A Wee Dose of Death (17 page)

Dirk turned away from the kitchen window when I snapped on the light. “Could ye no sleep?”

“You don't,” I said with a blithe disregard of logic, “so why should I?”

“Ye are no dead,” he said, which was such an obvious statement I ignored it and headed for the bread box.

“Ye maun go to see Mistress Emily again.”

It had taken me a while to learn that “maun” meant “must.” He'd been
maun
ing me right and left for most of the past week. Except when he was folded up. “And why would that be?”

“She doesna have visitors.”

He folded his arms, changed his mind, and planted one fist on his tartan-clad hip. The other hand drummed against his kilt, setting it to vibrating.

I tried not to look down the length of his leg, but I sort of lost that battle. Before he could notice—at least I hoped he hadn't noticed, but there was an uplift to the side of his mouth that said maybe he had—I averted my eyes and paid attention to the buttered bread in the fry pan.

“The puir woman. She has been widowed for only a short while.”

His hand stopped the drumming and went to his other hip. It made his shoulders look extra broad. “Have ye never lost someone dear to ye? Have ye never grieved for a year and a day?”

“A year and a day? What are you talking about?”

“Everyone kens that when ye lose a husband or a child, a parent, brother, or sister, ye maun mourn for one day more than a year.”

“Everybody might have known that back when you were alive—although I've never heard of it so maybe it was just a Scottish thing—but we don't do that sort of enforced mourning thing anymore.” I turned the toast to brown the other side.

“Why do ye no? How do ye deal wi' the grief or help friends and family to deal with theirs? How would ye honor your dead?”

“Well.” I thought about it. I'd never lost a husband—maybe because I'd never
had
a husband—and both my parents were still very much alive. “Maybe it's because we don't deal with death quite so much in this century as you had to do back then.” I flipped the toast one more time. “Not on a day-to-day basis.”

The line between his heavy eyebrows deepened. “Everyone must die.”

“That's true, but I think we generally do it a little later in life than you used to.”

He didn't look convinced.

“Look at you,” I said and plopped the stove toast out onto a small plate. “You died when you were thirty, right?”

“Aye.”

Plate in hand, I headed toward the woodstove. It felt cold in the kitchen. Maybe it was because I hadn't put on my slippers. Maybe it was Dirk's frosty attitude. “And Peigi, your ladylove, you said she was about twenty when she died?”

“Aye.”

The grief I heard in that one syllable almost stopped me in my tracks. It was a few seconds before I could follow through on my train of thought. “Nowadays, if you lived now,
I mean, you'd expect to reach seventy-five at least. And Peigi could look forward to reaching eighty.”

“Why would she want to live longer than I?”

Men.
“It's not a matter of wanting to outlive you. Statistics just say that women live longer than men. Wasn't it like that in your day?”

He worried his lower lip with his very white upper teeth. “Ye mentioned Master Stuhstisticks once before, but ye didna explain who he was.”

“It means the chances of something happening. Statistics are the numbers of things that some people keep track of, and that gives us an idea of the likelihood . . .” My voice trailed off in the face of Dirk's look of absolute bewilderment. I tried again. “Nowadays people—some people—keep track of how long individuals live. Once you've counted enough people, then you have
statistics
and you begin to see, uh, trends?”

“Did people count these things when I was alive?”

“I doubt it.” I opened the damper a bit to rack up the heat. “I think statistics is a fairly modern field.”

He seemed to mull this over. “Many women were widowed when I lived. But then again, many of the women died in childbirth. A man who outlived three or four wives was not unusual.”

“Childbirth isn't quite so scary nowadays.”

He strode to the window and back. My living room wasn't nearly big enough for pacing. At least not for someone with legs as long as Dirk's.

“Ye havena answered me yet.”

I took a big bite and asked, with my mouth full, “Answered you about what?”

“About ye going to visit wi' Mistress Emily.”

“Oh, all right, I'll go after I close the shop tomorrow—later today—but you have to come along, too, again.”

He raised one eyebrow. It wasn't quite a scowl, but it was close to it. I could almost hear him saying,
I could ha' come wi' ye many times to many places if ye didna keep rolling me up in yon wee shawl.

He had a point. It didn't matter whether or not he said it. I got it.

A Wee Ski in the Woods

S
unday morning, Dirk called out to me from the bay window a couple of minutes before eight. “Ye maun be ready to go. Mistress Karaline is close by.”

“I'm ready,” I said. “All I have to do is finish tying my shoelaces.” Of course I also had to pull on a stocking cap and adjust the shawl around my shoulders. I fastened it with a sword-shaped kilt pin, one I'd bought the first time I visited Pitlochry, when I was considering opening the ScotShop. I stuck two big cloth hankies in a zippered pocket on the front of my pants leg and a third one in my parka—much better than paper tissues that came apart after the first two wipes.

Dirk waved out the window. I glanced outside in time to see Karaline wave back from the end of the walkway where she leaned lightly on one of her ski poles. A pair of skiers—people I didn't recognize—glided past, looking up at my house. They couldn't see me, far back in the living room as I was. And they certainly couldn't see Dirk. I could just
imagine them wondering why she was waving at an empty house.

“Okay. Let's go.” I opened the door, and Dirk glided out onto the porch as smoothly as if he'd been on skis himself.

That first breath of chilled early-morning air over a three-foot-deep covering of snow made my nose hairs crinkle when I stepped outside. Between zero and five degrees, I guessed. Not that it mattered. We were going regardless of the temperature. The blizzard still raged throughout the rest of New England; I was glad I didn't have to deal with zero visibility this morning.

I pulled my skis from the mound of snow I'd stuck them in last night, brushed them off lightly with my glove, and laid them next to each other flat on the snow at the top of the ramp that led down from my deck. My twin brother, Drew, seldom visited me in the wintertime. Dealing with the snow under his wheelchair was just too much hassle. I truly did wish I'd thought to have heating elements installed underneath the ramp, only then the ramp would have had to be metal, and I wasn't sure I liked that idea.

I inserted the metal toe of my right shoe into the front binding until I heard a
click
. Once I was sure that shoe was secure, I did the same with my other foot. “Ready,” I called, and followed Karaline down the middle of Hickory Lane. Before we got home in a couple of hours, the snowplow would already have done its damage, so we'd have to take off our skis to cross the street, but for now, life couldn't be better.

Harper
, I thought.

Well, all right, it could be better, but in the meantime, what with no vehicle traffic, the heavy blanket of snow that had fallen overnight, and a glorious morning, I wasn't holding off on enjoying any of it. My neighbor had once again shoveled the end of my drive where the snowplow had made
one pass, most likely well before dawn. With my bedroom at the back of the house, and with Shorty purring so loudly beside me as I slept, I hadn't heard a thing.

I sped up a little and veered to my right so I was next to Karaline, but I didn't say anything. I wanted to tell her everything I'd learned about Emily, but decided to wait until we were off the lane and onto smooth, unbroken snow. The morning was too splendid for talking, so far, anyway. Even Dirk seemed subdued. Wrong word. He seemed quietly happy. It was a good feeling, knowing he cared for each of us. Why had I ever thought to get rid of him?

“Good morning!” The greeting came from our right, where the street forked. Scamp pranced at the end of a leash. He looked like he was walking Gilda rather than the other way around.

Dirk squatted. I noticed that he took care to drape a fold of his kilt between his legs—a necessary precaution if he had nothing on under there. Why was I thinking of such a thing on a Sunday morning?

Scamp tugged on the leash, slowing when he was within a few feet of Dirk. He stretched his neck, his nose wriggling like crazy.

“What's he doing?” Gilda asked. “Scamp, are you okay?”

Karaline chuckled. “He probably just likes to sniff the air.”

And the resident ghost.

“I didna know Mistress Gilda had a wee doggie.”

“How long have you had Scamp?” I thought I'd be helpful.

Gilda looked at me funny. “Since the summer.”

“That's right. Too bad you didn't start bringing him to the ScotShop until just the last few days.”

Dirk peered up at me. “Whan that I was . . . wrapped . . . in the wee shawl? Is that when the doggie appeared? Is that why I havena met him until now?”

Scamp tilted his head from one side to the other, and we all laughed. Thank goodness. It kept me from having to answer my wee ghostie.

Gilda gave the leash a gentle tug. “Come, Scamp. Time to head on home.” She raised her chin. “We walk at least three miles every day.”

“Good for you. I'll see you at noon.” I watched them until they were out of sight. He sure was a cute pup. Maybe I could get a Scottie for myself.

Within a couple of blocks, we came to the place where a public path led between two houses. We had to stop so we could sidestep up the enormous mound of snow piled beside the road from previous snowplow runs. Dirk watched with a growing sense of hilarity. We started, standing sideways next to the four-foot-tall mound, with me about six feet in back of Karaline. We each lifted one foot far enough so the ski was off the ground. Once we'd dug that ski into the side of the piled-up snow about a foot and a half up the pile, we had to haul the other one up beside the first one and slightly downslope from it. Then we had to dig that ski into the snow enough to be sure it was securely anchored; once that was accomplished, we'd lift the first ski higher and repeat the process.

By the time we reached the top of the pile, Dirk was practically rolling on the snow. “Ye look like two mallards,” he croaked between guffaws. “Quack, quack.”

I didn't think it was nearly that funny. “You'd quack a different tune if you had to try it yourself.”

Within moments, Karaline was laughing too hard to pay attention to what she was doing. She slid on her side down the final couple of feet, quacking as she went, skis flailing in the air ahead of her. I'm happy to say I maintained a more dignified demeanor as I descended and helped her brush off the snow—and dig some of it out of the bottom of her jacket.

We glided side by side most of the way across the meadow where the Hamelin Highland Games were held each summer to the edge of the forest, at which point I dropped behind Karaline and let her break the path up the Perth trail. When we came to what I increasingly tended to think of as my Robert Frost spot, we stopped for a moment. We had to keep our feet moving, of course, but we stood there, skis firmly planted, raising one heel as high as we could and then the other. “I visited Emily yesterday,” I said.

Karaline just looked at me. I could tell she wasn't particularly interested.

“Remember how we were wondering what Dr. W might have seen in her?”

She perked up her ears—well, they were under a knit cap, but she looked more involved in the conversation than she had been a few seconds earlier. “Did you find out something?” She bounced up on both feet a couple of times. “Something interesting,” she added.

“Wait'll you hear this.” By the time I was halfway through recounting the story of Emily's career and the throat cancer, Karaline had forgotten to move her feet. So had I, for that matter.

“It was worth putting up with her steam bathhouse,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

I explained about the heat. “Such a waste of energy,” I said. “And to think she lives in such a well-insulated home. It's not like she has to keep the heat up to compensate for cold air coming in through cracks.”

Karaline looked up into the bright sunshine above us, as it danced through the trees, but I had the feeling she wasn't really seeing it. “Of course she's cold all the time,” she finally said.

“What do you mean?”

“For why would ye say that?”

Dirk's and my questions came out at the same time.

“I bet her cancer affected her thyroid.” She didn't say anything else, almost as if she expected me to know what the heck she was talking about.

I looked at Dirk. He looked at me and made one of those gestures that said,
Beats me
, although I didn't think that phrase was available in the fourteenth century. Karaline must have tuned in to our lack of response. “Thyroid cancer,” she said again. “When the thyroid is injured or destroyed, the body can't regulate its temperature—can't heat itself from the inside. Weather that seems moderately balmy to us can feel bitingly cold to someone with low thyroid function. They would have given her a prescription, but I'd be willing to bet the dosage needs to be adjusted.”

Things began to make sense. “I don't think I've ever seen her without long sleeves, and some sort of scarf or wrap around her neck, even at the height of the summer.”

Karaline began to shuffle her feet again. “Speaking of cold, we'd better hurry if we're going to get back to Hamelin before noon.”

“You think we'll really find something?” I asked. “That cabin is truly minuscule. There's nowhere to hide anything the police wouldn't already have found.”

“You'd be surprised,” she said, and headed up the trail.

*   *   *

Harper sat on
the side of his bed Sunday morning, still in his boxers. He was ready to pull his heavy socks on, but unwilling to let go of the thoughts swirling around his brain. First, his dad. Of all the stupid things he could have done, getting thrown in jail in the middle of South America was one of the stupidest. Especially since he'd caught a bug of some sort. A bug that killed him.

By the time he got the body cremated and the ashes home, Harper had been ordered to Poughkeepsie because of a breakthrough in a case he'd worked on—an identity theft ring. Even with the break, that investigation had gotten nowhere. He'd developed something of a reputation when he worked in Poughkeepsie, what with the first ring he'd busted. But now this new one was better protected, harder to crack.

And then there was the Wantstring death. Harper wasn't ready to quit on this investigation, no matter how frustrating it felt to be so far past the death date and still not have a clue. He wouldn't quit. Not yet. Something was bound to turn up.

Maybe he should ski up to that little cabin where the body had been found. Murphy said he'd checked the place thoroughly, but there was always a chance something minor had been overlooked. Something that seemed minor but might be the key to cracking the case wide-open.

He dressed quickly, threw an insulated bottle of water into a small day pack, stuck the metal-reinforced toes of his ski boots into his cross-country skis, and headed for the Perth.

He'd find some answers there. He was pretty sure of that.