LITMIR.BIZ

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again. Unlike Diana, Fergie hadn’t gone on his way. As for his words—Jean rounded on Alasdair. “You told him you’re allergic to ghosts? I thought that was your best-kept secret.”

      “Kept from most folk,” said Alasdair. “I’ve told you.”

      “No, you showed me.”

      “I was no more than twelve at the time I showed Fergie,” Alasdair explained. “I was not aiming to show anyone anything, but I’d not yet learned what you’re calling the great stone face routine.”

      Fergie’s face slipped into a reminiscent smile. “We were standing in a passageway at Stirling Castle, Alasdair watching someone walk by who wasn’t there, half buckled with the weight of his own sight. That was my reward for agreeing to look after such a young lad, and me graduated from university and engaged to be married. Not the first time Alasdair’s knocked me back a step or two.”

      Alasdair’s expression was far from stony, if less than enthusiastic.

      “But I never picked up a thing,” Fergie went on. “When it comes to the supernatural, I’m tone-deaf, color-blind, and numb, more’s the pity. There are some say that Dunasheen has a guardian spirit, the ghost of my ancestress Seonaid MacDonald, the Green Lady. Some say Rory MacLeod falls from the old castle tower, again and again. You couldn’t prove either by me.”

      Jean wasn’t sure whether to boggle more over the image of Alasdair as a child or of Fergie actually wanting to sense ghosts.

      Fergie’s smile reversed back into a worried frown. “I was coming to tell you that the cops from Portree have gone round the back and are waiting at the courtyard gate.”

      “Thank you kindly, Fergie. I’ll try getting back for dinner.” With a stylized salute, two fingers to the end of his eyebrow, Alasdair walked on down.

      Skipping the issue of whether Alasdair had told Fergie about her own allergy, she offered their host a consolatory smile—I know how you feel, believe me, I know—and plowed ahead. “Do you happen to know what Greg MacLeod’s occupation was?”

      “He told me he’d recently sold a factory manufacturing tourist paraphernalia, soft toy kangaroos, T-shirts, didgeridoos. He said something about investments in property, and how he’s dealing in art and starting up a museum of religion, an antipodean version of the one by Glasgow Cathedral. There’re brochures from the Glasgow museum in his and Tina’s room, I saw them when I brought her back to the house.”

      “The St. Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art. I love the place, and not just because it was one of my first articles for Great Scot… Hold that thought. Be right back. Alasdair! Wait up!” Jean galloped on down the stairs and into the entrance hall.

      He was just heading into the back corridor, and made a U-turn at her shout. “Eh?”

      “Can I have the phone, please? I need to ask Miranda whether she’s ever heard of Greg. He’s an art dealer and was opening a museum.”

      “He’s one of her lot, is he then? Was, rather. Sounds to be they’re not traveling on a shoestring.” Alasdair pulled out the cell phone and handed it over. “I’ve programmed it with Thomson’s number, if you’re needing me whilst I’m at the scene.”

      “Thanks,” she replied, and as he turned again toward the postern gate, “Mind your step. There are a lot of rocks out there that could work as tripping stanes. As for ghosts…”

      “Aye, I saw and heard Rory MacLeod plunging into the keep half a dozen times whilst I waited with Tina. It’s that sort of night.” A nod, a flash of a smile, and his steps faded away down the back hall.

      Chapter Six

      Oh yeah. It was that sort of night. The next knock on the door would be Count Dracula collecting blood samples.

      The phone clutched to her breast, Jean turned back to the staircase. Funny how twitchy she could get without her communications slaves, not just her cell phone but her laptop computer, when she’d managed to spend the first half of her life without either.

      No, she’d told Alasdair back in Edinburgh, she didn’t need to haul along her computer. All she needed was her paper notebook to jot down odds and ends. She wasn’t going to write the article about Dunasheen on the spot. This was the time for a celebration of the year’s end and their own beginnings, not for web surfing or e-mailing.

      There was never a good time for researching the extinguished life of a murder victim.

      Meeting Fergie at the foot of the steps, she asked him, “Can I borrow your computer sometime? If I’d brought mine along I wouldn’t have wanted it, but since I didn’t…”

      “Any time. You know where my office is.” His shoulders turned one way and his stomach the other, trying to be two places at once. “Drinks for the guests—the Krums and you and Alasdair—dinner—we’ll organize food for the policemen in the old servant’s hall beyond the kitchens, that’s now the staff sitting room in the summer, when we have folk in from the village to help Nancy and Rab.”

      “That’s nice of you.”

      “Seems the least we can do, in the circumstances.”

      Hosting the police, then, wasn’t what Diana had been arguing against. “Can I help organize anything? Or I’d be glad to sit with Tina. I promise I won’t give her any third degrees.” Not yet, anyway, Jean added to herself.

      “She’s in a bad way. Doctor Irvine is seeing to her, I expect with sedatives.”

      Knowing that the Krums were settling into the Wallace suite, Jean asked, “She’s in the Mary, Queen of Scots suite?”

      “That she is, yes. I hope she’ll not think that’s in bad taste, with Mary being widowed twice and all. Poor woman.”

      Tina, he meant, not Mary. Jean couldn’t resist a quick, one-third degree. “Greg took off right after he arrived, right?”

      “Yes, he left just after arriving, didn’t even stay for his tea—Tina wasn’t half upset with him for that. He stopped just long enough to get his hat, I expect. I heard him walking down the stairs as I went round the corner to my office. I was there listening to a CD when you rang the bell and called out.”

      Greg hadn’t even waited long enough to get a hat. Jean asked, “Did he say anything about knowing anyone here? Did he ask directions to the old church?”

      “If he knows anyone here, he didn’t tell me, other than saying he’d never visited the old country before. And no, he didn’t ask directions. I indicated the rooms in the house as I took them up the stairs is all. You met him on the castle path and he told you he was going to the church?”

      “Yes. We think he had an appointment with someone there.”

      “That’s odd, then, I mean, him going by the castle path.” Frowning, Fergie took a couple of steps toward the back hall. “But the place is confusing.”

      “You took the MacLeods to their room? Where was Diana?”

      “Sorry, Jean, can’t stop any longer—there’s work needs doing.” He strode off toward the kitchen, but not before she saw the shadow that lay on his normally affable expression deepen to a thundercloud. What was up with him and his daughter? What had they been, if not arguing, then having words about? And where had she been right before sunset, anyway?

      Jean looked suspiciously down the hall toward the back door. When she and Alasdair came back to the house, the dogs had been outside. And there’d been a wet raincoat hanging in the cloak room. It had fallen off its hook, as though it had been tossed there just moments earlier.

      What was she trying to do, pin something on Diana?

      Jean turned toward the staircase and jumped. Diana stood on the bottom step, her complexion no longer flushed but a dewy ivory-pink. “Hullo, Jean,” she said, but her cornflower blue eyes were fixed on

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