“Hello again, Miss,” he said with a smile.
“Stuart, I wasn’t expecting you. Come in out of the snow,” Nora insisted as the snow rapidly clung to his hat and beard.
He stepped inside and knocked off his boots before handing her the two bags.
“I do most of the deliveries in the area, people and foodalike,” he chuckled. “Quite the squall out there, good thing you ordered when you did, or I wouldn’t have been able to get it to you. Unusual weather,” he told her as he took off his hat and brushed the snow off.
“It looks like it’s really coming down. Are the roads bad?” Nora inquired, her thoughts drifting to Mr. Grant. Despite his rudeness, she couldn’t shake a slight worry for his safety out in this awful weather. She didn’t like him, but she also didn’t want anything to happen to him just because she had won the battle over the Airbnb. The last thing she needed was an unfortunate mishap weighing on her conscience.
“Aye, they’re not good.”
“By any chance did you see a little black dog around here when you drove in?” she asked, worrying about the dog out in this kind of weather.
“No, but I couldn’t see much because of the snow.”
Nora nodded and smiled. “Here, you better get back on the road and get home before they get any worse,” she said, handing him a tip.
“I think that is a good idea. The missus doesn’t like me out in this kind of weather, but it’s close to Christmas, and I can use the extra money.”
“Thanks for coming back out here,” she said, holding up the bags.
“My pleasure. Now, you make sure you don’t go wandering outside during the storm. Tourists go missing all the time in these parts. They wander off into the snow and get turned around, either wind up in the icy waters of the loch or lost up in the mountains.”
Nora looked back over her shoulder toward the loch, and the uneasy feeling came rushing back. “I plan on staying right next to that fire and reading,” she assured him as she turned back around.
“That’s a good lass. Stay in and stay warm by that fire,” he said, putting his old paper-boy hat back on and turning to the door.
“Drive safe,” Nora said as he exited, the wind blowing so fiercely that it cut her words off.
As she shut the door, the uneasy feeling spread through her like a chill that arrives with the first frost. She walked over to the fire and stood with her back to the flames, trying to chase the feeling away. As the heat of the fire cut through her jeans, she gazed out the window toward the loch. It was night now and with the thick snowfall and only a sliver of the moon peeking out from behind the clouds, the loch looked like a portal into another world, eerily shrouded in a ghostly white veil. She crossed her arms, rubbing them as she tried to tamp down the nervous feeling surging through her like a storm.
What had she seen in the water before Stuart had shown up?
She loved watchingThe Why Fileson YouTube and it had become her Friday night ritual, complete with a cider and a pizza from Rae’s. The host delved into various mysteries, especially cryptids, like bigfoot and mothman, aiming to uncover the truth and debunk many of the popular hoaxes. One episode covered Champ, the so-called lake monster in Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont. Scientists and historians had concluded it was just a giant lake sturgeon.The mysterious thing in the water was probably something similar, she thought,like a floating log or chunk of ice, not a loch monster. With the weather conditions and the heavy snow, it surely had to have been a trick of the light. There was always an explanation for these types of things, one being she hadn’t eaten all day. Then again, she was in Scotland, home to the most famous loch monster of all time, Nessie.
Walking over to the bags of food sitting on the island, Noraunpacked the order and tucked things away in the cupboards and refrigerator, leaving out a frozen pizza. While she waited for the oven to preheat, she thought about the little red book and wondered if perhaps the main character or the story had seen a dragon or some other mythical creature. No, she had concluded that all the coincidences in the book were just a figment of her imagination, her mind’s way of bringing some excitement into her life. But were they? Something gnawed at her, a tiny bit of doubt that was about to win the argument as she walked over and took the tiny red book out of her bag.
Turning the book over in her hands and running her fingers across the smooth leather surface, Nora noticed something on its cover that she had missed. There in the gilded gold pattern that bordered the book was the same Celtic knot that was on the ornament. She pulled the ornament from her bag and held it up to the book. The knotted triangle within a circle was identical to the one in the book, even down to the crack running down its center. There were too many coincidences for this to be something she had made up in her head.
She set the ornament back into her bag and took the book over to the sofa. Hesitating, she wasn’t sure if she really wanted to keep reading. What if the main character got hurt or died? Would the same fate await her? Maybe if she didn’t read it, those things wouldn’t happen. What if reading it brought those events to life? If the book was foretelling the future, however, didn’t that mean it had answers? What if it actually helped her prepare for what came next? These were all good theories, but in the end she decided she would rather know her fate, so she opened the book and began to read.
I cradled the fractured ornament in my hands as I watched the duke’s sonstorm off. His father also watched from the doorway with a look of disgust staining his once joyful demeanor. How had such an ill-mannered person come from such kind and gentle parents, I pondered as my gran and I waited for our carriage to arrive.
“That rude man who ran into me yesterday was the duke’s son,”I whispered to her.
“Yes, I know,”she said, surprising me.
“You knew that was him? Why didn’t you tell me? What a dreadful man.”
“Remember, dove, we don’t always know the inner workings of someone’s mind. There is almost always a reason for behavior such as his.”
“You are much more forgiving than I.”
“What is that you have there?”she asked me, noticing the small blue bauble in my hands.
“The duke gifted it to me. For my first Yule tree, he said,”I told her with a smile that soon faded as I looked down upon the crack that ran its length.
“The duke is a kind man.”
