Font Size:  

“Aren’t ye supposed to be trolling the loch?” the constable asked, then glanced in the direction of Loch Side Cottage. “Ye’re going to get fired if ye keep this up.”

Liam snorted. He was definitely not going to get fired.

Alan Mac lifted the paper in his hand. “The information ye wanted. Yon wee girlie’s brother has been quite the busy boy.”

Liam’s eyes narrowed.

“I traced his passport.” Alan Mac peered at the white sheet. “Went from America to France, then Russia, Tasmania, blah-blah, Africa, yada yada, Canada, and Scotland. This is all in the past year. Couldn’t find anything on what he does for a living, which would be suspicious even without all that gadding about.”

Liam resisted the urge to rush across the loch and station himself in front of her door to prevent Kris’s mysterious brother from gaining entrance again.

“I put in a call to Interpol,” Alan Mac went on. “But they have some sort of security hold on his file.” He lowered the paper with a frown. “That he has a file is not a good thing in my experience. But as soon as they get back to me, I’ll let ye know.”

Liam, still peering at the cottage, lowered his head in acknowledgment. He hadn’t seen Kris come out. He hadn’t seen any kind of movement in there at all. For all he knew she wasn’t even in there but had gone to the village, to Inverness, or even back to America.

The despair that swamped him at the last location was sharp and deep and a little frightening. They didn’t have a future. Someday she would return to her life and he would return to his. Such that it was. He’d always known this, yet still he had touched her.

He’d understood that being with her was a mistake, that any relationship would end badly. But he hadn’t been able to stop himself.

“I’ll leave a copy of the list at your place.”

Liam started when Alan Mac spoke. He’d been so intent on the cottage, on Kris, he’d forgotten the man was there.

But the constable was used to Liam’s broody silences, especially when he was on duty at the loch. With a lift of the hand that still held the paper, Alan Mac left.

Long after the sound of the constable’s car had faded toward Drumnadrochit, Liam remained. The sun caused his eyes to droop, his body to warm and become languid. But the sharp splash to the north jerked him awake. Within seconds he was headed in that direction. He knew that sound.

It was the exact thump-cush a body made when it hit the surface of the loch.

*

As Kris came out of the bedroom, freshly showered and dressed, she noticed the yellow notepad she’d been scribbling on while she and Mandenauer talked sitting on the table. Something about it made her skirt the couch and pick it up.

“Whoa,” she said.

She had doodled each tattoo separately. She remembered doing that. Then, with her brain occupied by other legends, her subconscious had put them together and she’d drawn something else.

“What is so disturbing about that?”

The voice made Kris start. Mandenauer was back on the screen, sharp gaze focused on the sketch of Nessie that had formed on Kris’s yellow pad.

“Nothing, until you understand that this—” She tapped the monster. “Contains all of these.” She tapped each of the four tattoos.

“Explain.”

“I saw…,” Kris indicated the hump, “tattooed on my landlady’s…” Now she waved vaguely in the direction of her own breasts. “This—” The flipper. “On her brother’s wrist. That,” the thick line that had circled Alan Mac’s biceps, “was on the chief constable’s arm. And here—” Jamaica’s ankle tattoo. “We have the head of what I thought was a snake but could, when put together with the rest, become—” Again she pointed at the picture of Nessie.

“Interesting,” Edward murmured. “Tattoos have been employed as a…” He searched for the word. “Magnet. For instance, some Native American shamans used tattoos to draw their magic from—” He shrugged. “Wherever they drew it from.”

“Bullshit land?”

“You don’t believe in magic?”

“Not yet,” she said. Which was a far cry from last week

’s answer of Not in this lifetime.

“I’ve also known tattoos to be used as an aid in shape-shifting.” Mandenauer’s thin lips pursed. “You saw the marks on four different people?”

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
Articles you may like