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“I didnae say you didn’t,” he said calmly.
Kris decided to let the whole question of the man she’d kissed in Urquhart Castle fade away. She’d seen him. Alan Mac hadn’t. End of story.
For now.
“Wait.” Kris stopped, and the constable did, too. “In 1999, Nessie was spotted on land for the first time since 1963. And it was at night!” she finished with a triumphant poke in the direction of his broad chest.
He lifted his flashlight from the road ahead to a spot just above her belly button, then contemplated her in the upward spray of yellow light. “Ye seem to know a lot about the monster.”
Whoops.
For an instant her mind blanked. She had a lie in place for situations like this, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember what it was. Such was the trouble with lies.
“I … uh…”
She needed practice. Lying had to get easier the more you did it. Which was probably why the best liars were always the biggest liars.
Maybe by the time Kris came home from Scotland she, too, could stare a child in the face and say, I’ll never leave you, sweetheart. I promise.
Kris winced as the last words her mother had ever said to her whispered through her mind.
“Yer a Nessie hunter?”
“No!” she said, much too loud. “I mean I don’t want to hunt. How could I hunt something that…” She paused before she blurted the truth.
You can’t hunt what isn’t there.
“I’m here to…” Why in God’s name was she here?
“Oh, wait.” His confused—or had that been suspicious?—frown smoothed. “Yer the writer woman. I remember Effy talkin’ about ye now. Ye’ll be writing about Nessie?”
Kris hadn’t said what she was going to write about, but that seemed as good a topic as any and would explain why she knew so damned much.
“Sure.”
“A children’s book?”
Why did everyone think she was writing a children’s book?
“Okay.”
He nodded sagely. “I’ve heard how ye writer types don’t like to talk about yer work. Curses it, so to speak.”
“Right.” Kris grasped at the excuse, even though she believed in curses as much as she believed in the fairy tales where they were found. “Wouldn’t want to do that.”
They began to walk again. The lamp she’d left on inside the cottage seemed to flare like lightning against the night. Behind the house, hills that she knew to be sapphire in the sunlight loomed like the great black humps of a mythical beast.
Kris sighed. One day in Drumnadrochit and she was being drawn into the group delusion.
“Your last name’s Mac?” she asked, desperate for a normal conversation.
“Mackenzie,” he said. “They call me Alan Mac because my father is Mac, ye see.”
She didn’t but nodded anyway.
“There are a lot of Mackenzies. ’Tis a Highland name.”
“All the Mackenzies are related?”
