Chapter 35 Robyn
ROBYN
While extremely cozy, Mac’s cottage seemed to close in on me. In the sitting room, I stared around dazedly with hands on my hips. Outside, vigilant in a car, were two members of the security team. Guarding me. I flinched thinking how much paying for this had to be draining Lachlan’s coffers.
But Mac wouldn’t have felt free to leave me to go to work on the estate if his men weren’t outside. And I’d promised I’d stay put today, a promise I now regretted.
I was not a person who lounged around the house.
Deciding I could work on uploading new shots to my website, I moved to return upstairs for my laptop when I saw the pile of get-well cards sitting on Mac’s coffee table.
Oh right. He’d told me those came through the letterbox for me from the villagers after they heard about the car acc—well, it wasn’t an accident. The car incident.
I smiled at the thought, thinking how different it was living in a village compared to Boston. Growing up, Mom complained all the time how much things had changed since she was a kid.
“This used to be a community,” she’d gripe. “Now my neighbors can barely look me in the eye long enough to say a goddamn good-morning.”
But here, in Ardnoch, people cared enough to send a card to someone who’d only lived among them for a few months.
Deciding to open the cards first, I brought the pile into the kitchen, made coffee, and sat at the table.
There was one from Gordon and his wife. One from Morag and her husband.
Chen and her husband Wang Lei, Janet from the tourist shop, Suveer and Moira from the chocolate shop, and even a bunch from villagers I didn’t know well or hadn’t even met.
A card from Arrochar, and one from Thane and the kids.
There was even one from Jock and his family.
I was just reading a cute little card from Fergus when something prodded the back of my mind.
To Robyn,
Hope you feel better soon.
Fergus
I squinted at the handwritten card with its succinct, straight-to-the-point message. What was so familiar about it? Irritated, I took another sip of coffee, but I couldn’t tear my eyes off the words.
What was—
I tensed with dawning. “No way.”
It wasn’t the words that were familiar—it was the handwriting.
Suddenly, I was running through the cottage and only the tender scream of my ribs slowed me as I attempted to hoof it upstairs. Damn it, I huffed, irritated at my body. I still hurt from the crash.
Grabbing my laptop, I hurried downstairs and ignored the jarring pain of it against my bruised ribs. I was too excited to slow down.
Back in the kitchen, I reopened the card after opening Lachlan’s case file. I’d transferred it from Mac’s laptop to mine weeks ago.
Zooming in on the photo of the Post-it Notes Mac was obliged to hand over to the police, a chill brushed down my back.
We missed it. We should have ordered all of Ardnoch’s staff members to write something down for handwriting forensics to analyze.
I placed the get-well card up against the screen, my eyes bouncing from it to the Post-its bearing the message “Why don’t you see me?” Those were the ones that had been placed all over Lachlan’s stage office at the castle.
There was no mistaking it.
It was the exact handwriting.
Fuck!
I’d suspected the little shit weeks ago when Mac was first attacked, but I’d let his good-boy attitude and the Adairs’ belief in him sway me from questioning him further.
The handwriting was something, but we would need more evidence. Fergus was working at the estate because it wasn’t his day off and Lachlan hadn’t furloughed him. Quickly checking the file I’d obtained from Mac with staff addresses, I memorized Fergus’s.
I should call Mac. Yet I knew he’d leave me behind and go after Fergus without me. I wanted the satisfaction of getting the evidence to nail this prick. Call it stupid pride, call it vengeance, but this was personal. And it wasn’t like I’d go alone. I couldn’t.
There were two bodyguards waiting outside in a car.
Grabbing a few supplies, as ready as I could be, I locked up the cottage behind me and walked over to the car with the alert security guys. I slid into the back seat, and the two men turned to look at me.
“I’m Robyn,” I introduced myself. “You are?”
“Gillies,” the driver said.
“Smithy,” the other replied. “Problem?”
“Yeah. I need you to take me somewhere.”
“Okay.” Gillies switched on the engine. “Address?”
I told them, and he popped it into his GPS.
Only a few minutes later, I realized we were driving toward Arrochar’s bungalow. But then we veered off onto a quiet cul-de-sac with an ugly-looking, midcentury apartment block situated around a pretty courtyard. Arrochar’s home was a mere few minutes from here.
Probably coincidental, right? There weren’t a lot of places to live in a small village like Ardnoch.
“Don’t drive any farther,” I ordered as we approached and gestured to a spot outside a neighboring bungalow. “Park here.”
Gillies did as I instructed, and both men looked at me over their shoulders as if to say, “What now?”
If they accompanied me, neighbors would definitely be suspicious. They looked like the Men in Black.
“Wait here.”
“No,” Smithy said flatly. “We’re under strict orders to stay with you at all times.”
“You’re not exactly inconspicuous, and it’s important that no one sees me.
Now, I could have easily lost you by taking off through the backyard of my dad’s cottage, but I’m not an idiot, I’m not at my physical best, and going anywhere alone right now would make me a moron.
” I leaned into them. “But where I’m going, no one is home.
I just need to check some things out. I have my phone.
If you give me your number, I’ll call you from up there”—I gestured to the apartment block—“if I need you.”
It seemed to take them forever to deliberate, but finally, Gillies took my phone and typed in his info, replacing Mac as my first speed-dial number. Irritating, but I’d fix it later.
“Great. I won’t be long.” I got out and forced myself to stride with relaxed casualness up to the building.
I also tried not to look like I was checking out the building numbers while I actually was.
If any of Fergus’s neighbors were watching, I wanted them to think I’d been here before and was perfectly welcome.
Slipping my hand into my pocket as I strutted upstairs to the second floor, I pulled out the bobby pins I’d grabbed from my stuff back at Mac’s.
Following the concrete gallery around to the side of the building that housed Fergus’s apartment, I pulled one of the bobby pins apart and hoped I could do this as fast as I used to be able to.
Heart hammering, I got to his door and took another bobby pin in hand and bent the entire thing at a right angle to create a lever.
Inserting it into the lock, hoping my back hid my activities from outside view and I just looked like I was turning a key, I took the other splayed pin, made a loop out of the end for gripping and began to pick the lock.
Sweating, because it took me longer than it should have, I forced myself not to look over my shoulder and sighed with relief as I heard the door click open. Removing the bobby pins, I pushed into the apartment and quietly closed the door behind me. My ribs ached from the tension.
Believe it or not, it was Regan who taught me how to pick a lock with bobby pins. She googled it when she was a teenager for a reason still unbeknownst to me. But I thought it was a neat skill that might come in handy one day.
Thank you, baby sister.
It was dark—the curtains over the front window were shut.
Letting my eyes adjust to the gloom, I tried to hear over the rush of blood in my ears.
Nothing.
Stealthily, I made my way through the small apartment, checking every one of the four rooms, including behind cupboard doors. The apartment was empty.
But the fourth room was behind a locked door.
My heart rate escalated.
A locked door was never a good thing, right?
Making quick work of the lock with my bobby pins, I pushed inside and fumbled for a light switch. It snapped upward, and light flooded the tiny room.
“Holy shit.” A wave of nausea washed over me.
The room was obviously used for storage but scattered across the floor, as if he’d emptied the box and didn’t have time to tidy it, were photo albums, loose photographs, and magazine clippings. Lowering to my knees, I opened the albums and inhaled sharply.
The Adair family.
With Fergus.
Photos of him as a little boy, growing up with them. Most of the shots were of him and Brodan. But there was a cluster of photos of him and Arrochar, and when I saw those, I sucked in a breath.
Were the Adairs that blind?
The way Fergus looked at Arrochar was almost the same as how he looked at Brodan.
Pure hero worship.
There was a photo of Fergus with Arrochar at the ceilidh weeks ago. His arm around her, beaming at the camera. He wasn’t over her?
And the magazine articles were all about Brodan. Every single one of them. His face was blacked out with a marker in all of them.
Shit.
I lifted the lid on another nearby box and found more magazines. Another box filled with every film Brodan had starred in.
Where Lachlan fit in, I wasn’t sure. The messages were left for him, but … these boxes didn’t say proud friend. They told me with absolute certainty that Brodan, in particular, was the focus of Fergus’s obsession.
But why?
I yanked my phone out of my pocket because I had what I needed.
We’d go to the police with the post-it notes and cards so they could use it to obtain a warrant to search Fergus’s apartment.
The evidence needed to be collected legally, which meant I needed to get out of there and get the notes to the police.
Wanting to give Dad the heads up, I scrolled through my contacts trying to find him now that Gillies had taken him off my speed dial.
The phone burst into song in my hand as it rang, and I startled, cursing under my breath.