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Olivia straightened slowly and followed their gaze toward the far side of the churchyard.

An old woman stood between two weathered stones. For several seconds, neither of them moved.

Then the woman turned, and after a few moments Olivia recognized her. It was the same woman she’d seen beneath the streetlamp back in Boston, framed by the same silver hair and the same midnight-blue cloak. Tiny points of light seemed to shift in the dark fabric when she moved, too faint to be embroidery and too cold to remind her of anything as ordinary as sequins.

“Do ye ken what yer looking for?” the woman asked.

Olivia crossed the grass toward her. “Whisky.”

“That isna what I asked.”

The woman studied her in a way Olivia didn’t particularly like, as if she’d known her for a very long time, which was ridiculous.

“Ye’ve come a long way.”

“All the way from Boston.”

“Aye.”

Olivia came to a stop several feet away, unwilling to get any closer.

“You were in Boston.”

The woman’s mouth curved faintly. “Was I?”

Olivia looked toward the gate, then back at the church. There was no car on the narrow lane beyond the wall, no umbrella propped anywhere nearby, and no obvious path through the wet grass showing where the woman had entered the graveyard.

“I’ve been hired by the distillery to reproduce a whisky made here in 1786.”

The woman took a step closer, and that was when Olivia noticed the grass beneath her boots hadn’t bent.

A small cold feeling moved through her stomach. A moment later, a crow called sharply from the church roof. Olivia glanced up, and when she looked back, the woman was gone.

For a moment, she simply stood there, waiting for some perfectly ordinary explanation to present itself. None did. There were no footsteps beyond the wall, no movement near the gate, and no dark cloak disappearing along the lane.

Then she saw the feather. It lay against the base of some long dead Campbell stone, black and glossy against the wet grass.

She stared at the perfectly dry iridescent feather, but didn’t pick it up.

Instead, she crossed to the low stone wall, sat down, and opened the paper bag Fiona had packed for her that morning, because eating lunch seemed normal, and right now she needed normal, not some supernatural woo woo in a cemetery.

The sandwich was cheddar and chutney on thick brown bread, along with an apple and a piece of shortbread.

She took a sip from her water bottle then ate half the sandwich while watching the place where the woman had stood only minutes ago.

By the time she finished, she’d settled on three possibilities.

The first was that the woman wasn’t from Boston, she just looked like the woman Olivia had seen from a distance in the dim light of a streetlight after a few drams of whisky. More likely was that she was a local and enjoyed frightening the distillery visitors.

The second was that someone at Glenbrae had arranged an elaborate practical joke to frighten away the seven consultants before her and was trying to scare her off as well. But why?

The third involved explanations Olivia had no intention of entertaining while sitting in a graveyard in the Scottish Highlands. Not to mention in the shadow of the eerie castle ruins up on the hill.

Naturally, that was the one her mind kept returning to, and it didn’t help that fog was rolling in and that the rain had picked up. All she needed now was a ghostly Highlander playing the bagpipes off in the distance.

Her grandmother would have rolled her eyes and said what utter nonsense, and if Olivia was going to stand around daydreaming, she could make herself useful and wipe down the bar.

And if Olivia studiously avoided looking at the dry spot around the black feather, well, it was no one’s business but hers.