A Wee Dose of Death (2 page)

The Joy of a Cozy Fire

P
eople who don't like winter simply should not move to Vermont, as far as I'm concerned. Visit in the summer or fall, by all means, and buy lots of souvenirs here in Hamelin. Buy an extra number of them in my store, the ScotShop—preferably expensive items like full dress kilts, or even lots of little items, like tartan ties or reproductions of the Loch Ness Monster. Buy one for every single relative back home. But either live somewhere else, or quit your infernal bellyaching. Ten degrees Fahrenheit is the way winter works in the Green Mountains. Get over it. Or get yourself a good wood-burning stove and four or five sets of thermal underwear. Silk long johns and sock liners. Good woolen hats and gloves. Or GORE-TEX if you want to be fancy.

Of course, I didn't say any of this to Emily. Thank goodness this was a phone call. I couldn't have hidden my irritation face-to-face.

“Mark left me all alone again, Peggy,” she whined, her
voice almost echoing, as if she were in a barrel. “It's bad enough that he works in Burlington all the time and we only come here on weekends, but now he gets a week off, and does he stay here? No. He took off before dawn on his skis and didn't even say good-bye. Here I am freezing cold in this godforsaken house.”

She even sounded cold, and I could swear I heard her teeth chatter; but I wasn't going to feel sorry for her. Their house was one of those new energy-efficient ones outside of town. Probably had R-150 insulation all around—or whatever number meant a lot of warmth. I moved a little closer to my woodstove. “Just make yourself some hot chocolate,” I advised. “That'll warm anybody up.”

“But he left me alone, Peggy. Why does he do that?”

I'd seen Emily's husband only once. Tall and lanky beside his short, pudgy wife, the two of them like the ancient cartoon characters Mutt and Jeff, walking up Hickory Lane, past my house. As far as I could see, he hadn't said a word the entire time I watched them. She'd talked nonstop, of course. I heard some time ago that the loneliest people were the ones who were unsuitably married. Not that I had any way of knowing from personal experience.

“Emily!” I interrupted her flow. “You might enjoy cross-country skiing if you'd give it a try.” Not that I believed for a moment she ever would. “With the Appalachian Trail not half a mile from your house, think of the gorgeous scenery. But you have to go outside if you want to enjoy it.”

“You sound just like Mark. He taught me to ski when we were first married, but I didn't like it. I never could get the hang of it, and he just wouldn't understand.”

I rolled my eyes at Dirk Farquharson, the fourteenth-century ghost I'd acquired on a trip to Scotland this past summer, who stood looking out my living room bay window.

I pointed to his left. “Whoops,” I said into the phone. “Have to run, Emily. There's the door.”

“You go answer it, Peg,” she told me. “I'll wait.”

“No. I'll probably be a while. I'll catch up with you later.” I disconnected and heaved a sigh.

“Ye were nae quite honest with Mistress Emily. There is naebody come a-calling at the door.”

My fourteenth-century Scottish conscience. Even though I could almost see through him, even though he'd been dead 653 years, he still had opinions that were hard to shake. “I didn't say there was anybody standing outside. All I said was,
There's the door
. And”—I pointed again—“there it is.” It seemed perfectly logical to me. “If she wanted to think someone was knocking on it, that's her problem.”

He made that low-pitched, grumbly Scottish sound of disapproval.

“Don't growl at me,” I said, even though I rather liked hearing it. It emanated from his massive chest. I tried to keep my eyes from scanning the length of him, but lost the battle. He was so tall, so black-haired, so gentle, so fierce, so . . . Scottish.

“Ye should nae tell untruths.”

So stubborn, too. “This is the way things are in the twenty-first century, as I've told you numerous times. I don't like getting trapped on the phone. Anyway, what's it to you?”

He gave me a long, level look from under those thick straight brows of his. “I didna ask to come here,” he said. “I didna desire to leave my home.”

“Yeah, well—”

“I dinna like some of what I see here. Now.”

“I may not like it, either, but there's nothing I can do about it.”

“Nay. Ye are nae right about that. Ye
could
do something. Ye could stop telling untruths.”

“Would you rather have me tell her she's boring me out of my gourd?”

“What would be a
gord
?”

“Never mind that. You just need to loosen up a little and accept things the way they are.” I tried not to sound supercilious, but from the look on Dirk's face, I didn't seem to have accomplished it. Poor Dirk. I was grumpy about Emily and I was taking it out on my ghost.

“Mistress Emily seems lonely to me.”

He was probably right. She'd walked into the ScotShop about four months ago and spent an hour complaining. It was a slow day, so I couldn't begrudge her the time, but it struck me as a little bit weird that she found so much fault with everything. Wasn't there any joy anywhere in her life? Dirk had, of course, felt free to eavesdrop with impunity, since he was invisible to her. Naturally I hadn't been able to reply to any of his comments while she was within earshot.

Since then she'd taken to calling me on my days off, and I usually felt too sorry for her to send her to voice mail.

“Her husband's looking to retire down here,” I said. “That's why they bought the house.”

“What would be this
retyre
? I asked ye once before, but ye didna answer me.”

The words Dirk didn't know would fill a dictionary. Of course, I didn't understand a lot of the words he used—he'd died in Scotland when people were still speaking Middle English, like Chaucer. I'd decided there was some sort of transcendental translation agency at work for most of our speech, but we still had a few words to learn. Sometimes I could figure out what he meant just through the context:
Ye needna whinge so
meant he wanted me to stop complaining. Well, right now I wanted
him
to quit grumbling. “‘Retire' means to quit working and take it easy.”

He squinted. Two lines appeared between his heavy eyebrows. If he wasn't careful, those lines would etch themselves into his face. No, wait. He was a ghost. He'd never get any more wrinkles than those crinkly laugh lines he already had around his eyes. Nothing had changed for him since 1359, the year he died. Except that he and the shawl he was attached to had been transported to twenty-first-century America, a country that hadn't even existed when he was alive. Well, the land existed, and people were here; but America wasn't even an idea in any Scottish head 653 years ago.

Retire. I could almost see his brain still shuffling the idea around. Back in the fourteenth century when he was alive, maybe nobody ever retired. If they survived infancy and childhood, then they worked all their lives, got old, and died. Or at least that was what I thought had probably happened. I was truly going to have to bone up on my history. Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
was about all I'd known of the time back then, until I bought an old shawl and met Macbeath Donlevy Freusach Finlay Macearachar Macpheidiran of Clan Farquharson. You can see why I opted to call him Dirk.

Settling In

M
arcus Wantstring glanced at his green three-ring binder. Thank goodness he'd found it; otherwise this whole trip would have been a waste of time. He hadn't known where it was at first, and the early-morning dark was getting considerably lighter by the time he remembered he'd left it in the car. So he'd stuffed it in his backpack on top of a brand-new bag of Tootsie Rolls. Well, it had been
almost
brand-new. Marcus patted the rolled candies in a zippered pocket on his pants leg. A Tootsie Roll was a good reward for having left so quietly, locking the garage side door behind him, so he hadn't woken his sleeping wife.

He reached for the binder and flipped through it idly, reading a sentence here, a paragraph there. He jotted a five-pointed star in the margin on page 153. He'd have to do something about that section. Without any particular reason he could identify, he remembered that next week was his wife's birthday, and her sister had planned to fly up from D.C. as a surprise. With this
storm, there was a chance nobody would be flying anywhere. He ought to call her and select an alternate date, just in case. He turned back to the first page and jotted today's date in his distinctive green ink.
Call Josie Calais again (when I get cell service)
, he wrote, wondering as he did so why he was bothering to write himself a note. He wasn't likely to forget something as important as his wife's birthday surprise.

He left his camping ax where it was for the moment, stuck through a loop on the side of the backpack. He spread his sleeping bag out on the lower level of the rustic bunk bed built into a corner. Might as well get comfortable since he'd be here three days at the very least, maybe four.

He left enough food for one meal on the table and put the rest of the packages on the wooden platform of the top bunk. He was tall enough that he didn't have to strain to check for rodent droppings. Only a few, and they looked pretty dry; they were old enough that he might not have to worry about mice nibbling through the packaging.

Idly, he pulled out one of the half dozen Tootsie Rolls still left in his pants pocket. Nothing like a Tootsie Roll to sharpen mental focus. He unwrapped it and stuffed the wrapper back in his pocket along with the two others he'd already placed there.
Bring it in with you, take it out with you
: the motto of any good camper.

He rounded the table to sit on the second chair—the green binder was on the one closest to the door—and bent to remove his cross-country skiing shoes and replace them with his crazy socks and his hiking boots.

The blizzard inundating the East Coast didn't bother him. Vermont always made it through blizzards without even noticing them, but this storm would have the eastern half of the country shut down. Except for Vermont. He needed solitude?
Well, he sure was going to get it. Nobody would be out pleasure skiing on this snowy Sunday.

*   *   *

Emily stood next
to the phone for several minutes, glued, as it were, to the spot. She didn't want to be a complainer. She always hated herself when she did that. But she just couldn't seem to stop herself from nitpicking about everything and everybody. Especially about Mark. There was something that bubbled out from somewhere inside her, making her criticize her husband, complain about him. Bad-mouth him. Like a little chained monster in her that clawed its way up her throat—her throat. Emily felt like she was choking, and she eased a finger into the collar of her turtleneck. She pulled the fabric away from the front of her neck. As she did so, she felt the faint ridge of the scar.

These spasms never lasted for long, but when they hit like this, she didn't know what to do except to loosen the stretchy fabric, stand still, and wait for her body to slow down. The monster inside her was what made her do it, the choking, the complaining. It made her grouse at everyone. She was always harping at Mark. She couldn't stop herself. It wasn't his fault, but something inside her—that monster—believed that if she had never gotten married in the first place, if she'd followed her dream without interruption, somehow she wouldn't have had to go through . . . what she'd had to go through.

She'd read in some self-help book her sister Josie had given her about how the
deepest self
—that was what it was called—knew the truth at a visceral level, even if one didn't want to acknowledge it. Or admit it. Well, it was all very well and good to theorize up one side and down the other, but living with . . . a monster inside her, there was no way
to get past that fact. She wasn't even sure she knew whether she had a
deeper self
. It had been so long since she'd believed in anything.

Once her throat stopped the spasms, she straightened the magazines and newspapers on the coffee table, wishing again that she had tidied the house in Burlington before they'd left this time. Sandra would see it, and Sandra was a good enough friend not to care, but Emily would have felt better if she'd taken just a few minutes to wash the dishes. She hadn't, because Mark had been in such a hurry to leave. She didn't understand him. She hadn't understood him for years. And, of course, she'd forgotten to water the plants, but she'd called Sandra and asked her to stop in and take care of that. She would
never
have asked Sandra to wash the dishes she'd forgotten about. Never.