Her hands and feet tingled in the heat. Her head fizzed, thoughts rising and popping like bubbles in a flat soda—motive unknown, opportunity a very narrow window, means a knife in the dark.
When Alasdair walked through the doorway from the bedroom, she could tell from the vertical furrow between his eyebrows that he was ticking off the same list.
She knew his expressions, his face, and his form as well as her own. His short-cropped hair, a ripple of golden grain tipped by frost. His regular, unremarkable features, planes and angles assembled like a geometry proof, rational and elegant. His armor of reserve, claiming privacy rather than secrecy, that had once fooled her into thinking he felt no emotion. His broad shoulders, slender hips, strong hands, compacted into a relatively small frame. The angle of his head, tilted in consideration of a Fergus MacDonald painting over the mantel, and the solidity of his tread. Some men sagged into middle age. Alasdair stood all the straighter, especially when facing trouble.
“Well,” she said.
“Well,” he returned.
“I’ve almost had a feeling of foreboding all day, although I thought it was just the darkness. Or even wedding nerves.”
“You’re having second thoughts, are you now?” He spoke more wearily than warily.
“You know me. I’m down to twentieth thoughts, maybe thirtieth, not that any of them are going to make me back out. We’ve not only reserved a priest, we’ve filled out all the paperwork!”
That drew a smile from his taut lips, restoring their curve.
“I just want, well, dang it, I want to live happily ever after. Even though that’s an aspiration based more on hope than experience.”
“We’ll muddle through this one, too, Jean.”
“This one. Yeah. It’s like together we make some sort of critical mass and generate sudden death. Not just sudden death. Murders.”
“We met because of a murder.”
“Sure, but it’s hardly fair that someone had to die for us to meet.”
“We’ve beaten the odds a bit, oh aye. But maybe the odds are turning the other way and we’ll soon be getting that ‘ever after,’ ‘happily’ to be defined later.”
That drew a smile from her. She wrapped her arms around his chest and nestled her face into the angle of his shoulder. Sparring partner, best friend, lover. Betrothed.
He held her close, the slight prickle of his jaw against her cheek, his hands still radiating cold through her sweater and into her flesh, his body humming with subtle electricity that was anything but cold.
The chill lingered in his sweater and jeans, and the scent of soap with which he’d washed his hands of blood and dirt. And something else, a whiff of a rich, tropical fragrance, gardenia or lotus, maybe. “What’s that…oh. Tina’s perfume. You had your arm around her.”
Gently, with a light kiss on her cheek, he extricated himself from the embrace and extended his hands toward the fire. Personal interlude over, time for work. “It took some doing convincing her to leave the scene, ’til I thought to tell her that every step she took—and she was taking more than a few, trotting to and fro wringing her hands and moaning, poor woman—was destroying a bit of the crime scene.”
Yeah, Jean thought, I’d be moaning, too. “Could she answer any questions? Did she say anything about Greg meeting with someone at the church?”
“She blethered on about his genealogy studies, and how foolish they were, a waste of time, energy, money. And she was saying how they’d made a gamble coming here.”
“A gamble?”
He shook his head. “She was not giving me context. Their holiday has likely overextended their budget.”
“He blamed that on her shopping spree in London.” Jean’s idea of a shopping spree was a bookstore crawl from the glossy covers at Waterstone’s to the dusty, cracked bindings at an antiquarian’s. “Do they have children? Other relatives back in Australia?”
“A son, I got that much, how he’d not be coming here to help, not with two small children. And there’s a brother as well, though I could not make out if he’s hers or Greg’s. ‘How can I tell Kenneth,’ she kept saying.”
“Well, there’s someone who needs to be notified. Is she up to making a call?”
“Fergie’s saying no, not just now. He’s asked Irvine to see to her. Kenneth will be hearing the bad news soon enough, I reckon.”
As though certain the matter was well in hand, Dougie lay down his head and dozed off. Jean strolled over to her favorite feature of the room, a bay window with a padded seat running along its length. That would be a great place to sit and read on a sunny afternoon, assuming they had sunny afternoons. Now Jean could see nothing but, again, her own reflection in the glass-covered night.
No. Through her own image, she saw the lights not of Kinlochroy but of a set of headlamps coming up Dunasheen’s driveway, past the garden wall. “They made good time.”
“Who?” Alasdair joined her at the window.
“The team from Portree, that’s less than an hour away, but…oh. Wait.”
The headlamps slowed, made a right-angle turn, and stopped, illuminating the facade of a stone cottage. Then the lights went out. A shadowy figure moved from car to cottage, a door opened, and a window lit up.
“That’s Lionel Pritchard, Fergie’s manager,” Alasdair said. “Leastways, that’s his cottage.”
“Fergie said it was his day out. I guess he hasn’t heard the news or he’d come up to the house.”
Leaving the curtains open—only a human fly would be able to see in a third-story window—Jean stepped back into the warm aura of the heater. “Greg went down to the beach right after he and Tina got here, and was alone for only twenty minutes. There’s not much chance he just happened to run into a mortal enemy. And why would a total stranger kill him? He must have known his murderer.”
“Or his murderer knew him.”
“Whatever. How many people could he have known so far away from home?”
“Dozens. More. Maybe he’s traveled here again and again. Maybe he’s in constant contact with half the folk on Skye. And just now our list of suspects includes all of them.”
“Surely you’ll be able to eliminate most of them.”
“I’ll not be doing it, that’s Gilnockie’s job.”
“Sure it is.” Jean knew full well that once a detective, always a detective.
Alasdair’s lopsided smile registered her point. “I’ll be dialing back the territorial imperative, all right?”
“It’s not up to me,” she told him. “Patrick Gilnockie, isn’t it? He took your position when you retired last August.”
“Oh aye. You’ve never met him.”
“No, I haven’t. You said he was older than you, which made me wonder why he was lagging behind you in promotions. If he isn’t as bright as you, though, he wouldn’t have taken over for you.”
“He’s sharp as a tack, no worries there, a grand detective. He was not as committed as me to the police work is all, but then, he did not burn himself out.” Alasdair didn’t have to add, like I did. Jean had been there at the slow fizzle and sudden flare of the embers.
She murmured, “He wasn’t as likely to be committed as you. You know, institutionalized?”
Doing her the courtesy of ignoring the bad joke, Alasdair peered out into the gloom.
“The murder had to have been premeditated,” she told