Heather Graham - The Presence

Her heart began to sink, and yet, inside, a voice was insisting, No! This just can’t be!

“Everything is just fine, Jon,” Bruce said, eyes coolly set upon Toni once again. “But perhaps you could assure these nice people that I am indeed the owner of the property.”

“The Laird MacNiall,” Tavish told them solemnly. “Owns the castle, half the village and the good Laird above us all knows just what else.”

Toni stared at the man incredulously. Now her heart seemed to thump straight downward into the pit of her stomach. The stunned confusion remained, and once again her temper soared.

Toni suddenly found herself furious with the constable. How could the man have let them all do this without saying a word if there might have been a problem? “Constable Tavish, if this is all true, sir, you might have informed us that there was a living MacNiall who rightfully owned the property and wasn’t known to rent it out!” Toni said, trying very hard to keep her voice level.

The constable looked at her, grimacing ruefully. “If I’ve added to your confusion and distress, lass, I am, indeed, sorry. You never suggested to me that you weren’t aware that Laird MacNiall existed. And until I saw Bruce, I couldn’t be certain that he hadn’t rented the property … though I definitely found it a surprise that he might have done so,” Tavish said.

A crack of lightning showed them that Tavish had not come alone. Behind him was Eban Douglas, a man who had introduced himself as the jack-of-all-trades for the place. They’d explained that they’d put just about everything they had into the rent on the castle and for the repair materials. He’d seemed very pleased, but then again, he always seemed pleased. He was a small, wizened man with tufts of white hair on his skeletal face. Gina referred to him as Igor, and was convinced that he might have made a fortune in life performing as Riff-Raff for the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

He’d actually talked to them a great deal. At times, he’d appeared to help. And never once—in any way, shape or form—had he mentioned that there was a Laird MacNiall who still owned the place.

Despite that—and his rather creepy appearance—he had certainly seemed decent enough. Toni had seen him working about the grounds and had assumed that he was paid by the agency that had rented the castle to them.

A shopkeeper in town had told them that he lived in a little carriage house just beyond the hill in back, a piece of landscape created by the fact that the moat that had surrounded the castle no longer existed.

“You, Eban!” Toni said. “Why didn’t you tell us about Laird MacNiall?” she demanded.

“Y’didna ask,” Eban told her, then grimaced. “I didna know myself—perhap His Lairdship had decided such folks as yerselves might ha been good fer the old place.” He shrugged. “After all, y’were doin’ a fine job of settin’ ‘er ta rights, that y’were!”

“Well, thank you for that acknowledgment, at least! I think we’ve been really good for it,” Toni said, feeling her jaw clench.

“Ah, then, back to the buses!”

David, who had apparently been charming the guests in the massive kitchen, came bursting back into the hallway, the large group of tourists behind him.

“Now, now!” David said as his group began to splinter. “The buses are waiting!” But he had lost control, and their guests began to mingle before leaving, stopping by Toni, Gina, Ryan and Bruce. The four of them, including Bruce MacNiall, received glowing compliments for their performances.

“Oh, it was great!” a woman named Milly—from Chicago, if Toni remembered correctly—cooed to Bruce MacNiall. “I mean, it was all just so wonderful. And then you on this magnificent beast here—pure magic! Thank you so very much. I’ll never, ever, forget this trip to Scotland. What a dream fulfilled it has been!”

“Thank you, dear,” Kevin said, quickly sweeping up behind her to draw her away.

“I loved it!” Milly said.

“Buses are waiting!” Kevin said cheerfully. “Mustn’t hold them up!”

“Really!” Milly called to Bruce MacNiall as she was ushered out.

He had the grace to slightly incline his head to her. “I’m delighted that you’re enjoying Scotland,” he said.

The crowd moved on, passing by the constable and Eban, the tourists chatting and boisterous as they moved out to the courtyard, ready to board their buses.

Thayer, however, was now in the room.

“My cousin! He is a Scotsman!” Toni said. Her words sounded defensive, as though, because Thayer was a Scot, they couldn’t possibly be in a mess here.

“A Scotsman, or an American of Scottish descent?” MacNiall queried.

“Glasgow, born and bred,” Thayer said, frowning. He stepped forward, offering a hand. “Thayer Fraser, sir. I’ve overheard just a bit of this. And I’m really sorry regarding this and my own confusion. We may well be at your mercy. Toni did the paperwork from the States after finding this rental through the Internet. The agreements went through a rental agency, a corporation. But we had a lawyer—and I saw the ads for the place myself, down in Glasgow.”

MacNiall shook his head. Toni once more felt a fierce irritation. Again, the men’s club was meeting, and she and Gina were entirely ostracized. MacNiall was decent enough about horses, and give him a fellow Scotsman and he could almost resemble polite.

“There’s definitely a problem, I’m afraid.”

“Aye, but they been good, Bruce, really good a fixen ‘er up!” Eban announced suddenly.

“We really have put a lot of hard work into it,” Ryan said.

Apparently the tourists had been loaded back onto their buses. David and Kevin came back into the hall.

For a moment, they were all a tableau, at an impasse. David moved up awkwardly. “Laird MacNiall?” he murmured. “David Fulton, and my friend, Kevin Hart. We’re only beginning to understand the gist of what went wrong, but, honestly, no group could have put more toil and loving effort into making improvements here. If you’ll take some time and look around, you’ll see what very real elbow grease has gone into our stay here.”

Then, to Toni’s amazement, Bruce MacNiall uttered an oath beneath his breath, and made what to him must have been a very generous statement. “All right. It’s Friday night. Jon is here with us and can validate who I am, but the legal offices are in town and they won’t be open again until Monday morning. Until then, I believe you’ll have to stay.”

“We’ll have to stay because we paid a great deal of money to be here, and we have legal documentation,” Toni said stubbornly.

Gina jabbed her with an elbow to the ribs. She winced, realizing that maybe she was pushing it. But she wasn’t going to blindly believe this man, or even the local-yokel constable, when she had brought the agreement to an attorney, and he had read over the deal.

“We do have an attorney!” she murmured.

“Solicitor,” Thayer murmured to her softly. “We have solicitors here.”

“I get the feeling he knows what an attorney is,” Toni murmured back softly.

Jonathan Tavish cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m truly sorry now that I didn’t try to stop you. As I said, I didn’t know for certain that Bruce hadn’t decided to rent out the old ancestral place. But I am afraid that someone knew about the castle—and how much Bruce traveled—and took you for a soaking.” He cleared his throat and looked at Bruce with an uncomfortable shrug.

“Should I take those papers now? Not much I can do on this till Monday, though. Law enforcement spends the weekends goin’ after the dangerous fellows running around out there, I’m afraid. All the law offices are closed.”