started to say something, but the bell over the door rang and they heard Ian call hello to Tallie. Janet started to say something, but checked herself. Instead she waved to Hobbs and went to the counter.
“Good! Janet! Excellent!” Ian said. “Glad to see you both. I can kill two birds, as it were.”
“Please don’t kill anything on our behalf,” Janet said.
“Er, no, of course not. I thought you’d like to know that my theories have gained traction. My colleague reports the crime specialists are taking them seriously. Following up, and all that.”
“That’s very interesting, Ian,” Janet said. “Your books should be here in the next day or two. We’ll give you a call. Thank you for stopping by.”
Ian saluted and left, and Janet turned to Tallie. “Thank you for not saying anything rude.”
“You can thank me, as well,” Hobbs said, stepping from the aisle where he’d overheard the conversation. “I’ve my doubts about his theories, although my doubts no doubt illustrate why I’m yet a P.C. and not a specialist.”
To Janet, that sounded more like a source of pride than an assessment of shortcomings.
Just before the four women left Yon Bonnie Books for the evening, Christine’s father phoned to say they’d cracked the code. Christine, bewildered, relayed the call for the others. “What code are we talking about, Dad?”
“Two of them, actually. In the Culpeper herbal. Quite ingenious, but not so difficult once we caught on. You did your mum a world of good. Says she’s ready to join the women at Bletchley Park and wonders do you have another book like that for her?”
24
Christine brought the Culpeper back the next morning. The four women had arrived earlier than usual, and rather than meet in the doorway, they gathered in the office with the box of books.
“It’s a substitution code based on words underlined on page 180,” Christine said. “That’s the page where Mum read about the merry benefits of melancholy thistle wine.” She handed the book to Summer. Tallie reached for paper and pencil.
“I saw the margin notes,” Janet said. “Some in ink, some in pencil, different hands. They looked like they’d been added over generations—the kind of notes you’d make after trying recipes. Next time less salt, that sort of thing.”
“A lot of them are like that,” Summer said. “But some read like lines from a drunk bard, like this, Merry that cricket, decoction merry thistle wine.”
“That’s what Mum noticed. And then she saw the underlined words on 180 and her dear old brain started whirring. Dad is right, a simple substitution code isn’t difficult to break, but for a couple of boys, leaving notes for each other, it must have felt subversive and oh so clever.”
“Merry that cricket, decoction merry thistle wine translates to Our code,” Tallie said. “And here are their names. Malcolm is Makes for body decoction merry body makes. Gerald is Drank wine cricket for body thistle.”
“It sounds like a drunken poetry slam,” Janet said.
“The other code is even easier,” Christine said. “Do you see the small dots spattered across some of the pages? Each dot is under a letter. String those letters together and they spell words.”
“We should check the other books for dots and underlines,” Tallie said.
“May I?” Janet took the book. “Poor old thing.” She ran her hand over the slight depression in the pages that she’d noticed that first morning. “Someone closed something up in it. You can see its impression, so it might have been here for years. It helped split the text block.”
“You know what would fit right there?” Summer said. “Probably a bit too thick, so it would split the text block? The zhen xian bao.”
Janet looked at the book and then at the others. “I wonder what else those boys got up to and what their notes are about?”
Tallie and Summer started leafing through the other foundling books.
“It’s time we thought these books through more carefully,” Janet said. “Florence is saying now that they’re stolen. It’s easy to dismiss that, because she hasn’t called the police or asked to have them back. But, if a thief or thieves are at the center of all this, and if the books are stolen, then we have an interesting clue.”
“Or a red herring,” Christine said. “We can call it a whisky herring. But let’s go on the assumption they’re stolen. To simplify things, let’s call the thief ‘he.’ He stole them, and then dropped them here. Why?”
“He felt safe,” Summer said. “He didn’t think we’d make a big deal out of them.”
“They weren’t what he was after,” Tallie said, “but why take a chance by leaving the note?”
“He feels safe and values books,” Janet said.
“He might feel safe because he knows Florence,” Christine said. “That she wouldn’t recognize them, care about them, or know that we have them. He might know she doesn’t go in the library.”
“He might know about the open window,” Tallie said. “Lachy could have learned those things from Gerald. He could have told a partner. Isla could have learned them from Malcolm, Lachy, or Gerald. She could be a partner.”
“She could be working alone and Lachy found out,” Janet said.
“Or the books have nothing to do with the deaths,” Summer said. “Gerald could have taken them the night he came to town. Is it stealing if they’re family books? But again, why take them and then drop them here?”
“What if our thief stole the box because he thought he was getting whisky?” Janet said. “But who wouldn’t know a box of whisky from a box of books when they pick it up?”
“Kids,” said Tallie.
“Maybe he had a general idea what he was looking for and maximized his thieving time by grabbing options,” Christine said. “He looked through them at his leisure, kept what he wanted, and then dropped the rest here.”
“Like first editions in better condition with no codes or margin notes.” Tallie patted The Sword in the Stone. “That’s not this one. Dots galore. It was Gerald’s book.”
“This was Malcolm’s.” Summer put Swallows and Amazons beside The Sword in the Stone. “If the thief didn’t want these, maybe he was looking for the zhen xian bao.”
“I wonder if Florence made any notes,” Janet said.
“Too young, I should think,” Christine said, “or told she wasn’t clever enough.”
“Mean big boys,” Janet said. “I’d like a chance to tell them what I thought of that.”
Ian’s books arrived that morning. He arrived that afternoon to sign them and brought disquieting news with him.
“Somet
hing I thought you should know, Janet. I’ve seen a car stopped in front of your house several times. I believe the driver is a woman, although I haven’t had a good look. It was there again this morning, and I thought I’d do you a favor—stroll outside, pretend I’d just seen her, tell her I thought she was someone I knew—that sort of thing. Let her know she’s been seen and will be recognized.”
“Thank you, Ian,” Janet said.
“Didn’t do any good. Broke my concentration, and as soon as she saw me step out the door, she drove off.”
“Can you describe her at all?” Tallie asked. “Old? Young? Hair color?”
“Sorry, left my specs inside.”
“You wear glasses?” Janet asked.
“Only in the privacy of my study. My vain little secret.”
Twit. Janet hoped she hadn’t said that out loud. “What kind of car?”
Ian stared blankly. Then he looked interested. “That would have been useful information, wouldn’t it? Sorry. If it helps, it was a sort of metallic. Gray. Silver. Possibly gold.”
While Janet thought about unidentifiable cars lurking in Argyll Terrace, Tallie told Ian he reminded her of an OED. He thanked her and left, looking pleased. Tallie looked pleased, too.
“Wait, OED?” Janet said.
“It’s a simple substitution code,” Tallie said. “Instead of Oxford English Dictionary, it’s old enormous dic—”
“Wheesht!”
Tallie bit off most of the last sound, and went to shelve the signed books, still looking pleased. When she returned to the counter, Janet had her phone out and her thumbs were busy.
“Text?” Tallie asked.
“To Norman about the books. And the car. Not that he can do anything about that.”
“Drive by more often? But if this was someone with nefarious motives, it wasn’t very subtle or nefarious.”
“That’s true,” Janet said. “That makes me feel a little better.”
“Good. And here comes someone who’s a real mood-changer.”
The door opened and a smiling Sharon Davis breezed in. Breezing and smiling were good signs. At other times, the director of the Inversgail Library and Archives had pounded the sales counter as she’d ranted about inconvenient authors or roped Janet into volunteering for a committee without giving an accurate picture of the commitment.
