Holy Terror in the Hebrides (21 page)

“There now! That’s you settled! I’ll just be off; Andrew’s waiting with the car. He got as far as the jetty, but the road is too badly littered after that.”

I finally found my voice. “Wait. Hester—how can I thank you? I’ve been such a nuisance—”

“Nonsense. If we can’t help one another in an emergency, what were we put here for? You’ll come up if you need anything.”

With that clear command, she was off, leaning into the wind, her hair blowing out from under her scarf, and I was shaken out of my lethargy, feeling like a particularly low variety of worm.

It wasn’t surprising that Hester knew the accoutrements of my cottage better than I did. Many parts of the British Isles are still places where neighbors know each other, visit each other, help each other. No, it was that matter of helping that stuck in my throat.

“If we can’t help one another . . .” And I’d deserted the hotel the moment I could get out of it.

It wasn’t quite that easy, was it? There were things I still had to do. I unpacked, took a bath that was at least tepid, and put on the warmest clothes I had, long underwear and all. There was a great deal of cleaning to do up at the hotel, and I ought to help.

It’s annoying, when you’ve gone all high-minded and made up your mind to do a good deed, to be thwarted before you’ve even begun. When I went downstairs, I looked out the window and realized no more cleaning was going to be done today, at least not outside. The rain was worse again, coming down in torrents. Although the wind had subsided still more, nobody could get any work done in this. There would come a time for me to be of use, but evidently it wasn’t now.

Part of me was immensely relieved. I was so utterly, world-with-out-end weary. I sat down on the couch, in front of the small but warming fire, pulled the afghan over my lap, and felt how wonderful it was to do nothing but sit.

But the other part of me, the part that inhabited most of my being when I wasn’t feeling my age so devastatingly, wanted to be up and doing. I remembered a small great-nephew of mine who had once come upon his mother and me when we were sitting on her California patio, luxuriating in the sunshine and stillness. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Nothing,” was my reply. “Just enjoying doing nothing.”

He considered for a moment. “But isn’t that awfully boring?”

He was right. It was.

And then there was the other, more insidious scourge of idleness. For when you’re busy, when you’re fully occupied with busy-ness, you can put off unpleasant thoughts for a long time. When you’re doing nothing, thoughts come thick and fast, and it’s hard to beat them off.

There were many thoughts I didn’t want to think, and they were all centered around Bob Williams, a young man I had never really known and had certainly never liked. But he was dead, and I wanted, needed, to know why.

I also wanted to know what Teresa Colapietro meant when, in her delirium, she kept repeating the word “water.”

Finally, I wanted to know why Teresa was so much worse in the middle of the night than she had seemed just after the blow to her head.

Because, no matter how hard I tried to shut out the picture, I kept coming back to that fall of Bob’s, that horrific, slow-motion fall, and the water-glazed rocks where no water should be. And I knew the nightmare would haunt me until I knew for certain whether or not he had been murdered.

I had to accept the fact that no one was going to help me with this. With no telephone, possibly for several more days, I couldn’t call Alan. The local police didn’t believe a word of what I’d tried to tell them, and were, in any case, unavailable except for a dire emergency.

No, if anyone was going to do anything about the situation, it would have to be me.

It was perhaps just as well, I thought grimly as I pulled the afghan a little closer, that I was stuck in this cottage with nothing to do but think. A great deal of thinking needed to be done, and the result of it had better be cogent and correct.

Very well. The time had come to make the list I’d never gotten around to. The only paper in the house, as far as I knew, was the telephone pad, so I struggled out of my woolly cocoon, got the pad from the kitchen and a pen from my purse, and began, snuggled up again, to think in earnest.

Means, motive, opportunity. The classic three points of investigation. I’d already decided that everyone had, or could have had, both the means—a bottle or two of water—and the opportunity. Bottled water was ubiquitous, and anyone could have managed to be in the cave alone for a few seconds.

The risk, though! Not to the murderer, really; he—or she, there was no reason it couldn’t have been a woman—could, with clever use of his or her body, have shielded the critical actions from anyone just entering the cave. Or if he—the single pronoun was easier—had been observed, he could have exclaimed over his carelessness, warned everyone, and sat down later to figure out a different method.

No, it was the sheer disregard for anyone else’s safety that took my breath away. What if someone else had stepped on those deadly, wet rocks, someone who had no idea of the danger? Anyone could have died that day.

Which brought up a point. Was Bob the intended victim, or simply an unfortunate bystander?

That, I decided, was a byway I didn’t intend to explore at the moment. The task was going to be hard enough without bringing in impossible complications. If I had to figure out which of six people had reason to murder any one of the other six, I had a problem which, in its sheer mathematical proportions, was to all intents and purposes unsolvable.

No, stick to what happened. Bob died. Any one of his traveling companions could have murdered him. So I was, once more, down to what was traditionally the least important of the three big questions, but was in this case the only definitive one: Who had a motive to kill him?

Although my poking around of the last few days—it didn’t deserve to be called an investigation—had been inefficient in the extreme, I had, in fact, gleaned a few facts about a few people. I began the list-making. After a good deal of memory-searching and head-scratching, the first small page of the pad read:

Was there a motive for murder there? Just possibly, I supposed, if she felt that Bob had directly threatened her own two boys. The lioness protecting her cubs, et cetera. But there was absolutely no indication that any such threat had existed, or even that Hattie Mae thought it had, which was the point. I sighed, flipped to the next page of the pad, and adjusted the wick of the lamp so it burned a little more brightly. I wished I could likewise adjust my mind.

Which, however, did not constitute a motive, I scolded myself. I certainly wasn’t accomplishing much, and besides, the room felt chilly and I was getting hungry. Maybe if I fed my stomach, my brain would operate a trifle better.

Hester had brought me, among other things, a large jar full of potato soup. Surely I had once known how to light a camp stove?

It took me a while to remember how to pump the thing up, but once I got it going, it heated the soup in only a few minutes, and a large bowlful not only warmed me through, it had a positive influence on my mood, as well. There is something homey and solid and genuine about potato soup. When I had finished, I felt once more in possession of my right mind and a certain amount of my self-confidence.

I went back to my list, promising myself some blackberry crumble when I was finished, accompanied by, for once, all the cream I wanted. A few more coals and some earnest blowing brought my fire back to life, and I settled myself, well wrapped in the afghan, to productive thought.

But if he were to kill someone, I mused, he’d probably do it in just such an indirect, chancy way. And that was pure speculation, and utterly irrelevant. I sighed again.

And besides, I thought, shifting a little, if there was anything in my theory that Teresa was—well, somehow damaged a little further during one of those long watches of the night, then she was out of the picture as first murderer. The only motive for hurting her would involve something she knew, something the murderer couldn’t afford to have get around.

Which left me with:

I pondered this. That could, I supposed, mean Jake didn’t subscribe to the same moral code he used to. I wished, I thought fretfully, that I had any idea how Aaron had been infected. He was involved in sports, had played against some of the teams that Bob coached. I wondered if Jake had ever asked Bob; he might have seen some interaction—

The idea hit me with almost physical force; I think I actually reeled back a little. Could it have been Bob himself? All those kids he worked with, such long hours—what if he were a child molester?

Once the idea presented itself, I wondered why it hadn’t been obvious before. The room seemed very cold suddenly. I wrapped the afghan arnund me more tightly. Perhaps it was time for a cup of coffee, if I could figure out how to make coffee without an electric coffee-maker. How spoiled I was! I began to unwind myself from the afghan.

You’re delaying it. You’re afraid to face it. Coward!

I put some more charcoal on the fire, quite unnecessarily, and sat back down, pad in hand.

I stopped writing. What I was picturing was horribly plausible. I could see him doing it, pouring water on the rocks like—like a libation to the ancient gods. And leaving matters, in a way, up to them. Bob might fall or he might not. If he did—I could see Jake shrugging his shoulders. In the hands of the gods. In the hands, maybe, of the Jahweh he said he didn’t believe in, but who was reputed to exact swift and terrible vengeance.

The room wasn’t really cold. It was cozy and warm. The lamplight was just as soft and golden, the couch just as comfortable. Then why was I so cold and miserable?

I didn’t want my dessert, after all.

T
HE NIGHT PASSED
, as even the worst nights do. Untwisting the bedclothes once again, at three in the morning, I was aware that the rain had stopped, and resented the fact; its soothing sound had helped lull me to sleep for brief periods.

But morning came, eventually, a gray, cheerless morning that was only slightly less gloomy than the darkness of night. If it wasn’t raining, it might at any moment. I got up because there seemed to be no point in staying in a bed that had offered no rest, and struggled with lighting the camp stove and making coffee because I hoped that acting normal might make me feel normal. There was no way to make toast, short of holding it on a fork over the gas flame. That might once, at a campground, in another lifetime, have seemed like fun. It didn’t now. I ate something cold without noticing what it was, made my bed, tidied up the cottage. Act normal.

There is a merciful numbness that takes possession of us in times of great pain. I had experienced it when my beloved Frank had died. Suddenly my world was shattered, my whole life was without shape or meaning, and yet I kept on, writing the thank-you notes that had to be written, buying groceries, preparing meals for myself, going on automatic pilot until the numbness wore off and the pain took over, agonizing, but a little easier to bear because I had already established new habits.