Finding Fraser (19 page)

Fickle Fortune…

10:30 pm, March 16

Inverness Airport, Scotland

Sudden, happy change of plans. Fortune
has smiled on me! My circumstances have altered a bit, and the quest to find my
Fraser carries on. Will report in at my next stop. Wish me luck!

- ES

Comments: 61

SophiaSheridan, Chicago, USA:

Well, thank god you’re all right. We’ve
been worried sick since hearing about the robbery. Why won’t you call? Surely
you will have to come home now. If you won’t call, perhaps you’ll send me an
email?

Gerald Abernathy, Ft. William, Scotland:

Not sure you’ll remember me, Emma, but we
met a few nights ago at the Clava Cairns. I promised you I would give you more
information if I could on the subject we both care about. Just wanted to tell
you that I found the circle, but no——ah——inhabitant. I
caught a terrible cold that night and I’m actually typing this from the lounge
at the hospital here in Fort William. If you do ever make it down to this neck
of the woods, look me up. I’ll be happy to give you the information about the
site. Maybe you’ll have better luck. My email is GAbernathy@ge*rgiabell.com

HiHoKitty, Sapporo, Japan:

Very relieved to hear you are well,
Emma-san. Book club send luck!

(Read 58 more comments
here
…)

I
woke in the gray dawn, swimming up to consciousness through the shreds of a
terrible nightmare.
American agents had forced me
onto a plane back to the US at gunpoint. We’d gotten somewhere deep over the
Atlantic Ocean before I discovered that there was no one flying the plane. I
had to take the controls. The plane dipped and weaved, and finally flew the
entire distance about ten feet above the waves. A whale spouted in the water beneath
us, we were so close. Sharks swam below us, keeping pace with the plane. One of
them had a laser beam strapped to his head, but even that didn’t give me pause.
Land in sight, I brought the plane down safely to the rousing applause of the
entire crew of the Pequod from MOBY DICK.

I sat up in bed, my body bathed in sweat,
adrenaline pumping. The cockpit dissolved around me into the shape of a drab
little room, about the size of my closet at home.

I wasn’t in an airplane with Captain Ahab. I
wasn’t in America.

I was in the town of Fort William, Scotland,
population unknown. I had a hundred pounds of Scottish sterling safe in an
inner pocket of my backpack. I had nearly three hundred and fifty more
transferred from my visa card to my current account.

And I had a journey to complete.

The previous night, after a quick stop at
the cash point, I’d spied an Internet-access-for-a-pound computer in the
airport, so I had sat down to scope out accommodation. I thought she might
offer me some compensation, but Mrs. Henderson had vanished with little more
than an apologetic smile at the police station, so I was disinclined to ever
darken her doorway again. Still, nothing was going to bring me down. And just
moments after I had posted the cheery blog entry, up popped the comment from Gerald.

With my sudden change of fortune, at least
it was a place to start. I shouldered my pack and looked for the signs pointing
to the bus stop.

Outside the airport, I ran across the
parking lot and hopped on a bus that was idling but still had its door open.
The driver informed me that he was heading north, but that a southbound bus
should be arriving shortly. “It’s headin’ for Glasgae, mind,” he said, “but
it’ll stop in Fort William for ye. Jes’ make mention to the driver, aye?”

And that is what I did.

Forts & Friendship…

9:00 am, March 17

Fort William, Lochaber, Scotland

Today as I type these words, I find
myself in one of the most beautiful parts of this country I’ve seen yet.
Upstairs, through my bedroom window I can see the peak of Ben Nevis, Scotland’s
highest mountain. And just south of here are breathtaking glens that roll away
for miles between jagged peaks. Last night I couldn’t see any of this, but the
bus driver filled me in on a few of the details, since it turned out I was the
lone passenger.

Not much call for midnight bus service to
Fort William on an icy March night, apparently. Fort William was named for
Prince William of Cumberland, a fact most of the Scots around here don’t really
enjoy. “He were a goddamned butcher, ‘at he were,” was how the bus driver put
it.

And yes——there is a hostel in
Fort William. How can there not be when this is the center of all Scottish
mountaineering? But I am not there. We pulled in long after midnight and the
driver took me to his auntie’s house before heading further south. I have
already availed myself of a most excellent full Scottish breakfast cooked by
the driver’s proud Auntie Gwen, connected with you——my fine friends——on
her home computer, and now, on this beautiful almost-spring day … I go to see a
friend in need.

- ES

PS Yes, I did notice it is Saint
Patrick’s Day. And no——I will never celebrate the wearing of the
green ever again.

Comments: 56

The
truth was that Auntie Gwen’s breakfast had put me into a food coma from which I
didn’t emerge until noon.
I popped back onto her
computer before I left for the hospital to see the comments had begun arriving pretty
much immediately after I’d posted. They were almost to a letter all asking
about how I was able to stay on in Scotland when I had been robbed. This made
me a bit nervous. What if my nefarious deed got back to the airline? I decided
that sticking with a general travelogue format on the blog was the best idea
for the moment. It was important to engage my readers so I needed to keep the
travel tips coming, but maybe I’d hold the more personal stuff to myself.

Even after all that time, I wasn’t really
clear on the finer details of posting to my blog about real people. I mean—was
it okay to mention names? I’d been pretty careful about it so far. Even in the
case of Gerald posting straight to my blog, I still wasn’t sure about using his
name online. I decided to check with him when I saw him. Better take the safe
route.

Auntie Gwen’s place was gorgeous, and still smelled
of bacon and warm bread. I couldn’t help feeling a pang of guilt as I headed
out the front door, her hand-drawn map safely tucked into my pack. She’d risen
at that god-awful hour to let me stay the night before, and even offered me
winter rates, but the cost was still triple what I would have paid to stay at
the hostel.

I decided I needed to sort out the money as
soon as possible. But I also I knew I was going to have to find a job to make
up the shortfall, anyway, so a night or two of totally reckless spending wasn’t
going to kill me. My ill-gotten gains had only fostered my rebellious spirit. I
had no work permit, so under-the-table employment was going to be my only
option. A pirate’s life for me, yes? I laughed out loud at the thought.

Walking down the street, I could feel a real
change in the air. There was a lightness to it that lifted my heart, even on
the way to a hospital. The grass may not have been green yet, but I had a bit
of my pirate gold in my pocket and the birds surely believed spring was on its
way. The air was filled with feathered Bocellis, all singing their hearts out.

After a twenty-minute walk, the roof of the
hospital arose just up the road. It was the standard three-storey affair that I
would have known even without the address. What is it about hospitals that they
look so similar, regardless of where in the world they are?

It turned out to be a good thing that I’d
gone back for a post-breakfast nap, as visiting hours were only in the
afternoon and the early evening. After taking a wrong turn into the maternity
wing, I found my way into the ward where Gerald was staying. His bed was
closest to the window, but he shared the room with three other beds, two of
which were occupied.

He hadn’t seen me at first, and my heart
went into my mouth a little at the sight of his pale face against the pillow.
The hospital smell didn’t help. Disinfectant, mixed with … what? Sickness and
worry, maybe.

A nurse was adjusting his IV, and Gerald
caught sight of me just as she finished. “Emma! I can’t believe you’re actually
here.”

His smile lit up his face, making me hope he
was less proximate to death’s door than he had first appeared. He patted the
side of the bed, and the nurse returned to sweep a curtain around to give us a
little privacy.

“Sitting on the beds is forbidden,” she said
sternly, and pulled in a chair from one of the other cubicles.

Gerald stuck his tongue out at her back as
she walked away. “I don’t like that one,” he whispered loudly. “There’s another
who’s much nicer, but not on today, sadly.”

I perched on the edge of the chair. “What
happened?” I murmured, as the curtain wasn’t doing much to keep our
conversation private.

He pulled a controller out from under the
covers, and held a button down so that the head of his bed slowly rose to bring
him more upright.

“Not much to tell,” he said, once he’d found
a comfortable position. “I found the circle without any trouble at all.” He
shot me a sideways glance. “Don’t you worry, none. I’ve kept the map for
y’all.”

“Oh—I wasn’t worried,” I insisted. “I
just came down here to make sure you’re all right.”

A wide grin spread across his face. “Ain’t
you the sweetheart? Well, I must have caught something on the bus ride. Some
woman had her snot-nosed kid with her, and he coughed all over me the entire
trip. I moved right up to the front of the bus, but there was obviously no
escaping his germs, the little bastard.”

He coughed a little himself, and then began
again. “By the time I arrived down here in Fort William, it was mid-afternoon.
I got myself settled and then hired a car to drive up to the circle.”

“A car?” I began doubtfully. The whole
no-driver’s-license thing might become a bit of a problem.

“Oh, don’t worry, hon. You can easily do it
by cab. Anyway, I got there just at sunset, and sat there the night through.”

“The entire night?”

“That I did, honey. And it was a whole hell
of a mistake, because first off, ain’t no ghost gonna come around when
someone’s coughing their lungs up inside a stone circle. And second—by
the end of the next day, I had pneumonia. Ah’m asthmatic, so they didn’t want
to give me drugs and send me back to my hotel room. Been here since then.”

“Oh, Gerald—I’m really sorry to hear
that. Both of those things,” I added, hastily.

He nodded and I could see that just the act
of telling me the story had taken a toll on him. His hand was limply feeling
around the bedcovers, so I leaned out of my chair and slid the controller
within his reach.

“Thanks, Emma,” he said, and pushed the
button to lower his bed.

“Are you okay?” I asked, as he sank away.

He nodded. “I think I might just have a
nap,” he said weakly, and then waved his hand at the bedside table. “Go ahead
and take the map. It’s in the top drawer with my Ricola.”

As I slipped the map out from under the
package of throat lozenges in the drawer, his eyes fluttered closed. I shut the
drawer as quietly as I could.

“I’ll expect a full report,” he said, his
eyes still tightly shut.

“Of course,” I replied, and walked over to
the opening in the curtain.

“And not jes’ online—in person,
y’hear?”

“I promise, Gerald.”

“Good.” He turned his face away from me and
I crept out through the curtain. His voice carried after me, his Southern
accent so incongruent in this setting.
 
“And stay away from any of them goddamned germy kids, y’hear?”

The nurse frowned at me and I hurried out
the door.

It was wrong to feel exasperated with
someone who is ill. But I somehow managed it.

As I walked back along the road to Auntie
Gwen’s, I studied the map Gerald had given me. It was a printed map, the kind
you get when you’re staying at a hotel or sometimes a restaurant in a tourist
area. It encompassed the entire region of Inverness-shire, effectively from
Fort William along Loch Ness, all the way up to Inverness. There were no real
notes on the map at all, beyond a few hieroglyphic-like notations in red ink,
and whether they were for himself or for me was unclear.

Either way, they spelled trouble.

There were two locations marked on the map.
The first I found must have been the stone circle he’d talked about, where he’d
spent the night and managed to acquire pneumonia. It was near a little town
called Drumnadrochit. As far as I could tell, this was halfway back up Loch
Ness toward Inverness, which had to be at least an hour away by car. The other
location marked on the map was not as far—but as his red X ran through a
site labeled
Ainslie Castle
, I
couldn’t even tell if there was a stone circle at all.

I checked my watch. It was 5:00 pm—a
kind of dead zone in terms of time in the Scottish countryside. Just about
everything in this part of Fort William appeared to have closed down, including
the only Internet cafe I had spotted on my walk. I leaned against a tree on the
corner of Auntie Gwen’s property and pored over the map again in the failing
light.

A car pulled up on the road beside me, and
the driver leaned across and rolled down the passenger side window.

“Need a lift?”

I opened my mouth to decline, and then I
noticed the hand-painted logo on the side:
 
Alec’s Cab—Inverness-shire.
No trip too small!

The wizened-tortoise face of an old man on a
bus flashed through my mind. Could it be?

I slid into the front seat, putting the map
on the seat between us. “Just a sec,” I said, and yanked my wallet out of my
pack. The cabbie looked at me expectantly. I fished around inside, pulled out a
tattered card and held it up to him.

“Is this you?” I demanded.

He took the card and held it under the
dashboard light. “Aye, tha’s me, awright. But this is one of my old cards—where’d
ye find it?”

“I met your dad on a bus-ride to Inverness,
and he gave it to me.”

He laughed. “Ye’d never believe how many
ride’s the old codger has gotten me. Auld Alan is a marketing machine, he is.
So—where to?”

“It’s a little odd,” I began …

It was nuts. We both agreed—Alan’s
son, Alec-the-cabbie, and me. But when had that ever stopped me before?

CL,
Gerald’s notes
read on the very margin of the map.
Tidal castle. Definitely haunted.

CL? What did that mean?

Alec, who turned out to be as convivial as
his father, could not decode the CL acronym, but filled in a few other details
of what he did know as we bumped along the winding route.

“Ainslie Castle, eh? Aye, it’s an auld ‘un,”
he confirmed when I showed him the place on the map.

“Bi’ of a sad story, actually. The Laird who
owns this property is what you’d call a mite cash-poor. He’s tried for years to
get government money to help restore the place, but it’s too far off the beaten
track.”

“Is it a complete ruin, then?” I asked,
straining my eyes to see the road in front of us. The afternoon sky was
lowering, and I hoped he could see the road beyond better than I could, as it
twisted through the trees on the old mountainside.

“Aye, pretty much. Ye can’t get inside the
place atall—it’s blocked off to stop tourists from having the walls come
down on their heads. Nice ta spend the day there, if ye want a picnic in high
summer, mebbe, bu’ it’s tiny, so no’ much to see, for all that. An hour should
give ye a’ the time ye need.”

I held the map under the flickering light
shining out from Alec’s broken glove box. “I’m pretty sure there is no circle
here,” I muttered. “But it’s near Fort William and it’s on a mountainside.”

“Why not ring yer friend?” Alec asked, not
at all put off by my conversation with myself. “Mebbe he can gi’ ye his reasoning.”

“He’s in the hospital with pneumonia,” I
said, absently. “He’s written something else here, in the margin. Cattle … something.
Thane? Maybe? Cattle thane—does that make sense to you?”