“Not at all,” Rutledge said. “She seems very weak. Is it serious?”

“The doctor feels it isn’t. She caught a chill this spring when she undertook the charity bazaar and was left with a cough. She’d had influenza last year, a very serious case, and was slow recovering from that. Dr. Murchison is trying to rebuild her strength. And sometimes she feels well enough to come into town. The influenza took the heart right out of people. A shame, really.”

“Yes. A shame.” He remembered Hugh Fraser’s words. It was like a medieval plague. . . .

Turning the motorcar around again, Rutledge drove away from the town once more and headed in the direction of Glencoe.

He made another brief stop in Brae to speak to Mrs. Davison. She asked him for news of Fiona, but as he had nothing cheerful to tell her, he said only, “I assure you, we’re doing everything we can.”

“Then if it isn’t good news, what does bring you back again?”

They were in the parlor, and the boys, happy to see him, were clinging to the arms of his chair while the little girl climbed confidingly into his lap. Mrs. Davison reached out for her, but he said, “No, let her stay. I don’t mind.”

The child curled herself against his chest and began to play with the fob on his watch chain.

“I need to ask you about some jewelry that Fiona MacDonald owned. A brooch with a large cairngorm in the center—”

She nodded before he could finish his description. “Yes, I remember it. A lovely piece. She said it was a wedding gift from her father to her mother. She didn’t wear it often. She was afraid, playing with the children, that it might be pulled off or lost. She also had a bracelet from her fiancé, which she allowed my daughter to try on when she’d been especially good.” She smiled indulgently. “You can see that young as she is, she has a taste for gold.”

He looked down at the fair curls catching on his vest buttons. “It’s natural,” he agreed. “Had her fiancé also given Fiona a ring?”

“She never said anything about it if he had.”

Detaching curls from buttons and fingers from the fob, he set the child on her feet and rose. “You’ve been a great help,” he told Mrs. Davison. “Thank you once more.”

She must have read something in his voice. She rose but didn’t cross the room to the door. Instead she asked, “Is it important, this brooch?”

“It might be,” he confessed. “I’m on my way to find that out.”

“Then I hope it will be good news!”

On the step he paused and said, “Do you think that Maude Cook was expecting a child when she left Brae?”

“Maude Cook?” Mrs. Davison shook her head. “No, I’m sure she wasn’t. There would have been signs.”