A Wee Dose of Death (3 page)

Pop Goes the Weasel

M
ac Campbell had always been graceful on skis, much more so than when he walked on solid ground. Every gliding step he took today, though, seemed to fuel his anger. He had never been one to be particularly aware of his body, except when he admired his physique in the privacy of his own house, so he didn't pay any attention to the way his muscles tightened with every negative thought. He'd been mad at that woman for months, and he still felt irked as hell about all the crap around Mason Kilmarty's death in Peggy Winn's ScotShop store last summer. Mac was CHIEF of the Hamelin, Vermont, police force. In his mind, the capital letters were automatic. Yet that upstart Peggy was the one who'd discovered Mason's murderer.

He'd never admit it to anyone, and he hardly admitted it even to himself, but he, Chief Mac Campbell, hadn't had a clue. Not a single clue, while that half-baked twit of a female had overpowered the perp.
Perp.
Mac liked words like that.
Sounded so—so
cop.
Twenty years he'd policed in Hamelin, with him in the top position for eleven of those years. Good thing the previous chief had croaked, and there was Mac, the best—well, the only—candidate to fill his shoes.

Irritation made Mac ski faster. Heading uphill like this, it was easier the faster he went. Slow down too much on cross-country skis and you'll tend to slide backward. He was making good time, though.

He hadn't skied or even hiked this particular trail in three or four years. There were others he enjoyed more, especially the Fife; it was quiet, even though that trail had four or five houses on it. In the summer, the Fife skirted far behind the houses; in winter, they were closed up tight.

Nothing ever changed in Hamelin, so he was sure there wasn't any new construction out here. This trail, the Perth, had only the one cabin. Just one room and an outhouse. There was an old wood-burning stove, too. Maybe he'd come back this summer and stay a few days.

For today, he planned to ski right on past it. That way, he should get to the top of the Perth trail in another two hours. He'd eat the sandwiches and one of the energy bars he'd packed and then head back toward Hamelin. Maybe take the other fork on the way down just for some variety.

Trouble was, Hamelin was too quiet. Mostly speeding tickets, an occasional burglary, penny-ante stuff. Only a few murders, usually by stupid dolts just asking to get caught. No scope for real policing.

Mac's idea of real policing involved car chases, shoot-outs, hostage situations, and a little karate thrown in for good measure. Not that he practiced the kata very often. Still, he knew how to do Swallow Pivoting on a Beach and Extract from a Castle with the best of them. Or were those Kung Fu moves? Couldn't keep the names straight. He'd taken lessons here and
there over the years—karate, jujitsu, tae kwon do, kung fu. There were a couple of dojos in the nearby town of Arkane. It was easy to mix up all those names. He raised his ski poles into a double sweeping block. If Peggy hadn't gotten there first, he could have taken out that son of a gun with a few well-placed—

In that moment of inattention, he didn't notice that the ski tracks he followed veered two or three feet to the left of a slight mound. Mac went straight, and his right ski caught on something.
Probably a snow-buried branch
, Mac had time to think. Mac had skied cross-country all his life. Since he was five. He should have been able to recover quickly, but he'd been so focused on his anger over Peggy Winn, and so off balance with his poles in the air, he'd taken just a moment too long to react. He was down, spraddle-legged, before he could even squawk. He felt the front half of his ski immobilized by the branch. The front edge of his ski shoe was locked into place on his ski. The inside of his right leg slammed against something hard.

The
pop
of breaking bone—and the excruciating pain—told him something was wrong. Very wrong.

*   *   *

Earlier in the
week, Wantstring had tried to ignore his students' collective sigh of relief when he canceled the next two graduate seminar classes that met on Saturdays and Mondays. He couldn't blame them. They needed more time on their papers. He'd felt his own sigh of relief over those cancellations. His research assistants would handle the undergraduate classes until he returned.

He pulled two USB thumb drives from one of his multiple pockets and tucked one of them under the rolled-up flannel shirt he used as a pillow. He wedged a second one in between two logs halfway down the woodpile. Enough wood inside for
a week at least, and twice that amount outside under the wide overhang of the roof. The cabin had been well designed for a Vermont winter, even one like this, with heavy October snows.

He distributed a few other small items here and there around the cabin. Time to get the fire built so he could melt snow for washing. He patted his shirt pocket and felt his green ballpoint pens and the box of waterproof matches. What more did he need?

He thought for a moment and retrieved two of the energy bars he'd stowed on the top bunk. He put them on the simple square table next to his lunch. Nothing like an energy bar snack for later, to get his brain revved up in an hour or two when he was bound to get stuck on a difficult paragraph. Thinking about the bars reminded him—he retrieved his cell phone from the windowsill and checked those bars. No service. That was just as well. Nobody would have any reason to call. He'd made it clear that he was going to be unavailable for an entire week. The phone charge wouldn't have lasted more than a few days at best. He powered it off with a deep sense of satisfaction.

Once all his supplies were arranged to his liking, he stepped away from the cabin to gather a pot of snow to melt for wash water. With his filter system, he could use the snowmelt for drinking water, too.

He had an itchy feeling, like somebody might be watching him, but one quick glance around the clearing and at the trees beyond reassured him that he was alone. Completely alone.

When the Store Is Closed

I
pulled my old plaid shawl tighter around my shoulders. I couldn't help being grateful for having bought it in that mysterious shop in Pitlochry, one of my favorite towns in Scotland. That had been four months ago. Little had I known the shawl came with its own baggage—this almost transparent, incredibly rugged ghost, complete with full-sleeved homespun shirt, a Farquharson tartan kilt—the old-fashioned kind made of nine yards of handwoven and hand-felted fabric. He had to pleat it each morning, lie down on it, roll it around his . . . I was getting distracted here. Anyway, he didn't have to do all that anymore, now that he was dead.

I took two more well-aged maple logs from the stack in the corner and added them to my beautiful bright red Defiant FlexBurn wood-burning stove. Flames leapt up as I closed the door. I moved the damper lever back to keep the heat from overpowering the living room. Through the heavy glass insert, the thick bed of coals glimmered brightly, casting a
reddish glow over the dark living room. Even with the curtains wide-open, the cloudy afternoon light seemed to be growing dimmer. There'd be more snow by midafternoon; they were predicting at least another twenty inches overnight, on top of the two feet that had fallen last night. Probably not a full-out blizzard, but it might be close to one. Nobody would be going anywhere tomorrow.

Fine with me. I wasn't opening my store, the ScotShop, a piece of old Scotland, today. There weren't any tour buses scheduled, and—this time of year, at least, once the autumn leaves were off the trees—the tour buses were about the only thing to liven up the downtown area, especially on a Sunday, and the ScotShop was always closed on Mondays. The blizzard that had stopped most of the eastern cities in their tracks was just one more regular old winter day here in Hamelin. By Tuesday, they'd have the roads cleared and we'd have an influx of tourists, although the regular tour buses from Boston might not be able to make it. The store was ready. Last Friday, I'd received a long-awaited order of kilts, tartan ties, ghillie brogues, and
sgian-dubhs
. Gilda, my shop assistant, who was finally back from her sixteen-week sojourn in the alcohol rehab center, had helped me log most of it in and get it on the shelves. Sam and Shoe—they were my twin cousins and employees as well—had pitched in. Many hands make light work. My mother always used to tell me that. Still did, as a matter of fact. Like an eerie echo, my ghost had told me the same thing as he'd watched the four of us unpacking, pricing, and displaying the new merchandise.

Once last summer, he'd told me how sorry he was that he couldn't help. Ghosts can't pick things up. Can't eat. Can't sleep. Can't even . . . Well, never mind that.

“Don't worry about it, Dirk,” I'd told him when there was nobody around to hear me talking to him. Nobody else could
see or hear him—nobody except my dear friend Karaline Logg, who owned the Logg Cabin, the wonderful restaurant across a small courtyard from the ScotShop. It was open for breakfast and lunch only—and Karaline made a very good living offering the state's best maple pancakes, to name only one of her specialties.

Karaline had picked up my shawl one day and found out that she could see my ghost, although other people—well, one other person: Harper—had held it to no effect. No effect, that was, other than a speeding up of my heart as I wondered how I was going to explain Dirk, who appeared to be a permanent part of my household, to Harper, whom I would have loved to have as a permanent part of the same place. Only Harper hadn't seen or heard anything out of the ordinary.

I wasn't really sure why I was the one who'd bought the old, old tartan shawl, one that had been handed down from great-grandmother to great-granddaughter through thirty or thirty-five generations. The perfectly ordinary-looking woman who'd sold it to me in Pitlochry when I went to Scotland on a buying trip had mentioned that she had no daughters or granddaughters to pass it on to, so the shawl would have to go to her sister's line. But if that was the case, why had she sold it to me? And why hadn't I been able to find the store again when I went back the very next day?

It was all a mystery to me. Peigi, Dirk's long-dead ladylove, had woven the shawl—in the fourteenth century, if you can believe something as crazy as that.

There were days I thought I'd just made this all up, like a waking dream, but then I'd turn around to find Dirk talking quietly to Shorty. My cat could see him. Spiders were attracted to him. So was Tessa, my brother's service dog, although Tessa had learned early on not to try to lick Dirk's face or his fingers. Animals—or people—who touched him accidentally
ended up with a disconcerting pins-and-needles feeling, and if they made the mistake of colliding with him, it could leave them disoriented or, even worse, flat on the floor, for quite some time.

But I'd learned all of this slowly, over the past four months. The basic truth was that, somehow or other, the shawl had found its way to me, a twenty-first-century woman with a penchant for all things Scottish. This 653-years-dead Scot came along with it. If I folded the shawl and set it aside, Dirk disappeared. Where he went I didn't know, and he didn't, either. He'd tried to describe it, but spoken language just didn't come close.

All I had to do to get him back was to place the shawl around my shoulders, and there he was, as dependable as the door.

I'd found his presence particularly comforting—after the initial shock, that was—but this closeness was beginning to wear. I felt like I was back in college again with a clinging roommate. It wouldn't have been so bad having a hunk like him around, except that he found a lot to criticize about my life and the way I chose to live it.

His particular beef lately had been the fact that I wasn't married. “We don't have to get married in the twenty-first century,” I'd explained over and over again.

“Ye dinna have a man,” he'd observed—last August, I think it was. It was one of those bright, brilliant days. I'd taken him for a walk along the shores of Lake Ness, just north of Hamelin. We'd sat down on a grassy bank, and he lay back with his arm under his head while I picked dandelions and made a yellow chain, splitting half of each stem carefully and threading the next flower through it.

There was a whole congregation of little spiders in the grass around him. I didn't know whether other ghosts attracted spiders—not having met any other ghosts—but Dirk certainly did.

“Ye need a man to protect ye,” he said.

“I don't need protection.”

He'd narrowed his eyes at me, but rather than belabor the point, he struck out with another fourteenth-century argument. “And what about bairns?”

“Bairns? You mean children?” I knew darn well what a bairn was; I just didn't want to deal with my conflicting feelings about child raising right then. I was only thirty. There was still time. Trouble was I had to find the right man.

Harper
.

I tried to cancel that thought. Nothing had happened between us. Nothing except an increased pulse on my part.

“Aye. Ye dinna have a man, and ye dinna have bairns who will care for ye when ye've lost half your teeth and can eat naught but gruel.”

“Gruel? Yuck!” I joined one end of the dandelion chain to the other and placed the resulting crown atop my head. “I'll have you know I have investments to pay for my old age, and what makes you think I'm going to let my teeth decay? I have a very good dentist, and I get my teeth cleaned twice a year.”

I hadn't explained either my financial situation or modern dentistry to Dirk—at least I didn't think I had.

“Dih-kay? What would that be?”

“It means ‘rot.'” I'd read enough to know how many people lost their teeth back then. “Decay is what happens to teeth when people don't use toothbrushes.”

Toothbrushes he understood. In fact, he'd told me once that he'd been taught to use a sturdy willow twig with a smashed end to clean his teeth. An extraordinary fourteenth-century toothbrush. His teeth were certainly white, as white as the daisies intermingled with the dandelions in the field around us.

“The snow, 'tis falling.”

I looked up, surprised to find myself in my living room.
There was no crown of yellow dandelions, no daisies, no spiders, no lake beside me, and the August sunshine had turned into cloudy mid-October. Dirk, outlined against the gray light of the bay window, seemed particularly pensive. He spread his arms wide and stretched. How can muscles get tight if you're a ghost?