A Wee Dose of Death (20 page)

Crapola on Toast

I
didn't want to risk folding her over, so I reached behind Karaline and felt underneath her parka all the way from her hip to her shoulder blade. All the fabric was intact.

I tugged off my parka and tried to rip it apart. All that happened was I got something approximating rope burns on my fingers. How did women in pioneer days ever manage to rip apart their petticoats for bandages? They were always doing it in books and films. Now, when it was real life and I desperately needed something other than a couple of hankies to stem the flow of my dear friend's lifeblood, I couldn't make a scratch, much less a rip in the fabric. I tried my teeth. The effort left my parka soggy with saliva, but still intact.

I vowed to pull out my old Swiss Army Knife and carry it with me everywhere from now on.

But for right now, what could I do?
Please let her live.

*   *   *

Harper paused near
a rock wall that towered twenty feet above the trail and unzipped his parka about halfway, releasing a cloud of steam. Cross-country, especially when you were going uphill, could work up a sweat.

He'd always liked this part of the Perth, ever since he'd found it while exploring shortly after he moved to Hamelin. Once these investigations were out of the way, he planned to invite Peggy up here for a picnic. He knew she loved it, too, because of the way her voice had softened when she described it for the police report. For that reason alone, it was doubly precious to him.

The police report. He went over the details in his mind, how Mac had broken his leg—where? He skied a few yards farther up the trail and located the sharp lump of fallen granite and the heavy branch beside it. The first bone Harper had ever broken was his big toe. Dropped a heavy rock on it when he was about eleven or twelve. It probably wouldn't even have made a dent if he'd been wearing shoes. But he'd spent most of his boyhood summers barefoot over in Arkane.

He turned ninety degrees to his left, a maneuver that took a bit of time on skis, moved off the trail a few feet, and stopped, looking straight ahead of him at the curves of two birches leaning in toward a maple. If he squinted his eyes, he could see how they formed almost a heart shape.

He wondered what Peggy had looked like as a little girl.

*   *   *

I'd just leaned
Karaline back against the woodstove when Dirk pounded through the door at a dead run. “Wha' would be wrong?” He skidded to a stop—hard to do when you're
a ghost who can't touch anything. How had he gotten any traction? “I heard the . . . the cannon,” he said for want of a better word. Maybe they didn't have handguns where he was in Scotland when he was alive. “I was atop the wee hill.” His motioned toward the top of the steep mountain incline behind the cabin. “Mistress Karaline?” He studied her pale face, the blood on both our hands, and looked over at me. I could see fear, anger, and something approaching dread in his eyes.

“She's going to be okay,” I assured him, hoping to convince Karaline and myself, too. “I know people died from wounds like this back in the fourteenth century, but we have surgery and antibiotics nowadays.” I'd tried explaining antibiotics to him once, and he'd listened politely to my treatise on germs, but I could tell he didn't really believe me. So much of twenty-first-century life was just a great big fairy tale to Dirk.

“Chirurgery?” He rolled the word around on his tongue.

“It's something that's going to help her. The good news is this is the only place she's bleeding.”

“No . . . exit . . . wound,” she managed to say between whimpers.

“Right. Isn't that great?” It was hard to sound enthusiastic when deep down inside you had a dark feeling that your dear friend might die after all.

“That means . . . the bullet . . . is . . . stuck inside me?”

“Crapola on toast!”

Years ago my mother had tanned my hide for saying a swearword. I guess the lesson stuck. But there were times I just had to say something more pertinent than
gosh golly darn it.
And saying it at full volume seemed to help somehow. At least it felt good for half a second as my rage reverberated in the cold air.

Ambulance. I whipped out my cell phone. “Crapola! No service.” I could have gone on shouting, but it wasn't helping Karaline.

I pulled myself back together and turned to Dirk. “What we need to work on first is to get a bandage put together, and then all we'll have left to do is get her down the mountain.”

It took him just a moment to register what I'd said. Then he turned and slammed his fist violently but soundlessly against the wall. “I canna help ye' move her.” The anguish in his voice tore into me. “What good is my life here when it isna really a life and I canna aid my friends when they ha' need o' me?”

I'd never in my life heard so much anger followed so quickly by so much sorrow. I didn't know how to answer him, so I busied myself taking off my lightweight sweatshirt, since I didn't happen to have a petticoat to tear apart with my teeth. All I had left on was a silk tee. I didn't even bother with modesty. I'd be clothed in goose bumps soon enough. They'd cover me nicely.

Dirk paid no attention whatsoever. He stationed himself next to Karaline, hand on his dagger, watching her intently, forming a ghostly barrier between her and anything that might come her way. If he'd been between her and the shooter when the shot was fired, I wondered, what would have happened to the bullet?

*   *   *

Harper glanced over
his right shoulder. Even with the snows that had fallen since last week and the tracks of two or three other skiers, he could see a wide, depressed swath that led from this spot up to the top of the hill. He never would have thought Mac had it in him. It must have taken an incredible
amount of determination to crawl that distance in the shape he was in. Adrenaline would have helped a lot, but surely the adrenaline charge must have worn off after a while. What would have kept him going in the face of all that pain?

Harper pictured the big, burly police chief, always ready with scorn, but powered by a bluff congeniality that usually worked with men. Some men. It had been enough to get him appointed as chief and to keep him in that position for all these years. Harper had seen the covert cringes, though, in the body language of women who'd had official dealings with the man. Political correctness went out the window when Mac walked into a room. If Mac hadn't been related to someone on the Board of Selectmen, he never would have been appointed as chief of police. Harper was half expecting Fairing to enter a charge of harassment any day now. The only woman on the Hamelin force, she'd had to put up with—

“Crapola on toast!”

He heard the voice as clearly as if the speaker stood next to him, even though he could tell it had drifted down to him from over the hill to his right. Even as he executed a jump turn, the fastest way to change direction on a pair of cross-country skis in motion—although he'd never before managed it while he was standing still—he knew it was Peggy. She was the only person he'd ever heard using that particular turn of phrase. He'd know her voice anywhere, anytime.

He topped the rise and, glad there was such a steep slope down into the little clearing where the cabin stood, he crouched and used momentum, ski poles, and gravity to propel him toward where he knew she must be.

His Peigi's Shawl

H
arper was the last person I expected to see burst through the open doorway, and I couldn't prevent a cry that was 50 percent surprise and about 90 percent delight. Even as he stepped into the room, causing Dirk to jump back out of the way, I could see his eyes swing over the entire space, checking for danger.

He looked me over with a glance that was so all-encompassing, and so . . . so soft, I felt like I'd been touched. I hoped to all get-out it wasn't just my imagination. Then his eyes moved to Karaline, and the blood. After one more quick glance around, he knelt beside her.

“She's been shot.”

“Are you hurt?” His nod encompassed my bloody hands.

“No. Just her.”

“Bandage?”

“I'm trying.” I held up my sweatshirt. “Okay, Karaline, let's move your hand. . . .”

“And . . . elbow,” she grunted.

Harper supported her arm, and I could see how white her knuckles had become as I peeled them away and pressed my folded sweatshirt over the hankies against the center of the wound, hoping with every ounce of me that the bullet hadn't torn into anything vital, anything that couldn't be repaired.

Harper zipped his parka the rest of the way open and extracted a long scarf. It looked hand knitted. When I glanced from the scarf up to him, he said, “My mother knitted this for me, but I don't think she'll mind if I put it to a better use than warming my neck.” He slid one hand, firmly clutching a scarf end, behind Karaline's back. I grabbed it on my side and worked it underneath her left arm.

Once it was over her tummy, Harper checked the placement of the sweatshirt bandage and tied the scarf tightly in place. “I hope that'll hold,” he said, “until we can get her out of here.”

By this time I was shivering uncontrollably. I donned my parka and felt the kilt pin in my pocket. I pulled it out and handed it to Harper. He smiled warmly as he pinned the scarf so it would be more secure. Karaline raised one corner of her mouth about a quarter inch. I had the feeling that was about as much of a smile as she could manage.

He nodded and pulled out his cell. “No service.” He slipped it back into his pocket. He looked around, muttering under his breath. “Three pairs of skis. We'll need two pairs for us.”

“There's no way she can walk,” I said.

“We could probably work up some sort of sling to support the upper half of her body, but I'm afraid her legs will have to drag all the way down the mountain.”

“I can . . . take it,” Karaline said in a voice that was more bravado than certainty.

“We really need three poles,” he said, “to make a travois.”

“What would be a
travoy
?”

“The Indians used them. Triangular contraptions to haul goods on.”

Harper looked at me funny. “I know that.”

Karaline chuckled; at least, I thought it was a chuckle, but hardly any air came out. She must have been in incredible pain, and she let out an involuntary moan.

Harper took off his parka.

“What are you doing? It's five degrees out here.”

“We need a big block of sturdy material to support her weight. We'll have to attach this to the skis somehow and tie her onto it.”

“Stop,” Dirk said, and Karaline and I both looked over at him.

Harper noticed the direction of our gaze, and looked around. “What?”

“Nothing.” I looked at Dirk and raised an eyebrow.

“Ye need the shawl. Yon man may be gallant, but he would freeze wi'out his coat. His coat isna large enow any the way.”

“That's true,” I said.

Harper drew back his chin. “What's true?”

“Ye could use my Peigi's shawl.” Dirk lifted it from his shoulder where it had been draped over his kilt pin.

“You can use my shawl,” I said to Harper.

His eyes swept this way and that, searching for the as-yet-invisible shawl. I pushed myself to my feet. “I left it over by the woodpile.” I headed that way, almost tripping on my untied laces. Dirk followed and handed it to me as I bent as if to pick it up from behind the logs. I turned around and held it up for Harper to see.

He looked as if he thought he might have missed something, but couldn't for the life of him figure out what it was.
Boy, was he right. What he'd missed stood right in front of him wearing a kilt. Harper put his parka back on.

The shawl had always been large, warm, and enveloping, but as I held it now, it seemed heavier, denser, longer than I remembered. That was ridiculous. I'd had it on in my living room this morning. I couldn't have forgotten its size in the past few hours. But somehow, it was big enough to tie firmly at the corners so it formed a sling between Karaline's skis.

We set it up so the curved, pointy ends of her two skis would slide along the ground behind us. I picked up the square back end of one of her skis in my left hand and my ski pole in the other. Harper, to my left, took up the other ski.

Poor Karaline was horribly unbalanced, what with Harper's and my disparate heights, but we did the best we could. We couldn't keep her weight from pushing the shawl down to the ground, so it wasn't just her feet that dragged. It was her whole bottom.

We managed to struggle all the way across the clearing and up the tree-topped incline before Karaline's groans became almost more than I could bear. We eased the makeshift arrangement down as gently as we could. I stepped out of my skis and knelt beside her. “I don't know what else to do, K. We have to get you back to town.”

Before she could answer, before Harper could say anything, Dirk walked up beside me. “I havena been able to help before this, but I do think I may be of some small service.” He laid a cool, transparent hand on Karaline's forehead, and a look of genuine amazement came into her eyes. “Ooooh,” she said, and closed her eyes.

Harper looked from Karaline to me, and back again. When his gaze returned to meet mine, he asked, “What just happened?”

She didn't look dead, but I felt for her pulse, just to be sure. “I, uh, I think she fainted.”

I had the feeling he wouldn't let this one pass. What on earth could I tell him?

I stood, kicked my toes into the ski bindings once more, and got ready to pick up my side of the load again, but in doing so I looked forward down the hill to where two slender birches bent in solemn promise toward the old maple tree. “Excuse me,” I said. “I'll be back in just a moment.”

Dirk stayed standing beside Karaline, his hand touching her head and then her waistline, while I retrieved Mac's buried ski and presented it to Harper in triumph.

“Right,” Harper said. Karaline stayed blissfully asleep while we repositioned the shawl and added the third ski, creating a stable triangle. It involved a bit of fancy footwork on Dirk's part so he could keep his hand in contact with Karaline's forehead or tummy without letting Harper run into his ghostly presence.