—
As we drove back to the inn, Bob said, “So you’re telling me there was photographic evidence of the attempted murder, but it’s gone?”
“Aye,” said Angus.
Bob turned to Hank, who was in the passenger seat, staring out the side window. “And you’re saying you didn’t see a thing?”
“Just the monster,” Hank said despondently.
“But you were right there!” Bob slapped the steering wheel twice for emphasis.
“I was focused on filming.”
Bob glanced at him a couple of times in exasperation, then sighed. “Well, there’s one eyewitness, and fortunately the intended victim is still around to testify. I can certainly arrest him based on that.”
We reached the inn and pulled up in front of it, the gravel crunching beneath the cold, hard rubber of the tires.
Bob twisted around in his seat, watching as Angus lifted me from the car.
“I’ll fetch Dr. McLean,” he said, “and then I suppose I should go collect the pathetic creutair. I canna remember the last time I had someone in my holding cell.” He sighed again. “I suppose I’ll be expected to feed him.”
—
As soon as Angus carried me up the stairs, Anna, Meg, and Mhàthair wrested me away and banished him with orders to get himself properly dried off.
In short order, there was a fire roaring in my grate, they’d dressed me in a heavy nightgown, and placed me under so many covers I couldn’t move. They tucked stoneware pigs by my feet, and Mhàthair—after pressing her ear to my chest and shaking her head—disappeared for a while and returned with a steaming, smelly poultice that she shoved down the front of my nightgown. She put crushed garlic between all of my toes and wrapped my feet. When she replaced the quilts, she laid an extra one, still folded, across the bottom of the bed, weighing me down even further.
I withstood it all without protest. When I wasn’t coughing, my lungs rattled. I was too weak to move, and lay with my eyes aimed vaguely toward the fire, drifting in and out of a fitful trance, reliving what I’d thought would be my final moments—the weightless, almost leisurely rolling in the water, the deafening whoosh of bubbles bursting up from all around me, the knocking of the oars inside the oarlocks. The first moments, when I tried to figure out how to survive, and the final moments, when I accepted that I would not.
Ellis had recognized an opportunity to get rid of me and seized it without a second’s hesitation. My inheritance, his inheritance, his dirty little secret—all of it could be secured at once, with only a minute or two’s effort.
Ellis would deny what he’d done, of course, touting my mental condition as proof that my testimony was unreliable, and saying that Angus had misinterpreted what was going on. He would probably even frame himself as a thwarted hero, claiming he’d been seconds away from hauling me into the boat, and that Angus’s interference had subjected me to being in the water even longer.
I wondered how he’d explain the missing camera, or Hank’s version of events, because while he might be able to cast doubt on my testimony, that was not true of Hank, and I doubted very much that he would be easily quieted.
Was it really the monster we’d encountered? We’d never know. Because of Ellis, no one would ever know.
Chapter Forty-four
My fitful trance was actually hypothermia, according to Dr. McLean, although, with an appreciative nod toward Mhàthair, he declared me sufficiently warmed up to be past danger in that regard. However, he said I had pseudopneumonia from taking in water, and the important thing now was to prevent it from turning into real pneumonia, which could turn deadly in a matter of hours. He pulled a bottle of bright green tonic from his bag and set it on the dresser.
“This contains an expectorant. We want her to cough everything out.”
“What about castor oil?” Anna said anxiously.
The doctor shook his head. “I’m afraid it won’t help.”
Anna sucked the air through her teeth in despair.
—
Over the course of the night, my temperature rose and fell, and I went from boiling to freezing in the space of seconds. I was wracked by terrible coughing fits, and in between, felt my lungs crackle whenever I took a breath. I was at the complete mercy of my body.
I would clutch the covers to me, begging for someone to throw more logs on the fire. Then I’d kick the covers away from me, sometimes managing to hurl them to the floor. Mhàthair replaced them every time, calmly, gently.
She was in and out with poultices, alternating onion-and-vinegar mash with mustard plaster. When the unbearable heat rose in me, I flung them away. She replaced them in the same composed manner she did the bedclothes. She hovered in the background, doing mysterious things, seeming more like a pair of competent hands, a set of nimble fingers, than Mhàthair the actual person.
Angus never left my side. When I was sweltering and crying for ice, he mopped my brow and dribbled tiny bits of water onto my tongue. When my body bucked and heaved from the cold, he tucked the covers around me and stroked my face. There was not one moment the entire night when I could not open my eyes and immediately find his face.
At one point, in the wee hours of the morning, when I was so wracked by fever that my jaw was clenched and aching, Angus laid a hand on my forehead and looked up in alarm.
Mhàthair also felt my forehead, then rushed from the room. Angus stripped the bedclothes back and held my limp body forward as he pulled my nightgown over my head. Then he wrung out cold facecloths and lay them all over my clammy skin.
A few minutes later, Mhàthair came back, and I found myself propped up between them, being forced to sip some kind of tea. It was full of honey, but not enough to mask the bitter taste underneath. As they eased me back onto the bed, I was already slipping into a darkness as deep as the loch. The moment before everything disappeared, a pretty young woman with sad eyes appeared in front of me. She was floating, with her gown and hair billowing around her. It was Màiri—I knew it instinctively. She mouthed something to me and lifted her arms, but before I could make out what she was saying, she—and everything else—faded away.
The next thing I remember was waking up and not being sure where I was. I blinked a few times, and found myself looking into Angus’s blue eyes. He’d pulled the chair up to the bed.
Mhàthair reached over from the other side and laid a hand on my forehead.
“The fever’s broken, thanks be to Heaven,” she said. “She’s come through.”
Angus shut his eyes for a moment, then lifted my hand and kissed it.
“Never scare me like that again, mo chridhe. I thought I’d lost you, and I’ve lost enough to the loch already.”