Did You Declare the Corpse? by Patricia Sprinkle Page A

enough with him and Sherry both to clap both palms to my cheeks and exclaim, “Oh, dear, I think my daddy’s grandmother was a Campbell. Is that bad?”

    Watty flapped one hand. “Dinna fash yerselves. The massacre’s a matter of three hundred years and more. Go enjoy. Buy souvenirs. Improve the economy.” He waved us all away like chickens and shuffled back to the bus.

    Sherry began walking purposefully toward the shops, calling over one shoulder, “Come on, Kenny. I want to shop.”

    “Go.” Laura gave him a little push. “I’m in no danger from Mac. Besides, my family came from Uist and Skye.” Kenny took off after his wife, kilt rippling against his calves.

    When he was gone, though, Laura frowned down at me. “You never mentioned you had a Campbell in your family.”

    “I don’t. I just couldn’t resist that, the way they were carrying on.”

    “It was none of your business.” She turned on one heel and strode away.

    Brandi hurried after her, exuding waves of exotic perfume. “Laura? Wait up. Would you show me around and tell me about the massacre? I don’t know a thing about it, and Jimmy’s staying on the bus.”

    I watched them go and felt a twinge of distress. I couldn’t ever remember quarreling with Laura, and while what I had done wasn’t nice, her response seemed out of proportion. I hoped she had better sense than to be renewing her old interest in Kenny Boyd.

    Abandoned, I walked alone up the glen. Laura’s voice came back to me in snatches carried by a brutal wind. “. . . sixteen ninety-two . . . wouldn’t swear . . . invited to dinner . . . women and children. . . .”

    I pulled my collar tight against my throat, shivering not just from cold. An odor of death and betrayal seemed to hover just beneath the thick gray clouds in the lowering sky. Snow capped the mountains, and shifting waves of mist made them look remote and menacing. I’d read the story before I left home, so as I walked, I tried to imagine the glen as it had been in 1692. I saw the old chief, looking a bit like Watty, first refusing to swear loyalty to the King of England, then changing his mind and setting off through February snow to Inverness, leaving his people behind. As I wandered farther and farther from the parking lot, I pictured the Campbells arriving in force, pretending to be friends and accepting the hospitality of the MacDonalds, whose homes would have been scattered all up and down the glen. I left the main path and followed a track uphill, trying to get a vantage point where I could see the whole sweep of the valley. But when I got to imagining the actual massacre, picturing the Campbells rising before dawn intending to wipe out every man, woman and child in the glen, I felt so weak, I had to lean against a nearby stone.

    The valley certainly made a perfect trap. Cliffs rose three thousand feet on both sides, and the hills at the end were too rugged to be easily crossed. What panic there must have been! What terror! And what despair as women watched their children hacked down before the murderers turned on them. If there ever was a place imprinted with a day of destruction, this was it.

    To add to the eeriness, the whole time I’d been walking a thick mist had drifted down from the hills, cold and clammy as death itself. Now, in an instant, the mist fell like a curtain to my feet and somewhere in the distance, pipes began to play. Mournful notes wailed from hill to hill. I could rationally tell myself there was a live piper—probably Kenny— playing somewhere up the glen. It was easier to believe that the music was floating from beyond history to mourn the massacre at Glen Coe.

    “This is spooky,” I said aloud. Like my daddy used to say, “You have to talk to yourself occasionally, to be sure of getting some intelligent conversation.” I hunched up in my coat and put out a hand, but I couldn’t even see it at the end of my arm, much less the track that led down to the path I’d