Did You Declare the Corpse? (16 page)

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Authors: Patricia Sprinkle

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“Were you raised down South?”
She stiffened.
“I’ve often noticed that folks who grew up in the South tend to talk Southern when they get tired or disheartened,” I explained, “and you sounded real Southern just then.”
She shrugged without turning around. “I went to high school up north and stayed there afterwards, but my folks were from Georgia.”
“What part?” That question is as automatic for Southerners as swatting flies. Northerners generally ask what country somebody’s ancestors came from. We’re more concerned with which
county
somebody’s folks come from, in case we may be related or have mutual friends. Southerners don’t really trust strangers, but we’re willing to accept you if we can establish as rapidly as possible that we have a legitimate reason to.
She hesitated. “The middle part.”
That covers a lot of territory, but I didn’t like to press her. “Are they still there?”
“No. Daddy died years ago and Mama—she died a little later.” She blew her nose again. She probably had her reasons for being vague—like the fact that her teeth were still chattering in spite of the blanket.
“I’ve lost my parents, too, and you never get over that.” We stood there for a minute or two looking out the window, then I said, “You know what I wish we had? A cup of hot tea. Shall I call down and order up some? Or would you rather get into bed and forget these dratted folks?”
“I can make tea.” Our room was so small that one sideways step brought her to her suitcase. Before I could switch on the lamp again she had reached into a corner of her case and brought out one of those little electric converters and a coil that heats water in a cup. “Herbal okay with you?” She held up two bags. “So it won’t keep us awake?”
I was so busy admiring a woman who had traveled for a week and still knew exactly where to put her hands on something in her suitcase, I was slow to answer. Seeing she was still waiting, I nodded, although I generally think herbal tea tastes like brewed grass.
Her hand hovered over her case, and she murmured in dismay, “I’ve just got one mug.”
“I bought one this afternoon.” I was already rummaging in my Gilroy’s Highland Tours bag, where I was storing smaller souvenirs. “I’m taking it to our cook, but she won’t care if I use it first. She’ll like the swans. I’ve got some shortbread somewhere, too. I bought it for my older granddaughter, but it’s silly to carry it around when I can get more later.”
Joyce went to the bathroom to fill our mugs. I heard water running and figured she was also washing her face. Sure enough, she returned with her hair combed and her face clean, looking more like her usual brown-mouse self. Pity. I preferred the wild mountain woman.
Still, we had a good old time sitting on our beds sipping tea and munching shortbread in the middle of the night. “This is the most fun I’ve had on the whole trip,” she confessed.
“It ranks right up there,” I agreed. But I sure hoped I wouldn’t have to go home and tell Joe Riddley that a slumber tea party was the highlight of my trip.
“Don’t tell the others I got so moody,” she begged. “I must be having PMS or something.”
“Your secret is safe with me, honey. In your shoes, I’d be running down some hill screaming, if I wasn’t hitting somebody with one of those big claymores.”
She smiled, then grew serious. “Would you tell me something?” I nodded. “The other night at the ceilidh, when I had too much to drink, did I say anything—well, odd?”
I thought back. “Not that I can recall. Of course, I’d had a bit to drink, as well.” When she still seemed anxious, I added, “You sounded pretty bitter, I think. I wondered if you’d been through a nasty divorce or something.”
“Oh, yes. It was real nasty.” She took a sip of tea and added, “He got almost everything—even all the furniture we’d bought together, because his lawyer listed it as ‘used.’ I got the junk we’d bought in thrift stores, because his lawyer listed it all as ‘antiques.’ ”
“What about your lawyer?”
“He didn’t do a blessed thing. But I don’t like to talk about it.” She stood and held out her hand. “You want some more tea?”
“No, I’m warmed and fed.” I stretched and yawned. “It will be good to get to Auchnagar tomorrow, won’t it? When do we arrive?”
“Sometime in the afternoon.” She went to wash both our mugs, then brought them back and set them on the dresser. “Ready for bed?”
While she went to brush her teeth, I snuggled down into my bed and tried to get the sheets warm again. As I drifted off, I had a notion that something about our evening’s chat had puzzled me, but I was too sleepy to remember what it was.
13
You don’t need to know a thing about our two nights and a day in Inverness. We mostly saw sights and shopped—except for Jim, who left the hotel early Wednesday morning and didn’t return until time for tea. Sherry, Kenny, and Brandi continued their merry game of “Let’s see who can drive the others crazy first.” It was hard to determine who was ahead.
Thursday morning, however, I woke up singing. I kept singing as I packed. By mid-afternoon we’d be in Auchnagar, where I could take solitary walks on the moor, prowl around the village, and maybe find traces of my long-lost relatives. Most of all, I looked forward to four days of not being confined on a bus with the rest of our obstreperous group.
I never anticipated looking down at one of them in a coffin the very next day.
Within an hour after we got underway, though, I’d have consigned several to a lesser but still painful fate. To begin with, when Brandi and Jim got on, Jim slid into the seat by the door, so she slid in behind Watty.
Sherry climbed on and told Jim (pleasantly, for her), “You’ve got my seat.”
“I’d like to watch the road today.” He sounded about as movable as Georgia’s Stone Mountain.
All of us—including Sherry—could tell Brandi was waiting for her to make a scene. Instead, she shrugged. “Sure.” She took the seat behind him and started talking about fiddling.
That did not please Miss Brandi, so she started talking about plants for their new garden. They were like two little girls playing tug-of-war over one doll. Jim didn’t listen. He was leaning forward, hands clasped on the rail, staring down the road. I figured that his old bones, like mine, must be tired.
Brandi transferred her chatter to Watty, who practically put us in a ditch a couple of times answering her over his shoulder. Dorothy leaned up from behind me to whisper, “Think anybody would object if I stuck my scarf in Brandi’s mouth and tied it tight?”
“Not me,” I assured her. “I’m ready to rest, but I don’t want to do it in a hospital.”
Laura and Kenny had gone to the back bench that morning, where they carried on a soft conversation. However, what I could hear of it disturbed me. He was asking real personal questions about the motor companies’ business, and I didn’t like to hear Laura discussing her private affairs with a man she hadn’t seen for ten years.
Marcia was morose and stared at the scenery through a film of tears. I saw her wipe several away. Even Joyce was jumpy and short with us all. I suspected she was worried about her play, and I wished I had the nerve to say, “Hey, honey, we aren’t expecting Broadway. Relax and have fun.”
It appeared to me like Dorothy and I were the only ones enjoying ourselves, which was a real shame, because we were traveling through some mighty pretty country.
Auchnagar lies in the heart of Scotland, in the Grampian region, among mountains called the Cairngorms. Maybe I’m prejudiced because of my ancestors, but now that I’ve seen the eastern Highlands, it is easy for me to see why the royal family still goes there for an annual vacation. Unlike the stark hills of the West, these big rounded mountains tumble over one another like fat brown puppies. Bright splashing streams, which Watty called “burns,” somersault over boulders and plunge into silver rivers that slide through broad fields to the North Sea.
When Sherry lamented loudly, “It’s such a pity we came in April. When the heather’s in bloom, these hills are a glory of purple,” I had finally had enough of her complaints. After all, the air still held a tinge of mauve, while unexpected patches of daffodils and yellow Scotch broom brightened the roadside and grew along what Watty called “drystane dikes”—walls of stones made without mortar—that outlined pastures filled with black-faced sheep and lambs.
“Next time,” I called up to Sherry a mite tartly, “why don’t you come at a time of year when you won’t have to spend your trip ruining everybody else’s?”
“Yon trees,” Watty called loudly, waving toward thick stands of evergreens, “have all been planted in the last for-r-rty years to r-r-replace for-r-rests cut down in the last war-r-r.”
I was ashamed to have fussed at Sherry so publicly that Watty felt a need to smooth over my gaffe. “Sorry,” I called, but Sherry ignored me.
At Watty’s direction, we all craned our necks for a quick view of Balmoral Castle, and fifteen minutes later were glad to disembark for lunch in Braemar. Marcia roused herself to walk with the rest of us, led by Watty, up through the village to view the outside of the house where Robert Louis Stevenson wrote
Kidnapped.
En route, Kenny pontificated about some ruins by the banks of Cluny burn. I didn’t pay him much attention until he said, “It was Malcolm Canmore’s hunting lodge—you know, the one who defeated Macbeth.”
I climbed back on the bus reflecting that if we let them, almost anybody can teach us something. I hadn’t realized until then that Macbeth was a historical person.
From Braemar, we wended our way through more mountains until Watty announced, “In chust a wee while we’ll be in Auchnagar.”
I leaned up in my seat and asked Marcia, “Excited about seeing your family?”
She gave me a wan smile. “A little nervous, really. There’s only Eileen—my mother’s sister—and her son, Roddy, and I’ve only seen her once and never met him.” She raised her voice a notch and her dark eyes lit with a gentle twinkle. “Roddy’s thirty, so I’ve earmarked him for Dorothy, eh?”
I looked over my shoulder and saw Dorothy looking out the window like she wasn’t listening, but her cheeks were bright pink again.
“And you’ve only met your aunt once?” Encouraged by that rare shaft of light in the clouds that hovered over her, I wanted to broaden it if I could.
She nodded. “When I was nine, Mum brought me over to visit her parents, eh? But as far as I was concerned, it was a dreadful trip. I hated the food and the rain, and my grandparents were austere, dour folks who wouldn’t spend money on what they called ‘frivolities’ like heated rooms or television. I was disgusted to have such backwards relatives, and didn’t mind sharing that opinion.” Her lips curved in a smile of rueful remembrance. “Eileen called me a ‘wee holy terror,’ eh? And I was, right enough. To make matters worse, I couldn’t understand half of what they said, and it made me furious that Mum could. Before we left to go back to Canada, I announced to all my relations that I hated Scotland and would never return. Poor Mum was mortified, eh? After that, she came back on her own every few years, but she never brought me or my brothers.” She gave a low chuckle. “Eileen and Dugald hadn’t had children yet, and Mum always said they had Roddy the following year to show they could make a better job of him than she had of me.” At last she laughed aloud.
I laughed with her, astonished at how that changed her whole appearance. She must have been lovely before her husband’s death consumed her. I hurried to keep the conversation going. “So you haven’t seen your aunt at all since then.”
“No, but after Mum died last spring, I knew Eileen would want to know, so I wrote to tell her. She wrote back, giving an e-mail address and saying she and Dugald had bought this guest house several years ago and she’s been running it alone since his death. We started e-mailing back and forth, and we’ve both revised our initial opinions of each other, eh?” She chuckled again. “She seems quite pleasant.” Marcia hesitated, then added sadly, “Paul and I even talked about coming over to meet her last summer. He wanted to attend a history seminar on Skye. But Mum had been sick a long while, and I was so weary . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“Caring for a sick person can be exhausting,” I agreed, sorry to see her losing the animation she’d just had.
She sighed, then words burst from her. “I wish we had come! But before we’d made firm plans, Eileen wrote that she had this group from the States coming to stay this April, and they’d offered her two places for the price of one.” Her eyes filled with sudden tears. “I suggested that we postpone our trip until now, to celebrate our fifteenth anniversary. I never imagined it would be too late.” Her lips trembled and she pressed her hand across her mouth to still them.
“I’m proud of you for deciding to come anyway and bring Dorothy,” I told her briskly.
She shook her head. “Don’t be proud of me. It was Eileen and Dorothy. Eileen insisted that I still make the trip, even without Paul, and Dorothy offered to pay Paul’s share. But I wasn’t ready. I should have realized that. It’s been so hard, visiting all the places we looked forward to seeing together.” Now it was her voice that trembled, and she turned away from me to look out the window.

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