The Burning Glass by Lillian Stewart Carl Read Free Book Online

headstones inlaid with gilded letters, very recent
burials, if not as recent as the one closest to the road, a long
pile of wilted flowers extending from the vertical of wooden plank.
Jean couldn’t make out the name painted on the temporary marker,
but she could guess. This was the grave of the luckless caretaker.
Not far away lay a second grave with a temporary marker, a few days
older—the flowers were well on their way to mulch. Mrs. Elliot, no
doubt.
    Shaking her head at these intimations of
mortality, Jean accelerated past a grove of trees, then braked
again in front of a handsome stone mansion. Since its dormers and
gables didn’t rise to the full excess of Scots Baronial, the place
had likely been built when Victoria was a slip of a lass. A small
sign on the front gate read: “Glebe House.” Casa Rutherford, in
other words. Jean wondered whether she’d get points at Minty’s tea
for knowing that a glebe was land that paid rent to a church.
Assuming Minty carried on with the tea.
    Jean coasted on by, noting the police car
parked in the driveway next to a no-nonsense Range Rover. A
movement in the bay window fronting the house might be a woman in
tweed and leather, or it might not . . . Jean wrenched at the
steering wheel to keep from driving into the weed-filled ditch
between the road and the wall enclosing the lawn. When she looked
back, every little pane of the mullioned window met her gaze
blandly.
    Behind the house, in the place that might
once have been taken by a barn, stood a contemporary timber and
glass Euro-insipid building. A large but still tasteful signboard,
reading “Cookery at the Glebe” rose beside a second drive. The
Rutherfords had not been strapped for the money to invest in their
cooking school, then, even before de-accessioning a property.
    Onwards, then, over the last half-mile to
Ferniebank. Which wasn’t going to be as peaceful as Jean had
intended. As for Alasdair’s intentions, professional or personal,
she probably didn’t need to fill him in on the question of the
missing councillor or the case of the stolen clarsach. And the
unfortunate incident of the caretaker was already on his mind.
Forewarned was forearmed, she told herself, a concept that applied
to relationships as well as to crimes, ghosts, and Borders
warfare.
    A farmstead appeared on her right, complete
with hillside pasture dotted with black and white cows. Here the
sign was a simple painted shingle wired to the fence: “Ferniebank
Farm.”
    The trees on her left opened ranks and shed
some of their thick undergrowth. Ash, rowan, alder, oak, birch,
willow, hazel—she knew them by reputation, if not personally. Their
long shadows reached down to a sparkle that was the River Teviot,
then suddenly were enclosed by another stone wall of such antiquity
that the one around the church might just as well have been made of
Legos. This one stood eight feet in height and was topped by jagged
stones, here and there clumsily cemented into place. Above the
stone teeth rose the dark gray walls, parapets, and chimneys of
Ferniebank Castle, even on this sunny August afternoon exuding the
grim chill of long winters and longer warfare.
    Jean took the left turn through the narrow
gateway with care. Alasdair’s Renault and a mini-bus sat in the
gravel-paved courtyard defined by the perimeter wall, the castle’s
sheer facade, and a low structure roofed with corrugated metal. It
sported the plate-glass window and door of the ticket office and
shop, while a second door was marked “Toilet,” and a third was
blank. Park benches and some potted plants proclaimed a welcome
that dashed itself futilely against the forbidding face of the
castle.
    Jean saw the archway of the main door gaping
atop a flight of wooden steps, and the glass in the irregularly
spaced and unevenly sized windows shimmering with distorted
reflections. What she didn’t see was the cozy caretaker’s cottage
she’d been anticipating. Maybe it lay farther down the