Page 25
Three days earlier, buried in a stack of scanned correspondence that had survived mostly because some nineteenth-century clerk had been unable to throw away expensive paper, she’d found two lines about casks moving through a passage beneath the Dunarraidh lands. Insignificant to the merchant who wrote them, perhaps. To Olivia, they were the first clue that felt like a road instead of another list of variables Glenbrae had already tested.
The seven specialists before her had failed. She had no intention of becoming number eight on that particular list.
“Five minutes,” she said.
Calum stared at her. Behind them, Fiona pulled her hood over her dark hair and tucked the folder of restoration plans beneath her jacket.
“Five minutes,” she agreed, pointing at Olivia. “And if the water comes up, anything shifts, or you hear a noise you don’t like, you come straight out.”
“I have no intention of being caught in a flooded tunnel.”
Fiona arched a brow. “If the ghost tells you to stay, ignore him.”
Calum laughed under his breath as he set the pry bar aside and picked up his flashlight. “Come on, then.”
Olivia switched on her headlamp and ducked beneath the lintel.
The sound of the rain changed the instant she stepped inside, losing the sharp patter of water striking gravel, scaffolding, and plastic sheeting until it became a muffled rush somewhere behind them. Within the passage itself there was only the irregular drip of water from the ceiling, the scrape of their boots over grit, and the faint echo of their movements as they walked farther into the hill than Olivia expected.
Her headlamp moved over rough stone, showing how some parts of the tunnel had been cut directly through the rock, while others had been shored with fitted stones where the earth must have been less stable, and tool marks still crossed the walls in shallow parallel grooves. Along one side ran a drainage channel almost hidden beneath centuries of silt and fallen debris, narrow but carefully graded toward the entrance.
Olivia crouched beside it. “This was well made.”
“A smuggler with wet feet is still a smuggler with wet feet,” Calum said behind her.
She glanced back at him. “You mock, but I’ve seen modern buildings with worse drainage.”
They continued deeper into the passage, where the ceiling dropped gradually and the floor sloped downward beneath a path of mud, loose gravel, and fragments of rotted timber. Olivia kept one hand near the wall and held her flashlight low with the other, watching for changes in the ground ahead while her boots found purchase where Calum’s heavier work boots slid once or twice.
After several days of wearing waterproof pants over her jeans as they explored the grounds, she’d developed a renewed respect for well-made outdoor clothing.
Thunder rolled above them, low enough now that she felt the faint vibration through the soles of her boots.
Calum glanced back toward the entrance. “It’s been eight minutes.”
“You’re keeping count?”
“I enjoy being alive.”
“Very sensible.”
“I’ve always thought so.”
Olivia smiled and kept walking. The air cooled as they descended, carrying the close mineral smell of wet stone and earth, and she breathed through her nose without thinking, letting the scents separate the way they always did when she concentrated.
Water. Clay. Mildew. Old timber. Then something else as she sniffed again. She stopped so abruptly that Calum nearly walked into her.
“What?”
She lifted a hand. “Quiet.”
He stood still.
For several seconds she listened to the water falling somewhere ahead and the rain beating faintly behind them, but she wasn’t really listening at all. She was breathing slowly, trying to catch something so slight she wasn’t sure it had really been there.
A gust of air blew through the tunnel and she found it again. Smoke. Not fresh smoke, nor the sharp acrid scent left by a recent fire, but something that had settled into the earth and stone long ago and remained beneath the damp.
Olivia turned toward the left.
