Her fond smile dissolved into a frown. Dan continued to help out when his brother needed an extra pair of hands, and Joe was quick to call on his younger son anytime he found himself shorthanded at the hotel. Some days Dan spent more hours behind the bar or at the reception desk than he did in his workshop.
Always honest with herself, Liss admitted she was just as bad as her father-in-law. She’d been taking shameful advantage of her father, asking him to keep the Emporium open anytime she had something else she needed to do. Before her parents came home to Moosetookalook, she’d simply closed the shop if she had to be elsewhere, a practice that had not had any appreciable effect on her bottom line. Since she didn’t get all that many walk-in customers on a good day, her failure to open up this afternoon was unlikely to cost her any sales.
“Dan,” she said tentatively as she slowed in going around one of the sharp curves on their route. “I’ve been thinking it might make sense to do away with the brick-and-mortar store altogether and concentrate on the mail order and online end of things. I mean, it’s only because Margaret owns the building that I can afford such a large space at all. The overhead would be less, not to mention the liability insurance, if I didn’t allow customers on the premises.”
She could almost feel his gaze as he turned his head to stare at her. “Seriously? Wouldn’t you miss the rest of it if all you did was pack and ship all day?”
“I do meet some interesting people when they come in to browse, and a few of them do go on to buy something before they leave.” Joe sent tourists staying at The Spruces her way, and so did innkeepers from neighboring towns.
“That’s not what I meant.” He sounded a tad impatient with her. “The Emporium has always been a gathering place.”
“After Patsy’s and the post office,” Liss quipped.
“Look at it this way. Where do the members of the MSBA congregate when something comes up that concerns us all?”
The Moosetookalook Small Business Association could meet anywhere, Liss thought, although “anywhere” would probably end up being their house. Gathering at the Emporium was definitely preferable. Then, too, having coffee with Sherri in the cozy corner of the shop was something of a daily ritual. They could still meet and talk if she turned all the available space into inventory storage, but the ambiance would be gone.
“Have you talked to your father about this?” Dan asked. “Or Margaret?”
Liss shook her head.
“I know you’re sole proprietor now, but they grew up in the business and each of them ran it for a while. Besides, it’s obvious Mac gets a kick out of manning the fort. Your mother even jokes that it’s good he has something to keep him busy and out of trouble.”
“He says working in the shop brings back good memories. But, Dan, even with his help, I find myself putting up the Closed sign far more often than any dedicated shopkeeper should.”
“You were open for three hours this morning. Any sales?”
“A woman browsed, but didn’t buy anything, and a young couple came in and talked about buying a kilt as a present for their six-year-old son. They left empty-handed, although they did say they might come back during the March Madness Mud Season Sale.”
“So that’s good, right? Even at the sale price, you make a decent profit.”
“What about all the days the bell over the door never rings?”
“If you were just there filling orders, you’d still have the expense of heat and electricity. You might as well stay open for walk-in business.”
Liss let the subject drop when she pulled into the parking lot at the funeral home. Talking things over with Dan had made the drive pass quickly, but she wasn’t any closer to making a decision about the Emporium.
Bracing herself for the ordeal ahead, she parked and got out of her vehicle, stopping long enough to smooth down her long black velvet skirt before she took Dan’s arm for the walk to the entrance. In Charlie MacCrimmon’s honor, Liss wore an Americanized version of traditional Scottish dress, pairing the skirt with a white blouse and a tartan shawl. She had to lift her hem to keep it out of the slush. There had been snow overnight, and although the sidewalk had been shoveled, the warmth of the afternoon sun had left icy puddles behind.
Vi had chosen an old and venerable Fallstown firm to handle Charlie’s funeral. The viewing room was on the first floor of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century mansion. The carpeted hallway leading there smelled faintly of roses, but the closer Liss came to the door, the less she was able to pick out that scent among so many others. So much for the family’s request that mourners donate to cancer research in lieu of flowers!
A disgruntled reporter in jeans and a ski jacket brushed past her on his way out, turned away at the door to the viewing room by Vi MacCrimmon herself. Liss’s mother looked fully prepared to deal the same way with anyone she deemed likely to cause a disruption.
Liss leaned in to whisper in her ear. “Doesn’t weeding out the suspicious ones defeat the whole purpose of this exercise? What if the killer doesn’t pass your litmus test?”
She moved on before Vi could reply. Once inside, she paused to take a look around. The first person she recognized was Kelly Cussler. The state police detective was attempting to blend with the rest of the mourners and failing utterly. She’d never look like anything but what she was—a hard-nosed lady cop intent on casting her suspicious gaze over each and every person who entered the room.
Liss didn’t recognize all the people who’d come to pay their respects, but she did notice a great many of them were about Charlie’s age. Some talked among themselves, while others sat in quiet contemplation. No one appeared to be gloating. If one of them had successfully committed murder, it wasn’t immediately obvious.
The idea that both her mother and Detective Cussler thought Charlie’s killer might show up at his funeral had Liss shaking her head. The possibility seemed highly unlikely to her, but then her suspicions centered on Jeremiah Forestall and Wade Udall.
While she waited for the service to begin, Liss introduced herself to several strangers and asked them how it was that they’d known her uncle. She came away from these conversations with no helpful information about Charlie’s recent activities. Everyone she spoke to said the same thing. They’d known him in high school. They’d thought he died in Vietnam. They’d read about his murder in the newspaper or online or heard the news from mutual Fallstown friends. Unspoken was the addendum that they’d come to the funeral out of curiosity.
Among the familiar faces Liss caught sight of Joe Ruskin, Ernie Willett, Moose and Dolores Mayfield, and Thea Campbell, the latter accompanied by her son and daughter-in-law. Before she had a chance to speak with any of them, Vi caught her by the elbow and tugged.
“Come along, dear. The family sits at the front.”
They were halfway down the aisle when a small commotion erupted behind them. Liss turned her head in time to see two women enter, one of them swathed in black up to and including a black hat with a veil that entirely concealed her face.
Someone else to question, Liss thought, but not until after the funeral.
It was only when they were seated, waiting for the brief, ecumenical service to begin, that Liss took a good look at the flower-draped casket. Shock reverberated through her. She’d expected it to be closed, since Charlie had been murdered and autopsied and wasn’t likely to be a pretty sight. Instead, there he lay in state. From her present position what little she could see of him looked more like a wax figure than a man.
She swallowed hard and reached for Dan’s hand, glad he was seated beside her. On the other side of her, Vi seemed oblivious to her daughter’s reaction.
Since no one, including his own family, knew enough about Charlie’s life during the last fifty years to say much about him, the funeral didn’t last long. It came to a close when Liss’s father played “The Flowers of the Forest” on his bagpipes.
Dan winced as if in pain and several people clapped their hands over their ears as
the room reverberated with the sound of skirling pipes. Mac wore full Highland regalia to march down the aisle between the seats. He stopped in front of his brother’s casket, lowered his instrument, and cleared his throat.
“Thus we say farewell to my brother.” He hesitated. “I ought to be able to find a few memorable words to say, but nothing comes to mind. I buried the Charlie MacCrimmon I knew a long time ago. This one is a stranger.”
With that, he did an abrupt about-face and walked out of the viewing room. A look of concern on her face, Vi rushed after him.
The original plan had been for Liss’s parents to remain at their seats while mourners filed past the casket and stopped to offer their condolences. Now Liss wasn’t sure what to do.
Margaret leaned across the chair Vi had vacated. “Go ahead and say your final farewell to your uncle. I’ll take over as chief mourner.”
Liss stood and moved closer to her uncle’s remains. She had to force herself to look into his face and then fight not to recoil. Seeing him lying dead in her backyard had been bad, but this was worse. Now she knew why his features seemed so familiar, and why that lock of hair falling over his forehead made her think of her father.
She was trembling as she turned away. Seeing her distress, Dan draped an arm around her shoulders and tried to steer her outside. She resisted. She hadn’t forgotten the veiled woman. She still wanted to talk to her.
“What’s wrong?” Dan asked when she craned her neck to survey the crowd.
“Can you see that woman, the one all in black?”
After a moment’s fruitless searching, he shook his head. “She must have left.”
“Did you recognize her?”
“How could anyone make out her features through all that thick black netting?”
Liss found herself wishing the interment had been scheduled for the same day. Maybe the mystery woman would have shown up at the cemetery. As it was, it wasn’t possible to dig a new grave in the small burying ground in Moosetookalook. The ground was still frozen solid. They’d inter Charlie later in the spring, in the plot where he already had a tombstone.
People were still milling about when Liss returned to her aunt’s side. Margaret’s face was set in what, in ordinary circumstances, Liss would have called a professional shopkeeper’s expression.
“That woman all in black,” Liss blurted out as soon as there was a break in the procession of mourners. “Who was she?”
“A poor, sad creature who hasn’t been quite right in the head for years.”
“Can you be a little more specific?”
Margaret sighed. “To tell you the truth, I can’t remember her name. She was a year or two ahead of me in school, and she had a wicked crush on Charlie. He barely knew she existed. Well, she did tend to fade into the woodwork. It’s an old-fashioned name. Constance? Cecilia? No.” Her brow furrowed with the effort to recall. “Not Cordelia. Not Cornelia. Drat! Why can’t I remember?”
“Clementine.” Moose Mayfield slurred the syllables together.
As Liss had promised, Moose had been tapped to serve as one of Charlie’s pallbearers. He was waiting to take the coffin out to the hearse for the trip to the storage facility at the cemetery. Cut into the hillside, protected by a huge metal door, it was used to store those who died in winter until the ground was soft enough to dig their graves. Some wags called this “putting them on ice.”
Both Moose and Dolores wore dark suits. Liss couldn’t help but think he cleaned up well. She was surprised all over again when she realized that he and Dolly were holding hands.
“That’s it!” Margaret looked relieved. “Clementine Hillerman. Wasn’t she in your class, Roger?”
Moose nodded. “Silly little thing. What she saw in Charlie, I’ll never know. Hard to believe she’s still carrying a torch all these years later.”
“If I’m not mistaken,” Dolores said, “Clemmy wore that same outfit to Charlie’s first funeral.”
Called to his duties, Moose joined the other pallbearers. A few minutes later, only Liss, Margaret, and Dan remained in the viewing room.
“When you say Clementine isn’t quite right in the head, do you mean she’s certifiably crazy?”
“I don’t really know.” Margaret’s smile was crooked. “She could just be a tad eccentric. When she stopped to talk to me and pay her respects, I had trouble understanding what she said, but if I heard her correctly, she referred to my late brother as a ‘faithless bastard.’ ”
Liss felt her eyebrows shoot up. “Why, for heaven’s sake?”
“It might have ticked her off that he was supposed to be dead and turned out not to be, especially if she thought he ought to have been in touch with her all along. I can certainly sympathize with that feeling, since I’m not too pleased about Charlie’s secrecy myself.” Margaret shrugged. “I can’t speculate further than that, Liss. This is the first time I’ve seen Clementine in decades. I didn’t even know she was still living in the area.”
“She may not be,” Liss said with a grim smile of her own. “Mom managed to spread word of Charlie’s funeral far and wide. It wouldn’t have surprised me if some of his pals from Florida had made the trip to Maine.”
During the drive back to Moosetookalook, Liss couldn’t stop thinking about the woman in black. Maine was full of eccentrics, most of them harmless, but she had to wonder about this one. Someone from Merveilleuse International was still her prime suspect in her uncle’s murder, but she wasn’t foolish enough to discount other possibilities. For all she knew, Vi had been right and Charlie’s killer, in the form of Clementine Hillerman, had shown up at his funeral.
* * *
Liss was crossing the street on her way to the Emporium the next morning when Stu Burroughs spotted her from the ski shop window. He rushed outside to intercept her before she could so much as put her key in the lock.
“We’ve got a problem, Liss,” he announced.
“Can it wait until I get inside?”
Stu bounced impatiently on the balls of his feet until she’d entered and trotted after her to the sales counter, frowning fiercely enough to add more lines to an already lined face. He knit his bushy eyebrows together as she followed her usual routine of turning on the lights and booting up the computer. He even trailed her into the stockroom when she ducked back there to extract enough cash for change from the small wall safe her aunt had installed decades earlier.
On her return to the shop area, she hopped up onto the high wooden stool behind the counter and gave him her full attention. “Okay, Stu. What’s the crisis?”
“Have you taken a good look at the town square this morning?”
She glanced in the direction of the plate glass window at the front of the Emporium. Even at this distance she had a decent view of the area in question. “Trees. Monument. Gazebo. Playground. Looks pretty normal to me.”
“Mud, Liss. We’re missing the mud. We got snow. We got slush. Mud for Moosetookalook’s Annual March Madness Mud Season Sale? Not so much.”
The pretty coating of fresh snow had melted away the previous day. Then a cold snap overnight had frozen the slush solid again.
“Less to track in?” Liss suggested. “Less to clean up.”
“We need mud. No mud, no mud slide for the kids. No mud puddle for the woman-carrying race.”
“I can’t control the temperature, Stu. Besides, people came out in the pouring rain two years ago. Our unpredictable weather is part of the fun of the Mud Season Sale.”
“In the rain we had mud.”
“Fine. If necessary, we’ll ask the fire department to use their hoses to make mud, but wouldn’t it be nice, overall, if Saturday was bright and sunny?”
“I already asked the chief about that. He doesn’t want to waste water he may need to fight a fire.”
Liss stopped being flippant. “Is he that worried about the town’s water supply? If so, why on earth didn’t he say something at the hearing? We can hardly afford to lease water rights to Merveilleuse
International if we don’t have enough for our own needs.”
Holding both palms in front of him, palms out, Stu backed away from her. “Hey, nobody said anything about a water shortage.”
“I did. Weren’t you at the hearing?”
“Some of us are concentrating on March Madness.”
“Oh, for—” She broke off and took a deep breath. “Look, Stu, even if we can’t hold those two events, there are still plenty of things for tourists to do. All the shops are running specials. My mother has managed to turn her private effort to get rid of accumulated junk into a gigantic community yard sale. You’ll be calling the auction, as always.”
“It’s a March Madness Mud Season Sale,” Stu insisted. “We need mud.”
Liss resisted the temptation to roll her eyes. “Have you checked the weather forecast? Maybe it will rain tomorrow and be sunny on Saturday.”
“Dry. Bone dry.”
But not fire-danger dry, not at this time of year with snow still on the ground.
“I’ll think of something,” she promised. Maybe she could persuade the fire chief to change his mind.
Still grumbling, Stu took his leave.
Liss barely had time to turn the CLOSED sign to OPEN before the phone started ringing. For the next hour she fielded one last-minute question after another, all to do with Saturday’s festivities. Most of the issues were minor, but none of them could be ignored. By ten o’clock she’d accepted that her free time was going to be severely limited until the first of April.
She did manage to make a quick call to Jake Murch.
“I need you to talk to Clementine Hillerman, Billy Twining, and Peter Cramer, aka Greaser,” she told him, “and find out where each of them was the night my uncle was killed.”
“Will do,” Murch promised. “And I’m making headway in finding out what Merveilleuse International is really up to. It’s getting proof of their underhanded dealings that’s going to be tricky.”
“How about evidence of criminal activity?” Liss asked.
A View to a Kilt Page 18