All The Time You Need (4 page)

Well, at least for the next two weeks she did.

True to Syrie’s claim, the pantry and fridge were well stocked, and Annie easily found everything she needed to pack a lunch. A sandwich, an orange, a chocolate bar and a bottle of water. She was set for the day.

She paused at the door, considering how to best carry her picnic along with her when her gaze landed on her purse. Of course. With its strap lengthened, she could sling it across her chest and have her hands completely free. But there was no point in carrying all the things she’d considered absolutely necessary to have with her on the plane.

Her key, that was important. She fit the ribbon around her neck, where the little silver key clinked against her grandmother’s necklace. For a moment, she considered taking the necklace off so it wouldn’t get scratched, but it felt good where it was, hanging around her neck.

“Keeping you close, Nana Ellen,” she said with a smile. “We’ll spend the day exploring together.”

Her key, her bottle of water and her lunch. That was pretty much all she needed to carry with her. She debated back and forth on her e-reader, ultimately deciding to leave it behind. If she found a good place to linger and read, she could always retrace her steps tomorrow.

Decision made, she pulled open the drawer of the little desk so she could dump out the contents of her purse, only to stop when she spotted a small, leather-bound journal inside.

Could it be the journal Syrie had mentioned? This she would take along with her on her exploration to find the gated arbor her grandmother had loved. It felt somehow fitting that she should read her grandmother’s journal in her grandmother’s favorite spot.

Annie stepped out of the cottage and onto the pathway that led toward the forest to again study the hand-drawn map and orient herself to the direction she would walk.

It was a beautiful, sunny morning, with just the lightest breeze to ruffle her hair. A few yards from the cottage, she found a massive stone that had been weathered by time to look almost as if it had been carved into a majestic seat, with a rough-hewn design chiseled onto it, as large as a man’s hand. An ancient version of graffiti, perhaps? She ran her finger over the carving to flatten the layer of moss growing in the lines, feeling as if she should know what it represented. It could be something as mysterious as a standing stone erected by some ancient peoples. Or it might just be the remnants of an ice sheet from the last ice age. As she stared at the carving, the design suddenly clicked in her mind, and she jerked her hand away from it to lean in for a closer inspection. No wonder it had seemed familiar. It was the same design as the pendant she wore around her neck, a heart within a heart. Someone in the past had been quite the romantic.

On an impulse, she climbed up onto the top of the rock to stand and survey all that she could see. A thrill of exhilaration thrummed through her body, as if she were a child again, without a single worry in the world. In the distance, the highway she’d traveled to get here snaked around the green hills like a carefully curled ribbon of unmoving gray. The beauty of this place filled her with an uncharacteristic sense of peace.

“Like I’ve come home,” she announced to the world around her. “This is mine. This is where I belong.”

No wonder her grandmother had loved to come here so much. And, for the next two weeks, she planned to love it just as much as her grandmother ever had.

“Thank you, Nana Ellen,” she whispered, turning her face up toward the sky. Above her, thin, wispy white vapor trails criss-crossed the sky like hand stitching on a blanket of blue. With only a little effort, she could well imagine her grandmother’s hand at work there. “You always did know what I needed before I did.”

The scene laid out before her began to shift, and a queasy feeling flowed through her stomach as vertigo threatened to rear its ugly head if she didn’t get her feet back on ground soon. She and heights had never gotten along well, and the six or seven feet she’d climbed was no exception. Not wanting to ruin her perfect morning, she sank to her knees and waited for the dizziness to pass. When it had gone, she climbed back down, concentrating on the positives of the moment, keeping her eyes focused on the rock rather than on the distance.

Her feet firmly on the ground, she cleared her throat and took a deep breath. She should have known better than to try such a thing in the first place.

In spite of that one little glitch, it really was shaping up to be a perfect day. The view, the beautiful morning, the whole feel of the place. Every single bit of it was so wonderful, she couldn’t imagine a better harbinger for her day of exploration.

Thirty minutes later she was ready to change her mind. The slippers that had been exactly what she needed for traveling were ridiculously inappropriate for a hike through the forest. She was beginning to regret not having waited for her luggage to arrive with her comfortable sneakers packed inside.

She might even have turned around and headed back toward the cottage if she hadn’t spotted her first glimpse of the castle ruins through the trees.

The sight of the crumbling outer wall filled her with a sense of accomplishment at having found her way to where she wanted to be. If she closed her eyes and held her breath, she could almost believe it all was as it had been in its best days. She could feel the history of the place wafting over her.

“Awesome,” she breathed, hurrying forward with a renewed sense of purpose.

Inside the defensive walls that surrounded the exterior of the castle grounds, she could only imagine how amazing it must have been several hundred years ago, since much of the castle was only portions of what it once had been. These each called for their own exploration, but not today. Today she was here to find her grandmother’s arbor, the place Syrie had assured her was where Ellen had spent the majority of her time at the castle.

Behind what remained of the keep, behind what had once been outbuildings, beyond the tangled remains of what once was a garden, she scrambled over the crumbled stones of what looked like the skeleton of a small building to find a small stone archway butted up against a growth of bushes. With just a little more effort, she pushed through the growth and found herself on the other side of the defensive wall. From there, she followed an overgrown pathway back into the forest she’d been walking in on her way here. At last she found it, set quite a distance outside the protection of the castle proper, a high, circular stone wall enclosing a huge tree and yet more overgrown plants. A large iron gate, long beyond any usefulness, hung agape from one side of the entrance.

Annie skirted the rusty gate and entered the arbor, heading straight for the center and a stone seat that had been placed next to the massive tree that overwhelmed everything else. Its big branches spread over the arbor like a protective roof.

“So this was your special spot,” she murmured, running her fingers along the unusual stone bench.

Someone, likely some highly prized stone-mason, had spent many hours turning a massive boulder into this lovely seat with its high curving back and its oversized arms. Maybe it was this bit of history that had drawn her grandmother to return to this spot over and over again. That or the square that had been carved into the center of the back containing the letters A and E
,
separated by a deep indentation that looked like an upside-down triangle, though its points were more curved than pointed.

More graffiti? Or perhaps the letters represented her grandmother and the mysterious Aiden, who had given Nana Ellen the necklace that now hung around Annie’s neck?

Yet more questions with no ready answers, something that was rapidly becoming the hallmark of her trip to Scotland.

Annie sat down, at first perching on the edge of the stone as if to test the seat before scooting back and making herself comfortable, her feet drawn up under her. The hike in the fresh air had stimulated her appetite, and the sandwich she’d made for herself was gone in no time. The chocolate bar followed just as quickly. With her hunger satisfied, she drew the little journal from her bag and unwound the leather strings tied around it to open it up to its first page, hoping something inside might provide the answers she sought. Two simple sentences had been written in her grandmother’s neat script.

The heart is the key. Follow your heart.

Nothing else. All of the remaining pages were as blank as the day the book had first been bound. Perhaps it was only the latest in a series of journals her grandmother had kept. When she returned to the cottage, she’d do a proper search to find the others that must have come before this one.

For now, she studied the words on the page in her hand.

The heart is the key. Follow your heart.

Were the words meant for the person who read the journal or an admonition to Ellen herself? Perhaps she’d run out of room in a prior book and this was a thought she’d continued over to this page. But even if that were the case, the sentiment made little sense. Ellen had never been what Annie would have described as a romantic, and yet the opening comment in her journal, the
only
comment in her journal, spoke of the heart. The grandmother Annie had thought she’d known so well had obviously kept an entire slice of her life secret and apart from everyone in the family. And how odd that the words she’d written were so similar to the last thing Syrie had said to Annie. It would appear her grandmother’s friend had known more about Ellen’s true feelings than anyone in her own family had.

Perhaps when Annie returned to Edinburgh, she should attempt another visit to chat with Syrie.

The journal slipped from Annie’s fingers as she laid her head back against the smooth stone of the bench and stared up at the sprawling branches over her head. She felt as if she’d stumbled into some alternate world where nothing was as she believed it to be. It felt almost like that time she was in first grade and she’d seen her teacher at the grocery store. She’d been shocked to realize that the woman could exist anywhere other than in the classroom, where she belonged.

Ellen Shaw had experienced a life beyond her family. She’d had a side of her life she’d hidden away, a past that she’d shared with none of her—

Annie’s thoughts abruptly shifted gears as her eyes lit upon an odd stone fitted into the crook of the tree’s branches. She could almost swear it was shaped like a heart.

It seemed so strange, both the shape of the rock and the fact that it was perched on a tree branch. Neither were something she’d expect to find occurring of their own accord in nature. Someone had to have put it there.

Annie almost laughed out loud at the thought of her grandmother climbing up into the tree to hide a stone up there, but, considering this arbor was on her grandmother’s private property, who would be a more likely suspect to have done it than Ellen herself?

Unable to resist the lure of yet another mystery, Annie slipped off her shoes and climbed onto the arm of the bench, stretching up to reach the stone. Her fingertips just brushed against its smooth edge, but she couldn’t quite get a grasp on it.

Holding one hand against the rough bark of the tree, she edged higher, up onto the back of the bench, balancing on her tiptoes. This time when she reached up, her fingers closed around the stone, and with only a slight tug she was able to dislodge it from its resting spot.

Carefully she climbed down from the bench, eager to examine her find.

The stone had indeed been crafted into the shape of a heart, bearing the etching of a large heart on its face. She turned it over and discovered a tiny heart etched into the very center of the stone on this side. Had her grandmother etched those drawings into the stone? She doubted it, since the etchings and the stone itself all appeared to be so old.

More mysteries to pique her curiosity.

Annie knelt in front of the bench and traced her forefinger over the lines of the square that enclosed the carved initials.

If this place had been her grandmother’s favorite, these things must have held some special meaning to that part of her life that Ellen Shaw had kept secret from her family.

“Were you part of that secret life, Aiden?” she whispered.

Examining the carving this closely, she realized that the square wasn’t simply a series of lines etched into the stone. It looked almost as if the square was a separate box that had been chiseled to fit perfectly inside the stone back of the bench, like a drawer. Or a door.

But if it were a door, how would it open?

She slipped her fingers into the opening and pulled. Though her overly excited inner child had hoped the rock would spring out to reveal all her grandmother’s secrets, she wasn’t really surprised when it didn’t.

The expectation had been silly, fueled by one too many movies, one too many fantasy stories that she’d read.

Next time she came here, she’d remember to bring something to pry at the stone. A screwdriver, perhaps. It certainly wasn’t as if she could have a locksmith come make a new key for it.

The heart is the key. Follow your heart.

She looked down at the smooth stone heart in her hand, a flutter of doubt speeding her pulse.

Surely it couldn’t be as simple as that. Could it?

Her fingers trembled from excitement as she lifted the stone toward the opening. With her imagination already working overtime, she could almost swear that the smooth stone began to vibrate against her skin. The thought was ridiculous. Impossible. And yet the stone did feel warmer than it had only seconds before.