Triallaire

The Call

7 September, 2165

Maidie's Flat, Edinburgh, Scotland

MAEVIS POV

Maevis yawned and stretched as she overcame her jetlag, having only just returned to Scotland after making arrangements to take a semester off of school to focus on finding her mother. When she left the guest room in Maidie's flat, she was surprised to find a cork board standing against the wall and both Maidie and Rory standing over a table filled with documents and the like. She raised an eyebrow as she glanced at the board, which was divided into four sections: 1740s, 1750s, 1760s and 1770s. "What's going on?" she asked the pair of them, and Maidie paused in the midst of pinning something to the '1760s' portion of the board.

"We figured we would organise what we know about Cat and see if we can pinpoint where she might've gone," Maidie explained to her.

"She must have gone back te Jamie, aye?" Rory chimed in.

"I thought we established it would be 1766," Maevis said with confusion.

"Oh, we did, Duckie. That's what I was just pinning to the timeline here," she said, pinning a notecard to the board. Maevis approached it to read the three postcards that were up there already:

May 1743 - Cat arrives in 18th century through Craigh na Dun

October 1751 - Cat leaves 18th century through Pobull Fhinn

October 1766 - Cat arrives in 18th century in Edinburgh (through what?)

"Huh," she said as she examined the notecards, and Maidie pinned two under the 1770s section: 1770 - Brèagha stops painting in Barra. Moves somewhere? and 1773 - Cailean gives up Laird title and moves to North Carolina.

"It's strange, isn't it? Cailean giving up his title to move to North Carolina, of all places," she said.

"That's my part of the research today," Rory chimed in. "Once we iron out what we know fer certain, I'm going to the archives te see if I can find any reason why Cailean would have gone te North Carolina."

"His name might be on a ship's log," Maidie told him.

"Most likely. I'll look. I doubt any ships left from Barra te go to America, so he would have had te have gone through a different port, like Inverness or Edinburgh, Dundee, Fife, maybe even Oban," Rory replied. "But the main question is, why North Carolina? What was there in 1773?"

"I dunno," Maevis replied, picking up a stack of notecards. On it were things like Archie being born in 1743, Brèagha being born in 1746, Eairdsidh Ruadh dying in 1759, and so on. Brèagha would have been twenty-three in 1770, so it was possible she married, but there wasn't any mention of the marriage in the family bible. "What... What if Mama's there?" Maevis said suddenly, looking up at both Maidie and Rory. "Well, why else would Cailean go to North Carolina for no reason other than to be with his family? Brèagha stopped painting in 1770 in Barra , but what if she continued in America? What if she stopped painting in 1770 because she left Scotland in 1770?"

"It's a possibility," said Maidie, adding that information to the notecard. "Come to think of it, there wasn't really any mention of Archie at all after a certain point, was there?"

"He wasn't painted on Barra after 1757," Rory said, having made a list of every painting Brèagha did of Archie as well as the year it was painted. "Maybe he left at some point to go somewhere. But where?"