A Wee Homicide in the Hotel
Page 1
Praise for
A Wee Murder in My Shop
“Peggy Winn brings a bit of Scotland home to her Scottish-themed shop in Vermont, but this time it’s more than she bargained for in this enjoyable debut. A great start to a new series!”
—Sheila Connolly, New York Times bestselling author of the County Cork Mysteries
“The very first paragraph of A Wee Murder in My Shop hooked me. . . . It is the town of Hamelin, Vermont, however, that charms its way into the readers’ hearts . . . a fun start to the ScotShop Mystery series.”
—Fresh Fiction
“[A] strong start to what is going to be a fabulous series. [Stewart has] created very memorable characters, full of charm and mischief, and readers will be fondly recalling this adventure long after they turn the last page.”
—Cozy Mystery Book Reviews
“Scotland, a seven-hundred-year-old ghost, a hunky police officer, and [the] murder of a cheating boyfriend. What’s not to like in the new ScotShop Mystery series?”
—Lesa’s Book Critiques
“An interesting concept that you might expect in a time-travel romance, only it is a cozy mystery—which provides a completely different flair.”
—Mysteries and My Musings
Berkley Prime Crime titles by Fran Stewart
A WEE MURDER IN MY SHOP
A WEE DOSE OF DEATH
A WEE HOMICIDE IN THE HOTEL
BERKLEY PRIME CRIME
Published by Berkley
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2017 by Fran Stewart
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
BERKLEY is a registered trademark and BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the B colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Ebook ISBN: 9781101639573
First Edition: February 2017
Cover art by Jesse Reisch
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
This book is lovingly dedicated to my sister, Diana, who gave me my first book of Shakespeare and thereby lit a fire.
Acknowledgments
Excuse me for inventing politicians right and left. Believe me, none of the ones in this book are real. I’d like to thank Millar Brown, a piper with the Firefighters Honor Guard of Gwinnett County, Georgia, who spent time showing me the finer points of bagpiping and introduced me to “the Green Book,” which is what pipers call The College of Piping Tutor for the Highland Bagpipe; Mary Stone, who was the highest bidder at the “Murder on the Menu” silent auction in Wetumpka, Alabama, and who asked me to use the name Windsor Stone in this book; Eric Varner, who won the “Your Scottie’s Name in Fran’s Book” contest sponsored by the Scottish Terrier Club of Greater Atlanta (STCGA), resulting in the introduction of Silla; Rhea Spence of the STCGA, who verified that a Scottie could dig through a wall; Peggy Dixon, who suggested the name Cord; my editor, Michelle Vega, who took a rather chaotic manuscript and helped me hone it; and the entire production staff of Berkley Prime Crime, who turned an electronic file into something beautiful. Most of all, though, I’m deeply indebted to the independent bookstore owners who’ve helped to spread the word about the ScotShop Mysteries. I have the greatest respect for you.
All text headings are taken from Hamlet, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Cambridge Edition, as edited by William Aldis Wright, © 1936, Garden City Books, Garden City, New York.
Contents
Praise for A Wee Murder in My Shop
Berkley Prime Crime Titles by Fran Stewart
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
1
You come most carefully upon your hour.
ACT 1, SCENE 1
Nobody expected to die attending Hamelin’s sixty-third annual four-day Highland Festival.
Everybody expected kilts and bagpipes, porridge jelly beans (a specialty of Sweetie’s candy shop—believe me, they taste better than they sound), caber tossing and hammer throws, with a sheepdog demonstration and a little sword dancing thrown in for good measure.
That’s what everybody got from Thursday to Sunday. Everybody except Peggy Winn, owner of the ScotShop. That would be me.
People were expecting to load their stomachs with good food and junk food, and load their cars with kilt pins and lengths of tartan in their favorite clan plaid.
That’s what everybody bought from Thursday through Sunday. Everybody except me.
Everybody wanted a spectacular opening ceremony Thursday night, exciting competitions on Friday and Saturday and a part of Sunday, and a spectacular bonfire Sunday evening at the closing ceremonies.
That’s what they got those four days. I guess I got some of it.
What nobody expected, though, between the Highland dance competition and the pipe bands, between the Celtic harpists and the solo drummer, was death.
* * *
But I’m getting ahead of myself. There are some other things I’d rather mention first. Like the fact that my ghost was throwing a hissy fit that Thursday morning in early August before the ScotShop opened. An angry ghost is nothing to fool around with. Unfortunately, the object of his ire—my employee and, incidentally, my cousin Shoe Winn—wasn’t aware of the storm cloud building on the ghostly horizon.
“Ye havena practiced the chanter enough. I canna tell any the difference betwixt your leumluath nor your taorluath.” Dirk shifted his plaid in irritation, and it settled on his massive shoulder like a hound curling up for a long winter’s nap. “And to put the fillip on it, ye tuned the bass drone as badly as aulde Grandda Gosham.”
Shoe played on in blissful ignorance. His loomlooahs and his torlooahs certainly weren’t distinguishable to me, either, maybe because I had no idea what Dirk was talking about. With the A.T.T.T.F. that was generally in process—that’s what I called the Automatic Trans-Time Translation Factor that had to be at work here, since Dirk had last taken a real breath during the time of Chaucer, when English sounded totally different—I could usually understand him, but occasionally he’d use words that didn’t seem to have an American equivalent.
Covered by the sound of the pipes, which filled the ScotShop
with earsplitting cacophony, I ignored the unknown terms and asked, “Couldn’t your grandpa Gosham play very well?”
“Nae, that he couldna. He was tone-deaf as a hedgehog.”
“How do you know a hedgehog is tone-deaf?” I asked into the sudden silence as Shoe stopped playing. Well, it wasn’t quite silence, since the bags had to empty themselves of their excess air in a wheeze that always made me think of a dying dinosaur.
“I dunno,” Shoe said. “Something to do with hedge funds?”
Dirk looked at Shoe in disgust. “This isna Twenty Questions, wee manny.” He’d been intrigued when I’d told him about that game. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing fourteenth-century Scots would have played back then. They were too busy tending gardens and hunting deer and taking care of the family goats and hens. Or were they? When had such games started? And where? I suppose I could have asked my ghost. When nobody else was around to hear me.
“. . . anytime you’re ready.”
“Huh?” I looked up to see Shoe peering at me over the deflated pipe bag.
“Are you going to give me the answer?”
“To what?”
He raised his eyebrows, and I couldn’t help but notice that Dirk had almost the same expression on his ghost-face. “To your riddle,” he said with exaggerated patience. “How do I know a hedgehog is tone-deaf?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just thought you might know something about hedgehogs.”
Dirk didn’t even try to damp down his guffaws. That’s one of the distinct advantages to being a ghost nobody can hear. Nobody except me.
“Put that thing away, Shoe.” I checked my watch. “We have to open the door in seven minutes.”
Shoe ran his finger along the braided cords that connected the drones to each other. “I could pipe the customers into the store.” His voice was wistful.
“If ye dinna learn any the better, ye would send them running for the wee hills.”
“Mountains,” I said.
“Huh?” Shoe says that a lot when Dirk and I are around.
I waved him off. “No,” I said. “You may most definitely not pipe in the customers. Not until you work on your torlooahs some more.”
I love it when my gangly cousin is at a loss for words. Not for long, of course. “How—where did you learn about taorluaths?”
I smiled, even though I didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. I must have said the weird word the right way. “Oh”—I waved an airy hand—“here and there.”
“Ye didna give me the credit, forebye?” At least my resident ghost was smiling when he said it.
“You can leave your bagpipes in the back room for today, Shoe, but don’t you dare forget to take them home this evening.” I’d gotten tired of walking around what I was beginning to think of as his souvenirs. Shoe’s junk pile would be a better term. His second-best baseball gear had cluttered up the place last summer, until the bat was used to murder my ex-boyfriend, and now it looked like his piping materials were trying to invade. At least nobody could kill anyone with bagpipes. Blast out their eardrums maybe. My head was still ringing.
“Hills,” Dirk said. Because he came from the Highlands of Scotland, his impression of the venerable Green Mountains of Vermont was less than awe-filled. Despite the fact that every road heading out of this picturesque town went steeply upward, even the one that eventually led to Burlington, Dirk refused to think of these wonderful old mountains as anything other than pipsqueak lumps of dirt and stone.
I glanced out the tall plate glass windows and saw yet another travel trailer, towed by yet another pickup truck, headed for the meadow outside town, where the Hamelin Highland Games would commence tomorrow, but the opening ceremonies and the first rounds of the Highland dance competition were scheduled for this evening, so most of the people were here already. The meadow looked like a little city, with the various clans setting up their tents around the perimeter. Some of the people who attended each year were drawn as much by the nearby Appalachian Trail as by the all-things-Scottish theme of Hamelin.
Taking advantage of the fact that Shoe had disappeared into the back room, I turned to Dirk. “You have the shawl,” I said, referring to the ancient fabric his fourteenth-century ladylove had woven, the one that had allowed me to see Dirk when I first put it on. With the shawl in hand or, in this case, wound securely around the hilt of his dagger, he was free to roam anywhere he wanted. When I held the shawl, though, he couldn’t stray more than a few yards away from me, except when we were at my house or here in the ScotShop. Don’t ask why—there seem to be certain ghostly rules nobody understands. And who on earth could I have asked about them anyway? Maybe my great-grandmother, if she’d still been alive. My grannie had told me long ago that her ma claimed to be able to talk to ghosts. Or maybe it was only one ghost. I really couldn’t remember. It was something of a joke to most of the family; but when my twin brother, Drew, and I turned ten, my wish as I blew out the candles was that I’d have a ghost of my own someday.
And here he was. Last year, when I’d acquired the shawl he was attached to, the woman who’d sold it to me said it had passed from great-grandmother to great-granddaughter for umpteen generations. But then she’d said something that had intrigued me ever since. She’d said she had no children of her own, and the shawl would have to pass to her sister in Nefyn. I’d looked up Nefyn when I got home to Hamelin. It was a town in Wales. Wales was where the Winn family had come from. I even had a whole outfit in the burgundy-toned Wynn family tartan. And Grannie said her mother had died in Scotland on a visit there. Why hadn’t I listened more closely to all those old stories?
“What would ye be thinking of wi’ such a rimple across your brow?”
“Rimple?”
He scrunched his eyebrows together in illustration. I guess I had been thinking pretty hard. I’d figure it all out later. “Why don’t you wander down to the meadow,” I said, “and see if the Farquharson clan tent is up yet?”
He considered my question. “D’ye think there will be Farquharsons here, foreby?”
“Of course there will. People come from all over the States to attend the Hamelin Highland Festival.”
“I know that,” Shoe said from behind me.
“So,” I countered, recovering quickly, “do you think we’ll sell out of all this extra merchandise this year?”
Luckily, the bell over the front door announced the arrival of Gilda Buchanan, my assistant manager, with her blond curls bouncing around her face, followed closely by Sam—my third employee—with Gilda’s dog Scamp, who sported a bright blue collar and leash. Scamp stopped in the doorway to look behind him. When a Scottie digs in his heels, even someone as tall and strong as my cousin Sam tends to pause. “Whatcha lookin’ at, Scamp?”
As if he had to ask. A tiny Scottie—a female, I knew for sure—had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk beside the sunken courtyard outside the ScotShop. She eyed Scamp from beneath her perky Scottie eyebrows and sniffed the air delicately. Her human came up the last step, and the dog moved considerably closer to Scamp. I heard the distinct click when the man pressed the button to stop the leash from extending any more.
I halfway expected fur to fly, but Scamp had been neutered, and was very well trained. Apparently the other dog was just as well behaved.
They sniffed noses, unable because of their respective leashes to reach the other, more interesting end. More interesting to dogs, that is.
“Your dog is lovely,” Gilda said.
The gray-haired man beamed. “And that’s quite a handsome fellow you have there.”
Gilda blushed. “He’s pretty special.”
“So are they all.” He gazed at his dog for a moment. I knew love when I saw it. “Scotties are a breed apart,” he said.
I recognized the man and—wonder of wonders—remembered his name, even though I’d never met
him. Big Willie Bowman had been a regular competitor—and winner—at the Hamelin Highland Games, although I hadn’t seen him for several years. I’d never seen him with a dog, though. I couldn’t resist. So what if the store was a little late in opening? Anyway, it wasn’t like I had customers lined up waiting to get in.
Tomorrow and Saturday they’d be lined up out to the curb, if past festivals were any sort of guideline, but today so far, most of the visitors were still dribbling into town, getting settled in the hotels, B and Bs, or camping sites. By midafternoon today, though, the shop would be packed.
I stepped past Sam and Gilda, who both seemed rooted to the spot. “You’re Big Willie, aren’t you? Do you mind if I pat your dog?”
“Not at all, not at all.”
Hearty. That’s how his voice sounded. Like Santa Claus, but without the reindeer. And with considerably more life. Maybe exuberant was a better word. I smiled in response and reached down a fist. The little female licked the end of my thumb and turned expectantly to Dirk. He backed up a step. Anyone who made contact with Dirk tended to get dizzy.
“What’s her name?”
“Officially, her name is Dunedin’s Drusilla.”
“Drusilla? Wasn’t that Cinderella’s sister?”
I saw his mouth twitch. “That was Drizella, I believe.” He looked down at the petite black dog. “Drusilla is nothing like Cinderella’s sister. For one thing, Drusilla has a very nice singing voice.”
“Who would be Sindrella? And what,” Dirk asked, “does singing have to do wi’ wee doggies, forebye?” Naturally I couldn’t answer my ghost.
I wasn’t sure whether or not the man was pulling my leg. But something still bothered me. “Drusilla,” I said. And then the light dawned. “From Buffy the Vampire Slayer?”
Dirk opened his mouth again, but shut it when the man said, “No, no, no. Drusilla is a historical character. She was a member of the Roman imperial family; she was aunt to Nero and sister of Caligula.”