A Wee Dose of Death

by Fran Stewart

  He’d never objected. As if he understood.

  She thought about the twice-yearly faculty dinners she had to attend in the autumn and spring. She’d never have to attend another one. The last one, just three weeks ago, had been sheer torture. There had been a string quartet playing in the background. Marcus had taken her arm firmly, as if he could lend her his strength through his strong hand. But when two young women from the university choir came onto the little stage and began to sing “The Flower Duet,” Emily had stood so suddenly she’d knocked over her wineglass. She could still feel her panic as she’d run from the room. She collided with one of the numerous graduate assistants—they were the ones who served the senior faculty. The impact had knocked the tray out of the girl’s hands, but Emily had run on without apologizing. Mark . . . Marcus had caught up with her on the front steps. He’d taken her home without a word of regret for the missed dinner. She was sure everyone there thought she was crazy. Why hadn’t they listed the song in the little program they’d handed everyone? That way, she could have been prepared.

  * * *

  Saturday night I’d already given up on the day and changed into my flannel pajamas. With a ghost in the house—a very masculine ghost unrelated to me—I’d been a bit reticent the first couple of months about walking around in my pajamas, but first of all, he was dead, and secondly, I was more covered up in my heavy pj’s than I was in a summer dress, so what could it matter?

  The phone rang around ten o’clock. I loved caller ID. “H’lo, Karaline.”

  “You want to go to the cabin with me tomorrow morning?”

  “The cabin? Why?”

  “To see what we can find.”

  “Like I said—why?”

  “I’ve been sitting here thinking. You know how I told you Dr. W always squirreled things away?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “I got to thinking about how Murphy said there wasn’t anything in the cabin except Dr. W and the clothes he was wearing, you know?”

  “I know. So, why would you want to go over a cabin that’s already been thoroughly searched?” I saw Dirk perk up his ears.

  “That’s just it, P. I don’t think it was searched thoroughly.”

  “But . . .”

  She didn’t let me get any further. “They didn’t know who he was when they searched. They didn’t know about his squirreling habit, so they wouldn’t have known to look in unusual places.”

  I thought about that bare, bleak cabin. “Karaline Logg, there aren’t any unusual places in that building. It’s not big enough to have any”—I pitched my voice in a low, throaty growl—“unusual places.”

  “Quit the sarcasm. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ll meet you—when?”

  I did a quick calculation. The ScotShop was open from noon to five on Sunday. “Let’s go early so I can get cleaned up in time to open. No, wait; you have to be at the restaurant for breakfast. Shall we go in the evening, after five?”

  “First of all, we don’t want to be out on the mountainside that late. Gets dark early this time of year, remember?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said with exaggerated politeness. “What’s your second point?”

  “Second point is that Dolly and Geraldine are going to handle things tomorrow morning. I have full staff working, and I’ll be back well before the lunchtime rush, so I’ll be on your front step about seven?”

  “Seven? No way. What about nine?”

  “Eight,” she said and hung up.

  * * *

  I made the mistake of getting up in the middle of the night for a glass of water. Then I got to feeling hungry, so I thought I’d scoot down to the kitchen and make myself some stove toast.

  Dirk turned away from the kitchen window when I snapped on the light. “Could ye no sleep?”

  “You don’t,” I said with a blithe disregard of logic, “so why should I?”

  “Ye are no dead,” he said, which was such an obvious statement I ignored it and headed for the bread box.

  “Ye maun go to see Mistress Emily again.”

  It had taken me a while to learn that “maun” meant “must.” He’d been mauning me right and left for most of the past week. Except when he was folded up. “And why would that be?”

  “She doesna have visitors.”

  He folded his arms, changed his mind, and planted one fist on his tartan-clad hip. The other hand drummed against his kilt, setting it to vibrating.

  I tried not to look down the length of his leg, but I sort of lost that battle. Before he could notice—at least I hoped he hadn’t noticed, but there was an uplift to the side of his mouth that said maybe he had—I averted my eyes and paid attention to the buttered bread in the fry pan.

  “The puir woman. She has been widowed for only a short while.”

  His hand stopped the drumming and went to his other hip. It made his shoulders look extra broad. “Have ye never lost someone dear to ye? Have ye never grieved for a year and a day?”

  “A year and a day? What are you talking about?”

  “Everyone kens that when ye lose a husband or a child, a parent, brother, or sister, ye maun mourn for one day more than a year.”

  “Everybody might have known that back when you were alive—although I’ve never heard of it so maybe it was just a Scottish thing—but we don’t do that sort of enforced mourning thing anymore.” I turned the toast to brown the other side.

  “Why do ye no? How do ye deal wi’ the grief or help friends and family to deal with theirs? How would ye honor your dead?”

  “Well.” I thought about it. I’d never lost a husband—maybe because I’d never had a husband—and both my parents were still very much alive. “Maybe it’s because we don’t deal with death quite so much in this century as you had to do back then.” I flipped the toast one more time. “Not on a day-to-day basis.”

  The line between his heavy eyebrows deepened. “Everyone must die.”

  “That’s true, but I think we generally do it a little later in life than you used to.”

  He didn’t look convinced.

  “Look at you,” I said and plopped the stove toast out onto a small plate. “You died when you were thirty, right?”

  “Aye.”

  Plate in hand, I headed toward the woodstove. It felt cold in the kitchen. Maybe it was because I hadn’t put on my slippers. Maybe it was Dirk’s frosty attitude. “And Peigi, your ladylove, you said she was about twenty when she died?”

  “Aye.”

  The grief I heard in that one syllable almost stopped me in my tracks. It was a few seconds before I could follow through on my train of thought. “Nowadays, if you lived now, I mean, you’d expect to reach seventy-five at least. And Peigi could look forward to reaching eighty.”

  “Why would she want to live longer than I?”

  Men. “It’s not a matter of wanting to outlive you. Statistics just say that women live longer than men. Wasn’t it like that in your day?”

  He worried his lower lip with his very white upper teeth. “Ye mentioned Master Stuhstisticks once before, but ye didna explain who he was.”

  “It means the chances of something happening. Statistics are the numbers of things that some people keep track of, and that gives us an idea of the likelihood . . .” My voice trailed off in the face of Dirk’s look of absolute bewilderment. I tried again. “Nowadays people—some people—keep track of how long individuals live. Once you’ve counted enough people, then you have statistics and you begin to see, uh, trends?”

  “Did people count these things when I was alive?”

  “I doubt it.” I opened the damper a bit to rack up the heat. “I think statistics is a fairly modern field.”

  He seemed to mull this over. “Many women were widowed when I lived. But then again, many of the women died in childbirth. A man who outlived
three or four wives was not unusual.”

  “Childbirth isn’t quite so scary nowadays.”

  He strode to the window and back. My living room wasn’t nearly big enough for pacing. At least not for someone with legs as long as Dirk’s.

  “Ye havena answered me yet.”

  I took a big bite and asked, with my mouth full, “Answered you about what?”

  “About ye going to visit wi’ Mistress Emily.”

  “Oh, all right, I’ll go after I close the shop tomorrow—later today—but you have to come along, too, again.”

  He raised one eyebrow. It wasn’t quite a scowl, but it was close to it. I could almost hear him saying, I could ha’ come wi’ ye many times to many places if ye didna keep rolling me up in yon wee shawl.

  He had a point. It didn’t matter whether or not he said it. I got it.

  29

  A Wee Ski in the Woods

  Sunday morning, Dirk called out to me from the bay window a couple of minutes before eight. “Ye maun be ready to go. Mistress Karaline is close by.”

  “I’m ready,” I said. “All I have to do is finish tying my shoelaces.” Of course I also had to pull on a stocking cap and adjust the shawl around my shoulders. I fastened it with a sword-shaped kilt pin, one I’d bought the first time I visited Pitlochry, when I was considering opening the ScotShop. I stuck two big cloth hankies in a zippered pocket on the front of my pants leg and a third one in my parka—much better than paper tissues that came apart after the first two wipes.

  Dirk waved out the window. I glanced outside in time to see Karaline wave back from the end of the walkway where she leaned lightly on one of her ski poles. A pair of skiers—people I didn’t recognize—glided past, looking up at my house. They couldn’t see me, far back in the living room as I was. And they certainly couldn’t see Dirk. I could just imagine them wondering why she was waving at an empty house.

  “Okay. Let’s go.” I opened the door, and Dirk glided out onto the porch as smoothly as if he’d been on skis himself.

  That first breath of chilled early-morning air over a three-foot-deep covering of snow made my nose hairs crinkle when I stepped outside. Between zero and five degrees, I guessed. Not that it mattered. We were going regardless of the temperature. The blizzard still raged throughout the rest of New England; I was glad I didn’t have to deal with zero visibility this morning.

  I pulled my skis from the mound of snow I’d stuck them in last night, brushed them off lightly with my glove, and laid them next to each other flat on the snow at the top of the ramp that led down from my deck. My twin brother, Drew, seldom visited me in the wintertime. Dealing with the snow under his wheelchair was just too much hassle. I truly did wish I’d thought to have heating elements installed underneath the ramp, only then the ramp would have had to be metal, and I wasn’t sure I liked that idea.

  I inserted the metal toe of my right shoe into the front binding until I heard a click. Once I was sure that shoe was secure, I did the same with my other foot. “Ready,” I called, and followed Karaline down the middle of Hickory Lane. Before we got home in a couple of hours, the snowplow would already have done its damage, so we’d have to take off our skis to cross the street, but for now, life couldn’t be better.

  Harper, I thought.

  Well, all right, it could be better, but in the meantime, what with no vehicle traffic, the heavy blanket of snow that had fallen overnight, and a glorious morning, I wasn’t holding off on enjoying any of it. My neighbor had once again shoveled the end of my drive where the snowplow had made one pass, most likely well before dawn. With my bedroom at the back of the house, and with Shorty purring so loudly beside me as I slept, I hadn’t heard a thing.

  I sped up a little and veered to my right so I was next to Karaline, but I didn’t say anything. I wanted to tell her everything I’d learned about Emily, but decided to wait until we were off the lane and onto smooth, unbroken snow. The morning was too splendid for talking, so far, anyway. Even Dirk seemed subdued. Wrong word. He seemed quietly happy. It was a good feeling, knowing he cared for each of us. Why had I ever thought to get rid of him?

  “Good morning!” The greeting came from our right, where the street forked. Scamp pranced at the end of a leash. He looked like he was walking Gilda rather than the other way around.

  Dirk squatted. I noticed that he took care to drape a fold of his kilt between his legs—a necessary precaution if he had nothing on under there. Why was I thinking of such a thing on a Sunday morning?

  Scamp tugged on the leash, slowing when he was within a few feet of Dirk. He stretched his neck, his nose wriggling like crazy.

  “What’s he doing?” Gilda asked. “Scamp, are you okay?”

  Karaline chuckled. “He probably just likes to sniff the air.”

  And the resident ghost.

  “I didna know Mistress Gilda had a wee doggie.”

  “How long have you had Scamp?” I thought I’d be helpful.

  Gilda looked at me funny. “Since the summer.”

  “That’s right. Too bad you didn’t start bringing him to the ScotShop until just the last few days.”

  Dirk peered up at me. “Whan that I was . . . wrapped . . . in the wee shawl? Is that when the doggie appeared? Is that why I havena met him until now?”

  Scamp tilted his head from one side to the other, and we all laughed. Thank goodness. It kept me from having to answer my wee ghostie.

  Gilda gave the leash a gentle tug. “Come, Scamp. Time to head on home.” She raised her chin. “We walk at least three miles every day.”

  “Good for you. I’ll see you at noon.” I watched them until they were out of sight. He sure was a cute pup. Maybe I could get a Scottie for myself.

  Within a couple of blocks, we came to the place where a public path led between two houses. We had to stop so we could sidestep up the enormous mound of snow piled beside the road from previous snowplow runs. Dirk watched with a growing sense of hilarity. We started, standing sideways next to the four-foot-tall mound, with me about six feet in back of Karaline. We each lifted one foot far enough so the ski was off the ground. Once we’d dug that ski into the side of the piled-up snow about a foot and a half up the pile, we had to haul the other one up beside the first one and slightly downslope from it. Then we had to dig that ski into the snow enough to be sure it was securely anchored; once that was accomplished, we’d lift the first ski higher and repeat the process.

  By the time we reached the top of the pile, Dirk was practically rolling on the snow. “Ye look like two mallards,” he croaked between guffaws. “Quack, quack.”

  I didn’t think it was nearly that funny. “You’d quack a different tune if you had to try it yourself.”

  Within moments, Karaline was laughing too hard to pay attention to what she was doing. She slid on her side down the final couple of feet, quacking as she went, skis flailing in the air ahead of her. I’m happy to say I maintained a more dignified demeanor as I descended and helped her brush off the snow—and dig some of it out of the bottom of her jacket.

  We glided side by side most of the way across the meadow where the Hamelin Highland Games were held each summer to the edge of the forest, at which point I dropped behind Karaline and let her break the path up the Perth trail. When we came to what I increasingly tended to think of as my Robert Frost spot, we stopped for a moment. We had to keep our feet moving, of course, but we stood there, skis firmly planted, raising one heel as high as we could and then the other. “I visited Emily yesterday,” I said.

  Karaline just looked at me. I could tell she wasn’t particularly interested.

  “Remember how we were wondering what Dr. W might have seen in her?”

  She perked up her ears—well, they were under a knit cap, but she looked more involved in the conversation than she had been a few seconds earlier. “Did you find out something?” She boun
ced up on both feet a couple of times. “Something interesting,” she added.

  “Wait’ll you hear this.” By the time I was halfway through recounting the story of Emily’s career and the throat cancer, Karaline had forgotten to move her feet. So had I, for that matter.

  “It was worth putting up with her steam bathhouse,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  I explained about the heat. “Such a waste of energy,” I said. “And to think she lives in such a well-insulated home. It’s not like she has to keep the heat up to compensate for cold air coming in through cracks.”

  Karaline looked up into the bright sunshine above us, as it danced through the trees, but I had the feeling she wasn’t really seeing it. “Of course she’s cold all the time,” she finally said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “For why would ye say that?”

  Dirk’s and my questions came out at the same time.

  “I bet her cancer affected her thyroid.” She didn’t say anything else, almost as if she expected me to know what the heck she was talking about.

  I looked at Dirk. He looked at me and made one of those gestures that said, Beats me, although I didn’t think that phrase was available in the fourteenth century. Karaline must have tuned in to our lack of response. “Thyroid cancer,” she said again. “When the thyroid is injured or destroyed, the body can’t regulate its temperature—can’t heat itself from the inside. Weather that seems moderately balmy to us can feel bitingly cold to someone with low thyroid function. They would have given her a prescription, but I’d be willing to bet the dosage needs to be adjusted.”

  Things began to make sense. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her without long sleeves, and some sort of scarf or wrap around her neck, even at the height of the summer.”