Ghosts of Culloden Moor 23 - Brodrick Read online

  BRODRICK

  The Ghosts of Culloden Moor (No. 23)

  By L.L. Muir

  AMAZON KDP EDITION

  PUBLISHED BY

  Lesli Muir Lytle

  www.llmuir.weebly.com

  Brodrick © 2016 L.Lytle

  The Ghosts of Culloden Moor Series © 2015 L.Lytle

  All rights reserved

  Amazon KDP Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. The ebook contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or stored in or introduced into an information storage and retrieval system in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the copyright owner, except in the case of brief quotation embodied in critical articles and reviews. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This ebook is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  DEDICATION

  To my beta team…

  who jump to my aid

  whenever I ask for volunteers.

  And to Darcy F.

  who always seems to be awake when I need her.

  You guys are priceless!

  BOOKS IN THE SERIES

  The Ghosts of Culloden Moor

  by L.L. Muir

  1. The Gathering

  2. Lachlan

  3. Jamie

  4. Payton

  5. Gareth (Diane Darcy) 6. Fraser

  7. Rabby

  8. Duncan (Jo Jones)

  9. Aiden (Diane Darcy) 10. Macbeth

  11. Adam (Cathie MacRae)

  12. Dougal

  13. Kennedy

  14. Liam (Diane Darcy)

  15. Gerard

  16. Malcolm (Cathie MacRae)

  18. Watson

  19. Iain (Melissa Mayhue) 20. Connor

  21. MacLeod (Cathie MacRae)

  22. Murdoch (Diane Darcy)

  23. Brodrick

  A NOTE ABOUT THE GHOSTS

  The Gathering, a short introduction that sets everything in motion, should be read first to understand what’s going on between the Muir Witch and these Highland warriors from 1746.

  The names of Culloden’s 79 are historically accurate in that we have used only the clan or surnames of those who may have died on that fateful day. The given names have been changed out of respect for those brave men and their descendants. If a ghost happens to share the entire name of a fallen warrior, it is purely accidental.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  BOOKS IN THE SERIES

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVETEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  An obnoxious ringtone pulled Larkin out of a thick, black pudding of sleep. She opened her eyes. The screen of her new cell was lit up, and the thing was vibrating its way toward the edge of the nightstand. The time, shining on her ceiling like a bat-signal, said 3:20 am.

  This is it!

  Awake now, she reached for the phone while she rolled to the edge of the bed and got her feet on the floor. Her hands shook a little as she tried to unlock the screen.

  “Hello,” she said before she got it to her ear. “Hello?”

  “Hello, is this Doctor Nash?”

  This was it. Her first official call. “Yes, this is Larkin Nash.” Doctor Nash just wasn’t a comfortable thing to wear yet. She’d had her PhD for all of a week.

  “This is Melanie Cottrell, a nurse here at Landry Medical Center, eh?” The woman on the phone had a pronounced Minnesota accent. “Doctor Rentmeister said you’d be filling in for him tonight, since he’s tied up at the MSH.” She snorted. “Well, not tied up, I guess. That doesn’t sound good, does it? But ya know what I mean.”

  The MSH was the Minnesota Security Hospital, a hundred-bed facility for the mentally ill who had committed dangerous crimes. So yeah, being tied up there wasn’t something to joke about.

  “Yes,” Larkin said. “I’m covering for Rentmeister.”

  “I’m sorry to call ya out in the middle of the night, eh, but the sheriff is here, with a cop-killer he needs evaluated. Ya know, so he can get the guy locked away nice and tight before he gets shot. Sad though, really. Wait until ya see ‘im.”

  Larkin ended the call as quickly as she could and jumped in the shower to wake herself up. From her little house at Bay Lake, it would still take her 30 minutes to reach the Landry Hospital if she took the 18.

  Wait until you see ‘im. Had the nurse been talking about the prisoner? Or the sheriff?

  The clear image of her handsome sheriff/boyfriend popped into her mind and made her shiver. Goose-pimples lifted her skin and she told herself it was only because she had accidentally bumped the temperamental valve and turned the shower cold, not because she was freaking out. She quickly cut the water off and grabbed one of her thin, ancient towels to get some friction started on her arms. She needed to get moving anyway.

  She put her half-wet hair into a tight ponytail, dried off, and tried to keep her mind on getting on the road—and not who might be waiting at the end of it.

  Which sheriff? What if it’s Justice?

  The possibility made her queasy. She’d been dating Justice Payette, the sheriff of Mille Lacs County for two months. And since the hospital sat in Crow Wing County, the nurse might have been talking about her local sheriff and not one of the four men from bordering counties. But still, the chances of it being Justice were only one in five.

  Maybe, if she hadn’t been in such a hurry, the woman would have volunteered the information. Of course, Larkin could have asked…

  Why hadn’t she asked?

  Anyone else would have been excited by the twenty percent chance of meeting their boyfriend on the jobsite. But not her. She was under enough pressure, answering this first call, without worrying about what Justice would think of her. They had a strange relationship already, and she didn’t want to make it stranger still by keeping a professional distance just when he’d started talking about taking the next step—whatever that was supposed to be.

  She ignored another wave of nausea as she put on her new gray shoes with the woven backs. Not only did they go well with her slightly darker gray slacks, they made her taller, and taller people won more respect automatically, didn’t they? Besides, if there was ever a time she wanted instant respect, it was on her first doctor call, possibly placed by her attractive, powerful, what-in-the-hell-is-he-doing-with-me boyfriend.

  Please don’t be Justice. Please don’t be Justice.

  As she flipped through hangers of old clothes, looking for her blazer, she wondered wha
t she would say when she saw him, if she saw him.

  Hey, babe? Surprise? What are you doing here? Gah! She was going to sound stupid no matter what.

  She communicated better with perfect strangers than she did with Justice. They talked around things, talked about other people, the world in general. They spent a lot of time with other couples—all deputies and their wives or girlfriends—so they would have someone to chat with. Or she and Justice watched movies in silence.

  He kissed her hello. He kissed her goodbye. They’d made out exactly twice, but both times it had happened with the clock ticking—minutes before Tommy, his deputy, was due to show up, and then again, when he’d been about to leave for a night shift. But even though they weren’t getting any chummier, he hadn’t seemed to mind. At least he kept calling, kept coming back.

  When he’d talked about taking the next step, her boss, Felix Rentmeister, had been standing beside them. And though Rent had acted as if he understood, she hadn’t had a clue!

  She took ten seconds to throw on some mascara and told herself she needed it whether or not Justice would see her that night. There was a chance he was still in Minneapolis where he’d been in meetings for the past week. He’d had to miss all the celebrating when she’d received her doctorate—okay, so he missed a cupcake and a chick flick. How else would she have celebrated on her own?

  He’d warned her that dating a lawman would mean that they wouldn’t share a lot of things other couples shared, but she’d insisted she didn’t mind. After all, he was the first steady date she’d had since before grad school. And most of the time, she felt like he was the first mature man who’d ever asked her out. Thirty-two was mature, right? And mature men had mature jobs. Why would she mind?

  He tried not to talk about his job. She didn’t talk about her patients, or her work. In the beginning, he’d joked about their professional paths probably crossing one day. After all, she worked with some mentally disturbed people, and so did he. But he was all about locking them away from the world, while her job was to get patients back out into it. And now that she had her doctorate, and could start her own clinic, she would be able to help a lot more people. But since their professional goals were pretty much at odds, they’d decided that it was best not to talk much about them.

  “No use trying to win over the opposing team,” he’d said. Then he’d warned her that one day, she’d come face to face with some truly dangerous characters, and she’d come over to his side. That she’d be the one begging him to lock some guy up before he could hurt anyone else. And he’d promised not to rub her nose in it when it happened. “I won’t say I told you so…” Then he’d winked, and she’d melted a little. A wink from him always worked that way and he knew it, leaving her feeling like a popsicle left on a hot sidewalk.

  She opened the car door, jumped in, and patted her pocket to make sure she’d remembered her driver’s license and wad of cash. With a landlady like hers, she didn’t dare leave a dollar lying around, let alone her entire paycheck. She knew it was stupid not to deposit it until she opened a new account, but the idea of holding six thousand dollars in her hands, just for a day or two, had been too tempting to resist. She’d also been tempted to spread the bills out on her bed and roll around on them, but she hadn’t given in—yet.

  With the hundreds folded in half, it didn’t make too large of a lump, thank goodness. And a pat on her blazer assured her the weight of her phone was where it should be. Yes, she should take a purse, but doctors didn’t carry purses, right? Right. And no one was going to pick her pants pocket if she couldn’t get her own fingers in there.

  Ten minutes she’d spent getting ready. Not bad, considering she’d been dead asleep. But she was awake now.

  In no time, she was on the 18 headed west. The hospital sat halfway between Brainerd and Braxton, just north of the crossroads of 317 and the 215. The surrounding communities were small, but in a medical emergency, Minneapolis was just too far away for a lot of folks.

  Those butterflies stirred up again, warning her that somewhere up ahead, Justice Payette was waiting for her…

  Dating him wasn’t as easy as she would have liked, but so what? Handsome men, professionals with their heads on straight, who also happened to be interested in her? Well, she wouldn’t say they were hard to find, because she’d found one.

  One.

  She just wasn’t in any hurry to see him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sitting in her twenty-year old Honda, in the parking garage of the Landry Medical Center, Larkin took a couple of minutes to calm down. She’d never been to a yoga class, but she knew enough to take some slow, deep breaths and try not to think about what a big deal this job was for her.

  Just a job. I’m ready for this. Just a job. Get in, get out, and get home to bed.

  Five minutes came and went. She’d done all she could. Time to rock and roll.

  She climbed out of her car and looked around, alert for dangerous types. Looking cool was one thing. Ignoring the shadows in a nearly empty parking garage, in the middle of the night, was another. Besides, she’d heard enough from disturbed patients to know where they liked to hide. And though the hospital garage was well lit with little black camera’s here and there, along with emergency call boxes, she wouldn’t take any chances.

  She laced her fingers between her wad of keys and made her own version of brass knuckles, then headed for the elevator. A thick rubber mat grabbed onto one of her new heels and she nearly turfed it, but recovered in time to stay on her feet. The elevator doors opened and two nurses caught her mid-lunge, but they didn’t miss a beat in their conversation. Larkin figured, at three in the morning, they were probably way too tired to care if there was a chick doing aerobics in the garage, as long as she didn’t get in their way.

  Larkin stumbled into the elevator and took another deep breath. No one saw that. No one at all. I’m just a professional coming on a call. I’m a professional. I look professional. I know my stuff—okay, so I know a lot and I can fake the rest. There is someone in that hospital that needs me, and I’m going to help them. And if I can’t help them, I will get them to someone who can.

  Doctor Larkin Nash to the rescue.

  The medical center sat on a hill above and behind the parking garage, so she punched the number three button, hospital level. The doors re-opened, however, and a man in tattered, colorless clothes stumbled inside with her. He glanced at her, rolled his eyes, and hunched forward. His back spasmed twice like he was having some kind of seizure.

  She held out her hands, so she could catch him if he started to fall. “Are you all right?” She couldn’t tell if he was breathing, but since he was still on his feet, she figured he wasn’t in too bad of shape. And if she was lucky, there would be a nurse nearby when the doors opened again. “Just hang on,” she told him.

  His back jerked again and the most unwelcome sound in the world filled the elevator along with the even less welcome stench of vomit. But it wasn’t the smell that got her—it was the warm, wet feeling seeping through the open toe of a new expensive shoe.

  The man straightened and faced her with wet, grinning lips. “Yeah, honey. I’m all right now.”

  She was still frozen in horror when the doors opened. And if not for the fresh air wafting in when the guy walked out, she might have still been frozen in place, holding her breath, when they closed again. She’d recovered just in time and hobbled out onto the walkway while holding up an endangered pant leg. With her other hand, she patted her pocket to make sure the square lump of money was still there, and it was.

  Yeah, she should have deposited that paycheck.

  The hospital doors were still another fifty feet away with nothing in between she might wipe her shoe on, not even a little stretch of grass. The landscape was full of poky little bushes that said “keep off.”

  The sick man swaggered through the doors far ahead of her and she hoped that when she got inside, everyone would assume the smell came from him. She just had to
find a restroom fast and clean up before she went to the crisis unit. Hopefully, she could resist throwing up, herself.

  A janitor passed her, pushing a mop handle that steered his rolling yellow bucket toward the elevator. The paper mask dangling around his neck and the disgust on his face told her he knew what was waiting for him.

  The giant revolving doors had been turned off for the night, so she pushed through the smaller door. Still hobbling and trying to spare her pant leg, she came across two security guards smirking at a bank of monitors. One of the guards stepped out from behind his desk and threw his arms wide in an awkward pose with one foot in the air behind him. “Ta da!”

  It was a perfect replica of her own pose after she’d caught her heel on the mat in the garage. Apparently, all those little black cameras were in working order, which was probably why the janitor was so prepared. And even if her acrobatics hadn’t impressed the nurses, they’d at least impressed someone.

  “Not your night, is it?” said the second guard.

  She shook her head. “If they had to call me, it means someone else has it a lot worse.”

  Both guys sobered. “Who called you?”

  “Crisis Unit. You want to tell me how I find it?” She’d been there a couple of times with Rent, but after being in so many different hospitals and clinics, sometimes they all blended together.

  “Seventh floor. Those elevators to your right. Turn left when you step out.”

  She nodded. “And a restroom?”

  The second man pointed across the hall.

  “Thank you.”

  With as much dignity as she could summon, she limped calmly to the ladies’ room. She had to be all out of bad luck, she thought…until she finally looked down at her shoe. Without missing a beat, she walked to the garbage can, pulled out the liner, and continued on to the big stall on the end. The seat was up. Thankfully, the toilet had just been cleaned.