Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [reading in the dark TXT] 📗

I need to lie down.” She smiled at Dehan and gripped her arm. “Thank you. See you at dinner.” And she walked out on unsteady legs. Dehan got up and moved around to sit facing me in the chair Pam had just vacated. She was quiet for a moment, looking out the window. I saw her narrow her eyes, I heard a car start up and move away up the hill, and then Dehan looked at me and made a face.

“You touched a nerve, partner.”

I nodded. “This is damn fine whiskey and damn fine cheese.”

She nodded. “Agreed.” She cut a slice and sat eating it. Then she drained her glass. “Man, that is good.” She refilled us both and pointed at me. “You have a theory, don’t you?”

I nodded. “I have a theory that we are on our honeymoon and outside our jurisdiction.”

She started a little singsong, like a school kid, with a silly grin on her face, holding her glass. “You have a theory, you have a theory.”

“Shut up, Dehan.”

“Not till you tell me your theory.”

I drained my shot and cut more cheese while she refilled it. Finally I smiled.

“Fine, but it is only preliminary, OK?”

“Cool…”

I took a deep breath.

SEVEN

An hour later I asked Len to get us a cab to take us up to the castle and he told us Bobby had a car he sometimes used as an unofficial taxi service, there being no actual taxis on the island. We paid up, he went to make a call and we went to wait outside. There was a wooden bench beside a couple of troughs brimming over with flowers and we sat there, feeling sleepy in the afternoon sun. It was probably only in the high sixties or low seventies, but the humidity was high and it made the afternoon sultry and sleepy. Dehan rested her head on my shoulder and as I yawned, I noticed two people outside the post office.

It was Dr. Cameron and his wife, Sally, standing beside a new Volvo having what was turning from a heated conversation in harsh whispers to an out and out row. Suddenly she turned away from him, moved to the back of her car and opened the trunk, obscuring him from my view. Then she marched into the grocery store beside the post office and I heard him shout, “Don’t you walk away from me when I’m talking to you!”

He came into view moving toward the door just as Sally emerged again, carrying two boxes, one on top of another, loaded with groceries. He spoke to her savagely, but too quiet to hear what he was saying. She ignored him and put the stuff in the trunk, then turned and went back into the shop. He went after her and I wondered whether I should go over and make sure she was OK. But a few seconds later, she reemerged carrying four plastic bags filled with more groceries, and him still trailing behind her, still speaking savagely, but now stabbing the air with his finger for emphasis, even though she couldn’t see him.

She dumped the stuff in the trunk and closed it, then turned to face him. She cut him dead and spoke loud enough for me to hear.

“Leave me alone, Ian! Maybe ten, maybe eleven, maybe tomorrow. The answer is, I don’t know! Do you understand that? Can you understand that? I-don’t-know! Now leave me alone!”

She walked around the car to the driver’s side and opened the door. He went after her at a run, pulling at her shoulder, speaking louder now, “Ye can’t do this! It’s wrong, fer God’s sake! Sally!”

She spun and her face was flushed. She half yelled at him, “Leave me alone, Ian! Or so help me God, I’ll…”

She didn’t finish telling him what she’d do. She climbed in the car and drove away at speed, toward the castle. He shouted after her, but she couldn’t have heard him. After that, he turned and stormed into the post office, slamming the door behind him.

A moment later an old Ford Mondeo rolled up and a man in his fifties with a face like a granite cliff and eyes like a couple of icebergs climbed out and looked at me. “Yous the Americans gone up’t Castle?”

I said, “Yup,” and gave Dehan a shake.

She sat up yawning and we climbed in the back, where she crawled under my arm and said, “Wake me when we get there.”

I saw him glance in the mirror as he slammed the door.

“I’ll no take ye past the gate.”

I frowned. “Why not?”

He pulled away and we moved at a sedate twenty miles an hour up through the woods. I saw his eyes in the rearview mirror. “Tha’ there castle, friend? By rights tha’ should be mine. But tha’ bastard—excuse mah language in front o’ yer missus—tha’ bastard Gordon stole it from uz.”

I was surprised. “Charles Gordon stole that castle from you?”

“Ay, tha’ he dud.”

“I thought his father bought it.”

He nodded, still watching me in the glass as we moved slowly through the tunnel of whispering pines. “Aye, he dud. But while his son were away in America, I…” He tapped his chest with his finger. “I was here, helpin’ the old man fix the place. An’ he says ta’ me, ‘Bobby, yer moore like a bairn to me than my own boy,’ so he did. I were wi’ him every day, workin’ talkin’ plannin’, dreaming! He were an American, but his blood was Scottish, more’n many I ken. An’ he promised me tha’ castle. He said, ‘Bobby, when I die, thus castle is fer thee. Fer thee’s more mah bairn than mah own kith and blood.’ God is mah witness. So I’ll no go into those grounds until ut’s to claim it as mah own, see?”

I made