TOURIST ATTRACTIONS Read online

  TOURIST ATTRACTIONS

  by

  Molly J. Ringle

  Copyright (c) 2002 by Molly Winter

  First Electronic Publication

  September 2002

  Scheherazade Tales

  Romance E-Novels

  http://scheherazadetales.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  DEDICATION:

  For my dad, who always hates it when the heroine rejects the intelligent, reliable suitor in favor of the irresponsible, romantic outsider;

  For all the altar boys of St. Mary's;

  And, as always, for Steve, who may be the only person in the world perfectly suited to put up with me.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1: The Journey

  2: Airport to Hostel

  3: The First Evening

  4: The Magic Pub

  5: Connection

  6: Attachment

  7: Liaison and Discovery

  8: Laurence, the Best Person We Know

  9: Outside the Recording Studio

  10: Our Lady of Perpetual Suffering

  11: Juicy Gossip

  12: Unexpected Visit

  13: Laurence and Gil

  14: The Ghost Tour

  15: Dawn of Jealousy

  16: The Placebo Effect

  17: Feminine Wiles Fail

  18: Sympathy for Sharon

  19: Nobody's

  20: Ice

  21: The Night the Heat Went Out

  22: The Morning of the Apple Tarts

  23: Unexpected Visit (Reprise)

  24: February 19th

  25: Called

  26: Revelations

  27: The Last Two Weeks of Exile

  28: Return to Oregon

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  If anyone were to ask me what single event had the greatest effect on my life, I could easily answer. It was my trip to Scotland.

  In the future my answer might change: I could have kids, or inherit a million dollars, or a satellite could fall out of the sky and leave a crater where my house once stood. But until then, Scotland takes the prize.

  I'm not the only one who would say so; all four of us who went there came away with a new feature to our lives, be it dual citizenship, mystic experiences, careers, romantic memories--or true love.

  On that trip I, Eva Sonneborn, Psychology major, the small scruffy one from northwestern Oregon, found myself involved with not one, not two, but three boys. This was unprecedented, and is not likely to happen to me again, thank God.

  How did I get myself into this? Why did we go to Scotland at all?

  A simple reason, really: we went to see ghosts.

  Chapter One

  The Journey

  I was sure our plane was going to crash.

  All inexperienced travelers think their plane is going to crash. But really (I thought), we would have deserved it, me especially.

  How presumptuous we were--four young Americans thinking we could just fly to Edinburgh, Scotland, and live there for six months, just waltz right in! Something was sure to go wrong. But we had left Oregon several hours ago; our tickets were bought, our hostel reservations were made; it was much too late to turn back.

  I was sick with anxiety. What were we doing? I was going to be away from my boyfriend Tony for half a year.

  We'd never been apart that long. The truth is we had only been dating for about eleven months. Perhaps I was afraid that our relationship might not survive the separation. From my perspective high over the iceberg-dotted Atlantic, it seemed like an awful mistake to have come on this trip when I knew very well that he couldn't come too.

  Although Tony had been supportive, I was now being eaten alive by remorse. To think, last week I had been glad Tony couldn't come along and had actually been daydreaming about meeting cute Scottish boys! Clearly I was evil and would deserve it if the plane crashed.

  And why were the four of us flying to Scotland? Because my friend Eileen Willock wanted to see ghosts. She could see ghosts in America, of course. But no, apparently Edinburgh's ghosts were world-famous and she just couldn't go on living until she saw them.

  She had shown me books and magazines with pictures of purple heather, shaggy orange cows, black castles, and pointy churches. She had reminded me, in her most seductive voice, that in Scotland there were also modern lads with honey-thick accents and milk-fair skin. In short, she had talked me into it.

  She had also talked my younger sister Sharon into coming, as well as our friend Laurence Hawthorn. The four of us had been something of a clique for years, so this was only natural. But now nothing seemed more unnatural than for us to be voluntarily leaving our families' comfortable homes in green, rainy Oregon, and diving feet-first into the unfamiliar stone streets of Edinburgh.

  None of us had been there before. Sharon and I had never left the country before. Sure, the timing was right--I had just earned my B.A. in Psychology, Eileen had just quit a job, Sharon had just finished a two-year community college course, and Laurence was thinking of moving to Maine.

  It was one of those transition points in life that should be celebrated. One Last Chance At Youth. But this didn't feel like a celebration to me. It felt more like a hangover.

  I turned and looked at my companions, seated next to me on the airplane. Eileen and Sharon appeared to be fine. They didn't have boyfriends to feel guilty about.

  Eileen was leafing through a book of Edinburgh ghost legends which lay on her lap, telling my little sister Sharon about the spooky places that she intended to visit. Sharon was nodding in a lively manner, chowing down on animal crackers and answering with her mouth full.

  Laurence, however, looked dreadful. He was airsick. His face had taken on a greenish hue, and he was shivering under his fawn-colored overcoat. It was unsettling to look at him, so I closed my eyes and tried to pay attention to Eileen talking about ghosts.

  Eileen had seen ghosts all her life. Or, at least, this is what she claimed, and I believed that she believed it. Since our pre-pubescent years, we had often gone with her to eerie locations at night and waited for ghosts to materialize. Eileen sometimes gasped and said she saw one, but nobody else ever did. Sharon thought she did once, but then Sharon was always impressionable.

  "Edinburgh had the highest number of witch-burnings in all of Europe in medieval times. Maybe in all the world," Eileen was now saying.

  "Did they burn the witches up at the Castle?" Sharon asked, licking cookie crumbs off her fingers before pointing at the picture in Eileen's book.

  "Yeah," Eileen said. "I bet if they let me spend a night there, I'd see tons of ghosts."

  I rather expected Laurence to make some comment along the lines of, You know, at the lab I could whip you up a batch of pills to take care of those hallucinations. Laurence worked with his widowed father, who was a successful chemist, and he liked to maintain a skeptical and even sarcastic outlook on life.

  Instead, however, he started making choking sounds, pushed his coat away, and stumbled past me to the restrooms in the back. I cringed. Having always been something of a sympathetic vomiter, I began keeping an eye on the airsick bags myself, in case I would need to grab one.

  "Jeez," Sharon said, still munching cookies. "Poor Laurence."
>
  "Guess I shouldn't talk about people burning, huh?" Eileen said, and grinned.

  I didn't find it funny. To see our rock-steady companion reduced to quivering silence was rattling my own composure. For this I was, of course, furious with Laurence.

  When he returned, flopped down beside me, and observed, "It's so difficult to be dignified while vomiting," I didn't refrain from snapping back:

  "You're refusing medicine, you're refusing water, you won't listen to any of us when we offer to help. How do you expect to get better?"

  "Having the plane land would make me better."

  "Oh, yes. I'll see what I can do. We're only over the North Atlantic; I'm sure there's a nice icefield around."

  Laurence tugged his coat over himself and curled up away from me. He took the empty airsick bag from the seat in front of him, and flicked it into my lap. "Write Saint Anthony a postcard," he suggested. "You're obviously suffering from separation anxiety."

  I flung it back into his lap and closed my eyes.

  My boyfriend Tony was a happy and pious Catholic, a former altar boy, in fact, and Laurence took delight in calling him "Saint Anthony". It was a touchy topic at the best of times, but any reminder of Tony made me positively ill right now.

  Think Scottish lads and misty moors and craggy castles, I told myself. Think medieval ghost stories.

  I opened my eyes and leaned across Laurence. "Eileen," I said, "tell me a ghost story."

  "All right; what kind?" she asked, leafing through the book.

  "Don't talk about people's flesh being burned," Laurence mumbled from under his coat.

  "That's okay," said Eileen; "mostly they hung people."

  "Hanged," Laurence said, never too sick to correct grammar.

  "Here we go," began Eileen. "This happened in the 1600's, in Edinburgh. A man named John Chiesly wanted a divorce from his wife, but he didn't like the court's ruling on it. He thought they gave her too much money. So he swore he would kill the judge. And he did. He shot him in broad daylight on the street. So he was tried and sentenced to death. But before he got hung--hanged-- they cut off his right hand, the one that held the gun, and put it up on a spike for everyone to see."

  Laurence made a faint grunt of unhappiness.

  "Then they hanged--hung--the pistol around his neck, and hung him too."

  "Hanged," Sharon and I said, together.

  "Anyway," Eileen said, "they left his body there in public, in chains, to rot."

  "Yuck," Sharon commented.

  "But then he got taken down at some point; no one's sure who did that. People started seeing this horrible ghost along that street, this hysterically laughing, screaming guy with one hand missing. They called him Johnny One-Arm. This went on until 1965, when some construction workers found a skeleton in the stones of a house there. The bones were broken, one hand was missing, and there was a pistol on a chain around its neck. After they reburied him, his ghost was never seen again."

  "But you're going to look for it anyway, aren't you," I said.

  She smiled. "Of course."

  "Flesh rotting on chains?" Laurence complained.

  "What's the matter with you?" I demanded, still edgy. "You're supposed to be our rock! That's why we brought you. Now you're totally shattered, and we aren't even there yet."

  "I will be fine when we land," he said, as firmly as a shattered person could manage. "By the way, Eva, nice bedside manner. I think you missed your calling. You should've gone into nursing."

  "Shut up," I answered, and closed my eyes again to calm my stomach.

  "Both of you shut up." Eileen yawned. "I told you your story; now go to sleep."

  "Dream of rotting hands stuck on spikes," added Sharon.

  "Sharon!" all three of us said.

  She giggled.

  Chapter Two

  Airport to Hostel

  We sat in a taxicab in Edinburgh, at a red light, on a rainy September afternoon. That is, three of us sat, and Laurence lay curled against the window, cradling his head in his hands.

  Eileen patted his knee. "Just a taxi ride to our hostel, and then we're all done moving around," she said.

  He had nothing to say about that. He had given up talking to us shortly after the final connecting flight left London.

  I rolled down the cab window, grateful for the fresh air. The cab had taken us from Edinburgh's airport, which was several miles out of town, into the middle of the city. And it had taken us fast, and I had been facing backward the whole way, and my head was reeling. Laurence had taken a forward-facing seat, by unanimous insistence, but he obviously wasn't doing much better.

  It had been nineteen and a half hours since Tony had picked us up at our parents' homes in Wild Rose, Oregon, and taken us to the Portland airport. The time zone changes tacked on another eight hours on the clock. In short, it was the middle of the next day in the United Kingdom, and we weren't ready for it to be anything but 3 a.m. in Oregon.

  We had traveled up and down in the air, backwards and forwards on the land, and several thousand miles overall. We hadn't had a proper meal in over 24 hours. And to add indignity to weariness, we were wearing as many layers of clothing as we couldn't fit in our suitcases, so we were sweaty and rumpled and weighted-down, too.

  I am probably only repeating what every seasoned traveler has gone through, but this was the first time I really understood what jet lag is, and why it gets such a bad rap.

  Sharon had bought Laurence a bottle of mineral water at the airport, with her freshly changed currency. She pressed it on him now, and he consented to sip from it. He had always been a little soft toward Sharon.

  "I feel like such an idiot," she had lamented after buying it.

  "You should. A pound for that little bottle of water?" I said, having spied the price sticker.

  "No, I mean, the woman who sold it to me; she had to say, 'Will that be all, miss?' three times before I understood her."

  That was our first lesson about Scotland: being fluent in English didn't mean you would be able to understand anybody.

  "We totally don't belong here," Sharon said now, looking out the windows at the pedestrians. "I feel like such an obvious American. Everyone's staring at us, aren't they?"

  "No, they're staring at Laurence, because he looks like he's going to throw up," I answered.

  "Maybe I am going to throw up," Laurence said. "Scoot a little closer, won't you, dear?"

  "Oh! The statue speaketh," I said.

  "Shut up, you guys," said Eileen.

  "Two sentences in 700 miles; yes, I can see how I'm talking far too much," Laurence said.

  "Your hostel's on Queensferry, you said?" asked our driver in a heavy Scottish accent, as the light changed and he stepped on the accelerator.

  "Yes. Queensferry," Eileen answered. Then she got livelier, and turned to look at him. "So, I came here to see ghosts. Did I waste my money?"

  "Never seen 'em myself, but there's plenty who say they have," the driver told her, and went on to elaborate. It was a long story beginning with, "My brother-in-law Graeme, he's from across in Aberdeen, ken, but he used to work in Embra here..."

  Embra was basically how the Scots said Edinburgh.

  But I don't remember any more of it, because at that point I looked out the window, and there was the most incredible, surreal castle, towering on a jagged black cliff above the city.

  A massive relic from the Middle Ages, there it stood in modern times, skirted by green public gardens and narrow lanes of traffic, looking more sinister and more gorgeous than any building I had ever seen.

  At that first moment, of course, it just made me woozy with disorientation. This was definitely not Oregon anymore.

  Sharon leaned across me for a better look, took in her breath in rapture, and said, "That is so-o-o cool."

  * * *

  I suppose my expectations were too lofty, and I realize I had never seen a hostel before and should not have had preconceived notions, but somehow it was disconcerting to
find an Australian manning the front counter.

  And while I knew that there would be other lodgers there, of about our age and from all countries, I guess I had pictured them studying maps and learning about architecture and traipsing the city with tidy haircuts and a healthy glow to their cheeks.