by Fran Stewart
“One minute he was here—and I saw the way you two looked at each other—and then he was gone almost from one day to the next.”
Almost from one heartbeat to the next, I thought. “He stood me up.”
“Yeah? So? His dad died. And then work got in the way.”
“He could have called.”
She ignored that, maybe because she knew I was right. “Now he’s back and you don’t know what to do. He didn’t even kiss you hello.”
Not that he ever had, I thought. “What did he tell you after I left to take care of that customer?”
She stirred more cream into her half-empty cup. Stalling for time, I thought.
“He didn’t say much. I think he’d rather tell you about it.”
“Not a chance.” I pushed my mug away from me. “He’ll be all caught up in the murder investigation now.” I readjusted my kerchief and tucked away a stray lock. Forget that—my hair wasn’t long enough to be a lock, only long enough to tickle my ear. “He won’t have time for me.” I sounded like a frustrated adolescent. “Let’s not talk about Harper. Or Dirk. Tell me more about Dr. Wantstring. What was this project he was talking about?”
“I really don’t know anything specific. What I told Harper and Murphy was all I know.”
“That’s all?”
“Yeah.” I must have looked skeptical, because she added, “If I knew anything, don’t you think I would have told Harper and Murphy—and you,” she added almost as an afterthought.
“Wait. You said he was secretive? Maybe he’s working on some hush-hush government project?”
Karaline looked at me as if I’d gone out of my mind. “At UVM? In the microbiology department?”
I looked into my half-empty coffee mug. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. But still, he’s dead.” I took a sip of the rapidly cooling coffee. “Are you sure he didn’t mention any more details?”
She gazed out onto the snow-filled courtyard. A man enveloped in a bright blue parka had brushed the snow off one of the courtyard benches, and sat there using his cell. A tourist, by the look of him. Awful cold phone booth, I thought.
“He wouldn’t say anything more. He was such a private person.” The pain in her voice was almost palpable. “He never talked much about himself or his wife. I never understood their relationship. They seemed like such . . . opposites.”
I decided to take the high road. Dirk would have been proud of me—but I wasn’t thinking about him. “Maybe she made him laugh,” I said, wondering even as I said it whether that would be enough to sustain a marriage. I looked beyond the cell phone guy. The front door of the ScotShop was still firmly closed. “I wonder what’s keeping them so long?”
“They’re trying to decide how she killed him. Don’t you know the spouse is always the prime suspect?”
“Emily wouldn’t have the gumption to kill anybody.” Then again, I remembered her constant bickering. She’d been so upset the day he’d left her to go up to that cabin. Hmm . . . maybe . . . No . . . impossible. Emily couldn’t be a murderer.
“Even if she’s innocent,” Karaline said, “they’ll have their sights on her until they find who really did it.”
“Could he have been killed because of whatever he was working on? PD said the same thing—that he’d gotten secretive, remember?”
Karaline’s eyes widened. “Oh my God.” She was getting into a habit with that phrase.
20
Better Than a Bear
I looked out the Logg Cabin’s big front window again, just as the door to the ScotShop opened. Murphy and Emily turned to their left, toward the police station. Maybe she had to sign a formal statement. At least she wasn’t in handcuffs, but Karaline was probably right—Emily was a suspect for sure.
Harper stepped out, looked around for a couple of seconds, and headed toward the Logg Cabin. He must have seen us in the window.
“Looks like his radar is turned on,” Karaline said.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She walked over to let him in and locked the door behind him.
“I need to talk with both of you.” He stamped the snow from his boots and took off his parka. “Eventually you’ll need to sign statements at the station, but I’d like to have an informal discussion, if you don’t mind.”
“Fine with me,” I said.
“Sit,” said Karaline.
“Can we go back there?” He tipped his head toward the alcove near the kitchen. “Away from this window.”
Karaline led the way and sat us at the same table where Harper and I had sat once before. I wondered if she did it on purpose. Once again, Harper took the seat that would put his back against the wall. K took a moment to disappear into the kitchen, where I assumed she was refilling the carafe. She came back and poured Harper a mugful without asking. When we settled in, he turned to me. “Tell me what you know about Emily Wantstring.”
What did I really know about her, other than that she seemed to be lonely? “She talks so much about herself, but I don’t really feel I know her.” I rubbed my hand across my forehead. “I’m not proud of this, but I usually tune her out. The only concrete thing I remember is that they had their thirty-seventh anniversary last month. Other than that, all she did was complain about how lonely she was.”
“The thirty-seventh? Not the thirty-ninth? Are you sure about that?”
“Yes. She talked about it quite a bit.”
“Have you talked to her since Sunday?”
I thought back. “Let’s see. Sunday. I remember looking out at the two-foot snowfall when I woke up. Then . . .” Then I’d had breakfast with Dirk, but I couldn’t very well say that. Anyway, I was not going to think about Dirk. He’d been fascinated by the waffle iron. In fact, I’d made five waffles instead of my usual two just so he could watch the butter melting in the little square holes. When I poured on the maple syrup . . .
“Then . . .” Harper prompted.
I put Dirk firmly out of my mind, although it was a shame he’d never heard of maple syrup, that northern ambrosia. I took a breath. “Then Emily called me after breakfast. She was angry because Mark . . .” Karaline shifted in her seat. “Marcus,” I corrected, “had gone off into the woods. She doesn’t like skiing.”
“He loved it.” Karaline’s voice was so sad, I lost my train of thought and Harper had to prompt me again.
“She was angry?”
“No, I didn’t mean that. She was upset at being left alone. She complained about being cold.”
A line formed between his eyebrows. “She told me they’d bought a house in that new development. They’re supposed to be well insulated.”
“Snore,” I drawled, and we all three laughed. The ads for Eco Estates showed a fat mama bear with two roly-poly cubs curled up asleep and snoring in a roomy den. A people den; not a bear den. I did wonder how they’d gotten the bears to cooperate. Probably photoshopped, I thought. The tagline read: Better insulated than a bear.
“Maybe she forgot her fur,” Karaline said. That brought us back to the topic.
I ran my phone conversation with Emily through my memory bank. “She really did sound cold. At one point, her teeth chattered.”
“Maybe she was calling you from outside,” Karaline suggested, “like the guy out there in the courtyard.”
“That sort of defeats the purpose of a bear-insulated house, doesn’t it?”
Harper pushed his coffee cup aside. “Could you hear any background noise?”
“No. I just told her to make herself some hot chocolate, but I can’t help wondering if Emily really was outside while we were talking.”
“Why would you think that?”
“I’m not accusing her of anything, Harper. I just can’t get over how cold she sounded.”
He drew his brows together. It was obvious that he would already have consider
ed Emily a suspect, just as Karaline had said, but I sure hoped I hadn’t added fuel to that fire.
After Harper left a few minutes later, I turned to Karaline, who’d pushed her chair back from the table. “Do you think Emily could have been calling me from that cabin? Maybe she did kill him.”
She bent forward, elbows on her thighs, and hid her face in her hands. “God, I hope not.” A minute or two later, she said, “We goofed. We should have told Harper about the break-in.”
“Emily probably told him when he questioned her.”
We talked for almost an hour, accomplishing absolutely nothing. It was all conjecture at that point. Over three or four more cups of coffee, Karaline mourned her beloved mentor and shared stories from her days at UVM. Outsiders thought UVM meant University of Vermont, but it really stands for “Universitas Viridis Montis.” That’s Latin for “University of the Green Mountains.”
I idly wondered what Dirk would have thought of all this—he’d learned a little Latin, and a fair amount of Greek no less, from Brother Somebody or Other when he was a boy. I pulled myself up short. Why was I thinking about that ghost again when I was so mad at him? And why was I mad at him, when I was the one who’d been too stubborn? He was right. I was wrong. It wasn’t a pretty picture. Maybe I should apologize?
As if she knew my mind, Karaline asked me about what happened when Dirk and I had gone up the Perth trail. “You really heard Mac? You could tell it was him?”
“Oh, yeah. He was swearing worse than I’ve ever heard. I know I should have checked on him right then,” I admitted, “but it never occurred to me he was hurt or that he had a body in there.” I resolutely put Dirk’s voice out of my mind. His voice when he’d said, Mayhap he is injured. I was not going to dwell on that. I couldn’t keep myself from wondering, though, what might have happened if we’d gone to help Mac.
She thought for a moment. “You don’t suppose . . .”
“What?”
“What’s the possibility that Mac killed him?”
I thought about it, but only for a few seconds. “Maybe. All we have is Mac’s word that Dr. W was already dead when he got there.”
“And neither one of us trusts him as far as we could spit.”
“I can’t spit very far, K.”
“That’s what I mean,” she said. “Still, if his leg was broken that badly, I doubt he could have killed anybody.”
“Maybe . . .” I tried to picture the scene. “Maybe Mac broke his leg after he killed Dr. Wantstring. Would that have been possible?”
She screwed her mouth up so much I thought it would wind itself off her face. “You know darn well I’d love nothing so much as to pin this on Mac, but what could he possibly have had against Dr. W? Motive, you know? Motive is essential if what you read in books is to be believed.”
“Maybe Mac has been secretly in love with Emily and saw this as a way of eliminating the competition?”
Karaline groaned as hard as my stupid suggestion deserved.
“You’re right, K. No motive.”
“No motive that we know of,” she said. “I still want Mac to be the perp.”
“Perp?”
“It’s the sort of word Mac would love, don’t you think?”
“Yeah. He would.”
“What did Dirk have to say about Mac?”
“I’m not talking about him.”
“Cut the fake indignation, Peggy Winn. It does you no credit.”
“It’s not fake. I’m saddled with a ghost I don’t want, one who gets all bossy and self-righteous. Just because he’s from the fourteenth century doesn’t mean he’s better than any of us.”
“Are you in love with him? I thought you were in love with Harper.”
For want of a better response, I stuck out my tongue. “I’m not in love with anybody. I’m just fed up with having him on my heels telling me what to do every minute of the day.”
She gave me a knowing look, and I wilted. “Okay. I give up.” I uncrossed my legs and recrossed them the other way. “If you must know . . .”
“I must.”
“Dirk said we should go to the cabin and be sure Mac was okay.”
“And what did you do?”
“I, uh, I turned around and left.”
“Great decision, P.”
As much as I hated to admit it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I’d gone to the cabin, Dr. Wantstring might still be alive.
She stood and picked up our three coffee cups in one hand and the carafe in the other. If I tried that, there’d be at least two items on the floor. Turning toward the kitchen, she said, “At least there was nothing you could have done about Dr. W.”
“Oh, yeah.” I felt better, but not by much.
I went next door, retrieved my parka, and locked the ScotShop. I drove Karaline to the bank so she could make her deposit. I hadn’t taken the time to close down the cash register, and I sincerely hoped nobody was going to choose tonight to break in. I dropped Karaline off at her place and drove home slowly in the early-winter dark, weighted down by Karaline’s sorrow, by Harper’s inexplicable actions, by a nagging fear that I was somehow responsible—not for the death, but for having made the situation worse. There were also my suspicions about Emily and Mac.
From all Karaline had said, Dr. Wantstring was something of a paragon. Why would such a good man have been murdered?
Unless it was by his wife. Was he a closet abuser and she’d finally had enough? I couldn’t believe that. Karaline respected him too much. Or had Mac done the dirty deed; was he a closet maniac? I disliked the arrogant son of a gun so much I wanted to believe it. But couldn’t.
A block from home I made a U-turn and headed out of town, despite the heavy snow. The Hamelin Clinic was too small, so Mac had to be in the Arkane hospital. I owed him an apology for not checking on him when I heard him swearing, and the sooner I got it out of the way, the better. I seriously considered not saying anything, but I knew he’d be able to read my statement in the official files, and I thought it would be better if he heard from me that I’d been there and left, rather than from reading it in some dry police report.
I’d even seen where he’d fallen, and the flattened swath where he dragged himself to the cabin. Why hadn’t I listened to Dirk?
21
There’s No Place Like Home
At the hospital, I asked for Mac’s room number and peeked in at his door. He had more plaster and wire on him than a modern art exhibit. I put on a cheery voice. “You up for a visitor?”
Mac had one continuous eyebrow, as springy as a Brillo pad. It stretched over both eyes. Right now it was drawn down in a disgusted-looking V, like an arrow pointing at the bridge of his wide nose. “A visitor? Do I have any choice?”
Oh boy, is this going to be fun or what?
With surprisingly little encouragement, he regaled me with a step-by-step account of his entire saga. When he told about burying his other ski, I remembered stopping there and stepping on something. He should have had bright blue skis. Then I would have known something was wrong. Nobody leaves a ski buried for no reason. As it was, I’d thought it was a smooth brown snow-covered branch. Not that I’d paid much attention to it. I’d been thinking about Robert Frost the whole time Mac was getting two fingers broken and struggling to get a fire started.
I’d also argued with Dirk about . . . what? About something I couldn’t even remember now.
“So I want you to go get it for me. Leave it at my house.”
“Get what? Leave what?”
“My ski, dammit. Haven’t you been listening to me?”
I was about to retort in kind, but I remembered that I’d come here to apologize—and he was right: I had not been listening to him—so I swallowed my irritation. “I’ll get it.” Naturally, he never said, Thank you.
He rattled on for q
uite a while. When he got to the part about the ax that caved in the back of Dr. Wantstring’s head, I interrupted him. I didn’t want gory details. “I have to apologize to you,” I said.
“It’s about time.”
“About time for what?” I was truly mystified. How could he know already? Had someone from the police department called him about it already? I decided to play innocent. “What do you mean?”
“That time you laughed at me when I was in second grade and you were in kindygarden.”
He said it wrong, but I was too astonished to correct him. “In second grade? Kindergarten?” Okay, so I did feel a need to correct him. “What are you talking about?”
“Danny pushed me on the playground during recess, and you laughed at me. You’ve owed me an apology for years.”
“Why should I apologize for that?” I had to think for a second, but then I remembered. “Danny didn’t push you. You fell.” The picture of Mac flailing as he tripped over his own two feet and toppled to the soft grass was still funny, even though I hadn’t thought about it in almost two dozen years.
“He pushed me. And you laughed, and that made everybody else laugh, too.”
“I didn’t laugh long. If I remember right, I ran over and helped you stand up, even though you weren’t really hurt.”
“Yeah.” He held up his left hand, the one with the cast on the fingers, and I wondered if he was trying to make a rude gesture. No. That wasn’t Mac’s style. “First you laugh at me, and then”—he held up the index finger of his right hand—“you humiliate me.”
“Humiliate you? You’re nuts.”
“So, apologize.”
“In your dreams.” I turned and stalked out. Let him read about what I’d done in a police report. I didn’t care. And if he thought I was going back up the Perth trail to pick up his lousy ski, he had another think coming. Let it sit in a snowbank for the rest of the winter. He’d find it come spring.
Not that I felt vindictive or anything.
* * *
Home felt empty. Even Shorty had disappeared. My fuzzy gray cat liked to nap on my bed, or a chair somewhere, or behind the woodstove, but he always bestirred himself to acknowledge me when I came home. I headed toward the warmth and opened the damper a little more to let the fire blaze up a bit. Damn Mac Campbell. But my heart wasn’t really into resenting him. He wasn’t worth the effort.
