Page 9 of Blood Game

Her hand was on the latch at the stout oak door.

Too long. She thought of something Cate once wrote in the front of one of her books.

“Every one of us loses something precious; lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. We have to hold onto the things that matter.”

Feelings she could never get back—respect for someone who had shaped the way people viewed the world around them, admiration for someone who had never compromised even though it had cost her important assignments, then a successfulauthor, and the friendship over the past eight years that came from working together on her books.

Tears? Cate would have laughed, that rich full-throated sound.

“Good God, girl! We’ll have a drink. And then get on with it.”

The iron latch at the oak door was original to the Tavern. Cate had insisted on keeping it. It had rusted into place. She’d had it restored by a craftsman in Inverness who specialized in restoring old fixtures. The key too was iron, heavy in her hand. Cate had it made, specially cut for the massive lock at the door.

“Get on with it,” she told herself, turning the key.

The mustiness of old places, blended with the familiar smell of over two hundred-fifty years of whisky and ale made her smile. That too had been a big part of its appeal to Cate when she and Anne Morgan first set out to find her a place to call home.

“I’ve been in my share of bars. It feels like home.”

Of course, it looked somewhat different from the pictures she had seen when Anne first discovered that it was for sale. There had been substantial restoration to bring it to what it looked like now, a fully functional tavern.

A sound greeted her, the meow of the resident cat, a black-and-white tuxedo the size of small dog, that had showed up on Cate’s doorstep and then moved in. Cate had named him Rob Roy—Robbie for short.

“He robs the food off my plate when he should be catching mice, but we get along,” Cate explained. She’d never been in one place long enough to have a pet, and hadn’t expected him to hang around.

“He likes an occasional nip of ale, and warms the bed. My kind of male!”

But Robbie the cat had stayed, wandering in an out of the Tavern like a regular customer. Whenever Kris had stayed at theTavern, he somehow found his way onto her bed in the guest room. He was a great foot-warmer.

She bent down and picked him up. He curled over her shoulder and started purring.

“What are you doing in here?”

It wasn’t like Cate to leave him locked inside when she left for a few days. There was usually a large food bowl left at the back landing, or he scrounged for himself outside until she got back. The only answer she got was that loud rumbling in her ear.

“You miss her,” she said, rubbing a cheek against the soft fur.

She had grown up with an assortment of pets—a succession of dogs, cats, a couple of hamsters, and the usual assortment of goldfish that seemed to survive everything.

It was only when she got older that she learned the goldfish regularly went on to fish heaven and were replaced without her knowing it. That had been a rude awakening at the age of nine.

The cat made himself comfortable on her shoulder as she walked through the Tavern.

Cate had it restored, using as much of the original fixtures and materials that could be salvaged. She had contacted a local historian, learned as much as she could about the history of the Tavern, then hired local carpenters and craftsmen for the work. It had taken over three years.

The wood floor had been beyond salvage, caved in to the dirt underneath, with all sorts of rodents living there. The new flooring was milled locally, and glass for windows was reproduced the same as it was two hundred years earlier. The only concessions to modern technology were electricity and plumbing. The fixtures were all authentic, simply restored with wiring for lights instead of whale oil or candles.

Cate had rented an apartment in town and drove out daily from Inverness to check on the progress. When it was finished, the Tavern had been restored to its former glory, right downto the original bar that had been salvaged, complete with nicks and gouges no doubt made by some regulator’s pistol or highwayman’s knife.

Just as it had almost three hundred years ago, shelves lined the wall behind the bar, stocked with ale and whisky, in bottles instead of casks, with labels from local distilleries. But a special place was reserved for her favorite—a forty-year single malt. They had opened a bottle and toasted the completion of the restoration on the Tavern, then again when her first book sold over a million copies.

The main room of the Tavern became a gathering place for friends from her days as a correspondent reporting for major networks from war-torn countries, and celebrations with Anne Morgan and friends she’d made after moving to Inverness. An interview by the BBC had once taken place there. But it was the taproom through the doorway at the end of the bar that had become Cate’s creative haven.

A couple hundred years earlier, the tap room had provided storage for casks of ale and whisky for travelers to quench their thirst on their journey to and from the Highlands. The casks were still there, empty, except for a couple that occupied the shelves behind the desk with Cate’s computer, printer, satellite receiver, and widescreen television, and the wall, symbolic of another wall—the Berlin Wall.

Cate, along with her cameraman, was one of a handful of journalists assigned to cover the fall of the Berlin Wall. She had interviewed dozens of Berliners in the days leading up to that historic event, candid interviews that had brought the world into that divided city, like so many other historic events Cate had been part of. At the top of her wall was the date the Wall had come down and a stone retrieved from the rubble.

Like the Berlin Wall, it was covered with Cate’s own graffiti—notes, pieces of paper with dates and other reminders, a plotdiagram for the next book she was planning, receipts, newspaper and magazine articles, and the date at the very top: November 9, 1989.