Chapter 21
Rhona was not having a good morning. She’d awakened before her alarm and pulled on as many warm layers as didn’t restrict her ability to haul a toboggan back to where she’d discovered it, and she’d tiptoed out the back door to the coal bunker, only a winter robin witnessing her shuffling through the garden, and she’d pulled the door open to discover…
absolutely nothing in there. The toboggan was gone.
Had someone stolen her stolen secret? How could that be?
She checked the garden gate. It was bolted from the inside.
She walked round the thick frosted box hedge boundary of the garden.
There were no gaps a thief could have squeezed through.
Looking back at the house, it was in darkness.
No smoke curled from the chimney. Senga was still in bed.
Had she imagined it all, she asked the robin, who was taking a close interest in her because she was the sister who usually brought him breakfast crumbs of a morning.
Was she losing her mind? What was with all of this stuff with Eric? Was it coming back to her because she was losing her grip on reality? Senga had always accused her of being a daydreamer. Was she getting lost in dreams now?
The robin flew to the roof of the coal bunker and sang for his breakfast, but Rhona was going to disappoint him today, as her hopes seemed always to be disappointed, and without a thought in her mind other than the need to understand what on earth was going on, she left the garden by the side gate and walked the slippery pavements to the ski centre lock-up to check she hadn’t imagined all of this, thinking how if she got there and the lock-up was padlocked shut like it had been these many years, she’d have to call Doctor Alice and confess that her mind was starting to go the same way as her heart. It was breaking too.
Hamish wasn’t expecting visitors. He’d barely slept and felt rougher than the surface of a dry ski slope but he had work to do, and if he was going to take his mind off the sound of the small planes taking off from the aerodrome runway on the other side of the mountain, he had better keep his head down and his eyes on the task of emptying out the lock-up.
Florrie had sent off her report last night so, he mused wryly, even if he did find gold bullion inside his lock-up, it was way too late.
He’d been hauling old junk out into the frosty flood-lit morning for over an hour, the white steam of his warm breath in the icy air mixing with the tears to make it very hard to see any of the stuff very clearly.
His hands inside his gloves were numb, but he kept dragging it out.
The skip hire guy was coming later today to take it all away, so he’d no choice but to crack on.
‘Oh! It’s you, Hamish!’
The cry at his back startled him and he almost fell onto the chipped and faded giant ice cream cone sign he’d been trying to shift.
‘Rhona?’ He blinked away the moisture in his eyes. ‘What are you doing here?’
She didn’t seem to know.
‘Come here, sit yourself down.’ He helped lower her onto an old folding garden chair, after an attempt at swiping the cobwebs off.
After asking a few confused, incomplete questions (something about a long time ago and someone called Eric, and a sled, maybe?), she seemed to give up, hunching over her tightly clasped hands. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I must have…’ She didn’t finish that sentence either.
‘Come inside and have a cup of tea,’ he called after her, but she was already scurrying away.
What was going on in Cairn Dhu this December? Was everyone cracking up? Himself included?
Hamish had been about to follow after her when he heard the creaking strain from the newly exposed face of the junk mountain where a slow avalanche was starting.
There was nothing to do but stand clear and watch it happen as the highest of the clutter tumbled out onto the tarmac driveway, burying some of the ski paraphernalia he’d just pulled clear.
As the heap settled in its new formation and Hamish was thinking that at least this stuff would be easier to chuck in the skip now, a blue plastic document folder slid out from amongst the jumble. He watched it come to a stop at the toe of his boot.
His eyes were dragged upwards to where the first plane of the day flashed and blinked, ascending noisily into the sky, pointing south-east and, he assumed, carrying Florrie Norheim away from Scotland.
He followed the trail as it cut through the dark towards the brightening horizon.
It was probably for the best, since she was so desperately unhappy here, snowed under with misplaced remorse.
He’d wanted to tell her last night that she could have crushed the air from his lungs, like a skier drowning under snowfall, and he’d still have saved his last breath to thank her for it.
Last night, he hadn’t minded that it was all ending, didn’t spare a thought for his life here at the ski centre, so long as she wanted him the way she’d seemed to.
All night, awake in his bed, he’d replayed the fierce, desperate way she’d kissed him, trying to seduce him into staying with her.
From where he had summoned the determination to stop himself giving in to her, he’d never know.
Now, in the devastation of the morning after, he wasn’t so sure he was as willing a victim of her landslide as he’d first thought himself. There was nothing but carnage and sadness left in her wake, and she had left sad and broken too.
‘What a mess,’ he said, as the plane disappeared from view and he rubbed at the ache in his chest.
His eyes fell to the blue folder at his feet once more and with a resigned sigh, he stooped to pick it up and carried it inside the hire shop where he could warm himself with a crappy coffee from the machine, thinking how nothing of any good could possibly come from this unhappy morning.