A View to a Kilt

by Kaitlyn Dunnett

  There was a slight delay in the proceedings while they indulged in their first kiss of the morning. When it turned into a second, and then into a third, Liss was tempted to suggest they go back upstairs. The weather continued to be uninspiring—bleak and cold—and they were both self-employed. Up to a point they could set their own hours.

  She stepped back reluctantly when Dan lifted his head. A bone-deep sense of responsibility had been drummed into them both from earliest childhood. Dan had commissions waiting to be filled in his custom-woodworking shop. Liss needed to open Moosetookalook Scottish Emporium, even if walk-in business was rare at this time of year.

  Dan left her side to collect the slotted metal spoon reserved for scooping up kitty litter. “I’ll handle this,” he volunteered.

  “My hero. You are a prince among men.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  She watched as he walked away, taking a moment to appreciate her good fortune. She’d married a man who was not only good-looking, but kind and considerate, too. He kept his hair a little shorter now than when they were first married, but otherwise he had changed little. When he looked back at her, a question in those beautiful molasses-brown eyes, her heart melted.

  “Something wrong, Liss?”

  “Not a thing,” she said with a smile.

  It faded when she noticed the disgruntled look Glenora was giving her food. Liss glanced at the label on the can she’d so recently emptied into it.

  “That’s grilled chicken in gravy. It’s good. Eat it.”

  The little cat flicked her tail and stalked away.

  Liss sighed. It had always been Lumpkin, majestic and imperious, who demanded a different flavor for breakfast. Until recently, Glenora had eaten whatever she’d been given.

  The sound of barking had Liss glancing toward the back door. It was unusual for the Scotties to make a fuss. She supposed they’d spotted a squirrel or a bird, or maybe they’d caught sight of the Farleys’ poodle.

  Having disposed of the soiled litter, Dan had returned to the kitchen sink to wash his hands. “Do you want me to let them in?”

  “I doubt they’ll come.” Liss poured two mugs of coffee and plated four slices of freshly toasted and buttered sourdough bread. “Obviously, something interesting has caught their attention.”

  He opened the back door, letting in a gust of cold air, and called their names. As Liss had predicted, they ignored him.

  “They’re over by the side of the carriage house,” Dan reported. “Maybe I should go out and get them.”

  “Sit down and eat first. I admit I’m no expert on dogs, but it seems to me that if they’re happily barking at something in the yard, we can safely leave them to it for a few more minutes.”

  “When did you say Margaret is coming home?”

  Liss chuckled as she and Dan fired up his-and-her iPads to check e-mail and skim the latest edition of the Daily Scoop, the local online newspaper. She didn’t regret agreeing to look after Dandy and Dondi while Margaret was away, but they were more work than she’d expected. Cats didn’t need to be let in and out a half-dozen times a day, or walked regularly for exercise.

  “Nice ad for the Mud Season Sale,” Dan said.

  “Thanks.”

  Liss was pleased with it herself. Turning to a letter to the editor written by one of their local curmudgeons, she became absorbed in reading. She was dimly aware that Dandy and Dondi were still barking, but they weren’t all that loud and it didn’t sound as if they were in any distress.

  In short order they finished breakfast. While Liss rinsed the dishes and Dan’s mug, he refilled hers and fixed a go-cup of coffee for himself. After he shrugged into a fleece-lined vest, he tried again to call in the Scotties. Once again they ignored him.

  “I’d better go get them.” Sounding resigned, he trudged out into the slushy snow.

  Liss collected a towel. There was no point in heading upstairs to dress until after she’d dried their paws. If they’d been rolling in the dirty snow, they’d need an allover rubdown.

  She took a sip of her second cup of coffee of the day while she waited. Before she could manage another one, the kitchen door slammed open. Dan burst into the room, carrying one dog under each arm.

  The sight would have made Liss laugh if she hadn’t caught a glimpse of his face. His complexion had gone whiter than the late-winter snow in their backyard.

  “What—?”

  Instead of answering, Dan kicked the door closed behind him. None too gently, he deposited the dogs on the floor and reached for the nearest telephone, the landline mounted on the wall. Holding the receiver in a death grip, he punched in three numbers.

  Liss didn’t have to see which keys he hit to know he was calling 911. Filled with dread, she moved to stand beside him.

  “This is Daniel Ruskin,” he told the emergency services dispatcher. “I’m at 4 Birch Street in Moosetookalook. You need to send the state police major crimes unit to that address.”

  At Liss’s gasp Dan slung his free arm around her shoulders and tugged her tight against his side. As she rested her cheek against the rough fabric of his vest, she struggled to make sense of what she was hearing.

  “There’s a dead guy in my backyard,” Dan said into the phone, “and I’m pretty sure he didn’t die of natural causes.”

  Chapter Three

  As Moosetookalook’s chief of police, Sherri Campbell was on the scene within minutes. Before she arrived, Liss had only time enough to ask Dan if he knew who the dead man was.

  “I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

  Liss stared at her husband, almost as shocked by this revelation as she had been by his announcement that someone had died in their backyard. Moosetookalook was a small town. The total population barely topped a thousand, and there weren’t many of them with whom Dan Ruskin didn’t have at least a nodding acquaintance.

  “Why the hell didn’t you call me first?” Sherri shouted at Dan as she stormed into the house. At five-two, the petite, blue-eyed blonde had to tip her head back to yell at him, but she had acquired an air of authority from a decade of working in law enforcement.

  He took a step back and stammered an apology. “Sorry, Sherri, but you know you’re not the one who’s going to end up handling this case. Murders are handled by the state police.”

  She huffed out an annoyed breath, but both she and Liss knew he was right about the jurisdiction. In Maine, only the cities of Portland and Bangor investigated their own homicides.

  “You still should have called me instead of leaving it to the dispatcher,” Sherri grumbled. “You know it will take a while for anyone else to get here. Did you touch anything?”

  Dan shook his head. “No need. It was pretty obvious I was too late to help him.”

  Sherri shot a suspicious glance at Liss. “Did you take a look at the body, too?”

  She answered with a negative shake of her head. She was still trying to wrap her mind around the fact that someone had been murdered within twenty feet of their back door.

  When Sherri stalked outside to verify what Dan had told her, Liss belatedly realized that the two Scotties had sounded the alarm at least fifteen minutes before he made his discovery. She didn’t know which was worse—that the dogs had found a corpse or that the man might have been saved if she and Dan had gone out at once to find out why they were barking. The latter possibility made her feel slightly nauseous.

  Dandy and Dondi seemed unfazed by their adventure. They were happily scarfing down the dog treats Liss had given them. She looked around for Glenora and found the cat keeping a watchful eye on her canine friends from a favorite perch on top of the refrigerator.

  “You’ve got yourself a corpse, all right,” Sherri said when she returned to the kitchen, “and he’s been dead for a while.”

  An even creepier possibility sprang into Liss’s mind. “Please tell me he hasn’t been there all winter,” she whispered. At times the drifts had been four feet high, big enough to hide a small car,
let alone a man.

  Sherri shot a “get real” look Liss’s way before she realized her friend was serious. “Don’t worry. We’ll have to wait for the official report, but my best guess is that he’s only been dead for a few hours.”

  “There was no one there yesterday afternoon when I locked up the shop.” Dan’s voice was grim.

  “That a man was killed in our backyard while we slept doesn’t exactly make me feel any better.” The knot in Liss’s stomach twisted tighter. “Why didn’t we hear something? Just getting up and turning on the outside light might have been enough to save him. Even if he’d already been attacked, he might still have been alive.”

  “Or you two might have ended up dead, too.”

  Sherri’s blunt assessment left Liss speechless, but not for long.

  “How—” She had to swallow hard before she could continue. “How was he killed?”

  Sherri and Dan exchanged a glance.

  “We’d have heard a shot. And the dogs didn’t bark during the night.” Unless she’d slept through that, too.

  Sherri moved to stand by the back door, so she could keep an eye on the crime scene, and pulled out her cell phone. “Best guess? Somebody whacked him over the head with a fallen tree limb.”

  She made two quick calls, pulling in one full-time and one part-time officer to assist in securing the area.

  As Liss listened to one side of the exchanges, she gathered that the local police would be responsible for crowd control. She grimaced. Once word got out, as it surely would when the state troopers arrived, if not before, the curious would congregate. Then the press would show up. It was going to be a three-ring circus, and not the entertaining kind.

  “You might want to get dressed,” Sherri suggested after she put away her phone. “My men will be here any minute.”

  Liss looked down at herself, bemused. She’d given no thought to what she was wearing, completely forgetting that she was still in her nightgown and robe. Moving like a sleepwalker, she went upstairs to stare at the contents of her closet. She ended up grabbing clothing at random. It wasn’t until she was in the upstairs bath, sloshing cold water onto her face, that she managed to focus on her appearance.

  She didn’t like the looks of the stranger blinking at her in the mirror. The blue-green eyes she’d inherited from her father had a glassy look. She ran a comb through the tangles in her medium-length dark brown hair, but wasn’t inclined to do any further primping. She wasn’t a makeup-and-high-heels type on her best day.

  * * *

  By the time Liss came back downstairs, two patrol cars and a state police van were parked in the driveway, and another cruiser was just pulling up to the curb in front of the house. The officers who got out didn’t come to the front door. Instead, they slipped through the narrow space between the garage and the house to go directly into the backyard.

  “Dan?” Liss called, but she got no answer.

  Dan and Sherri were outside, too. Except for Glenora and the Scotties, Liss was alone in the house.

  She picked up her second mug of coffee, long since gone cold, and nuked it in the microwave before adding an extra packet of sweetener. Seated at the kitchen table, she waited, trying her best to brace herself for whatever intrusive questions the state police might have for her. She took some small consolation from her certainty that it would be her old friend, Gordon Tandy, who asked them. Carrabassett County had been his area for years. He’d automatically be put in charge of the investigation.

  At the sound of a sharp rap at the back door, she rose almost eagerly, but in a morning full of shocks, she received another when she pulled it open. It was not Gordon who stood on the stoop, but rather a hard-faced, middle-aged woman holding up her identification for Liss’s inspection. It took a moment for the name and rank to come into focus. As Liss read, her heart sank.

  “Are you going to let me in or not?” the woman asked in a snarky tone of voice.

  The name on her ID was Cussler. She was a state police detective. Feeling numb, Liss opened the door wider to allow her into the house.

  She entered with a forceful stride. Everything about her demeanor signaled that she was a no-nonsense, by-the-book kind of cop. Liss supposed she had to be. She’d heard Sherri’s rants on the subject often enough. There weren’t all that many women in rural law enforcement. To prove themselves, they didn’t simply have to be good at their jobs; rather, they had to be better than their male colleagues.

  Liss cleared her throat and attempted to gather her wits. “I was expecting Gordon.”

  “Gordon Tandy has been promoted. I’m his replacement.” Cussler took a seat at the kitchen table, pulled out a notebook and pen, and gestured for Liss to resume her chair.

  “Coffee?” Liss offered.

  “Thank you, no.” Cussler’s narrowed eyes and pursed lips suggested she was impatient to get on with the interview.

  Repressing a sigh, Liss sat, pushing aside her empty coffee mug so she could rest her elbows on the place mat. She felt as if all the starch had gone out of her. Maybe, once this interrogation was over, she’d just go back to bed.

  The detective regarded her in silence for a long moment. Liss supposed that intense stare was meant to be disconcerting.

  “If you’re expecting me to confess, you’ll have a long wait.”

  Liss regretted her flippant remark at once, but she didn’t apologize. She had a right to be out of sorts. She hadn’t asked for someone to be murdered on her property.

  Dandy and Dondi, who, when last seen, had been curled up together on the living-room carpet, chose that moment to put in an appearance. Dandy sniffed curiously at one leg of the detective’s slacks. Dondi just looked cute. Glenora was nowhere in sight.

  “Did you hear anything during the night?” Cussler asked, ignoring the Scotties.

  “Nothing.”

  “The dogs didn’t bark?”

  “Not that I heard, and I think I would have. We’re still getting used to having them in the house. They aren’t ours. We’re dog-sitting while my aunt is away for two weeks.”

  “Run me through the events leading up to the discovery of the body.”

  Liss presumed Cussler had already asked Dan the same questions. As accurately as she could, she gave her own account of their movements.

  “So the dogs were out in the yard, barking?” The officer spared them a glance. They had taken up bookend positions, one on either side of Liss’s chair, but all their attention remained fixed on the stranger in the room.

  “That’s right. We didn’t think anything of it at first. I assumed they’d spotted a squirrel or the neighbors’ poodle.”

  “Weren’t you afraid they’d run off? Your backyard isn’t fenced.” She made that sound like a crime.

  “They wouldn’t have gone far. They hadn’t been fed yet.” Liss heard the defensive note in her voice and abruptly stopped speaking.

  The odds were slim to none that Dandy or Dondi would have run into the street and been hit by a car, but she probably should have been more concerned about their safety. Margaret had built that special fenced-in dog run at the back of the Emporium specifically to protect them from getting into trouble.

  “You say it was about fifteen minutes later that your husband went outside?”

  Liss nodded. “That’s my best guess. His woodworking shop is in the carriage house out back. He was going to bring in the dogs, since they’d refused to come when he called, and then start work for the day. His woodworking business is a full-time job. He’s been very successful in a niche market. There’s a three-month waiting period on new orders.”

  She was babbling. She never babbled. Liss took a deep breath and held it.

  “He says he didn’t recognize the victim. Did you?”

  “I never saw him. Dan brought the dogs in and then we both stayed inside to wait for the police.”

  “Come on, then. You’d best take a look at him.”

  Liss felt her jaw drop. “If my husband didn’t kn
ow him, neither will I.”

  “You can’t be sure of that.” Cussler stood, waiting for Liss to do likewise.

  “Wasn’t there any identification on the body?”

  “Would I be asking for your help if there had been? Come along, Ms. Ruskin. Let’s get this over with.”

  Liss rose reluctantly. Although the last thing she wanted was to be up close and personal with a dead body, under the circumstances she could hardly refuse to cooperate. She grabbed a coat from one of the pegs beside the back door, deftly used one foot to prevent the dogs from sneaking outside, and followed the state police officer onto the stoop.

  From that vantage point, she could clearly see the area marked off with yellow crime-scene tape. When Dan had first tried to decide what the dogs were barking at, all he’d have been able to discern would have been a dark shape lying atop the dirty snow. Since the winter’s windstorms had left branches of all sizes scattered around the yard, he’d probably mistaken it for a fallen tree limb. There hadn’t been any point in clearing them away until after the last snowstorm of the season, a weather event that might yet occur. The realization that one of those neglected branches had supplied the killer with a convenient weapon sent a convulsive shudder coursing through Liss’s body.

  The victim had already been examined and the remains encased in a heavy-duty body bag ready to be transported to Augusta to be autopsied. With what seemed to Liss to be ghoulish relish, Cussler pulled down the zipper and folded back the black plastic to reveal a face.

  Liss inhaled sharply and took a step back.

  “Do you know him?” Cussler’s relentless gaze bored into her.

  “No.” Liss swallowed hard and forced herself to take another, closer look. “For just a second there, something about him reminded me of my father, but that’s not him. I’ve never seen this man before. I have no idea who he is.”