Grace Under Fire (Buchanan-Renard 14)

“There’s turmoil up there. Isn’t that right, Alasdair?”

Her husband had looked half-asleep but as soon as Millie pulled him into the conversation, he became animated. The floodgates opened and he poured out every fact he knew about the different fights going on. He didn’t get around to the MacKennas for a long while, but when he did, he had a lot to say. Since Isabel and Michael were the only customers, Alasdair didn’t have to curb his opinions.

“I don’t want to talk out of turn,” Alasdair said. “But there’s a man named Clive Harcus boasting he’s the legitimate son of the man who owned Glen MacKenna. Clive thinks he’s the rightful heir, though everyone is guessing he wasn’t named in the will. As far as being the legitimate heir... we know better, don’t we, Millie?”

“Yes, we do, Alasdair.”

“Why do you know better?” Isabel asked.

“Like I said, I don’t want to talk out of turn, but Freya Harcus, Clive’s mother, was friendly when she was younger. Real friendly, if you know what I mean, with quite a few men.” He wobbled his eyebrows for emphasis. “Any one of at least a dozen men could be Clive’s father.”

“Is Freya Harcus still alive?”

Millie nodded. “She’s adamant that Clive is the rightful heir.”

“For the money, you see,” Alasdair said. “Folks are whispering that he already has a buyer. Gonna pay him a lot of money.”

Isabel was trying to hide her anger. The Patterson Group, she decided. Clive had probably already made a deal with them once he got rid of Isabel.

“None of the other men who were friendly with Freya would claim Clive, though, because he’s such a mean son of a...”

“Snake,” Millie rushed to say.

Alasdair rolled his eyes.

“We need to get going,” Michael said.

“In just a moment,” Isabel promised.

She wasn’t going to leave without purchasing something. She chose a large white vase and asked Millie to fill it with a variety of flowers. Millie was quite an artist, and when she was finished, the arrangement had every color of the rainbow.

Alasdair turned Michael’s attention. “It’s a might stuffy in here. Would you mind propping the back door open to get a breeze? Right around the corner,” he directed, pointing the way. “There are some heavy boxes you’ll have to move to get to the door. In fact, I sure would appreciate it if you could lift them and put them on the metal shelves. They’re too heavy for me, and you look like you could handle it without any strain.”

“No problem,” Michael said.

While he couldn’t see Isabel, he could hear her. She was asking Millie to send the flowers to the nearest hospital and insisting she didn’t need a receipt.

“These flowers are beautiful, Millie. They’ll cheer someone up.”

Michael heard the bell signaling someone was coming in. He finished with the last box when he heard girls shrieking.

Oh, hell no.

There were four teenage girls cornering Isabel, and they all knew who she was. They had their phones out and were clicking away while Isabel kept shaking her head, trying to get to Michael.

Isabel had never seen anyone move as fast as Michael did. He had his arm around her, and all but carried her out the back door. Alasdair followed and locked the door so the girls would have to go around the block to catch up with them.

She waited until they were back in the car and on their way and then said, “One of those girls asked me if I was engaged to Xavier. She said she read it on the Internet, so it must be true. I shook my head, but I didn’t talk to her.” The muscle in his cheek flexed. “We aren’t going to make any more stops today, are we?”

“That’s right. No more stops.”

“It’s just as well. I’m plain sick of hearing about Clive Harcus. If you hear something terrible about a person, you have to wonder if it could be true. But when you hear the same thing over and over again from different people in different villages, you have to conclude there’s more than a grain of truth in what they’re saying.”

“Uh-huh.” He wasn’t really listening. He was trying to figure out how he was going to get Isabel in and out of Gladstone’s office. Inspector Sinclair would have all the details. The first thing he was going to do when they were in their hotel room was call Nick and find out why Gladstone couldn’t meet them somewhere outside of Dunross.

“Millie’s a lovely lady, isn’t she?”

The question jarred him out of his thoughts. He nodded but didn’t have anything to say about Isabel’s newest friend. How did she keep track of all of them? he wondered.