Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Tee said, “There’s nothing really to tell.
Eli came in right when that Mickey guy was trying to leave—he was there with some older dude.
Eli seems like a really nice guy. I got the feeling from people around us that people underestimate him and how much he knows because he comes off as a big loveable teddy bear, but he’s—”
“A Minory.”
“I was gonna say a Baker but, yeah, I suppose that’s more accurate now. Eli made this Mickey fellow feel like he could be Mickey’s one saving grace, and then Mickey told him everything.”
Rowan had helped me up off the floor and was holding me in an embrace, both to calm me and to restrain me while Tee told the whole damn story at the pace of a slug.
I gave Rowan a squeeze and breathed in his clean linen and salty loch smell and felt my bones relax.
His right hand worked its way up my back and into my hair as Tee spoke.
I looked up at Rowan. We both know why he unloaded his burdens on Eli.
Yes, he hoped this very thing would happen, that word would get back to us.
Rowan massaged his thumb behind my ear, small but purposeful circles soothing me.
Over my shoulder at TJ, I asked for the final time, “What’d he say?”
Mickey felt small there in that dark Glentree pub. The kind of small that happens when a larger-than-life character from your past reemerges and fucks around. When he had been a child, no one understood that the sweet-talking man had been a blighter. A real piece of human flotsam.
Now, that man was saying, “If there’s more, son, we could be rich. Put this piss-poor climate behind us and find a nice beach in the Bahamas to live out our days.”
“For you.”
“What’d you say?” His Dublin tone reflected his neighborhood, where his question would be a threat as well.
Mickey had built something of himself. Sure, it wasn’t as posh as his colleagues preferred, but considering the tenement housing his father had raised him in with a hard hand, he was practically royalty now.
“Sounds like a pretty fairy-tale life for you. I’m not a fucking retiree, now, am I?
I’ll bugger off. You’re welcome to stay and attempt to nick the gold that will put you back inside or summon a pissed-off ghost who’ll cut your head off.
It’s up to you.” Mickey polished off his pint, and the heaviness of the glass hit the table hard.
The only outward sign that his temper was flaring.
He stood as his father leaned back in his chair.
The lines that etched the older man’s face from a hard life with hard drink now had lines of their own.
The son could still read the father by those cracks and crevices.
A barometer of his mood changes. This expression said he was about to launch into what a piece-of-shit kid he was, and if he didn’t do what he asked, then he was going to use his leverage to put him in prison with him.
Only the ruby was gone. And he’d properly dodged the constable, and Rowan had let him, watched with those keen, devil-blue eyes as Mickey had lied his way out of the grasp of the law and put himself squarely in MacLaoch’s debt.
Fuck that man. Fuck everything he owned, and the entire county of Glentree.
“So, that’s how it’s to be then, eh? Your father needs help, and this is how you repay him?” There it was, the Catholic guilt in a Protestant man. He was hypocrisy on two legs. “I spent my life trying to raise you right, trying to do right by you, and this is the thanks I get?”
“Blackmailing your own son for a couple of quid?”
“Couple of quid? Are you mad? This will put us up fine for the rest o’ our days, son. And you? Just walking away? What are you playing at?”
“If you’d seen the things I have, you’d run. You’d run so far and fast that you’d never look back. It’s what I’m trying to do, and you’re keeping me here and they’ll find me, and what I’d nearly escaped will get me. So, fuck off, I’m out. Far out. I’m transferring to a university in the Americas.”
“America?” His father sat up surprise written on his face. It was as if he couldn’t believe he’d leave him and all his good ideas behind.
“North, Central, South, doesn’t matter, as long as there’s an ocean between us.”
“My son, running for his pretty life?” Something dark slithered into Lou Gillian’s laugh.
The dig of how pretty he was sat like a red-hot button with Mickey.
The same face that got slapped for looking like his mum.
Mickey leaned in so close he could see the red veins in the whites of his father’s eyes.
“What you’ve done is fucked us. You took a Rembrandt from a place that is so haunted that its ghosts emerge out of the bodies of their descendants and murder in the name of their honor.
I saw one, nae, I saw two”—he held his fingers in front of his father’s face in case he was as stupid as he knew him to be—“breathing ghosts that ripped a hole in this life, so, no, I’ll not be going back onto MacLaoch land.
They know who I am and how to find me—I’ll not give them more of a reason to.
Though, again, if you want to, go right ahead.
But before you do,” he said, throwing cash down on the table, “tell me, white or red?”
“White or red what?” he spat back, his son’s temper igniting his own.
“White or red roses for your funeral, you fuck. ’Cause that is the only thing I’ll wonder when the police knock on my door and tell me you’re dead.”
“Oh, well, look who it is!” came a jolly voice from the door of the small pub.
Mickey looked up and groaned. He was too late; he’d never escape this place. Eli Campbell, cousin and sure as shit Minory descendant, was making his way over to their table, pint in hand and grin in place.
“Eli was there the whole time, then?” Rowan asked after he gave the top of my head an absent-minded kiss.
Tee nodded. “He was there having a pint on his day off, and he stayed when Mickey came in, then me.”
“We need to find Mickey,” I said into Rowan’s chest.
He sighed. Pure resignation. “And lock up tha’ gold.”
I looked up at his face to find him looking at Holly.
Her face said it all: Mickey was with her.
Back at Rowan: “Does anyone leave Glentree?”
“No, we’re a bit like tha’ ‘Hotel California’ song.” Something made him look at his phone.
Charmaine gave me one last look of apprehension before: “I’ve got paperwork to prep.”
Rowan stopped scrolling through his phone and gave me a coy smile. “Ye’ll never guess who has the worst timing.” I tried to spy at the screen, but he tucked it away, saying to Tee, “I could use a strapping young man for what I have to do next.”
“Who are you talking about? I’m neither strapping nor young.”
“Oh aye,” Holly protested, “looked in the mirror lately, love?”
This drew Charmaine’s gaze, and Holly slung her arm around TJ’s shoulder and waggled her eyebrows at her.
Rowan smiled and cuffed him on his free shoulder. “Aye, good. Come, we’ve a rescue to make.”
At that, TJ was all business, shaking off Holly before falling in stride next to Rowan. “What’s happened?”
Rowan assessed him as we went down the front steps then out the great front doors. “At ease. It’s a simple, and, I’m hoping, uneventful rescue.”
We got to the gravel, and I realized my heels weren’t going to cut it. “Well, crap,” I uttered and pulled my shoes off. “Hold up!”
I was back fast with my wellies on, and Holly and I jogged to catch up with Rowan and Tee.
Tee cut off his conversation with Rowan and dropped back to be next to me. “That thing you did back in the meeting room earlier, the close-your-eyes bit, what was that all about?”
I raised my eyebrow at him. “I’m not talking to you until you promise to stop humping Charmaine. Plus, I’m sure Marion, or someone at the pub, has filled you in.”
“No deal. She’s the one. Was it that communication thing?”
Rowan piped up. “Don’t worry about it; the more ye think about it, the more it’ll screw with yer mind.”
“Do you have to close your eyes to talk to each other?”
“Nope, but sometimes it helps me to concentrate. Look numb nuts, Charmaine tried to torch my career and me out of existence not more than a month ago.”
“I know, she told me.”
“She told you?”
“Yeah, but she used words like ‘my behavior was abhorrent and existed in a competitive bubble in which crushing you was the only aim.’”
“And you thought, ‘Yeah, awesome,’ and whipped your dick out to get some of that.”
Holly tittered.
“You’d make a sailor blush, Cole.”
“And yet you don’t deny it.”
“Hey, I get that it’s really shitty timing, but can you pause judgment for one week? And I’ll do the same for you.” TJ nodded to Rowan ahead of us.
Rowan had keen hearing and gave us a look over his shoulder before: One less body to bury in the cairn knoll. That’ll save us some work.
I gave a dark laugh. “Fine, sure, Tee. One week.”
This made him beam, and he gave me his arm. I hooked mine through his and pretended he was a real gentleman.
He whispered out of the corner of his mouth, “He did it again, didn’t he? Talking with his mind to you?”
“Yup.”
“Just grunts or general feelings come through that?”
“Full sentences, emotions, and sometimes a bit of sensory information about where he’s at. Like when he’s at the loch edge, I can smell the brine of the water.”
Tee was silent as we went through the tidy forest that Rupert kept from going full wild; we headed toward the bubbling burn of the Lady MacLaoch stream in the distance. Holly was enjoying watching Tee’s mind break.
Tee tightened up his arm, thinking. “I’m not sure I’d get used to that. You could at any point interrupt him to tell him to pick up groceries, or you could tell when he’s horn—”
I lightly punched TJ in the pectoral.
“Ow,” he said with a grin.
Holly chimed in. “Ye weren’t around when they were first dating, so ye don’t know, but they didn’t need a secret language for tha’. This one is always horny.”
I feigned surprise at seeing her thumb aim in my direction.
Tee shook me off. “Disgusting. What would Mother say?”
“Atta girl?”
Tee scoff-laughed and caught up with Rowan. The four of us worked our way through the property, taking trails that forked off each other. Fallen leaves and damp soil were soft underfoot.
The sound of running water rose in volume as we got closer to the main bridge that separated MacLaoch grounds from the rest of the area.
The air around us seemed wetter, as if the river were running through the air.
We broke out from the thick forest to a green meadow dotted with tiny white roman chamomile blossoms and sunshine-yellow marsh marigolds.
A while ago, the bridge had “mysteriously” lost four of its large timber treads, making it impassable for cars, and any walkers who didn’t want to tightrope walk along the railing, but it had been “repaired” upon Rowan’s request, for my brother’s visit.
So, it was interesting to see the treads gone again.
And clarified why we were on a “rescue” mission.
Someone we wanted to see was stuck on the other side of the river.
Holly read my mind. She patted her pocket where her phone was. “I’m so surprised folks knew exactly when the bank dude left. Huh, funny.”
“Holly…”
She shrugged at her laird. “It’ll be hard to serve bank papers when ye can’t access the property.”
“Holly…” he reiterated.
She beamed at him as if he were commending her on a job well done; then he returned the grin.
“Who are we meeting?” I called to Rowan.
His eyes sparkled as he looked back at me. “Someone who understands energy and was instrumental for you tae believe the unbelievable.”
Just then I saw who Rowan meant. I began waving exuberantly.
“Peabody!” I shouted across the splashing water. “Welcome!”
TJ squinted into the distance with Holly next to him. “Who’s Peabody, the old dude with glasses?”
“Yes!” I said and waved again as Peabody waved back with equal enthusiasm.
Rowan took Tee to the riverbank at the wooden bridge’s footing and was messing with the floating dock, guide ropes, and pulley system attached to it.
I cupped my hands around my mouth. “It’s good to see you!”
He gave me a thumbs-up and shouted back, “And you as well, Mrs. MacLaoch!”
Mrs. MacLaoch, I thought and smiled absently, looking over to Rowan; he paused to smile with me.
TJ ruined the moment by giving me a thumbs-up and a fake smile. “How’s that for an atta-girl? Mother is gonna shit a brick when she hears that.”
I sneered at him.
Rowan handed him a rope. “Pull.”
He pulled. “She will, you know,” he said to Rowan.
“I’ve yet to see a brick leave the anus of any being,” Rowan replied.
Holly wandered closer, pointing to something Rowan wasn’t looking at because he was too busy glaring at Tee.
“Tee,” I explained, “we have a date set for a traditional wedding. Mother will get her day in the sun.” My palms were beginning to sweat. Holly gave up on Rowan and waded through the tall grass down the embankment, her boots slipping here and there in the mud.
She stepped onto the movable dock like a pro and called to TJ, “Send me across, and I’ll help him over.”
Rowan put his hand on the rope, stopping Tee.
Something was on his mind: “When ye arrived, you got to punch me in the gut. I deserved that from you and took it as payment for being with your sister before fulfilling my honorable intentions toward her. Now? I’ve rectified that, and we are trying to honor your family as we move forward.
Dinnae threaten her with your mother’s animosity. She feels it. Without your assistance.”
“Guys, that’s not necessary—” I said.
TJ just bared his teeth at Rowan, not quite a grin and not quite a growl. “Take your hand off the line.”
“Your jabs are robbing Cole’s face of her smile and making her panic, and I won’t let it stand. Blood brother or nae.”
“Boys…” I said in warning.
Holly was halfway across the wide stream when she shouted back, “Oye! Ye gonna keep pulling, or do I have to take over?!”
TJ repeated, “Take your hand off the rope…”
“Tee,” I said, “if you sock Rowan again, I’ll tie rocks to your ankles and pitch you into the river.”
Keeping his gaze on TJ, Rowan said, “He won’t get another crack in.”
Tee yanked the rope hard. “Oh, really, Braveheart? I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“Guys! Can we focus on Peabody, please?”
At this Peabody waved again.
Rowan let go. “I prefer Rob Roy, and ye’ll heed my warning.”