The Burning Glass by Lillian Stewart Carl Page A

still without
removing her hands from her jacket pockets.
    “Where Mr. Wallace Rutherford died? The place
has been locked up, hasn’t it? No one giving tours ’til muggins
here arrived.” Alasdair wasn’t any taller than the couple, but he
had mastered the feline ploy of making himself look bigger, and the
kids bowed in front of him like miscreants before the bench. After
a long pause for effect, he turned toward the door. “Come along
now. Hop it.”
    Derek and Zoe started off across the floor at
a fast clip, their boots thudding, then caught themselves and
slowed to a devil-may-care saunter behind Alasdair’s marching pace.
Smiling with something between amusement and sympathy—she’d been
that young, once, and that desperate for a persona—Jean brought up
the rear and even remembered to turn out the light.
    But when she walked into the Laigh Hall she
frowned, confused. The front door should have been on her right,
not on her left. Maybe the rooms and passages had shifted around
after they passed and even now waited, just outside the corners of
her eyes, poised to slip sideways . . . No. Alasdair had merely led
Jean and the teenagers down a second staircase.
    Now Zoe and Derek were craning eagerly as
Alasdair bent over a patch of stone flags in the deeply shadowed
corner of the room next to the entrance. He grasped a metal ring
the circumference of a dinner plate and pulled.
    The wooden planks of a trap door swung
upwards with a tooth-scouring screech. Alasdair laid it down
gently. “There you are. The death chamber. It’s closed to the
public. But you know all about it, don’t you now, Zoe?”
    “Aye,” the girl admitted, while Derek leaned
precariously over to peer into the depths.
    Alasdair reached out, plucked the boy back
from the brink, and set him down a pace or two away. His gaze never
left Zoe’s face. “Mr. Rutherford showed you round the place, did
he?”
    “Every year the school has a day out here.
Not the water park, no. This old place. And there’s Wally, handing
out leaflets, selling sweeties, telling the same old, same old
stories. The healing well. The lairds buried in their armor. The
Gray Lady, Isabel’s ghost.”
    “Lies, the lot of them,” Derek muttered.
    “Lies?” repeated Jean. “Stories aren’t
necessarily lies. Of course, they’re not necessarily the truth,
either.”
    Rolling his eyes, the boy assumed a pose
obviously meant to be nonchalant but that ended up simply
sloppy.
    “Mr. Rutherford,” Alasdair enunciated. “Your
folk knew him, didn’t they, Zoe?”
    The black fabric covering Zoe’s pockets
writhed. She must be clenching and unclenching her hands. “He’d
come drinking at the pub. And my granny and my mum, they’d bring
him hot meals and stay for a blether, with him living on his own
and all.”
    “He wasn’t so much on his own. Your
grandparents, the Elliots, live just across the road.”
    “What of it? My grandad, he said Wally was a
nutter and spying on him. Said he expected Granny to look after him
as well as doing her own work. And then he said he killed her.”
    Derek had apparently heard all this before—he
didn’t react. Jean, though, repeated, “Killed her?”
    “Your grandfather said Wallace killed your
granny?” Alasdair established. “What happened?”
    “They found her lying in the road, dead, not
three weeks since.”
    “Was she hit by a car?”
    “Not a mark on her. Heart gave out. My
grandad’s saying she was always rushing to and fro, dancing
attendance on Wally. So down she went, all alone, with no one to
help her, and she died.”
    Alasdair glanced at Jean, who could only cock
her eyebrows back at him. No, Ferniebank didn’t seem to be a
particularly healthy place for the elderly. These things come in
threes . “That’s stretching it a bit, then,” he told Zoe, “to be
saying Wallace killed her.”
    The girl shrugged. Derek gazed raptly at his
boots.
    “What’s this about Wallace spying?” Alasdair
prodded.
    “He