Chapter 11 #2
“It’s nothing. An old friend.” I flex my fingers and they complain about it, loudly.
“I have fibromyalgia. My body decided years ago it would hurt for no particular reason, and the cold and the wet make it worse, and I just walked here through both, so.” I shrug, the practiced shrug, the one that says please don’t make it a thing. “It’ll settle.”
I expect him to do what people do—the quick sympathetic noise, the changing of the subject, the faint discomfort of the healthy faced with a body that doesn’t work right.
Instead he crouches by the hearth and builds the fire up higher, deliberately, until the heat of it reaches me where I sit, and then he takes the velvet from where it’s slipped off one shoulder and draws it back up, settling it over the worst of where I hurt without my having told him where that is.
“Then we’ll keep you warm,” he says simply. “And you’ll not move from that chair until you’re ready to. There’s no hurry in this house. There’s never been any hurry in this house.”
Something in my chest goes tight and hot, and it has nothing to do with the whisky. Because nobody does that. Nobody just…believes it, and adjusts, no questions asked, no making me prove it first.
“You didn’t ask if I was exaggerating,” I say, before I can stop myself.
He looks at me, faintly puzzled, like the thought hadn’t occurred. “Why would you exaggerate your own pain to me?”
And I don’t have an answer for that, because the honest one is because everyone makes you, and I’m not ready to say a true thing that large to a man I barely know.
He seems to read this on my face too because he says, “Whisky?”
“Yes, please,” I say, now grateful for the change of subject. All this attention, this beautiful, focused attention on my pain, is making my heart bloom.
He pours me a generous serving standing at his bar cart, and hands me the glass.
I drink. It burns, but it burns so good. I can tell the whisky is older than I am and probably expensive as hell.
He starts putting together a fire with logs from a brass bin and it lights quickly. In no time, I can feel the flames.
He drags another chair toward the fire and sits down across from me, looking at me through the firelight. The smile has gentled now, but has not gone. He still has that look of awe in his face—though I detect something else there; something I don’t want to read too much into.
I find my voice.
“I read the letters.”
His face falters slightly. “What letters?”
“Effie’s letters. They were in the trunk.”
A pause. He does not look away.
“I’m not exactly sure what letters you’re talking about.”
I might believe him.
“Seventy-five years of them. From 1949, to a year before she died. She never sent any of them.”
He looks down at the glass in his hand. “Well, that explains why I’d never heard of them, doesn’t it?”
Maybe.
“She wrote them to a man named Eachann but saved every one of them.”
He turns the glass once in his fingers, watching the amber catch the fire. His face has is impassive and impossible to read.
“Aye.”
“Who is Eachann? It’s in this castle’s name, isn’t it? The sign at the start of your driveway.”
“Yes. A name this castle has been called by, the man who lives here. The local term, going back a long time. Means chief. Leader.”
“So who was the man she wrote to?”
“Hard to say without seeing the letters.”
I have another sip of whisky. This time it goes down even smoother.
“There was a name in one of the letters,” I continue after a swallow. “Well, in a list. Catriona Carmichael. Inspector Sinclair came to the cottage and told me she went missing in 1962. Effie was the last person to see her alive.”
He looks up at me sharply. “Sinclair came to your cottage?”
“Yeah. A few days ago.”
He sets his glass down. His face has changed—not worried but definitely alert—his posture stiff, eyes more intense.
“What did he ask you?”
“About the man on my property I reported the other week. He wants me to call him the next time I see that man.”
“And will you call him?”
“No. I don’t know what man he’s talking about.”
I’m tempted to wink so he knows what I mean.
He looks at me for a long moment, the light from the fire dancing on his face hypnotically, his eyes seeming to spark with flames. Suddenly I’m out of breath again.
He picks the glass back up.
“Catriona Carmichael,” he says quietly. “The name sounds familiar. From the village, maybe, but very long ago. She had something to do with your aunt?”
“Seems so.”
“Hmmm.”
We lapse into silence, save for the crackling fire. The whisky is warm in my chest, and the blanket is heavy on my shoulders, and outside, the rain has slackened to a quieter rain, the kind that will fall steadily now for hours.
But I’m not done yet.
“The letters were with a list that had forty-seven names, including Carmichael’s.”
He waits, staring at me curiously.
“I think some of them are the drowned wives.” I go on, as silly as it sounds. “From the folk tales or legends. I think Effie was keeping count.”
“Aye.” He turns the glass in his hand. “She would have.”
“Did she know those women?”
“Hard to say, but that’s the sort of thing she would keep track of.” He peers at me. “The two of you are very much alike.”
Maybe too alike.
“Drowned by what? What drowned the wives?”
A small silence.