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

surveyors,” replied Ciara as she
wafted into the driver’s seat. “I’ve got a friend who dowses a
treat. He’ll trace the foundations and the line leading to Rosslyn
as well. A shame Wallace will not be here to see the final designs,
but then, it’s all built on his foundation, isn’t it?”
    The engine started. The red of the taillights
gleamed. The van backed and filled and rolled sedately through the
gate and out onto the road, leaving Jean’s and Alasdair’s cars
alone. A lamp attached to the front of the shop buzzed and came on,
shedding an eerie blue-tinted light across the courtyard.
    “From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggit
beasties and things that go bump in the night, Mystic Scotland
turns a profit, eh?” Alasdair’s tone was flat, emotionless. He
wasn’t being sarcastic. He was simply stating a fact. “The woman
would not recognize a bogle, a ghost, a spirit, or a specter if it
pinched her on the bum.”
    “Really?” Jean shoved aside the vision of
Alasdair pinching Ciara’s ripe, round behind. “She has no ESP? She
got all that about the ghost walking down to the chapel and feeling
a chill and everything from the Ferniebank leaflet?”
    “You and I, lass, have got more of a ghost
allergy in our fingernail parings than she’s got in her entire
body.”
    “Well, telling stories is a respectable
profession. Probably about the third-oldest one.”
    “The problem is, she’s not recognizing that
they’re stories. Not a bit of it.”
    “Ah. I see.” Not that Jean was seeing the
entire vista, far from it, but at least she was peeking through the
keyhole at why the Alasdair and Ciara project had ever gotten
started, let alone why it had gone so sour.
    Alasdair checked his watch and plucked an
industrial-strength flashlight from its bracket next to the door.
“It’s time to be closing the place down. Fancy a private tour of
the keep?” His lips were clamped in a straight line, not just his
upper one but his lower one stiff as well, and his jaw was set. And
yet his eye sparked again, if not with humor then at least with
resignation.
    Well it only took a few sparks to set
tinder alight, if the tinder was susceptible to flame . “So
there really is a ghost.”
    “Decide for yourself,” Alasdair answered, and
escorted her into the dusk.
     
     

Chapter Six
     
     
    Modern wooden steps led up to the entrance of
Ferniebank Castle. Jean levered herself over the stone threshold
into a small room so dark she could make out only the rectangular
shapes of three more doorways, two opaque with shadow, one dimly
lighted. Chill oozed from the gritty floor through her shoes and up
her legs. A musty odor, like that of a wet dog, hung so thick in
the air it felt like a pillow pressed to her face.
    No, Ferniebank was not making a good first
impression. To heck with her feminist principles—she inched closer
to Alasdair’s steady, sturdy body.
    He was either oblivious to her discomfort or
too polite to comment. “This entrance might not have been the
original. Hard to say. These places are like mazes in three
dimensions.”
    “Your average Virginia plantation looks
simple by comparison,” Jean managed to reply.
    He leaned past her. A switch snapped and a
light came on, a bare bulb dangling from the vaulted ceiling like a
spider’s prey from its web. “The electricity supply’s a bit dodgy
in these airts,” Alasdair said, brandishing the flashlight the way
he might once have brandished a truncheon. “The electric flex dates
back to the last spasm of restoration round and about 1900, before
the place was abandoned. I’d not go in here after dark without this
torch.”
    She could say something about not going into
the place after dark at all, but she was inflicting enough of her
phobias on the man as it was.
    “Say the word ‘castle,’ ” Alasdair went on,
“and most trippers from your part of world think of something like
Floors, outwith Kelso.”
    “Well, yeah. Too many Hollywood