A Wee Dose of Death (5 page)

The Joy of a Wee Run

T
he second ski was too good for Mac to leave it lying beside the trail. With his rotten luck, somebody would come along and steal it. He took his bearings. Nearby, to the left of the trail, two skinny white birches formed almost a semicircle as they bent toward each other across one of the lower branches of a thick-girthed sugar maple. Between that and the rock cliff, he'd be able to find this spot easily once he was back on his feet. Grunting with the effort, he shoved the leftover ski beneath the light, fluffy snow. There. Safe. He added one of his ski poles to the stash but kept the other one with him.

The backpack weighed three tons as he struggled to get it on. He couldn't leave it. He'd need the water and food. It might take those people in the cabin a while to get help up here. With his luck, they'd be the kind of people who were never prepared for anything. You sure couldn't trust anyone these days.

The cabin couldn't be that much farther ahead. His body
was still warm from the effort of skiing and the ordeal of getting his broken leg splinted, but he knew the heat would begin to leach out—had already begun to, in fact. There'd be a fire. Surely the people who'd skied ahead of him would have started a fire there.

He laid his head down on his gloved hands to catch his breath. Just a minute to rest. Maybe two minutes. Then he'd get started.

A long while later Mac raised his head and stared with bleary eyes at the snow sifting onto him. Had he fallen asleep? Something had woken him, some sound, but he couldn't place it. At the top of the hill in front of him, he saw a blur of movement, something dark. He had the crazy—no, it was insane—thought that maybe it had been a person disappearing behind the crest. He called for help, but his voice came out more like a croak than a yell. Whoever it was couldn't have heard him. He could have sworn he'd seen a knitted cap sinking out of sight. That was impossible. Whoever it was, if it had been a person, would have stopped to help.

Mac's eyes gradually cleared and he looked around him. He'd obviously been asleep. There was another inch of snow. For now, all he heard was silence.

It wasn't far, but getting to the top of the incline seemed to take hours. He peered over the rise and spotted the small cabin in the clearing. One set of skis stood propped up to the right of the door. He called out, but nobody appeared. There wasn't any smoke from the chimney, so maybe one of the two guys whose trail he'd been following was out collecting firewood.

Mac took a deep breath, noticing the almost buried tracks of the second skier who had moved off the trail a few yards to the right. Probably wanted to take a quick pee against one of those trees. Those tracks rejoined the first set of tracks
partway down the incline. Mac could clearly see the outhouse on the far side of the clearing. Couldn't the guy have waited that long?

He shouted, but nobody came to the open door. He was probably hard of hearing. Mac was having trouble getting enough breath. Damn. This would be over soon, though. Once the guy in the cabin called for help, Mac would be okay.

The backpack weighed four tons now. Even though it took him two tries to make it only one foot farther along the path, at least from here it would be downhill, and he wasn't talking about skiing. He wanted a fire. He wanted shelter. He wanted help. And they were all just a hundred feet away. A hundred agonizing feet.

*   *   *

I turned from
the window. “This snow looks too good to pass up.” I picked up a skein of neon pink yarn as I passed the table at the bottom of the stairs. “I'm going skiing.”

“I will go wi' ye.”

I turned on the bottom stair and looked him over. His sleeves were rolled up above his elbows. He had hand-knit stockings that came almost up to his—I had to admit it—gorgeous knees, but he probably didn't have anything on under his kilt. I stopped that thought before it could progress. “Stay here. You're not dressed for it.”

He tilted his head to one side. His mouth was open. “Surely ye jest.”

I slapped the newel post. “I'm not kidding, Dirk. It's probably five below out there.”

“Below what?”

“Didn't you have temperatures back then?”

“
Temprachoors
? What would they be?”

“You know. Fahrenheit. Or did you use Celsius?”

Dirk looked at me like he thought I'd lost my mind.

I spoke slowly, as if he were five years old. “How on earth did you know how cold it was outside?”

The kilt pin holding his plaid over his shoulder—it was made of antler—moved as he took a deep breath. “The snow was one indication. If 'twas melting, the day was becoming warmer. If 'twas like this”—he turned to look out the window—“we'd have a wee fire. Even a wean could tell 'twas cold.”

“Well, there's a big difference between just above freezing and five below.”

He turned back to face the window. “I dinna understand this
five below.
”

“That means it's really cold. If you go outside now, you'll freeze.”

“Nae. I willna. I canna feel the cold. I canna feel anything.” His voice faded away.

I shifted my feet on the bottom stair. “Stay here, Dirk. I'll just go a little way up one of the trails. Maybe the Perth. It's an easy one, the bottom part of it. Be back in a jiffy.”

“I will go wi' ye. Ye said it could be dangerous if one
skeeded
alone.”

“Skied. And only if they're lost in the mountains, and you can't get lost on the Perth.”

He crossed his arms. “I am coming wi' ye.”

Stubborn Scot
, I thought. “This snow is too fluffy, and you don't have skis. How do you know you won't sink in?”

“We will discover that soon enow, would ye not say?”

I threw up my hands. It would serve him right if he fell in and got stuck. “I have to change clothes.”

“I will wait for ye. Dinna take long, for ye wouldna want
to be caught out of doors in the dark.” He turned his obstinate face back to the window.

No, I
wouldna
want to be skiing after dark, but I also
didna
like him telling me what any halfway intelligent adult would already know. Grrr.

*   *   *

It took too
much energy to keep calling out. The door of the cabin stood tantalizingly open. It looked like one or two steps up, but he could make that. He'd come this far. At least he could get inside, off this cold ground. Hopefully, whoever was staying here would be back soon and they could get a fire going.

By the time he hauled himself up the steps—the snow fell so freely in the clearing they were practically buried by now—he was close to exhaustion. The thought that if he didn't keep going he'd freeze to death kept him motivated. That and the possibility that whoever was using the cabin might not come back for hours, so it was up to him to save himself.

“Anybody home?” That sounded stupid. Of course there wasn't; they would have heard him long ago. They must have taken snowshoes out to walk around. He inched forward another foot or so, enough to see into the square room.

The man sprawled on his back beside the cold woodstove wore bright orange-, red-, and yellow-striped socks. The man's pant legs were stuffed into the socks. Any good skier knew that technique to keep cold air from flowing up inside your pant legs. But this man would never ski again. He was quite obviously dead. Mac had seen enough dead bodies to be sure, even if it hadn't been for the state of the guy's skull and the ax beside the body. For a moment, Mac forgot his own situation and tried to pull himself to his feet. The pain swamped him, and he collapsed in agony. It was a long time
before he managed to shrug out of his backpack and a longer time yet before he could make it across the floor to check the guy's pockets.

No wallet, although patting the guy's pockets wasn't the easiest task considering the state of Mac's fingers. No cell phone. No driver's license tucked into the top of his heavy orange socks, the way some skiers did. The only things Mac found in the guy's pockets were three empty Tootsie Roll wrappers in his pants and two ballpoint pens in his shirt. Green, no less. Who carried green pens, for God's sake? Who was this guy? Why did somebody have it in for him?

A niggling thought crept up the back of his spine, lodged in a primitive part of Mac's brain stem, and wouldn't go away. Mac never felt fear. He was big. He was strong. What was there to be afraid of? He was the chief of police. But what would happen if a bear wandered in, following the smell of blood, the scent of dead meat? Most of the bears would be hibernating by now, but there were always a few, usually the cranky males, who wandered the forest until well after the first snowfall. The dead guy didn't smell too bad yet; Max could tell he'd been killed only recently. The blood on the floor hadn't frozen yet, and the blood that had soaked into the collar of the guy's brown plaid flannel shirt was still a bright red. But the smell would build if Mac didn't get help soon. The bear would come. Mac could have kicked himself for not bringing his rifle along.

He made it across the floor in record time, considering the state of his leg and the awkwardness of the ski splint. He closed the door and wedged one of the two chairs in the room under the knob. No bear was getting in here while Mac had breath.

Still, what if it wasn't a bear trying to get in? What would
happen if the ax wielder came back? Even if the wedged chair held, there were four windows.

Even if the ax was still inside the cabin, Mac had to admit to himself—he'd never admit it to anyone else—that in his present condition he couldn't fight off a kitten, much less a murderous maniac. Not with his leg the way it was.

Mac's gut clenched. The police chief of Hamelin was scared.

Crisp Enough to Freeze

T
he air was crisp enough to freeze the little hairs inside my nose, so it had to be colder than ten degrees. Anything warmer than that, and your nose hairs don't freeze. Just one of those handy little Vermont truisms. So maybe the old Scots didn't need thermometers. Dirk was right, doggone him.

I grabbed my skis from the shed out back and, while Dirk pestered me with questions, I took a moment to scrape them lightly and buff on a layer of blue wax. Most everybody in town prepared their skis like this well before the first big snowfall was predicted.

I usually did, too, but with the big kilt shipment we'd had to process Friday and Saturday, I hadn't taken the time. It wouldn't take long to whip my skis into shape, though.

People new to the art of cross-country skiing usually bought tons of paraphernalia that we old-timers didn't bother with. An old-timer in skiing is anyone who's been on skis their whole life, whether that life is five years or, as in my case, thirty.

Sporting goods stores like to sell new skiers fancy little pouches filled with four or five different colors of ski wax for different snow conditions—purple, red, blue, green, and yellow for gliding and another set of colors formulated for kicking off. The klister waxes are like glue. I guess you use those to keep from sliding off the side of an icy mountain. Sure can't go fast with sticky gunk on your skis.

Then there were scrapers, spreaders, corks, warming irons, rilling tools, special brushes made of some sort of exotic bristle; the increasingly expensive list seemed to multiply every year as more people took up the sport and more companies saw the possibility of a big profit margin. Maybe professional long-distance racing skiers needed some of those things, but most of the rest of us just threw on a basic coat of blue wax at the beginning of the season and headed out once the first snow fell.

I loved gliding across a fresh snowfall. I pointed myself out of town toward the forest. Dirk stayed close to my side. After all, this was his first snowfall in more than six hundred years. I doubted that was a factor, though, as to why he stuck so close. “Stuck” was the operative word. He couldn't stray more than a yard or two from the shawl as long as we were outside my house. There was some sort of exception to the ghostly rule, though. In my house and in the ScotShop he could roam around to his heart's content, but anywhere else he was restricted unless he was carrying the shawl. Maybe I should have let him carry it, but there was a piece of me that wondered if he might run away with it if he had the chance. Of course, where would he go?

I could have let him hold it. Was it mean of me to hang on to it? I didn't need its warmth while I was moving. That was one of the beauties of cross-country. The very act of moving on skis allows the legs and arms, fingers and toes—and every
other part of the body—to flex and bend, thereby keeping the muscles warm. But if I slowed down or stopped while I was up on the Perth, I'd need the shawl.

“Is this all the speed we will be going?”

“Why? You want to run?”

Beside me, Dirk let out a long, sustained, “Ahhhhh. I havena run anywhere for . . .”

“Since you died?” I lengthened my stride and picked up the pace until I fairly flew.

Dirk kept up with me with no apparent effort. He didn't have to deal with friction.
Or stumbling blocks
, I thought as I veered to the left to avoid a snow shovel someone had left lying at the end of their driveway. He seemed so energized, so . . . bouncy almost; I had the feeling he wanted to run for hours.

I slowed down, backtracked, and stood the snow shovel upright in a snowbank so the owners could find it, even if two more feet of snow fell before they came out to shovel again.

“That was most kind of ye, Mistress Peggy.” Dirk sounded diplomatic—something I wasn't used to, coming as it did from him. “Now, though,” he went on, “might we run again?”

As we reached the edge of the forest, where the path began to ascend, I slowed down a bit and glanced at his feet. There weren't any footprints. I guessed that made sense—after all, he couldn't open doors, couldn't really touch anything—but it was still a bit of a surprise. “What does it feel like, Dirk? Walking on top of the snow, I mean.”

“Och, it feels a bit like drinking too much ale and not knowing where my feet are.”

“Did you do that a lot?”

He threw an indignant look my way. “Nae, certes. But young men will try. I suppose they still do?”

I thought about my twin brother's occasional summer
forays into bars in Arkane, the next town up the road—there weren't any bars in Hamelin. And no telling what he'd done when he was off at college. He couldn't have been too wild, though, since he'd graduated summa cum laude. Then he fell off the framework around a dinosaur skeleton he was repairing and shattered his back.

“. . . ye listening?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah. Young men. They
do
still drink, and nowadays with cars in the equation, it's a much more serious problem.”

“And why would that be?”

“Because when they're drunk they don't have the reflexes or the judgment to drive safely. A lot of people are killed every year by drunk drivers of all ages—not just young men, although statistics say they're the worst.”

“Does he live nearby?”

“Who?”

“Master Stuhstissticks.”

I say “huh?” a lot around Dirk. I said it again before I figured out what he was talking about. “Sta-tis-tics.” I emphasized each syllable. “They're—”

But I didn't get to explain. The fir tree I'd just glided under had way too heavy a burden of snow. I must have brushed my head against one of the lower branches, and the whole load dumped on top of me.

By the time Dirk stopped laughing, which took considerably longer than it should have, I'd brushed myself off and gotten most of the snow out of my jacket. “Should we not turn back now?” he asked between very un-ghostly snorts.

“No. I want to go farther. I haven't been up here on the Perth in a couple of years.”

“What would be this
pirth
ye speak of?”

“All the trails around here are named for towns or shires
in Scotland. This trail is the Perth.” I twisted my upper body to the left and pointed with my ski pole. “The one on that hill over there on the far side of town is the Inverness trail. The Dunbarton and Fife trails are behind us, on the opposite side of Lake Ness, and the—”

He raised a hand to quiet me. We had dozens of named trails coursing up the mountains from this valley. Obviously he didn't want to hear about all of them.

“There's a cute little cabin in a clearing up ahead. It might be fun to go that far.”

Dirk cast a dubious eye at the sky—or what we could see of it through the snow-laden braches of the trees surrounding us. “Are ye sure o' the path?”

“We're not going to get lost, if that's what you're worried about.” I twisted to gaze back over my right shoulder and pointed with the other of my ski poles. “Look. You can see Hamelin from here through the break in the trees. We're not that far out of town.” I pulled the pink yarn out of my jacket pocket. It's surprising how well wool compresses. “I'll tie yarn on trees as we go,” I said, matching my actions to my words. “That way we won't get lost even if the path gets totally snowed in.” I always carried yarn with me when I skied—as much a habit as fastening my seat belt in the car. “At worst, we can always just head downhill and we'll be sure to run into Lake Ness—it's not frozen yet, so we can't miss it. Then we turn left, and we get to Hamelin. Anyway”—I pointed to the parallel dents that marked the snow ahead of us—“a couple of other skiers have already come this way. Maybe we'll meet up with them.”

“Mayhap, but then I'll not be able to say anything.”

“It's never stopped you yet.” Carrying on a conversation while nobody else could hear Dirk asking for explanations of twenty-first-century words and customs had been something
of a challenge in the months since I'd . . . acquired . . . him last summer. “You never seem to shut up when I ask you to.”

He gave me one of those affronted looks, which was rather daunting coming from such a big ghost, but I turned away from him and from the tree I'd just yarned, and skied on.

Quite a few pink-beribboned trees later, we came to one of my favorite spots on the Perth trail, and I glided to a stop. A wall of solid rock rose a good twenty or thirty feet to our right, with winter-withered ferns clinging to cracks in the granite. Come spring, they'd green up and look like a veritable nursery. “Look at that cliff.” I stopped and pointed to my right, and Dirk raised an eyebrow. I could almost hear him thinking,
Ye think I canna see it?

“I love this place.”

“I can see why ye maun.”

“I come up here to picnic sometimes.”

“What would be a
nick
?”

“Huh?”

“A nick. Ye said ye come here for to pick them. Is it a wee flower?”

“Picnic. One word.” I spelled it for him. The explanation took considerably longer.

The snow was trampled a couple of yards to the left of the path. When I finished with the English lesson, I nodded toward the mess. “Looks like at least one of the skiers in front of us had a problem.”

“He fell?”

The answer was so obvious, I didn't reply.

“Mayhap he tripped on this rock.”

Dirk stood with one foot hiked up on top of a good-sized rock. Behind him—through him—I could see a rather large fallen branch. How could anybody not have seen those? “Sometimes rocks break away from the cliff face. Usually they fall
straight down, but this one must have bounced to come this far. How could anybody have missed seeing such an obstacle?”

“Mayhap he was looking at yon lovely cliff instead of watching his skees.”

I studied the trampled snow. “It can't have happened too long ago or the snow would have filled in more, even with as little snow as is getting through the trees.”

“Quite the tracker, are ye?”

“You would be, too, if you'd grown up around here.”

“I learnt enough tracking when I was a lad; although”—he pointed to the narrow parallel lines we'd been following—“I never tracked wee beasties with great long footprints like that.”

I moved off the path to my left. I could feel a good-sized branch under my skis. Thank goodness my skis hadn't snagged on it. I glanced down and saw just a hint of smooth brown through the covering of snow. I yarned a branch on the slender birch ahead of me, thinking all the time how silly it was to leave yarn
here
, since I knew this place so well. The trunk leaned across a branch of an enormous sugar maple, and I thought about Robert Frost's poem “Birches.” Had some boy, or girl for that matter, been swinging from this birch to that one nearby and back again, gradually bending the trunks as the trees grew? “Birches grow in Scotland, don't they?”

“Aye. Many.”

“Do children ever climb them and bend them down like this?” I gestured to the trees.

“Aye. Of course. Then, once they are bent, the goats like to climb them.”

“You're teasing, right?”

He looked incredulous. “Do ye not know that goats climb slanting tree trunks?”

“Can't say that was part of my education. Not too many goats around Hamelin.”

I headed up the trail, and he kept pace, shaking his head in exasperation. “What kind of world has this become, where the most common knowledge is lost?”

I plowed to a stop and glared at him. “I'm supposed to feel bad about a lack of goat lore?”

“Ye needna beceorest so.”

“I'll baykerayst if I want to.”
Whatever that is. It's probably related to whingeing.
“I may not know about goats, but you don't know about spreadsheets. Or mass transportation.”
So there.

He narrowed his eyes at me.

I found myself shivering and picked up my pace. The skiers ahead of us must have started dragging something—a load of firewood, maybe? The tidy parallel ski tracks had been obliterated by something wide. If I had to guess, I'd say they'd pulled a canvas tarp behind them. That cabin was fairly close, over the rise ahead of us. If they were there, I'd ask them what they'd done to make such a mess of the trail. I sure hoped a good fire was warming the interior. If not, I was going to start one.