A Wee Murder in My Shop (A ScotShop Mystery) (6 page)

“Why?”

I pointed.

“My dagger?”

“It’s called a dirk.” Why did I have to teach a Scotsman about something as elementary as this?

“Nae. ’Tis my dagger.”

Then it dawned on me. A lot of words had changed between then and now. “Nowadays we call it a
dirk
. Anyway, I like the name.”

He muttered something unintelligible.

“I have to take a shower before I turn in.”

He headed for the bookshelves next to my dresser. “A shower? And what would that be?” His voice was overly polite and only mildly inquisitive.

“I have to bathe.” He turned around, and I thought his eyebrows arched, but he turned back away so quickly I couldn’t be sure.

“Is the woman out there your servant to carry the water in for ye?”

“She’s not my servant. She’s my friend. Tell you what: Let me just fold you up in the shawl. You can take a nice little rest, and I’ll explain it all later.”

His fist clenched. “Ye say that entirely too frequently.” His
r
’s rolled so much, I thought his tongue would shake loose.

“Well, I’m sorry, but I just don’t know whether I can trust you.” Instead of snapping back at me, he began to laugh. I crossed my arms. “What on earth are you cackling about?”

He gasped a couple of times before he could settle down. “I canna pull out a chair. I canna open a door. I canna close it. I canna even decide for myself whither to go because yon shawl pulls me along with ye.” He ran a wide, strong hand through his shoulder-length black hair. “And ye wonder what I might do if I see ye in your shift?” He leaned against the dresser and crossed his arms. His face grew solemn. “I dinna like the feeling of . . . of nothingness that I find in yon shawl. If I promise on the honor of my clan to keep my back turned, will ye please just get on with it and let me sit quiet by all these lovely books of yours?”

Chastened, I pushed my comfy red chair over beside the bookcase, facing the window, and draped the shawl on the back of it. I halfway expected him to disappear when I let go, but he sat and leaned against the shawl. “My thanks,” was all he said. A daddy longlegs spider crawled up the arm of the chair and paused with just a whisper of space between its nose and Dirk’s arm. Fine with me. Spiders ate bugs, and Dirk seemed to attract spiders like a kilted man attracted curious females.

*   *   *

Half an hour
later, my skin still tingling from the blessedly hot water, I wrapped my fuzzy blue bathrobe firmly around the green oversized UVM T-shirt I slept in and stepped out of the bathroom. Dirk was bent over the white table near the door where I always kept a coffee-table book. I’d been looking at
Among Trees
, a book of photographs by Sean Kernan, off and on for a couple of weeks, simply relishing the gorgeous black-and-white photos of trees from all around the world.

I walked up beside him. “Lovely, isn’t it?” I brushed my hand across the dust jacket, a photo of tall pines, most of them limbless twenty feet up or so, with what looked to me like early morning sun oozing through mist.

“Aye, it is indeed. I have never seen a painting so precise.”

“It’s not a painting,” I said. “This is called a photograph.”

He thought briefly. “Drawing with light?”

At my perplexed look, he went on, “I learned some of the Greek and Latin when I was a boy. Father Marcus was a good man, although he sometimes tried to beat the knowledge into me.” He rubbed his backside a bit absentmindedly. “My father, though, didna think learning was a’ that important.”

“How many years did you study with Father Marcus?”

“Until I was twelve, grown enough to do a man’s work all day.”

“You knew Latin and Greek at
twelve
?”

“Och, aye. Not as much as Father Marcus, but enough to get by.” His hand hovered over the book.

“What did you call it? Painting with light?”

“Drawing. That is the
graph
part. ’Tis a Greek word. And
photo
, of course, means light.”

“Oh, of course.”

I don’t think he caught my sarcasm, because he continued smoothly, “So it would be light-drawing. Lovely.” He paused, and added, “How is it done?”

“It’s kind of complicated.” I opened the book at random and flipped back to the introduction. “Here, you can read this while I write in my journal.”

My poor neglected journal. I’d written in it only that one night in Scotland. How on earth could I sum up everything that had happened in the past week?

As I settled back against my pillows and pulled Shorty close to my side, I watched Dirk. He wasn’t simply reading. He devoured the book. He kept brushing his hands across it, as if it were somehow holy. A treasure indeed. I sighed and examined my journal. I took my journal so for granted. What on earth would I have done if I’d lived in a time when women routinely were not taught to read? Ghastly thought.

I absolutely did not want to write about Mason—no sense having him on paper since he was no longer in my life. I could write about Scotland, the Sinclairs, and Pitlochry. The shawl. Its resident wee ghostie.

Engrossed in writing, I didn’t notice Dirk beside the bed until I set down my ballpoint and he appeared in my peripheral vision.

“Since ye have paused writing in the wee book”—his voice went soft when he said that word, and I could hear the awe in it—“would ye mind owermuch coming to turn the page for me?”

“Sure.” I moved Shorty off my lap and pushed the comforter back. His eyes widened as I swung my bare legs over the edge. I grabbed my bathrobe.

He readjusted his plaid, pulling it more firmly up on his shoulder. “I have one question, if ye dinna mind.”

I looked up at him. “What’s your question?” This was no wee ghostie. I don’t think I’d fathomed until then just how tall he was. Except in the porta potty, but I’d almost forgotten that. I was a sucker for broad shoulders. My eyes came well below his Adam’s apple. It lurched a bit as he swallowed.

“Where did ye hide the inkwell when ye wrote?”

Mason Kilmarty

M
ason would have kicked himself if Andrea hadn’t beaten him to it. Out into the cold—well, all right, so it wasn’t all that chilly. Out on the streets, though. The walk home from Andrea’s usually took him only a few minutes, but he’d backtracked up to Hickory Lane to take a look at Peggy’s house. All those roses he’d sent her. She loved roses. She’d said so when they first started dating. She could have called to thank him. Why hadn’t she?

A light was on upstairs. Her car in the driveway. He walked as far as the bottom of the wheelchair ramp before he chickened out. She’d made her feelings pretty clear with that punch she’d given him last week. He rubbed his chin where the bruise was. She sure packed a wallop. Maybe she’d changed her mind, though.

He stood watching from the end of the driveway until the light went out. As he turned away from Peggy’s house, back toward his apartment in the middle of Hamelin, he vowed he’d give her something expensive for her birthday; it was coming up soon. He did know it was her thirtieth. He remembered that much. The other two—Gilda and Andrea—they’d just been flings. But Peggy was the real thing.

Once he got to Main Street, the street lamps puddled pale gold circles directly beneath their poles, closehanded as a string of misers, but Mason avoided even the edges of their light.

He paused across the street from Sweetie’s Jellybean Emporium. He’d stop by tomorrow and buy a pound or two.

The breeze picked up, swirling his kilt around his legs, and a stray piece of paper skittered across the street and into the gutter. He stepped away from the window, debating whether or not to run after it. Peggy would have. But Peggy was not a factor at the moment. Unless maybe she’d like to have him back. It couldn’t hurt. Maybe it would bring him good luck. He darted after the paper and scooped it up. He unfolded it, but here between streetlights, he couldn’t see what was written. Looked like a list of some sort. He crumpled it carelessly and stuffed it in his sporran. There.

Mason squared his shoulders and stepped back onto the sidewalk, intending to walk on home, but a glint of moving light caught his eye. Peggy’s store. Nobody should be there this time of night. He crossed the street again and stopped at the big display window. Through a tiny crack in the curtains behind the mannequins, he saw the vague form of someone moving near the back wall.

Peggy may have thrown him out—just like Andrea had, damn her hide—but he wasn’t going to let somebody hurt Peggy. He felt for his cell phone, remembered he’d left it at Andrea’s, and swore under his breath.

Mason eased his way over to the front door and quietly tried the handle. Locked. Just as well, he thought. That bell over the door would have given him away.

He turned left and headed alongside the empty courtyard toward the alley behind the Pitcairn Building.

A single car stood in the alley near the ScotShop’s back door. Mason thought it looked vaguely familiar. He was sure he’d seen it recently. By the time he reached the door, he’d remembered—and it was someone who had no right to be there. The door stood slightly ajar. Mason took a deep breath, straightened his kilt, clenched his fists, and stepped inside.

Mirror Talk

T
he next morning, Dirk was gone. So was the shawl.

I searched frantically through the house. Kitchen, pantry, living room, office, the guest bath. I even looked in closets, which was stupid, come to think of it. He couldn’t open doors. Nothing. He wasn’t anywhere.

Could he have gotten outside somehow? I turned the handle on the kitchen door, but the thought of Mr. Pitcairn stopped me. My friendly neighbor from the old, old house next door loved to talk over the fence. It didn’t matter what time of day I went out, he always seemed to show up, almost as if he’d been waiting for me, usually with helpful advice about landscaping or mowing. I knew he was lonely. His wife used to invite Karaline and me to dinner about once a month, but she died a year ago, and he’d become something of a recluse.

I looked down at my sleep shirt. Would not do. Nothing for it but to get dressed first. I headed upstairs.

And shrieked when I charged into the bathroom. Dirk sat on the edge of the tub, fingering the knobs for hot and cold water. The shawl was thrown across one shoulder, over his plaid. He stood quickly. “I always heard that people cry out when they see a ghost. Now I know ’tis true.” He smiled. “Although ye didna cirmest like that when ye saw me the first time.”

Keermist? What kind of word was that?

“Why, I wonder. Why did ye no?”

I was still a bit angry with him for scaring me, but after a moment’s reflection, I didn’t want to admit how relieved I was to have found him. I walked the few steps to the sink and turned on the hot water. Looking at him in the mirror, I matched his smile. “You seemed so natural in that meadow. You didn’t scare me, or at least not until I realized I could see through you a bit.”

He watched the water running for several seconds, shook his head, and looked at me in the mirror. “How are these made?” He gestured vaguely in front of him.

“How are what made? Faucets?”

“This mirror. I saw only one in my time. ’Twas polished brass. My face looked brown and distorted in it.”

“Oh.” I turned off the water. No sense in wasting it. “There was this period called the Industrial Revolution. It started in the, uh, the seventeen hundreds, I think, right around the time the steam engine was invented.”

“Yes?” He lifted his dark eyebrows in inquiry.

“Um, that was a time when people found ways to make things using machines.”

“Things?” He smiled at my reflection. “Like this mirror?”

I turned to face him directly. “Uh-huh, and thread and huge looms so fabric could be made more cheaply.”

Before I could keep going with my litany of the wonders of civilization, he looked down at his sturdy homespun shirt and his luscious hand-woven plaid and then at my UVM T-shirt. “Aye, cheaply,” he said. “And the people who used to make those things? What happened to them?”

Visions of child labor swam through my head. Soot, polluted rivers, tubercular factory workers, the Ghost of Christmas Present with two starving children beneath his cloak. I turned and opened the hot water tap. “They had jobs in factories, where the things were made.” It was a cop-out, but I couldn’t bear the thought of his look if he knew what steam engines and mirrors and fabric had really cost humanity.

He peered over my shoulder at the water. “That must be the source of the waterfall sound I heard last night when ye bathed, but it was louder somehow then.”

I turned my head and gestured toward the tub. “That was the shower.” This was hopeless. How could I possibly teach him everything I’d spent my life simply knowing? I shooed him out of the bathroom and into the hall. “You go somewhere else. Just stay in the house.” He was halfway down the hall before I realized he was more than a yard or so away from me. “Wait! How’d you do that?”

He turned and spread his hands. “Do what?”

“You’re not next to me. You’ve always had to be”—I swept my arms to indicate a wide circle around me—“closer.”

He wrinkled his forehead. “Aye. That’s true. Mayhap ’tis because this is your house, and your spirit spreads through it.” He raised a hand to his chest and fingered the shawl. “Or mayhap ’tis because I hold my Peigi’s work so close to me.” He spread the edge of it out, and I saw the flicker of the white line. “This is the first thing I have been able to lift, the first thing I can truly touch, since I came into this world of yours, this time of yours.”

I felt a totally unreasonable pang of—jealousy. I was jealous of a woman who’d been dead 650 years? Yes. I hated to admit it—even if only to myself. I certainly wasn’t going to admit it to him.

“I’m going to get dressed. I’ll be out in a little while.” I shut the door firmly between us.

I don’t know what he did while I was getting ready for the day, but I found him standing at my kitchen sink, looking out the window toward the bird feeders.

I wrenched a banana from a bunch hanging on the banana hook and peeled it. Dirk watched in fascinated silence.

“Go sit over there while I cook me some eggs.”

“Ah, eggs. Aye. Where do ye keep your chickens? I saw none outside.”

I opened the fridge. “You and I are going to take a little trip to the grocery store in a couple of days. That will explain a lot.”

After my usual breakfast of fried eggs, two slabs of pan-fried toast, and two links of extra-hot sausage, I excused myself to brush my teeth. Dirk’s teeth were in awfully good shape. I’d noticed that right away—well, in the porta potty. I turned around and leaned my head against the door jam. “Did you have toothbrushes back then?”

“What would be a—”

“Never mind, I’m sure you didn’t. I just don’t understand why your teeth are so healthy. Didn’t everybody back then have teeth that rotted out of their heads?”

His face went through a series of contortions. I couldn’t tell whether he was getting ready to laugh or growl. “Nae. Not everybody.” I must have looked unconvinced. “My grandmam taught us all to use wee twigs of willow trees to clean our teeth.”

“Twigs? How could that help?”

“We mashed the ends until they were soft-like.” He made a motion so like an actor in a Crest commercial I laughed.

*   *   *

“Let’s go,” I
called to Dirk a few minutes later. Shorty lay snoozing on the couch. I stroked his back and he fluttered one eye halfway open. “Guard the house,” I told him, as I always did, although why I bothered I had no idea. Shutting the door behind us, I stepped toward the head of the ramp and stopped short. Another dozen deep red roses stood in a floral delivery vase. Prepaid. Crap. I pushed the vase aside with the toe of my shoe. More food for the compost pile this afternoon.

“Yon flowers dinna look like any rose I ever saw.”

“They’re not, I’m sure. These are grown in a greenhouse, and they’ve been bred for size and color, but they don’t smell nearly as nice as the heirloom roses—the kind you must have known when you . . . back then.”

“When I was alive.”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking how very alive he looked right now, with his ebony hair spilling onto his shoulders, catching the morning light.
Stop it, Peggy. He’s a ghost.

He stepped back a pace and studied the blooms. “They are the color of spilled blood before it darkens.”

I shivered, although I’ve never been particularly superstitious. “Let’s go. I want to get my shop open. Two tour buses are on the schedule today.” I headed down the front walk. “When people come into the store, don’t say a word.”

Dirk stepped in front of me, and I had to stop so I wouldn’t run into him. I didn’t even want to think what would happen if I passed right through him. Yuck.

“Ye dinna have to keep telling me that. I am not simpleminded.”

“Sorry. I just don’t want to look like an—” I stopped myself. Why did I worry what he thought about my language? Dirk was a ghost for heaven’s sake. Still, he was more effective than my mother at keeping my mouth clean.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m talking to the wind.”

“I dinna think that is what ye planned to say.” He wiggled his eyebrows at me. “Am I right, now?” When I didn’t reply, he added, “I will try to stay quiet in your wee store.”

Mr. Pitcairn’s slightly adenoidal voice drifted into my consciousness. I’d been so intent on Dirk, I hadn’t thought about my next-door neighbor. “Are you starting to talk to yourself?” He chuckled and wagged his finger at me from his front porch.

I didn’t have time to talk, so I just waved and kept walking. Mr. P reminded me of nothing so much as an aging basset hound with his stumpy legs, massive chest, and slightly bowed arms. He had brown hair and baggy eyes. The only things missing were a tail and droopy ears.

His wife, before she died, had been chatty, round, the stereotypical sweet little woman. He’d always been a basset, though. Even when she was alive, he’d harbored an underlying sadness. Two months after her funeral, he’d resumed the monthly dinner invitations, although he never included Karaline anymore. I felt too sorry for him to decline, even though he wasn’t much of a cook.

I wondered occasionally if he thought I was a slob. His yard was meticulously maintained, unlike my rather junglelike assortment of native shrubs under carefully positioned trees. Fat bees bumbled through the clover and dandelions. My weedy yard was sunny in the winter and shady in the summer, and I loved it that way. Mr. P’s yard, on the other hand, was golf course quality. Mow, mow, mow. Every couple of days, he religiously deadheaded the impatiens at the foot of his mailbox. Any errant grass blades that dared to come up in his flowerbed were yanked immediately. Heaven forefend that there should be a dandelion in his lawn. I’d seen him wield a hedge trimmer with a vengeance whenever the hedge on the far side of his yard grew any delinquent shoots.

I glanced back over my shoulder. My foxgloves were getting a bit scroungy. I’d have to take a closer look. Later.

Dirk muttered something under his breath.

“What did you say?” I whispered it, trying not to move my lips, still aware of Mr. P watching me from his front porch.

“I asked if ye were a healer.”

“Why would you think that?”

He pointed his nose toward the masses of flowers. “Ye have foxglove for the hearts that skip, garlic for ears that pain, elderberry for the flux, and”—here he pointed to where the weeping willow in my backyard towered above the house—“and willow bark for heads that pound. I dinna know any of the others. My Peigi taught me those four.”

“I didn’t know you could use garlic for earaches.”

“And ye call yourself a healer?”

“No, I don’t, but what’s the garlic for?”

“My Peigi put garlic in the ears of children who wept for the pain, and they stopped their weeping eventually.”

Maybe garlic counteracted bacterial infection. I didn’t ask Dirk about it, though. Bacteria would have sounded like monsters to him if I’d tried to explain them.

“I’d be happy to mow your lawn for you,” Mr. P called out to me. “I have plenty of time.”

“Thanks, Mr. P, but I like it on the long side.” He’d probably mow down all my native wildflowers if given half a chance, and there wouldn’t be any more clover for the bees, either.

His mouth turned down as he compressed his lips. Poor Mr. P, having to put up with me as a neighbor. I know it was rude, and I hated to hurt his feelings—he really was a nice man—but I just ushered Dirk into the car and left with a wave.

“I’ll see you for dinner tonight,” he called after me.

Rats. I’d forgotten that.