A Wee Homicide in the Hotel

by Fran Stewart

  “The price she was asking wasn’t even a fraction of what it’s worth. Everybody knows shopkeepers jack the prices up really high, so she probably didn’t pay more than a couple of hundred for it.”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”

  Mistress Dolores raised her chin. “I never wore it when the family was around. The only time we ever see you is here at the festival. And at Lorena’s funeral, but I didn’t have the necklace then. Windsor hadn’t given it to me yet.”

  “And this time, here, even though you weren’t going to be wearing it, you just happened to have it with you?”

  “I wear it a lot. And I always keep it with me.”

  Dirk didna think a voice could go any deeper than where Mistress Burns had already gone wi’ her voice, but it could indeed. Like the angry grunting of a boar. Like the snarl of a wolf. Like the rumble of thunder no sae far away. Only this storm was here in this room. A room Dirk couldna get out of. “And now, dear wife of my thieving brother, you are going to tell me where my necklace is. The real one.”

  “I don’t know,” Mistress Dolores wailed, and Dirk could tell she wasna being a breugadair this time. Nay. She was telling the truth this time for certes. “He hid it somewhere and wouldn’t tell me where. All he said was it’s not here in the room. He knows I’m really good at finding things, and he said he didn’t want me to be tempted.”

  Mistress Burns leaned back in her chair. “That story he told you, about finding the fake. It sounds a little bit too pat for me to swallow.” She tapped one finger on the table. “I think he stole everything.”

  “No.” Mistress Burns sounded sullen now. “Windsor said he always thought you or Lorena, or even Robert, had staged the burglary.”

  Shay stood up so suddenly, Dirk had to jump back out of her way. “That stiff-necked, self-righteous Lorena wouldn’t; I certainly didn’t; and Robert couldn’t find his way out of a five-by-ten storage unit, much less plan a burglary. And you can tell my brother he’s an idiot if he thinks any of us did it.” She slapped Mistress Dolores wi’ the back of her hand, and her big ring left a trail o’ blood across the red-blotched cheek. “There’s one more thing you can tell that husband of yours. On second thought, I’ll tell him myself. If I don’t get my necklace, I’ll strip him of every trophy he ever won at any of the Games here, and he’ll never compete again.”

  “You can’t do that! He lives for these Games. He’d kill to win them.” Her eyes got verra wide, as if she couldna believe she’d said that.

  “Did he?” Mistress Burns asked. “Did he kill, just to win?”

  She smiled. It reminded Dirk of a picture of a monstrous sea dragon he had seen on a map in Brother Marcus’s cell once, back when he was alive. The dragon had had steam curling from its mouth, and ferocious teeth. Before he could blot the picture from his mind, Mistress Burns stormed to the door and left, slamming it behind her seconds before Dirk reached it. He drew his dagger and pounded on the door, but of course, nothing happened except that Mistress Dolores sat down on the side of the bed, cupped her bloody cheek in her hand, and began to cry.

  Dirk was left with plenty of time to contemplate what might be a fyveby ten storge younit, but he couldna decipher the strange words.

  * * *

  I waited the rest of the evening, well past the eight o’clock closing time, but Dirk didn’t reappear. The temps cleared out right away. No Dirk. Shoe delivered the cash box from the tie booth. No Dirk. Gilda and Sam left soon after that, taking Scamp with them, and I could tell they were happy to be headed for some well-deserved rest. They’d worked their tails off all day long. Silla crawled out from under the sweaters and seemed to attach herself to the bottom of my skirt.

  Finally, about nine, I called Karaline.

  “He’s gone, K,” I said. “Dirk’s gone, and he said he’d meet me here at the shop and he hasn’t come and I’m worried. What if he’s . . .”

  “Lying dead in a ditch somewhere?” Karaline wasn’t usually that sarcastic. “Don’t be silly, P. What could possibly happen to a ghost?”

  Silla bumped her head against my leg. “But I don’t even know where he went.”

  “Are you still at the shop?”

  “Yes.” I bent over and scratched Silla’s head.

  “Stay put and I’ll be right there.”

  “Maybe he went home,” I said, not sure whether I meant home to Hickory Lane or . . . or home to his Peigi, although how he could possibly have gotten there, I had no idea. He did have the shawl, though.

  “Did you hear me? Stay where you are. I’m on my way.”

  I put Silla’s red leash on her so I’d be ready to go, but Karaline wouldn’t let me leave until I explained what had happened.

  “Okay,” she said when I finished. “The first thing we do is go to your house and see if he’s there.”

  Shorty greeted me at the front door, took a whack at Silla’s poor nose, and jumped onto the couch.

  Dirk wasn’t anywhere in the house.

  I thought about it. “Wait! He couldn’t have gotten inside. The door was locked.”

  “He couldn’t have gotten inside even if the door was unlocked,” Karaline said.

  So we looked outside.

  When that turned up nothing—no ghost at least—Karaline sank onto a chair at my kitchen table. “The next thing we do is think about this.”

  We thought.

  “He’s never stayed away this long,” I said. “This is the last time I ever let him take the shawl. What if he got lost—”

  “I’m pretty sure ghosts can’t get lost, P.”

  “How on earth would you know?”

  Finally Karaline said, “Tell me again exactly what Shay said on the phone.”

  I thought about it for a moment. “She complained that whoever it was didn’t have a cell phone.”

  “Who doesn’t carry a cell?”

  I shrugged.

  “Did she say anything else? Anything about where she was going?”

  I tried to envision the scene before the bagpipers began their joyous wailing. “She said something like ‘It’s about time you got back to your room.’”

  Karaline stood so fast the chair knocked over. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “The hotel, of course.”

  Oh. Of course. But then I wondered, “What if it’s not a room at the hotel? What if it’s in a B and B or one of the motels, or—”

  “Shut up, P. We’ll deal with one step at a time.”

  Fine for her to say. She wasn’t the one missing a ghost. I hadn’t told her yet how Dirk—Macbeath—was my great-multiple-times-grandfather. I’d do that later. After we found him.

  23

  You will lose this wager, my lord.

  ACT 5, SCENE 2

  Karaline and I roamed the hotel lobby, hoping our ghost would appear. The clerk at the desk wouldn’t let us back in the hallways, since we weren’t registered guests. He gave us some cock-and-bull story about security being tighter, and maybe that was true, considering there’d been a murder, but it was darned inconvenient.

  Finally, we left.

  I got up four times during the night to open the front door and peer out onto the porch, hoping to see my ghost sitting in the swing.

  The first three times, Shorty accompanied me downstairs while Silla stayed curled in her bed.

  The fourth time I got up, Shorty wasn’t with me on the bed. I couldn’t see him in the dark bedroom, and I finally turned on a light. Shorty lay splayed across Silla’s back. I couldn’t tell if he was comforting the wee doggie or simply soaking up Silla’s warmth. By the time I checked the porch—no Dirk—and returned to my bedroom, Shorty had moved to one side and was curled between the plush side of the dog bed and Silla’s tummy. Silla had a paw resting on Shorty’s shoulder.

  Early Sunday morning, Dir
k still hadn’t shown up. I finally get a grandfather and he disappears.

  I called Karaline to make sure he hadn’t somehow found his way to her house, and then I called Harper and begged him to stop by my house. “I need your help,” I said. And he didn’t even ask what it was about. He simply came.

  Living room or kitchen, I wondered while I waited for him to arrive. Kitchen. I could serve coffee. I started it brewing, made sure Silla had taken care of her business, and opened the front door before Harper was even halfway out of his car. “Let him believe me,” I breathed, even though I wasn’t sure whom I was talking to.

  I took one more look at the swing, just in case. Nothing. “Come on back to the kitchen. I have coffee ready.”

  Once we were seated, I stared at him for a moment. His dark eyes were tired-looking—no wonder, he’d probably been working the murder investigation nonstop—but they were curious as well.

  “I have something to tell you. And I know you’re not going to want to believe it at first, but could you just give me some time to explain the whole story before you try to leave?”

  His eyes got that wary expression that’s hard to describe but impossible to miss. “Okay.” He lifted his coffee cup to his lips. I tried not to think about that one time he’d kissed my cheek.

  I took as deep a breath as I could. “When I went to Scotland last year and bought that shawl, it . . . it had . . . it had a ghost attached to it.”

  Once we’d cleaned up the coffee he’d spluttered all over the table, I told him the rest of it.

  “And now,” I finished, “he’s gone. He hasn’t been back since he went running off after Shay yesterday, and they wouldn’t let Karaline and me in the hotel to search for him last night.”

  “Karaline? You took Karaline with you?”

  “Of course. She’s the only other person in town who can see Dirk.”

  He pressed his palms over his eyes. “You and Karaline can see this ghost, but nobody else can?”

  “That’s right, and I need you to get me into the hotel so I can find him.”

  “Why doesn’t he just . . . walk through a wall or something?”

  “That’s the problem. He can’t. He can’t get through a door unless somebody opens it for him. He can’t turn the pages of a book—”

  “What book?”

  “Any book. He likes to read. A Tale of Two Cities is his current favorite.”

  Harper let out his breath, like he’d reached the end of his limit. “I thought you said he can’t turn the pages.”

  “He can’t. He reads out loud to me while I knit, and I turn the pages for him. Quit laughing. This is most definitely not funny. My ghost may be trapped somewhere and I have to find him and I need your help to do it and you’re laughing at me?”

  “Peggy, Peggy, Peggy.” His voice sounded softer with each iteration of my name. “It’s so outrageous, I almost have to believe you. And you obviously believe it, so even if it’s an unexplainable hallucination—”

  “It is not!”

  “I still have to go along with it, just to see how it’s going to turn out.”

  “You’re patronizing me.”

  He reached out and touched the tips of my fingers where they lay pressed against the table. I was tempted to jerk my hand away, but I didn’t want to miss the soothing calm of even that slight touch. “I’m trying to understand you,” he said. He pushed his chair back. “Let’s go find ourselves a ghost. I’m betting we won’t, but maybe I’ll be wrong.”

  I still thought he was laughing at me, but at least he was on his feet.

  I held Silla in my lap as we drove into the center of Hamelin.

  As Harper parked curbside—illegally—in front of the hotel, a man opened the door and I spotted Dirk behind him, trying to slip out.

  “There he is,” I yelled, and Silla barked. “Stay here, and I’ll get him in the car.”

  Harper grabbed Silla’s collar. I jumped out and opened first the hotel door, and then the back door of the cruiser. Dirk climbed in as I leaned forward and said, “Of all the ghosts in the world, I get stuck with one who doesn’t know how to walk through a wall! Didn’t you ever read A Christmas Carol? Didn’t you ever see The Ghost and Mrs. Muir? How dare you worry me like that?”

  “Ye needna beceorest so. Ye know verra weel I have read about the ghost of Jacob Marley, but as ye can see, I ha’ no chains to clankity around. Any the way, that particular ghost was nae a real ghost. And ye probably are aware that I havena met either Mistress Muir or her ghost, because ye have never thought to introduce us. I seem to remember me that ye said ye didna ken any ither ghosts. Perhaps ye would oblige next time they come into our wee shop.”

  He said our. He said our shop. He could accuse me of baykoraysting all he wanted to. “Oh, Macbeath, I’m so glad you’re safe and alive—uh—well—you know what I mean. I’m glad you’re here.”

  “I accept your apology, for I assume that is what ye intend by all this dithering about. For the now, ye maun quit talking. The folk walking past are beginning to wonder about ye.” He turned his head to peer over the back of the front seat. “And so is our constable.”

  “Let’s go. There’s a lot we have to discuss.”

  I closed the car door, careful to be sure his dagger was out of the way, and got back in the front. “I think it will be easier to talk at my house. Can we go back there?”

  Harper studied me for quite a while before he eased the car into gear.

  Silla whined and tried to jump over the seat, even though that barrier was in the way.

  Harper was wasting a lot of energy, I thought, shaking his head so much. I called Gilda and told her I’d be a little late.

  * * *

  I opened two more doors for Dirk—police car and house. Harper followed me, shaking his head slowly.

  “Ye did tell him about me?” It wasn’t so much a question as an observation on the part of Dirk as Harper and I seated ourselves.

  “Yeah. I told him.” I reached out a foot and pushed a chair away from the table. “Have a seat, Macbeath. I think this is going to take a while.”

  “Ye needna rush. Our wee murderer isna going anywhere soon.”

  “He isn’t? Who is he? How do you know?”

  Harper held up a hand. “Would you please explain to me what’s happening?”

  It took quite a while, of course, but once Dirk explained the whole story—or what he knew of it from his sojourn in Dolores and Windsor’s room—Harper no longer sounded quite so skeptical. In fact, he ended up asking, “If your ghost can’t walk through walls, how did he get out of the room this morning?”

  “I tried for to leave, but the man near filled the door with his shoulders so brawnish when he did come home yestreen.”

  “I think he means brawny,” I told Harper as I translated from ghost to present-day. “And ‘yestreen’ means last night—yesterday evening.” I had the feeling I’d left something out. Some vital piece of information, but I couldn’t think what it might be.

  “Whan that he threatened for to kill ye, Mistress Peggy—”

  “He threatened to kill me?”

  “Kill you? Who?” Harper was almost on his feet.

  “Why did he say he wanted to kill me?”

  “He is afeared ye will identify Mistress Dolores for the stealing o’ the necklace.”

  “He should have thought about his wife before he came up with the idea in the first place. What did you do when he threatened me?”

  “I struck his head w’ my hand and he fair passed out.”

  “Good thinking.” I explained it all to Harper.

  “Why would that make him pass out?”

  “You know, this would be a whole lot easier if you could just hear him. And see him,” I added. “Remember that time you were here last year and all of a sudden you got very dizzy and fe
ll down and couldn’t walk very steadily for a while?”

  He nodded.

  “What happened was, you ran into Dirk.”

  “I—I—”

  “Right. You did. That’s what happened.”

  Apparently Dirk wasn’t interested in all that explaining. “I waited until the wee woman called for help,” he said. “Whan that the . . . the . . .”

  “Paramedics,” I suggested.

  “Aye. Whan that they came, they left the wee door wide open, and I walked out, but then I couldna get all the way outside until . . .”

  “Until Harper and I showed up,” I finished for him.

  Dirk stood and paced between the table and the fridge. There wasn’t a lot of room, and each time he changed direction, his kilt swirled out.

  Harper cleared his throat. “Until we showed up where?”

  Once I’d transmitted Dirk’s explanation, I asked, “So, what do we do now?”

  “We don’t do anything.” Harper’s voice had turned steely. “I will handle it from here. My team and I. The problem is that—if your ghost is to be believed—” He indicated the chair where Dirk had been. I didn’t want to interrupt him to tell him Dirk wasn’t there anymore. Anyway, it didn’t seem relevant.

  “I now know the motive,” Harper continued. “I can plot the opportunity, and of course, I already knew how it was done with the karate chop and the bagpipe . . . cord.” His voice took on a funny tone when he said that last word, but I couldn’t interpret it.

  Dirk sat back down. “He didna quite admit to the murder o’ Large William. He said only that he was glad he had no more competition for the caber toss and hammer throw.”

  “That’s a terrible reason to kill someone.”

  “Aye. I agree wi’ ye. He told his wife that he had the necklace in his sporran but he had taken it off during the hammer throw, and somebody took it.”

  “Took the necklace?”