LITMIR.BIZ

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though. Dun na sithein, fortress of the fairies. I could hardly resist following up on that.”

      “Sithein can mean fairies,” allowed Alasdair. He’d already expressed caution at Fergie’s take on the subject, not to mention Fergie’s promise of a private showing of the famous Fairy Flagon and the unveiling of yet another notion.

      Jean, though, was sharpening her pencil for the revelation. “But what are fairies? The little people who lived here before the Celts arrived? Nature spirits? Lingering ghosts of the dead?”

      “The old Celts remind me of our aboriginal people, seeing spirits in the landscape. You think any of my old MacLeod rellies are still hanging about to answer my questions, give me the good oil now?” Greg laughed, a peal of unaffected merriment. The wind snatched the sound from his lips and whisked it away.

      Jean and Alasdair shared a glance. If Greg was allergic to the paranormal like they were, then his old MacLeod relatives might well answer his questions. Or not. No one knew the capriciousness of ghosts better than the team of Fairbairn and Cameron.

      White gulls sailed overhead, stained pink by the ray of sunlight. Of sunset. “My old granny,” said Alasdair, “she was fond of saying that gulls carried the not-yet-departed spirits of the dead.”

      “Hopefully my old rellies are well and truly departed. I’d rather read ghost stories than end up in one.” Greg raised his arm to inspect his watch, a massive number that probably displayed stock quotes as well as time and date. “Well then, I’ve got time for a squint at the old castle first. It’s straight on, is it?”

      “That it is.” Alasdair pulled the small flashlight from his jacket pocket. “Have a care, the paths are rough and narrow, and there’s no artificial light. You’d best be using this torch. Just bring it back to the house when you’ve finished. It’s Fergie’s.”

      “Ta. See you later, then.” Greg squished away toward the old castle.

      Alasdair squelched away toward the new one. Jean fell into step beside him, not without a cautionary glance at his rosy face. “When did Fergie get nicknamed that, anyway?”

      “My dad was calling him Fergie Beg before I was born. That’s what his own dad called him, himself being Fergie Mor.”

      “Little Fergus and Big Fergus. But your dad wasn’t Alasdair Mor.”

      “No, he was one of dozens of Allan Camerons. Likely there were more than a few murderers amongst the old ones. Raiders, robbers, rapists. Rum crew.” He spoke casually, just stating a fact.

      “I’ve wondered if your choice of profession was overcompensation for a colorful family tree.”

      “Mind that my own dad went for a soldier. And his dad as well.”

      “That, too. Being born to a middle-aged, retired officer would shape your worldview. I’m sorry I never met your dad.”

      “He was right tolerant of colonials such as Americans and Australians.” Alasdair glanced back at the old castle, then stopped and turned. Jean followed his gaze.

      There was Greg, like Jean herself, an outlander called back to the dark and bloody ground of his forebears. Maybe he was a policeman, too, or a chartered accountant, or another mild-mannered academic-cum-journalist.

      He worked his way up the path outside the enceinte and disappeared into the keep. A few moments later the red jacket appeared atop the tower, gleaming like a tiny flame.

      The clouds thickened, the sun sank, and land and sea, loch and castle, fell into shadow. A patch of pale light sparked on the ruined battlements—Greg had switched on the flashlight. The spill of light over the rough and tumbled stones, part man’s work, part nature’s, seemed brighter than the indistinct human shape. Then both man-shape and light eased down behind the wall and were gone.

      Chapter Two

      With a slight shrug, Alasdair turned from the old castle toward the new. “Old Tormod was transported rather than hanged, and in those days judges and juries weren’t likely to split hairs. He may have killed the man in self-defense. Or else the jury was packed with MacLeods. At any rate, Greg’s right, there’s more to that story. Eighteen twenty-two’s a bit late for a clan feud. And for religious conflict, come to that.”

      “I wouldn’t think even your finetuned instinct for the criminal could do much about a two-centuries-old case,” Jean told him.

      “Does anything need doing about it? Other than you writing it up for Great Scot.”

      “Well, no,” conceded Jean. Several raindrops raked her face.

      They walked on toward the welcoming, if expensive, glow of Dunasheen’s windows and what had to be a mile and a half of fairy lights. Her ears and nose felt brittle as ice, and her hair waved so wildly around her wool scarf that the chill wind penetrated to her scalp. A flock of black-and-white birds whorled upward from the moor, their cries eerier than those of the gulls. Gulls sounded like rusty screen doors. The cry of the oystercatchers, though, carried a trailing bittersweet that made Jean think not of soon-to-depart souls, but of lost ones.

      The call of the birds faded into the silence. Or, rather, into the absence of human noise—no car engines, no voices, none of the constant electronic hum of modern life. All Jean heard was their own footsteps, the sigh of the wind and the unceasing rise and fall of the sea, like distant thunder. The snap and flap of the blue-and-white Scottish flag flying from Dunasheen’s highest tower. And the ring of a telephone.

      Hiking up his coat, Alasdair dug into the pocket of his jeans and eyed the glowing screen of his cell phone. “Ian said he’d phone before the office closes down for Hogmanay. Half a tick, Jean.”

      Typical Alasdair, to set the ring tone of his mobile to the ordinary double bleat of a British telephone. Typical Alasdair, to double-check with his provider before leaving Edinburgh and make sure his mobile would work here in this remote northwestern corner of Skye. He’d been dependent on her phone when they were in the United States in November. Now she was the one restricted to Fergie’s land lines. Funny, Jean thought, how even a portable phone on a base unit looked like an antique while a rotary dial seemed antediluvian.

      Beyond Alasdair and his electronic umbilical, the faintest of blushes still tinted the waves of the loch. Loch Roy probably meant Red Lake, from ruadh, red. Although the stones here weren’t red, not like those on the far side of Skye. Had the waters of the loch been tinted red with blood from various clan battles? More likely, the name came from a person’s name—Rory, also from ruadh, as in red hair. Or, considering the climate, red face, red from the cold or red from the reaction to that bright yellow globe in the sky when it condescended to appear.

      Did he have red hair, the ill-fated Rory MacLeod who had chosen the hard place below old Dunasheen over the sharp edge at his back? How about Greg’s ancestor Tormod, of dubious but intriguing memory?

      Alasdair said, “It’s by way of being a fake, is it? Well then, the Duke has no call claiming a large insurance settlement.”

      Cold as they were, Jean’s ears twitched, and she abandoned her wordsmith’s reverie.

      A pause while Ian, whose virtues lay in method rather than imagination, spoke. Then Alasdair replied, “No, it’s not at all surprising. Crusaders, soldiers, toffs on their Grand Tours, they’d bring back loads of art, antiques, artifacts, holy relics—not all of it legally, mind you. And half the time not knowing what they had, nor caring, come to that, so long as they put on a good show. There’s a trait’s not yet died out, not by a long chalk.”

      No, it hadn’t, Jean thought, with another look at the castle. But she couldn’t criticize Fergie and his daughter and business partner—who, despite Alasdair’s “wee,” was almost thirty years old—for trying to present a good enough show to hang onto their house, the physical representation of their own family tree.

      “Cheers, Ian. Enjoy your holiday.” Tucking the phone into his pocket, Alasdair turned to Jean.

      Her feet

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