A Wee Murder in My Shop (A ScotShop Mystery)

by Fran Stewart

  Sam smirked at the supine mannequin. “He’s come down in the world.” He wiped his face clear when I frowned at him.

  “I’ll thank you to remember he’s one of a unique line that’s been discontinued. Worth a lot to collectors.”

  “Somebody would have to be out of their gourd to collect mannequins.”

  I pushed him aside. Dirk was strangely quiet. I suppose he felt bad about not being able to help. “Come on, you two. Let’s get this bookcase upright.” Shoe stepped to the counter and put down another handful of the odd bits he’d been gathering. They looked rather woebegone next to the cash register. “Try not to step on anything,” I said. “There may be a few items that didn’t break.” Fat chance, I thought, but I could always hope.

  Shoe pushed past me. “We can handle this.” Macho, I thought. Still, I was perfectly happy to let them do the lifting. “One, two, three.” They hauled the bookcase to an upright position and manhandled it into place back against the wall. I wondered if I could rig up some sort of brace that would keep this from happening again.

  Gilda screamed.

  “I do believe ye have a problem here,” Dirk intoned.

  My stomach roiled, and I slapped my hand over my mouth. I couldn’t throw up, I couldn’t, I couldn’t.

  Shoe reached out and pulled Gilda toward him. He sort of tucked her under his arm and she shut up. I turned my attention to the reason the bookcase hadn’t lain flat.

  He was definitely dead, but books and movies said you had to be sure, so I bent gingerly beside him, careful not to touch the blood, and felt the wrist on his splayed-out hand. I was fairly sure the carotid artery was a better place to feel for a pulse, but there was no way I was going anywhere near his smashed-in face.

  His skin was cold. Clammy. Nothing moved. No breath, no pulse. Nothing.

  “Shoe, that’s your bat.” Sam stood still, bracing the bookcase as if afraid it might fall again.

  Shoe cleared his throat. He cleared it again. “It’s only my spare.”

  Sam mumbled something, then said more clearly, “Who is it?”

  A muffled sound came from Gilda, her face still buried in the front of Shoe’s shirt.

  I took a deep breath, swallowed the bitter fluid inching its way up my throat. Even with his face caved in, I knew it was Mason. I recognized his tartan. And the length of his hairy legs. His kilt was hiked up almost indecently. No mistaking that small reddish-purple birthmark, shaped like a comma, quite a ways above his knee. If it had been on his knee, everyone else would have known about it. That’s what happened when you lived in a tourist town where most of the men wore kilts all summer long. No knees were ever sacrosanct. But I was probably the only person in town who knew about this birthmark. I and his mother. And Andrea, damn her.

  Gilda seemed to choke. “It’s Mason.”

  Shoe made a dismissive gesture. “You can’t be sure.”

  “Yes, I can. I recognized his . . . kilt.”

  Was it my imagination, or had she paused a moment too long before that last word? I reached out to pull his kilt down a couple of inches.

  Why would anyone want to kill Mason Kilmarty? Other than the fact that he was an obnoxious bastard, that is. Of course, I hadn’t always felt that way.

  Thank goodness Percy hadn’t landed in the blood, I thought, and was instantly ashamed of myself. Mason was dead. A baseball bat lay next to him. A dark red blotch stained several inches of the rounded end. Blood, I assumed. Mason’s blood.

  “There isna enough blood,” Dirk said, and I looked at him in some confusion. “I’ve seen a man bludgeoned near to death, when Caw McFarlane ran awa’ wi’ John Macnaughton’s wife. John caught up wi’ them that night and went after Caw wi’ a hoe handle. Struck him many times. The blood near covered the walls of the shed, and John as well.” He spread his arm. “There should be blood everywhere here.” He paused. “Unless only one blow was struck.”

  I was still having trouble controlling the contents of my stomach, but I could see the sense in what he said. “Somebody would have had to hit him pretty hard to do this much damage in one blow,” I said.

  Shoe grunted as if he’d been struck. “You can do that with . . . with a baseball bat,” he said. “You’d have to have a good windup though.”

  Sam pantomimed swinging a bat. There would have been enough room. The counter with the cash register stood a good seven feet from the bookcase.

  Mason’s face wasn’t the only thing bashed in. His shirt looked like it had been pushed an inch or two into his chest in a narrow stripe right across the front of his body. What could have done this kind of damage? I thought for a moment. My bookcase would have done him in if the baseball bat hadn’t killed him first. The edge of one of the shelves, right across his heart, as the bookcase crashed down on him, could inflict this kind of wound, could leave this kind of mark. Death by bookcase? What a ghastly thought. His knees, completely untouched, must have lain under an open area above a shelf. There were bookends and clan plaques on and around the body, around Mason, where they’d slid off the shelf when it came crashing down on him. Guidebooks lay scattered around his head and shoulders.

  But why had Mason been in my store at night? And why would he have stood still while somebody hit him with a bat and dumped a bookcase on him?

  Sam touched my shoulder. “We have to call the police, Peggy.”

  I held out a hand for him to help me to my feet—I did feel a bit shaky—and reached for the counter where I’d set my phone. I gritted my teeth and called.

  12

  Napoleon of Hamelin

  Moira, Hamelin’s sassy and thoroughly southern police dispatcher told me Mac Campbell was out of the office.

  Thank goodness. I didn’t need his officiousness this early in the day, especially when I had a dead body to worry about.

  Moira told me she’d send someone. It came out: Ah’ll sin suhm-won raht awaee, sugah. “You just sit tight, don’t touch anything, and don’t let anybody else in that store of yours. Do you know who it is?”

  “It’s . . . it’s Mason. Mason Kilmarty.”

  “Your boyfriend?”

  “My former boyfriend. I broke up with him last week.”

  “Well, honey, somebody finally done him in for you.” She paused, and I heard her voice in the background issuing orders. When she came back, there was a distinct clink as her ringed fingers cupped around the phone. “Was it you who did it?”

  “Moira!”

  “Well, honey,” she said, giving up her whispering, “everybody knew you two had problems.”

  “Everybody did not.”

  “They sure did after you asked to have the town books audited. Harper’s on his way there. You hold on.”

  My hands were shaking so hard, it took me two tries to hit the End button.

  Rather than just wait for someone to show up, I called my brother. He and Mason were—had been—friends. That’s probably why I got hooked up with Mason to begin with. He was always hanging out at our house, almost as much as Sam and Shoe.

  “Where are you, Drew?” Mobile technology is great, but I never know where anybody is when I call. Andrew travels a lot. He has a specially equipped van that lets him go practically anywhere. And Tessa to help him with all the details he can’t do himself.

  “Manchester. What’s up?”

  “Are you sitting down?” Rats! Of course he was sitting down. “What I mean is, are you okay to hear some bad news?”

  “Just a sec.” I heard him drop the phone into his lap, and his wheelchair squeaked the way it does when he lifts himself to reposition his legs. “Okay. Shoot.”

  “It’s Mason. He’s . . . he’s . . .”

  “What’s he done this time?” It was more a statement than a question.

  “No. Hush. He’s . . . dead.”

  “Did you say dead? He’
s awful young for a heart attack. Are you sure he’s dead? Maybe he just passed out.”

  “Drew! Shut up and listen. Somebody . . . killed him . . . last night . . . in my shop.”

  “What was he doing in your shop?”

  “I don’t know. Look, Drew, I have to run. There’s a cop at the door. Just wanted you to know . . .”

  “When’s the funeral? I can be back for it.”

  “Are you nuts? How would I know?”

  “Call his mom.”

  “No! The cops can tell her.”

  “Peg.” He was using his big-brother voice, even though he’s only five minutes older.

  “I can’t call her. I broke up with him just before I went to Scotland.”

  “He finally pushed you too hard, huh?”

  “He cheated on me. I don’t want to talk about it. Give Tessa a big pat for me. Be good.”

  I hit End and opened the front door.

  “I’m Captain Harper, Hamelin Police. We got a call that there was a body in here.”

  “Yes. That’s right. I’m the one who called. He’s . . . he’s . . .” I gestured over my shoulder. “He’s back there.”

  I opened the door a little wider, and he stepped past me. There was the tiniest suggestion of citrus in the air around him. Aftershave?

  I locked the door and led Harper to where Mason lay. Harper didn’t know there was a ghost preceding us.

  He took a searching look at the body, keyed the mike on his collar, asked Moira to contact the medical examiner and “the rest of the crew. You know what all we need.” She should know. Moira had moved up north to Hamelin when I was just a kid, and she’d been attached to that po-leece phone ever since.

  Harper moved all four of us to the side of the store away from the windows. I could see a few gawkers looking in—they must have wondered why a cop would go into a closed store—but the body wasn’t in their line of sight.

  Two more officers showed up and began stringing yellow crime-scene tape out beyond the sidewalk, all the way around the corner. Good, that would keep people from peering in either the front windows or the side ones next to the courtyard. The cops had attracted a crowd. I saw Andrea, notepad in hand, questioning people. Most likely she was making up sheer drivel for her so-called news blog. Bunch of petty gossip if you ask me. My next-door neighbor was there. So was Sweetie, from across the street.

  Ethan Dorman, who owned the Auto Shop, stopped one of the officers and held a brief conversation with him. Ethan was a good guy. I knew from past conversations that he was something of an insomniac who took frequent walks at night. Maybe he’d seen something.

  Harper introduced himself to the others and quickly established: 1) what the problem was—a dead body; 2) who we all were—Peggy, Gilda, Sam/Shadrach, and Shoe/Sh’muel; and 3) what had happened—we’d found the body after we’d moved the bookcase.

  “Let me get this straight: You didn’t know there was a body under there when you saw the bookcase on its side?”

  “No,” I said.

  “We saw Percy lying down,” Gilda added helpfully.

  “Percy?” He looked at her for an explanation.

  She dimpled. “Peggy’s favorite mannequin.”

  She made it sound like a perversion.

  He turned back to me. His dark eyes—not quite the color of charcoal, but close—narrowed a fraction. “Your favorite mannequin.” Not quite a question.

  How do you explain something like this? I opted for the unembellished truth, no matter how weird it sounded. “I bought Percy, the mannequin, when I opened ScotShop six years ago. He has sort of a Mona Lisa smile, and shoulders that broad,” I spread my hands apart to show him and saw that the officer’s shoulders were just as wide. I lost my train of thought. “Where was I?”

  “Mona Lisa.” His voice was a deep, resonant bass.

  “Yes, well, he looks really good in a kilt.” My eyes strayed down the length of the blue uniform in front of me, and I wondered briefly what a kilt would look like there. I caught myself. “It seemed natural to give him a name, since Gilda and I got into the habit of talking to him, asking him where he thought a particular item should be displayed.”

  Shoe piped up. “You can see he gave very good advice.” He waved his arm to indicate the layout of the store.

  “Thank you, Shoe,” I said. “Now shut up, please.”

  The officer looked from Shoe to me. “Brother?”

  I shook my head. “Cousin.”

  “Close enough,” he muttered, and wrote something in his notebook, which he held at just enough of an angle that I couldn’t see what he was writing. Another officer came in snapping a camera. He conferred briefly with Harper and walked back toward the body, taking more pictures as he went.

  I took Captain Harper through my actions starting with when I’d looked in the window and seen the red plaid on the floor. He took a few notes but mostly just listened to me. His eyes were very dark, and I kept getting sidetracked.

  “Who else knows about this?”

  “Nobody. Except the murderer, I suppose.”

  “You haven’t mentioned it to anyone else?”

  “I haven’t had time to. I just called Moira a few minutes ago.”

  He looked decidedly skeptical. “Is that who you were talking to when I knocked on the door?”

  “Oh, I forgot. That was Drew. But he and Tessa are in New Hampshire.”

  What makes you think he doesn’t count? I could almost see the thought go across Harper’s face. “And Drew would be . . . ?”

  “My brother, Andrew.”

  “Yes,” Gilda said, as if she were tired of being left out, “They’re fraternal. Not identical.”

  Harper kept a straight face. Shoe didn’t. “Gilda that’s nuts! Of course they’re not identical. Drew’s a guy, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “I noticed.” Gilda glowered as Shoe gave one of those go figure gestures. Can’t say I blamed her. Too bad he didn’t see it.

  Harper studied the two of them briefly and turned back to me. “Is Tessa your brother’s wife?”

  I looked at him in some surprise.

  “Or his girlfriend?” he added.

  “Tessa is my brother’s dog,” I explained. “She goes everywhere with him. He lost the use of his legs when he fell off a dinosaur three years ago. She’s not trained as a service dog, but she helps him out a lot.”

  “Fell off a . . . dinosaur?”

  “Well, the framework around it actually.”

  “What,” Dirk asked, “would be a dynasore?”

  “Not a live one. It was a skeleton.”

  “What would be a—”

  “A dinosaur,” Harper repeated slowly.

  “Yes. In a museum.”

  “What would be—”

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said, hoping that Harper and Dirk would both stop asking questions.

  Harper took a deep breath, as if he had to reset an internal mechanism. “Uh, where is this mannequin”—he looked at his notes—“Percy?”

  We were interrupted by the entrance of the medical examiner. He carried a black bag that made him look like an old country doctor. That was fast, I thought. “Didn’t he have to drive all the way from Burlington?” I spoke before I thought about it.

  “Dr. Gunn was vacationing in Arkane,” Harper said. If he hadn’t been leaning so close to me, I wouldn’t have heard him. “I guess people with his sort of job never really get a vacation, do they?” His words tickled my ear, his breath was so soft.

  Dr. Gunn ignored our group and walked slowly toward the body, looking up, down, and around as he went. Thinning gray hair tonsured his pointy head.

  I turned to Harper. “Don’t you have to go with him?”

  “No, no, no,” he said, and backed up a step. “I made the mistake of try
ing that once and got my tail feathers flayed. Dr. Gunn wants the body all to himself. He hates when people mess up his evidence.”

  Uh-oh. I looked at Gilda and my cousins. We were in trouble.

  He must have seen that look. “Was there something you wanted to tell me?”

  “Oh, uh, nothing much. I just think maybe you should know that I pulled down Mason’s kilt—it was . . .” I made a gesture and Harper nodded. “And then I checked the back door and pushed the button a couple of times. I think that’s how the . . . murderer . . . broke in. And we picked up a bunch of broken stuff that was lying around the bookcase.”

  A muscle on the side of his face contracted. Hard.

  I put one hand on my hip. “You really shouldn’t do that, you know.”

  “Do what?”

  “Grit your teeth. It wears down the enamel.”

  He stared at me for such a long time, I felt a need to run my tongue over my teeth, checking to see if they still felt solid and healthy.

  “Thank you for that piece of advice,” he finally said, “but we were talking about how you opened the back door and disturbed possible evidence when you shouldn’t have.”

  “I know I shouldn’t have,” I said, feeling a desperate urge to defend myself, “but I didn’t know there was a body. I thought it was just a prank.”

  “Hmm,” he said, and wrote another note. A lock of light brown hair fell onto his forehead. “What did you pick up?”

  I thought for a moment. “Well, Shoe and Gilda did it. They found a lot of broken merchandise, bookends, figurines, and such.”

  He turned to Shoe. “Where did you put them?”

  “In the trash basket under the counter.”

  He said something under his breath. Maybe it was just as well I couldn’t hear it.

  “What else have you not told me?”

  I was saved from replying by the grand entrance of Police Chief Mackelvie Campbell, self-styled Napoleon of Hamelin, otherwise known as Mac. He may not have been short like Napoleon, but he was a tyrant. He generally made up in noise what he lacked in subtlety. He listened to Harper’s recitation of the facts. He did listen; I’ll give him that. But then he raised one side of his Brillo Pad eyebrow—he had only one; it stretched all the way across his face like the fifty-yard line on a football field. “Now, just remind me, Peggy,” he said. “How long have you hated him?” He tilted a massive head toward the back of the store where the medical examiner bent over the corpse.