Did You Declare the Corpse? (9 page)

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Authors: Patricia Sprinkle

BOOK: Did You Declare the Corpse?
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Laura spoke into my ear, “Looks like you’ve beat Dorothy to it, and found yourself a Highland gentleman.”
“He’s not a Highland gentleman. He’s from Glasgow.”
“Still, I think I’d better call Joe Riddley and report.”
“If I thought it would bring him running, I’d lend you my phone.”
She gave me a sympathetic look. “Are you missing him a lot?”
Only about every five minutes—any time I saw something I wanted him to look at, or heard something he’d get a chuckle out of, or whenever I had to hoist those bags or calculate a price in British money—but I saw no point in putting a damper on her trip. “No, I’m storing up memories so I can bore him to death when I get home.”
We strolled down to join Dorothy, Joyce, and Brandi, who all stood peering into the mist. Brandi exclaimed with delight each time an occasional parting showed islands in the middle of the loch.
Kenny settled the bag beneath his arm, stuck the mouthpiece between his lips, placed his fingers on the chanter and gave the bag a squeeze. A squawk soared across the water and into the mist. After the squawk, Kenny solemnly marched up and down the waterside while “Loch Lomond” reverberated among the hills.
I had gotten off the bus to enjoy the scenery and endure the music. I had no inkling that Kenny could play so well, or that his playing would touch something deep and plaintive within me. As the mournful notes rent the air, they created a vivid picture of lost love, sweet memories, and confidence that love survives beyond the grave. By the time the tune died into stillness, tears stung my eyes. “Is he really good,” I asked Laura, “or is it just the setting?”
“He’s good. He wins competitions all the time.” I saw that her eyes were wet and pink, and she dabbed them with a tissue and turned away.
“Oh, honey! Is it your folks you’re missing? Or Ben?”
She shook her head and spoke in a voice clogged with tears. “It’s Kenny. We talked a while last night, and oh, Mac, he’s so unhappy.” Now what was I supposed to say to that?
Nothing, as it turned out. Laura must have felt she’d said too much, because she turned and strode off down to the waterside.
Meanwhile, Brandi was applauding. “That was pretty,” she called. “What was it?”
“It’s called ‘Loch Lomond,’ ” Watty explained. “There’s a legend that after the Battle of Culloden, the English chose some at random to be hung and sent ithers walkin’ home, and this was written by a soldier who knew he’d be hung. He’d left his true love on these banks, y’ken? So he tells his comrade that by deein’, he’ll come home to her by the low road and arrive sooner than those who travel yon high road.” He jerked one thumb to indicate the road we’d just traveled and began a hoarse rendition of the chorus: “O, ye’ll tak the high r-r-road and I’ll tak the low r-r-r-oad . . .”
Brandi’s eyes widened in recognition. “I’ve heard that before. Play it again, Kenny.” She tilted her head to listen as he played it again. Only Sherry seemed unaffected by his playing. She leaned against the bus, filing her nails.
“That was marvelous!” Brandi set gold bangles ringing as she waved at him. “Now play something cheerful.” Kenny obliged.
The breeze was strong enough to penetrate my trench coat and sweater, and I was shivering all over, so when Kenny started a third tune, I decided to head back to the bus.
I found Jim busy at his laptop and Marcia working needlepoint. I slid in behind her and said, “No wonder the pipes are the national instrument of Scotland. What else could send music soaring so far among the hills and over the water?”
“They do sound fine,” she agreed.
After a few minutes’ silence, I asked, “Are you feeling any better?”
“A bit, perhaps.” She produced a slight cough, then gave me a weak smile. “It’s nothing for you to worry about, eh?” She returned to her needlework.
“What are you making?”
“Covers for my dining-room chairs. It helps steady my thoughts.”
Another silence while I tried to think of something else to say. She didn’t make it easy. “It’s nice that Dorothy came with you on this trip.”
She turned her work and started a row in the other direction. “Actually I only came to bring Dorothy. She’s very shy, eh? And even though she’s twenty-five, she still lives at home. Except for playing the flute, she’s not shown interest in much of anything, but she lit up last summer when I first started talking about coming to Scotland. This spring, I was about to back out of the trip, but she asked if she could come with me, so I decided to come after all. I hope that seeing a bit of the world might inspire her to spread her wings and begin to live a bit.”
Something she herself had said sent a spasm of pain across Marcia’s face. Before I could reply, she had given a pained little “Oh!” and closed her eyes. Then she pressed her lips together and laid her head back against the seat as if life had become too heavy to bear.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She nodded and murmured, “I will be in a few minutes.”
If I’d been a nurse, perhaps I could have helped her. As it was, I looked out my window at the loch in the mist and felt utterly useless.
I also felt cold. The heat was dissipating from the bus, and my toes were already numb.
The others came back about two minutes before I froze to my seat.
We stopped for morning coffee in a small village, with time to visit a few shops. I invited Marcia to join me, but she claimed she didn’t feel well enough. “Maybe tomorrow,” she promised with another slight cough.
I didn’t think she had a cold, though. I hadn’t heard her sneeze once, and never saw her lift a tissue to her nose. Still, something was dreadfully wrong. Her eyes were huge in her face, her skin drawn so tightly over her bones it looked like it would crack any minute.
Finding myself alone with Dorothy briefly in a wool shop, I asked her privately, “Do you know if something’s the matter with Marcia besides her cold? I mean, is she really ill and should we know it in case we need to get her to a doctor?”
Dorothy’s eyes grew sad. “No, she’s grieving. Her husband—a wonderful man, eh?—died right after Christmas, and it was a dreadful shock. He had cancer, but they never knew until three weeks before he died. Poor Marcia, they were very close, and she is wasting away with grief.”
She reached out and stroked a plaid wool blanket. “Nice rug, isn’t it?” the clerk asked.
Dorothy nodded with satisfaction. “This will be just the thing for my mum and dad.”
I bought one for each of my daughters-in-law, as well, choosing Martha’s because it was her family plaid and Cindy’s because it would match her color scheme. Gradually, I am getting to know what they prefer.
When we got back to the bus, I stowed mine in my new suitcase, but Dorothy shook hers out and handed it to Marcia. “There. Wrap up in that and keep warm when you stay on the bus, eh?” I wished I’d thought of that.
Marcia thanked her and wrapped up in the blanket right away, then turned her head toward the window to avoid further conversation. As we headed north, I watched her reflection. She stared at the hills and sky with greedy eyes, like she could not get enough of looking.
8
After the murder, the Auchnagar police sergeant would ask me, “Do ye ken if the victim had any enemies among your group? Did you feel any tensions, like?”
“We had lots of tensions,” I would admit, “but I didn’t expect any of them to end in murder.”
From Loch Lomond, we drove north to Glen Coe. Watty seemed to know a lot more about the region than Joyce did, so he kept up a running commentary. When we reached a stretch where mountains rose above bogs, hummocks, boulders and water that stretched to the mountain’s very roots, he called with obvious pride, “R-r-rannoch Moor-r-r.” A sweep of his arm sent the bus lurching over the center line toward an oncoming car. He righted it just in time.
“ ‘As waste as the sea: only the moorfowl and the peewees cryin’ upon it,’ ” he called, “ ‘and far over to the east, a herd of deer, moving like dots.’ ” When most of us immediately jumped up to look out the right windows, he cackled. “R-r-robert Louis Stevenson wr-r-rote that in
Kidnapped.
It hasna changed much, as ye can see. If you dinnae spot deer noo, ye’ll see some soon enough. Next stop, Glen Coe.”
As soon as we climbed down from the bus at Glen Coe, Dorothy set off alone down a narrow track like she was being drawn by an invisible beam, with the same spring in her step she’d had in Glasgow. Brandi said what the rest of us were thinking: “She looks like she’s going to meet somebody.”
Kenny wasn’t watching Dorothy. He was too busy taking Laura’s arm.
When he turned toward the glen, Sherry frowned at him and objected, “I want us to check out the shops.”
“Go on. I’ll be there after a while.” He gave Laura what I could only call a fatuous smile, and pulled her closer to him. “I don’t want Laura, here, wandering around alone and running into a Campbell.”
Sherry glared at her husband. “There is nothing funny about a massacre.” Her voice was sharp.
“Besides,” Laura added, “I doubt there are any Campbells around.” She removed Kenny’s hand from her arm and stepped away from him.
I was just irritated enough with him and Sherry both to clap both palms to my cheeks and exclaim, “Oh, dear, I think my daddy’s grandmother was a Campbell. Is that bad?”
Watty flapped one hand. “Dinna fash yerselves. The massacre’s a matter of three hundred years and more. Go enjoy. Buy souvenirs. Improve the economy.” He waved us all away like chickens and shuffled back to the bus.
Sherry began walking purposefully toward the shops, calling over one shoulder, “Come
on,
Kenny. I want to shop.”
“Go.” Laura gave him a little push. “I’m in no danger from Mac. Besides, my family came from Uist and Skye.” Kenny took off after his wife, kilt rippling against his calves.
When he was gone, though, Laura frowned down at me. “You never mentioned you had a Campbell in your family.”
“I don’t. I just couldn’t resist that, the way they were carrying on.”
“It was none of your business.” She turned on one heel and strode away.
Brandi hurried after her, exuding waves of exotic perfume. “Laura? Wait up. Would you show me around and tell me about the massacre? I don’t know a thing about it, and Jimmy’s staying on the bus.”
I watched them go and felt a twinge of distress. I couldn’t ever remember quarreling with Laura, and while what I had done wasn’t nice, her response seemed out of proportion. I hoped she had better sense than to be renewing her old interest in Kenny Boyd.
Abandoned, I walked alone up the glen. Laura’s voice came back to me in snatches carried by a brutal wind. “. . . sixteen ninety-two . . . wouldn’t swear . . . invited to dinner . . . women and children. . . .”
I pulled my collar tight against my throat, shivering not just from cold. An odor of death and betrayal seemed to hover just beneath the thick gray clouds in the lowering sky. Snow capped the mountains, and shifting waves of mist made them look remote and menacing. I’d read the story before I left home, so as I walked, I tried to imagine the glen as it had been in 1692. I saw the old chief, looking a bit like Watty, first refusing to swear loyalty to the King of England, then changing his mind and setting off through February snow to Inverness, leaving his people behind. As I wandered farther and farther from the parking lot, I pictured the Campbells arriving in force, pretending to be friends and accepting the hospitality of the MacDonalds, whose homes would have been scattered all up and down the glen. I left the main path and followed a track uphill, trying to get a vantage point where I could see the whole sweep of the valley. But when I got to imagining the actual massacre, picturing the Campbells rising before dawn intending to wipe out every man, woman and child in the glen, I felt so weak, I had to lean against a nearby stone.
The valley certainly made a perfect trap. Cliffs rose three thousand feet on both sides, and the hills at the end were too rugged to be easily crossed. What panic there must have been! What terror! And what despair as women watched their children hacked down before the murderers turned on them. If there ever was a place imprinted with a day of destruction, this was it.
To add to the eeriness, the whole time I’d been walking a thick mist had drifted down from the hills, cold and clammy as death itself. Now, in an instant, the mist fell like a curtain to my feet and somewhere in the distance, pipes began to play. Mournful notes wailed from hill to hill. I could rationally tell myself there was a live piper—probably Kenny— playing somewhere up the glen. It was easier to believe that the music was floating from beyond history to mourn the massacre at Glen Coe.
“This is spooky,” I said aloud. Like my daddy used to say, “You have to talk to yourself occasionally, to be sure of getting some intelligent conversation.” I hunched up in my coat and put out a hand, but I couldn’t even see it at the end of my arm, much less the track that led down to the path I’d come in on. The boulder against which I leaned was all that was left of the world. As I peered through the whiteness for any familiar landmark and saw none, terror rose in me.

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