The Blue Hackle (44 page)

Diana handed the massive, ornate key through
the bars of the gate to Alasdair. Metal scraped metal. The chain
rattled to the ground. Skreeling, the gates swung back.

Diana and Jean jostled each other through the
opening and hustled up the driveway behind Alasdair—the house
loomed ahead, every window a blot of nothingness—someone bolted
from the shadow of the trees—oh, it was Colin, breathing hard,
stumbling, and yet outpacing Alasdair to the front door. Which was
also locked, but this time Diana had a key.

The wooden panels flew back against the wall.
“Father!” shouted Diana.

“He said he was in the library.” Jean charged
off across the entrance hall. There was just enough light that she
avoided barking her shins on the kist or caroming off the corner
into the corridor.

The door to the drawing room was closed, the
one to the library open. The Christmas tree blocked most of
the—hardly light, more of a phosphorescent glow—leaking through the
tall windows. The pale stone of the fireplace gleamed like a
spectral trilithon. Something moved . . .

Two shapes hurtled out of the shadows and
Jean reeled back against someone too slender to be Alasdair. The
dogs barked and leaped and shed, doing their best “Timmy’s down the
well” routine.

Diana dropped to her knees beside the mounded
form sprawled across a chair. “Father? Father!”

“I’ll fetch Dr. Irvine.” Colin said, and his
steps thumped away down the hall accompanied by the patter of furry
feet.

“Di,” said Fergie’s wheezing, whispery voice.
“There’s my wee lass.”

A bolt of lightning bounced through the door,
and another one, and the lights flashed off the glass doors of the
bookshelves and bits of tinsel on the tree—Thomson and McCrummin,
with beautiful police-issue flashlights the size of truncheons.
Thomson said, “The incident room door was unlocked—Orla’s not yet
found the lass . . .”

“Her mum and dad didna answer my knocking
’til I’d pounded my knuckles raw,” said McCrummin, “and even then
would not open the door, just shouted, right shirty at first,
saying the lass’s not with them, she was told off to sit here in
the library . . .”

“Is that Fergus?” Thomson asked.

Alasdair leaned over the chair to support
Fergie’s head and shoulders while Diana kneaded his hands. Even in
the dubious light Jean could see the color and texture of his face,
like sour bread dough. Despite the icebox-chill of the room, beads
of sweat trickled down the furrows of his jowls.

“Is he injured?” asked McCrummin, reaching
for the radio riding her shoulder.

Diana’s voice caught and cracked. “It’s his
heart. All this has been too much for him.”

Jean wasn’t placing any bets on her own heart
right then. It was bouncing up and down between her throat and her
chest like a paddle ball. She grabbed a floppy cushion and a lap
blanket from another chair, then helped Alasdair place the cushion
beneath Fergie’s head and Diana arrange the blanket over him.

McCrummin retired to the hall, exchanging
mutters with a staticky voice—
ambulance, Dunasheen
.

Been there
, Jean thought.
Done
that
. Déjà vu
all over again
.

“I’m perfectly fit,” Fergie said slowly, his
words slurred. “Just had a bit of turn realizing Rab was, well—the
gloves are there on the table, Alasdair, Sanjay.”

Thomson concentrated his light on something
that looked like a squashed squid, two leather gloves crumpled
together, fingers stiffened with rust-brown stains.

“Where’s Rab?” asked Alasdair. “Where’s
Nancy?”

Fergie licked his gray lips. “The lights were
dimming and blinking. He went to see to the generator.”

Thomson muttered, “The power plant, aye, in
the west tower,” and slipped out the door. From the hall came his
voice, “They’re in the library, Auntie. Irvine’s where? Ah, good .
. .”

Brenda O’Donnell ran into the room, fell to
her knees beside Diana, and opened a bag. “I’ve got hot tea and
cold compresses, whichever you’re needing.”

“Nancy’s in the attics,” Fergie wheezed,
“took a big torch with her, there’s no lights there in any event.
The lass, Dakota. She was sitting here, reading. I walked by and
saw her, then I walked by and she wasn’t here at all.”

Jean looked frantically around, but saw no
notes, no maps—
she went thataway
—only a book lying on the
table beside the chair. The cover of
Mysterious Castles of
Scotland
still sported a price tag reading “Kinlochroy Heritage
Museum.”

Dakota had wanted to come to Scotland, Scott
had said, for ghosts and castles . . .

Two pairs of feet pounded down the hall and
Heather burst through the doorway. “Where is she? Where’s my
baby?”

Scott pounded behind her. “We told her to
stay here. We just went back upstairs for a few minutes, didn’t
mean to fall asleep . . .”

Jean assessed the state of their clothes,
disheveled, their hair, mussed, and their faces, flushed. Heather’s
glasses skewed across her nose. She and Scott had been groping each
other during the party last night, in a confirmative marital way,
of course. But alcohol subverted male performance—or so Jean had
heard. Maybe that’s why Scott had defaulted to business concerns in
the middle of the night, trying to save some face. Maybe he and
Heather had retired upstairs to take care of other unfinished
business, leaving Dakota safe and sound here in the library.

If you couldn’t be safe in a library, where
could you be safe?

Alasdair was saying, “She’s wandering about
the house having a look at Fergie’s whimsies, I reckon—there are
torches in the cloak room . . .”

“Torches?” demanded Heather. “You’re going to
have travel agents marching up to the gates waving torches when we
get done with you, you got that? One-star reviews on every Internet
. . .”

“Dakota!” Scott bellowed, and charged back
out into the hall.

“Dakota!” Heather shrilled, if not beside
him, then not far behind. Their cries resounded through the house,
setting the dogs to barking again.

“And they do not know the half of it.”
Alasdair turned back to Fergie. “Was Greg MacLeod offering to
invest in Dunasheen, build a golf course, convert the place into
luxury condos? Was he offering to buy the place, lock, stock, and
barrel?”

“No, he was . . .” Fergie’s eyes goggled.
“Was
that
what he meant by making a grand offer, not for the
Coffer, for the estate itself? No, no, I’d only sell up over my
dead body!”

That won’t be necessary
, Jean beamed
toward him. Nor had it been necessary making Greg into a dead body,
never mind how desperate Rab was to stop the march of—if not
progress, at least change.

Alasdair’s face in the failing light glinted
like an ice sculpture. “Rab. Nancy. Perhaps she was offering to
show Dakota the attics. No good going with strangers, the lass is
too canny for that, but Nancy’s no stranger.”

“Neither is Rab,” Jean replied.

But Alasdair was already out the door,
saying, “You’re with me, McCrummin.”

Brenda’s round face registered first concern,
then confusion, then concern again, but she said nothing, only
wiped Fergie’s face with a soft cloth.

“I’ll stay with Father.” Diana smoothed
Fergie’s gray ponytail on the cushion.

His lips crimped in a crooked smile. “Di, I’m
sorry about Colin, you, he, have my blessing . . .”

“Hush,” said Diana, her voice now calm as a
mill pond. “We’ll deal with that later.”

At some point, Jean thought, Diana had looked
at Dunasheen, at Fergie, and at Colin. She’d thought, “This will
never do,” and taken them all in a firm hand. But Diana couldn’t
help find Dakota. She couldn’t apprehend Rab and Nancy, not now . .
. Jean twitched left, jerked right, then gave it up and ran after
Alasdair.

She skimmed the corner into the entrance
hall. The front door stood open on a rectangle of smeared landscape
and the feeble glow that was Kinlochroy. Shouts, barks, and
footsteps echoed down the densely shadowed coil of the turnpike
stair. If they’d all been running in a clump they’d be imitating
the Keystone Kops, but no, they’d fanned out, and she’d been left
alone in the dark. Setting her jaw, she grasped the cold, slightly
prickly rope handrail with both hands, felt for each misshapen
step, and repeated her mantra:
Nothing is here that isn’t here
in the light
.

But there was plenty that was there in the
light.

Like the door to the second floor. A dim
light washed over the steps, then faded as Jean worked her way
further upward into the chill, the cold, the icy air—a tremor
surged from her hand up her arm and amassed on her shoulders.
Seonaid.

Shadow upon shadow, shape upon darkness—the
ringlets, the dress, the shawl—an otherworldly light in two staring
eyes. A faint rustling sound . . . oh. That was the draft from the
open front door moving Seonaid’s tapestry, nothing paranormal about
that, the tapestry was cloth and thread and depicted Old Dunasheen
as a backdrop for dramatic events.

Old Dunasheen. Dakota was reading
Mysterious Castles of Scotland
. Dakota had wanted to go out
to the old castle. Without lights, she couldn’t read about it, so
she’d gone to see it. She wasn’t lacking courage, to go out there
in the dark, alone.

Jean prayed that she was alone.

She turned her back on Seonaid’s ghost,
shrugging away the cold fairy fingertips brushing the nape of her
neck. She felt her way down the stairs, then picked up speed into
the back corridor, only to stop abruptly at the library door.
“Diana, Brenda, how’s he doing?”

“He’ll be right as rain.” Diana’s voice in
the darkness brooked no debate.

Again Jean accelerated, shouting back over
her shoulder, “I think Dakota’s gone out to the old castle. Tell
the others—wait, I’ve got the phone.”

She patted herself down as she fumbled along
the corridor. No, she didn’t have the phone. It must have slipped
off her lap in the car and was now between the seats, probably
ringing its little electrodes out. She’d lose valuable time going
back outside and searching for it.

She was in the cloak room. Where was the
cabinet? There. Gloves. Scarf. The cold cylinder of a flashlight.
In the sudden, bright beam she scanned the hooks on the wall—was
Diana’s raincoat gone? Dakota’s own coat would have been in her
room.

Jean scooted out the door, down the steps,
and across the courtyard. After the gloom of the house, the light
outside seemed bright. She partly ran, partly stumbled down the
path—heather roots like grasping hands, boulders like trolls
crouched, reading to spring forward—the walls of Old Dunasheen
materialized from the mist before her as the walls of New Dunasheen
faded into the mist behind her. The sky and the horizon, a very
close horizon, blurred into one uncanny gleam tinted the pink of
blood-tinged water and the gold of a dying fire. Sunset, and a hint
of smoke hanging in the turgid air. She imagined the old church
burning, the cries of the wounded and dying, the indifferent calls
of seabirds . . .

She really was hearing voices, Irvine’s
perhaps, from the front of the house, and in the distance the
rising and falling bleat of at least two sirens closing in on
Kinlochroy.

Her shoes thudded on the damp planks of the
footbridge. Was that a light behind the enceinte wall? Two days
ago, two sunsets past, she and Alasdair had seen Greg’s red jacket
vanish behind that wall.

“Dakota!” she shouted. Then her already
ragged breath caught in her throat—she’d just given herself away.
But she didn’t know whether Rab was here, too. Alasdair and Thomson
could already have him in custody. “Where are you, Dakota?”

Jean fought her way up the path leading past
the enceinte into the keep, splashing through ice-rimmed, peaty
puddles, feeling her coat catch on brambles and weather-roughened
rims of stone. Unless it was being caught by bony fingertips
reaching through time and space.

She’d never before met a ghost with
substance. Then she’d met Seonaid. Seonaid, who’d stitched Rory
MacLeod’s falling body.

She stepped between two bulwarks of stone,
through the gaping gateway into the cage of the tower. Her light
flashed across gouges, hollows, lumps of brush, dragging shadows
behind it. “Dakota!”

A rustling noise might be a bird disturbed on
its nest. But no bird would have said, in a small, trembling voice,
“Here. I’m here.”

Her voice came from the dungeon, the
cellar—Jean couldn’t remember now what Alasdair had called it. But
she remembered where it was, behind a buttress and down a set of
steps subsiding into bedrock. Tucked in beneath the weight of the
tower’s remaining walls.

“Sit tight, Dakota. I’m coming.” The beam of
her flashlight probing ahead of her—tumbled cobblestones, mud,
lichen—Jean started down the steps, one at a time, her left hand
braced against the cold grit of the wall.

The doorway was still mostly rectangular.
Beyond it, her puny light no more than pricked the darkness. The
stench of mold, mildew, and decay clotted in her nostrils and her
throat. Every nerve in her body thrilled. The hair on the back of
her neck squirmed. She forced herself to walk on. “Dakota?”

A sudden light blasted her eyes and she
recoiled, her arm across her face.

Rab Finlay said, “I’m telling you, no guid
will come of this, any of it.”

Squinting, Jean peered over her sleeve.
There, on a stone that might once have been a headsman’s block, sat
Rab. His cap was pulled down low over his eyes. His beard stuck out
in a dozen directions. One gnarled hand held an industrial-strength
flashlight. The other rested a kitchen knife, also
industrial-strength, on the knee of his yellow raincoat.