Hooked on Ewe (15 page)

“You’re assuming the murder was committed by a man?” I asked, wondering if the news about the sleeping pill had gotten out yet.

Oliver answered for her. “Aye. A woman doesn’t have that kind o’ strength.”

I studied Lily and Oliver while they discussed the merits of his belief that only a man could have strangled Isla. So far it seemed the inspector had been successful in withholding certain details from the general public. The cupcake sprinkled with crushed sleeping pills was still a secret known only to a few of us investigating the case. And, of course, to the killer.

My thoughts turned to the sort of person who felt the need to offer the victim that cupcake as a prelude to murder. That act, more than anything, made me suspect a female killer now that more information was available. It just didn’t seem like the sort of thing that would occur to a man. Men are so much stronger than women, especially in their upper bodies; a man probably wouldn’t have worried about Isla Lindsey putting up a fight. Plus, sexist though it might seem, between the cupcakes, frosting sprinkles, and the Poppy Red yarn, this murder seemed to have a woman’s touch. At least I thought it did.

Let go of preconceived ideas, Eden,
I chastised myself. Men didn’t always choose violence, shooting or stabbing
their adversaries through the heart, or slicing open throats. And women didn’t always avoid bloodshed by concocting poisons or pressing pillows over faces.

“We’d best get some work done,” Lily said, “before it’s all over.” She grinned at Oliver. “Come along now.”

“As long as I don’t have tae get back in that vehicle,” Oliver quipped. “I’ll agree tae anything.”

After leaving Lily and Oliver, I was just about to finally storm Sheepish Expressions, when my cell phone rang.

It was Sean. “I thought we should coordinate our efforts,” he said. “What are ye up tae?”

“Interviewing some people,” I said, intentionally keeping my movements vague, as I realized I was behaving exactly like the inspector would. “What are you doing?”

“I’m startin’ tae drive the countryside gatherin’ yarn kits that had been posted.”

“Hold off a bit,” I told him, planning to save him wasted time and petrol. “I’ll get back to you shortly. Very shortly.”

“Wha’ are you? Me new boss?”

“Fine. Have at it.” And I disconnected.

At least it would keep him out of my way for a while.

Monday tends to be the slowest day of the week at Sheepish Expressions. Saturdays and Sundays are busiest, with tour buses arriving one after the other; then comes a lull during the first days of the week with a slow buildup again as the week progresses. With summer winding down, business had fallen off substantially.

So it wasn’t surprising to find the parking lot practically empty.

Before entering the shop, I tested the doors of Kirstine’s car. Alas, they were locked, as I’d expected. Peering through the windows didn’t produce anything of interest, either.

I considered my options. There weren’t many. So I took a deep breath, reminded myself to stay cool, calm, and collected, opened the door to Sheepish Expressions, and ventured inside to do a little snooping.

“Not you again!” Kirstine said when she looked up from a pile of knitting needles she was organizing by size. Her
dismissive attitude almost sent me into a fit of anger before I’d even begun.

I forced a smile. “Thought I’d pick out some yarn,” I said, heading for the opposite side of the room where barrels, baskets, and nooks and crannies were brimming with soft, colorful skeins of yarn. Several customers were browsing at a table filled with folded scarves. Another was sifting through a stack of tartan skirts.

“Since when do you knit?” Kirstine asked.

“Since . . . um . . . Vicki offered to teach me.”

Just like that, Kirstine lost interest and went back to what she’d been doing with the knitting supplies when I walked in. A fly, or as the Scots called the most annoying insects, a wee midgie, would have gotten more attention than she was paying to me.

Wonderful.

I casually wandered into the knitting room, turning a few pages in a pattern book. Next, I ran my fingers over some of the skeins of yarn, enjoying the sensations of the different textures as I waited for the perfect moment.

Soon, I heard Kirstine speaking with someone, a customer at the front counter asking questions about tartans and clans. I knew that would give me at least a few minutes to complete the first stage of a rather haphazard plan of action.

I slithered into the back room where Kirstine kept her personal belongings amid a small supply of inventory. I quickly scanned the shelves for twenty-two packages of the same size, prepped for mailing. After making certain they weren’t there, I scooted over to a large desk covered with stacks of paperwork, and began opening drawers,
searching for her purse so I could swipe the keys to her car. Of course I didn’t locate her purse until I’d opened every single drawer. Then I fumbled through it for the keys, which of course were buried at the very bottom.

A sound directly outside of the room startled me. I froze, my heart pounding so loud I thought it would be heard through the door. If someone entered the room, they’d see me right away. It would be tough to explain what I was doing, rifling through Kirstine’s belongings.

But the knob didn’t turn, and the sound that had caused my blood pressure to spike didn’t come again. The breath I hadn’t realized I was holding rushed out.

Quickly, I palmed a key fob and chain with several keys attached, which I assumed were shop and house keys. Then I slowly opened the door to the storage room, peered out, saw that the coast was clear, and ducked back into the knitting room.

Just in time. I’d barely made it before I heard her voice.

“What are
you
still doing here?” Kirstine said from the doorway. She was suspicious now rather than disinterested.

“I can’t decide what to knit first,” I said, slipping her keys into my pocket with one hand while turning the pages of the same pattern book with the other. “A scarf or a shawl. Which should I start with?”

“You don’t need a pattern for a simple beginner’s scarf,” she said, eyeing me with disapproval. “Anybody should be able to handle that.”

“Perfect.” I closed the book and edged around her, heading for the door. “So no pattern necessary. And Vicki is sure to have some extra yarn.”

She followed me through the store as though she
thought I might lift something on my way out. As if! I’ve never stolen anything in my life. I didn’t even consider the pilfered keys in my pocket stolen. “Borrowed” was a better term. I was only borrowing her keys, and certainly had no intention of stealing her vehicle, either.

If I couldn’t have a search warrant, I’d operate under the guise of reasonable grounds. I’d helped Sean with his homework to apply for police training, and it was paying off. I remembered clearly that the police have the right to search if they suspect drugs or weapons, or a variety of other conditions, including stolen property. Still, the inspector would have hardly condoned my actions. He was a by-the-book investigator as he’d been trained. Jamieson was intelligent and thorough, but he was also proper. He followed the rules, didn’t bend them.

But I knew that Kirstine had lied about mailing out the kits, and those skeins of yarn were important to the investigation of a murder. Further, she’d lied to me, a law enforcement agent, which I hoped carried some sort of punishment. I wouldn’t have to sneak around searching for the truth if she hadn’t gone out of her way to deceive me from the beginning and obstruct justice. If she’d just admitted her wrongdoing and given up the kits, I wouldn’t have had to stand in line at the post office and then grill the postmaster. I wouldn’t have had to search her office for her keys and be going on a hunt for those kits this very minute.

Kirstine deserved jail time for wasting precious time and resources.

With that pleasant thought in my mind, visualizing her
behind bars, I stepped outside and away from the shop, made sure no one was observing my movements, and pressed a button on the fob. Kirstine’s trunk popped open.

I peered inside the car boot. It was filled with brown cardboard mailing packages.

Kirstine was
so
b-u-s-t-e-d!

I didn’t bother counting them right away, but I did open up one mailing box, just to make absolutely sure that these were the kits we’d been looking for. There was no mistaking the contents Vicki had packed, or the label
A Sheepish Expression Exclusive: Poppy Sox Knitting Kit
.

I smiled with sheer delight. Then I used my cell phone to contact the inspector and request his presence at the shop.

“Can ye tell me the reason?” he pressed.

“It’s complicated. I’d rather you see it for yourself.”

“In that case, I’m on my way.”

Only then did I count them. Twenty-two. No more. No less. Just as I’d expected.

This discovery meant almost all the kits Vicki had assembled for the yarn club members were accounted for. Only a few still remained out there. I did a mental appraisal. Thirty-five at the beginning minus twenty-two right here was thirteen, minus the other seven that hadn’t been picked up on Saturday left six. Of those six, we’d obtained the ones from Senga, Charlotte, and the two belonging to the volunteers who had designed the programs. That meant only two were still out there—Andrea Lindsey’s and the kit Harry Taggart had picked up for his sister in Glasgow.

I couldn’t help feeling a sense of pride in my accomplishment. Yet a cloud fell over my sunny outlook. So . . . we were making some progress. Thanks in part to . . .

Well . . . now that I really gave it some thought . . . to Kirstine . . . but only because of her obstinate behavior. If she hadn’t been trying to stick it to Vicki by neglecting to mail out the kits, our work would be more difficult than it turned out to be. So in a way she’d helped rather than hurt us.

Not intentionally, that was for sure, but still . . . in spite of her efforts otherwise, she had.

I didn’t want either Harry or Andrea to be involved in Isla’s murder. How could they be? Harry was committed to the hospice, and by all accounts, had done a superb job of securing its future. Isla took orders from him, but if he didn’t want her around, he could have gotten rid of her easily enough without resorting to violence.
Shove off
, he could have told her, in a nicer way of course.

And Andrea Lindsey? Andrea never made waves, didn’t have strong opinions, and definitely wasn’t the murdering type. Was she? Besides, why would she kill her own sister-in-law? Although the use of the crushed sleeping pill did give me pause, as did the fact that Andrea
was
a nurse. . . .

I had to remind myself that neither of them had to be the killer. If I was going to murder someone, I wouldn’t use my own weapon if I could steal someone else’s.

I considered ringing up Sean and announcing my successful score to relieve him of a wasted day of traveling around to collect them. But he’d been climbing up on a high horse and since he’d expressed his reluctance to take
my advice when I’d tried to offer it, he was on his own. He could continue on the snipe hunt until the inspector called him home.

Which, knowing the relationship between the inspector and Sean, wasn’t going to happen too quickly.

While I waited impatiently for Inspector Jamieson to arrive, I leaned against Kirstine’s car, still feeling the satisfaction of a job well done.

My smugness faded soon after.

“What are you bloody doing?” I heard from the direction of the shop, a familiar voice filled with a roiling, boiling combination of surprise and rage.

Turning, I saw Kirstine charging my way, snorting fire, shooting me with eye-glare daggers, a ruddy, splotchy red flush on her contorted face. She was also clutching one of the knitting needles she’d been working with, one of those enormous needles with a wickedly pointed tip.

My impending death flashed before my eyes. For a brief moment, my mind went numb and my limbs locked in place. Then I took in what was about to happen. If I didn’t get moving, my innards might end up spilled on the ground.

So I ran around to the far side of her car, making sure to stay on the balls of my feet in case quick direction changes were required.

Kirstine was at the open trunk. She slowed down. Her eyes slid from me to the contents of the trunk and back to me again.

Perhaps if I’d been wearing a police uniform, she might have remembered that I deserved a little respect as part of the inspector’s team. She certainly wouldn’t have reacted
with such open hostility if Inspector Jamieson were here instead of me. She would have shown the proper decorum and behaved rationally.

Although on second thought, the inspector might not have allowed himself to be caught in this predicament. But that’s where I was at the moment—in a difficult situation with no way out.

She rounded the car, coming straight at me.

“Stop right there!” I shouted a warning, trying to figure out whether I should keep running around the car or make a stand. She hadn’t raised the knitting needle in a threatening manner, but was I prepared to take the chance that she would? This wasn’t going to become Eden’s Last Stand. “Stop! Right there,” I repeated, still moving away from her.

Kirstine didn’t acknowledge the warning.

So I did exactly what the inspector had hoped I’d never have to resort to. Although he couldn’t have anticipated the precarious position I now found myself in, with a crazy woman attacking me wielding a needle sharp enough to do serious damage to the body I highly valued.

Not able to come up with a better option in the spur of the moment, I whipped out the pepper spray and hit the button, giving Kirstine a healthy blast. Healthy for me. Not so much for her.

It did the trick.

Kirstine came to an abrupt halt, stopping dead in her tracks. She dropped the knitting needle to the ground. Her eyes slammed shut, her hands shot to her face, and she started screeching.

Pepper spray isn’t life threatening, it doesn’t even result in raised blood pressure, so I wasn’t a bit worried that she
was really injured, even though to listen you’d think she was in her death throes. Temporarily blind, maybe, but that would pass.

What
did
concern me were the volunteers out in the field. I looked out and saw all heads turned our way. I waved and shouted as loud as I possibly could, “Everything’s fine.”

Several waved in return and all of them went back to what they were doing prior to Kirstine’s screams.

She began coughing, a sign she’d inhaled some of the fumes.

If sprayed, according to prior research, the best bet was to move away to fresh air. I really wanted to leave her to suffer but instead I led the blind woman away from the area.

“It’s only temporary,” I told her.

“You attacked me!”

“Blink,” I ordered. “And keep blinking. That will help wash the spray out.”

Milk would also help. I could call up to the house and tell Vicki to bring some over to the shop. And we needed access to soap and water so Kirstine could wash her face.

“I’m filing charges!” Kirstine said.

“I acted in self-defense,” I replied.

“My arse, you did. Pepper spray is against the law. You’ll be shipped out of Scotland for good, and the sooner, the better, if you ask me.”

I changed my mind about helping her. An hour or so of pepper pain might do her a world of good.