Bonnie of Evidence Page 11

  “So how do you like wearing a skirt?” I needled.

  “How do you think I like it?” he snapped. “I look like a girl.” He tugged the fabric in the opposite direction. “Damn fool thing. It’s itchy.”

  “Not enough undergarments,” speculated Dick Teig. “What are you wearing? Boxers or briefs?”

  Dick Stolee registered a blank look as he patted down his flanks. “Damn. I knew I forgot something.”

  Euw.

  “I kinda like the whole pantless thing myself,” confessed Dick Teig as he rotated his hips, causing the pleated wool to swish back and forth. “But so help me, Emily, if you ever breathe a word to Helen, I’ll deny I ever said it.”

  The girls had bought them identical kilts in a Black Watch plaid, with identical sporrans to carry incidentals. The outfits fell apart below their knees though, with Dick Stolee sporting black dress socks and white canvas sneakers, and Dick Teig running around in white athletic socks and wingtips. Not the best fashion accessories to achieve that rugged, devil-may-care highland look.

  “So are these your team uniforms?” I asked.

  “The wives tell us they are,” groused Dick Stolee.

  Swish, swish, swish. “The ventilation is great,” said Dick Teig as he continued to rotate his hips. “That Erik fella sure called it right. My boys finally have room to breathe! And wait until I see my chiropractor again. He told me if I’d stop parking my backside on my wallet, my sciatica would improve, and doggone, he was right. Look at this.” Stretching his arms out in a T, he executed a series of torso twists that sent his stomach swinging with near seismic bounce. “It doesn’t hurt anymore!”

  Dick cringed. “Oh, Jeez.”

  “I might never wear pants again.”

  “Will you stop?” snapped Dick Stolee. He peered around the room as if all eyes were on him. “You’re embarrassing me.”

  Dick Teig hiked his kilt to his knees and stared down at his shoes. “I’m not sure about the wingtips and athletic socks though. What do you think, Emily? Would dress socks look better? Helen bought some really nice ones at the dollar store.”

  “I’m gonna take in the video,” huffed Dick Stolee as he nodded toward the theater.

  “Great idea,” I encouraged. “I bet the whole area will come alive once you learn the history behind the ruins.”

  “I’m not going in there to hear about the ruins,” he deadpanned. “I’m going in there because it’s dark.” He arched a brow at his friend. “You coming with me, or would you rather stay here, discussing your ensemble with Emily?”

  Dick Teig looked suddenly desperate. “I’ve gotta use the men’s room. Anyone seen it?”

  “By the gift shop,” I said, pointing in the right direction. “That-away.”

  As he struck out across the floor, Dick Stolee stood beside me, watching him go, which was a little unusual, since the two men rarely allowed themselves to be out of each other’s sight.

  “You’re not going with him?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Sooo … unlike the female of the species, men don’t have to go to the restroom in twos?”

  “I wouldn’t mind going, but …” He threw a careful look around him before leaning toward me and asking in a self-conscious voice, “Can I go in there dressed in a skirt?”

  After calming Dick’s nerves about acceptable dress code in a Scottish men’s room, I headed toward the exit doors and stepped out onto the blacktopped terrace that fronted the building. In the distance I could see the battered ruins of the castle, perched on a bluff like a crumbling section of the Great Wall of China, looking oddly formidable in its decrepitude. It was as long as a Florida strip mall, with a solitary watch tower poking up from its gutted remains, and a footbridge welcoming tourists through an arched gate that might once have run slick with boiling oil. Nana and Tilly stood at the veranda, checking out the grounds with their binoculars, while George manned the observation telescope, looking much like a submarine captain draped over his periscope. Mom sat at a patio table to my right, entering information onto her laptop while seemingly oblivious to Dad, who was locked in conversation with Wally at the far end of the terrace.

  I fired up my camera to snap a few candid shots of everyone, but had to scoot out of the way when Cameron Dasher barreled out the door with Bernice, Lucille, and Dolly chasing behind him like tin cans behind a car with a Just Married sign. They were next up to search for the cache, so I was glad they were here and raring to go, but if I’d been Cameron, I might have decided to hide in the men’s room to be free of his entourage, if even for a few minutes.

  “Will you take a picture of me with Cameron over by the railing?” Dolly shoved her camera at me. “And just so you know, my right side is my best side.”

  “You already had your picture taken with him in the café,” sniped Bernice. “It’s my turn.” She slapped her Smartphone into my palm. “Don’t use the zoom, Emily.” Then, in a whisper, “Cameron looks better at a distance.”

  “Funny,” taunted Dolly, “I would have guessed you’re the one who’d look better at a distance.”

  “Goes to show what you know.” Bernice turned smug, jutting her chin into the air. “I used to be a magazine model.”

  “Which magazine?” asked Dolly. “Antiques Journal?”

  “Why don’t I take a picture of your whole team?” I suggested in the hopes of defusing the situation.

  Dolly squinted at me with impatience. “Because photos of the whole team aren’t going to make it into my photo album.”

  “Stand a little closer,” Nana instructed. “That’s right. Say ‘Cheese.’ Oh, you’re gonna like this one, Lucille. This Scottish light takes twenty years off your age. Stay right there, now. I wanna take one with my cell.”

  We glanced sideways to find Cameron and Lucille smiling enthusiastically as they posed against the veranda. Dolly sucked in her breath and grabbed her camera back. “Witch,” she muttered in an undertone, her eyes throwing daggers at Lucille. As she stormed toward them, Bernice snatched her phone from my hand and charged after her.

  “Don’t you think we should have a picture of the whole team?” Dolly suggested to Cameron as she staked claim to his free side, snuggling close against him.

  “Now, that’s the spirit.” He wrapped one arm around her shoulders and the other around Lucille’s, looking suddenly chagrined when Bernice planted herself in front of him, arms crossed as she tapped her foot. “Well, come on and join us, Bernice,” he encouraged. “You’re part of the team, too.”

  “I don’t think everyone got that memo.” Posing stiffly in front of him, she gritted her teeth in a less than flattering smile.

  “Hold that pose,” said Nana, snapping the picture. “Wow. This is a real nice one. What do you think, Emily?”

  I hurried over to her, nodding my approval at the photo. Somehow, the camera had managed to turn Bernice’s gritted teeth into a thousand watt smile. Gee. She really was photogenic.

  “We done yet?” asked Nana.

  “One more,” said Bernice as she burrowed backward into the half-inch space between Dolly and Cameron, propelling Dolly out of the picture with an able thrust of her hip. “Okay, Marion. Shoot.”

  “Hey!” balked Dolly as she stumbled off-balance. “I was standing there first.”

  “Well, you’re not standing here now.”

  “Can we switch sides?” asked Lucille as she gave up her plum spot to join the fray. “I look thinner on my right side.”

  As they jockeyed for position around Cameron, I realized that the three of them had turned cozying up to him into a competitive sport, with no rules, no boundaries, and no holds barred. Geesch. I hope they didn’t get too carried away. I’d hate for a guest to avoid traveling with us again because he’d been pestered to death on his first go-round. Too bad men didn’t live longer. If they did, maybe thei
r participation on tours wouldn’t be such a novelty, and maybe men like Cameron wouldn’t have to beat their admirers off with a stick.

  I rolled my eyes as the ladies leapfrogged around each other.

  Nana snapped a picture of the chaos, then angled her camera screen toward me. “You s’pose if I show them girls what a nuisance they’re makin’ of themselves, they’ll leave the poor fella alone? I don’t wanna say nuthin’ unkind about the dead, dear, but can you imagine how much worse it’d be if there was still four women fightin’ over him instead a three?”

  I stared at Nana, my breath catching in my throat. “What?”

  “Team Four’s heading back,” yelled George from the observation telescope, prompting Nana to shuffle over to him for a looksee.

  Mom popped out of her patio chair. “Team Yes We Can! You’re in the batter’s box!”

  As Cameron struggled to herd his teammates in Mom’s direction, I remained rooted to the spot, Nana’s words still echoing in my head: Can you imagine how much worse it’d be if there was still four women fightin’ over him instead a three?

  “Stay very calm and try not to overreact, bella,” Etienne said as he drew alongside me, “but we’ve run into a patch of bad luck.”

  I looked up at him, intuiting what he was going to say even before he said it.

  “I just received a call from the medical examiner. He’s unsure what caused Isobel’s death, but he’s certain it wasn’t anaphylactic shock.”

  Damn.

  ten

  Four hours later, having departed Urquhart Castle and completed our tour of the Loch Ness Monster Exhibition where, to the accompaniment of laser lights, digital projections, and eerie music, we spent a quick sixty minutes traveling from the dawn of time to the third millennium­—we were ready to undertake the next step: venturing onto the loch itself.

  “What do you mean, you’re not going on the cruise?”

  I’d yet to warn Nana against mentioning her Maccoull ancestry to Bill Gordon, so as the other guests proceeded to hike down the gravel path to the sightseeing boats, I’d pulled her aside to issue my alert, only to be blindsided by her unexpected pronouncement.

  She shrugged the shoulder that wasn’t weighed down by her oversized pocketbook. “It’s on account of my memory, dear. I forgot to pack them pills what’s s’posed to keep me from losin’ my cookies all over the person sittin’ next to me on the boat.”

  “You don’t get motion sickness.”

  She tucked in her lips and regarded me impishly. “No kiddin’?”

  “When the decks were awash on our Hawaiian cruise, you were in the ship’s lounge, tossing back Shirley Temples like there was no tomorrow.”

  “That don’t mean I won’t get sick today. I got more years on me now. My system’s more delicate. I can’t handle them big waves like I used to.”

  I glanced at the loch to find it calm as bath water. I narrowed my eyes at her. “What’s the real reason you’re ditching the cruise?”

  “It don’t have nuthin’ to do with you, dear, so don’t you go takin’ it personal. We just decided that old bones and high seas don’t go together real good.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “You gotta have names?” She gave me a downtrodden look as she ticked them off on her fingers. “Me, George, Tilly, Margi, Osmond, Ali—”

  “The whole gang is staying on shore?”

  “We’re not taking no chances. You don’t get to be older than dirt by bein’ stupid.” She paused. “Well, the Dicks did, but they’re the exception.”

  “Nana! What is stupid about cruising the most famous lake in the world? And don’t tell me your bones are old because I’m not buying it.”

  She twitched her mouth self-consciously before blurting out, “There’s a monster down there, Emily.”

  “No, there isn’t.”

  “Yes, there is, and your father seen it.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Then what’d he see?”

  Damn. She had me there. “I don’t know what he saw, but I’m thinking it might have been one part ocular anomaly and one part figment of his imagination.”

  “He don’t got no imagination.”

  “Okay, imagination isn’t his strong suit, so maybe what he thought was a sea creature was just a really big floater.” I smiled, hoping to convince myself as much as Nana. “He should probably see an ophthalmologist when he gets home.”

  “He don’t need no eye doctor. He needs folks to believe him.”

  “I believe him.” I nodded emphatically. “Kinda. I mean, I believe he saw something.” I paused reflectively. “Can floaters appear in the shape of sea serpents?”

  “Emily, there wasn’t nuthin’ in that monster exhibit that proves there isn’t no Jurassic Park creature livin’ in this lake.”

  I thrust my finger into the air in a “Eureka” kind of gesture. “Mrs. Dalrymple confided to me this very morning that the only reason the legend of Nessie persists is to boost the local economy.”

  “No kiddin’?”

  “Yup. Her ancestors have lived on the shores of Loch Ness for four hundred years, and not one of them has ever reported seeing a sea creature.”

  “Maybe them’s the folks what needed the eye doctor.”

  “So what do you say? Will you change your mind and come with us?”

  “Can’t. We already voted nine to two to stay on shore instead a goin’ down with the ship.”

  I gave her an exasperated look. “The ship is not going down.”

  “Tell that to the folks what was on the Titanic.”

  “There’s a difference. Loch Ness doesn’t have icebergs.”

  “It’s got a monster. That’s worse. You just make sure they got enough life jackets to go around on that boat, Emily. I don’t want nuthin’ happenin’ to you.”

  As she shuffled down the path in front of me, I noticed something odd. “Why are you listing thirty degrees to starboard? What’s in your pocketbook? Bricks?”

  She stopped short and snorted with impatience. “This is all your mother’s doin’.” Swinging her pocketbook in front of her, she unsnapped the top and opened it wide to show me a jumble of brown plastic bottles with labels that read “Milk Thistle” and “White Willow Bark.”

  “Uff-da. Are these the elusive supplements she bought to prevent you from shrinking?” I frowned at the cache. “How many bottles do you have in there anyway?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Well, duh? No wonder you’re listing.” I regarded her quizzically. “How come you didn’t leave them in your room?”

  “’Cuz Margaret says I gotta take ’em with every meal, and I can’t figure out no way to ditch her at meals, so I gotta haul the dang things around with me. If I’da known I was gonna be tossin’ back a steady diet of weeds ’n trees on this trip, I mighta stayed home!”

  I’d rarely seen Nana out of sorts, so her mood worried me a little. Oh, God. I hoped the situation didn’t escalate to the point where she and Mom would be forced to have “words.” What would I do? Whose side would I take?

  I scratched a sudden itch at the back of my neck and tried not to think about it.

  By the time we reached the waterfront, my guys had already spaced themselves out along the shore like ducks in a shooting gallery, their Smartphones focused on the impossibly calm waters of the loch as if in anticipation of a YouTube-worthy event.

  Plink, plink, plink.

  Heads and cameras swiveled toward the sound.

  “D’you hear that?” shouted Osmond, who’d recently been outfitted with hearing aids so high-tech, he could have heard belching if the Mars rover had developed acid indigestion. “Look! The water’s rippling!”

  “It’s Nessie!” cried Margi.

  “It is not,” crabbed Bernice. “It’s those mor
onic Dicks skipping stones.”

  The remainder of our traveling twenty-nine were filing onto our waiting boat, the Highland Queen—an ancient-looking tub with paint peeling off its wheelhouse and benches flanking the aft bulwarks to accommodate outside seating. Etienne spurred me on with a “hurry up” gesture as I ran onto the dock.

  “I thought I was going to have to send out the bloodhounds,” he chided with good humor. He nodded toward the photographic frenzy taking place on shore. “Do they realize they’re literally in danger of missing the boat?”

  “They’re not coming.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of the monster. They’re apparently not interested in becoming her mid-afternoon snack.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  I cocked my head and gave him the look.

  “Merde. You’re serious.”

  Cursing held so much more allure when uttered in a foreign language.

  I craned my neck to see who was gathered on deck, noting the absence of two critical guests. “Have you seen Mom and Dad?”

  “Your mother decided to stay on the bus to tally the geocache results.”

  Not a bad idea. At least Nana would get a breather. “Is Dad with her?”

  “Your father has staked out a seat in the wheelhouse to be near the new multifunction fish finder with bottom tracking performance, GPS, sonar, and an 83/200 khz transducer.”

  I stared at him, deadpan. “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Neither do I, but your father does. He plans to videotape the monitor while you’re cruising in case the device picks up the image of a sea serpent.”

  I sighed. “But he doesn’t know how to use his camcorder.”

  “He does now. He apparently stayed up all night reading the manual.”

  “If yer coming with us, lass, yer’d best climb aboard.” From the deck, a lanky man in bib overalls and a skipper’s cap bent over to extend his hand to me. “Up ye go.”

  Bridging the significant gap between dock and boat, I hopped aboard then turned to Etienne, who was wearing a resigned expression as he backed away from the vessel. “Hey, where are you going? Aren’t you coming with us?”