The Murder Hole Read Online Free PDF

too,
we can lift a glass to old times and old friends, right?”
    Wrong, on several counts, not least of which
was that she was no girl. But Jean didn’t owe Roger or anyone else
an account of her divorce and relocation-cum-escape. “Wel . .
.”
    “See you tomorrow afternoon at five, okay?
Cheers!”
    “And cheers to you, too,” Jean said, even
though he’d already hung up. Switching off her phone, she eyed
Ambrose’s book accusingly, as though it were responsible for the
holes in Dempsey’s story.
    In her request for an interview she’d skipped
the inconvenient details, saying merely that she’d met Dempsey at
the Williamsburg conference and signing her name as “Jean Fairbairn
(Inglis)”. Maybe he did remember her, and his remark about publish
and perish was meant as a joke at his own expense.
    Whatever, there were no old times to lift a
glass to. Dempsey was claiming a closer and more cordial
acquaintance than they’d really had. And not because of her
sparkling personality. Because he wanted her to hype his
expedition. Crass, yes, but hardly surprising. Although you’d think
Dempsey would have learned by now to lose the egregious “girl.”
    However, unless she’d mentioned Brad in
conference small-talk before things heated up, Dempsey had no
reason to have even heard of the man . . . Oh boy . Jean spun
away from the desk with a two-fisted gesture of frustration.
Dempsey was so eager to ingratiate himself that he’d researched her . Once past the Great Scot masthead, the first
items in an Internet search on her name were the headlines about
her lawsuit against the university, to say nothing—and heaven only
knew she’d like to say nothing—of the scandal behind it. And then
there was the murder case last month, generating more headlines.
His remark about going over to the enemy gave Dempsey away. It was
Jean who had occasionally found the media to be her adversary. To
Dempsey, reporters were the tools of his trade.
    Jean stopped beside the window, considering
the ghostly shape of her own reflection. If her divorce from Brad
Inglis was mentioned on the net at all, it was buried so deeply
that Dempsey even with his remote-sensing devices hadn’t found it,
and so added gaffe to presumption. Typically over-the-top, to claim
Brad, too, as a friend. And odd, too, not that Jean could claim
immunity from oddness.
    Outside, the raking light of late evening
glared off the western faces of the buildings but sank their
eastern sides in blackness. Even as she watched, the light faded
into a fragile gloom. Her damp T-shirt lay chill against her breast
and stomach. The water horse, she thought. You get up on it, and it
takes you down into the dark depths of your own soul.
    If she had wanted comfort, she could have
stayed in Texas, bunkered in an air-conditioned office while the
sun beat on the parched earth outside. She could never have asked
Alasdair Cameron to dinner, last month, as the gentle rain softened
the green hills of—well, it was home now.
    It was time, she told herself, for her voyage
of self-discovery to include a trip down the loch with all the
other tourists who hoped to see the head of something rich and
strange emerge from the waters. When you know fate is lying in wait
for you, you could do a lot worse than get up on your horse, water
or otherwise, and ride out to meet it.
     
     

Chapter Four
     
     
    Jean peered around the tour bus clogging the
road ahead of her and spotted a sign reading Pitclachie
House . At last! She two-wheeled her rented Focus into an
asphalt drive before the harried paterfamilias in the car hugging
her bumper got a squeaky Nessie in the ear and rear-ended her.
    The big blank spot to the southeast of Loch
Ness on a Scottish road map said as much about the terrain as a
topographical survey. Jean had had two ways to get to Drumnadrochit
from Edinburgh, neither of them remotely related to flying crows.
She’d chosen the northern route, through Inverness. That way she
could