by Fran Stewart
I drummed my fingers on the island in the middle of the kitchen for a moment. “I, uh, read some of her mail.”
“Ye what?”
“Don’t get so self-righteous.” I pulled a grapefruit out of the fridge. “It was just lying on her counter.”
Dirk was awfully silent. I looked up at him. He was staring at the grapefruit like he thought it might bite him. “What would that be?”
“This?” I cut it in half. “It’s called a grapefruit. Why?”
“I travelled to Edinburgh once.”
“Yeah?” I ran my knife around the first little wedge.
“I saw a fruit verra much like that, only it was smaller and of a different color. It was called an or-ange.” His voice was hushed as he said those two distinct syllables, and filled with awe. “Only the nobles could afford them.”
I set the knife down. “Dirk, you’ve got to get used to the idea that a whole lot of things, like books and fruit like this, are pretty common around here. Around now. I eat grapefruit all the time, and I ain’t rich.”
He frowned. “And crimes? Murders? Are those common, too?”
“Of course not!” I picked the knife back up and went to work on the hapless grapefruit.
“Yet ye have a number of constables who appear to do only that work. They are not farmers or blacksmiths or coopers. Their only employment seems to be finding people who have done wrong. Am I correct?”
I scooped the loosened sections out into a bowl. “Well, when you put it that way, I guess the answer would have to be yes.”
“I lived my entire thirty years and didna encounter a single instance of anyone killing another human being. There might be brawls between men at the pub occasionally, but little more than that. Reoch Macdonald did bear false witness against his neighbor Tawse Macleod for supposedly taking a pig from Reoch’s sty, but the village knew the truth of it and wouldna allow Reoch to speak so.”
“You mean to tell me everybody in your village was perfect except the brawling men and this Ree-guy.”
“Nae, nae. Just that we didna solve our problems by murdering anyone.”
“So why did you tell me you knew all about fighting?”
“Och, aye, I did, but that was to settle clan quarrels.”
“Oh, big difference.”
“We didna go out to murder.”
“Well, we don’t, either.” I slurped the rest of the juice out of the bowl. “Not usually.”
“So I must get used to books and grape fruits often and killing occasionally?”
“You had a war just before you were born.” Sorry as I am to admit it, I sounded a little nasty.
He sighed. “Aye. There were wars and clan fights.” He sat down across from me. “Are ye saying there are none now?”
He had me there. I pushed away from the table. “I, uh, have to go brush my teeth.” I was going to be hungry by ten, but my scrambled eggs would have to wait for another day when the Inquisition wasn’t going on at my kitchen table. “We have to walk this morning,” I told him. “I haven’t gotten a rental car yet.”
“Could we no use the wee carriage out front?”
“What are you talking about?”
“This morning, before ye awakened, a verra big truck of garbage stopped in front of this dwelling. Behind it, a wee car drove into the . . .”
“The driveway?”
“Och, is that what ’tis called? Aye. Weel, a man got out of the car, climbed into the truck of garbage, and left.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“This has nothing to do with goats.”
I had to think about that one. I was halfway to the front door before I got it.
Sure enough, just as he had said, a wee carriage, a chocolate brown Volvo, stood in my driveway. “You didn’t tell me he put a bow on it.”
“I supposed it was meant to be a surprise. Mayhap ’tis for your bee-day.”
It was a surprise all right. I pulled an envelope from under the bright red bow adorning the hood and read the note aloud.
Dear Miss Winn,
I hope you will forgive my running into you. The accident helped me make a decision I’ve been agonizing over for some time. Please accept this gift as my way of thanking you for your part in this drama. It’s an older car, but it is in prime condition and quite trustworthy. The keys, bill of sale, and the registration papers are in the glove compartment. You’ll see that I’ve sold the car to you for one dollar.
Sincerely,
Martin Cameron
Former Owner
Cameron Garbage
Arkane, Vermont
p.s. I feel a great deal happier than I have in a very long time. That alone is worth far more than the price of a used car.
p.p.s. I don’t expect to receive that dollar. Let’s call us even?
I ran my hand over the hood.
“Yon Master Cameron sounds like a courtly gentleman. I wouldna expect him to carry refuse.”
I smiled up at Dirk, feeling completely right with the world at the moment. “Gentlemen come in all sorts of packages. Let me grab my purse and we’ll take it for its maiden voyage.”
Dirk looked at me sideways but must have gathered the gist of what I was saying. “All ye need to do is open the door, if ye wouldna mind.”
* * *
Harper stood outside the ScotShop. Dirk made a low, grumbling sound, but I kept walking. “H’lo, Harper. Is anything wrong?”
“Why do people always assume something’s wrong when they see a police officer?”
“Maybe it’s because you’re always after the bad guys.”
“Aye, now. I was right, was I not? Your constables have no other work to do.”
“Do you ever do safety talks at schools?”
Harper seemed mildly surprised by the change in topic. “Yes. In fact, I’ll be at the elementary school next week.”
See? I wanted to say, but I think Dirk got the idea because he grumbled a bit more sotto voce.
“New car?”
I didn’t think he needed the details. “New to me.”
“Martin, huh?”
“You knew?”
He shrugged. “He called me to see if I thought you’d accept it.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him that anything worth doing was worth trying.”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
That lovely smell of wood floors, rich wool, and ancient walls enveloped me in its welcome when I opened the door. Even the jangle of the bell sounded less irritating than usual. “You might as well come on in.” I looked at my watch. “Am I going to have to delay opening this morning?”
“No. You can open on time. I wanted to see how you were feeling and have another look at that storage area in back.”
“I’m feeling fine and you’re welcome to it. When Sam gets here, he can clear off the shelves if you need him to.”
“That won’t be necessary.” He patted his pockets.
“Looking for something?”
“I must have left my measuring tape in the car. I’ll be right back.”
“I have one. It’s twenty-five feet. Is that long enough?”
“Should be. Thanks.”
I locked the door behind us and headed for the counter. He followed along, his footsteps in time with mine.
The lost-and-found basket was balanced precariously near the edge. I pulled it out of the way and located the tape measure. There was entirely too much junk under here. I handed the tape measure to Harper, motioned him toward the back room, and rifled though the basket. How long did I have to keep these things before I dumped them? A ring—not an expensive one, and I knew for a fact it had been here at least a year. I tossed it in the waste can. Then there was one of those super bounc
y balls and four keys. One looked like a house key. A little one, like for a padlock. A longer gold one. There was a car key, too. Some poor tourist, probably. I hoped the owner was part of a married couple, so the wife might have had an extra key in her purse. A Swiss Army knife just like the one my dad had given me on my tenth birthday. Three cheap earrings, none of which matched. I tossed them, too.
I glanced around to see where Dirk was. The far side of the room, over by the front windows. Just as in my house, he seemed to be able to drift farther away from me here in the store. I wondered what he would think of the mishmash of items in my lost-and-found basket. Did people in the fourteenth century lose things so casually? Did they even have such bunches of junk?
Harper poked his head through the staff door, and I lost my train of thought.
“Come look at this.” He stepped forward and held the door wide open. I set down the basket slowly to give Dirk a chance to catch up with me, but he popped up at my elbow. He must have been closer than I’d thought. I paused in front of Harper and motioned surreptitiously for Dirk to walk through the door ahead of me. Weren’t ghosts supposed to be able to walk through walls?
I looked at my watch. It was the only excuse I could think of to justify standing there. Dirk stepped around me and into the back room. “Twenty minutes till we open,” I said. “Gilda should have been here by now.”
I looked up at Harper’s quizzical expression, patted my watch, and followed my ghostie. Harper was going to think I was an absolute flake.
He placed his hand lightly on the back of my waist and steered me to the left and into the little bathroom/storage room. My back stayed slightly warm where he had touched it, even after he let go. I swallowed.
He handed me one end of the measuring tape. “Hold this against the wall.” I did. He reeled out the tape to the front edge of the old wooden built-in shelves. “Six feet, two inches,” he said, and reeled it in.
“Yeah? So?”
“The shelves are twenty-four inches deep. When you add that to the six-two, you have a room that is two inches over eight feet front to back, right?
I nodded, wondering where this was heading.
He led the way out into the workroom and around the corner of this eight-foot-two-inch room. He hooked the metal tape measure onto that corner and gestured to me to hold it in place. He reeled out the tape again, all the way to the wall and marked the tape with two fingers. On the other side of that wall was the ugly brown wallpaper at the back of my shop.
“If you allow six inches or so for the framing,” he said, “this wall ought to be close to eight and a half feet long, right?
I did the math and nodded.
He walked back to me, holding the yellow metal tape. It crinkled as it bent in his wake. “Look.” Dirk leaned closer. Harper’s fingers were on either side of the line that said 132 inches. Eleven feet. “Where,” Harper asked, “did the extra two and a half feet go?”
Dirk shook his head. “The wall behind the wee safe was not that deep.”
I thought back to the way the safe looked. “You’re right.”
“About what?”
It sure would be easier if other people could hear Dirk. “The safe wasn’t that deep.”
He nodded. “Eighteen inches front to back. Remember when I pushed that thin wire into the holes”—he looked at me askance—“the ones you didn’t destroy when you pulled out the Sheetrock?”
Next to me, Dirk said, “Aye?”
“What about them?”
“The wire went in a good two feet before it hit something.”
“So you knew there had to be a problem—”
“A discrepancy.”
“A discrepancy between how thick the wall ought to be and how thick it actually is?”
“Right,” he said.
“So the question is . . .”
“. . . why is part of that false wall only wide enough to hide a safe . . .”
“. . . while the other section of it is wide enough to hide . . .”
“. . . something else?”
Dirk gave a groan. “Ye are doing it again.”
I looked at him and raised my eyebrows.
“Sounding like the Sinclairs.”
“Oh.” I guess we did. Sort of like a Ping-Pong match, back and forth.
Harper followed the direction of my gaze, but all he saw was a wall. “Oh? Oh, what?”
“Nothing. I talk to myself sometimes.” And, of course, to my ghostie.
“Care to let me in on your interior conversation?”
I spread my hands about eighteen inches apart, wide enough for the safe, front to back. Then I spread them wider. “You don’t suppose there’s, uh, a body hidden in there, do you?”
“A body? In where?” Gilda stood halfway in the room. How much had she heard?
“We were just throwing some ideas around. Nothing to worry about.”
“Peggy was hypothesizing about what might be in the wall next to the safe.” Harper must not have considered her a threat. Well, that wasn’t such a hard call. I didn’t consider her a threat, either. She looked perky this morning. No migraine, thank goodness. She was no good at all when she dragged around.
“Can we look?” She sounded hopeful. What had happened to the shrinking-violet persona? Sam wasn’t around. She shouldn’t feel a need to act helpless.
“Yesterday you were scared there might be a body,” Harper said, “and today you want one?”
“Well”—Gilda sounded defensive—“Peggy said it would only be a skeleton by now, and that can’t be very scary. We could rip out one more section of drywall and put up another bookcase in front of it.”
“Now, wait a minute. You can’t just go around destroying my walls.”
“I thought you rented this place,” Gilda pointed out, “so they’re not your walls.”
I had an unpleasant vision of me trying to explain to my landlord why I’d already damaged one section of the wall. Come to think of it, though, I didn’t really know who my landlord was. I’d have to explain to the people at the property management firm that took care of collecting rent. I never seemed to deal with the same person twice there. They must have had an outrageous turnover rate. I wondered, not for the first time, who owned the building. “As long as I repair the wall and replace the wallpaper, I don’t think there’ll be a problem.”
“You’ll have to do that anyway where the safe is,” Harper pointed out, like I didn’t know that already.
“As long as ye have ruined one section, ye may as well discover what is hidden elsewhere in yon wall.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to have to close the store, and I’d have to do that if we ripped down another section of the wall.”
“That’s not what I said.” Harper furrowed his brow. “You have enough wallpaper in that extra roll to cover the section behind the bookcase.”
“Aye. We would need some of that rock sheet as well.”
“Sheetrock,” I corrected.
“What about it?”
“Huh?” Harper and Gilda both sounded confused.
“I’ll have to replace the Sheetrock, but I don’t think there’s enough wallpaper.”
“There’s enough to cover the safe.”
“Harper, you’re missing the point. We’d have to open up another several feet of the wall to find out if—”
“No, you’re the one missing the point. We could take out the shelves in the bathroom back here and get into the wall that way. There wouldn’t be any mess at all. At least not any that the tourists would ever see.”
Hmmm. I’d have to think about that. The thought of finding an old skeleton was . . . was downright ridiculous. “There’s not going to be a skeleton in there, Gilda, and I refuse to spend the time taking apart a wall for nothing.”
She looked a bit peeved at
me, but before she could say anything, Sam’s distinctive shave-and-a-haircut knock came from the front and she went to open the door. I looked a question at Harper. “It’s up to you,” he said.
Without Gilda there pushing me into doing it, the idea began to have some merit. “What are the chances?”
“Verra good.”
“Not too great.”
I looked at Harper. “Why do you say that?”
“Why else, I ask ye, would a wall be that wide except to hide a murdered body?”
“It may have been just an architectural anomaly.” Harper sounded patronizing.
“You don’t believe that,” I said.
“I most certainly do, or I wouldna have said it!”
“Not you.” I flapped my hand at Dirk.
“Who?” Harper sounded genuinely puzzled. I could see why. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m just surprised that you’d think something as obviously well planned and well hidden as that extra-wide wall could be a mistake.”
Harper held up a hand. “That’s not what I meant. Whoever built this obviously planned to hide the safe right from the start. So the wall was designed wide enough to be concealed by the little room in the back. When they went to put in the safe, they saw that they’d made the wall too deep, so they plugged up the area behind the safe with a few boards.”
“Why would they have done that?” Dirk asked, quite reasonably I thought.
I waited for Harper to answer, but he just looked at me. Finally he asked, “Doesn’t that sound reasonable?”
Shoot. He hadn’t heard Dirk’s question, of course. I slapped my forehead like in one of those V-8 commercials. “Yeah, well, why bother to hide the extra room behind the safe? Presumably the only people who would know about it were the folks, or the person, who’d hidden the safe to begin with, and it wouldn’t matter to them, or to him, whether there was extra space back there or not.”
Harper thought about it for a minute.
“Mayhap there is something else hidden behind that second wall, behind the safe.”
Rats. I was going to have to tear out the wall now, just to satisfy my own curiosity if nothing else.
“You’re going to have to—”