Read Online The Burning Glass by Lillian Stewart Carl - Free Book Online

hanging to
attention in the wardrobe, including his kilt and its appurtenances
swaddled in a garment bag. The clothes were arranged on one side,
just as his toiletries occupied only one shelf of three in the
bathroom, leaving room for her things. She hoped Alasdair wasn’t as
meticulous in his personal habits as he was in his intellectual
ones. It would be like living with a drill sergeant and his white
gloves.
    But then, he’d seen her fidgeting around her
apartment, card-cataloguing her books and washing his coffee cup
almost before it left his hands, and was probably worrying that
she’d climb into bed beside him and whip out a clipboard with a
pre-flight checklist.
    If both of them found it necessary to have
command over their environments, did that hint at underlying and
possibly troublesome control issues . . . Good grief, Jean told
herself as she started back to the front room, you’re focusing so
tightly on all of this you’re magnifying gnats into dinosaurs. You
sure weren’t indulging in this sort of analysis before your
wedding.
    And herself murmured in reply, this time you
know what you’re getting into.
    In the hallway, Alasdair was emptying a bag
of cat litter into Dougie’s box. Just as he’d estimated, it fit
into one end of a misshapen closet, two feet deep and probably six
feet long, that must have originally been a chamber or even a
chimney in the original castle wall but now contained a water
heater and cleaning supplies.
    Dougie himself was stretched out on the
windowsill like a miniature sphinx. Jean draped the blanket from
his basket across the hollowed seat of an old easy chair, one that
wasn’t going to bring any second looks on Antiques Roadshow .
“So,” she said, and her voice seemed like a shout in the silence.
She reminded herself that it only seemed silent because she was
used to living in the city.
    Alasdair left the door of the cupboard ajar.
“So?”
    “How long did Wallace Rutherford live here?
Was all this stuff his? There aren’t any personal effects lying
around—no reading glasses, no toothbrushes, no monogrammed
mugs.”
    “He moved house here when the castle was
opened, so aye, I’m supposing the furnishings were his.”
    “Did you ever meet him?”
    “I spoke to him on the phone the day before
he died is all. He said he was just after having a look at the
roof. He knew the place inside and out, I reckon. ”
    “Did climbing up to the roof—what is it, five
flights up?—bring on his heart attack?”
    “There’s four flights from the ground floor
to the cap house and a ladder down to the dungeon.”
    “Where Wallace was found.”
    “Oh aye. Where he was found.” There was that
quick frown again, not a full-fledged scowl of suspicion, just a
pucker of skepticism along the top of Alasdair’s brows. Policemen
were skeptical. It came with the territory. And Alasdair had
probably been a skeptic before he’d ever been a cop. Still . .
.
    A sudden series of sharp raps made them both
jump, then each look around to see if the other had noticed. No,
the sound wasn’t a message from the next life, but from a former
one.
    In one stride, Alasdair reached the door and
threw it open. Ciara stood on the front porch, her curls and
flounces outlined against the darkening courtyard. “Cheers,
Alasdair. We’re away. I’ll be talking with you, Jean. Have a good
night. Ferniebank’s bogle is a harmless one, I’m promising you
that.” With a good-natured megawatt smile, she turned to go.
    Instead of slamming the door, Alasdair
watched Ciara stroll across the courtyard. Jean craned past his
shoulder, trying not to heave an aggravated sigh in his ear.
    Keith Bell stood beside the van. He said, as
though continuing a conversation, “The surveyors need to outline
the foundations of the medieval hospice so we won’t damage them. We
can leave transparent panels in the floor over the old footings.”
He climbed into the passenger side and slammed the door.
    “No need for