“Very well,” she said, which made me laugh again.
“Mary?” she asked. “Where are we going?”
I lifted my head to the sky, and saw the stars.
The sensible thing would be to go to the police and trust them to accept my explanation. True, they would take Estelle away, and in the lack of other family they would put her into care, but they were not ogres. Surely they would return her to me, or to her father, as soon as things were settled. The sensible thing would be to send Mycroft a wire and hope that he was in a position to get me out of this.
But then, were I a sensible person, would I have been sitting on an Orcadian hillside at five in the morning with an unknown step-granddaughter's hand in mine? I looked at her, and squeezed her tiny, trusting hand.
“Estelle, how would you like to go up in an aeroplane?”
Post Script
Many days later, lodged in the hidden depths of Scotland, I read an out-of-date newspaper article concerning a farmer who lived beside the Stones of Stenness, wakened that Friday night by gunshots and the sight of flames amidst the stones. When he reached the spot, with shotgun and paraffin lamp to hand, he found only a broken lamp, the burnt edge of a blanket, and signs of a bloody struggle.
No sign of a hand-bound book written in blood; no knife crafted from a meteor's iron.
Police investigations the following day turned up no body, and no injured person had been seen by the doctor's surgery. The police were puzzled, and suggested that a youthful prank at the Stones had gone awry.
Some of us knew otherwise.
… to be continued.
Acknowledgments
This book owes much to the extraordinary willingness of a lot of people to put up with peculiar questions and offer expertise in exchange.
Anthony and Anna Tomasso, Clare Claydon and Win Westerhof, and Susan Rice, ASH, BSI, all tried to educate me about bees; where I resisted their tutoring, I apologize for the demands of the fictional process. Zoe Elkaim brought me books and researched a myriad of weird factoids. Glen Miranker, a most dependable gentleman, traded a donation to the Baker Street Irregulars for the chance to be turned into a broken reed of a Sussex beekeeper. Alice Wright did the same, permitting herself to be re-shaped into a Soho sculptress of questionable virtue in exchange for a donation to the Enoch Pratt library and Viva House.
John Mallinson, North West, and Burt Gabriel at the Hiller Air Museum; Francis King and Keith Jillings helped me get a 1924 Bristol Tourer into the air, on paper anyway. Cara Black nudged my French, Doug P. Lyle, MD gave me all kinds of problems when he corrected my forensic history, and Vicki Van Valkenburgh and Kathy Long helped keep my electronic identity in order.
As always, I owe the librarians of UCSC's McHenry Library a hive's-worth of blessings, for their boundless energy and creativity.
A portion of the proceeds from this book go to the beehive project of Heifer International. For details, see my website at www.LaurieRKing.com.
About the Author
Laurie R. King is the New York Times bestselling author of nine Mary Russell mysteries, five contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, and the acclaimed novels A Darker Place, Folly, Keeping Watch, and Touchstone. She is one of only two novelists to win the Best First Crime Novel awards on both sides of the Atlantic, from MWA and CWA. She lives in northern California where she is at work on her next Russell and Holmes mystery.
