At the Water's Edge (30 page)

With enormous force of will, I managed to bring my hands back in front of me and locked my fingers around its shaft, just above the blade. I kept hold of it and, after what seemed like an eternity, wondered why I wasn't moving toward the boat. Bewildered, I looked up and saw Ellis's determined face through the millions of tiny strands of peat in the water.

He wasn't saving me. He was making sure I stayed under.

I tried to push the oar away, but it was futile. He moved it to the center of my chest and pushed me deeper still, until a final stream of bubbles escaped my nostrils. My consciousness flickered, the surface receded, and then there was silence.

What happened next was like being sucked into an inverted waterfall. An arm swooped firmly around me and I was propelled upward, exploding through the surface with a deafening crash of waves. Then I was being hauled through the water, quickly, from behind.

“Hold on,
mo gràdh
, I've got you,” Angus said directly into my ear.
His free arm backstroked steadily, his legs pumped furiously beneath us. I tried to take a breath, but my chest wouldn't budge. I couldn't even lift my hands to hold onto his arm.

My eyes drifted shut, and I fought to keep them open. One moment, I saw clouds churning and rolling above me looking for all the world like a living thing; and the next, nothing.

Clouds, nothing. Clouds, nothing. And finally, just nothing.

T
he next thing I was aware of was Angus's mouth covering mine, followed by me vomiting water. He flipped me onto my side and a spasm ripped through my rib cage, sending another stream of water flying from my nose and mouth. I drew a hoarse, gurgling breath—my first since going under.

Angus pulled me into a sitting position and wrapped his coat around me.

“What the hell?” said Hank, ducking out from beneath his raincoat tent. “Jesus Christ—what happened? Maddie, are you okay?”

“No, she's not okay,” Angus barked. “She's half-drowned and frozen. Give me your coat.”

Hank struggled out of it and thrust it at Angus. “What happened? I didn't even see her go in.” He looked at me again. “My God, her hands and face are blue.”

Angus wrapped me in the second coat and scooped me into his arms.

“I'm taking her to the corn-drying kiln,” he said. “It's the intact room in the opposite wall. Run as fast as your legs will carry you to the
first white house to the north. It's the McKenzies' croft. Tell them what happened and have them send for the bobby. He'll bring his car.”

As Angus carried me through the Water Gate, holding my head against his shoulder, I looked back at the loch.

Ellis was still in the boat, paddling like a madman with a single oar. The other was floating away from him.

Hank returned with Mhàthair, the two of them bustling in with armfuls of quilts and blankets. Before I knew it, Mhàthair had replaced the coats and swaddled me like a baby, depositing me on the edge of the ancient kiln and then sitting right next to me, pulling the edges of her own coat as far around me as they'd reach. I leaned against her, quaking with the cold, alternately drawing shallow breaths and coughing violently.

Angus wrapped a blanket around his drenched clothes like a kilt and paced. Each time I was wracked by coughs, he rushed over to prop me up so Mhàthair could thump my back.

Hank crouched against the wall, pale. After a while, he climbed to his feet.

“I suppose I'll go see if I can get that fool back on dry land,” he said.

“If I were you,” said Angus, “I'd grab my camera and leave that
amadain
right where he is.”

“I know that was a pretty rotten trick he tried to pull on you, but surely you don't want him to drown out there,” Hank said.

“I would like nothing more,” said Angus, “although I expect he'll find his way back, if only to take care of the evidence.”

“If you mean the camera, I think it's pretty well protected by my raincoat.”

“I do indeed mean the camera. But it's not the rain it needs protecting from. In addition to anything else you might have captured on film was your friend's attempt to murder his wife.”

“What? No. That's ridiculous.” After a slight pause, Hank jerked around to face me. “Maddie, is that true?”

I managed to nod.

He stared at me for a few seconds as understanding dawned. Then he turned and marched out the door.

From my perch on the kiln, I had a perfect view of the Water Gate. Hank crashed through the weeds, paused beneath its arch, and looked down at the landing. Then he bellowed like a wild animal and tore down the hill. There were several minutes of angry shouting, amplified by the water but none of it comprehensible.

When Hank reappeared, he was changed. He plodded back to the kiln room with his face pointed at the ground and his shoulders slouched. His arms didn't even swing. He looked like an upright corpse.

He slid down the wall until he was crouching against it. He looked at the floor between his legs, resting his forearms on his knees and letting his hands dangle. They were bloodied and scraped.

“He made it back before I got there,” he finally said. “He threw the camera in the loch.”

The rest of us remained silent.

He looked at me, his eyes bleak. “You tried to tell me and I didn't listen. I thought I knew him. Can you ever forgive me?”

I remained huddled against Mhàthair, not even attempting a response.

“No, of course you can't,” Hank continued. “I can't make it up to you, I know that. But I really didn't know—I don't even know when he found the time to slip off to the phone booth. We're almost always together. But I swear, if he called the hospital as well as the courthouse, I won't let them take you anywhere.”

“You!” Angus sputtered. “You won't even get a crack at the
bastart
who's fool enough to show up trying to take Maddie away. Someone's brains will get scrambled, I promise you that. And I'll scramble the whole of that coward at the bottom of the slope, brains and all, while I'm at it. He'd better hope Bob the Bobby locks him up right quick, before I get the opportunity.”

Hank watched Angus while he spoke, then dropped his head again.

When Bob showed up, Angus carried me to the car, and Mhàthair and Hank followed. No one suggested we get Ellis.

As we drove back to the inn, Bob said, “So you're telling me there was photographic evidence of the attempted murder, but it's gone?”

“Aye,” said Angus.

Bob turned to Hank, who was in the passenger seat, staring out the side window. “And you're saying you didn't see a thing?”

“Just the monster,” Hank said despondently.

“But you were
right there
!” Bob slapped the steering wheel twice for emphasis.

“I was focused on filming.”

Bob glanced at him a couple of times in exasperation, then sighed. “Well, there's one eyewitness, and fortunately the intended victim is still around to testify. I can certainly arrest him based on that.”

We reached the inn and pulled up in front of it, the gravel crunching beneath the cold, hard rubber of the tires.

Bob twisted around in his seat, watching as Angus lifted me from the car.

“I'll fetch Dr. McLean,” he said, “and then I suppose I should go collect the pathetic
creutair
. I canna remember the last time I had someone in my holding cell.” He sighed again. “I suppose I'll be expected to feed him.”

As soon as Angus carried me up the stairs, Anna, Meg, and Mhàthair wrested me away and banished him with orders to get himself properly dried off.

In short order, there was a fire roaring in my grate, they'd dressed me in a heavy nightgown, and placed me under so many covers I couldn't move. They tucked stoneware pigs by my feet, and Mhàthair—after pressing her ear to my chest and shaking her head—disappeared for a while and returned with a steaming, smelly poultice
that she shoved down the front of my nightgown. She put crushed garlic between all of my toes and wrapped my feet. When she replaced the quilts, she laid an extra one, still folded, across the bottom of the bed, weighing me down even further.

I withstood it all without protest. When I wasn't coughing, my lungs rattled. I was too weak to move, and lay with my eyes aimed vaguely toward the fire, drifting in and out of a fitful trance, reliving what I'd thought would be my final moments—the weightless, almost leisurely rolling in the water, the deafening
whoosh
of bubbles bursting up from all around me, the knocking of the oars inside the oarlocks. The first moments, when I tried to figure out how to survive, and the final moments, when I accepted that I would not.

Ellis had recognized an opportunity to get rid of me and seized it without a second's hesitation. My inheritance, his inheritance, his dirty little secret—all of it could be secured at once, with only a minute or two's effort.

Ellis would deny what he'd done, of course, touting my mental condition as proof that my testimony was unreliable, and saying that Angus had misinterpreted what was going on. He would probably even frame himself as a thwarted hero, claiming he'd been seconds away from hauling me into the boat, and that Angus's interference had subjected me to being in the water even longer.

I wondered how he'd explain the missing camera, or Hank's version of events, because while he might be able to cast doubt on my testimony, that was not true of Hank, and I doubted very much that he would be easily quieted.

Was it really the monster we'd encountered? We'd never know. Because of Ellis, no one would ever know.

M
y fitful trance was actually hypothermia, according to Dr. McLean, although, with an appreciative nod toward Mhàthair, he declared me sufficiently warmed up to be past danger in that regard. However, he said I had pseudopneumonia from taking in water, and the important thing now was to prevent it from turning into real pneumonia, which could turn deadly in a matter of hours. He pulled a bottle of bright green tonic from his bag and set it on the dresser.

“This contains an expectorant. We want her to cough everything out.”

“What about castor oil?” Anna said anxiously.

The doctor shook his head. “I'm afraid it won't help.”

Anna sucked the air through her teeth in despair.

Over the course of the night, my temperature rose and fell, and I went from boiling to freezing in the space of seconds. I was wracked by terrible coughing fits, and in between, felt my lungs crackle whenever I took a breath. I was at the complete mercy of my body.

I would clutch the covers to me, begging for someone to throw more logs on the fire. Then I'd kick the covers away from me, sometimes managing to hurl them to the floor. Mhàthair replaced them every time, calmly, gently.

She was in and out with poultices, alternating onion-and-vinegar mash with mustard plaster. When the unbearable heat rose in me, I flung them away. She replaced them in the same composed manner she did the bedclothes. She hovered in the background, doing mysterious things, seeming more like a pair of competent hands, a set of nimble fingers, than Mhàthair the actual person.

Angus never left my side. When I was sweltering and crying for ice, he mopped my brow and dribbled tiny bits of water onto my tongue. When my body bucked and heaved from the cold, he tucked the covers around me and stroked my face. There was not one moment the entire night when I could not open my eyes and immediately find his face.

At one point, in the wee hours of the morning, when I was so wracked by fever that my jaw was clenched and aching, Angus laid a hand on my forehead and looked up in alarm.

Mhàthair also felt my forehead, then rushed from the room. Angus stripped the bedclothes back and held my limp body forward as he pulled my nightgown over my head. Then he wrung out cold facecloths and lay them all over my clammy skin.

A few minutes later, Mhàthair came back, and I found myself propped up between them, being forced to sip some kind of tea. It was full of honey, but not enough to mask the bitter taste underneath. As they eased me back onto the bed, I was already slipping into a darkness as deep as the loch. The moment before everything disappeared, a pretty young woman with sad eyes appeared in front of me. She was floating, with her gown and hair billowing around her. It was Màiri—I knew it instinctively. She mouthed something to me and lifted her arms, but before I could make out what she was saying, she—and everything else—faded away.

The next thing I remember was waking up and not being sure
where I was. I blinked a few times, and found myself looking into Angus's blue eyes. He'd pulled the chair up to the bed.

Mhàthair reached over from the other side and laid a hand on my forehead.

“The fever's broken, thanks be to Heaven,” she said. “She's come through.”

Angus shut his eyes for a moment, then lifted my hand and kissed it.

“Never scare me like that again,
mo chridhe
. I thought I'd lost you, and I've lost enough to the loch already.”

Although my fever had broken, I was in no condition to get out of bed. The coughing alone was exhausting, as well as agonizing.

Anna was knitting by the fire and I was resting my eyes when there was a rapping on the doorframe.

“Knock, knock,” said Hank. “Are you receiving visitors?”

“I should think not,” Anna said sternly. “Not when she's in this state.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be glib. Please, Maddie—may I have a word? Alone?”

“She's recuperating, you fool,” said Anna. “Whatever it is can wait.”

“It's all right,” I whispered. My voice was nearly gone from all the coughing.

Anna stared at Hank for a couple of seconds, then held up the splayed fingers of one hand. “Five minutes,” she announced. “And not one minute more. I'll be in the hallway.”

She set her knitting on the floor and sailed out, throwing Hank a searing look as she passed.

He hovered uncomfortably, fidgeting, as though he didn't know what to do with his hands. I was afraid he might light a cigarette. Finally he walked around the bed to the chair. He plopped into it, crossed his legs, and stared at the mantel.

“Did he really try to drown you?” he finally asked. “I mean, are you positive?”

Only after the words were out did he look at me. I stared straight at him. He dropped his gaze and took a deep breath.

“Look,” he said. “I know this doesn't change what happened, but I've decided to send a telegram to the Colonel. I'm going to tell him Ellis was lying about being color-blind. There are tests, you know. He can't fake it forever.”

After a pause, I said, “What for? Revenge?”

“Because he deserves it! Because in addition to what he almost managed to have done to you medically, he tried to kill you! And he destroyed the footage! And he cost me Violet! He's cost me everything, probably even you!” He dropped his head and pressed his fingers into the corners of his eyes, as though he were about to cry.

I watched him, unmoved.

“He didn't cost you Violet,” I said. “You were just as terrible to her as you were to me.”

He quit trying to cry and looked up. “I beg your pardon?”

“I know everything, Hank.”

“Well, apparently I don't. What are you talking about?”

“Were you heads or tails?” I asked. “And more importantly, did you win or lose?”

His eyes went wide and unblinking. He stared at me for a long time. “Jesus, Maddie. I don't know what to say.”

“I think I'd prefer it if you said nothing at all.”

Anna came back into the room.

“Bob the Bobby is downstairs,” she said. “He says he needs to speak to both of you right away, and since it can't wait and Maddie can't come down, he's asked me to check if it's all right for him to come up to the bedroom, even though I was very clear that it's not at all proper, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if you said no.”

“It's all right,” I said. “He can come up.”

I tried to remain calm, but was shot full of adrenaline. What if he'd come to tell us that Ellis had slipped away?

Angus and Anna led Bob into the bedroom.

He stood at the foot of my bed, holding his cap.

“Mrs. Hyde,” he said, nodding a greeting. “Are you feeling a wee bit better, I hope? Angus tells me you were quite poorly overnight.”

“Yes, thank you. I think I'm on the mend,” I said, although the effort sparked a fit of coughing. I rolled onto my side, and Anna rushed over to thump my back.

Bob waited until I was finished and Anna had propped me up again. “I'm very sorry to intrude like this, but I'm afraid a situation has arisen.”

“What type of situation?” asked Angus, and from the way his face clouded I saw that he'd jumped to the same conclusion I had.

“It's not what you're thinking,” Bob said. He gazed at his shoes for a moment, then looked Hank square in the face. “Mr. Boyd, was there any kind of…altercation down at the shore?”

“Sure, I knocked his block off.”

“But was he…conscious when you last saw him?”

“He was a little worse for wear, but definitely conscious. Mewling and obstreperous, even.”

“Yes, well,” said Bob, twisting his cap. “I'm afraid that when I went back to make the arrest, I found the suspect deceased.”

Angus was by my side instantly, his hand on my shoulder. I reached up and clasped his fingers.

“What? How?” Hank demanded.

“He appears to have drowned in two inches of water,” said Bob. “I've never seen anything like it. He was facedown at the water's edge. The rest of him wasn't even wet.”

Hank laughed bitterly. “He was probably playing possum so you'd leave—he's not above doing that, you know.”

“There's no question that he's dead. The body's already at the morgue in Inverness. So the question now becomes how it happened.”

Hank's expression grew panicked as the implication sank in. He leapt from the chair.

“My God, you can't think I killed him!” he said. “He was staggering around when I left, I swear! He must have fallen in after. I boxed his ears! That's all!”

He swiveled to face me, his eyes desperate and his fists clenched. “Maddie! Tell him! For God's sake—you
know
I wouldn't kill Ellis!
Tell him!
”

“It's true,” I said. “Hank would never kill Ellis. They're two parts of the same person.”

Hank stared at me, stricken.

Bob rubbed his chin for a while, thinking. “Well, given the situation—and it is indeed a first for me—I suppose I could file it as an accidental drowning…Assuming there are no objections on the part of the family?”

He looked at me inquiringly. After a few seconds, I dipped my head in assent. Angus squeezed my shoulder, and I clutched his fingers even more tightly.

Bob took a deep breath. “Under the circumstances, I'm not sure what the right thing is to say. And while I know this is all very sudden, I'm afraid you're going to have to start thinking about final arrangements. Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help, anything at all.”

“Thank you,” I said quietly.

After Bob left, Hank headed toward the door, moving like a sleepwalker.

When his bedroom door clicked shut, I looked up at Angus. I knew something was coming, but nothing could have prepared me for the bloodcurdling scream that rang through the building. I threw my arms around Angus's waist, waiting as the dreadful keening subsided into wild crying.

Angus held my head against him and stroked my hair. “And what about you,
m'eudail?
Are you all right?”

I nodded. “I think so. I don't suppose I would have wished this on anyone, but my God…”

“It's all right,
mo run geal og
. There's no need to explain. Not to me.”

I took his hand and pressed my cheek into it.

Down the hall, Hank continued to rage and grieve, but there was nothing any of us could do. There was not a soul on earth who could have comforted him, because he was worse than heartbroken. He'd been cleaved down the middle.