Page 11 of Bonetide

I feel a slow prickle at my neck, that terrible urge we get to look at things like car crashes and roadkill. Like there’s something horrible there, watching from the trees. But I don’t look back. I open the door, go inside, and close it behind me, leaning against it for a second before I get on with the rest of my day.

By two in the afternoon, however, I’ve given up on working.

I tried. I set up at the kitchen table with the sketchbook and the watercolors and a small jar of the heather I cut from the slope yesterday before the fog rolled in. I’ve been drawing and think I’m doing a good job of it, but my mind is elsewhere.

Across the bay.

I put the pencil down and push the sketchbook away as if I’m pushing him away.

I think I need to socialize with people other than my naked neighbor.

I’ve decided to visit the Torridon Hotel, the closest building of note to me. It’s supposed to be a four-star country house with a long gravel drive and a view of Upper Loch Torridon. I have the kind of cash for one drink and a small dinner if I order carefully, which will be a small miracle if I can pull it off. Me and budgeting have never ever mixed well—another reason Ryan and I fought all the time—but I have vowed this year to make every damn dollar count.

I pull on my good wool sweater, the burgundy one that doesn’t smell like a basement, and I get in the car.

The drive itself is an event. The single-track wraps around the foot of the mountain across the head of the loch, and even in the fog you can feel the scale of what’s around you, the way the hills hug you and the mountains rise dramatically and the dark water carves a boundary around you as if trying to pin you in place. I take it slowly, and luckily there are no cars coming the other way that make me panic whether I’m driving on the right side of the road or not.

The pub at the Torridon is dark wood, good vintage lamps and the kind of fireplace that’s, in late August, doing a small token fire because the management has correctly identified that the tourists want one. The bar smells of peat and good whisky and something braised. I order a pint of the local ale, a bowl of Cullen skink because the name sounds funny—I imagine it’s a dish the Cullens would have made their non-vampire guests—and a chunk of bread, and sit at the corner of the bar with a paperback I picked up at the airport that I keep reading the same couple of pages of.

There are eight or nine people in the place. Two hill-walkers in technical gear at a corner table, and a couple in their seventies sharing a plate of haggis fritters (yum). Three locals at the far end of the bar, two men and a woman, all roughly fifty or sixty, all settled in the way of people who’ve been at this bar for a good long while and intend to stay for longer. There’s something about that that I admire, maybe even envy.

I drink my beer and eat my creamy fish soup and half-listen to the ambience around me.

It takes about ten minutes for the conversation at the locals’ end to drift somewhere useful. The man in the middle, ginger-bearded, in a cream fisherman’s jumper, says something about “the Mackenzie lass” and the woman beside him says “Aye, two weeks now,” and the third man, older and quieter, makes a faint gruff sound.

The hill-walkers, who’ve been quiet at their table, hear it too. “Sorry,” the woman hill-walker says, leaning toward the bar. “Are you talking about that woman who went missing?”

The three locals look at each other. The ginger-bearded man takes a careful pull of his pint. “Aye,” he says. “Walked from her cottage to her sister’s, never got there. Two weeks last Sunday.”

“Where was this, near here?”

“Down near Applecross.”

“That’s the third one, isn’t it?” the male hill-walker says.

A silence at the locals’ end of the bar that’s not awkward but is deliberate. The older quieter man finally says, “Aye, the third. All vanished this summer.”

“All women?” the female hill-walker asks nervously.

“All women.”

“Tourists or locals?”

“Mix of both it seems.”

“The polis any nearer?” the older man wonders, to the room more than to anyone specifically.

“The polis,” the ginger-bearded man begins, “are doing what they do. Which is bugger-all. Seems to think all the ladies were too capricious and decided to start their lives over elsewhere.”

“Well, they don’t have any evidence that something bad happened to them,” offers the bartender, giving them a reproachful look that says don’t scare the fucking tourists. He’s a blond man in his thirties with the kind of soft Highland accent I could listen to all day.

The woman among them, who’s been quiet, picks up her pint and says, in a tone that’s half-joke and half-not, “Well, aside from the liver.”

“The liver?” the male hill-walker exclaims. “What liver?”

“Oh, they found a liver on the shore of Applecross Bay. A human liver by the looks of it. Not sure what came of it though.”

“What came of it was that it belonged to a deer,” the bartender admonished her. “None of this human remains nonsense.”