The Blue Hackle (19 page)

“Rab Finlay?”

“Yeah, him. Mom says he can’t speak English
but Dad says he’s just got a thick accent. I mean, you can, like,
pick out most of it if you pay attention.”

She said. He said
. Jean recognized the
head-butting dialog of a tense relationship. But that wasn’t her
business. What was her business was Greg MacLeod with a phone to
his ear. Means, opportunity, the competitive nature of the
antiquities trade as motive. Not that she wanted to finger Dakota’s
father—or mother, wandering around town—for murder any more than
she wanted to finger one of Alasdair’s friends. “I’m sorry I
interrupted. You were driving up the driveway . . .”

“Yeah.” Dakota considered the gate’s
decorative scrollwork, a bit rusty in spots but still graceful,
like an aging ballerina. “As we went by the gate here, someone,
like, stepped through it, out of the light, and shut it behind
him.”

“What made you think it was a ghost?”

“He was all shiny, from the lights of the
house and from the car lights, too. In dark clothes, but
shiny.”

Jean remembered Colin Urquhart standing
beneath her window. Had he been on the estate earlier that evening,
too? “Could you see his face?”

“No, he had a hat or something pulled down
low.”

A hood,
Jean thought. “He was going
into the garden, not coming out of it?”

“Into the garden, yeah.”

“You’re sure it was a man?”

“Well, no, not really. But he hugged the
woman standing inside the gate.”

Jean stopped in her tracks. “Woman? Inside
the gate?”

“I just caught a real quick look as we drove
by, you know? The man stepped through the gate, shut it, and walked
right up to a woman with long skirts and funny little curls hanging
down beside her face. I saw her face, it was white as a sheet. Do
you think she was a ghost, too?”

Jean went giddy, as though the path beneath
her feet had whisked away and she’d dropped into free fall.
Seonaid.
The man—if it was a man—had seemed to hug her
because he walked right through her. He hadn’t seen her. But Dakota
had. Dakota was allergic to ghosts.

“I always get, like, a creepy feeling when I
see a ghost.” Hesitantly, Dakota’s mitten-covered hand indicated
the back of her neck.

Jean closed her eyes, grasped her
equilibrium, and prayed for the right words—honesty wasn’t always
the best policy, as Heather had proved. She looked down to see the
child’s small gamin face turned upward.

“I’m sorry, I’m not suppose to tell stories
like that.” Dakota’s hand fell back to her side and she looked
down, waiting for the ruler of logic to rap her knuckles.

“But it’s no story, you just said.
Sometimes,” Jean went on, “people see things that aren’t really
there, like thinking the wake of a boat is the Loch Ness monster.
Optical illusions, wishful thinking, whatever. It happens. But
sometimes we—and I do it, too—sometimes we see things that other
people can’t see. That creepy feeling on the back of your neck. I
know exactly what you mean.”

Dakota looked up. Sparks flared in the depths
of her big, dark eyes.

“I think the man you saw was just that, a
man. A living one. I might have seen the same man standing outside
the house later on. He was probably on the way to the village and
stepped out of the driveway when he saw your car coming. The woman,
though, yes, she was a ghost. I saw her on the staircase last
night. She’s Seonaid MacDonald, who died in 1822.”

“Oh wow,” said Dakota, the sparks exploding
into fireworks. “Cool!”

Jean bit back,
no, it’s not cool, you’ve
already seen how your parents reacted
. “It’s like an allergy.
Some people have it, some people don’t, and it’s hard for the
people who don’t to understand.”

“And they don’t want to hear about it. Yeah,
I know. My grandmother has to be real careful with Chinese food
because MSG gives her a headache, but my mom says it’s all in her
head, that why aren’t the people in China walking around with
headaches, then?”

Jean started to say, “A headache is
definitely in your head,” but this was no joking matter. “I call
being able to sense ghosts an allergy, but it’s not a medical
condition, a situation science can recognize and explain. Yet,
anyway. It’s weird, and it’s very personal. I know some people who
get, well, vibes off things, which is similar, but you’re only the
second person I’ve ever met who actually sees ghosts.”

“Who’s the first?”

For asking that, Jean awarded her another
atta girl
. “My, er, husband, Alasdair Cameron.”

“Oh. Him. He doesn’t say much, does he?”

“He gets his point across,” Jean said with a
grin.

Grinning back, Dakota did a dance step
through the leaves.

Jean’s grin wobbled into a squirm. She’d just
picked up her own disciple.

Time to move on, and without laying
this
is our secret, okay?
on the child’s already burdened shoulders.
If Dakota told her parents what Jean had told her, well then,
they’d deal with it. The child was going to spend her life dealing
with it. Jean remembered her own youth, the impatient sighs, the
indulgent nods, the teasing and, worse, the sincere offers of
psychiatric help. And then there were the people who assumed she
must share their own weirdnesses.

Reticence, edging into Alasdair’s
taciturnity, worked real well.

Briskly, Jean pushed open the garden gate and
sent a suspicious glare toward Pritchard’s picturesque cottage. In
the summer it would even have roses growing around the door, but
now the gray stone facade glowered behind a few thorny twigs. “I
saw another gate around the side of the house,” she told Dakota.
“It might be a more direct route to the old church.”

“Sure,” Dakota said, all weariness
evaporated. Absolved, maybe.

Side-by-side, they walked past the three
parked cars and around the corner of the house to the flagstone and
gravel yard. From this side of Fergie’s office window, Jean saw the
door of the new kitchen, flanked by garbage bins. The garage filled
in the entire space between the house and the wall. If you wanted
to reach the sea from here, you’d have to go into the house and out
the far side, or back around the front of the house, or through the
small wooden gate, where, yes, the hand-lettered sign read,
To
Old Dunasheen Church
.

Just as Jean lifted the latch and pushed the
gate open, she caught a movement in the corner of her eye. Fergie
stood in his window, the telephone to his ear, a cup of tea in his
hand. He lifted the tea in salute.

Jean waved, thinking, baronet under glass.
Castle under siege.

“He’s a nice guy, isn’t he?” asked
Dakota.

“Yes.” Jean closed the gate, hoping that
“yes” was an honest answer.

The child bounded up a narrow path between an
evergreen hedge and the bare ruined choirs of a vegetable garden,
her shoes squelching. Here, too, a few stubborn leaves quivered in
the still air, gulls squawked overhead, and a low booming resonance
that flowed through Jean’s ears to fill her heart was the surge of
the sea.

What she heard with her head was a small but
distinctive snick from behind. Was that the gate shutting, the
latch falling into place, her paranoia becoming flesh? She looked
over her shoulder but saw nothing around the curve of the hedge
except a small brown bird flapping frantically across the path,
fleeing . . . She walked into Dakota’s back. “Oops. Sorry.”

“That’s okay. I wasn’t sure where to go. This
way?”

The main path bent off to the left, running
into the streaked shadow beneath the trees. A thinner path skewed
suddenly to the right, up a low hill, and around and over several
boulders. “The church should be that way, yes. Beyond the
trees.”

They picked their way to the boulders, and
past them, and emerged onto a hillside shelf above the sea. “Whoa,”
Dakota said on a long whistling breath.

Jean didn’t say anything. She breathed in the
cold, sweet-salt air, and shaded her eyes with her gloved hand.
Sure enough, beyond the brilliant dark blue billows of the water,
the horizon was closed by an undulating rim of land tinted
violet-blue by distance and melting into the cobalt blue of the
sky. Even though she knew she was looking at two of the Outer
Hebrides, Harris and Uist, she felt she could see clear to Ireland.
And beyond, to Tir nan Og, the Celtic version of heaven. No wonder
the early Celtic saints had braved that sea to share their beliefs.
No wonder generations of residents had built places of worship
here, in this place that proved “earthly nirvana” was no oxymoron.
No wonder generations of emigrants were called to return.
Blood
is thicker than water
.

To the left rose the remains of the church,
broken walls and pointed gable ends of dark gray stone, cracks
still black with soot. Beyond it the ground fell away, and then
rose again into a line of cliffs, mounting higher and higher until
the topmost hillock was crowned by the white block-and-spire of
Keppoch Point lighthouse. No more than half a mile separated it
from Dunasheen Castle.

There was the exit from the path Jean and
Alasdair had taken yesterday, beneath the eaves of the trees at the
far end of the grassy shelf. Could the murderer have run from the
beach, via one or the other garden path, to the driveway in time
for Dakota to see him? Yes, with knowledge of the landscape, a
flashlight, and a strong pair of legs.

Urquhart must know his way around Dunasheen
Estate. Would Dakota recognize him if she saw him again? If she’d
seen him to begin with.

Remembering her brief as educator, Jean
turned back to her. “Fergus MacDonald has found ‘fairy houses’
here, ancient stone walls hidden in the heather and covered with
lichen. They could go back thousands of years. And his grandfather
found some Roman coins, although whether they were left by the
Roman fleet that may have reached here, or whether they were
brought back by some tourist, is open to debate. No context, you
see.”

“They should get archaeologists out
here.”

“Yes, they should. There are too many
interesting sites to dig them all, though. And once you dig a site,
you’ve destroyed it forever.”

“Oh. Yeah. I hadn’t thought of that.”

Jean and Dakota swished through the tall,
reddish-gold grass toward the latest and last church. Even at
midday, the sun hung at half-mast, so low that the shadows of the
walls reached toward the sea. “A hermit may have lived here ages
ago. The original church was built around the first millennium. At
least one since then was sacked by Vikings.”

“Cool.”

“Not to the sackees,” said Jean. “This church
was built by a notorious cattle-thief and raider in the fifteenth
century to atone for his crimes. There’s no way of knowing if it
worked.”

That went past the child’s head.

“This church was burned down in 1645,” Jean
concluded, without providing details, let alone mentioning how
barbecuing the neighbors was a fine old human tradition. That
dreadful act of violence seemed to have destroyed the spirit that
had drawn people to this place—at least, no one else had built
here. And yet, while the memory lingered in men’s minds, it did not
seem to linger in the eternities of the land, the sea, and the
sky.

She listened with every sense she possessed,
then, so quietly her voice blended with the sound of the sea,
asked, “Are you picking up anything?”

That didn’t go past Dakota’s head at all.
“No. There aren’t any ghosts here. It’s just kind of cold and sad
and yet there’s something else.”

“The melancholy of age and the consolation of
beauty,” Jean murmured. Hey, that was a good phrase. She should use
it in her article.

Beyond a low wall lay the graveyard. What
slabs and knobs of tombstones were not swallowed by grass were
weathered out of true, so that they resembled natural boulders
inscribed with frost and lichen rather than the names of the dead.
Here and there trembled a white feather, shed by a gull, not an
angel.

“So there are some really old dead bodies in
there,” said Dakota.

“In acid soil like this, they’re all gone,
not even bones left.”

“Oh.”

“The special gravestones are over here.” Jean
walked the child over to a shed topped by a sheet of green
corrugated plastic better suited to protect cows or sheep than rare
artifacts. But then, in Scotland, artifacts like these weren’t all
that rare.

Beneath the roof lay a row of fissured gray
slabs, patched with moss, lichen, and the occasional strip of
concrete. Hands long gone to dust or mud had carved them with
armored men holding spears or swords, or, in a couple of cases,
just the sword itself, surrounded by raised cords and knotwork like
a medieval fetish. Several other slabs were graced by a cross, a
skull, or both. A few patches of moss had recently been peeled away
from one, revealing damp, corroded stone.

Dakota eyed the gravestones, soldiers on
parade, and said, “That guy’s helmet looks like a chocolate kiss.”
So it did, the metal curving around the roughed-in face and coming
to a point on top. “They weren’t all buried in a row here, were
they? Did they all die at the same time?”

“No, the stones are from different time
periods, and even though some people—”
Like Greg MacLeod
,
Jean thought, “—say they’re the graves of crusaders, they probably
don’t go back that far. Though there were a lot of Crusades.”

“What are Crusades?” Dakota asked.

Jean had no short answer for that, or one
that wouldn’t force her own beliefs on Dakota—there being a fine
line between sharing your beliefs and ramming them down someone’s
throat. A shame how often the former was perceived to be wimping
out and the latter to be stirring and inspirational. How would Greg
MacLeod’s museum have presented such issues—contemporary
happy-clappy, traditional smells and bells, prescriptive fire and
sword?