The Blue Hackle by Lillian Stewart Carl

little gray cat was now disguised as a
tea cozy, paws and tail tucked, whiskers furled. His iridescent
golden eyes watched Jean. Another criminal
investigation?
    “Don’t ask,” Jean told him. She’d already
answered Alasdair’s questions on the way back from the beach,
despite nothing much having happened at the house in his absence.
But then, like the non-barking dog in the Sherlock Holmes story,
even absence was evidence.
    Feeling every year of her accumulated forty,
Jean turned the back of her lap toward the electric fire whose
three glowing bars were giving their all. The appliance looked like
an alien crouching in the interior of the four-hundred-year-old
stone fireplace. But places like Dunasheen no longer housed more
servants than guests, including maids whose purpose in life was to
lay coal fires and set them alight when the gentry returned from
gallivanting across the moor.
    Her hands and feet tingled in the heat. Her
head fizzed, thoughts rising and popping like bubbles in a flat
soda—motive unknown, opportunity a very narrow window, means a
knife in the dark.
    When Alasdair walked through the doorway from
the bedroom, she could tell from the vertical furrow between his
eyebrows that he was ticking off the same list.
    She knew his expressions, his face, and his
form as well as her own. His short-cropped hair, a ripple of golden
grain tipped by frost. His regular, unremarkable features, planes
and angles assembled like a geometry proof, rational and elegant.
His armor of reserve, claiming privacy rather than secrecy, that
had once fooled her into thinking he felt no emotion. His broad
shoulders, slender hips, strong hands, compacted into a relatively
small frame. The angle of his head, tilted in consideration of a
Fergus MacDonald painting over the mantel, and the solidity of his
tread. Some men sagged into middle age. Alasdair stood all the
straighter, especially when facing trouble.
    “Well,” she said.
    “Well,” he returned.
    “I’ve almost had a feeling of foreboding all
day, although I thought it was just the darkness. Or even wedding
nerves.”
    “You’re having second thoughts, are you now?”
He spoke more wearily than warily.
    “You know me. I’m down to twentieth thoughts,
maybe thirtieth, not that any of them are going to make me back
out. We’ve not only reserved a priest, we’ve filled out all the
paperwork!”
    That drew a smile from his taut lips,
restoring their curve.
    “I just want, well, dang it, I want to live
happily ever after. Even though that’s an aspiration based more on
hope than experience.”
    “We’ll muddle through this one, too,
Jean.”
    “This one. Yeah. It’s like together we make
some sort of critical mass and generate sudden death. Not just
sudden death. Murders.”
    “We met because of a murder.”
    “Sure, but it’s hardly fair that someone had
to die for us to meet.”
    “We’ve beaten the odds a bit, oh aye. But
maybe the odds are turning the other way and we’ll soon be getting
that ‘ever after,’ ‘happily’ to be defined later.”
    That drew a smile from her. She wrapped her
arms around his chest and nestled her face into the angle of his
shoulder. Sparring partner, best friend, lover. Betrothed.
    He held her close, the slight prickle of his
jaw against her cheek, his hands still radiating cold through her
sweater and into her flesh, his body humming with subtle
electricity that was anything but cold.
    The chill lingered in his sweater and jeans,
and the scent of soap with which he’d washed his hands of blood and
dirt. And something else, a whiff of a rich, tropical fragrance,
gardenia or lotus, maybe. “What’s that . . . oh. Tina’s perfume.
You had your arm around her.”
    Gently, with a light kiss on her cheek, he
extricated himself from the embrace and extended his hands toward
the fire. Personal interlude over, time for work. “It took some
doing convincing her to leave the scene, ’til I thought to tell her
that every step