A Wee Dose of Death

by Fran Stewart

  Karaline began to shuffle her feet again. “Speaking of cold, we’d better hurry if we’re going to get back to Hamelin before noon.”

  “You think we’ll really find something?” I asked. “That cabin is truly minuscule. There’s nowhere to hide anything the police wouldn’t already have found.”

  “You’d be surprised,” she said, and headed up the trail.

  * * *

  Harper sat on the side of his bed Sunday morning, still in his boxers. He was ready to pull his heavy socks on, but unwilling to let go of the thoughts swirling around his brain. First, his dad. Of all the stupid things he could have done, getting thrown in jail in the middle of South America was one of the stupidest. Especially since he’d caught a bug of some sort. A bug that killed him.

  By the time he got the body cremated and the ashes home, Harper had been ordered to Poughkeepsie because of a breakthrough in a case he’d worked on—an identity theft ring. Even with the break, that investigation had gotten nowhere. He’d developed something of a reputation when he worked in Poughkeepsie, what with the first ring he’d busted. But now this new one was better protected, harder to crack.

  And then there was the Wantstring death. Harper wasn’t ready to quit on this investigation, no matter how frustrating it felt to be so far past the death date and still not have a clue. He wouldn’t quit. Not yet. Something was bound to turn up.

  Maybe he should ski up to that little cabin where the body had been found. Murphy said he’d checked the place thoroughly, but there was always a chance something minor had been overlooked. Something that seemed minor but might be the key to cracking the case wide-open.

  He dressed quickly, threw an insulated bottle of water into a small day pack, stuck the metal-reinforced toes of his ski boots into his cross-country skis, and headed for the Perth.

  He’d find some answers there. He was pretty sure of that.

  30

  Search Party

  I couldn’t figure out why anyone would build a simple cabin with a door that was easily seven and a half feet tall. In fact, I had no idea who owned the cabin. Maybe he—or she—was a giant. The good thing was that Karaline would never have to duck her six-foot frame. I pushed the door open and took an immediate step backward, inadvertently running into Karaline. I hadn’t realized she was practically on my heels.

  “What’s wrong?” The breath puffing out of her mouth froze in the cold morning air, making her look like a steam engine.

  I puffed right back at her. “You may not want to go in there.”

  “Why not?” She pushed past me and stopped on the threshold. “Oh. Oh my God.”

  Somebody had done a halfhearted job of trying to clean up a little, but a trail of Dr. Wantstring’s blood still stained the floor beside the woodstove. It was too cold for there to be much smell, but I could tell Mac had been lying here for four days. With his broken leg and smashed fingers, the outhouse in back of the cabin would have been a pipe dream.

  I was suddenly glad it was such a cold winter, and I began to truly feel sorry for Mac.

  Without saying anything—what was there to say, after all—Karaline shrugged out of her day pack and pulled out a heavy-duty flashlight. “Let’s get this search party going,” she said and began to investigate the woodpile. I climbed the ladder to look around the top bunk. What a grandiose term for what was only a platform made of planks of wood. I remembered when I’d first seen the place. I loved the little laminated sign beside the door, but I did recall thinking how uncomfortable it would probably be trying to camp out here.

  Dirk thrust his head over the edge of the bunk into the shallow well formed by a one-by-four screwed into place along the front edge of the platform, probably to keep people from rolling out of bed in the middle of the night. “He wouldna try to hide anything here,” he said. “Not even a wee youh-ezzbeedrive.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He repeated the word. Or rather, his idea of the word.

  “It’s an abbreviation, Dirk.” I explained—sort of. My knowledge of the ins and outs of data storage was limited at best, and I had no idea what “USB” stood for, but I’d already told him about computers and had shown him my Mac laptop, so he had a general idea of what I was talking about.

  “There’s nothing up here,” I said. “That’s for sure. But I think you’re wrong about his not hiding anything here. I think it would make a great hiding place.”

  “Nay,” he said. “Anyone could look into it as I am doing.” He bent his head almost into the well, and his chin didn’t even graze the top edge.

  I studied him a moment. “Maybe anybody as tall as you are, but what if our murderer was short?”

  “He wasna,” Dirk said with finality, but I wasn’t going to let up on this.

  “Why are you so sure?”

  “Mistress Karaline has said that her Dr. Doubleyou was a tall man, aye?”

  “Yep,” came Karaline’s comment from all the way across the room, which meant less than a dozen feet from us. “He was a few inches taller than I.”

  Dirk nodded, as if that proved his point.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “It’s simple logic,” Karaline said. “Dr. W was tall enough not to consider this a good hiding place, since he’d be able to look right into it without climbing up the ladder, the way you had to do, so he wouldn’t have hidden anything there.” She poked around in the ashes of the woodstove. “And the murderer must have been equally tall.”

  “For heaven’s sakes, K, how can you say that?”

  “Anyone able to bring an ax down on the head of such a tall man . . .”

  “. . . maun ha’ been a tall man himself.” Dirk finished her thought with a distinct flourish in his voice.

  “Mawn?” Karaline shut the woodstove door. “What’s mawn?”

  I guessed I hadn’t clued her in. I explained while Dirk prowled around the perimeter of the room, looking under the table, and leaning to look behind the woodpile. When he didn’t find anything, he asked if he might take the shawl.

  “Sure,” I said, unhooking my kilt pin and removing the shawl from my shoulders. “Why do you need it?” I tucked the kilt pin into a front zippered pocket.

  “I would like to look around outside the wee cabin.”

  “If I were you I’d walk up the trail a ways,” Karaline suggested. “Tell us if you think the snow’s been disturbed by anyone in the past week.”

  “Aye; that I will, but for why?”

  “Maybe whoever murdered Dr. W escaped that way. There’s a trail. He might have left some kind of sign.”

  Dirk made a sort of wiggly motion with his hand in the air. Maybe it was a Gaelic blessing of some sort. “God bide,” he said, or something like that, as he headed for the door, throwing the shawl casually but lovingly over one shoulder. I opened the door for him, watched him skirt around the skis we’d propped against the side of the cabin, and closed the door behind me.

  On second thought, I opened it again. We didn’t have a fire going, but we’d been so active, we’d both maintained our body heat. There wasn’t any wind, and I thought we could use the extra light from the open door. Also, I’d gotten a little bit used to the stink, but the room could still use some cross ventilation. I crossed to the window on the other side and opened it all the way.

  * * *

  Harper opted to cross people’s backyards until he was out of town. The road would have been faster, but then he’d have to get up and over the heap of snow left by the snowplow, unless he was lucky enough to find a house where the people had already shoveled out their driveway. That wasn’t too likely this early on a Sunday morning.

  He’d lived for a short while in the South, and he could never get over how people there had no concept of what to do in a heavy snow. Heck, they didn’t know what to do in a light snow. Here in Vermont, over
the course of a winter, particularly if there were a lot of heavy snowstorms, the streets would get narrower with each passing month as the mounds of snow built up and up. Harper could remember one year when he was a teenager, when there wasn’t the usual January thaw, and the path to each house in his hometown of Arkane was more like a tunnel than a walkway. The streets were barely wide enough to accommodate a single car. That was the year the snow was too heavy and too deep for the plows, and the town had to hire bucket loaders to scoop it up. Luckily, that didn’t happen very often.

  He saw one couple coming toward him. They looked elderly, maybe because they seemed to be out for a leisurely stroll, hard to do on skis. It was so much easier to ski fast, so the momentum would carry you along. All you had to do was keep your legs moving. Going slowly, though, as these two people were doing, it was more like shuffling than skiing. They’d be better off on snowshoes, Harper thought. As he watched, he saw the man begin the distinctive wobbly motion of someone whose skis were sliding backward, out from under him.

  Harper stopped to help the man back to his feet. Once he was sure nothing was broken and the fellow had his legs under him where they should be, he waved good-bye and skied on. “Thank you,” came the woman’s voice, muffled somewhat by the heavy scarf wound around her face and neck.

  Harper gauged the look of the sky and the cloud cover, taking into account how cold it was, and what the wind felt like. He’d be okay skiing up the Perth. All he had to do was reach the little cabin. You couldn’t get lost on that trail.

  He headed for the dark oval at the beginning of the trail, where old-growth trees joined hands high in the air above the path, and skied, fast, into the yawning maw of the path, still heavily shaded from the early-morning light by ancient evergreen trees that stood like sentinels.

  * * *

  Mac Campbell hated breakfast; he hated having to depend on those snotty nurses for everything he needed; most of all he hated not knowing what was going on at the station. He needed his hands in the action. He yanked the rolling table closer. Maybe there was someone he could call. Somebody who needed to hear what had happened to him. Maybe that Andrea woman who worked for the newspaper. She should have come by to interview him. It wasn’t every day the Hamelin police chief was incapastiated . . . incaspipitated . . . laid up. As Mac reached for the phone, he knocked that stupid report off his lap. He’d fallen asleep reading it. Boring as heck. Nothing to report. They needed him there directing the operation. The perp would be behind bars already if Mac had been in on the investigation.

  Shoving it out of the way, his glance passed over one word. Insurance. Mac perked up, pushed the phone away, and started reading. Five-million-dollar insurance policy. Sole beneficiary Emily Fontini Wantstring. What kind of middle name was that? Damn Eyetalian.

  He picked up the phone. Harper wasn’t there, out investigating something, Moira told him. “Put Murphy on, then.”

  “Sorry, Chief. He’s not available. I can connect you with Fairing.”

  Mac swore. “Awright, put her on.”

  When Fairing came on the line, Mac told her to arrest Emily Wantstring for the murder of her husband.

  “But we don’t have a shred of evidence to implicate her.”

  “You don’t call a five-million-dollar insurance policy evidence?”

  “No . . . sir. I’d call that a possible motive, but it’s not evidence.”

  “Quit stalling. I order you to arrest that woman. Now!”

  * * *

  “Have you found anything yet, K?”

  She shook her head and kept on dismantling the woodpile, moving the logs one or two at a time from the corner of the room to a place beneath the window closest to the bunk bed.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Remember how when we came in, this woodpile was disturbed, like some of it had fallen over?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “and I know why it was.” She paused in the process of hefting one particularly large log. Somebody was going to have to split it; it wouldn’t fit through the stove’s doorway. “When I visited Mac in the hospital—”

  “Poor, dumb you,” she muttered.

  “I know. I have no idea what got into me. Anyway . . .” I took the log from her, like a bucket brigade, and added it to her new pile. “Mac told me he’d pulled the logs over on himself.”

  “Stupid move, wouldn’t you say?”

  I tried to be fair. He was a jerk, but his leg had been broken, after all. “He was trying to get just one log off the top of the pile so he could get a fire started, but when he snagged his ski pole on it and tugged, that whole end of the pile collapsed on him. That’s what broke his two fingers.”

  “Serves him right,” she muttered.

  “So,” I said, “why are you moving the woodpile?”

  “Because if somebody disturbed it—Mac or anybody else—he may have inadvertently covered up a CD or a USB or something that Dr. W hid. I hope it wasn’t a CD—too much danger of breaking. The woodpile would make a perfect hiding place.”

  I wasn’t too sure about that.

  She must have noticed my look of disbelief. “Really,” she said. “About a third of the way up from the bottom is where I would have put it.” She picked up one more log. “And ta-da,” she sang out, “here it is.”

  At first I thought she was teasing, but she lifted a dark blue flash drive and held it high.

  We high-fived it. And somehow I ended up with the thing in my grasp.

  “I’ll be happy to take care of that for you.”

  Karaline and I spun so fast it was a wonder we didn’t fall over. “Who are you?” We both said it. I couldn’t tell which one of us had spoken first.

  The voice sounded fake, as if it were disguised on purpose. Between the black ski mask and a heavy parka, I couldn’t identify either the hair color or weight of whoever it was. Average height. Black gloves—well, glove, singular; one hand was out of sight behind his back.

  “Let’s just say I’m somebody who should have that thumb drive and leave it at that.”

  Karaline backed up a step, but I stood my ground. “No.”

  Black Mask shifted his weight, moving his legs farther apart, with one a little in front of the other. He brought his other hand forward. Why on earth had we let Dirk go wandering off into the woods? I hated guns.

  Especially if they were aimed at me.

  “I want you to set it down real easy-like,” the black-masked guy said. “Then shove it across the floor to me. We wouldn’t want it to get hurt in the process, would we?”

  I had to disagree. Whatever was on the USB, I didn’t want this monster to have the information.

  “Wouldn’t want either one of you to get hurt, either, but I already killed one person. It wouldn’t bother me much to kill two more.”

  Everything in my heart screamed to fight, not to let this creep get Dr. W’s flash drive. At the same time, everything in my head told me to be a good girl and give it to him so he’d leave.

  “Give it to him, Peggy,” Karaline said. I was surprised her voice sounded so calm.

  I thrust my chin forward. “Give me one good reason why I should.”

  “He’s got a gun,” she said, and I paused. She had a point.

  The more I thought about it, the more it began to sound like a perfectly good reason. If I bent down really slowly, though, I could get my balance arranged so I could throw the thing at him when he least expected it. But I’d have to act fast.

  “Don’t try anything funny,” the guy said from across the room, shifting his shoulders as if the weight of his backpack was bothering him. He was too far away for us to rush him. He could kill at least one of us the moment we started to move. “Like I said,” he added, “kill one, kill three. Not much difference.”

  “He has a point,” Karaline said, echoing my sentiments. “Give it to him, Peggy.”
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  “You already said that,” I said, stalling for time. Where was Dirk when I needed him? All he had to do was run into the guy from behind and this fellow would pass out faster than he could shake his gun.

  And the gun might go off accidentally, a niggling little voice said inside my brain.

  “Okay.” I knelt as slowly as I could and set the flash drive on the old wooden floorboards. All I had to do was give it such a hard shove, it would spin out of control through the open door. Then Dirk could tackle the guy and . . .

  “Very good,” El Creepo said. “Now just slide it across the floor, real gently.” He held up an admonitory hand—the one without the gun. “If you try anything funny,” he warned me, “I’ll shoot you for the fun of it.”

  Nice guy. Too bad he was a mind reader. I sent the little navy blue bit of plastic and metal spinning across the floor. He trapped it under one booted foot—cross-country ski boots, I noted. More like shoes than boots. So that was how he’d gotten here. Out of curiosity, I asked, “How long have you been following us?”

  “Following you? Don’t be so self-centered. I wasn’t following you.” He bent so quickly to scoop up the USB that neither Karaline nor I had time to react. “I came this way to be sure I hadn’t left anything of our dear doctor’s behind.” He waved the gun negligently. I sure hoped it wouldn’t go off accidentally. On the other hand, if it did, Dirk would be sure to hear and would come running to investigate.

  The guy took one step backward, and another one. One more step and he’d be in the doorway. Dirk couldn’t help but see him—if that ghost of mine were anywhere close by.

  “I saw your skis leaning against the wall outside,” Creepo the Malignant said, “so I knew two people were here.”

  And one ghost, I thought. Where the heck had Dirk disappeared to?

  “I just happened to overhear your little discussion about what you were looking for. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.”

  Stalling for time, I asked, “What opportunity?” Not that I was curious about it. I just wanted the guy out of here, but maybe Dirk would show up any minute now.