Highland Laddie Gone

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ELIZABETH caught her breath. Here goes, she thought. Cameron Dawson and Sheriff MacDonald were walking back together on the path that led to the parking area. She wanted to see him so badly. She wished he were in China. She wanted to run and hold him, right in front of everybody. She was scared to death of him. And mostly, she kept forgetting to breathe.

Before she could make up her mind to lose herself in the crowd at the counter, he had caught sight of her and waved, smiling. Elizabeth waved back, feeling the hot flush in her cheeks. Damn you, anyway, Cameron, she thought. You’re like a bloody baby giraffe: you’re trampling me and you don’t even know it.

Bloody! Even the words were his.

He had said something to the sheriff-who had gone into the hospitality tent-and now he was coming toward her as innocently as a falling cable car. I love you so much, she thought; please get the hell away from me. I don’t want to live through the next five minutes, and you’re damn sure not going to enjoy it either, kid.

He still had about twenty yards to traverse, during which time she tried psyching herself into indifference. Sometimes he hardly even knows I’m there, she told herself; he talks to me-at me-as if he were cleaning out his mind. And when I try to tell him things, he replies with something so off-the-wall that he can’t have been listening. I wonder if he even takes women seriously. I might as well be a seal, sometimes.

This line of reasoning might have worked if it had not been overlaid with a ton of subjectivity, all in the offendder’s favor. The part of Elizabeth’s mind reserved for the defense replied with a soft-focus video memory of the night before, accompanied by a sound track of a country song: “Loving you feels just like coming home.”

Oh, well, she thought, when my level of reasoning is reduced to quoting country music, I might as well throw myself in front of a Mack truck. A MacTruck, she thought ruefully. And here it comes.

Cameron Dawson, still a bit edgy from having to suffer fools gladly for the last hour or so, was blissfully unaware that he personified disaster. “Hello,” he said, still smiling. “I nearly got myself thrown in jail just now. I tried to do a good deed, mind you, and keep a bloody drunk off the road by giving him a lift, and that sheriff wanted to put me away.”

“I expect you were on the brew yourself,” Elizabeth replied, remembering Heather’s phrase.

Cameron blinked. “What? No, I don’t think so. Dr. Campbell is dead, so I expect I’ll be allowed to go ahead with my seal research.”

“What does that have to do with drinking?”

“We weren’t talking about drinking,” Cameron pointed out. “ ‘On the brew’ means unemployed.”

Elizabeth shrugged. Heather couldn’t have meant it that way. British nobles did not have unemployed fathers. (Did they?) Apparently the nobles had their own version of slang. She was too polite to mention this to Cameron, though.

“I’ve just been up with the sheriff, looking at poor Mr. Forsyth. He was a very nice fellow; it’s a great pity.” He looked at her. “Is that sort of thing usual in this country?”

“Two murders a day?” murmured Elizabeth. “Not usually in one’s immediate vicinity.” She did not offer any further topics of conversation, which was most unusual for Elizabeth, who often talked to avoid having to communicate.

“Is anything wrong?” asked Cameron finally.

“We need to talk,” Elizabeth said quietly.

Oh shit, thought Cameron. He may have only been in the States for a matter of hours, but cultural gap or no, when a woman says, “We have to talk,” there’s a storm brewing. “Okay,” he said pleasantly. “Want to walk a bit while we’re doing it?”

Elizabeth nodded. In the direction of a cliff, she thought. “It isn’t really very important,” she murmured when they were out of the festival crowd. “Just something I thought I probably ought to ask you.”

Cameron was silent for a moment, and his ears had turned noticeably redder. “Fire away, ma’am,” he said, still as calm as ever. It isn’t very important was another danger sign.

Elizabeth looked at the soft green mountains couching the sky like so many overstuffed sofas. Appalachian mountains, she thought: you can’t see them for the trees. And we are just like them: everything is soft and covered up by layers of politeness and caution. I couldn’t say anything straight out if my life depended on it. She wondered what the mountains were like in Scotland.

“I realize that last night probably didn’t mean anything,” she began slowly.

Cameron didn’t look at her. “I don’t know,” he said carefully. “It did to me.”

“Well, I just wanted you to know that you don’t have to keep spending time with me if you don’t want to. If you’d rather be with somebody else, I’ll understand.”

“Someone else? I’ve spent the last two hours with a drunk and a sheriff who thinks I’m a spy. Is that your idea of competition?”

“No. I thought there was someone else here that you might want to be with. And I guess she needs you more than I do, now that her husband-”

Cameron thought it all through very carefully. She and husband and Elizabeth’s look of moist-eyed nobility. He took a wild guess. “Are you talking about Heather?”

“I know it’s none of my business,” Elizabeth murmured. “It was pretty obvious that you knew her back in Scotland, and I thought you might still be in love with her.”

The rest of her carefully planned speech might have rivaled Sydney Carton’s address from the guillotine, but she didn’t get to deliver it. It would have spoiled the emotional content of the scene, what with Cameron sitting on the ground laughing. Elizabeth was confused. There is something here that I’m missing, she told herself. It wasn’t the kind of laughing that one associates with guilt or embarrassment. He was laughing just as if she had said something incredibly stupid.

“I suppose it’s all over now as far as you’re concerned, but I’m not sure about her. She probably should have someone she likes with her right now. Oh, maybe you should call the British embassy. After all, she is the niece of the Duke of Rothesay, and perhaps they’d send someone to advise her.”

Cameron, still grinning, looked up at her. “What did you say?”

“That the British embassy might send someone-”

“No. Before that. She’s what?”

“I don’t know what her title is. Walter just says that she’s the niece of the Duke of Rothesay. He’s been bragging about it all weekend. Of course, you’d know, wouldn’t you? What is the correct thing to call her?”

His eyes narrowed. “I think impostor would just about cover it,” he said evenly.

“What?”

“Everyone kept telling me she had a title, and I thought she was claiming to be a cousin of a life-peer. That was just barely possible. She wouldn’t have a title, of course, but I put it down to American generalization. I wouldn’t have thought she could get anyone to fall for this rubbish, though.”

“What rubbish?”

“Do you know who the Duke of Rothesay is?”

Elizabeth shook her head.

“It’s the Scottish title for the Prince of Wales. In other words, the present Bonnie Prince Charlie.”

“Walter must have got it wrong, then. Maybe it’s an earl with a similar title.”

Cameron patted the grass beside him. “Sit down. We’re going to talk about this long-lost love of mine.” When Elizabeth had settled beside him, being careful not to get too close-she still wasn’t sure about all of it-Cameron said, “All right. Granted that Heather and I are both Scottish. But do you notice any differences between us?”

Discarding all the time-wasting smart answers, Elizabeth said, “Well, her accent. And you don’t seem to use the same words much.”

“Very good, ma’am. What about her accent?”

“It’s so cute. Yours sounds sort of BBC, but hers is really Scottish.”

“Bloody hell!” muttered Cameron, shaking his head. “I see how she’s pulled it off then.” He sighed. “Heather’s accent, my dear, is perfectly normal if you happen to be from the Gorbals. That’s the slum area of Glasgow.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure! And I let her know it, too, when we were at that party of theirs. I suppose that was why she went out of her way to be insulting.”

Elizabeth tried to remember the gibberish they’d been talking at the party. “Something about a Ming bird,” she said at last. “I remember thinking about Chinese art.”

Cameron sighed. “She said the bobcat stank. A ming is a bad smell.” He paused, thinking how to word the next bit. “And a bird is a girl.”

Elizabeth scowled. “Why that… What else did she say?”

“Let’s see… Right after she made that remark, I decided to test her ladyship. So I said-”

“What was that Bella… something?”

“Oh, that. I was talking about schools. She claimed to have gone to Park, which is an exclusive girls’ school in Glasgow, and I knew that was rubbish. So I said, Bellahouston.”

“What’s that?”

“A public park. The only park she could get into, I meant.”

“You also asked her about a farm, didn’t you?”

“A farm? Oh, I must have asked, did she come from a dear green place.”

“Isn’t that a farm?”

“No. In Gaelic the word for dear green place is Glasgow.” Elizabeth brightened. “You know Gaelic?”

“About a dozen words.”

So Lachlan had been right about that. “She’s been calling you a Sloane Ranger, whatever that is.”

“Yes. I think you have another word for it in America. Preppy?”

“How would she know that?”

Cameron smiled. “Can you spot American ones?”

“Of course! I see what you mean. You spotted her by her accent and vocabulary, and she knew you for the same reasons.” She looked suspicious. “But you must have known her before, because you had pet names for each other.”

“We did? What?”

Elizabeth was never going to forget those. “Jimmy and Senga,” she said promptly.

He laughed. “Do you have a name you call somebody when you don’t know their name?”

She thought about it. “Buddy? Like ‘Hey, Buddy, watch it!’ ”

“Exactly. We say Jimmy. And Senga is…” He hesitated.

“Is what?”

“Agnes spelled backwards. It’s really used as a name.” He smiled. “But not by the nieces of dukes.”

Elizabeth nodded slowly. “Like Ethel-May. So you knew that Heather was a phony aristocrat. Who else would know?”

“Any Scot.” Cameron shrugged. “Anyone who knew much about Scotland.”

“Lachlan Forsyth?”

“None better.”

“And the fact that the Duke of Rothesay is Prince Charles. Anybody who knew a lot about genealogy and Scottish traditions would know that.”

“I expect so. They mentioned it during the royal wedding, which is how I happened to know. Watched it on the TV at the lab.”

“What’s a baby sham?”

“What does that have to do with anything? Babycham is a drink that you might get at the pub… for a Senga.”

Elizabeth nodded slowly. “Then Colin Campbell knew.”

“Of course. I didn’t say anything about her passing herself off as a snob. It wasn’t any business of mine, and I certainly didn’t think you’d be jumping to the daft conclusions you did. Anybody could see she hated me.” He scowled. “She called me a toffee-nose”

Elizabeth kissed him on the cheek. “I think you have a beautiful nose,” she said. “And the rest of you is pretty adorable, too, but right now we have to go and find the sheriff.” She stood up and brushed the grass from her skirt.

“What?” said Cameron.

“We have a murder to solve. And once that’s out of the way, you can get back to biology.” Seeing his bewilderment, she added, “Not seals and porpoises.”

Sheriff Lightfoot MacDonald, already in a black mood at having to spell out skian dubh on umpty-million police forms, scowled at the two young people in front of him-holding hands, yet! “I ain’t no goddamn justice of the peace,” he rumbled.

“No, Sheriff,” said Elizabeth politely, letting go of Cameron’s hand. “We brought you some information about the murder.”

“We’ve solved it!” Cameron chimed in.

Lightfoot’s headache went up a notch. “One of you confessing?” he drawled.

Elizabeth and Cameron looked at each other. “Let me explain,” she said. “You help me out on the cultural points.”

Lightfoot looked at his watch and yawned.

“I guess to understand the murders, you’d have to know about Scottish-Americans,” Elizabeth began.

“We aren’t all crazy,” grumbled the descendant of Flora MacDonald.

“No,” Cameron agreed. “But most of the ones here don’t know much about Scotland in the present century.”

“They don’t even want to. They’re perfectly happy rooting around for ancestors who might have held the Bonnie Prince’s horse, or been a third cousin of someone with a title. Titles are very glamorous to Americans. So when Heather McSkye-”

“Which couldn’t be her real name,” Cameron put in. “McSkye, indeed!”

“-When Heather claimed to be the niece of a duke, it just bowled poor Walter over.”

“So?” growled Lightfoot, hoping this was leading somewhere soon.

“So he divorced his wife and married her, which I’m practically sure he wouldn’t have done otherwise. He might have been attracted to her, but I think it would have passed otherwise. She wasn’t a very nice person.”

“She was a right bloody bitch.”

“Which brings us to another not-very-nice person,” said Elizabeth, ignoring him. “Colin Campbell. He was obsessed with Scottish traditions, and ancestry, and all the rest of it. So when he heard who Heather claimed to be, he knew she was a phony.”

“Why?” asked Lightfoot, interested.

Elizabeth explained about the Duke of Rothesay, and Heather’s real background as evidenced by her accent and manner. “Cameron knew she was a fake right away,” she said.

The sheriff looked over at Dr. Dawson. “Then how come you’re not dead, boy?”

“I think it’s because I let her know that I wasn’t interested in giving the game away,” said Cameron slowly.

“I think it’s because he hasn’t been near her since, and he hasn’t been alone all day,” said Elizabeth. “Anyway, Colin Campbell would have been delighted to make a fool of Walter in front of the whole festival. He already had a score to settle with him about that land business.”

The sheriff nodded. “I know about that. Go on.”

“He told Walter that he wanted to call a meeting about a fraud, and he meant Lachlan Forsyth and the S.R.A., but then he met Heather. I’m sure he was planning to put her in as Fraud: Part Two, and she overheard about the meeting and may have known what he planned. He let her know he was on to her.”

“How?”

“He congratulated her on having a new baby cousin. Prince Charles and Princess Diana have a new baby, of course. So that she knew that he realized who the Duke of Rothesay was.”

“So she killed him to keep the secret?”

“Yes. She had just as much access to Walter’s skian dubh as he did.”

“That’s the part that don’t make sense,” Lightfoot remarked. “If a woman kills somebody in order to keep her husband from being disillusioned with her, then why would she go and use his weapon-marked with his fingerprints-and get him arrested for the crime?”

Elizabeth thought it over. “I don’t think Heather loved Walter. She didn’t want him to divorce her, but that was for economic reasons.”

“If he was sent to prison for the crime, she would have control of all his money, wouldn’t she?” asked Cameron. “A lot of money and no husband might be preferable to having money and one you didn’t care for, especially if you were always having to worry about your lies coming out. Getting him sent away might have been a great relief for her.”

Elizabeth nodded. “I agree. I think she went to see Colin Campbell early this morning and stabbed him-before he could call that board meeting and ruin her scheme.”

“What about murder number two?”

“Another source of danger,” said Elizabeth. “Lachlan would have known she was a fake as well.”

“He’d have got it faster than I did,” said Cameron. “He knew which part of Edinburgh I came from straight after I’d met him.”

“Blackmail?” asked Lightfoot.

“Maybe,” sighed Elizabeth. “But he didn’t approach her until after Walter was arrested, did he? I don’t know. I’d like to think that he didn’t want the wrong person convicted for the murder, and that he wanted her to give herself up.”

“Blackmail,” said Cameron.

“This isn’t evidence,” Lightfoot warned them.

“Tell Walter the truth about her,” Elizabeth advised. “I’ll bet he knows that she took the skian dubh, and that she wasn’t around early this morning. You’ll have all the evidence you need.”

“You’ll give her the third degree, anyway, won’t you, Sheriff?” asked Cameron.

Lightfoot turned to Elizabeth. “Get him out of here.”

She smiled. “I bet you’ll be glad to get this case out of the way.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He was dialing his mobile telephone. “Hello, Merle? Bring Dr. Hutcheson with you out to Glencoe Park. Yeah, we got a new development. Quick as you can. Out.” The sheriff put the phone back on his belt. “Yep, I sure will be glad to finish this case. We need to get this park back to normal, too.”

“For the Civil War reenactment?”

“Right. I still got practices to schedule. And then after that, I’ll have to come back up here next weekend, because the park is being used by the SCA.”

“Is that the group that dresses up in armor and holds jousting tournaments? Those people are crazy,” sniffed the Chattan Maid of the Cat.

“I agree with you there, ma’am,” said Confederate Colonel Lightfoot MacDonald.

Elizabeth found Marge Hutcheson in the practice meadow with Somerled and the rookie ducks. The feathered troops had calmed down considerably since they realized that they were not intended to be puppy chow, and they were now happily marching through concrete pipes and up little ramps, at the border collie’s bidding.

“We may be able to do the trials again tomorrow,” Marge remarked. “These brutes are nearly manageable now.”

Elizabeth nodded. The collie seemed in perfect control again, sliding across the field like the planchette of a Ouija board. “I came to tell you that the case is solved,” she said quietly.

“Someone confessed?” asked Marge.

“No. Cameron and I figured it out.” She hesitated, wondering what effect this was going to have. Marge didn’t need more complications in her life. She hoped this wouldn’t be one. “It was Heather.”

Marge pulled a cigarette out of the pack in her pocket. “Tell me about it,” she said.

Elizabeth explained about the Duke of Rothesay, and the rest of their deductions. “The sheriff brought Walter back, and we told him the truth. He had known, of course, that she was the logical person to have taken his skian dubh.”

“Didn’t want to believe it, of course,” muttered Marge.

“He did, though,” said Elizabeth. “When they confronted her with the evidence, she confessed, but she’s trying to say that Colin attacked her, and that it was self-defense.”

“Hardly twice in one day,” said Marge dryly. “You say Walter is back?”

“Yes. I think he’s in the camper. The sheriff took Heather away. Walter says that the lawyer can take over her case, since he’s on his way down, anyway.” Elizabeth hesitated again.

“What else?”

“Well… Walter wants to see you.”

“Does he?” Marge smiled. “I expect he does. Poor Walter. He’s had a roller-coaster of a year, hasn’t he?” She brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. “I’d better go and see about him.”

“Are you sure?” asked Elizabeth.

Marge Hutcheson smiled. “Oh, yes, Elizabeth. You have to be forgiving in this world. And I think it’s best for Walter. Tell him I’ll be along when I get things packed up here.”