Finding Fraser(47)

“Sitting on the beds is forbidden,” she said sternly, and pulled in a chair from one of the other cubicles.

Gerald stuck his tongue out at her back as she walked away. “I don’t like that one,” he whispered loudly. “There’s another who’s much nicer, but not on today, sadly.”

I perched on the edge of the chair. “What happened?” I murmured, as the curtain wasn’t doing much to keep our conversation private.

He pulled a controller out from under the covers, and held a button down so that the head of his bed slowly rose to bring him more upright.

“Not much to tell,” he said, once he’d found a comfortable position. “I found the circle without any trouble at all.” He shot me a sideways glance. “Don’t you worry, none. I’ve kept the map for y’all.”

“Oh—I wasn’t worried,” I insisted. “I just came down here to make sure you’re all right.”

A wide grin spread across his face. “Ain’t you the sweetheart? Well, I must have caught something on the bus ride. Some woman had her snot-nosed kid with her, and he coughed all over me the entire trip. I moved right up to the front of the bus, but there was obviously no escaping his germs, the little bastard.”

He coughed a little himself, and then began again. “By the time I arrived down here in Fort William, it was mid-afternoon. I got myself settled and then hired a car to drive up to the circle.”

“A car?” I began doubtfully. The whole no-driver’s-license thing might become a bit of a problem.

“Oh, don’t worry, hon. You can easily do it by cab. Anyway, I got there just at sunset, and sat there the night through.”

“The entire night?”

“That I did, honey. And it was a whole hell of a mistake, because first off, ain’t no ghost gonna come around when someone’s coughing their lungs up inside a stone circle. And second—by the end of the next day, I had pneumonia. Ah’m asthmatic, so they didn’t want to give me drugs and send me back to my hotel room. Been here since then.”

“Oh, Gerald—I’m really sorry to hear that. Both of those things,” I added, hastily.

He nodded and I could see that just the act of telling me the story had taken a toll on him. His hand was limply feeling around the bedcovers, so I leaned out of my chair and slid the controller within his reach.

“Thanks, Emma,” he said, and pushed the button to lower his bed.

“Are you okay?” I asked, as he sank away.

He nodded. “I think I might just have a nap,” he said weakly, and then waved his hand at the bedside table. “Go ahead and take the map. It’s in the top drawer with my Ricola.”

As I slipped the map out from under the package of throat lozenges in the drawer, his eyes fluttered closed. I shut the drawer as quietly as I could.

“I’ll expect a full report,” he said, his eyes still tightly shut.

“Of course,” I replied, and walked over to the opening in the curtain.

“And not jes’ online—in person, y’hear?”

“I promise, Gerald.”

“Good.” He turned his face away from me and I crept out through the curtain. His voice carried after me, his Southern accent so incongruent in this setting. “And stay away from any of them goddamned germy kids, y’hear?”

The nurse frowned at me and I hurried out the door.





It was wrong to feel exasperated with someone who is ill. But I somehow managed it.

As I walked back along the road to Auntie Gwen’s, I studied the map Gerald had given me. It was a printed map, the kind you get when you’re staying at a hotel or sometimes a restaurant in a tourist area. It encompassed the entire region of Inverness-shire, effectively from Fort William along Loch Ness, all the way up to Inverness. There were no real notes on the map at all, beyond a few hieroglyphic-like notations in red ink, and whether they were for himself or for me was unclear.

Either way, they spelled trouble.

There were two locations marked on the map. The first I found must have been the stone circle he’d talked about, where he’d spent the night and managed to acquire pneumonia. It was near a little town called Drumnadrochit. As far as I could tell, this was halfway back up Loch Ness toward Inverness, which had to be at least an hour away by car. The other location marked on the map was not as far—but as his red X ran through a site labeled Ainslie Castle, I couldn’t even tell if there was a stone circle at all.

I checked my watch. It was 5:00 pm—a kind of dead zone in terms of time in the Scottish countryside. Just about everything in this part of Fort William appeared to have closed down, including the only Internet cafe I had spotted on my walk. I leaned against a tree on the corner of Auntie Gwen’s property and pored over the map again in the failing light.