Finding Fraser(115)

Not that I did.

The car’s engine was the only sound as the miles rolled away under our wheels. It turned out that my snoring worries were all for naught anyway, since I didn’t sleep a wink.

I spent the drive thinking over all the mistakes I’d made, beginning way back with my first boyfriend Campbell. I realized I had been casting men in roles they didn’t suit; trying to make them each fit my image of what a boyfriend should be, all the way through to Egon. Sure he was a philanderer, and that was entirely his to own, but hadn’t I secretly known that part of him existed? Hadn’t I thought I could make him change? And because Hamish reflected some of the physicality of my ideal mental image of Jamie, I had pretended the other parts of him didn’t exist until it blew up in my face. I needed to learn from all these bad choices. These were choices Claire would never have made.

For a long time, when sleep wouldn’t come, I looked over and watched Jack driving the car. After all my time in Scotland, and all the friends I had found, it was he who was the one I had come to most depend on. And even though in the dark I could see there was no ring on his finger, the fact that there was a Rebecca in his life meant that I needed to learn from all the bad choices I’d made in the past. I turned and stared out into the darkness as the road took us away from everything I had grown to love.

Sometime just before dawn, the car shuddered a little as we pulled onto a side road. I’d been drifting—thinking again about Jack’s kindness since I’d met him. Before my arrest, and especially after, he’d gone out of his way to make sure I’d felt safe and comfortable. And now he was driving all night to make sure I didn’t get arrested again.

The car slowed a little with the change of roadway and I lifted my head to see he was looking at me. His face appeared a little worried in the lights from the dash.

“Ach, I’m sorry Emma,” he said, his finger tapping against the steering wheel. “I dinnae mean to wake yeh. It’s just—there’s somethin’ I thought ye might like tae see before you catch your plane.”

I sat a bit more upright, and surreptitiously wiped the side of my mouth. “I wasn’t asleep,” I said. “Where are we?”

He turned a sharp corner and then pulled the car to a stop.

“When I was growin’ up, my cousins had a place near here. We used to come as children, to play on the stones.”

He peered out the window at the sky. A thin gray line showed the shape of a dark hillside looming above us. “I believe it’s stopped raining,” he said. “Would yeh like to step out with me?”





The circle of stones stood silent in the near-darkness. I was still panting a little from the climb, but it was much easier to see now than it had been when we’d left the car. Leaves swirled underfoot and around our ankles as we walked up the path. Jack had taken my hand and held it through the long climb in the dark, but he dropped it then and stepped forward into the circle.

“Holy smoke,” I breathed.

The dark gray stones seemed to materialize out of the air around us—solid but somehow out of time. The air was crisp, and a curled brown leaf skittered across the dew-studded grass in front of me. We were in a clearing that had no right to be where it was—a flat, sort of oval space somehow carved out of a wooded hillside. Unless you stumbled upon this place, I don’t know how anyone could have known it was there.

I spun around, trying to take it all in.

“Is this more like the place you were looking for?” Jack said, his voice hard to hear above the wind.

“Yes. Definitely.”

Unlike the earlier circles I’d visited, this one had no cairn at its center. There was a collection of eight small stones forming a sort of ellipsis, encircled by a group of twelve much larger, more evenly-spaced stones. A single stone connected the two groups.

I walked over to look more closely. Of all the stones, this was the only one that had the same cup marks on it as the cairned circles at Clava and Drumnadrochit. I traced one of the marks with my finger, wondering.

The trees above us were rimmed in pink. I looked up to see Jack watching me as I walked around the ancient, sacred space. I could see his face clearly for the first time since the car. He looked anxious and—something else I couldn’t read.

“This is amazing,” I said. “I’m so happy I got to see it before I had to leave.”

“I’m glad,” he replied. “When I read the post you’d written about your search for the circle, I remembered this place. I hadnae thought about it in years.”

I lay my hand against the cool stone with the cup marks. “Do you know what these mean?”