“Everybody stayed to find out what was going on,” Gabe agreed.
“Was there anyone else in the classroom building?” Liss asked.
Willa shook her head. “It’s summer session. I’m pretty sure there weren’t any classes scheduled after Dr. Palsgrave’s morning seminar.”
“What were you doing there?” In contrast to her earlier behavior, Willa now seemed perfectly composed and willing to answer questions. Liss had no problem taking advantage of that situation.
“Dr. Halladay sent me to find Professor Palsgrave. She said she wanted to talk to him about something and he hadn’t come back to his office yet. Sometimes he’d stay late after the seminar to meet with individual students, so it made sense that he’d still be in his classroom.”
Liss frowned. Her father had said that the room was empty when he stopped by. For the first time, she wondered what had happened to all the students. “What time did this seminar meet?”
“It was a three-hour session, eight till eleven.”
But Gabe was shaking his head. “He dismissed class early. At least a dozen people left Lincoln Hall, more or less together, and then a couple more, separately, maybe a half hour before you went in. Maybe longer.”
Liss’s heart started to beat a little faster. “And you said you were outside all morning, right?” At Gabe’s nod, she described her father. “Did you see anyone who looked like that go into Lincoln Hall?”
“I think so.” Gabe’s brow furrowed in thought. “I wasn’t paying all that much attention. Not to who went in and out. I was there to make sure my grandfather stayed out of trouble, not to watch the building.”
“So you don’t have any idea how long it was before my father came out again?”
“Sorry. No.”
“Do you think you’d have noticed him if he’d come out covered in blood?”
Gabe laughed at her sarcastic tone, then sobered instantly. “Sorry. Yeah. I’m pretty sure I would have twigged to that.”
“Okay. Good. Remember that detail if the police ask you about it, okay?”
“Sure thing, Ms. MacCrimmon.”
“What about the other protestors besides your grandfather. Did you notice any of them entering the classroom building?”
“I think both Jones and Amalfi took breaks. Probably to use the bathroom, like you said. But nobody came back out covered in blood. I’m sure of that. And no one carried in any weapons, either. Not that I saw.” There was a question in his voice.
“Hand-and-a-half broadsword,” she said succinctly.
Gabe gave a low whistle. Liss knew what he meant. Between the size of the weapon and the amount of spilled blood, how could anyone have gone into the building, killed Lee Palsgrave, and gotten away again without being seen?
There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, and Liss had run out of questions. When Gabe said they had to get going, she escorted them to the door.
“If you come by the Emporium a couple of days before the highland games begin, that should give you time to familiarize yourself with the stock and fill out paperwork,” she told Willa when they reached the porch.
“I really appreciate this, Ms. MacCrimmon.”
“Make it Liss. Ms. MacCrimmon is my mother.”
She watched the young couple cross the town square to a pickup truck parked in front of the Emporium. Her smile faded after they’d driven away. Had she just made a huge mistake by hiring Willa?
She was remembering, with sudden disconcerting clarity, the day that Willa and Caroline Halladay had set up the window display. Willa had picked up one of the swords—Liss couldn’t remember which one—handling it easily as she mimed impaling an enemy.
What did she really know about the girl, Liss wondered, except that she had an ancestor who’d been an archaeologist? And Gabe? How could she trust anything he told her when his grandfather had been so fiercely opposed to Palsgrave’s reenactment? All three of them—Willa, Gabe, and Alistair Gunn—had known exactly where to find a hand-and-a-half broadsword. And if Palsgrave had been stabbed instead of slashed or hacked, it wouldn’t have taken all that much strength to kill him.
Willa could have done it.
Maybe even Alistair Gunn could have.
And a stab wound put her father back in the running, too.
“Aargh!” Liss closed the door and let her head fall against one of the wooden panels with an audible thump.
Almost anyone could have stabbed A. Leon Palsgrave to death. But the same problem remained, no matter who the killer turned out to be—how had he, or she, gotten to Lee Palsgrave, carrying a sword, without being seen, and then gotten out again, also without being seen? It wasn’t quite a “locked room” mystery. The classroom had been open. But it did seem as if it fell into the “impossible crime” category. It was a subgenre Liss had never particularly cared for.
Think positive, she ordered herself. At least in fiction, where there is a locked room, there is usually a secret passage.
She just had to find it.
Chapter Eight
By the time Gabe Treat phoned Liss two days later with Barry’s last name—Rowse—she had already spent many hours surfing the Internet, trying to find out more about the people on her list. To John Jones, Louis Amalfi, and Barry, she’d added Gabe himself, his grandfather, Willa, Caroline Halladay, and Kirby Redmond, the young man she’d been told was in charge of weapons for the mock battle.
Everyone seemed to have an online presence these days. Most of her suspects were on one social network or another. Some were on several. Those pages gave her entirely too much information about far too many aspects of their personal lives, but no single revealing tidbit to point a finger and shout, “Murderer!”
She also perused newspaper items, faculty bios, and articles in scholarly journals. As she’d read, she’d dutifully made notes, but now she just doodled on the pad in front of her, plagued by an uncharacteristic lack of direction.
She could almost hear the voices in her head—Dan, Sherri, and State Police Detective and former boyfriend Gordon Tandy, the loudest—shouting at her to leave solving crimes to the professionals. But she’d seen what all the unanswered questions about Palsgrave’s murder were doing to her parents. Vi and Mac barely spoke to each other. When they did, they were excruciatingly polite. Both of them seemed to be walking on eggshells. The constant tension did not create a comfortable living environment.
At the end of the day, no closer to finding a killer, Liss went home. She had to brace herself before she went through her own front door. As she’d expected, she found her father in the living room.
“How’s it going, Dad?” she asked.
He shrugged, barely looking up from the jigsaw puzzle of a winter scene that he was putting together on the custom-made table—one of Dan’s most popular woodworking creations—set up in Liss’s bay window. He’d moved the Canadian rocker and footstool that usually occupied the space to a spot on the far side of the room and substituted a straight-back chair that didn’t look at all comfortable.
Liss’s mother bustled in from the kitchen. Her brittle smile and the dark shadows beneath her eyes were blatant evidence that she hadn’t been sleeping well. “I made an apple pie,” she announced.
“That’s great, Mom.” Liss managed a quick kiss to her mother’s cheek before Vi, jumpy as a rabbit, scurried back the way she had come.
“She bakes when she’s upset,” Mac said. “Gives most of it away. The woman eats like a bird.”
“I hope she lets you have some.” Liss had to force the words out. Choked up over apple pie? Somehow, she doubted that was the real cause of what she was feeling.
Mac snorted. “Not often. She’s forever fussing about my weight. If she’s so damned concerned I might gain a pound, she shouldn’t be baking in the first place.”
He went back to sorting puzzle pieces in one of the four wooden drawers built into the sides of the puzzle table for that purpose. Liss wasn’t surprised to see that the puzzle he’d
selected from her supply was one of the more complex ones. She wouldn’t be surprised, either, if he gave up on it before it was completed. She knew she had. In the end, all those hundreds of pieces the exact same shade of sky blue or snow white had defeated her. She preferred puzzles where the pieces contained clues, even if it was only a hint of some other color. At least that little bit gave her a starting place to figure out where the piece was supposed to fit into the whole.
Liss headed for the kitchen, intending to force herself to eat a slice of her mother’s pie. That would cheer Vi up. Someone in this house should be happy. She stopped short in the doorway. Her mother sat at the table, her face buried in her folded arms. Her shoulders heaved with quiet sobbing.
As soon as she realized she wasn’t alone, Vi sat up straight, dashing the betraying moisture from her eyes. “I wasn’t crying. I never cry. I only put my head down because I felt a migraine coming on.”
“You don’t get migraines.”
“How would you know? It’s been a dozen years since you lived with your father and me.”
Liss had to bite back bitter words. She hadn’t known a lot of things, including the fact that Vi had undergone major surgery. She pressed her lips together so tightly that they formed a flat line. Anything she said now would be taken the wrong way.
Vi didn’t seem to notice her daughter’s silence. “He won’t talk to me,” she complained. “He won’t explain about the hand-and-a-half broadsword.” She left the table and started to clean the kitchen. Her baking spree had left traces of flour and sugar behind. The sink was filled with measuring cups, bowls, and the baking sheet she’d put under the pie pan to catch spillover.
“What is there to explain? Someone planted that sword in his car to make him look guilty.”
Vi sent her an “oh, please!” look.
Liss stared at her, her heart sinking. “Mom,” she said carefully, “you do believe Daddy’s innocent, don’t you?”
“I don’t know what to believe.” Vi slammed a measuring spoon into the sink to emphasize her frustration and turned the hot water on full force to start washing up.
Stunned, feeling as if she’d had her legs knocked out from under her, Liss sank into the nearest chair. No wonder Mac wouldn’t defend himself to her. He must have sensed his wife’s doubts about his innocence from the first. He didn’t believe she’d listen to anything he had to say. And he was probably right. Once Vi MacCrimmon made up her mind, she rarely changed her opinion. How hurt he must feel. And how abandoned.
“Are you staying here for supper or going to Dan’s?” Vi asked.
Liss cringed at the peevishness in her mother’s voice. She’d originally planned to spend the evening with her parents. Now she knew she had to get out of the house before she did something drastic—like bang both their heads together in an attempt to knock some sense into them.
“Dan’s,” she blurted. “I need to talk to Dan about something.” And before her mother could say another word, Liss fled.
She bolted out of the house through the back door. The balmy air of an early evening in summer was lost on her. She kept going at a fast clip until she was standing on the back stoop at Dan’s place. He wasn’t home yet, but she used her own key to let herself in.
Once inside the quiet kitchen, she felt calmer. It helped to indulge in a bout of cooking therapy herself. By the time her fiancé arrived, hot and grimy after a long day at the construction site, enticing smells filled the air. She’d added a healthy dose of garlic and herbs to the roasting chicken.
“I could get used to this,” he murmured, leaning in for a kiss.
Liss started to move closer for a hug, but Dan laughed and evaded the clinch.
“Hold that thought until I’ve had a shower.”
“Dan, I—”
But he was already gone, taking the stairs two at a time. Liss sighed and went back to putting together a green salad. The rice was the ninety-second microwave kind. When he came back downstairs she was ready to serve.
She asked him about his day, pretending interest but barely hearing a word he said. She ate without an appetite. She hoped Dan wouldn’t notice. She should have known better.
“You’re just picking at your food,” he remarked halfway through the meal. “What’s wrong?”
“What isn’t?” She didn’t really want to talk about it, not even to Dan, but everything spilled out in a rush. “Now I’m avoiding my own house,” she added after she finished giving him a somewhat disjointed account of her day. “I’m spending long hours in the Emporium. I lied to my mother and said we had plans tonight so I could come over here instead of having supper with them.”
“I’m sure your mother doesn’t really think your father’s a murderer,” Dan said. “She’s just upset by the uncertainty of the situation. That’s only natural.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” When she realized she’d just piled all of her rice into a mound at the center of her plate, she hastily set down her fork.
“It will all sort itself out eventually, Liss.”
She didn’t want to hear platitudes, mostly because she couldn’t believe in them.
Then an even more alarming realization came to her. If she couldn’t talk to Dan about this, then what did that say about their potential for future happiness? They were supposed to be able to share everything. That had been what they promised each other when they decided to get married.
“What if it doesn’t work out?” she whispered.
“We’ll deal with whatever happens,” he promised.
It took her a moment to realize he was still talking about the fact that the police suspected her father of murder. “I mean us,” she said in a strangled voice. “What if we don’t work out?”
He reached out a hand, but she shrank back. “Liss?”
“Maybe we should postpone the wedding. We may have to anyway, if the father of the bride is under arrest and—”
“Stop right there.” He threw down his napkin and stood. “Amaryllis Rosalie MacCrimmon, you listen to me.”
He flattened his palms on either side of her on the table and leaned in until they were nose-to-nose. He didn’t look angry so much as determined, and Liss felt a little shiver of anticipation wash through her. “We are not postponing a damned thing. I’ve been working my butt off so that everything will be perfect for our wedding day and our honeymoon. I can’t say I was sorry to move the ceremony to the hotel, but that’s it. No other changes. Got it?”
“Got it,” she echoed.
Then she seized his face in both hands and dragged him closer for a kiss to seal the deal. It was much, much later before she started worrying about her father again.
The next day, Thursday, Liss decided she had to be more proactive. She started by calling the cell phone number Willa had left with her and asked the young woman if she could come in for a training session. Willa’s response was gratifyingly eager and she turned up at Moosetookalook Scottish Emporium early that afternoon.
“Is the commute going to be a problem for you?” Liss asked. “I know it takes about an hour and a half to drive from Three Cities to Moosetookalook.”
“Oh, no.” Willa’s cheeks went pink. “We’ve already moved up here. Gabe and I.”
Liss’s eyebrows shot up. “You rented a place?” There wasn’t all that much rental property available in the area. That’s why Pete, Sherri, and Sherri’s son, Adam, were in that cramped little apartment above the post office. There was the hotel, of course, but Liss was sure The Spruces was more expensive than Willa could afford.
“Not exactly.” Pink turned redder and the young woman spoke in a rush. “We’re at the campground. Gabe has an old pop-up. We were planning to stay there during the highland games anyway. After I lost my job, we decided to come early.”
“Campground?” Liss repeated. “Do you mean Whispering Willows?” She tried to hide her dismay but doubted she was successful. “Are you sure you’ll be okay there? It’s not the most . . . salubr
ious place in the area.”
Nor was it scenic. Curmudgeonly old Harold Cressy, his style of living crimped by a tight economy, had installed the minimum of required sanitary facilities on his back forty, paved a series of “streets” with gravel, run in a few outdoor electric outlets, and called it good. Most of those who stayed at Cressy’s campground moved on after only one night.
Willa chuckled. “I know it’s kind of a dump, but it’s cheap, and I have a big, strong boyfriend to protect me from bears and moose and drunks.”
Such assurances didn’t stop Liss from feeling responsible. She resolved to introduce Willa to Sherri. At least then, if she and Gabe needed help, they’d know they had a friend at the local police station.
The paperwork didn’t take long. Neither did training Willa on the cash register. She’d previously spent a summer working in a bookstore.
“Where was that?” Liss asked. She supposed she ought to check Willa’s references. She’d get around to it . . . eventually.
“Boston.”
“Is that where you’re from?” When Willa nodded, Liss asked, “What brought you to Maine?”
“My grandparents have a place on the coast. Off the coast, actually. It’s an island in Penobscot Bay.” She didn’t seem to notice Liss’s astonishment. “And I wanted to attend a small college, not some big university.” She grinned suddenly. “And I liked the picture of the chapel on the Anisetab College Web site. It’s just the prettiest thing—like a little Gothic-style church in miniature. Gabe and I are thinking we might get married there after we graduate.”
Most of the next hour was taken up with Willa’s oohing and aah-ing over the many items Liss sold in her shop. The Emporium offered an eclectic selection of stock. Although all of it was related in some way to Scotland or Scottish American heritage, that still left a lot of room for variation. Liss’s merchandise ran the gamut from delicate bisque figurines of highland dancers to bright chartreuse Loch Ness Monsters that straightened out to become draft blockers.
“You just put it at the bottom of a door or a window during the winter months,” Liss explained, “to keep out the cold.”
Bagpipes, Brides and Homicides (Liss Maccrimmon Scottish Mysteries) Page 10
