A Wee Dose of Death (10 page)

Hot chocolate would help.

Then, a little later, she'd drive over to the ScotShop and talk to Peggy. That always made her feel better.

Dog on a Throne

T
hursday morning, oblivious of even the sunshine on my face, I overslept. Shorty finally succeeded where the sun had failed by patting my cheek softly three times and meowing at me. I pulled myself out of bed, aware of every muscle. I shouldn't have been surprised. This happened every winter. I'd go skiing for the first time of the season, and pay for it with four or five days of aches and pains. It wasn't like that twenty years ago when I was ten years old. Nothing ever ached back then.

I took a long hot shower—best medicine ever for sore muscles—and pulled on my dark blue silk long john top and bottom, a floor-length heavy green and blue plaid wool skirt, and my old winter standby, a deep green fisherman's knit sweater. The cowl-like neck of my navy silk long john top draped becomingly—if I did say so myself—over the thick wool of the sweater. I ignored my face in the mirror. I'd taken one quick look and hadn't liked what I'd seen. My hair hadn't yet recovered from where part of it had been shaved where I
had to have stitches last summer. I'd cut it fairly short, but it was still in that in-between stage that made me look like a stale, warmed-over pancake on one side and a dandelion head on the other. Thank goodness I was used to wearing a Scottish kerchief. It covered a multitude of hair disasters. I'd left mine downstairs. There was no way I'd forget it, though. I had my priorities straight.

The shop opened at nine. I'd planned to get some paperwork done, and now I wouldn't have time. I absolutely refused to miss breakfast. Gilda would have to open without me. I tromped downstairs. What was Dirk doing in my favorite chair? Before I could say anything, he scanned me up and down. “Will ye be working at the wee shop today?”

“Yeah, and I have to hurry. I'm running late.” I slipped into my boots so I could get the newspaper without freezing my toes off.

“Ye need more clothing. Ye will freeze in this cold. Why can ye no wear breeches on a day such as this one?”

Dirk had quickly grown accustomed to short skirts on women in the summer and long, leggy jeans in the autumn. Despite his initial fourteenth-century shock at seeing women's legs, he'd gotten over it real fast.

I stuck one booted foot forward toward him and raised my skirt a few inches above the boot top. “I'm wearing long johns.”

“Long jahns? Would
long jahns
be those blue stockings?”

“They're not socks. They go all the way up, and they provide insulation so I don't get cold.”

“All the way up where?” He sounded scandalized. And interested.

“They're like jeans, only softer, and they . . .” I gestured up the length of my leg to my waist. Not that it was any business of his. I bypassed my kerchief and pulled on a knit cap
to keep my ears from freezing. “Anyway, I like wearing long skirts to work. If customers see me wearing them, they're more likely to buy some for themselves.”

“Ye have six of those skirts that I have seen so far.”

He was counting?

“Why need ye so many skirts?”

I refused to be sidetracked by how cute all those
r
's sounded when he said “skir-r-r-rts.” “I happen to have ten of them. Not that it's any business of yours.”

“Ye needna whinge so.”

He sounded so . . . so superior . . . I wanted to deck him. But with shoulders as broad as his were and biceps as massive, I doubted I'd make much of a dent. I brushed past his chair—my chair—grabbing the shawl off the back as I went. He stood to follow me, but I closed the door in his face.

It was too cold to linger outside. I waved to my next-door neighbor, grabbed the newspaper, and scooted back into the warmth of my living room. Dirk had retreated to the woodstove, although I couldn't for the life of me figure out how he could possibly need the warmth of it. I ducked into the kitchen rather than argue over woodstove proximity. A hot cup of java would warm me just as well, and I could wrap my cold fingers around it.

Humming despite my irritation with Dirk, I started a big pot of oatmeal and, coffee in hand, I spread open the
Hamelin Piper
. The headline blared the news that our police chief had been “MISSING SINCE SUNDAY.” Good grief. I set down my coffee mug and reached for the phone.

Dirk sidled into the kitchen and looked at the paper. “I told ye we should ha' looked in the wee cabin.”

“Oh, hush up. You didn't think it was all that important or you would have insisted.” The trouble was, I knew he was
right and he
had
tried to insist that we check on Mac; but I wasn't going to admit that to him. “Anyway, everything was just fine when we were there.”

“How can ye be sure of that?”

“He was cussing so loud.”

Dirk obviously missed the reference, but he must have gathered the gist of what I said, because he quirked an eyebrow at me. “Are ye saying he swore?”

“Yes. So he couldn't have been hurt.”

“Mayhap he swore
because
he was hurt, as I seem to recall I mentioned to ye at the time. Did ye not even consider that possibility?”

I slapped the phone back down on the counter. “Why are you grilling me like this?”

“What would be this
grillink
?”

“Grilling. Interrogating. Bothering.”

“I am asking questions that need to be asked.”

“You're bugging me. It's not my fault Mac hasn't come home for four days.”

“Ye needna shout at me.”

“I am not shouting,” I shouted. “I'm being assertive.”

“Ye are being stubborn because ye think ye were wrong to leave him.”

I jammed both my fists onto my hips. “You . . . you . . . you can't say that to me.”

“Aye. That I can.” He crossed his arms, and I saw the muscles bunch under his billowy white sleeves.

I'd been with this man, this ghost, every day for the past five months and he'd been correcting me for three quarters of them. “Go away!” This time I really was shouting. “Leave me alone!”

He looked at me like I'd hit him. “I canna leave, as ye verra weel know.” His brogue got thicker with each word.

“Oh, yes, you can!” I grabbed the shawl from around my shoulders and bundled it up as tight as a Tootsie Roll. He. Was. Gone. I strode into the living room and tossed him—tossed
it
—onto the couch. Good. Riddance.

I picked up the phone, got hold of Murphy, and explained what had happened up on the Perth.

“When you say,
We were skiing
, just who else are you referring to?” Police sergeant Murphy sounded quite reasonable when he asked this most unreasonable question. Unreasonable because I didn't want to answer it.

I was referring to my ghost—the one I'm not talking to.
“Uh, it's the royal
we.
Like Queen Elizabeth?” A pregnant pause filled the phone line. “I, uh, like to imagine I'm with someone when I'm skiing,” I said, scrambling to fill the silence without mentioning Dirk. I wasn't even going to think about him anyway. Damn Scot.

“Oh?” Murphy sounded skeptical. I couldn't blame him. “Like who?”

Harper.
Cancel that thought. “I talk to the birds and squirrels while I'm skiing,” I told Murphy.
And my resident ghost whom I just banished
. “It's sort of like having company.”

“So you're telling me you didn't go into the cabin but you're sure Chief Campbell was there?” Murphy's Irish brogue got stronger with each syllable.

“That's right.” I shoveled in another mouthful of oatmeal and chewed fast, hoping I was chewing quietly enough that he wouldn't hear me.

“And how would you—and your squirrel friends,” he added in a tone I thought was unnecessarily mocking, “know it was the chief if you didn't see him?”

I swallowed. “Well, I already told you. His skis were parked beside the door.”

“You recognized his skis?”

“Well, no, but we knew—I mean, I knew he was there.”

“You and the squirrels knew he was there?”

“We . . . I heard him swearing at the firewood.”

A few seconds of silence during which I heard muffled choking. Or maybe it was laughter. “I'll get right on it, Ms. Winn.” He must have believed the swearing part. “We'll send somebody up there to look for him.”

It's about time
. “Thank you,” I said. Maybe Mac had strapped on his skis and gone farther up the mountain after he got his fire started. Maybe they'd never find him.

I left for the ScotShop in a dire mood, but when I got there, my mood changed instantly. I found a crowd of people oohing in front of one of my display windows. Yesterday it had contained four kilted mannequins, several artful stacks of Fair Isle sweaters, and a selection of books, bookends, and other items. Now, nestled between two of the mannequins, was an ottoman covered in a tartan shawl that I recognized as one of Gilda's. Scamp sprawled in Scottie splendor on the ottoman, basking in the admiration, his head resting on a soft fat Loch Ness Monster pillow.

“Come on in,” I told the crowd. “Feel free to browse.”

“I want to buy the dog,” one woman said. “Is he for sale?”

“No, but you can buy one of those sweaters next to the dog's throne.”

I sold four sweaters, two Monster pillows, and five boxes of shortbread, thanks to Scamp. He was hired.

Blue Enameled Box

S
ergeant Marti Fairing pulled the report from the printer and attached it to the file, although she hated to waste the paper. At least she had an answer, of sorts. The license plate was still fuzzy, and she couldn't tell for sure whether one of the characters was a 1 or a lowercase
L
; then there was a question whether another character was an
A
or an
R
. That left her with four possibilities. A1, AL, R1, or RL.

She ran the plate all four ways and ended up with three hits. Great. Now she had three suspects for a stupid report she shouldn't even be wasting time on. But there wasn't much else to do. She'd asked around. Nobody had seen a gray car with a crushed right rear taillight.

She looked back at the three possibilities. One from Bennington, one from Burlington, and one from Winooski. Pat Featherstone, Zebra Harvey, and Cessford Kerr. She was gonna put her money on the Featherstone guy. Sounded like the kind of a flake who'd back into somebody's car and leave
the scene. Or Cessford. Who'd name a kid Cessford? Of course, when it came to that, who'd name a kid Zebra? Heck, it could be any one of them.

She almost wished she hadn't pulled the report. Maybe a nice robbery would show up before the end of the day. She took the entire fender-bender file, as she called it, and stuffed it under the items in Harper's in-box. Everyone had been threatening to put him on traffic. First he was gone for a week. Then he hared off to Poughkeepsie four different times on some sort of special assignment. Rumor mill had it that Archie—the town moderator—had requested it. No telling what sort of strings got pulled there. Still, Harper was okay. She could imagine his full-throated laugh when he found it. He always reminded her of her big brother.

She couldn't wait to tell him about how she'd picked the locks on Mac's house. When he hadn't shown up for work yesterday and everybody got worried, they thought maybe he'd had a heart attack—wouldn't that have been lovely?—and she'd volunteered to be the one to check out his house. But he hadn't been there.

Murphy had skied up the Perth about an hour ago to check out Ms. Winn's story—Fairing privately hoped Mac had fallen off a ledge. It was probably a good idea Murphy had gone. If he'd sent Fairing and she'd found Mac incapacitated, wouldn't she have just loved to turn around and leave him?

When the phone rang a moment later, Moira routed it to her. Well, of course she did. Fairing was the only one around. “Fairing here . . . He broke what? . . . Murder?”

She called for an ambulance and the mountain rescue crew.

And to think she'd wished for a simple robbery. Or a heart attack.

*   *   *

Karaline made her
usual afternoon stop at the ScotShop when the Logg Cabin closed for the day. In between customers, I told her about Mac—how it turned out he'd been missing for four days. She was about to answer when Scamp scrambled to his feet and pointed his long-bearded snout toward the front door.

Karaline's face broke into a smile, and I turned to see what had caused such a look of joy.

Harper!

He shut the door behind him. He looked older, somehow. Worn. Gaunt. Tired.

Without quite knowing how it happened, I stood in front of him, the memory of that one time he kissed my cheek surrounding us both. Well, surrounding me anyway. He looked too exhausted to care. There were deep shadows around his gorgeous charcoal eyes, and I thought maybe he'd lost weight, but I couldn't tell for sure what with his heavy parka. “Hello,” I said. How dull could I get? His eyes brightened for a second. Or maybe that was only my imagination. After all, he'd stood me up three times, but who was counting?

From behind me Shoe called out, “Yo, man.”

Harper nodded in Shoe's general direction without making eye contact, and Shoe for once must have taken the hint. His footsteps ended at the bookcase. Harper dropped his gaze to the floor. “I came by to apologize.”

I gestured to Gilda to take care of things and led Harper and Karaline into the back room. There was no way I was going to let him off the hook that easily. He'd have to come clean in front of a witness. We sat at the battered old table that had seen so many late-night conversations. I poured him the last bit of coffee, unplugged the pot, and tried not
to glare at him. Tried not to be too hopeful, either, but he didn't have to know that.

“My dad was in jail,” he said.

That was about the last thing I'd expected to hear him say.

“In the Amazon jungle.”

No.
That
was the last thing I expected.

“He died the day after I got there.”

Karaline and I reached out at the same time. She touched his left arm. I took his right hand. “I'm so sorry,” I said.

“It's not your fault.”

What a
man
thing to say. I knew it wasn't my fault. I was expressing empathy, not apology. Karaline and I both let go, but I doubt Harper noticed.

“I brought his ashes back in a blue enameled box. I wanted to explain, but then Poughkeepsie called Archie, and Archie called me, and I had to—” He stopped abruptly.

He was hiding something. Maybe not hiding, exactly, but not telling us everything. Poughkeepsie was the city where he used to work before he came here to Hamelin. Why would they call our town moderator?

He lifted his coffee cup and set it right back down. “That's why I kept having to—”

Shoe stuck his head through the doorway. “Unhappy customer needs to speak with you, Peggy.”

“Can't Gilda take care of him?”

“It's a her, and no, she insists on talking to the owner.”

Rotten timing. Karaline motioned me to go on. Harper didn't even look up.

*   *   *

Apparently I'd sold
this unsatisfied customer a Graham of Monteith tie last summer, but her son-in-law was a Graham of Montrose. The fact that Dirk had upbraided me at the
time for not selling her both of them—so she could be sure to have the right one—did not improve my mood. The only good point was that Dirk wasn't here to rub it in.

I exchanged one dark green tie for another that was so similar I had to look twice, but I handled the transaction with relatively good grace. Then she pulled out the matching scarf I'd sold her for her daughter, and I had to exchange that as well. I even did it without gritting my teeth. A happy customer was more important than a ten-day return policy. In fact, she was so happy, she proceeded to buy seven one-pound boxes of shortbread—“one for each grandchild”—and a scarf for herself, so there was quite a bit of positive cash flow, and she was smiling as she left. So was I.

Before I could get back to Harper—and Karaline, I added mentally—Sergeant Murphy, our only Irish cop in a town of Scots, closed the door behind him with a bang. I heard a muffled
woof
from Scamp that sounded distinctly like an objection to the loud noise, or maybe it was to the draft of frigid air that had blown in with Murphy. We'd have to get Scamp a little doggie coat to wear. Maybe in a nice tartan, although I wasn't sure which clan a Scottish terrier would belong to. Gilda would probably want him to wear her yellowish Buchanan plaid, but I was afraid it would clash with the blue and green carpet that covered half the floor. Scamp quieted immediately. That was good. I couldn't have him barking whenever he felt like it. Of course, he hadn't barked when Harper came in.

“Brrr! Too cold out there.” Murphy threaded his way between the racks of kilts and long-sleeved white shirts, looking around as if checking to be sure nobody else was in the store. “I need to show you a picture. See if you recog—” He stopped in mid-sentence as Karaline and Harper came out of the back room. “You're back? It's about time. Fairing and I are threatening to put you on traffic detail.”

I couldn't help it. I felt a rush of heat up my face as I realized what his words meant. Maybe Harper really had bounced from the rain forest to central New York. Truly. And he'd come here, to the ScotShop, before he'd gone to work.

“I'll be at the station in”—he looked at me—“in a while.”

“Good thing you're back.” Murphy's Irish lilt was prominent.

Harper gave an inquiring look and walked toward us. “You mean you missed me?” He was talking to Murphy, but I could swear he was looking at me.

Karaline stopped at the bookcase and readjusted a few items.

Murphy lowered his voice as Harper got closer. “We've got us a murder to solve. Guy up in that old cabin on the Perth.”

For half a sec, I thought it might be Mac, but no; not even Danny Murphy would have been this casual if the dead person had been his police chief.

He handed an eight-by-ten photo to Harper. “No idea who this guy is. Do you recognize him?”

“No,” Harper said and handed it to me.

There's something about death that sets a person apart. You can't be alive and look this dead, at least not as far as I knew.
Dirk could be dead and look alive
, I remembered, but that was different.

This guy in the photo, as dead as could be, looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place him. More than anything, he looked like the stone effigy of a dead king. Chiseled cheekbones ran parallel to his jawline. The only note of incongruity in the face was the delicacy of his soft feathery eyebrows. That and the obviously broken nose.

Karaline was finally satisfied with the way she'd arranged the shortbread display on the bookcase. It was amazing how quickly displays could deteriorate when customers rummaged
their way through a store. I thought it was funny, too, how she could straighten things up in my store, but I never thought to straighten a thing in her restaurant. Maybe the next time I was over there I'd look around to see if I could find anything out of place.

She looked up at me, smiled, and headed across the store toward us. She obviously hadn't heard what Murphy was talking about.

I looked at the photo again. “He looks vaguely familiar, but I can't place him,” I said as Karaline stepped up beside me.

“Oh my God.” She reached for the photo. “It's Dr. W.”