A Wee Dose of Death

by Fran Stewart

  All I had to do to get him back was to place the shawl around my shoulders, and there he was, as dependable as the door.

  I’d found his presence particularly comforting—after the initial shock, that was—but this closeness was beginning to wear. I felt like I was back in college again with a clinging roommate. It wouldn’t have been so bad having a hunk like him around, except that he found a lot to criticize about my life and the way I chose to live it.

  His particular beef lately had been the fact that I wasn’t married. “We don’t have to get married in the twenty-first century,” I’d explained over and over again.

  “Ye dinna have a man,” he’d observed—last August, I think it was. It was one of those bright, brilliant days. I’d taken him for a walk along the shores of Lake Ness, just north of Hamelin. We’d sat down on a grassy bank, and he lay back with his arm under his head while I picked dandelions and made a yellow chain, splitting half of each stem carefully and threading the next flower through it.

  There was a whole congregation of little spiders in the grass around him. I didn’t know whether other ghosts attracted spiders—not having met any other ghosts—but Dirk certainly did.

  “Ye need a man to protect ye,” he said.

  “I don’t need protection.”

  He’d narrowed his eyes at me, but rather than belabor the point, he struck out with another fourteenth-century argument. “And what about bairns?”

  “Bairns? You mean children?” I knew darn well what a bairn was; I just didn’t want to deal with my conflicting feelings about child raising right then. I was only thirty. There was still time. Trouble was I had to find the right man.

  Harper.

  I tried to cancel that thought. Nothing had happened between us. Nothing except an increased pulse on my part.

  “Aye. Ye dinna have a man, and ye dinna have bairns who will care for ye when ye’ve lost half your teeth and can eat naught but gruel.”

  “Gruel? Yuck!” I joined one end of the dandelion chain to the other and placed the resulting crown atop my head. “I’ll have you know I have investments to pay for my old age, and what makes you think I’m going to let my teeth decay? I have a very good dentist, and I get my teeth cleaned twice a year.”

  I hadn’t explained either my financial situation or modern dentistry to Dirk—at least I didn’t think I had.

  “Dih-kay? What would that be?”

  “It means ‘rot.’” I’d read enough to know how many people lost their teeth back then. “Decay is what happens to teeth when people don’t use toothbrushes.”

  Toothbrushes he understood. In fact, he’d told me once that he’d been taught to use a sturdy willow twig with a smashed end to clean his teeth. An extraordinary fourteenth-century toothbrush. His teeth were certainly white, as white as the daisies intermingled with the dandelions in the field around us.

  “The snow, ’tis falling.”

  I looked up, surprised to find myself in my living room. There was no crown of yellow dandelions, no daisies, no spiders, no lake beside me, and the August sunshine had turned into cloudy mid-October. Dirk, outlined against the gray light of the bay window, seemed particularly pensive. He spread his arms wide and stretched. How can muscles get tight if you’re a ghost?

  6

  A Bone to Pick

  Back inside the cabin, Marcus set the snow-filled pot on the empty woodstove. Nothing fancy about this one. In fact, it was little better than the old potbellied stoves had been a hundred years ago. But it was more than adequate for heating this one room.

  He looked inside the utilitarian monstrosity. Good. It had been cleaned out, and the last person there had been smart enough to leave a thick layer of ash in the bottom. He shut the door with a sense of satisfaction. The only problem was that the guy hadn’t left any kindling. There was a hefty stack of thick logs piled in one corner of the room, but there wasn’t anything small enough to catch fire easily.

  Cross-country skiing always warmed a person up, but he could feel the cold beginning to seep in. He pulled his favorite soft brown scarf out of the rain hood pocket on his parka, where he had stowed it early that morning. He adjusted it around his neck, making sure the ends didn’t hang below his jacket. No need to snag it on a wayward branch. He went to the backpack, unhooked his small ax—just the right size for small logs or kindling—and stepped through the door. The outside pile of firewood, under the overhang of the roof, looked dry and dependable, but there wasn’t any kindling there, either. He’d rounded the side of the cabin earlier and checked on it before he parked his skis and came inside.

  He and his wife had found the cabin the previous summer. They’d gone hiking up this trail for a picnic shortly after they bought a retirement home just outside the little town of Hamelin, Vermont. Later, they’d thrown a magnificent party, inviting all his colleagues, the graduate students, and neighbors from Burlington. He and his wife had been surprised at how many people showed up. Two of the other professors had looked into buying property in the area, too. His wife had been nervous before the party, but she’d relaxed once the crowd gravitated to the kitchen of the new house. That was where parties—the good parties—always ended up. It was supposed to be an early-afternoon affair: stop by, eat some, talk some, and leave in time for everybody to drive back to Burlington before dark. But somehow or other a group of them ended up hiking the trail, toting graham crackers and chocolate and, of course, marshmallows for s’mores, which they’d toasted over a fire in the clearing. Later, they’d hiked higher up the mountain so they could take the other path—the steep one, the treacherous one—back to town. Stupid thing to do, but nobody had fallen. He glanced out the window. No sign of the fire ring now, not under all that snow. Nothing in the clearing, nothing in the surrounding woods. Just him and his work.

  He wondered occasionally if they should have kept quiet about the purchase. No sense in having his colleagues think he was on his way out. But he’d deliberately never said the word “retiring.” He’d called it a vacation home. He was still a couple of years away from mandatory retirement—and he’d had plenty to say about that policy—but he’d finally decided retiring wouldn’t slow him down. He might not have access to the university’s lab after he retired, but he still had his mind. Last year, an article about him in Science Magazine had declared that his mind was incisive. He liked that. Incisive. Like a surgical tool.

  * * *

  Mac lay there with snow drifting gently onto his face, stunned by the agony that tore through him. Of all the stupid things that might have happened, this took the prize. Nobody knew where he was. Even if someone had seen him, he went out skiing so often, nobody would think anything about it. He didn’t have to be back at the station until Thursday. A little vacation, he’d told them, although he’d planned to return home before nightfall and spend the next three days watching TV. Nobody would miss him. He knew these woods. He’d never been lost. He’d never been hurt. At least not until now.

  He was less than an hour outside Hamelin, but the trail he was on—the Perth trail—wasn’t a very popular one. It had a killer steep gradient once you got beyond that little cabin halfway up the trail. But surely someone crazy enough to ski the Perth would come along soon. Maybe the people who’d made the cross-country tracks he’d been following would turn around and come back this way. There were two of them. That much he could tell from the tracks. One of them must have been lagging behind the other, because one set was always on top.

  Mac raised his head enough to peer back down the trail through a haze of pain, hoping against hope that someone might be skiing up the trail behind him. He dimly realized that his tracks had pretty much obliterated those he’d been following. It looked like only one—at most two—people had skied here.

  Mac might have congratulated himself on his tracking skills, but jolts of pain prevented any positive thoughts. His right leg. This wasn’t good. It felt
like a badly torn muscle at the top of his leg, but the waves of fire coursing up from the vicinity of his shin were what had him really worried.

  He did a quick survey of the rest of him. Head, fine. Arms, check. Heart, still beating. Left leg, workable. How could he have fallen so badly? He’d been thinking about the double sweeping block, and maybe his mind might possibly have wandered, but that wasn’t the problem. No, the problem was Peggy Winn. If she’d behaved the way a civilian was supposed to behave and let the police apprehend the killer last summer, then Mac wouldn’t have been distracted while he was skiing and he never would have fallen.

  The other problem was those people ahead of him—they hadn’t tested the path well enough. They shouldn’t have led him into such a trap. What was a big rock doing in the middle of a ski trail? Those people ahead of him should have moved it. How could anyone get in a good day’s skiing with idiots like that in front of him?

  He’d fallen onto his left side. He pushed himself up an inch at a time, every slight movement an exercise in agony, until he could slip off his backpack. Despite the pain, he hauled the pack forward and flipped open one of the side pockets. Empty. Mac swore vehemently. He always put his cell phone in there. Without much hope, he searched the other pockets.

  He had enough food and cigarettes for two days, even though he’d planned to be home by nightfall. It always paid to pack extra. He had two bottles of water. He had waterproof matches, so he could melt snow for drinking. He didn’t have a sleeping bag, but he’d brought a compact emergency tent, more to conserve heat and protect from the wind than anything else. Here, deep in the woods, he wouldn’t have to worry about wind. The rock escarpment rising on the right-hand side of the trail might be a good place to hunker against, if he could get there. He could cover himself with the tent, but without a sleeping bag, he might lose his toes to frostbite before morning if he couldn’t keep them moving.

  And he most definitely could not. Even thinking about moving his toes incited the flaming agony running up his leg.

  Ahead, at the top of a small rise, the trees thinned a bit. He must be close to that vacant cabin. Maybe those two people skiing ahead of him had gone there. If so, they’d have a fire. That was better than an emergency tent any day. He could get warm. And they could call for help. Everybody carried cell phones. He yelled for help, but the snow and the surrounding trees seemed to absorb the sound. He heard a faint reverberation as his voice bounced back at him from the high rock cliff. He doubted anyone would hear him unless he could get closer to the cabin.

  Even if nobody was there, he could start a fire and maybe he could send some sort of smoke signal. He’d have to think about that one. The fire was the most important thing. It was cold enough now, maybe ten or fifteen degrees, but temps were supposed to plunge to subzero before morning. By then, he had to be out of here. The snow—forecasters said it was a blizzard moving in—would be no fun to deal with.

  Before he could move, though, he needed a splint of some sort to immobilize his leg. The only thing even vaguely straight and solid was a ski. He pulled two fat Ace bandages out of his pack. He’d almost removed them from his pack before he left. Now he was mighty glad he hadn’t. Groaning with the effort, he removed his left ski and set to work on getting off the right one. The more it hurt, the angrier he got. The angrier he was, the less he seemed to feel the pain.

  Still, the grinding of sharp bone on the muscle tissue inside his leg came close to making him pass out. When he finally finished, his leg was bound to the ski, from his thigh all the way down as close to his ankle as he could reach. There was no way he could crawl with his leg sticking out straight like that. He’d have to pull himself along on his left side. This was going to be a long day.

  7

  Cutting Up Kindling

  Marcus Wantstring had less than a week to finish this. Wrap up all the loose ends. Tweak the rough spots. Revise the computer file.

  The blizzard would keep casual skiers away for at least the next three days. He glanced up at the cloud cover. That blizzard had better hurry. There was only a foot or two of snow on the ground so far. Not nearly enough to keep him dependably isolated. Still, he was sure he wouldn’t be interrupted.

  He had no idea who owned this cabin, but found justification for using it in the tidy hand-lettered laminated sign tacked beside the door:

  Feel free to stay for a day or two

  Clean up after yourself

  Leave firewood for the next person

  Whoever wrote the sign should have said, Leave some kindling, too, he thought. He needed more than a day or two, but he doubted the owner, whoever that was, would object to even a week’s stay here in the beginning stages of a blizzard. From everything he’d heard around town, the Perth wasn’t a frequently used trail, not like the other ones, so there was a good chance nobody would come anywhere near the cabin. There hadn’t been any ski tracks ahead of his on the way up here.

  He needed solitude in a situation like this. His wife, dear as she was, could not stop talking for more than ten minutes at a time. Luckily, although she enjoyed picnics in the summer, she wasn’t one to ski.

  He and Denby had stumbled onto this—what should he call it? This project?—entirely by accident. Eight years so far. Eight pretty good years. He couldn’t drop the ball now. Not with Denby gone. He had to keep up his end. He had to complete the contract, but there was no way he could finish it at home. Not with his wife popping in and out of his office. And not at school. Not with all those people around. Even with his office door locked, people would wonder what was taking him so long in there. This would be the last one. He couldn’t keep going without Denby. He didn’t even want to try.

  * * *

  “I recall many winters in Scotland,” Dirk told me, “when the snow was so thick we were hard put by to keep ourselves alive. The cellar below our house was dug deep, back into the hill.”

  The hill, as he called it, was the impressive Ben y Vrackie, now something of a tourist destination north of Pitlochry. I’d first seen Dirk there when I took a walk up that particular mountain to a grassy meadow. He’d initially mistaken me for his ladylove. Once we got that straightened out, it took him a while to resign himself to being dead.

  He said something else, but I’d missed his train of thought.

  “Into the hill,” I said. “Like a cave?”

  His eyebrows lowered. “Ye werena listening, yet again. But aye, ’twas cavelike. One winter, when I was but a lad, we lost many of our goats. We spent months in the cave.”

  “What did you eat?”

  He gave me a quizzical look. “The bounty of the summer garden, of course.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Of course.”

  “Neeps, mostly. Carrots. Cabbage. Onions. Nothing else lasted so well.”

  Neeps? Yuck. I knew that was what they called turnips. How on earth could anybody last a whole winter on turnips and cabbage? Still, it would sure be better than starving to death. If I had to depend on my own garden, I’d never make it. Other than a hill of zucchini, an area full of radishes, three tomato bushes, and the big asparagus patch that had been here for generations, my idea of gardening was asters, dahlias, dill, milkweed, sunflowers, daisies—and the dozens of other plants bumblebees and butterflies needed in order to thrive. I’d tried growing carrots one summer, but they ended up unbelievably crooked—guess I should have pulled more rocks out of the stony Vermont soil.

  “. . . are they doing, foreby?”

  I came back with a start. “Who? What?”

  He nodded out the window, and I joined him, accidentally grazing his elbow and feeling that increasingly familiar sense of cool water flowing across my arm.

  He stood a little straighter, so I knew he’d felt me touch him.

  Outside, on the two feet of snow accumulated on the front lawns throughout Hamelin, a bevy of X-C skiers glided along the narrow parallel paths the
y’d been carving into the top few inches of snow cover in this our first big snow of the season.

  “Practically everyone in town skis,” I told Dirk. “Either downhill or cross-country, or both.”

  “Skees.” He tried out the word. “What would be downill?”

  “Down hill.” I emphasized the two syllables. “It’s not like what they’re doing.” I gestured out the window. “In downhill skiing, you go really fast down the side of a mountain.”

  “For why?”

  Good question. “For the thrill of it, I guess. I’m too chicken to try Alpine—downhill—skiing. I’ve seen too many people with broken bones. I prefer the X-C way.”

  “What would be an eksy weigh?”

  “Huh? Oh. They’re initials. X. C. That means cross-country. Sometimes it’s called Nordic skiing. Cross-country is the kind they’re doing out there.”

  “Do ye ever break your bones in eksy skeeing?”

  “Nah. It’s pretty sedate—at least it is the way I do it. Nothing ever happens to people on cross-country skis. Unless they’re stupid enough to ski alone and get lost in the mountains.”

  * * *

  Except for the wrap-up, which he hadn’t decided on yet, Marcus had everything on USB flash drives. Denby had firmly believed in backing up everything more than once, and he’d taught Marcus to do the same.

  He took a deep breath and picked up one dead branch from the snow-free area under the overhang of a thick beech tree. He ought to pay attention if he was going to gather enough kindling, but his mind kept drifting as he mulled over possible scenarios.