He shone his light at my face again.
“Would you please stop doing that? You’re blinding me every time.”
He completely ignored me. “It must have been the hair,” he muttered viciously. “They love the ones with the curly hair.”
I put a hand up to my head and surreptitiously yanked out a couple of twigs, dropping them on the ground behind my leg. “Well, yeah, I think Evelyn might have been inclined to think that way,” I admitted. “But everyone set her straight.”
“Then it’s all Evelyn’s fault,” the man said, bitterly. “She was the one who swore she saw a ghost.”
“You’re on the Tour,” I said, slowly, as the pieces began to fall into place. “And you were looking for—Jamie?”
“I saw him too,” he declared, a trifle shrilly. “I woulda spoken to him, but for your interference.”
“I didn’t interfere,” I said, hotly. “I just stepped closer to get a better look.”
The man grabbed me by both shoulders and shook me a little. “Then you spotted him, too? In the moonlight?”
I nodded and he shook me again once more before dropping my shoulders. His face was exultant. “I knew it. I knew he was here.”
I crossed my arms, shivered and considered the possibility that I had crashed into a madman. I mean, I didn’t really expect to meet a fictional character from the past at the first stone circle I’d ever been to, but this guy clearly did. The light rain had wept itself away but the moon was completely gone, blanketed by the rolling fog. The thought of the bike ride back to Inverness was beginning to haunt me more than the ghost. Still, I had to know …
“You left the tour to stay here and look for a ghost? Why? What ghost?”
He gave me an impatient shrug and slapped the cover of the book in my hand. “What ghost? How are you even worthy to carry this around?”
“I—I just mean …” I stammered, at an almost total loss, “Of course I know the ghost from the story. It’s just—why are you looking for that ghost? And why here?”
He sighed and shot me a sideways glance. “Let’s get out of this rain,” he said, and even somewhat gallantly stepped aside with a gesture indicating I should go first. I stepped gingerly onto the spot where I thought the path lay, and seconds later, his flashlight beam shone down to light the way to the road. The path was very narrow and rocky, so the going was slow, but unlike his earlier behavior, he showed no impatience. He walked behind me slowly, holding the flashlight high so we could both make out the way ahead.
“My name’s Gerald Abernathy,” he said as we entered the narrow band of trees that ringed the ancient site. “That is, my father was an Abernathy, one of the Georgia Abernathys, actually, but my mother’s family are all old Scots. Her maiden name was Grey.”
I thought about this as I stumbled along the path. “As in Lord John Grey?”
The flashlight beam bobbed a bit and then stopped moving. I couldn’t see a thing without it, so I turned to face Gerald.
“I know it’s fiction,” he said quietly, his accent deepening as he spoke. “But it’s almost like I could be a descendent of Lord John. He believed Jamie was the perfect fella…” He took a deep breath. “And so do I.”
He raised his chin as he said this, looking at me defiantly.
I smiled up at him. “Well then, it appears we are both trying to find the same man,” I said, and turned back to the path once more.
A few stumbling moments later, we stood at the same spot by the side of the road where I had watched Evelyn and Helen’s tour bus pull away. A car stood idling in the drizzle, headlights cutting through the night and reflecting off the water droplets on my bicycle.
“You know,” said Gerald, eyeing my wet bike. “I could really use a drink after seeing that ghost, and you look like you could use a lift into town. Care to share my cab?”
With the help of the cabbie we got the bike jammed into the trunk—the “boot” he called it—and slid damply into the back seat of the wonderfully warm taxi. The return to Inverness was not long, but enough time for us to both discover how much we had in common, not the least of which was a love for OUTLANDER and its most famous Highland warrior.
The cabbie disgorged Gerald, my bicycle and me at a pub just a block from my hostel and across the street from the place where Susan and I had rented the bikes. The store was dark, so I leaned the bike up against the front wall of the pub and decided to return it in the morning, safe in the knowledge Susan would have paid the bill earlier.