“I’m not. I know this tartan quite well as it’s my best mate’s.”
Nora was confused. Why had her grandmother told her that this was her family tartan if it hadn’t been? Maybe she didn’t know what the Cameron tartan looked like or had gotten it confused withanother. A lot of the tartans looked similar in color but with different plaid patterns.
“Does the Cameron tartan look like this one?” she asked.
“No, not at all. The Cameron clan’s is red,” Alistair stated matter-of-factly.
Suddenly the man from the photo album, standing beside her gram in the hospital, the same man she had seen when she had come so close to death in the car accident, rushed into Nora’s mind, like an old film reel flickering back to life.
The name Colin MacDonald had been written on the back of the photo. MacDonald. Nora’s head spun with confusion as she began to mull over all the stories her grandmother had told her about her time in Scotland, about her grandfather.
The inconsistencies in her grandmother’s stories about Scotland and her grandfather began to nag at Nora’s mind. Despite the fondness with which her grandmother had always spoken of their time in Scotland, she rarely mentioned her grandfather outside of those war stories. It was as if there was a hidden layer to their history that Nora had never noticed before: a duality.
The more Nora thought about it, the more an idea began to form in her mind. Maybe it wasn’t just their time in Scotland that was different; maybe her grandmother was talking about a completely different man. Not the grandfather she knew from the photos on the family mantel, but the man she spoke of in her stories, the man in the album, Colin MacDonald.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Locked Out
“Are you okay?” Alistair asked as Nora stood stunned into silence, her mind reeling over the idea that her grandfather might not be her actual grandfather.
She mulled the question over in her head. Was she okay? She wasn’t sure. Her head was a jumble of stories that no longer made sense.
“I’m fine,” she said, looking down at the scarf that dangled from her neck.
“Your gran probably just didn’t know which tartan was which,” Alistair suggested.
She gave him an off-put smile.
“Seriously, what’s going on? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Alistair insisted.
“Would you know how to look up the name of a doctor who was stationed at Craigleith Military Hospital back in 1943?”
“Yeah, I’m sure I could dig up that information. Why?” Alistair asked, looking confused.
“I’ll tell you later. I’ve got to get out of here before I boil to death in these layers,” she said, opening the door and walking out into the cold. A foot or more of snow covered the walkway leading to the road.
“Let me see if there is a shovel around here somewhere,” Alistair said, trudging around the corner of the cottage and disappearing into a small overhang with firewood stacked in it.
Nora glanced around, her mind buzzing with a newfound idea. Memories of a bedtime story Gram had shared many times flooded back. It was about a newspaper clipping in the album depicting a colossal machine with disc-shaped wheels—The Bombe Machine was written in bold print underneath it. Gram had told her that her grandfather’s assignment had taken him to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, England, where he had worked as a code breaker, interpreting the bomb’s results to help break the Enigma codes during World War II. However, her grandfather had to keep the top-secret nature of his work from Gram, and she didn’t learn the full extent of his contributions until decades later when the information was declassified.
Thinking back on it now, Nora felt a pang of confusion. Her grandfather had been a medic surgeon for the army, not a code breaker. How could he have been involved with Bletchley Park? Yet, she remembered the story and how Gram’s eyes lit up with pride whenever she recounted his efforts to help end the war.
The more she thought about it, the more the pieces didn’t quite fit together. Was there something she was missing? Gram had always grown solemn at the end of the story, closing thealbum and saying something in another language.What was it?Nora thought, and then it came to her. “Gus an coinnich sinn a-rithist,” she said aloud.
“I wasn’t gone that long. You know Gaelic?” Alistair said as he came back around the corner with a shovel.
“I don’t. It’s just something my grandmother always said at the end of a story she told me when I was little. What does it mean?” Nora asked.
“Until we meet again,” he told her as he began to clear the walkway.
Nora’s heart sank; nothing made sense.
She looked back at the cottage; she needed answers, but the electricity was still out, so no internet access. Resigned to the fact that her research would have to wait, she followed Alistair up the walkway as he shoveled. The wind had died down, but it was still bitterly cold. Something about the day’s chilly embrace stopped her racing mind and calmed her.
She tried to determine if any power lines were down to the left of the cottage, but all seemed fine. She was accustomed to the way snowstorms in Vermont transformed the landscape, but it was different here. The way the snow clung to the trees and mountains off in the distance looked almost like a painting. Perhaps the sky itself made everything feel so enchanting. Even though it was filled with a thick duvet of clouds, it looked much larger than the sky she was used to in the Green Mountains.
“Those there are the Five Sisters of Kintail,” Alistair said, as her eyes fixed on the mountains.
