Did You Declare the Corpse? Page 8

  “A bit disconcerting this, eh? But don’t you just yearn to paint everything you see?”

  “If I could see anything and I could paint, I might,” I conceded, “but I’d prefer something a whole lot more cheerful. Who were you talking to?”

  “Some chap I met,” she said carelessly. “He’s on a walking tour. Do you have any idea which way we go to get back?”

  “Not really. I can scarcely see you, much less the path.” I peered for a hint about which direction to take. That clammy whiteness was penetrating all my layers to the bone.

  We both strained our eyes and saw nothing. We called, and heard nothing.

  “Should we just start walking downhill and hope we find the path?” Dorothy wondered. “Or do you think we could get really lost? They wouldn’t leave without us, would they?”

  If I was her designated Captain Courageous, she had made a poor choice. I didn’t feel brave at all. Still, I made a stab at reasonable thought. “Watty can’t see to drive, and Joyce wouldn’t dare desert us on the first day out. Since we know that one end of the glen is all mountains, we might as well start walking. We’ll go downhill as far as we can, and turn left. If we start going uphill, we’ll know we’ve gotten turned around, and head back.” It sounded wise, but I knew we could wander up and down all day and never find our way out through the fog.

  Still, having nothing better to do, we took hands and began to feel our way through the cold, clammy cloud. Single file, clutching each other as much for comfort as for safety, we stumbled blindly downhill until we found what was little more than a deer track, studded with rocks. It didn’t look at all familiar, but we followed it down, grateful that it was lined on each side by clumps of heather that bounced us back like sponge rubber if we veered off the path.

  About two lifetimes later a slight breeze swayed the mist enough for me to see an outcropping of rock below us that looked familiar. “I think we’re going right.” I was so relieved, tears choked my voice.

  “But let’s don’t let go one another’s hands quite yet,” Dorothy begged.

  Looking for something to talk about, I asked, “Do you paint?”

  “I used to.” She bit off the words as if she regretted them, then rushed on like they had been the cork in her bottle. “I started college as an art major, and I’d paint all day long if—oh, sorry!” She fell, nearly taking me down with her. I helped her to her feet and she dusted off her knees. “I’ve torn my pants,” she mourned. “Don’t tell Marcia”—I thought she meant about her pants, until she continued—“but I’m only a librarian because my parents urged me to take up something where I could earn my living, eh? If I were independently wealthy, I’d paint all day.”

  “But eventually each of us has to do what we are called to, not what our parents or anybody else wants us to do,” I told her bluntly. “If you’ve got talent, don’t let it atrophy. The world needs artists as much as it needs librarians.” It’s real easy to give advice when you are both lost in a fog.

  “But I don’t know if I have the talent or courage . . .” I couldn’t tell if she was speaking to me or herself, and she dwindled off into silence as we navigated a tricky part of the path that went straight down into nothing.

  Every second was a literal step of faith. When we reached the bottom without turning an ankle or falling into some abyss, we stopped, panting as if we’d been climbing up instead of going down. I dropped to a nearby boulder with a silent prayer of thanks. Dorothy stood peering into the mist and taking deep, joyful breaths. “Isn’t this marvelous?” she said in an awed whisper.

  Suddenly, I heard a voice I ought to recognize, full of irritation and sounding like it was right beside us. “Don’t worry about the title. I told you, I’ve got it. Don’t worry about how. That’s none of your business. Are you absolutely sure about the other parcel?”

  It took a minute to remember that voices carry in fog. It took longer to figure out why the other person didn’t answer. Dorothy was quicker than me. “That sounds like Jim. He must be on his cell phone.”

  “The title is secure,” Jim snapped. “It’s my business how I did it. Your job is to smooth out the wrinkles on your end. Did you line up the lawyer in Inverness?”

  After another pause, Jim’s voice rose in a series of expletives that made me want to cover Dorothy’s ears. He followed them with, “I told you Inverness. If you can’t do it right, I’ll do it myself.”

  I couldn’t tell how far away he was, and didn’t want him to think we were eavesdropping if we stumbled into him, so I raised my voice. “Dorothy, are you trying to inhale that mist?”

  Jim’s voice immediately grew lower and moved away.

  Dorothy and I wandered for several more minutes before the mist finally began to lift and we spied the path up ahead. Dorothy turned to look back at the steep hills reappearing from behind the cloud and spread her arms wide like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. “Beautiful, wonderful mountains, I want to stay and paint you forever!”

  I spread my arms and cried, “Blessed, ugly bus, I want to get on you and ride out of this place as soon as possible.”

  Dorothy laughed. “Come on, let’s go look for souvenirs.”

  “No, I think I’ll get on the bus.” I hoped she couldn’t see how I was trembling. I am old enough to realize that people do get lost forever, in fogs of various kinds. I wanted no souvenirs of that place.

  Watty was dozing with his arms crossed on the wheel and his head on his arms. Marcia slept with her head on a pillow propped against a window. I read.

  After a few minutes, Jim climbed onto the bus. Drops clung to his coat and hair and he brushed them from his sleeves. “Damned mist. I’d forgotten all about it.”

  I called softly, “Have you seen Scotland before?” Although that didn’t seem quite the appropriate question, since he wasn’t seeing much of it this time.

  He barked a short laugh. “Once.” Then he picked up his laptop and slid into his seat.

  Something about that frozen syllable irked me into chattering. “We came about twenty years ago. We saw most of what we’ll be seeing on this trip, but I hadn’t researched our family then, so we didn’t know to visit Auchnagar. I’m really looking forward to seeing it.”

  “Not much to see. Sheep, hills, boiled vegetables, more sheep.”

  That put the lid on my mayonnaise. He opened his laptop. I picked up my book.

  9

  Our second night we stayed in Fort William, at Gilroy’s Hotel. I asked Watty, “Are this hotel and Gilroy’s Tearoom, where we ate lunch, connected with Gilroy’s Highland Tours?”

  “Och, it’s a common name, Gilroy,” he told me with a shrug of one scruffy shoulder.

  However, the hotel was clean and comfortable, and empty enough that Laura and I decided to pay extra and take separate rooms, because she usually liked to go to bed early, while I liked to read late. Then she crawled out of bed at ungodly hours to exercise.

  That night, though, when I went up to bed, she and Kenny were sitting on a sofa by the fire discussing Highland Games they had attended in years past. Sherry went upstairs at the same time I did, leaving them to their reminiscences.

  I dragged myself out of bed Friday still feeling like seven-thirty was the middle of the night. As I took my seat at breakfast, I shuddered at the volume of conversation around the table. Watty had found a gym in town that let nonmembers use it, so Joyce, Laura, and even Brandi had gone for a workout before breakfast. They had come back indecently wide awake, with Brandi boasting, “Joyce bench-pressed two hundred pounds!”

  The only weight I wanted to lift right then was blankets up to my chin. I leaned over and reminded Laura, “My life clock is set on Eastern Standard Time, so if I die over here, somebody owes me five more hours.”

  I staggered onto the bus figuring I could doze until our first stop. I hadn’t counted on the sun, the scenery, or the Scotophiles. By now we were really in the Highlands. To a chorus of “oohs” and “aahs” we rolled past a succes
sion of pastures, lochs, and stark mountains sporting caps and streaks of snow, and through villages built of square gray stucco houses with dark slate roofs, looking like they had been rifled from a Monopoly game. Watty and Kenny pointed out special sites while Sherry informed us how much better they would look in summer, winter, or fall. Some of the places Watty named sounded so different from what was written in my guidebook, I concluded that to speak Gaelic you need a limber tongue and a sense of humor.

  Brandi and Dorothy kept dashing from side to side to snap pictures. I took a few, but had just decided to doze and buy a coffee-table book when Brandi shouted, “Oh, look at those adorable calves!” I pointed my camera obediently at a field of shaggy Highland cattle with enormous horns, standing next to offspring that looked like brown wooly bears.

  If I had been nominating candidates for Person I’d Most Like to Shoot Before We Leave Scotland, Brandi would have won first place that morning. She “adored” everything she saw with indiscriminate passion, until even Jim finally got enough and ordered her to shut up. She subsided for at least two minutes before exclaiming, “But, honey, look at those adorable lambs!”

  I personally had already seen enough lambs to last me a lifetime, and was getting mighty tired of my companions. I gazed wistfully at a small stone house sitting in isolated splendor miles from everybody, and thought, Those people could go for days without seeing another soul.

  I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud until Marcia turned in the seat ahead of me. “Do you know Yeats’s poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’?” When I shook my head, she quoted it softly. It was so lovely that I pulled out our itinerary and wrote the name on the back, so I could look for it at a bookstore. I especially liked the part about living all alone in a “bee-loud glade.”

  “That or one of those little stone houses would suit me fine,” I told her.

  “Crofts. They are called crofts.” Kenny entered the conversation from across the aisle and back one seat. He had slid in behind Laura again that morning, but she had currently moved up to speak with Brandi about something.

  As long as he was interrupting, I might as well ask him a question. “What’s this see-lid thing?” I pointed to the word “ceilidh” on our schedule for that evening.

  “It’s ‘cay-ley,’ ” he told me. “In Gaelic, ‘dh’ is silent, like ‘gh’ in our word ‘night.’ A ceilidh is a music program—which reminds me, I wonder if Joyce knows who’s playing. I hope they aren’t all amateurs.” He got up and swayed forward to take the bench behind the one Laura had moved into, then called his question up to Joyce.

  I didn’t hear what Joyce said, but could tell from her tone that she spoke sharply. I couldn’t blame her. Kenny had shown up in his kilt again, and twice had held us up by getting out to play when Watty had simply pulled over for a quick stop.

  “I hadn’t realized we’d signed up for the piper’s tour,” I muttered to Marcia when he was out of earshot. “I like the pipes, but am getting infernally tired of the piper.”

  “He’s a pest,” Marcia agreed.

  Dorothy, behind me, leaned up to suggest softly, “If Joyce still has those knives she took from him, maybe we could find them and cut off his head.”

  Marcia asked across me, “Are you playing tonight?”

  Dorothy nodded. “If they’ll have me.”

  “She plays the flute,” Marcia explained to me, “and they’ll have her. She’s good.”

  Watty pulled off the road. “Fifteen minutes to admire the Five Sisters of Kintail,” he announced. Even Jim put away his computer and got off with the rest of us.

  I don’t know what I had expected to see, but it certainly involved women. Instead, the “sisters” were five mountains in a row. Watty came over to where I stood snapping their picture and jerked his head in Jim’s direction. “Ye’d almaist think he was a r-r-real tour-r-rist.”

  With the wind mussing his hair and a drip of moisture forming at the tip of his nose, Jim did look less formidable. Less elegant, too, in tan corduroy pants and a worn brown leather jacket. Brandi, of course, was still gorgeous in a short camel’s-hair coat and peacock blue pants. When she ran gracefully down to the shore and bent to pick up another granite stone for a growing collection that was going to be mighty heavy to carry home, Watty left me and drifted down to chat with Jim. I couldn’t hear Watty’s words, but Jim’s reply was audible.

  “Och, no. Just in a geography book, like. But they’re nae bad, are they?” Which, I was coming to realize, was high praise in Scotland. Like Kenny’s, Jim’s accent was growing richer the longer we were there. I wondered if musical people unconsciously picked up accents and, if so, how Jim could maintain his Scottish accent in the north Georgia mountains.

  A short time later Watty announced, “We’re comin’ up on Eilean Donan Castle noo. We’re runnin’ a bit late. Are ye still wantin’ to stop?”

  “I certainly am,” Sherry answered before Joyce could. “This is my ancestral home.”

  “I’d better go in, too, to commune with the spirits of our common ancestors,” I joked softly to Marcia and Dorothy. “My maternal grandmother was a MacKenzie—probably a kitchen maid.”

  “You may be disappointed,” Marcia warned. “I’ve read that this castle isn’t very old. It was blown up in 1719 and not restored until the twentieth century. They didn’t finish rebuilding it until 1932, I believe. I’m going to stay on the bus and rest a bit.”

  Once again, Jim accompanied Brandi. As we prepared to leave the bus, Joyce requested, “Keep it to one hour, please. We have a lot to see today.”

  Old or new, Eilean Donan was the castle depicted on the cover of my guidebook, sitting on a small island out in a loch, and was even prettier than its picture. Feeling a bit proud and proprietary, I snapped a couple of pictures and headed for the bridge. Even knowing that the castle wasn’t really old didn’t diminish the fun of seeing how people may have lived hundreds of years before and what was purported to be a lock of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s hair.

  We all hurried as requested, except Kenny and Sherry. It was nearly two hours before Joyce could drag them back to the bus, and they arrived without their customary bags of souvenirs, both faces flushed. The way Sherry glared at Kenny’s back as he climbed aboard, I was surprised he didn’t burst into flame. He came back to sit behind Laura again and said with a little laugh as he dropped into his seat, “Had a bit of a dustup with the cashier in the shop. Took us a while to sort it out.”

  Before we stopped for our noon meal—at another Gilroy’s Tearoom—Joyce announced in a strained voice, “To get to Dunvegan Castle and on to Portree by teatime, please eat quickly.”

  “But I want to stop in Kyle of Lochalsh,” Sherry objected. “There’s a jeweler there I particularly want to visit. And what does it matter when we get to Portree, so long as we’re there for the ceilidh at eight? Or we could skip Dunvegan.”

  By then I’d had enough of Sherry and Kenny dictating our schedule. “Laura is meeting cousins in Portree for tea,” I called, “and I particularly want to see Dunvegan. My guidebook says there are seals there, and I’ve never seen a live seal except in the zoo.”

  “Atta girl,” Marcia said softly over her shoulder, and Dorothy leaned up to give me a pat. Laura, however, threw me a look I could not read, then turned to look out her window.

  For those who don’t know, Dunvegan is a large granite castle on the northwest corner of Skye, and sits squarely above the sea. It lies nearly fifty miles from Kyle of Lochalsh, where you cross from the mainland to the island, and the only way there is a tortuous, narrow road up along the Cullins, some of the most spectacular mountains in Scotland. Poor Watty was driving right into the sun, but none of the rest of us minded the drive, for the weather was superb, with huge puffy clouds that cast lavender and dark purple shadows on the gray hills.

  “We could live here,” I leaned up to suggest to Marcia. “I haven’t seen a soul in miles.”

  She nodded, then her eyes brimmed with tears. “I’ve
got a bit of a headache,” she said, getting to her feet. “I think I’ll go lie down on the back bench.”

  Watty stopped occasionally to point out places of interest, but the wind was so strong that most of us stayed on the bus and looked out the window. Kenny invariably got off, marched up and down, and played the “Skye Boat Song.” After his third rendition, Dorothy leaned up and asked me softly, “Do you suppose anybody has ever been murdered with a bagpipe?”

  When we got to Dunvegan, Kenny climbed off the bus and held out a hand to Laura. “Come on, fair wench, let’s go look for seals.”

  Sherry’s glare was enough to daunt the stoutest of heart. Laura shook her head. “Thanks, but I’m sticking with Mac, here. She’s the seal lady.” I sure was relieved to see several frolicking near the shore. Seals aren’t the sort of thing you can command at will.

  Everybody but Joyce, Jim, and Brandi decided to look at seals before touring the castle. As usual, Kenny and Sherry led the way. Over one shoulder he lectured us on the life cycle and habits of seals while she punctuated his lecture with laments that these seals weren’t as numerous or as active as those they’d seen on other visits.