A Wee Murder in My Shop (A ScotShop Mystery)

by Fran Stewart

  He motioned to Dolly. “We’ll go there now. I want to know if anything was taken.”

  14

  A Wee Mess, but Not My Own

  As Harper ushered me out the door, I paused long enough for Dirk to scoot through the opening. Wouldn’t want him to get stuck behind. Against the bright glare of the sun in my eyes, I could just barely make out a few people looking in the window at the ScotShop. Not that they could see much. Those privacy curtains were still pulled tight shut just behind the display—dammit! I needed my customers to see all the wonderful merchandise inside.

  I inhaled sharply. That sounded so crass. He’d been my boyfriend, my fiancé—well, almost fiancé—for way too long, and here I was worried about my bank balance.

  Still, Mason might be dead, but I was alive, and I needed the front door wide open. The next rent payment would eat into my savings if the shop stayed closed much longer. The building might be old, but the real estate was considered prime.

  I felt like a heartless heel, but I asked anyway. “How long before I can reopen?”

  His charcoal eyes widened. “We released the scene this morning.”

  “What?” I yelped. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?” I put on a bright smile as I approached the small group of people milling around the crime-scene tape. “Folks, we’ll be opening up this afternoon. I hope you’ll come back.”

  “You bet,” said a voice from the other side of a fairly large woman. A kid, maybe her son, stepped out from in back of her. “I wanna see where the guy got creamed.”

  “Watch your foul tongue, ye wee gomerel.”

  My sentiments exactly.

  “Now, Robert, you behave yourself.” His mother didn’t sound like she meant it. The avid gleam in her eye made me certain that she’d come up with the idea first.

  I let just the three of us in the door, closing it quickly in the woman’s face, barely managing to miss slamming the end of Dirk’s plaid. Not that anything would have happened—could a ghost plaid catch in a door? Maybe it could. I’d never seen Dirk walk through a wall or anything. It was too much to think about. I leaned back against the window frame, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dim light.

  After a few seconds I flipped on some lights and took a long, hard look at my shop, hoping all the blood was gone. The bookcase wasn’t aligned right. The tiered tables near the back were twisted askew. The two circular racks, one of pleat-sewn kilts and the other of full-sleeved shirts that could make any man look like an eighteenth-century poet, had been shifted to one side, probably so the police could move the body—Mason’s body. I’d designed the layout of the shop with my brother’s wheelchair in mind but had never thought a stretcher would need to get through. I swallowed a bitter taste and saw Harper watching me from in front of the tie display. He started toward me, as my ghostie stepped between us, hand on the top of his dirk. “Are ye aright, now? Ye still look a bit peaked.”

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” Harper said. “Seeing a crime scene can be a hair-raising experience, though. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “The bookcase is off-center.” Without thinking, I added, “I’ll get Sam and Shoe to help me move it.”

  Harper cleared his throat. “Maybe I could help instead.”

  “Damn. I forgot about Shoe.” I hadn’t really forgotten about him. The fact that he was in the town jail—thank goodness they hadn’t carted him off to the state prison—had been in the back of my mind most of the time since he’d been arrested.

  “I would help ye if I could.” Dirk paused before a particularly obnoxious plastic Nessie. “What is this?”

  I moved his way and shifted the little statue a bit to the right. “The Loch Ness Monster never looked so good, did it?”

  “That is no wha’ she looks like.”

  When that sank in, I couldn’t help myself. I gaped at him. “Have you seen her?”

  “Och, aye. Once. When I was a child and my family went to a gathering at the Loch.” His left hand clamped onto the hilt of that wicked-looking dagger of his. “But once was enough for a lifetime.”

  “Seen who?” Harper fingered a shirt. I wondered which clan he was from.

  “Nothing. I’m going to call Gilda and Sam. No reason why they can’t help me open up.”

  “You were going to check to see if anything was missing.”

  “After I call. Gotta get this shop open for business.” I shifted the shawl higher on my shoulder and pulled my cell out of my purse as I walked toward the back, but I stopped dead before I pressed the contact list. “What on earth happened here?”

  Harper and Dirk both headed in my direction. A fine, dirty-looking powder covered the display tables, the lamps, the bookcase, the cash register, the counter. “Good lord, I can’t open the shop if it looks like this.”

  “Fingerprint powder.”

  “What is finger prinpowder?”

  “Shh,” I said to Dirk, but they both looked offended.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Harper, hoping that Dirk would guess the apology was meant for him as well. “I guess I’m just feeling the strain.” I swept my arm in an arc that took in the devastation.

  Harper opened his mouth, closed it, and ran a finger along the smooth head of one of the less obnoxious Nessie statues. This one sported a sprightly green spray of artificial seaweed dangling from its jaw.

  Since he didn’t seem to be planning to say anything, I jumped back in. “I hope you found something worthwhile.”

  He paused. “No. Most everything had been wiped clean. The prints we found were what we’d expect to find in a store that most of the townspeople and a lot of tourists visit.”

  “Well, they won’t visit unless I can get this cleaned up.” I called Gilda, told her to bring Sam, and turned to inventory my messy store.

  As it was, I couldn’t find anything missing. And we didn’t open that afternoon, even with Harper helping us. Fingerprint powder is a bear to remove. So were the dried blood and bodily fluids.

  As we worked, I couldn’t help but examine Gilda. She looked like heck. Several times I asked her if she felt okay, but each time she just shrugged me off. “Headache.” Still, she kept doggedly at the cleaning, although I saw Sam and Harper—and Dirk, too—staring at her occasionally. I wasn’t the only one wondering what was going on.

  The obnoxious Robert and his mother came back around two o’clock and pounded on the door. I unlocked it and told them we were still cleaning.

  “Aw! I wanna see!” Robert pushed his way past me before I could stop him. I blocked his mother and called to Sam to catch him before he did any damage.

  I’d forgotten about Dirk, who stood smack-dab in the middle of the aisle.

  “Och, no, ye wee feond.” He didn’t sound particularly angry, but he did sound resolute.

  I was sure Robert, “fey-ond” or not, couldn’t see or hear my ghost, but he pulled to a sudden stop, and only I could see that he had seemed to collide with Dirk. He shuddered from his head to his feet, made a U-turn, and shoved me aside to get back to his mother. “I wanna go home,” he whimpered.

  I closed the door, not even caring how she handled the boy. Dirk stood, openmouthed, as bewildered as I was. “How did I do that?”

  “I was wondering the same thing,” I whispered. “Did you feel it when he ran into you?”

  “Not feel, precisely. But—ye ken when ye have a bad dream? Someone’s trying his best to kill ye, and ye dinna want it to happen, but ye dinna seem to be able to stop it?”

  I nodded, not sure where this was heading.

  “I didna like that young brat, and when he pushed ye aside, I wanted to stop him, but didna know how I could, and then . . .”

  I waited for him to go on, but he just stood there. “And then . . .” I prompted.

  “Who are you talking to?”
Harper looked concerned.

  “The resident ghost,” I said without thinking. How much had he heard?

  “Right.” He shook his head. He reached out, almost as if he were going to touch my arm, and Dirk bristled beside me.

  “Keep your hands off her, ye miswenden manny.”

  I wondered what “meswinduhn” meant but didn’t ask. After all, Dirk had lived just before the time of Chaucer. I wondered how I could even understand him. Some sort of trans-time auto translation, maybe. Memories of The Canterbury Tales in high school senior English came back: Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,/The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,/And bathed every veyne in swich licour,/Of which . . .

  Dirk reached in front of me. Harper’s hand hung in midair about three inches from my elbow. He shook his hand, the way someone whose hand has gone to sleep will shake it to get rid of the pins and needles.

  I glared at Dirk. “Did you do that?”

  He just smiled.

  Harper rubbed his hand down the side of his pants. “Do what?”

  “Um. Nothing. Did you need me for something?”

  He leaned to one side and looked around in back of me, shook his head, rubbed his hands together, and motioned me toward where Sam stood in the back. “We had a question about where you want the bookcase.”

  I followed him, with Dirk on my heels. “The bookcase has to be placed exactly, with its center twenty feet from that wall.”

  Dirk asked me why, and Sam snorted. “Picky, picky, picky.”

  “Can it, Sam.”

  Harper waited for the inanity to stop. “Why?” he asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why does it have to be centered?”

  “If it’s not, it looks unbalanced from the front door.”

  Sam rolled his eyes, but Harper—and Dirk—turned and walked back to the front of the store. They stood side by side. “Aye, ye are right.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  I put my hands over my face. Stereo. This was ridiculous.

  “Are you okay?”

  I spread my fingers apart to see Harper looking at me yet again with some concern. “Yeah. Sure. Let’s get busy here.” I started to reach under the counter but pulled back. “Don’t need the measuring tape. I’d almost forgotten—I marked the baseboard at seventeen feet. That’s where this edge of the bookcase goes.”

  * * *

  After the Logg Cabin closed at three, Karaline came to help, bearing gifts.

  “Good grief,” she hollered as she breezed in. “Looks like a funeral home in here.” She carried a large tray of doughnuts—I could smell them even from across the room. Or maybe I only imagined that I could. She balanced the tray on a rack of tartan skirts and opened the vertical blinds a bit. The light did make it brighter. Not happier but definitely brighter.

  Even with her help and lots of coffee from the oversized pot in the back room, we didn’t finish the cleanup until well after closing time and into the wee hours. Opening time at nine o’clock was going to come way too soon.

  Still, late as it was, we gathered at the table in the back room. Karaline’s edible gift had been almost decimated over the course of the afternoon and evening, but there were enough doughnuts left to lure us into sitting down. Dirk watched Harper take a seat across the table from me before he leaned against the edge of my desk. I could see him directly between Harper’s right shoulder and Gilda’s left. Gilda looked marginally better. Maybe hard work dissipated migraines?

  Sam snatched a jelly-filled. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the station interviewing somebody or canvassing door to door or testing blood samples or investigating something?”

  “What would be kanvasing?”

  Harper looked back over his shoulder. Surely he couldn’t have heard Dirk’s question?

  He said, “I am investigating,” but he looked just a wee bit uncomfortable as he said it, and I could have sworn he glanced at me. Was he . . . no, he couldn’t be here just because of me . . . but he had spent the major portion of the day here—I shook myself. He was not interested in me. He was not. He couldn’t help it if those charcoal eyes of his drew me into them.

  “I think we can assume,” Karaline said, waving a long arm around the table and grabbing a doughnut as her hand passed over it, “that nobody in this room is the murderer, right?”

  “Are ye sure of that?”

  “Yes,” I said in the general direction of the desk before I remembered. “I’m sure it wasn’t one of ”—I waved around the table. Harper cocked his head at me but didn’t say anything—“so I don’t know why you’re investigating us . . .”

  “Maybe he just wants to get to know us all better.”

  Karaline crossed her eyes at Gilda’s comment.

  I continued despite the interruption. “. . . and we know Shoe didn’t murder . . . Mason.” His name caught in my throat, but only Harper and Dirk seemed to notice.

  Gilda reached for a maple-glazed. “What I want to know is why Mason stood still long enough to get a bookcase dumped on him.”

  I looked at Harper. Was he going to answer her? Apparently not. “He was knocked out first, Gilda. With Shoe’s baseball bat, remember?”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t want to think about it.” Her voice was even breathier than usual.

  “But why, can ye tell me, was yon case for books moved in the first place?”

  “I don’t have a clue,” I said.

  “About what, cuz?” Sam asked between chocolate-covered bites.

  “Why the bookcase was moved.”

  “Maybe it was an accident,” Gilda offered.

  “Nay.”

  “No.” The stereo effect again. Dirk quieted down, but Harper pointed out that the bookcase was too heavy to have moved or fallen on its own.

  Dirk crossed his arms—his muscular arms, I noted yet again—and his plaid drooped lower on his shoulder. “There must ha’ been something behind it. Something our wee murderer wanted.”

  “That may be, but why kill Mason?”

  Karaline swiveled her head to her left and curled her lip at me. “Did you kiss the Blarney Stone over there? Who’re you talking to?”

  “The Blarney Stone’s in Ireland,” I snapped.

  “To her ghost,” Harper said.

  I shrugged. “It’s still a good question—what did Mason do to get himself killed?”

  “Ye’re not listening to me, woman!”

  I stared at Dirk. I didn’t know he could shout like that. For a dead man, he had quite a set of lungs on him. “I was, too—” I caught myself and improvised. “I was too worried before to think about it much, but . . .” I couldn’t come up with a way to end my sentence.

  “What, I asked ye, was behind the case that the murderer wanted?”

  I nodded to let him know I’d heard. “. . . but what do you think was behind the bookcase?”

  Karaline laughed. “Crappy wallpaper, that’s what.”

  “Dead bugs?” Sam suggested.

  “Nothing.” Gilda sounded definite for once. I was so used to her tentative groping for words, I gaped at her. “There wasn’t,” she said. “There wasn’t anything back there. The bookcase was just a way to throw us off the scent.” She nodded her head as if to say so there.

  “Mayhap your Mason was the one who moved it.”

  “He’s not my Mason,” I muttered under my breath, but I had to admit Dirk had a point. “Maybe Mason was the one who moved it,” I said to the group.

  “You need a good night’s sleep,” Karaline said. “Maybe then you’ll stop talking to the wall.”

  “He couldn’t have moved it,” Sam said. “He was under it.”

  Gilda touched his forearm and left her hand there. “Maybe it fell on top of him while he was moving it.”

  Harper shook his head
but stayed quiet.

  “Mistress Gilda’s horse isna hooked to her plow, is it?”

  Before I could giggle, Karaline filled in the silence. “Gilda? Hello? Second time, here. Remember the baseball bat?”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “The holes,” Dirk said. “Dinna forget the wee holes.”

  I was getting dizzy. I took a deep breath. Sam broke in before I could say anything. “It takes two to move that case.” He flexed his arm. “Two men.”

  Karaline threw her napkin at him.

  He fielded it and threw it right back at her. “Or a man and a strong woman,” he amended. “Maybe Karaline is our culprit.”

  “I wouldn’t touch Mason Kilmarty with a ten-foot pole, much less a short baseball bat.” She met my eyes, and I knew she was remembering how I’d cried off and on for an hour the night I’d found Mason and Andrea in bed together. The night I’d rushed to her house, blubbering like a drama queen, swearing one minute that I was brokenhearted and the next that hell couldn’t burn hot enough—freeze cold enough—for a rat like Mason.

  Dirk interrupted my little trip down nightmare lane. “The holes. Ask about the holes.”

  I reached for a double-glazed. “Anybody know why there’d be holes in the wall behind the bookcase?”

  “They looked like they’d been drilled,” Sam said. “Three-sixteenths,” he added with authority.

  “Three what?” Dirk strode around the table, his kilt swirling as he walked, until he stood to my right, behind Karaline—probably so he could get a good look at Sam’s face across the table. “What sort of number is that?”

  Harper shifted in his seat but remained silent.

  “Besides Peggy and Karaline,” Gilda said, and I could have sworn she added and me under her breath, “who else would want to kill Mason?”

  Harper gave a minuscule shake to his head. Or maybe he didn’t. I wasn’t sure.

  “Good question,” said Karaline.

  “That still doesna explain—”

  Karaline stood, and Dirk backtracked quickly to get out of her way. “I have to get some sleep.”