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September was cold in the Highlands, or so she’d heard. Not that she wasn’t used to the cold. She was from Chicago. Cold moved in about October and hung around until June. There’d even been a few July days when the breeze off the lake was reminiscent of the chill that drifted out of her freezer when she went searching for double chocolate brownie yogurt in the middle of the night.
“Are you sure, Kris?” Worry tightened Lola’s voice. “You’ll be all alone over there.”
Alone. Kris gave a mental eye roll. Horrors! Like that would be anything new.
Her mother had died, still promising she wouldn’t, when Kris was fifteen. Her brother had left for college when she was seventeen, swearing he’d visit often. If “often” was once the following year and then never again, he hadn’t been lying. Her father hung around until she turned eighteen. Then he’d taken a job in China—no lie. He hadn’t been back either.
So Kris was used to alone, and she could take care of herself. “I’ll be fine.” She zipped her suitcase.
“I’d go with you—”
Kris snorted. Lola in Scotland? That would be like taking Paris Hilton to…well, Scotland. Kris could probably shoot a documentary about it. The film would no doubt receive better ratings that Hoax Hunters.
And wasn’t that depressing?
“Aren’t you getting ready for the season?” Kris asked.
Lola was a ballet dancer, and she looked like one. Tall and slim, with graceful arms and never-ending legs, her long, black, straight hair would fall to the middle of her well-defined back if she ever wore it down. However, Lola believed that that style made her already oval face appear too oval. As if that could happe
n.
Kris wasn’t bland and average, unless she stood next to Lola. She also wasn’t a washed-out, freckle-nosed, frizzy-headed blond unless compared with Lola’s porcelain complexion and smooth ebony locks. The only thing they had in common were their brown eyes. However, Lola’s were pale, with flecks of gold and green, while Kris’s were just brown, the shade of mud she’d been told by a man who’d said he was a poet.
The two of them were still friends because Lola was as beautiful inside as out, as honest as a politician was not, and she loved Kris nearly as much as Kris loved her. In all her life, Kris had never trusted anyone the way she trusted Lola Kablonsky.
Lola set her long-fingered, smooth, graceful hand on Kris’s arm. “If you needed me, I’d go. Screw the season.”
Kris blinked back the sudden sting in her eyes. “Thanks.”
The two had met while living in the same cheap apartment building—Kris attending Loyola University and Lola attending ballet classes on the way to her present stint with the Joffrey Ballet. On the basis of a few good conversations, and a shared desire to get the hell out of their crappy abode, the two had found a better one and become roommates.
Casual observers might think that Kris and Lola would fight like cats in a bag when shoved into a residence the size of Lady Gaga’s walk-in closet. Instead they’d remained roomies ever since, earning the nickname the Spinal Sisters—because they were together so much they had to be attached at the spine.
Kris hugged Lola; Lola hugged back, but she clung. Lola had been raised in a large, loud, loving, pushy Polish family. Combine that with her appearance, and Lola had probably never been alone for five minutes in her entire life. A good thing since she didn’t like it.
Kris felt guilty for leaving her, but she didn’t have a choice. She couldn’t start over again with another show. She believed in Hoax Hunters.
She also believed that the Loch Ness Monster was ripe for debunking, and she was just the woman to do it.
Kris gathered the backpack that contained her laptop, video camera, and purse. “I’ll be fine,” she assured her friend for the second time. “It’s not like I’m going to Iraq or Columbia or even the Congo. It’s Scotland. What could happen?”
Though it felt like a week, Kris arrived in Drumnadrochit, on the west shore of Loch Ness, a day later.
She’d been able to fly directly from Chicago to Heathrow; however, unlike the rest of the people on the plane, she hadn’t been able to sleep. Instead, she’d read the books she’d picked up on both Scotland and Loch Ness.
Loch Ness was pretty interesting, even without the monster. The lake was actually a three-hundred-million-year-old crack in the earth’s surface. Because of its extreme depth—nearly eight hundred feet—the loch contained more fresh water than all the other lakes in Britain and Wales combined, and never froze over, even during the coldest of Highland winters.
Since there had been over four thousand reported sightings of Nessie, which no doubt fueled the forty million dollars attributed to her by the Scottish tourism industry, it wasn’t going to be easy to debunk this myth. Kris certainly wasn’t going to get any help from the locals.
By the time London loomed below, Kris’s eyes burned from too much reading and not enough sleeping. However, she couldn’t drag her gaze from the view. She wished she had the money to tour the Tower and Buckingham Palace; she’d always dreamed of walking the same streets as Shakespeare. But she was traveling on her own dime, and she had precious few of them.
The city sped by the window of the bus taking her to Gatwick Airport where she boarded a flight to Inverness. A few hours later, she got her first glimpse of a fairly industrialized city. Why Kris had thought Inverness would be full of castles, she had no idea. According to her guidebook, it had nearly sixty thousand people and less than half a dozen castles. Still she was disappointed. Quaint would play very well on film.
She got what she was hoping for on the road south. The countryside was quaint squared, as was Drumnadrochit. White buildings backed by rolling green hills, the place should have been on a postcard—hell, it probably was—along with the long, gray expanse of Loch Ness.
The village was also tourist central, with a wealth of Nessie museums, shops and tours by both land and sea. Kris would check them out eventually. They’d make another excellent backdrop for her show. The charm of the town would highlight the archaic myth, illuminating how backward was a belief in fairy tales. The excessive glitter of tourism would underline why the locals still pretended to believe.
Kris had once adored fairy tales, listening avidly as her mother read them to her and her brother. In those tales, bad things happened, but eventually, everything worked out.
