Suddenly, his image began to recede toward the river, and he reached for me as we drifted farther apart. Swirls of mist enveloped the stone path beneath his feet, winding their way up his body. “Come to me …”
I stumbled forward and pressed against the glass. I could no longer feel him. “Wait!”
The door swung open behind me, breaking the spell. The boy vanished. I whirled to find Kenna walking into the room.
“Are you searching for something?”
My pulse fluttered like hummingbird wings, and I gripped the window ledge behind me as I swayed on my feet. What the heck had just happened? If I was losing my mind, it was a pleasant way to go. But a deep instinct told me I hadn’t invented Jamie MacCrae in my head. He might be a ghost, perhaps, but definitely not a psychotic delusion. Wait, I didn’t believe in ghosts. Did I?
Remembering Kenna had asked me a question I grunted, “Huh?”
“I thought you might’ve been searching for the bridge.”
“What bridge?”
“The Brig o’ Doon.” Kenna drew out the last word with a perfect Scottish brogue, sending tingles skittering over my shoulders. “It’s Alloway’s most famous landmark.”
The gray arch I could see from my window was the Brig o’ Doon? I spun around and strained my eyes through the looming darkness … wondering if it resembled the stone pathway from my vision. “Can we walk down there?”
“Sure, but not tonight. There’s a trail from the backyard, but the caretaker, Mrs. Dell, warned me before we arrived that it’s badly overgrown. No sense breaking a leg our first night here. Get it? Break a leg?”
Kenna’s drama club pals back home would’ve appreciated the joke, but I couldn’t even muster a chuckle. I shoved my hands in my pockets to hide their shaking, and turned from the window to see Kenna analyzing me, her head cocked to one side. “Are you okay?”
I stared at her for a moment, considering if I should tell her about the visions … or hauntings … or whatever. Instead, my brain circled back to the arch of ancient-looking stones I’d seen and the possible connection to the actual bridge outside my window. “So, why is the Brig o’ Doon famous?” I was pleased my voice only sounded a few octaves higher than normal.
“Uh, Brigadoon!” At my lack of recognition, she added, “The musical by the immortal Lerner and Loewe?”
She hummed a haunting melody as she ran her fingers along my stack of books, knocking them over like dominos, and then turned to me expectantly. “Surely you recognize ‘Almost Like Being in Love.’”
“Nope.” She’d made me watch so many musicals over the years … I certainly couldn’t remember them all. I pressed my lips together and shook my head as I walked over to the dresser and righted my precious tomes, glancing at my copy of Oliver Twist. That musical I remembered, due to its grievous omission of the character Monks.
Kenna rolled her eyes. “You researched Alloway, right? Robert Burn’s poem, The Tam o’ Shanter, is set on the Brig o’ Doon. That ring a bell?”
“Of course. I just didn’t realized that the Brig o’ Doon was so close to the cottage.” It’s not like any of the roads we’d traveled had been straight. However, the more I thought about it, I did remember her telling me something a long time ago about a bridge near her aunt’s and a dark-haired boy with a brogue that used to call to her. “Didn’t your imaginary friend live under that bridge?”
Kenna snorted. “Not under the bridge—he wasn’t the troll from The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Finn lived on it. I can’t believe you remembered that.”
It was a random thing to remember … or was it? What were the odds that both she and I imagined Scottish boys standing on an ancient stone path and calling for us to come? One in a million?