Page 157 of Bonetide

“Oh. The islands. Shetland, of course, for the ponies.”

“You still like horses after all this?” he asks wryly.

“Ponies!” I repeat. “They’re a different kind of demonic hell creature—any six-year-old horse girl would tell you that. Oh, and Edinburgh. And then maybe the north coast. There’s a road, I read about it, it goes all the way around the top of everything. We could take a trip.”

“A boat trip?”

“No. No boats. A road trip. Car, land, tarmac, gravity. No boats, no water, not ever. I have had enough water, Alasdair, I have had a lifetime supply of water, you can show me Scotland from sea level or above, but never again from in it.”

He laughs, a beautifully human sound, and says, “A road trip, then, mo ghràdh.” The engine putters us out past the last of the headland, the floor of the sea dropping away beneath us into true deep.

He cuts the motor and the silence comes in like something that’s been waiting.

The swell out here is long and slow, the open sea breathing under the hull. Skye stands blue off the quarter, and the sun lays itself across the water in a hammered sheet, and Alasdair sits there looking at the bags in the bow for a long moment with his hands open on his knees.

Then he begins.

He takes them one at a time, draws each long bundle of linen-wrapped bone from the bags and holds it across his two hands and his eyes go somewhere in thought and then he says, quietly, who she is.

“Una.” A pause, the swell lifting us, setting us down. “She sang. Before. I heard her from the water, that’s how—” He stops himself; the how isn’t for today. He holds the bundle a moment longer. “She sang.”

The linen goes over the side with both his hands, lowered, not dropped, and the white of it wavers down through the blue and is gone.

“Margaret Brodie. She fought me. Hardest of any of them…she, she nearly reached the rocks.” He takes Margaret’s bones over, lowers them and then they’re gone. “Sileas.” Gone. “Mary.” Gone. A dozen more, some only a name, some a single sentence.

She had a dog that waited on the shore three days.

She was walking to her sister’s wedding.

She was with her child, and I let the child live.

The sun moves slowly on the water as I sit in the stern with my hands folded in reverence, letting the names go past me like a current. Somewhere in the middle of it I stop being horrified and start being something else, something more like a witness, which I understand now is what I’m out here to be.

Maybe I always was the witness. Maybe that was another Galloway job.

“Catriona Carmichael.” His voice catches its edge on this one. “Your Effie’s friend. She’d missed the last bus from Shieldaig.” He looks at the bundle a long moment, and then across at me. “Your aunt watched this water for decades knowing Catriona was in it, never able to say so to a living soul. Whatever else today is…it’s for Effie as well.”

“For Effie,” I say through a broken voice, and Catriona Carmichael goes down through the sunlight in her linen, to wherever the sea sends what the loch can’t hold.

The last bundle is the one with the newest linen.

“Becca Rhys,” he says, and then nothing else, because there’s nothing he can say about her that isn’t an indictment, and he knows it. He holds the bundle and he looks at me—the only other person on this earth who knows the truth of her, the woman I lied to two police officers about, the name I’ve been carrying like a stone since the morning the phone rang—and something passes between us across the boat that isn’t forgiveness, because some things don’t get forgiveness. It’s just the truth, held in the open air at last, between the two people responsible for it being hidden.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her bones, because it’s the least I can do for my role in all of this. “The sea will hold you now. I’m so sorry.”

She goes down through the depths like all the rest.

And then the bags are empty, and the boat rides a little higher from the waterline. Alasdair looks at the water with a frown. “There’s words for it. There should be words. Something should be said. A prayer.” Then he straightens and starts reciting in the old language. I can’t understand a word of it, but after some time he stops, frustrated, because apparently neither can he.

“I’m sorry,” he says, giving me a tired look. “I can’t seem to remember any prayers for this situation or…I don’t know what to say that seems fitting.”

“I do,” I say, and pull a folded piece of paper out of my coat pocket.

He stares at me dumbfounded.

“I figured something like this might happen,” I explain, waving the paper. “Or that there’d be a…I didn’t know what the protocol was, okay, there’s no book for this, so I looked some things up and I wrote out something. It’s a bit Celtic blessing, a bit sea burial, a bit that I pulled from my witchy books. It’s probably wrong but it does feel kind of right.”

He’s still staring at me. “You looked some things up?”