Finding Fraser(48)

A car pulled up on the road beside me, and the driver leaned across and rolled down the passenger side window.

“Need a lift?”

I opened my mouth to decline, and then I noticed the hand-painted logo on the side: Alec’s Cab—Inverness-shire. No trip too small!

The wizened-tortoise face of an old man on a bus flashed through my mind. Could it be?

I slid into the front seat, putting the map on the seat between us. “Just a sec,” I said, and yanked my wallet out of my pack. The cabbie looked at me expectantly. I fished around inside, pulled out a tattered card and held it up to him.

“Is this you?” I demanded.

He took the card and held it under the dashboard light. “Aye, tha’s me, awright. But this is one of my old cards—where’d ye find it?”

“I met your dad on a bus-ride to Inverness, and he gave it to me.”

He laughed. “Ye’d never believe how many ride’s the old codger has gotten me. Auld Alan is a marketing machine, he is. So—where to?”

“It’s a little odd,” I began …





It was nuts. We both agreed—Alan’s son, Alec-the-cabbie, and me. But when had that ever stopped me before?

CL, Gerald’s notes read on the very margin of the map. Tidal castle. Definitely haunted.

CL? What did that mean?

Alec, who turned out to be as convivial as his father, could not decode the CL acronym, but filled in a few other details of what he did know as we bumped along the winding route.

“Ainslie Castle, eh? Aye, it’s an auld ‘un,” he confirmed when I showed him the place on the map.

“Bi’ of a sad story, actually. The Laird who owns this property is what you’d call a mite cash-poor. He’s tried for years to get government money to help restore the place, but it’s too far off the beaten track.”

“Is it a complete ruin, then?” I asked, straining my eyes to see the road in front of us. The afternoon sky was lowering, and I hoped he could see the road beyond better than I could, as it twisted through the trees on the old mountainside.

“Aye, pretty much. Ye can’t get inside the place atall—it’s blocked off to stop tourists from having the walls come down on their heads. Nice ta spend the day there, if ye want a picnic in high summer, mebbe, bu’ it’s tiny, so no’ much to see, for all that. An hour should give ye a’ the time ye need.”

I held the map under the flickering light shining out from Alec’s broken glove box. “I’m pretty sure there is no circle here,” I muttered. “But it’s near Fort William and it’s on a mountainside.”

“Why not ring yer friend?” Alec asked, not at all put off by my conversation with myself. “Mebbe he can gi’ ye his reasoning.”

“He’s in the hospital with pneumonia,” I said, absently. “He’s written something else here, in the margin. Cattle … something. Thane? Maybe? Cattle thane—does that make sense to you?”

“Gi’e ‘er here,” said Alec, and without missing a beat he grabbed the map. To his credit, the cab wavered not at all while he squinted at the tattered page.

He thrust it back at me as we careened around a sharp curve.

“Cattle thievery,” he said, firmly. “Though cattle thane does make a bit o’ sense, as the lairds around these parts are known as thanes, sometimes. It was a title—kinda like an Earl, ye ken?”

“Right,” I muttered, trying to hold my head steady. The narrow roads and great speeds, not to mention the whole driving-on-the-wrong-side thing was reintroducing me to my good friend nausea. “I remember a Thane in MacBeth,” I said, to take my mind off my shaky stomach. “The Thane of Cawdor?”

Alec slapped the seat between us delightedly. “Righ’! Righ’! And there still is a Thane up in Cawdor, for all tha’! But I reckon in this case, yer friend wrote ‘thief’ or ‘thieven’.”

I thought back to the story. Cattle stealing made up the background behind a lot of scenes in the book. The opening scene, where Jamie is wounded and requires Claire’s medical expertise—he was with his uncle Dougal and his men, who had definitely been up to no good. Stealing cattle may have been a part of that.

I also remembered how large a part cattle thievery had played in Jamie’s rescue from the evil clutches of Black Jack Randall.

The car took yet another corner on two wheels. “There has to be a reason,” I said, teeth clenched to keep the contents of my stomach down. “If Gerald marked it, it has to be important.”





“Y’er sure ta freeze,” Alec said, as I stepped out of the cab onto ground beside the dirt trail that passed for a road. “I’ve a rug in the boot—can I please jes’ leave it with yeh?”