And that had sounded inane. Liss gave herself a mental head slap. Obviously, the mere mention of marriage had scrambled her brains.
“What are you really up to?” Dan asked.
“Nothing.” No way was she going to admit that she wanted a block of time with no distractions so that she could think about what he’d said to her just before Jeff showed up.
“Try again.”
Casual, she warned herself. Keep it casual. Go with an answer he’ll accept. It wasn’t hard to come up with one. She forced a laugh. “Okay. You caught me out. I want to take a look at the notes I made on the Scottish Heritage Appreciation Society. Three weeks ago, when I first agreed to help out with the Burns Night Supper, I did some research to familiarize myself with the organization. There might be something in that file that will help the police.”
As she’d anticipated, Dan believed her. He didn’t particularly like her explanation, but he bought it.
They stopped at her sidewalk, which hadn’t been shoveled. Wading through deep snow to reach the porch kept Dan fully occupied and avoided any unfortunate comments he might have meant to make about her meddling in a criminal investigation.
Liss was out of breath by the time she turned her key in the lock. As she’d expected, it was pitch dark inside the house, but it felt at least twenty degrees warmer than it did outside. Dan fumbled in his pack for the flashlight he’d stashed there. He clicked it on and they followed the beam into Liss’s living room.
“Candles, candlesticks, and matches are in the drawer under the television,” Liss said, and Dan swung the light that way.
In passing, it picked out two pairs of green eyes. They were a welcome, if eerie, sight.
“Mama’s home, babies,” Liss crooned.
Dan made a sound of mild disgust as she knelt down and made kissing noises to try to tempt Lumpkin and the kitten to come to her. Neither did. From the feline point of view, she’d abandoned them, leaving them to starve to death in an unheated house.
When Dan found the candles and lit the first wax taper, Liss straightened. “You have food and kibble in your feeders,” she reminded the two ungrateful cats. “And it isn’t my fault that the power went out.”
More candles flared to life, filling the room with a soft glow. “You know,” Dan said, “candles aren’t the best choice for light, especially with cats in the house. And if you’re going to have a fire, you’ll have to stay awake to keep an eye on it, which kind of makes it hard to get a good night’s rest. Maybe you should reconsider going to the shelter.”
“You have no romance in your soul,” Liss complained.
She could have kicked herself. What a thing to say to a man who’d just—almost—proposed to her! But it was too late to take back the words, and apologizing would just make the situation more awkward. She waited a moment, thinking Dan might say something, but he kept mum.
Okay, she thought. If he was going to ignore her comment, then so would she. Right. They’d been talking about candles. The danger of open flames.
“I’ll only use the candles when I’m right here and awake and can keep an eye on things,” she promised. “I have a lantern and plenty of flashlights and oodles of spare batteries.” In winter, it only made sense to keep such emergency gear on hand. Power outages, if not the rest of their current troubles, were a fact of life in rural Maine. “And you don’t need to worry about the fireplace. I had it inspected when I had the chimney cleaned a couple of months ago. And I have a fire screen stored in the closet.”
True, it would be the first time she’d actually had a fire in the hearth, but it wasn’t as if she’d never heated with wood before. Even if she hadn’t learned fire safety as a kid, she’d had last night and today at the hotel as a refresher course.
“If you’re sure…”
“I’ll be fine.” She walked over to the thermostat on the wall and peered at the temperature by the light of the bright red Christmas candle she held on one hand. “Hey, it’s all of fifty degrees in here. Practically a heat wave.”
But when she shivered, Dan noticed. “You’d better go change out of those damp clothes.”
“I plan to. Just as soon as you leave.”
She also intended to take a quick sponge bath. She should have enough water in her emergency store, and it would feel very good to be clean and to put on fresh clothing. For the trek through the woods, she’d worn her pantsuit, together with a set of long johns she’d borrowed from one of the skiers. She’d found a pair of gaiters to wear with the snowshoes, to keep the snow out of her boots. They had kept her feet dry, but the rest of her clothing was decidedly damp. The distinctive smell of wet wool hung in the air. Fortunately, the long joins were made of some space-age material that kept moisture away from bare skin, because time and again she’d snagged her pant legs on branches. She’d accumulated a multitude of small rips in the fabric, but the underwear had done a good job of holding both sweat and snow at bay and had kept the cold from penetrating, too.
Still Dan hesitated to leave.
A yawn snuck up on Liss, so huge that her jaw cracked. She wasn’t surprised. She hadn’t had more than a couple of hours of sleep the night before. “Go, Dan. I’ll be fine. I’ll start a fire, find those notes, and curl up on the couch with the cats.”
Who knew? There might even be something useful in the clippings and printouts. She’d collected a great deal of information about SHAS when she was preparing for her first meeting with representatives of the group. She’d just skimmed most of it back then. It would be worth her time to take another, closer look. Now that she’d gotten to know some of the members, anything significant ought to leap out at her.
Dan put his hands on her shoulders, instantly banishing all thought of SHAS. “Promise you’ll dig out that fire screen before you start the fire?”
“I promise.”
“And you’ll snuff the candles? Once you curl up on that sofa, you’ll be asleep inside of ten minutes.”
“Yes! I promise! No candles. Fire screen. Now go!”
“In a minute.” Slowly, he lowered his mouth to hers, giving her one very good reason to consider his almost-proposal in a positive light.
By the time they came up for air, Liss was clinging to him. Embarrassed, she stepped back. “Shoo. Scram. No fair dangling temptation in front of someone who’s over-tired and stressed.”
His face was shadowed in the candlelit room, but she thought his expression looked just a wee bit smug. “What I said earlier?” he whispered. “Think about it, okay?”
“Okay,” she promised.
How could she not?
Chapter Thirteen
When the helicopter had lifted off safely, Sherri turned to Pete and pantomimed wiping sweat off her brow. She had been spared dealing with a second death. There was every reason to be optimistic that Harvey MacHenry would make a full recovery.
Sherri glanced at her watch. It was only eight, but with the power still out she had a feeling that most people would opt for an early night. She hoped so. She was pretty close to collapsing from exhaustion herself.
On the other hand, it might be better if everyone partied all night and slept in tomorrow morning. The hotel’s reluctant guests were getting antsy. She expected a stampede the minute they could get their cars out of the parking lot. The staff would decamp, too, with Sadie, Rhonda, and Dilys leading the pack.
Without much expectation of getting a signal, she fished out her cell phone. She stared at the tiny screen in surprise and pleasure. “Well, hallelujah!”
In a matter of minutes she was talking to her six-year-old son. His replies were scratchy and hard to hear, but sufficient to reassure her that he was okay. Even better was the news that where he was, halfway between Moosetookalook and Fallstown, the power had been restored. So had cable. Adam wanted to watch television. Sherri reminded him that it was already past his bedtime, but in the end she relented. He’d drift off in front of the screen and her mother would carry him to bed.
After an even
briefer conversation with Ida Willett, who did not approve of coddling youngsters and reminded her daughter of that in no uncertain terms, Sherri went back inside The Spruces. Things were looking up, she told herself. Jeff Thibodeau, her boss, had relayed her report to the state police and they’d sent back word that they would arrive as soon as possible to take over the case. The downside was that it would probably be tomorrow evening before they could get through to The Spruces. Moosetookalook wasn’t the only place that still had power outages and downed trees blocking roads. Heck, it might not even be the only community where there had been a homicide.
Sherri thought longingly of sleep as she headed for the conference room, but the nagging sense that there was more she could be doing wouldn’t let her rest. Not yet. Not if everyone was likely to leave tomorrow.
She had left the notes she and Pete had accumulated, mostly from questioning people about the missing brooch, piled on the conference room table. Was there a clue somewhere in all that paperwork? Your average murderer, she reminded herself, especially one who killed on impulse, just wasn’t very smart. If he or she had slipped up somewhere, said the wrong thing, been seen in the wrong place at the wrong time, then maybe she’d have more to offer the detective in charge than a dead body, a bloodstained skean dhu, and a broken bagpipe.
She was still going through the notes two hours later when Pete came looking for her.
“I have no idea what I’m doing,” Sherri admitted. “And I don’t seem to be getting anywhere.”
“You’re doing everything humanly possible,” Pete assured her. “No one expects you to make an arrest. Your job was to preserve the scene, which you’ve done.”
“Right. But this all started with the missing brooch, which was my case. God! Was it only yesterday afternoon? It feels like we’ve been here for days.”
“So we’re concentrating on the theft?” Pete asked.
“Sort of.” Sherri stood, stretched, glanced at the coffeepot, and looked away again. She was jittery enough without adding more caffeine. “The thing is, the theft almost has to be connected to the murder. It would be an awfully big coincidence if the two weren’t related in some way. I’ve got a time line here somewhere.”
After a brief search, she handed over a lined yellow pad. She had written down key events in the order they’d happened. A second page contained a list of suspects. She’d enumerated possible motives along with alibis for the time of the crime.
“I’m making lists,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve been hanging around Liss MacCrimmon too long. This is what all the amateur detectives do in those mystery novels she reads.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” Pete said, flipping through the pages. “Think of it as a sort of mini murder board.”
“Theft. Just the theft, remember?”
He handed the tablet back to her. “Why don’t you summarize the case for me? Sometimes talking things through is even more helpful than writing down what you know.” He pulled out a chair, turned it around, and straddled it.
Sherri thought for a moment. “It all started at approximately four yesterday afternoon, when Liss was on her way to meet with the MacMillans and saw Rhonda, Sadie, and Dilys heading for the basement to clock out.” Her lips quirked into a fleeting smile. “She told me that she didn’t notice any suspicious behavior from any of them. They were debating what men wear under their kilts.”
“I’ll give you an up close and personal viewing any time you like,” Pete promised with a wink. “What’s next?”
“The meeting in the private dining room. That lasted until around four-thirty. Then the MacMillans returned to their suite and discovered that their rooms had been searched. Meanwhile, Liss encountered two pipers bashing each other in the lobby and noticed Phil and Eunice, who’d just been in the gift shop buying toothpaste, watching them.” She frowned. “That’s odd.”
“What is?”
“Neither Phil nor Eunice ever mentioned a side trip to the gift shop when they gave their statements. I only know about it because Liss told me.”
“Might just be an oversight. They probably didn’t think it was important.”
“But that left their suite unoccupied longer. And it takes away Phineas’s alibi, since he wasn’t with them the whole time.”
“Why would Phineas search his brother’s suite?”
“No idea. He probably wouldn’t.”
“You can ask him. Tomorrow. After everybody’s had some sleep.”
Sherri rubbed her tired eyes. He was right. She needed sleep. But of its own volition, her gaze returned to the time line she’d drawn up.
Liss had witnessed an encounter between Richardson Bruce and Angeline Cloutier in the kitchen. Earlier, she’d seen the three housekeepers leaving. Those five, plus Grant and Erskine, the battling pipers, were likely in the clear for stealing the brooch. Also the kitchen staff, Dan’s sister, and Liss herself. Sherri said so to Pete.
“Unless one of them made very short work of tossing the suite before heading downstairs. And maybe Bruce or Grant or Erskine deliberately created a scene, to give himself an alibi.”
Sherri sighed. “You’re not helping. I’m trying to eliminate suspects here.”
Pete held up his hands in mock surrender. “Just trying to help.”
“No. You’re right. We have to consider all the possibilities. Eunice MacMillan said they left their suite by three-forty-five and got to the dining room ahead of Liss. Everyone I just mentioned did have time to steal the brooch, even Liss.”
“And Phineas.”
“And Phineas.” She paused for a jaw-cracking yawn. “Moving on. After Phil and Eunice discovered that someone had been in their suite, they started to clean up before they realized that the brooch was missing.” Sherri shook her head. “I still can’t figure out why, as much as these people like to complain, they weren’t going to report the fact that some unauthorized person had been in their suite while they were out.”
“They said they thought they knew who was responsible,” Pete reminded her.
“Yes. The practical jokers of the group, Eric Buchanan and Norbert Johnson. No joy there. They are among the very few members of SHAS who really do have an iron-clad alibi. Remember? They were hassling Tricia.”
Pete, arms crossed on the back of the chair, looked relaxed, especially with his chin resting on his hands, but his eyes were alert. Sherri knew that, deep down, he wanted to find answers as much as she did. “We talked to the staff,” he remarked. “Three from housekeeping. Three from the kitchen, plus the chef. Three who waited on tables at the Burns Night Supper. Dan and his dad. Tricia, and Simon from the bar.” Simon had just relieved Pete on guard duty at the storage-room door.
“Lounge,” Sherri corrected, since Joe wasn’t around to do it.
Pete grinned. “Okay. Lounge. Storm gets worse. It’s what? Ten at night? You and Dan go up to the private dining room to tell the SHAS people they gotta give statements and—boom!—the lights go out. Everybody files downstairs to the lobby. We talk to them. Thirty-two people at the Burns Night Supper. Twenty-five men and seven women.”
“Plus the other guests, who were in the lounge or in their rooms when we lost power. They were all accounted for and in the lobby for at least long enough to pick up lanterns or flashlights and be apprised of the situation created by the storm. But we have no real idea how long anyone stuck around. We had no reason to keep track. The only person I can be fairly certain of is Sadie, since she decided to sneak a smoke before she went to bed. Until then, she stuck close to Rhonda. Dilys apparently turned in early.”
“We know Phil MacMillan decided to go on walkabout, in the dark, by himself. He was last seen outside the gift shop. He might have been headed down to the basement to look at the pool.”
“Missed opportunity there. If he’d drowned, we might have thought it was an accident.” She sighed. “We don’t even know exactly when he died. The gift shop incident took place around midnight. That’s the best guess, anyway.
No one was paying much attention to clocks, probably because they all stopped working when the power went out.”
“So how did Phil end up in the storage room with his throat cut?” Pete asked.
Sherri shuddered, remembering. “You know what? Let’s not go there. It isn’t my case. And to tell the truth, I think I prefer to deal only with less violent crimes.”
“Amen to that,” Pete agreed. “You couldn’t pay me enough to investigate homicides. Give me a run-of-the-mill domestic dispute any day.”
Sherri fought another yawn. It was definitely time to get some sleep. Her brain was so fuzzy it could pass for a dust bunny. She stood, swayed, and made no objection when Pete rushed to her side and put his arm around her.
“I hear the tower suite’s available tonight,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Want to take a trip back to the nineteenth century? Four-poster bed. Claw-foot bathtub.”
“We’re already in the nineteenth century,” she murmured sleepily. “No forensics. No quick and easy way to verify anything, not even fingerprints.”
But that four-poster did sound appealing.
Liss dreamed she was back in the gift shop, waiting on the women of SHAS. Such interesting names they all had: Elspeth, Maeve, Eunice, Glenora, Tory, and Lara. She frowned in her sleep. Wasn’t there another wife in the group? One she hadn’t met?
She’d call her Susie, Liss decided in her sleep, and felt a rush of pleasure at having picked a name so easily. It was no simple matter to find the right name.
In Liss’s dream, Susie bought the tourmaline ring, even though Liss repeatedly told her that it wasn’t for sale. Even Glenora Huggons, she of the bright green cat’s eyes, tried to talk Susie out of it. It did no good. When Susie stuck the ring on her finger and walked out of the gift shop, Liss abruptly woke up.
The black kitten was sitting on her chest, her furry face only inches from Liss’s nose. Liss stared into her bright green eyes, blinked once, and asked, “Glenora?”
The kitten cocked her head.
The Corpse Wore Tartan Page 16
