Page 34 of Bonetide

Then he turns and walks out of the shed, heading toward the road. I’m left in my new studio with my hands on the workbench and the heater humming softly under it and the smell of grass and salt coming in through the open door and I honestly couldn’t tell you what the fuck just happened.

He said I’ll know. Know what exactly, I’m not sure. Ready for what, I don’t know that either.

But it seems I’ll find out soon.

Chapter

Eight

I’ve been at the kitchen window for an hour; the coffee in my hand has gone cold twice. The castle is across the bay in the grey morning. Half-ruined, half not. The same view I’ve had for ten days now, except today it has hooks in me.

I’m proud of what I was able to accomplish yesterday, though. I pulled up my big girl panties and finished up in the boat shed. I cut meadowsweet from the slope and pressed it. I made a passable still life of the rowboat half-hauled on the rocks below the cottage, the kind of painting Effie would have done, and I’ve decided I want it in the kitchen if I can stand to look at it after I’ve framed it—I often can’t.

I also refrained from searching for Alasdair. And by refrain, I mean I only looked twice, and I didn’t even use my binoculars.

I didn’t see him, for what it’s worth. He told me he wouldn’t come, and he didn’t, not even on the shore with his dick out.

I thought that would be a good thing.

But…that was yesterday.

Today, the castle is calling me. There is no other word for it. It’s a thin thread behind my ribs that has been there since I opened my eyes and gotten worse in the hour I’ve been drinking cold coffee and staring at it, feeling it tug.

That said, I’m not actually going to see him. I’m going to go look at the castle, the actual castle, up close, in daylight, and confirm that the man who appeared behind my bedsheets wasn’t lying about where he lives. The cottage is mine for a year, the castle is across the bay, and I deserve to know the geography of my own situation, and who my neighbors really are. Mhairi says it’s empty; so had MacRae. Alasdair says it isn’t. At least one of them is wrong, and I’m a person who likes to settle these things and know who the lying liar pants is.

Also, if a man is murdering women along this coast, and that man is my neighbor, it would be useful to know whether his house has a basement. Do castles have basements? Maybe dungeons.

I shake my head, not wanting my brain to traipse down that figurative dark alley.

The fog came back overnight which doesn’t help with the vibes. The bay has gone soft at its edges, the mountains across Loch Torridon swallowed entirely, the castle visible only in pieces, a tower top here, a section of curtain wall there, the rest swallowed up in pale wet air. The kind of morning that would be ridiculous to drive in. Too dangerous, in fact, the single-track being what it is, and me being the driver that I am who tends to panic and forget what side of the road I’m supposed to be on.

So I’ll walk.

I pull on my wellies, Effie’s wax jacket, and a wool hat that smells like the mudroom. I bring my sketchbook because the sketchbook is my cover story—both to anyone who might see me and, mostly, to me because I’m really good at convincing myself. I bring secateurs because if I see something worth cutting on the roadside, I’d be a fool not to. I lock the back door. I lock the front door. I check the back door again because it pays to be a paranoid bitch these days.

Then I set out.

My driveway is long in itself and I take it slowly because I’m in no hurry and because the verges are giving me things. Knapweed in a stand of tall stalks, the flower-heads furred and purple. Devil’s-bit scabious in three different blues. I cut what I want and tuck the stems into the canvas bag. The fog catches in my hair and on the wool of my hat and makes a fine wet glaze on the wax jacket. Somewhere out of sight a sheep complains, and another sheep complains back, the sound traveling weirdly through the wet air so that I can’t tell which side of the road they’re on.

The road feels good in my body. My hips loosen after the first quarter-mile. My back stops doing the small grinding thing. I’d forgotten this, that walking, the right kind of walking, on the right ground, at the right pace, is one of the few activities my body tolerates.

We’ll see what it has to say on the way back.

The road comes up through the fog. I turn west over a cattle-grate. The castle’s access road is supposed to be about a mile and a half along this stretch, branching off to the right, so I walk slowly and watch for any signs.

Then I see it—small, scoured, half-grown over with hawthorn and giant rhododendrons, their flowers long dropped. Caisteal Eachainn, it reads, and then Category A Listed Building. Heritage Scotland. No access beyond this point without permission.

I think my neighbor and I are past the point of permission.

I turn down the access road and it narrows immediately. The hawthorn and rhododendron, obviously planted by people a long time ago, closes overhead, and the road becomes more track than road, the broken stone of the surface having gone soft with moss. Ferns on both sides, taller than my waist and already going copper at the edges, reach for me like greedy fingers. The fog is thicker here, the trees closer, the world reduced to maybe thirty feet of visible path.

Somewhere ahead the trees thin, the forest slowly giving way to space and light.

That’s when I see something.

A flash of white through the trees on my left, in a small clearing maybe twenty feet off the road.

My first thought, embarrassingly, is woman in white, because that’s what folklore puts in a foggy wood on a Highland morning, and my brain is suggestible. One of the drowned wives is coming for me, finding her way on land from a stream.