Aunt Dimity and the Deep Blue Sea (11 page)

I drew a quick, shallow breath and forced a smile.

“My goodness,” I said shakily. “That certainly beats the lobster pot Daddy found in Skegness.”

If I was worried about my sons’ being traumatized for life, I was overestimating their sensitivity. As it turned out, the little ghouls were thrilled by their find.

“Andrew won’t let us fetch it down,” Will complained.

“He says it’s dirty,” said Rob, “but we can wash it in the ocean, can’t we?”

“When it’s clean, we can take it home,” said Will.

“No, we most certainly cannot,” I stated firmly, and quickly improvised a reason for the ban. “It’s . . . not ours. It belongs to Sir Percy.”

“Sir Percy will let us keep it,” Rob said confidently, and he was probably right.

“I’m sorry, boys,” Damian interjected, “but I can’t allow you to take the skull home with you. Andrew, would you please get it down?”

Andrew tipped seashells from the plastic bucket he was carrying and hooked the handle over his wrist. While he climbed up to the skull, I scanned the looming cliff tops, then backed slowly away, pulling Damian with me.

“It’s
him,
” I whispered urgently when the twins were safely out of earshot.

“Whom?” he asked.

“Abaddon.”
Dimity’s words came flooding back to me in a panicky torrent. “He followed us to Erinskil yesterday, camped out on Cieran’s Chapel last night, and left the skull here this morning as a . . . a sick, demented calling card.”

Damian glanced toward Rob and Will, then pulled me even farther away from them.

“Lori,” he said, with the patient air of one pacifying a frantic toddler, “I want you to calm down.”

“Calm down?”
I snapped. “
You’re
the one who said he might cut my throat on the beach!”

“But he couldn’t have known you’d be on the beach this morning,” Damian pointed out. “He couldn’t have known it would be such a fine day.”

“Look,” I began testily, but Damian cut me off.

“Hold on, Lori,” he said. “Let’s ask ourselves a few questions, shall we? How did Abaddon follow you to Erinskil? He didn’t come on the ferry—it’s not due for another four days. If he acquired a boat privately and dropped anchor in the harbor, I’d have heard about it—the harbormaster reports to me. Sir Percy’s private cove is the only other reasonable landing place on the island, and it’s been under electronic surveillance since Mrs. Gammidge arrived. No boat has come ashore, and no one’s been seen decorating the beach with skulls.”

“There are other beaches,” I said. “I saw them from the air.”

“Beaches, yes. Landing sites, no.” Damian shook his head. “It’s not easy to land a boat in Sir Percy’s cove, Lori. It’s ten times worse at the other beaches. They’re fenced in by all sorts of underwater obstacles—rocks, reefs, snags. I wish Abaddon
would
try to land at one of them. He’d drown before he ever stepped ashore, and we’d be finished with him.”

I folded my arms and eyed him skeptically. “I suppose the skull sprouted wings and flew up there?”

“The tide washes up all sorts of strange objects,” said Damian in an infuriatingly reasonable tone of voice. “Storms deposit them in unexpected places.”

I recoiled, aghast. “Are my sons likely to find
more
body parts?”

“It’s not as uncommon an occurrence as you might think,” Damian explained. “There’s a small section in the Stoneywell churchyard reserved for the burial of bones returned by the sea.”

“Oh,” I said, momentarily taken aback. “Is that why you asked Andrew to get the skull? Are you planning to bury it?”

“I’ll send it to the forensics lab in Glasgow first,” said Damian. “If they can’t connect it with a crime or an accident, it’ll probably end up in the churchyard.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay now?”

“No, I’m not,” I said crossly, and shrugged off his hand. “What about my light? Someone should investigate it. Abaddon could be out there, spying on us!”

“I doubt that Abaddon would choose such a prominent landmark as a hiding place,” said Damian. He peered at me closely, then seemed to reach a decision. “But of course we’ll look into it. If it will put your mind at ease, we can go out to Cieran’s Chapel right now.”

“How?” I asked.

He pulled out his cell phone. “Say the word and I’ll have a boat pick us up in thirty minutes.”

I looked over my shoulder at the expanse of choppy water stretching between me and the wave-lashed islet, then looked back at my precious babes, who were bent low over Andrew’s bucket, holding a cheerfully bloodthirsty discussion about the skull’s possible origins. Was I a timid mouse or a bold lioness?

“Make the call,” I said.

I
avoided mentioning the upcoming boat ride to Will and Rob. They were so eager to show the skull to Sir Percy that they didn’t object to being sent back to the castle, but if they’d known what they were about to miss, they wouldn’t have gone quietly.

I was raring to get out to the islet. I didn’t particularly want to discover Abaddon’s campsite—I wanted my insane stalker to stay far away from Erinskil—but I hoped we would find
something.
If Damian went on treating me as if I were an excitable schoolgirl, I wouldn’t be responsible for my actions. I had to prove to him that the dim golden glow hadn’t been a figment of my overstressed imagination.

My determination was shaken slightly when the boat Damian had ordered came into view, bouncing from wave to wave as it rounded the headland. I’d expected some sort of fishing vessel, not an inflatable rubber dinghy with an outboard motor. I zipped up my rain jacket and glanced nervously at the whitecaps blooming between the cove and the islet. The wind was picking up.

Damian seemed to sense my misgivings. He pointed to a line of swirls and eddies about twenty yards offshore.

“You see those little ripples out there?” he asked. “The snags beneath them will tear the keel out of a boat faster than you can say snap. Luckily, we’re nearing low tide, when they’re easier to avoid, but finding the right channel still requires local knowledge, a high level of seamanship, and a boat with an extremely shallow draft. Sir Percy’s yacht wouldn’t be any good to us at all.”

“Who’s our . . . er, driver?” I asked.

“Mick Ferguson will be our pilot,” Damian informed me. “Mick was born and raised on Erinskil. He knows what he’s doing.”

I watched in consternation as Mick Ferguson threaded the dinghy through the swirls and eddies, then drove it at full speed straight at the beach. At the last minute, he cut the power, tilted the motor up out of the water, and allowed momentum to carry the dinghy onto the sand. It was a virtuoso performance and did much to restore my confidence.

Mick Ferguson was a short, burly man with curly salt-and-pepper hair, a grizzled beard, and bright blue eyes set deeply in a face pleated with wrinkles. He was wearing a fluorescent orange rain jacket with matching rain pants and a pair of black rubber boots that reached nearly to his knees.

“Mick, this is Lori,” said Damian, when we reached the dinghy. “Lori’s a guest of Sir Percy’s.”

“You’ll be the one who came yesterday, in the helicopter.” Mick’s blue eyes narrowed shrewdly. “With the two wee lads.”

“That’s me,” I acknowledged. I wouldn’t have been shocked to discover that Mick already knew what I’d had for breakfast and possibly my shoe size. I’d lived in Finch long enough to know how quickly news spread in a small community.

After Damian and I had zipped and snapped our rain jackets, Mick put out a hand to help me aboard, directed me to sit on the wooden bench that straddled the dinghy’s midsection, and passed me a life vest. He checked to make sure I’d fastened the straps correctly, then hopped out of the boat to help Damian push it back into the water. Damian’s khakis were wet to the knees by the time the two men climbed aboard, but I felt no guilt. The dinghy rode so low in the water that my jeans wouldn’t stay dry for long.

Damian sat beside me and suggested that I take hold of one of the nylon loops dangling from the boat’s sides. Mick started the outboard motor and backed away from the shore before turning the dinghy toward Cieran’s Chapel.

“Thanks for coming to get us, Mr. Ferguson!” I bellowed, half turning to face the pilot. I had to shout to be heard above the motor’s roar.

“We won’t be able to stay long!” Mick shouted back. “Weather’s moving in.”

I didn’t see a cloud in the sky, but I wasn’t about to question Mick’s expertise, and the information didn’t seem to bother Damian one bit.

“We won’t need much time,” he said complacently.

Once we left the shelter of the cove and entered open water, conversation became impossible. Mick seemed determined to get us out to the islet as fast as he could, so the boat leapt through the choppy water, hitting wave crests with bone-jarring smacks that sent streams of salt water splashing over us. It was like riding a bucking bronco through a car wash, and although a certain fun-loving portion of my brain was squealing “Whee!” the rest of it was entertaining profoundly covetous thoughts about Mick’s rain pants.

We slowed to a crawl as we approached the Chapel, and I wondered how on earth we would get ashore. The islet rose some forty feet straight up from the sea, a sheer-sided monolith festooned with bird droppings and slimy seaweed. But Mick was on home surf, and he knew his way around. He steered the boat to the islet’s north side, where a cleft in the rock held a series of broad shelves that stepped down to the water’s edge.

Mick guided the boat onto the lowest shelf and made a line fast to an iron ring that hung from a bolt driven into the solid rock. Damian paused to give the ring a tug before turning to supervise my death-defying hop from the boat onto the next shelf up. As I scrambled to the top of the cleft, using my hands and knees as well as my feet, I decided that if Abaddon had chosen Cieran’s Chapel as a camp-ground, he was an even bigger nutcase than I’d supposed.

When I emerged from the cleft onto more or less level ground, I saw that the Chapel was neither as exposed nor as barren as I’d expected it to be. The sheer stone walls formed a notched and irregular windbreak around the edge of the islet, and the uneven ground was covered with a tough, springy mat of low-growing plants that were spangled here and there with minute blossoms.

Mick waited in an elbow of rock, hunched against the freshening breeze, but Damian walked with me while I slowly crisscrossed the islet, scanning the ground for traces of a campsite. I saw none—no scorch marks, no ashes, no footprints, and no sign of crushed foliage where a tent might have been pitched. Damian squatted down now and then to study the local flora, but he didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. I could hear him
thinking,
“I told you so.”

I finished my search at the edge of a bowl-shaped depression on the east side of the islet. There, at the bottom of the bowl, lay a stone slab the size of a large door. An inscription had been carved into the slab, in Celtic lettering:

“It’s from Burns,” I said to Damian. “The quotation, I mean. It’s from a poem by Robert Burns.”

“It describes the old laird well,” Mick said, coming up behind me. “James Robert was a good man.”

I remembered why the tenth earl had asked to be buried on Cieran’s Chapel and smiled sadly. “I’m sure he was.”

“Is that why you came out here?” Mick asked, watching me carefully. “Did you want to pay your respects to the old laird?”

“Lori’s interested in folklore,” Damian answered smoothly. “After Sir Percy told her the legend of Brother Cieran, she couldn’t wait to visit the Chapel.”

“You should have known better,” Mick muttered.

“I beg your pardon?” I said.

“You’re a mother,” he said forcefully, and shot a reproachful glance at me from beneath his bushy brows. “You’re responsible for two young lives.You shouldn’t be taking such risks.”

I didn’t know what had angered the old man, but I tried to mollify him.

“Damian wouldn’t have called you if he didn’t think you could get us out here safely,” I said. “And I don’t mind getting wet.”

“I’m not talking about getting wet,” Mick growled. “Brother Cieran went mad, you know. He marooned himself and lost his mind. Did Sir Percy mention that?” He thrust a calloused finger toward the stone tablet. “It’s said he died right there, driven mad by grief and thirst and loneliness. That’s why the old laird chose the spot for his tomb.”

I looked down at the stony ground surrounding the old laird’s grave and felt pity well up in me. Of course Brother Cieran had gone mad, I thought. He’d glanced up from his prayers one sunny day to see black smoke billowing from the island. He must have known what it meant, yet he’d scrambled into his small boat, rowed hard to shore, and climbed the steep path to the monastery, where he’d found a smoldering ruin and, one by one, the bodies of his friends. How long had it taken him to dig their graves? How long had he stood staring out to sea before making the decision to return to the islet, release the boat, and condemn himself to death? Of course it had driven him mad.

Mick’s voice broke into my reveries.

“It’s said that Brother Cieran never left the Chapel,” he murmured hoarsely. “It’s said that his ghost wanders here still, suffering the torments of the damned.There’re those who wouldn’t come out here for love or money.”

Mick spoke with such conviction that I wondered if Aunt Dimity had been mistaken when she’d told me that Brother Cieran had left the islet long ago.

“Have you seen his ghost?” I asked.

“That’s none of your business,” Mick said gruffly, leaving me with the clear impression that he had and that it hadn’t been an experience he cherished. He cast a glance skyward, then stumped off toward the cleft, saying, “It’s time we were going. I’ll have to take you to the harbor, Mr. Hunter. Sea’s too rough to drop you at the cove.”