A Kind of Grief by A. D. Scott

Mackenzie. “It’s about the trial,” she started—no need to say which trial. “I wanted to ask . . .” She had no idea what she wanted to ask; she just couldn’t let go of Alice Ramsay.
    â€œI don’t mind. Maybe we could meet up?”
    Joanne dreaded the thought of another drive. The last one had been fun, but it had taken her three days to recover.
    â€œMe and my fiancée, Elaine, we’re coming down your way,” Calum said. “She has a training day at the hospital, and I’m driving her down in ma dad’s car, so I’ve all day to kill.”
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œFriday coming.”
    â€œPerfect.” Joanne was pleased. “Phone me when you arrive, then come for a cup of tea. No, better still, let’s meet at the Gazette office. I can show you around, introduce you to everyone.”
    Now it was Calum’s turn to be delighted. “Elaine has to be at the hospital at nine o’clock, so let’s say . . .”
    â€œTen o’clock at the Gazette .”

    Joanne sat in a visitor’s chair in her husband’s office, Calum in the other. Purloining McAllister’s chair was one step too many. She had her reporter’s notebook and a pen. She put on reading glasses. They reminded her that the surgeon had feared for her eyesight.
    In her thinking, however, she’d reached a turning point in her recovery. For a long while, she’d believed that the attack was her fault. She wrestled with different scenarios in which she should have done this, could have done that, changing the outcome. She wrestled with what she should have said, or done, and after the fact decided that she was not clever enough. Or brave enough. Until McAllister showed her different.
    Joanne guessed he would be unlikely to support her investigation into Alice Ramsay’s death, but she was determined to find out more, if only to lessen her own guilt.
    That stare, that sentence uttered in a cold voice on a cold day in the Station Square, would not go away. I thought better of you. Joanne had been, and still was, the victim of small-town gossip. And she in turn had gossiped with Dougald Forsythe. That she could not forgive herself for.
    â€œThe trial of Alice Ramsay,” she began. “Why was she prosecuted?”
    This was a question that flummoxed Calum still. The charge was an obscure one; even the procurator fiscal had wrestled with it. Calum hated to think about the miscarriage, deliberate or otherwise. Anything to do with what he called “women’s plumbing” he avoided.
    â€œWhen you asked to meet, I gathered it might be about the trial, so I looked at my original notes.” He pulled out a small spiral-bound reporter’s notebook. “There was the husband called for the prosecution. And the wife. There was Dr. Jamieson and Nurse Ogilvie.” He turned a page. “After the woman lost the baby, she didn’t go to the hospital. The husband went with her to the doctor. The doctor said nothing could be done. The husband accused Miss Ramsay. The doctor apparently dismissed the notion. So the husband, he went to the police, saying Miss Ramsay gave his wife some medicine to make her vomit and cause an abor—”
    â€œA miscarriage.”
    â€œAye, that’s the word.” Calum was grateful. That was not the word he had been thinking of, and “miscarriage” was much preferable to the other term for losing a baby. “The husband insisted it was deliberate. But Elaine says—she’s my fiancée—she says why would Miss Ramsay do that? For months, she’d been helping some of the old folk, giving them home-brewed tea and medicines. No one objected. Nurse Ogilvie said it was all harmless stuff like her granny used to make. And many women, so I’m told, suffer terribly from sickness when they have a baby.”
    He remembered his mother gossiping about how Miss Ramsay