the morning, but there was an unusual urgency in his tone.
“Where’ve you been?” he asked.
“Incommunicado in the Caribbean,” she said. “Hurricane knocked out all the lines.” She waited. Timmons always needed a moment to phrase precisely whatever he wanted to say.
“The housekeeper found Sir Harald dead on his study floor this morning,” he said. “He might have been there all the weekend. His heart, presumably.”
She swung her feet to the floor, her fingers locked around the receiver, and rocked on the edge of the bed. Her father’s birthday letter, which had arrived just before she left for Nevis, was still on her bedside table, his writing gone a bit spidery, his affection camouflaged by details of the estate operations, the last roses.
“Miss Eleanor?” Timmons said. “My condolences. A lion of a man.”
“That he . . . was,” she said. Referring to her father in the past tense took concentration.
She went to her dresser and picked up a snapshot of Harald, taken at least ten years before. He was in the hills, leaning against the Rover and smiling into the evening sun of midsummer that burnished his auburn hair. She felt as if her bones were falling into the open spaces in her body—timbers in a collapsing mine—but in silence, except for the faint crackle on the line.
“I’ve taken care of the preliminaries,” Timmons said. “The chairman and others await your decision on the service, as they all hope to attend.”
“Tell them Saturday, midday, so they can make it a day trip,” she heard herself say. “I’ll go up first thing tomorrow and ring you from there.”
When she dumped everything from her case onto the bed, the cheeriness of the bright summer frocks mocked her. An icy fury like that following Mallo’s murder was pushing out any remaining Nevis glow of well-being. Her father had brought this upon himself. He’d been scheduled for quadruple bypass surgery, but after the cancer finally claimed Burtie the previous February, he’d canceled the operation and begun to decline in earnest. That raw sense of abandonment—first her mother’s, then Mallo’s and Burtie’s, now her father’s—gave way to rage crowding in. Harald had chosen to follow Burtie into oblivion instead of staying on earth, with her, and he’d made his decision months ago when Burtie was slipping away.
She’d been standing in her New York apartment kitchen dripping from her morning run when her father rang. “Doc’s put her on the morphine,” he said. “She was clear for a bit this morning and asked for you.”
When she’d arrived at Cairnoch, Harald was nowhere to be found. Mary Partridge told her he spent much of his time lately driving the lands in the Rover.
She climbed onto the bed and rested her head on Burtie’s once ample bosom, now shrunken and smelling of decay instead of violet water. Burtie’s breathing was intermittent, and Els didn’t immediately register the moment it stopped altogether. She covered Burtie’s hand to hold onto her soul a moment longer.
They’d often been at loggerheads, two stubborn females, one trying to play a mother’s role, the other resenting her for it. Burtie had grown bold in her criticism of Mum, and Els had angrily come to her defense, until they ceased speaking of her at all. It was only after Mallo’s death that Els fully admitted the depth of affection she and Burtie shared.
On her bedside table, Burtie kept the triangle-folded Saltire that had draped Mallo’s coffin and a photo of him at twenty-one, just out of university. Els took both.
When Harald bid her goodbye after Burtie’s funeral, the last thing he said was, “It’s time you got that posting to London.”
Els swept her vacation clothing onto the floor, stuffed black cashmere and tweed into her case, and curled up on her bed. On her dresser was a miniature oil portrait of Mallo at about fourteen, her first clumsy attempt at a human face, which caught his lopsided smile and bright cheeks, and the cowlick that made his rusty hair poke out over his right ear, but not the intensity of his blue eyes. The whirling of her mind battling the exhaustion of her body, she stared at the painting and wished for the numbness she’d need to get through what was to come.
part four
CHAPTER 15
Scotland
November 22, 1999
From inside the revolving door at the Aberdeen airport, she could see Tommy McLaren already climbing out of the Rover and thought how he’d been drafted once again for a sensitive job. She dragged her bag outside.