Highland Laddie Gone

significant to you?”

“I don’t remember him. I met so many people last night.”

Betty Carson, who had been getting ice out of the cooler, turned around. “Colin Campbell, Mrs. Hutcheson? He was that short little man with white hair who asked you about your new cousin-the Duke’s child. I was standing right behind you.”

“Oh, yes. Him.”

“And he asked you something about its layette, didn’t he? I thought I heard him say baby sham, or pillow, or something.”

“Did he seem upset about anything?” asked Elizabeth.

“I didn’t notice.”

“Yes, he must have been,” Betty put in. “Because later Walter told my husband Andy that there would be a committee meeting this morning. Colin Campbell had some bee in his bonnet about embezzlement, or some such thing. Didn’t Walter mention it to you?”

“He may have done. I wasn’t paying any attention. Goodbye.” Heather walked away, obviously annoyed at the continual interruptions from Betty Carson.

Elizabeth made a mental note to file baby sham and embezzlement away for further consideration, but her chief concern was the relationship between Cameron and Heather. Just how well did they know each other, and did it matter? Of course it’s none of my business, Elizabeth told herself, so I’ll have to be very subtle indeed when I check up on it. She stapled the rest of the pamphlets to the tune of “You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man,” but a small, cold part of her mind refused to believe the lyrics.

She was still stapling ten minutes later when the deputy told her that the sheriff wanted to see her.

Alexander Lightfoot MacDonald wrinkled his nose at the smell of booze in the tent. He didn’t mind a cool brew with the militia boys, but sometimes the smell of it took him back. Six years old… with the Stars and Bars tacked over his bed… and Daddy stumbling in to bid his little corporal good night, reeking of bourbon and Sen-Sen. Little Ellick, as they called him then, would edge away from the fumes and stare at the sepia picture of Stonewall Jackson on the dresser, while Daddy told him war stories.

He must have been twelve before he knew that Guadalcanal wasn’t in the War Between the States, but by then it was too late to take an interest in Daddy’s war-or in Daddy, who finally finished the Japs’ job for them by wrapping himself around a tree in his black Bel-Air. Lightfoot wasn’t there at the time, but since then he’d pulled enough drunks out of wrecks piece by piece to have remarkably realistic nightmares about it.

Now Lightfoot was the county sheriff-maybe a little rougher on drunk drivers than he needed to be-and people laughed at the way he played war with the young bucks of the county; but to Lightfoot’s mind, it was a better way out of this world than most of the other exits he’d seen people try.

He took a swig of hot, un-spiked Pepsi, and picked up his notes on the Campbell case. Glencoe Park was private property, so the alcohol was not his concern-not until one of them tried to turn one of his county roads into the abattoir. Then he’d see. Meanwhile, he had to try to make sense of this three-ring circus: Scotchmen, spies, an old man hell-bent on cussedness… Seemed like none of it was really serious. All these people were on French leave from their real lives, he reckoned. In costumes up on a mountain, they just didn’t seem to count things up here as part of real life-just part of the show, as if they expected the dead man to come back to life on Sunday afternoon, the way the casualties did in his Civil War battles.

He shrugged. Why not? Most of them weren’t involved, and not one gave a rat’s ass about the deceased. But somebody at this sideshow was playing for keeps, and in an encampment full of play-acting simpletons, that could be godawful dangerous.

“Scuse me, Sheriff. The young lady’s here,” said Merle, who had started to knock on the tent flap.

“Right. Bring her in.”

She looked about twenty-three, and a little like Linda Ronstadt on one of those early album covers, Lightfoot decided. Didn’t look as though she could put a knife into hot butter, much less an old man, but you never could tell. Stabbing didn’t take much effort at all if the blade was sharp, and that one had been.

“Have you got her fingerprints?” he asked Merle.

“Yessir. We’re pretty near through with that. Got most everybody that we know of who had a connection with him.”

Elizabeth rubbed her smudgy fingers with a tissue. “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” Geoffrey’s form of insanity was highly contagious, she thought sadly.

Lightfoot took her name and address, and spent several minutes trying to make sense of the Maid of the Cat concept. He finally decided that it was something like the Carolina ram that was paraded at UNC football games, and he let it go at that.

“I understand you had a run-in with the deceased yesterday,” he remarked.

“Well, he fussed at me for wearing a kilt, and I told him what I thought of him. But neither of us took it as a capital offense.”

“How well did you know Dr. Campbell?”

Elizabeth considered it. “If somebody in your neighborhood kept a vicious dog in a fenced-in yard… about as well as you’d know the dog.”

Lightfoot laughed. “Mainly by reputation.”

“Exactly. There may not be people around with better motives for doing him in, but I bet there are a lot of people with similar ones.”

“Quite a few,” the sheriff admitted. “We got one woman that he reduced to tears by telling her what he thought of the tartan she was wearing.”

“The Royal Stewart, I’ll bet. Nobody’s entitled to wear it, really, but Dr. Campbell was the only person who’d pitch a fit.”

“Can you think of anyone who had better reasons to want him dead?”

“No. No one ever bothered to stay around him long enough to… wait a minute. He did have one friend. Marge Hutcheson. I’ll bet she could tell you what he was really like.”

The sheriff made a note of the name. “One more thing. Do you know anything about a terrorist organization connected with the games?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “It sounds unlikely. Is it something to do with Scotland? You might ask Cameron-”

“Cameron Dawson?”

“Yes. But I doubt if he’ll know anything at all about the games. He’s just arrived in this country, you see, and for most of that time…” She blushed.

Lightfoot looked at her closely. “Oh,” he grunted. “So you’re the one.”

Elizabeth smiled sadly. “Sheriff, I devoutly hope so.”

Of all the people Lightfoot had seen so far, Marge Hutcheson looked the most upset. She had not been crying, he decided, but she appeared to be under a strain. He offered her his empty Pepsi can for an ashtray, and watched her light a Benson & Hedges with shaking hands.

“How well did you know the deceased?”

“Well enough to mind that he got himself murdered,” said Marge grimly. “Poor Colin. I expect he would have enjoyed all the fuss. He was much more comfortable with dissension than he was with friendliness. He was always trying to drag me into an argument.”

“About what?”

Marge smiled. “The weather… the stock market… anything at all. It was a bit of a game with him, you know. He didn’t take quarreling personally, so I don’t think it would occur to him that people might actually get their feelings hurt in an argument.”

“You think he pushed somebody too far?”

“Perhaps. I used to tell him he would someday. But I never pictured any consequences more serious than a punch in the nose.”

“Did he mention any specific run-ins he’d had with anyone lately?”

“Little things. He had a quarrel with the Maid of the Cat because she was wearing a kilt. Nothing important.”