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handbag. Miranda would have
recognized the make and model of the bag, to say nothing of the
clothes, but even fashion-impaired Jean with her canvas
mini-backpack got the message: countryside chic. The woman needed
only a riding crop to complete the effect.
    She seated herself in the police car as
though the officer’s uniform was that of a chauffeur. Without
cracking an expression, he slammed her door, paced around to the
driver’s side, and drove away.
    “Araminta Rutherford.” Rebecca’s American
accent, migrating further east all the time, gave a quick tickle to
every “r.” “Maiden name Maitland, from Thirlestane Castle just up
the way.”
    Jean wasn’t going to swoon in astonishment at
that identification, although the thought of such a cool customer
laboring over a hot stove did take her aback. “She has a cooking
school?”
    “Oh, yes. Half the people who stay at the
B&B are signed up for courses. She’s the director of the museum
as well, has done a great job of keeping the local antiquities out
of Edinburgh’s clutches, not that I don’t see Edinburgh’s point.
You have heard about the clarsach?”
    “I’m afraid so. Did you and Michael get a
chance to look at it?”
    “No. We got here Saturday and it vanished on
Sunday. P.C. Logan—the Richard Nixon lookalike with Minty—answered
an alarm at the museum in the wee hours of the morning. He found a
window pried open and the clarsach gone, but everything else,
including the Roman and medieval coins, accounted for. Michael and
I flashed our credentials as museum curators and asked to look
around, but Mr. Councillor Rutherford, Angus, wasn’t best pleased
with our trying to push our way in and sent us packing.”
    “Two Edinburgh know-it-alls, right?” Jean
asked, at the exact instant Michael stopped playing. Her statement
came out more loudly than she’d intended, hanging in the
still-vibrating air like a fart after a dinner party. Wincing, she
lowered her voice. “And now Angus is missing.”
    Michael strolled across the garden,
graciously accepting the plaudits of his audience, and laid his
pipes across the table. They deflated with a sound between a groan
of weariness and a sigh of repletion. “Hullo, Jean. Come to look
out the local mysterious events, eh?”
    “Stanelaw seems to be teeming with mysterious
events,” she answered, without pointing out she was hardly looking
for them.
    “Development,” said Rebecca. “Tourism. Money
makes things happen, good or bad.”
    Michael leaned into the pram and smoothed the
Black Watch tartan blanket over Linda. Then he sat down beside
Rebecca. “There’s a resort, a golf course, and a water park across
the river, and St. Cuthbert’s Way just beyond, and the cooking
school here in Stanelaw. Now Ciara Macquarrie’s turned up with her
New Age conference center and spa—excuse me, healing center—at
Ferniebank.”
    “Who’d she buy the property from, anyway?”
Jean asked.
    “Themselves, Councillor and Mrs. Rutherford.
Angus and Minty. No surprise that Stanelaw Council granted planning
permission for the renovation of the castle and a new building down
by the chapel.”
    “Ah,” said Jean. “No surprise at all.”
    “The—ahem—Royal Commission for the Ancient
and Historical Monuments of Scotland funded a dig and a bit of
stabilization work in the nineties, and the Rutherfords opened the
place to trippers through a management agreement with Protect and
Survive. Pity the chapel was already a ruin.”
    “Pity about it all becoming just another
product,” Rebecca said.
    “Without folk like the Rutherfords and Ciara
Macquarrie,” said Michael, “secondary sites like Ferniebank would
be piles of rubbish plowed under for car parks. Your Alasdair’s
arriving just in time to organize the transition from scheduled
site and listed building to money-making facility.”
    Everyone was noting that Alasdair was, in
however awkward a fashion, hers. Maybe she’d come to terms with
that concept