Page 103 of Bonetide

“What did he tell you?”

“MacCoinnich.”

She nods. “Aye, it is. Or it was. That was the spelling before they anglicized it. It’s Mackenzie now.”

“Mackenzie!” I exclaim.

“Aye. The clan is everywhere on this coast. He’s from before the change in spelling. He’s never updated. Why should he? He doesn’t really exist.”

I close my eyes and give my head a shake. Too much. It’s too fucking much. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

I open them. Mhairi is watching me closely.

“The names,” I say, my voice coming out flat now. “I found a list in Effie’s trunk, of names of women throughout the years, including Catriona Carmichael…”

“Aye.”

“He killed them.”

“He did, hen.”

I knew it and yet refused to know it at the same time. The truth lodges in my chest like shrapnel from an explosion I’d been expecting.

“He killed all of them.”

“All of them,” she repeats with a grim nod.

The drowned wives. He was the one that drowned them. He is the one that created them. No wonder he talked about them with reverence. It was because he was fucking guilty.

“He killed Catriona Carmichael.”

“Aye.”

“The four this summer.”

She pauses and then nods. “Aye.”

The four this summer. It seemed like a lot at once considering how spread out it had been during the decades before.

“Why this summer?” I ask. “Why more?”

She sets her tea down. “Because Effie died, hen. She kept him bound, in a way. The one your bloodline has kept on him since the first Galloway came to that cottage, and whatever dwelling may have stood there before. As long as the Galloway woman of the line kept her threshold closed to him, he held to a pace. He took rarely. He held himself to the loch. It was a bargain between them.”

“What did he get out of it?” I ask. Because I have to ask. Because the only kind of arrangement I understand is the kind both sides want.

Mhairi looks at me for a long beat over her tea.

“An anchor, hen. They need one. A woman by the water who knows them by name while also refusing them. Without that, they forget what shape they are. They go back to the water and they don’t come back as anything you’d want to meet. The keeper kept him a man as much as she kept him to the loch. He needed her for that. He needs you for that, hen. And he’s losing it now.”

“How is he losing it?” I ask.

Mhairi takes a slow sip of her tea. Her eyes don’t leave mine over the rim of the cup.

“You’ve been there long enough to start seeing it, hen. The four this summer. He’ll be holding to a pace he set centuries ago, and that pace is breaking. He’ll be eating more, and what he eats is going to start looking less like the careful choices of a careful creature. The form will slip on him when it didn’t used to. Some night the man will sit at your table, and you’ll look up and not be sure for a second whether it’s even a man anymore. He’ll know it’s happening. He won’t be able to stop it. The longer he goes without a keeper, the less of him there is to come back to her when he comes up out of the water.”

She sets the cup down.

“I’d give him a year, hen. Maybe two. Before there’s nothing left across the bay but the horse. And it will be as if the man never existed.”