Chapter Seven (Untitled)

[Note: Earlier posts contain previous chapters. If this is your first visit, I highly recommend that you read the chapters in order. Also, be warned that as this is a work in progress, consistency is not guaranteed. For instance, names of characters — and och aye, that does include ghosts — are not written in stone. Example: the protagonist, who began as Debra, is now Gloria.]

I sank onto the room’s single chair and massaged my forehead, where a dull throb was making itself felt.

“I just . . . I don’t . . . "

“Shall I send for a cup of tea?”

I stared at him.

 “Tea? No. Thanks, but no. A stiff drink would be more like it.”

“Well, we don’t usually, but . . . of course. Pardon me.”

While he was gone, I struggled to sort things out.

My first thought was that this was Gran’s idea of a joke. But no. I’d felt her as surely as if she’d stopped by the house and peeped into the window for a quick wave goodbye on her way to hell.

Which, in truth, she had.

And then there was the call from the captain.

Of course, the captain.

By the time Mr. MacLean returned I was pacing in the narrow space between the bed and the window.

“Here we are,” he announced unnecessarily as he carried in a silver tray with three short glasses, a decanter of some golden liquid, and a small pitcher of what appeared to be water.

Apparently he and another someone meant to have a drink with me. Fine. I’ve never cared to drink alone.

As he poured the golden liquid, he asked, “Water?”

I peered at the decanter.

“Is that scotch?”

His smile was tolerant.

“Aye. But we call it whisky here.”

“I’ve never had it.”

His smile broadened.

“A bit of water then. It will round out the flavor for you.”

As he poured, there was a light knock on the door, which he’d left open, and a pale, dark-haired young woman stepped in.

“I’m Jean MacLean,” she said, holding out a white hand. “How do you do.”

“My wife,” Mr. MacLean put in.

“Pleased to meet you,” I replied automatically, standing to reach across the bed.

The firmness of her handshake belied her fragile appearance.

“I’m awfully sorry about the confusion over your grandmother,” she said.

But her voice was cool and her eyes on mine were assessing. I had the distinct impression she didn’t trust me.

I accepted a glass from her husband and lifted it in her direction with a brief, “Cheers.”

“Slange,” they both replied, but I was already drinking.

The warmth in my chest was immediately soothing. 

I closed my eyes for a moment and breathed a deep sigh.

Think, woman.

When I opened my eyes, they were both watching me.

The captain. Start there.

“Perhaps you could tell me how I might find Captain Will Mackay. He was a friend of my grandmother and it was he who called to tell me she’d died.”

I heard the formality in my tone and choice of words. Not my usual style, but one that I fall into when someone or some situation threatens me. And I did definitely feel threatened here. Though for the life of me I couldn’t say why I should be.

On hearing the captain’s name, Jean’s eyes narrowed. Her husband, though, seemed to give the name serious consideration.

“I’ve not heard of him. But a captain, you say?”

“Yes. I’m afraid that’s really all I know. Other than that he’s quite old. So a retired captain, I suppose. Oh, and it appears that he doesn’t keep a telephone in his home.”

Mr. MacLean was nodding, apparently thinking this over, but his wife continued to assess me in a way that was becoming annoying.

I took another slug of whiskey (this being no time for genteel sips), and arched my eyebrows at her.

“Mrs. MacLean? Have you any thoughts on the matter? Are you perhaps familiar with Captain Mackay?”

“Not a bit,” she replied, a bit smugly I thought. “But if there is such a person, I’m sure the police will track him down soon enough.”

“The police?”

The nerve of the little bitch!

“Of course,” she said, putting down the glass which hadn’t once touched her lips. “You say your grandmother’s dead, yet nobody in Orkney seems to know anything about it but this captain, who ... ”

She waggled her fingers in the air, an obscure move that only befuddled me.

“The police will be very interested in speaking with him,” she finished.

“Well if that isn’t just the cat’s behind!” I snapped, feeling a mild pleasure at the look of puzzlement that crossed her face.

And at that moment, footsteps sounded on the creaky stair. We all turned toward the open doorway and sure enough, right on cue a man in uniform appeared.

It really was getting to be a bit ridiculous.

“All we’re missing is Miss Marple,” I muttered under my breath.

Chapter Six (Untitled)

[Note: Earlier posts contain previous chapters. If this is your first visit, I highly recommend that you read the chapters in order. Also, be warned that as this is a work in progress, consistency is not guaranteed. For instance, names of characters — and och aye, that does include ghosts — are not written in stone. Example: the protagonist, who began as Debra, is now Gloria.]

The journey was every bit as brutal as I had feared it would be.

My late reservation had landed me a seat in the back-most row of the DC-10, which meant it didn’t recline, and I spent seven miserable hours absolutely unable to sleep. In an attempt to exhaust myself, I edited down biographies of the Society’s annual award winners to fit onto the single program page assigned to each. These men’s CVs (and they were all men) were tomes weighted with ponderous lists of accomplishments and honors. The work was dreadful, boring to the point of tears, and I was certain that after a few hours of it I’d simply drop off with my head nodding over the screen.

No such luck.

To be truthful, it wasn’t just the non-reclining seat that kept me awake. It was that damned Kurt Vonnegut.

As I’d stood at the rear of the line waiting to board, I’d glanced toward the rush of people on the concourse and, dear Lord, there he’d been again, leaning against the wall that separated gate G from gate H, watching me. As my eyes met his, he’d tossed an egg into the air with one hand, caught it with the other other, then tossed it up again.

I’d watched, mesmerized. Something about the egg had seemed odd — its color, its texture.
It wasn’t an egg at all, I’d realized.

It was — what?

A stone?

“Ma’am?”

Vonnegut’s hand had closed over the egg, the stone, whatever it was. A wink in my direction, then he’d turned and was — gone. Just gone.

“This way please, ma’am!”

A hand touched my elbow.

“It’s time to board now, ma’am.”

Tearing my eyes from the spot where Vonnegut had been, I’d been confronted by an American Airlines steward and ten feet of empty space between me and the boarding ramp. All of the other passengers had already passed through.

“Oh!” I’d muttered. “I’m sorry. I was distracted.”

“Yes, of course.”

Bored but polite. And insistent. He’d given my elbow a tug, but I’d been unprepared just yet to move.

“There was a man over there ... ”

“Yes, ma’am. Your boarding pass?”

“It was, well, never mind. But it looked like he — ”

“If you’ll step this way, please, ma’am.”

So no, I didn’t sleep on the plane Sunday night.

As a result, the long hours of my layover in Glasgow airport were a blur of head wobbling, chin sagging, and open-mouthed drooling as I languished on a series of hard plastic seats, dozing and dreaming of eggs and stones and a particularly trying old author. On the flight to Kirkwall, I finally dropped into a deep sleep, but unfortunately that flight didn’t take very long.

Poked into awareness by a stewardess, a young woman who told me with exceeding politeness that it was time to disembark, I dragged on my cashmere cardigan, collected my bags, and staggered off the plane, through the airport, and into a sub-arctic torrent. My gasp brought a laugh from a passing couple clad in oilskins and reeking of whisky.

“A wee bit chilly is it, hen?” the woman called to me.

I neither gave her the finger nor told her to fuck off, an accomplishment for which I remain proud to this day.

Instead, I struggled to remember where I’d stashed my parka, gave up, and looked around wildly for my driver.

There, I spied him, a man standing beside a car (small and blue), holding a sign with my name on it. I ran as quickly as it is possible to run while pulling a wheeled suitcase and lugging a computer bag and oversized purse.

The drive was blessedly short. Through the car’s windows, fogged and streaming with rain, I had an impression of a compact town of grey stone under grey skies. The driver was a taciturn man who responded with a grunt to my attempt at humor regarding the weather. But he redeemed himself by insisting on carrying my luggage into the hotel.

There, waiting for us in the lobby, stood perhaps the most handsome man I had ever encountered, looking more uncomfortable than I had ever seen a man look.

“Mrs. Davidson, how do you do. I’m Malcolm MacLean. Welcome to Kirkwall. We have your room all ready of course and, I, em, well, why don’t I show you up? We’ll bring up the rest of your luggage shortly.”

“There is no more.”

“This is it then? A light traveller, are you?”

His demeanor was friendly enough, but something was off. Even in my exhausted and dripping state, I could see that.

I followed him up a narrow, creaking wooden stairway and along a corridor carpeted in blue. My room was snug and vastly over-furnished with a bed,  a full-sized chest of drawers, and a dresser with a mirror. A tray atop the dresser contained a bone china cup and saucer, electric kettle, and two bone china sugar bowls containing tea bags and instant coffee. A delicate pitcher contained actual milk.

While Mr. MacLean settled my suitcase, I crossed to the window and with some effort pulled the curtains aside. The impression I’d received on the drive from the airport was confirmed: gray stone buildings under a steel gray sky.

“Heavy curtains,” I observed.

“Aye, you’ll want them, as well,” my host replied, facing me. “Unless you’re the sort who doesn’t require darkness to sleep.”

Of course. This far north, I was in a land of the midnight sun. How could I have forgotten?

“Well, it certainly isn’t the land of the midday sun, is it?” I joked.

Mr. MacLean just looked at me.

“The rain?” I prodded.

“Ah. Yes, of course.”

He tried to produce a chuckle, failed, and stood there some more, obviously hesitating. I had the distinct impression he was loathe to tell me something that he felt he ought to.

“Thank you, Mr. MacLean,” I said. “I suppose I should contact the funeral parlor as soon as I’ve changed into something dry. Would you happen to know their number?”

“Ah, yes, that. Well.”

He looked toward the window and shifted a bit on his feet and seemed so uncomfortable, I had a sudden desire to put him at ease.

“Is something the matter?”

“I take it you didn’t get the e-mails from myself or Mr. Corse?”

“E-mails? Why no. I made my arrangements, packed, and headed straight to the airport.”

No sense mentioning the cholesterol-laden breakfast and mimosas, or the exuberant bout of farewell belly-slapping that had followed.

“Why? Is there a problem?”

Mr. MacLean actually shuffled his feet and cleared his throat and then, as if he’d finally worked up the courage, said, “Aye, well, I’m afraid there’s no funeral service scheduled for Mrs. Faley.”

“Oh, I see. Well, it was just an assumption on my part that it would be held there. I hadn’t realized that Kirkwall was as large as it is and assumed there was only the one ... ”

I trailed off, seeing the negative shake of his head. What in the world was going on? As Mr. MacLean didn’t seem inclined to offer any more information, I said, possibly just a bit ascerbicly, “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“Aye, and that would make two of us.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Mr. McLean’ eyes went to the window and then over his shoulder to the door, as if he was looking for — hoping for? — someone’s arrival. Finally, he spoke.

“We’ve made enquiries. I’m afraid there’s no record of Mrs. Faley’s passing.”

Chapter Five (Untitled)

[Note: Earlier posts contain previous chapters. If this is your first visit, I highly recommend that you read the chapters in order. Also, be warned that as this is a work in progress, consistency is not guaranteed. For instance, names of characters — and och aye, that does include ghosts — are not written in stone. Example: the protagonist, who began as Debra, is now Gloria.]

By the end of Gran’s wake — which had involved entirely too much gin, but you’ll have that sometimes — we’d agreed that I needed to get myself to the Orkneys to make arrangements for her funeral and the disposition of her property.

Ignoring my nagging hangover, the first thing I did was attempt to call Captain Will Mackay. But the long distance operator assured me she had no listing for anyone by that name.

“That’s odd,” I said, after hanging up.

Harry shrugged. 

“He probably doesn’t have a phone. When I offered to call him back because of the bad connection, he said that wasn’t possible.”

I had an image of a hunched old man shivering in a drafty phone booth in howling wind and driving rain, which — according to my mother, God rest her soul — was entirely the norm for Scottish weather for roughly three hundred and sixty days of the year.

“The rest of the time,” she used to say, “it is positively gorgeous.”

There was nothing for it but to carry on, and make contact with Captain Mackay once I arrived in Scotland.

Settling at the breakfast bar with my laptop, I reserved the last available seat on a flight out of O’Hare that afternoon, and another from Glasgow to Kirkwall in the Orkneys. Next, I located the only funeral home listed for Kirkwall, and sent them an e-mail informing them of my arrival on Tuesday morning.

Then, blessing the Internet and the ease it brought to the complications of modern life, I reserved a hotel room. Trusting to the renowned hospitality of Scots in general and small hotel owners in particular, I further informed them that I was arriving for my grandmother’s funeral and gave them her name, mentioning that this would be my first trip to Scotland, in the unstated hope that they would take pity and be prepared do a bit of leg-work on my behalf. To further encourage such pity, I laid out my brutal travel schedule, explaining that I’d be spending an entire day and night and then some in transit. Shameless.

By eight a.m., I’d finished my second cup of coffee and the arrangements were all made. Now I just had to pack.

The night before, Harry and I had worked out that a week should be sufficient to arrange and see through the funeral and dispose of Gran’s belongings, the latter of which I was certain would fit into three suitcases, maybe four. In fact, the more I’d thought about it, the more I’d wondered if perhaps a week wasn’t too long.

Dashing off to Scotland for an entire week at this time of year was problematical, what with the engineering society’s annual meeting kicking off in Spokane in just five weeks. But, as Harry had repeatedly observed, she was my Gran, and I was the only surviving relative other than our daughter, Heather, who’d never even met the crazy old bat. I had to allow time to deal with any complications that might arise. Besides, a lot of my magazine work could be done remotely. With a good four or five uninterrupted hours in my hotel room each night, along with support from Ginny and Dierdre, I should be able to keep up with the absolutely necessary tasks. And if, by chance, I found myself with extra time on my hands after disposing of the old bat and her three suitcases, I could always do a bit of sightseeing — just think of all the barren hills and sheep that were waiting be to gazed upon.

In the end he’d convinced me. In the light of morning, the magazine’s demands were weaving a web of second guesses across the fog of my hangover. But I was committed now. Nothing for it but to forge ahead.

The first things I packed were my laptop, legal pads and pens, the society’s membership roster, and my satellite telephone. The phone was an extravagance purchased the previous year when Harry wanted to celebrate our twenty-fifth anniversary on safari in Tanzania and I was slated to conduct half a dozen telephone interviews of our most accomplished members for a special issue of the magazine. The phone had enabled me to do both. God bless technology.

Next, I turned my attention to clothes. A black suit and pumps for the funeral, of course. That was easy. But then I hesitated. What the heck was the weather like in the Orkneys in May? Howling wind and driving rain, certainly. But what of the temperature? Back to the computer I went.

Where I was reminded that my destination was only a few degrees south of the Arctic Circle.

“Dear Lord,” I whispered.

“What’s that?” Harry asked.

He was peeling potatoes while ham sizzled on the griddle.

“Break out the long johns,” I muttered.

Back in the bedroom, I did just that. Along with wool sweaters, thick socks, and flannel pajamas. I do hate being cold.

By now, the aromas drifting up the stairs were maddening. I descended to breakfast as only Harry can make it: potatoes with onions and green peppers fried in oil and butter with lots of black pepper, slabs of ham, grits with cheese melted into them, and eggs over easy. A shameless display of cholesterol, but a breakfast that would see me through the long road to Scotland. A breakfast, furthermore, that made me not want to leave my man for an entire week.

As if to make it even harder for me to leave him, Harry had popped open the bottle of champagne we’d failed to open on New Year’s Eve, and made mimosas.

“A little hair of the hound will do you good,” he assured me, blue eyes crinkling above his flute when I reminded him that I didn’t like to drink while flying.

“Well, okay then. If I have to.”

“To a safe trip.”

“Hear, hear.”

Clink.

My, but how I wished he was coming with me — even then, before I knew what was in store. Even then, before I’d begun to question my own sanity. Even then, before —

But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

I’ll just say that if I’d known then what I knew two days later, I’d have insisted that Harry come along.

Or I’d have stayed at home.

Chapter Four (Untitled)

[Note: Earlier posts to this blog contain previous chapters. If this is your first visit, I highly recommend that you read the chapters in order. Also, be warned that as this is a work in progress, consistency is not guaranteed. For instance, names of characters — and och aye, that does include ghosts — are not written in stone. Example: the protagonist, who began as Debra, is now Gloria.]
 
Harry, who hadn’t watched the egg fall, started.

“If that isn’t just my Gran,” I said.

He pulled back to look from the egg into my face.

“You’re not upset?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“No. Not upset. Curious. Concerned about what I have to do now.”

“Do you think you need to go there?”

“She’ll need to be buried, and there’s the property to be dealt with.”

I took a breath before adding, “And there’s this thing about eggs.”

Harry just looked at me.

I told him about Captain Mackay’s egg comment.

“It sounded like he said she was making headway on something to do with an egg.”

We both looked at the runaway Easter egg as if it could tell us what all this nonsense was about. But at the moment, the yellow egg just looked like an unfortunate and unwilling accessory to the crime.

Harry cocked a thumb in it’s direction.

“You don’t think your Gran had anything to do with that?”

“I most certainly do. But the thing is, Harry, even if there was nothing about eggs, knowing what she now must know about what Kurt Vonnegut said, I could see her pulling a stunt like this just to bug me. You know?”

“Um, well, no.”

“Of course not. You never met the crazy old bat.”

By mutual consent we separated and reached for our gin and tonics.

“Here’s to the crazy old bat then,” Harry proposed, holding his aloft.

We clinked.

“To Gran.”

I drank deeply, hoping to quell the shaky feeling that was growing in my chest. While it was true I wasn’t about to subside into convulsions of tears over my Gran’s death, the knowledge that I was now the oldest surviving member of my family left me feeling — orphaned. Exposed. No longer did an older, wiser (hah! there’s a good one) blood relative stand between me and death itself. Not that she’d ever been much of a grandmother when she was alive.

“I’m sorry,” Harry murmured. “I shouldn’t have called her that.”

I glanced at him, then realized he had mistaken my silence for ire.

“My darling, you can call my Gran anything you want, and you’ll never call her half the things I have. To her face, behind her back, in writing, you name it. Truly, there was no love between us.”

He took my hand.

“Let’s go outside and sit in the sun. I want you to tell me about her.

I laughed.

“I think you’re going to learn all about her without me telling you a word. I think she’s decided to haunt us.”

I could almost see Harry’s effort to not look spooked, and felt sorry for him. Harry, like most people who have never had the experience, is of the popular Hollywood horror movie opinion that an encounter with ghosts has to be terrifying. Which now that I thought about it, might have been one of the reasons he’d never really seemed to believe me when I told him of my encounters. Because in response to the inevitable question — Weren’t you frightened? — my answer has always been an unequivocal no. Perplexed, yes, at least until it became clear that this experience was being caused by a ghost, at which point, if I were to look at my thoughts, they would be something like this: Oh, it’s a ghost. Well, all right then. That explains it.

The thing is, people don’t want to believe that. I think it’s almost a disappointment to them. They want to hear that I ran from the house screaming as blood dripped from the walls, or some such nonsense. But that’s not the way it works.

We settled ourselves in a bright spot with the sun on our shoulders and the gently roling soy bean field in front of us. The season was still too young for planting, so at the moment the field was a muddy mess of herbicide-killed plant debris, but you take what you can get.

I told Harry all of my Gran stories. He’d heard most of them before, of course. But this was part of our ritual whenever somebody died. We drank whatever that person most liked to drink (pure coincidence that we happened to be preparing Gran’s favorite when the call came from Captain McKay?), and worked through our memories of that person, telling stories, laughing, crying, hoisting our glasses for many toasts. Kind of a private wake. Always more meaningful to me than the impersonal services put on in those living tombs called funeral parlors. Talk about something that makes you want to run screaming.

And so all the old stories were brought out and aired and shaken and inspected, with maybe just a tiny exaggeration stitched on here and there to keep things interesting. That was our tradition.

Although in the case of my Gran, there was absolutely no need to exaggerate. Quite the opposite, actually. I’d learned, over the years, to never tell stories of her antics to my American friends or, if I did, to tone down the truth a bit to make her actions more palatable to them. They simply couldn’t fathom a woman like her. Even some Scots found her hard to take.

I mean, what kind of woman would barricade her five-year-old grand-daughter and her three best friends (soon to be former friends) in the bathroom and refuse to let them out until every last one of them had kissed the old bat’s pet painted turtle, George, on his slimy little lips? Absolutely unmoved by our tears and real terror, she thought it was hilarious. Lord, how I used to yearn for a normal grandmother who would bake cookies and nag me about going to church. Not my Gran. She called those types of women holy rollers and hypocrites. The first time my parents left me alone at home for an entire weekend (I think I was fifteen) with the admonition to not bring anyone into the house, my Gran slipped me twenty dollars and told me to have a wee party while they were gone. And there was the time (I still groan with embarrassment whenever I think of it) that she danced on my parents’ coffee table at a get-together for all the neighbors. True, the table was solid oak and her spike heel shoes only dinged it up a little. But still.

So, that’s just a taste of my Gran. I won’t tell you everything all at once because I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about her. I mean, truth be told, she was a good woman at heart. If she heard about some ninety-five year old living alone at the end of the road, neglected by family and abandoned by friends who’d all had the gall to die first, my Gran would make a point of stopping in for a visit, even if she’d never before met the man or woman in question. Which in itself was a decent thing to do. What upset people was the pint of whiskey or gin, or bottle of wine that she’d take along to share with the poor old soul. Mind you, we never heard a peep of complaint from the old souls themselves. But their families had a tendency to get annoyed when they found grand-dad singing in his rocker, or grandma dancing a polka in her housecoat.

Gran’s response when my mother took her to task for one such episode?

“Och, away wi’ them if they cannae take a joke.”

What do you do with a woman like that?

When I was a little girl, she used to take my friends and me to the cemetery in town and show us a stone that marked the grave of a woman who, remarkably, had the same name as my Gran.

“See that? That was me in my former life,” she’d say.

And we would all duly note that the Molly Faley buried in that spot had indeed died just a few months before my Gran was born.

“But I died before I finished what I was sent here to do.”

And then we would calculate (with the help of Gran) and discover that the woman under the ground had indeed died at the age of thirty-three, and while that seemed perfectly ancient to us kids, Gran would assure that this was much too young an age to be up and dying.

“So I had to come back to finish the job,” Gran would go on, “but I was born in the wrong country, and what a time of it I had finding my way back here. It took some doing, so it did. But once I’d convinced my lass to come here on her holiday, she met her man, and I knew it was just a matter of time. And right enough, as soon as my man, Dan, died, they sent for me to come and live with them. And here I am.”

“And what’s the job you’re here to do, Gran?” I would ask, for at that time I still believed her nonsense.

“Och well,” she’d say, and she’d study me for a bit, and then my friends, before pronouncing that we were too young to understand. “Maybe when you’re a wee bit older.”

But I was never old enough. When my parents died together in a car wreck on Highway 12, I was eighteen. And damn if my Gran didn’t pick up and move back to Scotland just a few months later.
At first I was flabbergasted that she would leave me alone at such a time. Then I became furious. Her last day in the house with me, we fought. Or I should say: I fought. Gran just sat and smoked, sipping her gin while I ranted. When I’d worn myself out, she said, “Someday you’ll understand.”

“Understand hell!” I shouted and stormed from the living room.

I didn’t come down the stairs when she left for the airport an hour later. One of her bar buddies came for her in his red pickup. I watched from my bedroom window as he loaded her three suitcases into the back. Three suitcases, and in them, everything she owned. No intention of coming back.

She looked up at me as the truck backed onto the road. I didn’t wave and neither did she.
It was to be the last time I’d see her.

“I think you did love her,” Harry observed, as I wiped a bit of moisture from my eye and blew my nose.

“You don’t love someone who abandons you,” I replied.

“She hurt you terribly and you haven’t forgiven her,” he went on.

“Nor will I. And here’s to that.”

We clinked glasses. We were into our third gin and tonics and I was feeling more than a little drunk.

My Harry knows how to make a good drink.

“Why do you suppose she went back to Scotland when she did?”

“Because she was a mean and nasty old woman,” I said.

“You hear that, Gran?” I shouted this up into the sky as though perhaps Gran was hovering there with her halo and harp. More likely she’d be down there with a forked tail and horns.

“Did something happen there?” Harry asked.

I was confused for a moment. Down there?

“Where?”

“In Scotland. To make your Gran need to go back.”

“Oh. How should I know?”

“Well,” he persisted (Harry is an exceedingly persistant person, which is a trait I sometimes find annoying), “did she get letters or telephone calls from anybody there?”

“Oh. Well, letters of course.”

“From who?”

“From whom,” I corrected automatically (once an editor, always an editor), before turning my mind to his question.

Harry knew as well as I did that when my grandfather died, Gran was left entirely alone in the world but for a daughter (my mother) who lived thousands of miles away in America. For generations, it seems, we’ve been a family of only children. So obviously the letters hadn’t been from family.

“Friends, I imagine.”

“You don’t know any names? She didn’t tell you any stories about them?”

“No.”

“So why did she go to the Orkneys instead of back to Glasgow? Did she have friends there?”

“I don’t know,” I murmured.

That had been the particularly galling part of her departure. If, after the death of her daughter, she’d returned to the comfort of her hometown and support of lifelong friends, I might have understood. Instead, she hadn’t even set foot in the city where she’d been born and grown up. Rather, she’d flown straight on to Aberdeen and from there climbed aboard a ferry for the overnight trip to the Orkneys. Why?

“I have no idea.”

I’d been watching a wren intent on nest building dart into and out of the tiny, cedar birdhouse we’d hung from the sugar maple. It reminded me of my conversation with Kurt Vonnegut.

“Because they make good eggs?”

We both began to giggle then, like the innocents that we were, never suspecting that we were being led down the path of la-la certitude that everything in the world is as it seems, completely forgetting — not that we had ever seriously considered the issue to begin with — that there was more than one practical joker and trickster in the world.