That’s Moose for you, she thought, always a day late and a dollar short. She didn’t know why Dolores put up with him.
“Not today,” she called through the door.
Deliberately, she turned out the lights and walked away. Moving to a side window, she watched him make his unsteady way to the corner by the post office and keep going, heading for home. Shaking her head, Liss collected Dandy and Dondi, who’d been returned to their fenced-in dog run an hour or so earlier. Like most people in town, she tolerated Moose, accepting that he had a drinking problem without attempting to intervene. It was nobody’s business but his if he wanted to drink himself to death. Still, she wondered if anyone had ever tried to get him sober. That wasn’t a project she’d want to tackle. Moose Mayfield had scared her when she was younger, with his wild hair and loud voice. These days she just felt sorry for the harmless old drunk.
* * *
The Emporium was closed on Sundays and Mondays. For those two days, Liss and Dan agreed, they would once again turn off their phones and hide from well-intentioned neighbors, friends, and family. Liss holed up in the combination office and library Dan had created for her in their attic and lost herself in a good book, one that was not a murder mystery.
It was around three-thirty on Sunday afternoon and she had just finished reading the first in a paranormal trilogy by Charlaine Harris when the insistent buzz of the doorbell penetrated her solitude. When she and Dan didn’t respond, the person on their front porch resorted to pounding on the door. By the time Liss got downstairs and joined Dan in the living room, a face had appeared at the window. Their next-door neighbor Sandy Kalishnakof peered in at them.
“Open up. It’s important,” he called through the glass.
In disgust Dan threw down the woodworking magazine he’d been reading and stalked into the hall. A gust of cold air followed the two men back into the room.
“You don’t look like you’re at death’s door,” Liss remarked with a hint of sarcasm in her voice.
Dan was even less inclined to be polite. “We’re not up for company right now. Can’t this wait?”
“I don’t think it can.” Sandy turned to address Liss. “Hey, Kid. I get that you’ve been having a rough time, but I really need your help.”
She had to smile at his use of the affectionate nickname. Sandy was only three years her senior, but for the decade they’d been on the road together with the Scottish dance troupe known as Strathspey, he’d been like a big brother to her. In the early days of her romantic relationship with Dan, she referred to Sandy as her “best friend.” It had been a bit awkward when the two men met for the first time and Dan realized that “Sandy” wasn’t the gal pal he’d been imagining. Instead, he’d been faced with a handsome devil with jet-black hair and dark blue eyes and a face and build that instantly made people think of a young Sean Connery.
“What’s wrong?” Liss asked.
“It’s Max. He says he saw something the night of the murder.”
“Then tell the cops, not my wife.” Dan’s voice was colder than the temperature outside. He’d long since gotten over his initial jealousy of the other man, but he and Liss had agreed to spend their two-day weekend free of speculation about crime.
“He’s seven.” Sandy kept his gaze on Liss’s face. “Do you really think I’m going to leave him to the tender mercies of that martinet of a state trooper who came around to ask questions on Friday?”
Liss was already on her feet. “What can I do?”
“Just listen to him. Help us decide whether or not he saw something that needs to be reported.” His expression turned slightly sheepish. “It’s always possible he just had a bad dream.”
Dan’s scowl wasn’t enough to dissuade Liss from going. “Are you coming?” she asked as she collected hat, coat, and gloves.
He gestured at the TV. “Game’s about to start.”
She rolled her eyes, then crossed the room to plant a smacking kiss on his cheek. “I won’t be long.”
“When that lady cop questioned us,” Sandy said as they walked the short distance between their houses, “we couldn’t tell her anything. We were all in bed and asleep when the murder happened, or so we thought. It wasn’t until this morning that Max started talking about the ogre in the backyard.”
“An . . . ogre?”
“He’s got a good imagination.”
“Or he actually saw something. I can see why you’re concerned.”
“Zara and I discussed it after we put the kids down for their naps. We decided you were the best person to consult.”
“Like I’m such an expert on kids!”
“Maybe not, but you have had some experience with murder investigations.”
Her grimace spoke volumes.
Sandy and Zara lived above Dance Central, the studio they’d opened almost ten years earlier. He led the way up to their apartment by way of a flight of outside stairs, opening the door for Liss and ushering her into the welcome warmth of a homey living room.
Zara was waiting for them, looking anxious. Her long, slender dancer’s legs were encased in black tights. Over them she wore a bright green tunic that exactly matched the color of her eyes and brought out the red of her hair.
“I’m still not sure about this,” she said. “I don’t want Max to be traumatized.”
“He doesn’t understand that someone was killed.” The weariness in Sandy’s voice told Liss that he and his wife had already debated the issue, most likely more than once.
Zara sighed. “Come on, then. It’s time for him to wake up from his nap anyway.”
“He hates being put to bed in a darkened room when the sun’s out,” Sandy confided. “We have a rebellion in the making there, but Zara insists he still needs the rest.”
Although Liss knew little about child rearing, she couldn’t help but wonder if sleeping in the daytime might account for the boy being up in the middle of the night. And wasn’t seven a little old to still be taking naps? Then again, Tamara, Max’s little sister, was only five, and it was probably easier on their parents to keep them both on the same schedule.
When Zara flicked the light switch, Liss beheld a typical boy-cave decorated with movie posters and models of spaceships. A student’s desk and an overflowing bookcase took up one wall, while a dresser stood opposite. The shades had been pulled down to facilitate napping, but the bed in the middle of the room glowed with an eerie light. The smell of scorched cotton tickled Liss’s nose.
“Maximilian Kalishnakof, what do you think you’re doing?” Zara rushed to her son’s side. She whipped the covers away to reveal a carrot-topped boy trying to read by the light of the bare bulb he’d tucked beneath his pillow. He’d been lucky it hadn’t caught the pillowcase on fire.
“You are never, ever to do such a foolish thing again!” Sandy barked at his son.
Liss heard the fear underlying the anger in his voice. His hands shook as he returned the small bedside lamp to its proper place on Max’s nightstand and replaced the shade. Zara’s eyes looked suspiciously moist as she removed the singed pillowcase and hurried away to get a fresh one.
The boy’s lower lip quivered, but he didn’t seem to realize the risk he’d taken. “But, Mom,” he pleaded when she returned, “I had to finish the chapter and the batteries in my flashlight died.”
Liss bit back a snort of laughter. To Max, this argument probably made perfect sense. As an avid reader herself, she sympathized, but she kept her thoughts to herself.
The crisis resolved, they adjourned to the living room. Liss sat beside Max on the sofa.
“So, kiddo, what’s this I hear about an ogre?”
The boy shot a worried look in his mother’s direction.
“Go ahead and tell her what you told us,” Zara said.
“It’s okay,” Sandy assured him.
Max still looked doubtful, but he turned and met Liss’s eyes. “It went across our backyard into yours.”
“An ogre?”
; His gaze dropped. “Maybe.”
Sandy had said it was possible his son had been dreaming.
“How come you saw it?” Liss asked in a gentle voice. “Weren’t you supposed to be in bed and asleep?”
“I had to get up to go to the bathroom.”
Max’s matter-of-fact tone left no doubt in Liss’s mind that he was certain about that part of the story. She felt herself tense. Maybe it hadn’t been a dream, after all.
“Okay. Then what?”
“Sometimes, when I get up, I stop and look out the window before I go back to bed. If there’s a full moon, you can see all kinds of things. One time I saw an owl fly by.”
“There wasn’t a full moon that night.” It wouldn’t be full for another two weeks.
“It was pretty dark out,” Max agreed.
There were streetlights in the town square, but they didn’t do much to illuminate the yards in back of the buildings around it. Liss doubted Max could have seen more than shadows.
“What did this ogre look like?”
“It was big. Like Shrek.” His gestures indicated broad shoulders and an oversized head, like the character in the animated features. “And it walked all funny.”
“Funny how?”
He hopped up and demonstrated, first lurching across the living room and then going up on tippy toes in a caricature of sneaking up on unsuspecting prey. Her mind already on cartoon characters, an image of Wile E. Coyote stalking the Road Runner popped into Liss’s head, making her wonder what Max had been watching lately.
Then again, his account was remarkably detailed. Maneuvering in snow might account for that uneven gait. A bulky winter coat and hat, appropriate outdoor clothing for March in Maine, could explain why he’d imagined the figure to be an ogre. In the dark the shape might not have looked particularly human.
“Are you sure this was Thursday night or early Friday morning?” Liss asked.
Max nodded and resumed his perch beside her on the sofa. “I had school the next day and that was Friday, because I always like Fridays. The next day is the weekend.”
That sounded pretty definite. “How come you didn’t wake your parents and tell them about the ogre? Seeing that must have scared you, at least a little.”
This comment earned her a shrug. Oops, Liss thought. Wrong tactic. Being a scaredy-cat wasn’t something a boy, even one this young, wanted to admit. She tried again.
“You didn’t sound an alarm. I guess you weren’t all that spooked.”
“I was thinking I ought to say something,” Max said in an earnest voice, “but then I couldn’t see it anymore, so I went back to bed.”
“And promptly forgot about the whole thing until a couple of days later,” Sandy interjected.
Liss tried to imagine what she’d have done if she’d had a similar experience at Max’s age. Most likely, she’d have pulled the covers over her head and stayed wide awake for the rest of the night. She’d have known that there weren’t really any monsters under the bed, but if she’d imagined there might be one in her backyard, she’d have been certain that it would try to break into the house at any moment.
“Thank you for telling me, Max.”
“Was it an ogre?”
“I don’t think so. Just a person all bundled up against the cold and taking a shortcut.”
She wasn’t about to tell the little boy that the person he’d seen had been a monster, one who’d killed a stranger and left his body to be found the next morning. From what little Liss had seen of the victim, he hadn’t been a burly man and he hadn’t been wearing bulky clothing. It had to have been the murderer Max had mistaken for an ogre.
“What do you think, Liss?” Sandy asked when Max and his mother had gone to wake Tamara from her nap. “Do we need to have Max talk to the police?”
She hesitated, thinking of Detective Cussler’s brusque manner. “He didn’t really see anything that would be helpful to them.”
Sandy’s relief was palpable. “That’s what I thought. And right now, even though he’s still talking about seeing an ogre, he’s not sure he believes it himself. Give him another day or two and he’ll convince himself that he imagined the whole thing.”
“Maybe he did,” Liss said. But she didn’t believe it.
* * *
As they’d planned, Liss and Dan kept the phones turned off the next day, but someone pounded on their front door once again. This time Liss’s parents were the ones who intruded.
“We were worried,” Vi said when Liss let them in. “We couldn’t get through to you on any of your phone numbers and you didn’t respond to the messages we left.”
“We’re fine. We just wanted some time to ourselves.”
“If you’d answered your phone or your e-mail, we’d have left you alone.” Vi’s aggrieved tone of voice set Liss’s nerves on edge.
“We won’t stay long,” her father promised, “but since we’re here and it’s lunchtime, you may as well let your mother fuss over you.”
Vi was already halfway to the kitchen. Her voice drifted back to them. “Omelets, I think, if you have enough eggs.”
An hour later, they were just finishing the light lunch Vi had prepared when Sherri came to the back door. Once Liss let her in, she nodded a greeting to the senior MacCrimmons.
“It’s good you’re here,” she said. “It’ll save me a trip out to Ledge Lake.”
Liss exchanged a worried look with her husband.
“I’ve heard from that state police detective,” Sherri continued. “She wants to talk to all of you, now that she has a positive ID on the victim.”
“They know who he was?” Liss asked. “That’s good, isn’t it?”
“It’s . . . complicated. According to his fingerprints, he was a seventy-two-year-old man born in Maine, but currently living in Garden Park, Florida. His name was Charles Edward MacCrimmon.”
Liss blinked. “MacCrimmon?”
Vi looked gobsmacked. “Oh, my God.”
Mac stared at Sherri as if he’d seen a ghost. “That’s impossible,” he said in a strangled voice. “My brother has been dead for the last fifty years. He never came home from Vietnam.”
Chapter Five
Liss looked from her father’s stricken expression to Sherri’s solemn one and back again. Nothing about her friend’s announcement made sense. She had a vague recollection of being told, as a child, that she’d once had an uncle Charlie, but she’d never met him. He’d died years before she was born.
Unless he hadn’t.
“Are you sure about this?” she asked.
Sherri nodded. “He was identified by means of his fingerprints. He was in the system twice—once for his military service and again when he applied for a private investigator’s license in the state of Florida.”
“That can’t be right.” The mulish expression on her father’s face warned Liss that he was digging in his heels. “My brother was MIA in Vietnam. Later, when we were assured there was no chance he’d survived, we had him declared legally dead.”
“So there was no body.” Sherri’s voice was full of sympathy. “Until now.”
Mac continued to shake his head, unwilling to accept what he was being told. Liss’s mother was another matter. Vi had a thoughtful expression on her face as she rose from her seat at the kitchen table to stand beside her husband.
“It’s possible, Mac. You know it is.”
“That he didn’t die back in the sixties? Sure, I guess I can buy that. But that he let us go on thinking he was dead when he wasn’t? That he stayed away all these years, never coming home? Vi—why?”
“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” Sherri helped herself to a cup of coffee and leaned against the counter to drink it. “And it’s one the state police are going to be asking, among others.”
“He did come home,” Liss said slowly, working her way through the logic. “In the end he returned to Moosetookalook. . . and somebody killed him before he could contact anyone in the family.”
At that moment the doorbell rang, setting off a spate of barking from the two Scotties. With a grimace Liss went to answer it. As she’d expected, Detective Kelly Cussler stood on the front porch, a scowl on her face and a backup trooper in an unmarked car parked at the curb.
Liss proposed shutting the dogs in the kitchen and moving into the living room, where there were enough places for everyone to sit. Despite the hostile look Detective Cussler sent her way, Sherri insisted on staying. She might not be welcome as their little town’s chief of police, but she had standing as a friend of the family.
Cussler verified everything Sherri had already told them.
“I don’t believe it.” Mac’s mulish expression was a good match for the challenge in his voice.
“And I have trouble believing there was no prior contact between you and your brother.”
Liss didn’t like the look in the detective’s eyes. Did Cussler seriously consider her father a suspect? Stupid question! Of course she did. She was probably taking a long, hard look at anyone who had any connection to the dead man, even the niece Charlie MacCrimmon had never met and that niece’s husband.
The questions she asked confirmed Liss’s worst fear. She was clearly focused on Mac, and he wasn’t helping matters any by refusing to accept the identification of the dead man as his brother.
“I want to see him. I won’t believe it’s Charlie until I get a look at him.”
“What good will that do?” Vi objected. “After fifty years he won’t look the same as you remember.”
“I’ll know if it’s him.” Mac reached out to pat his wife’s hand before he abruptly rose to his feet and addressed Kelly Cussler. “I want to go right now. I’ll answer all your questions, Detective, but only after I’m sure your victim is really who you say he is.”
The determined look on Mac’s face must have convinced her that he meant what he said. Although she was clearly unhappy about his ultimatum, she gave a reluctant nod.
“All right, then. Let’s go. I’ll drive you to the state medical examiner’s office in Augusta and you can view the body.”
“I’m going, too.” Vi started to get up.
A View to a Kilt Page 6