Free The Murder Hole by Lillian Stewart Carl Page B

floorboards, her skin prickling with natural,
not paranormal, gooseflesh.
    That must be why the Bouchards had moved into
the main house. Not that they’d necessarily sensed or even scented
the ghost. She’d met few other people cursed with an allergy as
strong as hers, one of whom, through fate’s fiendish sense of
humor, happened to be Alasdair Cameron. But the Bouchards could
have felt uneasy. Plenty of people could feel a tickle in the
nostrils without ever succumbing to the full explosive whiplash of
a sneeze.
    Blowing a raspberry at the blank facade of
the still-locked door, she went downstairs and straight to the
kitchen, where she fired up the coffeepot and assembled cheese
toast. Miranda was paying for her to eat breakfast in the main
house, but neither fretful speculation nor greasy bacon would sit
too well on her stomach just now.
    Hmmm . Her rear echelon. Miranda.
Michael and Rebecca. Hugh Munro, who should have gotten into
Drumnadrochit last night. Not that she needed to make any phone
calls just yet. It wasn’t as though she’d had anything to do with
the explosion.
    She imagined Roger standing on the dock and
tearing at his hair, and Tracy saying “I told you so,” and Jonathan
and Brendan . . . No one had been on the boat when it exploded,
right? Those lights in the windows had been only reflections,
hadn’t they?
    Please , Jean prayed to her thoroughly
tarnished guardian angel, please let no one have been on that
boat .
    The coffee pot hissed and steamed, emitting
its delectable aroma. Instead of standing over it with her tongue
hanging out, Jean shoved her toast into the toaster oven and turned
toward the television set. And saw that the velvet curtain was
drawn across the vestibule, where she had most emphatically not
left it after her middle-of-the-night lock inspection.
    In three swift steps she crossed the room and
threw the curtain open, revealing no more than sunlight shining
through the transom over the door and the scattering of broom
blossoms on the floor. Not that she’d expected to see anything.
Ambrose’s ghost was repeating his actions in life, drawing the
curtain not only to keep out drafts, but also to secure his inner
sanctum, where he wrote his arcane books . . . The books. Something
nagged at the corner of her eye. She turned slowly around.
    The DVDs were piled on the floor. Some of the
tourist guides and popular histories were jammed tightly together,
while gaps opened between others. Some were shoved all the way back
into the shelf, others stuck out as far as its edge. A well-worn
copy of Ambrose’s Pictish Antiquities was laid crosswise
atop the other books, along with an equally worn copy of The
Water-Horse of Loch Ness , the book that collected all his
newspaper and magazine articles about the monster, but never
mentioned his theory about Aleister Crowley’s role in its, er,
creation.
    Last night Jean had gone straight upstairs.
She hadn’t noticed, either then or when she came down to check the
door, whether the shelves had been disarranged.
    Now she ran her fingertip along the uneven
row of books, releasing not one mote of dust, then picked up
Ambrose’s Antiquities and opened it to the photo inside the
back flap. The man’s long lantern jaw and partly befuddled, partly
lugubrious expression reminded her of classic horror writer H.P.
Lovecraft—an appropriate resemblance, considering. Ambrose’s round
spectacles, like two tiny magnifying glasses, and his severely
parted and slicked-down hair also evoked in Jean’s mind
implications of plutocrats as well as scholars. Well, he had both
inherited and married wealth, although how long he’d kept it was up
for discussion.
    As Michael Campbell-Reid had pointed out so
graphically, Pictish Antiquities was Ambrose’s only
archaeological publication, despite years of amateur digging. Or
plundering, as the case may be. Its sober historical account was
colored by off-the-wall theorizing. That the Picts re-used ancient
Neolithic