LITMIR.BIZ

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with the absence of Miranda’s familiar voice. With the absence of any sound at all except for the eerie whistle of the wind in the chimney. The shadowed room in front of her seemed to fade away, and she saw the lights of Edinburgh and the crowds jostling along the sidewalks, fireworks over the Castle and rock bands playing.

      No lonely beaches there, just the occasional lonely alley, and all the agitations of the city. There was something—there was a lot—to be said for mountains, sea, and sky, even a clouded one. Caledonia, stern and wild, harsh and beautiful. She’d committed herself to Scotland before she’d committed herself to Alasdair.

      Sitting up, she looked into the darkness, at the lights of the village blurred by the mist and rain, at the fluorescent stripes on the police cars shining in the lights of the house, at the man standing—

      The chill on her back surged through her body, tightening every follicle. A human shape stood below the window, so still she’d have thought he was one of Fergie’s sculptures, if there’d been a sculpture in the parking area. The posture, feet planted wide apart, hands thrust into pockets, indicated a man. But it wasn’t Pritchard, the manager. He’d been wearing a yellow raincoat. And why would he stand there when he had a nice warm cottage or even nicer, if cooler, castle to go to?

      This man wore mottled black, boots, pants, a long jacket with a hood. A hood pulled so well forward that it encompassed only shadow, like one of Tolkien’s ringwraiths or a specter of Death.

      Then he moved, tilting his head back so that the light revealed his face, white as old bone. He spotted Jean in her window, outlined against the dim light, and his body straightened from a merely cautious pose to an alert one.

      She didn’t move. She didn’t breathe. She returned stare for stare with those hollow eyes.

      Did he slump slightly? Or did he hear the front door opening? Just as light gushed outward and ran off his jacket like water, a yellow-coated figure ran up the driveway and a male voice shouted, “You there!”

      The dark figure faded into the night.

      Chapter Seven

      Jean exhaled between teeth clenched so tightly her jaw hurt.

      Yellow-coat ran into the parking area, still yelling. “Here! You there!” Which seemed a bit contradictory, but she was hardly in a position to criticize. She didn’t recognize the voice, and the figure was too slender to be either Fergie or Rab Finlay. Pritchard, probably.

      Below Jean, presumably from the front porch, Diana’s cool voice cut the heat of the male’s. “Mr. Pritchard, Lionel, if you please, there’s no need to shout.”

      “Diana, we can’t have the man hanging about. Your own father…”

      “No harm done. Someone in the village likely told him about—the unfortunate event—and he stopped by on his way home to have a look at the police vehicles.”

      His gait as smooth as a hobby horse’s, Pritchard strode to the door. Jean had to lean forward and press her ear to the icy glass in order to hear him say, “We’re hardly on his way, the path runs beyond the garden wall. He had no call…”

      The slam of the front door echoed upward, vibrating as subtly in Jean’s ear as distant thunder. She sat back on the window seat. Who was “he”? Where was “home”? And was Pritchard’s accent English rather than Scottish?

      Well, so was Diana’s. And Fergie himself had been infused with a “proper” accent, as befit the nephew of a baronet, never mind his thistle-strewn Highland ancestry. Although with Fergie, the infusion hadn’t quite taken.

      The clock on the mantelpiece chimed six times. She’d promised to be in the library at six-thirty. With one last searching glance out the window—no mysterious figures, no irascible managers, no police people—she pulled herself to her feet and headed into the bathroom.

      Her cosmetics bag was wedged between a ceramic lizard studded with fake gems and Alasdair’s nylon shaving kit, which in turn sat next to a Chinese vase holding fresh if odorless flowers. Maybe instead of donning the cap, bells, and motley of a court jester, she should don war paint. She applied eye shadow and mascara, chose a colorful tapestry vest over a basic skirt-and-turtleneck combo, added necklace and earrings, and traded her walking shoes for decorative flats, all the while pondering what Diana had called the unfortunate event.

      It was too much to expect the mysterious man in the parking area to be the murderer. Murderers, in Jean’s thankfully limited experience, didn’t stand around looking sinister. Besides, Diana and Pritchard both knew him, or of him, at least. He must be some local character.

      If one of the two military dirks in the entrance hall was the murder weapon, then the murderer must have come from inside the house. Or passed through it. Or known someone with access to it. Did that mean the murder had been a collaborative effort, and that there were two killers to apprehend? Great.

      In the bedroom, the telephone lay where she’d left it, on one of the tasseled pillows piled on the four-poster bed. Its little screen gazed up at her blankly. No, he doesn’t need you right now.

      She tried a telepathic message instead: Alasdair, let everyone else deal with the crime scene. Come get dinner.

      Her summons produced only Dougie, who trotted out of the dressing room licking his lips, leaped onto the bed, and snuggled down amidst the pillows. Jean regarded him with a touch of envy. Not so long ago she’d been proud of her hard-earned self-sufficiency, the sort of pride that went before falling in love. Now she was incomplete without a man, if far from just any man.

      They had been through more together in less than a year than she and her first husband had experienced in two decades. Alasdair had never met her ex, a man who was all ground and no imagination, but she’d met his, a woman who was all imagination and no ground. All four had promised to have and to hold until death did them part. But it wasn’t death that had parted them, although divorce was a sort of death.

      Fergie had lost his wife to disease. And Tina had lost Greg to murder.

      Jean jerked to attention as the clock struck six-thirty. Places to go, people to see, clues to ferret out. Tucking the phone into her second-best evening bag, a small leather pouch on a long strap, she gave her engagement ring a quick polish against her skirt and charged out into the hall.

      She almost caromed off Scott Krum, who was lifting the lid of an ivory-inlaid chest opposite the door of the Charlie suite. He dropped it with a thud and whoosh that made the Grainne tapestry ripple. His teeth gleamed in a fixed smile framed by his dark—no, what Rab Finlay had was a beard. Scott’s goatee looked like it had been traced on his face by a black marker.

      “Oh,” he said. “Hi. I forgot the camera, the girls want snapshots, I came back upstairs—this is your room, huh?”

      “Mine and my fiancé’s, yes.”

      “Your fiancé is here, too?” He sidled away.

      With a suspicious glance at the chest—Fergie probably wasn’t keeping the family silver in there—and another at Scott—she didn’t see any cameras about his person, but a digital one would fit in a pocket—Jean locked the door and allowed herself to be led toward the staircase. “We’re getting married at St. Columcille’s, the Dunasheen chapel, on the third.”

      “Great, great. After you.” Averting his eyes from the bedizened suit of armor, to say nothing of the mistletoe, Scott waved her onto the turnpike stair.

      Jean stepped past the tripping stane and the chill spot, and at the second-floor landing asked, “So are y’all enjoying the Wallace suite?”

      “Heather hasn’t found much to complain about yet, and that’s saying something.”

      They walked down the first flight in silence, Jean breathing in the odors of roasting meat and baking pastry. Her stomach’s pitiful grumble reminded her she’d missed tea and Nancy Finlay’s superior baked goods, but then, she’d feasted on them yesterday, so it averaged out.

      Safely

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