Legacy of the Highlands (18 page)

Alex sipped the strong amber liquid and
watched the two men warily — one straining with the effort to
contain his seething rage, the other slumped in defeat before the
first blow landed.

“Stop muttering. Precisely how were you
involved in Will’s murder?” Diego spat the words.

“They said I betrayed them, broke a blood
vow. They sent me a letter that said Will was the first, that no
one in my family was safe, even Alex. And the pictures! Oh, the
awful pictures. I don’t know why they killed him instead of me. It
makes no sense. It should have been me, but they said I’d suffer
more this way.”

“What vow are you talking about? What letter?
What pictures? And who is this ‘they’ you keep mentioning? Goddamn
it Cameron, pull yourself together and tell us what you know! What
— did — you — do?”

Alex could see that the tenuous grip Diego
had on his temper was fraying. If he decided to throw John through
the window she’d do nothing to stop him, but not before he told
them everything he knew about Will’s murder. She watched as Diego
breathed deeply to calm himself as he removed his cufflinks and
carefully rolled his shirtsleeves to just below the elbow. His
muscular forearms twitched with tension.

“I’ll only ask you one more time,” Diego
hissed menacingly as he tipped John’s chin up with one finger,
forcing the older man to look at him. When John simply shook his
head from side to side, Diego lost his fragile hold on rational
thought.

“¡
No tienes cojones! ¡Qué maldito puta
mierda
!
” His anger erupted into a torrent of Spanish
expletives. His full lips narrowed as he bared his teeth like a
wild animal poised to attack. The spacious suite suddenly seemed
too small to contain the emotions swirling within its walls.

Alex understood the gist of Diego’s swearing
and wasn’t alarmed until the last, uttered slowly, deliberately and
with icy menace: “
Voy a matarle
.” I’m going to kill you.

John shrank back and watched Diego warily.
Even if he didn’t understand the words, the threat was clear.
Alex’s nostrils picked up the unpleasant tang of her
father-in-law’s sweat. Deodorant’s not working, she thought
nonsensically.

“
Cálmate, Diego. No vale la pena.
Cálmate…por favor. Te suplico
.” Alex hoped that by using
Spanish to beg him to calm down, she might get through to him
before he acted. She wanted to go to him, but feared that John
might bolt if she left his side. She’d have to hope that Diego
would exhaust himself and behave rationally once the whirlwind
swirling through him abated. The curses now centered on John’s
mother and graphic sex acts done to her and by her, but they were
uttered less vehemently.

When Diego’s tirade began, Alex had put her
arm around John’s shaking shoulders to gentle him, as if he were a
skittish horse. It took a Herculean effort for her to embrace this
man, but she would deal with Satan himself if it pointed them
toward Will’s murderer. A moment later, she abruptly pushed him
away, kicked off her shoes and began her own pacing. He would have
to fend for himself like everyone else. She whirled toward him and
glared. “You! Don’t move!” Her face flushed as anger surged through
her.

Diego watched her warily as she pivoted to
face him. “And you, you son of a bitch, you sit down too. And stop
that fucking cursing.” Diego’s mouth opened, but he didn’t move.
“Now!” she snapped. He wasn’t used to taking orders and certainly
not from a woman. His dark eyes sparked with anger, but he sullenly
obeyed. He grabbed a mahogany chair from the dining room table with
one hand and swung it around as if it weighed nothing. He straddled
the chair and lowered his forehead onto his arms where they rested
atop the chair’s back. Alex couldn’t see his face, only the heavy
curtain of black hair that fell forward as he bowed his head.

“You both listen to me and listen good,” she
began, furious that two grown men were behaving like little boys.
“We are not leaving this room until each of you tells me everything
that you know — or suspect — about Will’s death. The lies and
secrets end here. I don’t care if we stay here for a week.” Tears
of anger and frustration welled in her eyes. She turned toward the
window and hugged herself, hoping to hide what these two macho oafs
would surely interpret as weakness.

“Alessandra,” began Diego.

“Don’t you Alessandra me! Shut up! Just shut
up, you condescending jerk,” she replied irritably, brushing tears
away. The suite seemed to have everything but a box of tissues, so
she brusquely grabbed the handkerchief Diego offered.

“As simply as you can, tell me what you had
to do with Will’s murder,” Alex asked John after she composed
herself and once again joined him on the sofa.

“I’ll try Alex. I’m sorry that I’ve upset
you.” He patted her hand, but she pulled it away.

“Apology accepted. Go on.”

He began to speak haltingly in a flat voice
as his trembling hands absentmindedly rubbed his thighs.

“Okay…it all began in Scotland centuries ago.
I thought I could finally end it, that Will wouldn’t have to know,
that he wouldn’t have to inherit the burden that my father handed
to me, as his father passed it to him.”

The face he turned toward Alex was ashen and
he stretched his hands toward her, palms up, like a supplicant. As
he reached for her she recoiled.

“All I wanted was to protect my son. Is that
a sin? I didn’t want him to know about our family’s involvement and
then the two of you had to go to that damn store in Inverness. Why
there, why that place? And after, once Will brought back the paper
that raving lunatic gave him, that Declaration of Arbroath, there
was no stopping it. Even then I didn’t warn him. God forgive me, I
didn’t warn him.”

“I don’t understand. What should you have
warned Will about?” Alex leaned toward him and grasped him by the
shoulders so he’d have to look at her. “What does the gift shop in
Inverness have to do with this?”

Diego continued to rest his head on his
forearms, but Alex saw his body stiffen as he listened to John’s
incoherent account. She frowned wondering how much of this he
already knew and how long it would be before he exploded again.

“I’m sorry if I’m not being clear. My brain
is a bit addled,” John conceded and his body sagged. “Is there more
coffee?”

Diego silently refilled John’s cup and
resumed his head down position.

“Go on,” Alex urged, “you were talking about
that man Mackinnon and the paper he gave Will.” She sensed that a
curtain was about to rise in a theater and she had no idea what the
play was about.

John’s eyes had a faraway look and he began his tale
as if in a trance.

“I was playing outside our house — the same
one I live in now — when I was a little boy, maybe five or six
years old. It was a cold autumn day and I was jumping into piles of
leaves that our gardener had raked up. I liked the way they
crunched and the pungent smell when he would set the piles on fire.
Sometimes he’d even let me strike the match. Anyway, my father
called me to come inside. He was quite strict and I thought he was
going to punish me for interfering with the man’s work. I can’t
remember the gardener’s name. Isn’t that strange?”

Alex hoped he wasn’t headed off on a tangent,
but he brought himself back to the story.

“Anyway, my father took my hand and brought
me into the library. We called it a den in those days. No one was
allowed in that room without my father’s invitation. There were
logs blazing in the fireplace and I could see two cups of hot
chocolate and some cookies on the table near his chair, so I
figured he wasn’t mad at me. I always liked that room, still do,”
he mused, “except now I wrecked it.”

He sighed deeply before he continued. “You
remember my father, don’t you Alex? His name was John, like me. All
of the first-born boys in my family were named John. But I wanted
something different for my son, so I named him William, for William
Wallace. You know, the Scottish hero from Braveheart — the Mel
Gibson character with the blue war paint.”

When he looked at her expectantly, Alex
simply nodded. The John Cameron who was spinning this tale was a
stranger. She wondered if he’d allowed Will to see this side of
himself.

“You knew him, my father, didn’t you
Navarro?” he said, turning toward Diego.

“Yes. I met him once or twice when I was very
young.” Diego seemed pensive as well, but he was as anxious as Alex
to find out what John’s fairy tale had to do with Will’s murder.
“You were saying you were in your father’s library…” Diego’s words
guided John back to his narrative the way a sleepwalker might be
led back to bed.

“Oh, yes. Right,” John’s eyes glazed as he
slipped back into the past.

“We sipped our cocoa for a while, but my
father didn’t say anything to me. Finally, he added a log to the
fire and sat facing me. He had a very deep voice, the kind that
could rumble like thunder or lull you to sleep. Between the fire’s
warmth, the cocoa and his voice, I remember wondering if I was
still awake since it was like listening to a bedtime story.
Obviously I wasn’t asleep, because I remember every single word he
said…I don’t think he ever read stories to me.”

“Is it all right if I walk around?” John
asked Diego, finally relinquishing control to the younger, more
powerful man. “Of course,” Diego answered quietly. “What did your
father say to you?”

“I was too young to understand a lot of it,
but every couple of years or so, he’d repeat the same story to be
sure it was ingrained in my mind. He said it began in 14th century
Scotland. One of my ancestors and other clan chiefs gathered at a
place called Arbroath to write an appeal to the Pope, asking him to
help Scotland gain her freedom from England. They didn’t actually
talk to the Pope. They sent a long letter, kind of like a petition,
with all of their wax seals affixed to it.”

“I’ve heard of that letter.” The memory
transported Alex back to the touristy shop where Will had spent an
hour being schooled in Scottish history by the store’s busybody
proprietor. “Will was blown away to find out that someone named
John Cameron signed it. He thought it was a coincidence, but I
remember that he told the shopkeeper that you have the same
name.”

“Coincidence? No, that was no coincidence.
There’s been a John Cameron in my family for centuries and the one
who signed that old document was my grandfather many times removed.
Every firstborn Cameron male since then has taken the same blood
oath.” He shrugged and looked directly at Alex. “Now do you
understand? When the two of you came back to Boston from Scotland,
Will was furious that I’d robbed him of his heritage. Some
heritage. I never wanted him to be a part of it,” he said,
bitterness hardening his voice. “He told me that Mackinnon gave him
something to show me and had even asked for your address. He
probably wanted to confirm that he had the right Cameron.”

“Yeah,” she said, frowning at the memory as
she leaned back and closed her eyes. “Will was fascinated by the
old guy’s stories. He couldn’t figure out why you’d never told him
that he was descended from Highlanders.” She forced herself to stay
focused on the present and not get lost in the memory of how that
discovery had made Will excited in other ways. But she couldn’t
stop a fleeting vision of her hands sliding over her husband’s wet,
soapy nakedness. She wanted to go with the daydream, to drift back
to the feel of his body on hers after their encounter with
Mackinnon. “Will,” she sighed, not realizing she’d spoken his name
aloud. Diego shot a puzzled look at her, but John evidently didn’t
notice anything and went on with his story.

“When Will gave me that copy of the
Declaration of Arbroath, he repeated Mackinnon’s words verbatim to
me as instructed: ‘Your Da will want to see it, too. Promise me
you’ll show it to him.’”

Alex was dumbfounded by John’s ability to
mimic a Scottish burr and then instantly switch back to normal
speech. “That particular document wasn’t just a reminder of the
blood vow I’d taken. It was a clear message, but I didn’t realize
it until it was too late. I never told Will about our family
history or my connection to Mackinnon and the others so he couldn’t
protect himself. Goddamn it, he was a man and I treated him like a
child and it cost him his life.” His voice dropped to a whisper,
“Anne kept trying to get me to tell him everything, but I was too
stubborn or too naive. I should have listened to her.”

John reached for his now-cold cup of coffee,
evidently satisfied that his story was finished.

Diego ignored him and turned to Alex. “Do you
understand what this has to do with Will’s murder?”

“Only a little. I mean it has something to do
with the Camerons and Mackinnon and some oath. But no, not really.
Not yet,” she shrugged.

“I don’t get it either. Cameron. Cameron!” he
raised his voice until John looked up. “What does a reproduction of
a seven hundred-year-old document have to do with you? And what
promise did you make to this Mackinnon character? What’s this blood
vow you keep mentioning?” Diego already knew the answers to some of
his questions, but he needed John to connect the dots.

“What? Were you talking to me?” said John
stupidly.

Jeez, had the man suffered brain damage from
all the booze he’d consumed, Alex wondered as she studied him in
disbelief. He’d always been articulate and intelligent and had been
coherent until a moment ago. Why couldn’t he explain this?

“I’m sorry, I seem to be having trouble
making myself clear.”

“Damn right,” mumbled Diego.

If Alex’s impulse was to beat John to a
bloody pulp, she was sure that it was costing Diego plenty to
restrain himself.

“Do you think a five-minute break might help
you gather your thoughts?” Diego asked politely. He would force
himself to be patient with this man even if it killed him.