Total pages in book: 163
Estimated words: 157491 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 787(@200wpm)___ 630(@250wpm)___ 525(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 157491 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 787(@200wpm)___ 630(@250wpm)___ 525(@300wpm)
“Can I get you anything, Mr. Vanyin?” The purser appears, turning her smile my companion’s way. “Lady Isla, could I bring you another orange juice?”
“No, thank you, Melanie. And thank you for being so sweet with the boys earlier.” The consummate diplomat she is, Isla immediately masks her tension. Both women’s gazes slide to the sleeping children.
“It was my pleasure,” my employee returns with a warm smile.
“Please pass on my thanks to the captain. I’m sure my sons will be talking about their trip to the cockpit for months to come. It was a dream come true for them both.”
“How do you do that?” I find myself asking as Melanie makes her way back to the bulkhead. “Make everyone smile.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. I know you do.” When she doesn’t answer, I add, “You make everyone feel seen. Important.”
“Everyone is important.”
“Even me?”
“Once upon a time, you were all I ever thought about.” She turns her head, signaling the end of the conversation.
“Uncle Van, do you own this whole island?” Without waiting for an answer, Archie sticks his head out of the window of the moving Jeep. His hair blows in the breeze, the brilliant sunlight giving it the appearance of a million fiery pins.
“Archie, stop that right now.” Isla pulls at his arm. “That all I need for you to lose your head.”
“It’s not going to blow off,” he says, then giggles. “Blow off, Mummy get it?”
“No, darling. I don’t get it, and by your giggles, I’m not sure I want to get it, either.”
“He means fart,” his older brother drawls. “That’s what blow off means. Archie, if another car or a truck comes the other way, and you’re hanging out the window like Gertie, you’ll never eat Geordie’s shortbread again. Because you’ll be dead.”
“Yes I will. I’ll just have to hold my head under my arm like this.”
In the mirror, I watch Archie mime feeding shortbread to his decapitated head, held against his hip.
“Speaking of heads,” his brother replies, “tell Mum what Ms Maddison said to Holly at the end of school yesterday.” The kid glances at his mother, a tiny pinch showing between his brows. “It was just yesterday we were at school, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” She smiles, pushing his overly long hair from his face.
“What time is it in Scotland now?”
“I’ve no idea. But get back to Ms Maddison, please.” Her eyes catch mine in the mirror. “Archie’s teacher is…”
“Horrible,” Archie retorts. “She doesn’t like me at all.”
“Then she must have very bad taste,” I offer with a smile.
“Exactly,” she agrees before remembering who she’s speaking to, swapping her open expression for a haughty one. “What happened?” she coaxes her son.
“She got her knickers in a knot over nothing.” Folding his arms, Archie harrumphs. “Uncle Van? You friend has fat rolls on the back of his head like a bulldog.”
“Archie! That isn’t a very nice thing to say. You know better than to hurt people’s feelings.”
“I was just telling the truth.”
“Of course you were,” I interject. “Besides, Sergei doesn’t have any feelings, do you?” I defy anyone not to smile in the face of Sergei’s scowl.
“I have feelings,” he mutters in heavily accented English. He rolls his shoulders as though discomforted by the admission. “But my neck is not like bulldog. Is like bull.”
Archie giggles, then tries to change the subject when his mother presses him again, but the story eventually comes out.
“So let me get this right,” Isla begins. She looks genuinely frazzled, which is still preferable to how she’d looked on my doorstep yesterday afternoon. As long as I have breath in my body, she won’t ever be scared again. Her hair seems to have taken on a life of its own in the humidity and her dress looks like she’s slept in it. I had suggested she take something more comfortable from her suitcase to wear during the flight, but she’s just glanced at me like I’d suggested she give me a lap dance. “Yesterday, you—”
“He took a skull into school,” his older brother supplies.
Eight-year-old Archie gives a definite nod. “I put it in a shoebox and put the box in my schoolbag.”
“An animal skull?” she asks warily.
“No. A people one. It had the jaw and everything.” Pressing his palms together, he makes a snapping alligator of them.
Isla glances at Hugh who grins a little manically. “He’s being serious?”
As I understand it from a comment Sandy made in passing, Archie’s reaction to his parents’ divorce has been to begin telling tall tales. Hugh, meanwhile, has taken to sullen moods and fighting in school.
“Where on earth did you get it, Archie?” Isla’s head swings to her younger son, then to the older. “He hasn’t been in the pet cemetery, has he?” As I recall, the castle has a Victorian pet cemetery.
“It was a people head,” Archie replies, clearly in his element. “I found it in a box in the attic with hundreds and hundreds of other bones.”