The Poe Baxter Books Series Box Set - volume 1

Chapter 3-2

I followed her gaze to where the inspector was striding purposefully in our direction. He looked pleasant enough about the face, but something about the length of his stride made me think he was all business. “Ladies,” he said as he sat down on the bench perpendicular to ours. “Thank you for meeting me. This shouldn’t take long.”

We had nowhere to be, but I hoped he was right. I didn’t really love being questioned about a death into which we could give no insight.

“So let’s begin with the obvious. Why were you at Davis MacDonald’s house earlier?” he casually said as he drew a small notebook out of his pants pocket.

Beattie took that first question. “We were going to inquire with Mr. MacDonald about a book he had recently sold. We are book buyers, you see.” Her tone matched the inspector’s, and I hoped he didn’t take the way she shifted in her seat as a sign of duplicity, especially since she was telling the full truth.

“And what book was that?” he asked.

“It’s a collection of sea monster stories,” I said. “Forgive my Gaelic, but it’s something like Finseal Oilfist.”

The inspector’s face broke into a wide smile. “That was very good, lass. The Finscéal Ollphéist, a famous book indeed.”

“You’ve heard of it?” Beattie asked with far more innocence than she actually possessed.

“Well, of course, I have. It’s cursed, you know.” He winked at Beattie then.

She nodded with exaggeration and said, “Of course it is.”

The game was afoot. “You don’t believe in the curse,” I said, trying to sound a little upset by the idea.

“I don’t believe in anything I can’t see with my own two eyes, be that sea monsters or curses,” the police officer said. “But I take it you do.”

I shrugged, trying to look like I was feigning disbelief. I found it a psychological challenge to pretend to be disinterested in something I was pretending to be interested in but not really interested in. “Maybe?” I said.

“Why is that?” the inspector said in what seemed like an innocent and polite tone but, I suspected, was a much deeper question than appeared on the surface.

“So many people who have owned the book have died, and now the curse has taken Mr. MacDonald, too,” I lowered my voice to a half-whisper. “It would suit me just fine if we couldn’t buy the book and just headed home without it.”

“I see,” he said and shot a wink to Beattie. “So you think the curse killed Davis?” He looked back at me.

“Well, I don’t think the curse actually killed him, if that’s what you mean. That kind of magic only happens with the darkest witches.” I was leaning hard into my role now. “But someone under the curse’s influence might have.”

“So you think it was murder?” he said as he looked down at his notepad and then up at me from beneath his eyebrows as if his question was not quite casual.

But as soon as I said it, I knew I was right. I wasn’t sure how, but I’d known since the moment I knelt over his body that Davis MacDonald had been murdered. “I do,” I said, figuring at this point honesty was better than role-playing.

“Well, you’d be right,” he said. “Any idea how he died?”

I studied the inspector’s face, and he kept his eyes on mine. “He was hit in the head,” I said, surprising myself. I hadn’t realized I’d deduced that, but I knew it as soon as the words left my mouth. “I saw the blood and the damage to the side of his skull, I think.”

“Good, lass,” he said. “If you hadn’t mentioned that, I would have had reason to be suspicious.” He smiled. “You had me a bit worried when you asked about the cause of death earlier.”

This time, I was puzzled. “But you gave me the benefit of the doubt anyway?”

“Sometimes it takes a bit for these things to sink in past the shock. Seems that’s the case here, too.” He looked over to Beattie and then back at me. “Anything else you’ve remembered? Anything at all that seemed out of place?”

I looked at Beattie, and then we both shook our heads. “Not that comes to mind, Inspector,” Beattie said. “But of course, we are not from here, so it would be hard for us to know what was out of the ordinary.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “Anyhow, how did you know to talk to Davis about this book of yours?”

I briefly explained our conversation with Stovall and his desire to obtain far more for the book than we had been prepared to pay. “We had hoped to get some clarity on the book’s value from Mr. MacDonald.”

“Ah, very good.” The inspector stood up. “I think I have all the information I need, but in case I come upon anything about the book that might be of interest to you, will you be here a while?”

“We’re heading out to the Isle of Skye tomorrow, but you have our numbers, and we will be back in Inverness by the weekend,” Beattie said before adding, “Anything, in particular, we should see out that way?”

“Well, given your project here, you’ll definitely want to visit the Loch Ness Museum and see if you can spot the old girl herself, but personally, I’d recommend Eilean Donan Castle. Bonny bit of landscape that one.” He gave us a quick two-fingered salute. “Safe travels.”

As we watched him walk out the door, I felt a growing affection for the inspector. “I like him,” I said to Beattie.

“I do, too,” she said. “He doesn’t miss a thing, but he also doesn’t assume a thing either. I like that in a person.”

With our business concluded and a couple of hours to kill before our dinner reservations at another quaint restaurant Beattie had found, we headed back to our room to pick up our traveling companion and take him out for a bit.

Most people don’t think of hamsters as good travelers, and I can’t speak for others. But BB travels like a seasoned voyager. He’s quite adaptable to any environment and loves sightseeing, especially from the translucent plastic bag that Beattie had custom-made for him. It had a sheepskin floor, several ventilation holes for oxygen flow and temperature control, and a small water bottle suspended in one corner. Every time I put BB in it, I thought of the Pope and his Popemobile. I knew it was sacrilegious, but I was seriously thinking of getting BB a white cassock and one of those pointed hats that the pope wears for formal occasions.

This afternoon, the sun had come out on what was apparently a rare event in Inverness if the comments and looks of awe and delight on the townspeople were to be believed. Several people were walking around with their hands out and their faces turned up to the sky as if they’d been living in an underground community for decades. It was pretty fun to see.

BB was similarly excited, but his joy took the form of sprinting back and forth across his bag so that he could see everything from every angle. As usual, he was also the source of much amusement, and Beattie and I spent the better part of our quite short walk answering questions about the hamster and pointing out that it would not be wise to take him out to hold him on the open street since he might fall.

What we did not say was that Butterball was quite likely to bolt for the closest scent of food that he could find. Every time we took him outside, I feared he’d be able to pull back the zipper, bust open the snap, and leap from his bag to let himself into a restaurant kitchen, where the chef would find him making his own food a la Ratatouille.

Today, we made it about two steps at a time as people caught sight of our chubby brown critter and asked everything from his name to where they could acquire one. My knowledge of pet stores was fairly limited, even in the US, so I had nowhere to direct them. One woman seemed particularly put out that I could not recommend a reputable shop in Inverness for her, and I made a mental note to ask our concierge about options before we took BB out in the Highlands. I didn’t want to be the cause of such pet-related scorn again.

While I was flummoxed by the attention, Beattie became, as usual, more graceful and charming. With each stop and query, she seemed to become more and more like the 1920s Hollywood actress I secretly thought she must have been in another life. She’d slow down her speech and get more languid in her movements, even as her radiant beauty got more and more noticeable, as if the sun was turning just to get her into the perfect light. I’d told her about this phenomenon on several similar occasions, but she just laughed and suggested I be a little less dramatic. She was one to talk.

We were just about to head back to the hotel and return BB to his travel cage so that he could nap away the excitement when a tall, reedy woman with a thatch of dark hair and a sort of awkward gait approached. Given that we had just spent the last hour as the spokeswomen for our hamster, I figured this woman was going to want to see him up close, so as she approached, I lifted his bag higher so she could get a better look.

But instead of focusing her eyes and the requisite cutesy voice on our tiny companion, she met my gaze and thrust out a hand. “Ma—Andrea MacDonald,” she said. “I wanted to thank you for finding my father and calling the authorities this morning.”

I started to correct her and tell her we hadn’t, indeed, called anyone and wouldn’t have even known how to do so, when the weight of Beattie’s hand on my arm made me hold my tongue.

“I’m so sorry for your loss, Ms. MacDonald,” Beattie said before stepping forward to hug the surprised woman.

Ms. MacDonald extricated herself from the clearly unwanted display of sympathy and, straightening her denim vest, said, “Thank you. But we weren’t close.”

Now, I’d heard people say this on movies and TV shows before, and I’d always chalked it up to a bit of poor writing since it seemed like a sort of shorthand for letting the audience know that the two characters didn’t have a good relationship. Now, though, I found the declaration remarkably disturbing because it was profoundly callous and completely unnecessary.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Beattie said. “But he was your father all the same.” I could hear the slight reproof in Beattie’s voice, but I wasn’t sure it got through to Ms. MacDonald.

“He was, and well . . .” Ms. MacDonald’s voice trailed off before she finished her sentence. I got the impression she’d thought better of finishing it. “Might I ask why you were visiting him today? He hasn’t been well for quite some time, and I am under the impression that he didn’t receive many guests.”

I wanted to ask how she might have come to that impression if she wasn’t speaking with her father much, but I decided to simply pin up that query for a later day. “We wanted to speak with him about a book he recently sold,” I said instead.

Ms. MacDonald’s entire posture stiffened, and it took her a minute to pull her poise together and ask, “Oh, he sold a book recently? I wasn’t aware.” She tossed the ends of her not-really-tossable hair and said, “Out of curiosity, which book?”

Beattie spoke over me as I started to tell her the name. “I’m afraid we’re not at liberty to discuss that with anyone but our client and their approved list of parties,” Beattie said. “You understand?”

Given the shade of pink that spread up Ms. MacDonald’s face, I didn’t think she understood at all, but she had the grace not to say so. “Very well, then. Again, I just wanted to thank you.” She shook each of our hands briskly and then turned on her heel and headed back the way she came, her walk even stiffer than it had been when she arrived.

Beattie, BB, and I made our way back to the hotel as briskly as we could, with BB tucked under my arm to protect him from his adoring fans, and once we were back in our room, I said, “Okay, that whole Ms. MacDonald thing was weird, right?”

“So weird,” Beattie said as she placed BB in his cage so he could collapse in the corner from exhaustion. “She was definitely fishing for information.”

“Definitely, and did you see her reaction to the fact that we wanted to talk to her dad about a book?”

“If he was even her dad,” Beattie said.

I gasped. “You think she was an impostor?” As if murder and a cursed book weren’t enough, now we had spies. “Do you think she was wearing a disguise? Like maybe that wasn’t her real nose?”

Beattie, once again, rolled her eyes. “I think we should tell Inspector Scott about our encounter. Let him do his work and investigate.”

I sighed. She was right, of course, but also, where was the fun in doing the right thing? “We should have followed her,” I said.

Beattie didn’t even dignify that idea with an eye roll and instead simply went into the bathroom and closed the door. When I heard the shower start, I knew she was taking one of what she called her “shut out the world” showers, and I was fairly sure that I and my desire for adventure were part of the world she wanted to shut out.

A half-hour later, a cloud of steam escaped from the bathroom, and Beattie came out in a robe with a towel on her head. She had some sort of facial mask, and she was carrying a full kit of beauty supplies. “I left your mask on the sink. Open your pores first, and then we’re doing a full regimen.”

“Um, all right,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“I am, and you’re going to be okay, too. We just need a quiet night, so I’ll get room service and cancel our reservation. We’ll do our nails and such, and then we’ll fall asleep to some British murder mystery. Sound okay?”

Something shifted in me, and I realized just how exhausted and overwhelmed I was by the international travel, the complications in our buying mission, and now the murder of Davis MacDonald. “Sounds perfect.”

I stepped into the still-warm bathroom and turned the shower on as hot as I could stand. Beattie had not only put a clay mask on the side of the tub, but she had also left her expensive bath wash for me to use with a brand-new, natural loofah. That woman was pampering me, and I needed it.

I savored my shower and let the hot water soften up the muscles I hadn’t even realized had tensed into tight knots. Then I turned off the water, put on my mask, slipped into the robe on the back of the door, and stepped out into the room . . . only to find Inspector Scott standing at the foot of my bed.