A Wee Murder in My Shop (A ScotShop Mystery)

by Fran Stewart

  He made that growl sound again. “Ye lie. Even a bairn learns early how to skin a rabbit.”

  “We don’t eat many bunnies nowadays.”

  “Bun—”

  “I also don’t know how to work a butter churn—”

  “That is so sim—”

  “Would you hush? Children in this time know how to use a microwave and cook a frozen pizza and blend up a fruit smoothie.”

  “Wha—”

  “And they learn pretty quickly how to cross the street without getting run over.”

  “Why—”

  “Furthermore, they know the Preamble to the Constitution, while you couldn’t even find America on a wall map! But children in your time learn about butter churns and hunting and skinning things and starting fires. And if you’d stayed in Scotland when you were supposed to, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  I paused, but only long enough to take a deep breath. “The point I’m making—and there is a point to this—is that you have no more to learn in this time than I’d have if I somehow traveled back to your time, so would you please just can it until I can get you to a library? Then you can learn everything you need to know.”

  Silence. For a long time. And then he said, rather huffily I thought, “Ye think that will help when I canna even turn the pages?”

  He had a point, but I wasn’t going to concede. I cast about for a change of topic. “You need a name.”

  “I have a name, a verra good name.” He turned his back on me.

  “Yeah, right, but it’s unpronounceable, and Macbeth has really bad connotations nowadays. I can’t call you Mac, because everyone will think I’m talking to our chief of police. Mac Campbell,” I added by way of explanation.

  He crossed his arms over his chest. I noticed the muscles roping up his forearms. “I dinna trust Clan Campbell.”

  “Oh, yeah. Because of Glencoe?”

  “What are ye speaking of? Glencoe is home to Macdonalds, not Campbells.”

  I was a little sparse on Scottish history. Maybe the massacre at Glencoe hadn’t happened yet. If so, I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him about it.

  “Never mind. I’m going to call you . . .” I looked him up and down. His long full-sleeved shirt was of a coarse grayish fabric. Homespun, I thought. Well, naturally it was homespun. The Industrial Revolution hadn’t happened yet. It took a woman an entire year to spin the thread and weave the kilt material. The blue-and-green pattern matched the shawl I wore, and the top ends were held in place over his right shoulder with a carved wooden circle, threaded through with what looked like a piece of antler. It was primitive and powerful and, somehow, exactly right.

  He’d let go of the handle of his dirk, but it was still clearly visible in the . . . scabbard, I guess you’d call it . . . hanging from a heavy leather strap he wore over his left shoulder. I wondered how he managed not to whack people when he walked past them. “Hmm. I’m going to call you Dirk.”

  “Why?”

  I pointed.

  “My dagger?”

  “It’s called a dirk.” Why did I have to teach a Scotsman about something as elementary as this?

  “Nae. ’Tis my dagger.”

  Then it dawned on me. A lot of words had changed between then and now. “Nowadays we call it a dirk. Anyway, I like the name.”

  He muttered something unintelligible.

  “I have to take a shower before I turn in.”

  He headed for the bookshelves next to my dresser. “A shower? And what would that be?” His voice was overly polite and only mildly inquisitive.

  “I have to bathe.” He turned around, and I thought his eyebrows arched, but he turned back away so quickly I couldn’t be sure.

  “Is the woman out there your servant to carry the water in for ye?”

  “She’s not my servant. She’s my friend. Tell you what: Let me just fold you up in the shawl. You can take a nice little rest, and I’ll explain it all later.”

  His fist clenched. “Ye say that entirely too frequently.” His r’s rolled so much, I thought his tongue would shake loose.

  “Well, I’m sorry, but I just don’t know whether I can trust you.” Instead of snapping back at me, he began to laugh. I crossed my arms. “What on earth are you cackling about?”

  He gasped a couple of times before he could settle down. “I canna pull out a chair. I canna open a door. I canna close it. I canna even decide for myself whither to go because yon shawl pulls me along with ye.” He ran a wide, strong hand through his shoulder-length black hair. “And ye wonder what I might do if I see ye in your shift?” He leaned against the dresser and crossed his arms. His face grew solemn. “I dinna like the feeling of . . . of nothingness that I find in yon shawl. If I promise on the honor of my clan to keep my back turned, will ye please just get on with it and let me sit quiet by all these lovely books of yours?”

  Chastened, I pushed my comfy red chair over beside the bookcase, facing the window, and draped the shawl on the back of it. I halfway expected him to disappear when I let go, but he sat and leaned against the shawl. “My thanks,” was all he said. A daddy longlegs spider crawled up the arm of the chair and paused with just a whisper of space between its nose and Dirk’s arm. Fine with me. Spiders ate bugs, and Dirk seemed to attract spiders like a kilted man attracted curious females.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, my skin still tingling from the blessedly hot water, I wrapped my fuzzy blue bathrobe firmly around the green oversized UVM T-shirt I slept in and stepped out of the bathroom. Dirk was bent over the white table near the door where I always kept a coffee-table book. I’d been looking at Among Trees, a book of photographs by Sean Kernan, off and on for a couple of weeks, simply relishing the gorgeous black-and-white photos of trees from all around the world.

  I walked up beside him. “Lovely, isn’t it?” I brushed my hand across the dust jacket, a photo of tall pines, most of them limbless twenty feet up or so, with what looked to me like early morning sun oozing through mist.

  “Aye, it is indeed. I have never seen a painting so precise.”

  “It’s not a painting,” I said. “This is called a photograph.”

  He thought briefly. “Drawing with light?”

  At my perplexed look, he went on, “I learned some of the Greek and Latin when I was a boy. Father Marcus was a good man, although he sometimes tried to beat the knowledge into me.” He rubbed his backside a bit absentmindedly. “My father, though, didna think learning was a’ that important.”

  “How many years did you study with Father Marcus?”

  “Until I was twelve, grown enough to do a man’s work all day.”

  “You knew Latin and Greek at twelve?”

  “Och, aye. Not as much as Father Marcus, but enough to get by.” His hand hovered over the book.

  “What did you call it? Painting with light?”

  “Drawing. That is the graph part. ’Tis a Greek word. And photo, of course, means light.”

  “Oh, of course.”

  I don’t think he caught my sarcasm, because he continued smoothly, “So it would be light-drawing. Lovely.” He paused, and added, “How is it done?”

  “It’s kind of complicated.” I opened the book at random and flipped back to the introduction. “Here, you can read this while I write in my journal.”

  My poor neglected journal. I’d written in it only that one night in Scotland. How on earth could I sum up everything that had happened in the past week?

  As I settled back against my pillows and pulled Shorty close to my side, I watched Dirk. He wasn’t simply reading. He devoured the book. He kept brushing his hands across it, as if it were somehow holy. A treasure indeed. I sighed and examined my journal. I took my journal so for granted. What on earth would I have done if I’d lived in a time when women routinely were not taught
to read? Ghastly thought.

  I absolutely did not want to write about Mason—no sense having him on paper since he was no longer in my life. I could write about Scotland, the Sinclairs, and Pitlochry. The shawl. Its resident wee ghostie.

  Engrossed in writing, I didn’t notice Dirk beside the bed until I set down my ballpoint and he appeared in my peripheral vision.

  “Since ye have paused writing in the wee book”—his voice went soft when he said that word, and I could hear the awe in it—“would ye mind owermuch coming to turn the page for me?”

  “Sure.” I moved Shorty off my lap and pushed the comforter back. His eyes widened as I swung my bare legs over the edge. I grabbed my bathrobe.

  He readjusted his plaid, pulling it more firmly up on his shoulder. “I have one question, if ye dinna mind.”

  I looked up at him. “What’s your question?” This was no wee ghostie. I don’t think I’d fathomed until then just how tall he was. Except in the porta potty, but I’d almost forgotten that. I was a sucker for broad shoulders. My eyes came well below his Adam’s apple. It lurched a bit as he swallowed.

  “Where did ye hide the inkwell when ye wrote?”

  8

  Mason Kilmarty

  Mason would have kicked himself if Andrea hadn’t beaten him to it. Out into the cold—well, all right, so it wasn’t all that chilly. Out on the streets, though. The walk home from Andrea’s usually took him only a few minutes, but he’d backtracked up to Hickory Lane to take a look at Peggy’s house. All those roses he’d sent her. She loved roses. She’d said so when they first started dating. She could have called to thank him. Why hadn’t she?

  A light was on upstairs. Her car in the driveway. He walked as far as the bottom of the wheelchair ramp before he chickened out. She’d made her feelings pretty clear with that punch she’d given him last week. He rubbed his chin where the bruise was. She sure packed a wallop. Maybe she’d changed her mind, though.

  He stood watching from the end of the driveway until the light went out. As he turned away from Peggy’s house, back toward his apartment in the middle of Hamelin, he vowed he’d give her something expensive for her birthday; it was coming up soon. He did know it was her thirtieth. He remembered that much. The other two—Gilda and Andrea—they’d just been flings. But Peggy was the real thing.

  Once he got to Main Street, the street lamps puddled pale gold circles directly beneath their poles, closehanded as a string of misers, but Mason avoided even the edges of their light.

  He paused across the street from Sweetie’s Jellybean Emporium. He’d stop by tomorrow and buy a pound or two.

  The breeze picked up, swirling his kilt around his legs, and a stray piece of paper skittered across the street and into the gutter. He stepped away from the window, debating whether or not to run after it. Peggy would have. But Peggy was not a factor at the moment. Unless maybe she’d like to have him back. It couldn’t hurt. Maybe it would bring him good luck. He darted after the paper and scooped it up. He unfolded it, but here between streetlights, he couldn’t see what was written. Looked like a list of some sort. He crumpled it carelessly and stuffed it in his sporran. There.

  Mason squared his shoulders and stepped back onto the sidewalk, intending to walk on home, but a glint of moving light caught his eye. Peggy’s store. Nobody should be there this time of night. He crossed the street again and stopped at the big display window. Through a tiny crack in the curtains behind the mannequins, he saw the vague form of someone moving near the back wall.

  Peggy may have thrown him out—just like Andrea had, damn her hide—but he wasn’t going to let somebody hurt Peggy. He felt for his cell phone, remembered he’d left it at Andrea’s, and swore under his breath.

  Mason eased his way over to the front door and quietly tried the handle. Locked. Just as well, he thought. That bell over the door would have given him away.

  He turned left and headed alongside the empty courtyard toward the alley behind the Pitcairn Building.

  A single car stood in the alley near the ScotShop’s back door. Mason thought it looked vaguely familiar. He was sure he’d seen it recently. By the time he reached the door, he’d remembered—and it was someone who had no right to be there. The door stood slightly ajar. Mason took a deep breath, straightened his kilt, clenched his fists, and stepped inside.

  9

  Mirror Talk

  The next morning, Dirk was gone. So was the shawl.

  I searched frantically through the house. Kitchen, pantry, living room, office, the guest bath. I even looked in closets, which was stupid, come to think of it. He couldn’t open doors. Nothing. He wasn’t anywhere.

  Could he have gotten outside somehow? I turned the handle on the kitchen door, but the thought of Mr. Pitcairn stopped me. My friendly neighbor from the old, old house next door loved to talk over the fence. It didn’t matter what time of day I went out, he always seemed to show up, almost as if he’d been waiting for me, usually with helpful advice about landscaping or mowing. I knew he was lonely. His wife used to invite Karaline and me to dinner about once a month, but she died a year ago, and he’d become something of a recluse.

  I looked down at my sleep shirt. Would not do. Nothing for it but to get dressed first. I headed upstairs.

  And shrieked when I charged into the bathroom. Dirk sat on the edge of the tub, fingering the knobs for hot and cold water. The shawl was thrown across one shoulder, over his plaid. He stood quickly. “I always heard that people cry out when they see a ghost. Now I know ’tis true.” He smiled. “Although ye didna cirmest like that when ye saw me the first time.”

  Keermist? What kind of word was that?

  “Why, I wonder. Why did ye no?”

  I was still a bit angry with him for scaring me, but after a moment’s reflection, I didn’t want to admit how relieved I was to have found him. I walked the few steps to the sink and turned on the hot water. Looking at him in the mirror, I matched his smile. “You seemed so natural in that meadow. You didn’t scare me, or at least not until I realized I could see through you a bit.”

  He watched the water running for several seconds, shook his head, and looked at me in the mirror. “How are these made?” He gestured vaguely in front of him.

  “How are what made? Faucets?”

  “This mirror. I saw only one in my time. ’Twas polished brass. My face looked brown and distorted in it.”

  “Oh.” I turned off the water. No sense in wasting it. “There was this period called the Industrial Revolution. It started in the, uh, the seventeen hundreds, I think, right around the time the steam engine was invented.”

  “Yes?” He lifted his dark eyebrows in inquiry.

  “Um, that was a time when people found ways to make things using machines.”

  “Things?” He smiled at my reflection. “Like this mirror?”

  I turned to face him directly. “Uh-huh, and thread and huge looms so fabric could be made more cheaply.”

  Before I could keep going with my litany of the wonders of civilization, he looked down at his sturdy homespun shirt and his luscious hand-woven plaid and then at my UVM T-shirt. “Aye, cheaply,” he said. “And the people who used to make those things? What happened to them?”

  Visions of child labor swam through my head. Soot, polluted rivers, tubercular factory workers, the Ghost of Christmas Present with two starving children beneath his cloak. I turned and opened the hot water tap. “They had jobs in factories, where the things were made.” It was a cop-out, but I couldn’t bear the thought of his look if he knew what steam engines and mirrors and fabric had really cost humanity.

  He peered over my shoulder at the water. “That must be the source of the waterfall sound I heard last night when ye bathed, but it was louder somehow then.”

  I turned my head and gestured toward the tub. “That was the shower.” This was hopeless. How c
ould I possibly teach him everything I’d spent my life simply knowing? I shooed him out of the bathroom and into the hall. “You go somewhere else. Just stay in the house.” He was halfway down the hall before I realized he was more than a yard or so away from me. “Wait! How’d you do that?”

  He turned and spread his hands. “Do what?”

  “You’re not next to me. You’ve always had to be”—I swept my arms to indicate a wide circle around me—“closer.”

  He wrinkled his forehead. “Aye. That’s true. Mayhap ’tis because this is your house, and your spirit spreads through it.” He raised a hand to his chest and fingered the shawl. “Or mayhap ’tis because I hold my Peigi’s work so close to me.” He spread the edge of it out, and I saw the flicker of the white line. “This is the first thing I have been able to lift, the first thing I can truly touch, since I came into this world of yours, this time of yours.”

  I felt a totally unreasonable pang of—jealousy. I was jealous of a woman who’d been dead 650 years? Yes. I hated to admit it—even if only to myself. I certainly wasn’t going to admit it to him.

  “I’m going to get dressed. I’ll be out in a little while.” I shut the door firmly between us.

  I don’t know what he did while I was getting ready for the day, but I found him standing at my kitchen sink, looking out the window toward the bird feeders.

  I wrenched a banana from a bunch hanging on the banana hook and peeled it. Dirk watched in fascinated silence.

  “Go sit over there while I cook me some eggs.”

  “Ah, eggs. Aye. Where do ye keep your chickens? I saw none outside.”

  I opened the fridge. “You and I are going to take a little trip to the grocery store in a couple of days. That will explain a lot.”

  After my usual breakfast of fried eggs, two slabs of pan-fried toast, and two links of extra-hot sausage, I excused myself to brush my teeth. Dirk’s teeth were in awfully good shape. I’d noticed that right away—well, in the porta potty. I turned around and leaned my head against the door jam. “Did you have toothbrushes back then?”