by Fran Stewart
I could have let him hold it. Was it mean of me to hang on to it? I didn’t need its warmth while I was moving. That was one of the beauties of cross-country. The very act of moving on skis allows the legs and arms, fingers and toes—and every other part of the body—to flex and bend, thereby keeping the muscles warm. But if I slowed down or stopped while I was up on the Perth, I’d need the shawl.
“Is this all the speed we will be going?”
“Why? You want to run?”
Beside me, Dirk let out a long, sustained, “Ahhhhh. I havena run anywhere for . . .”
“Since you died?” I lengthened my stride and picked up the pace until I fairly flew.
Dirk kept up with me with no apparent effort. He didn’t have to deal with friction. Or stumbling blocks, I thought as I veered to the left to avoid a snow shovel someone had left lying at the end of their driveway. He seemed so energized, so . . . bouncy almost; I had the feeling he wanted to run for hours.
I slowed down, backtracked, and stood the snow shovel upright in a snowbank so the owners could find it, even if two more feet of snow fell before they came out to shovel again.
“That was most kind of ye, Mistress Peggy.” Dirk sounded diplomatic—something I wasn’t used to, coming as it did from him. “Now, though,” he went on, “might we run again?”
As we reached the edge of the forest, where the path began to ascend, I slowed down a bit and glanced at his feet. There weren’t any footprints. I guessed that made sense—after all, he couldn’t open doors, couldn’t really touch anything—but it was still a bit of a surprise. “What does it feel like, Dirk? Walking on top of the snow, I mean.”
“Och, it feels a bit like drinking too much ale and not knowing where my feet are.”
“Did you do that a lot?”
He threw an indignant look my way. “Nae, certes. But young men will try. I suppose they still do?”
I thought about my twin brother’s occasional summer forays into bars in Arkane, the next town up the road—there weren’t any bars in Hamelin. And no telling what he’d done when he was off at college. He couldn’t have been too wild, though, since he’d graduated summa cum laude. Then he fell off the framework around a dinosaur skeleton he was repairing and shattered his back.
“. . . ye listening?”
“Huh? Oh. Yeah. Young men. They do still drink, and nowadays with cars in the equation, it’s a much more serious problem.”
“And why would that be?”
“Because when they’re drunk they don’t have the reflexes or the judgment to drive safely. A lot of people are killed every year by drunk drivers of all ages—not just young men, although statistics say they’re the worst.”
“Does he live nearby?”
“Who?”
“Master Stuhstissticks.”
I say “huh?” a lot around Dirk. I said it again before I figured out what he was talking about. “Sta-tis-tics.” I emphasized each syllable. “They’re—”
But I didn’t get to explain. The fir tree I’d just glided under had way too heavy a burden of snow. I must have brushed my head against one of the lower branches, and the whole load dumped on top of me.
By the time Dirk stopped laughing, which took considerably longer than it should have, I’d brushed myself off and gotten most of the snow out of my jacket. “Should we not turn back now?” he asked between very un-ghostly snorts.
“No. I want to go farther. I haven’t been up here on the Perth in a couple of years.”
“What would be this pirth ye speak of?”
“All the trails around here are named for towns or shires in Scotland. This trail is the Perth.” I twisted my upper body to the left and pointed with my ski pole. “The one on that hill over there on the far side of town is the Inverness trail. The Dunbarton and Fife trails are behind us, on the opposite side of Lake Ness, and the—”
He raised a hand to quiet me. We had dozens of named trails coursing up the mountains from this valley. Obviously he didn’t want to hear about all of them.
“There’s a cute little cabin in a clearing up ahead. It might be fun to go that far.”
Dirk cast a dubious eye at the sky—or what we could see of it through the snow-laden braches of the trees surrounding us. “Are ye sure o’ the path?”
“We’re not going to get lost, if that’s what you’re worried about.” I twisted to gaze back over my right shoulder and pointed with the other of my ski poles. “Look. You can see Hamelin from here through the break in the trees. We’re not that far out of town.” I pulled the pink yarn out of my jacket pocket. It’s surprising how well wool compresses. “I’ll tie yarn on trees as we go,” I said, matching my actions to my words. “That way we won’t get lost even if the path gets totally snowed in.” I always carried yarn with me when I skied—as much a habit as fastening my seat belt in the car. “At worst, we can always just head downhill and we’ll be sure to run into Lake Ness—it’s not frozen yet, so we can’t miss it. Then we turn left, and we get to Hamelin. Anyway”—I pointed to the parallel dents that marked the snow ahead of us—“a couple of other skiers have already come this way. Maybe we’ll meet up with them.”
“Mayhap, but then I’ll not be able to say anything.”
“It’s never stopped you yet.” Carrying on a conversation while nobody else could hear Dirk asking for explanations of twenty-first-century words and customs had been something of a challenge in the months since I’d . . . acquired . . . him last summer. “You never seem to shut up when I ask you to.”
He gave me one of those affronted looks, which was rather daunting coming from such a big ghost, but I turned away from him and from the tree I’d just yarned, and skied on.
Quite a few pink-beribboned trees later, we came to one of my favorite spots on the Perth trail, and I glided to a stop. A wall of solid rock rose a good twenty or thirty feet to our right, with winter-withered ferns clinging to cracks in the granite. Come spring, they’d green up and look like a veritable nursery. “Look at that cliff.” I stopped and pointed to my right, and Dirk raised an eyebrow. I could almost hear him thinking, Ye think I canna see it?
“I love this place.”
“I can see why ye maun.”
“I come up here to picnic sometimes.”
“What would be a nick?”
“Huh?”
“A nick. Ye said ye come here for to pick them. Is it a wee flower?”
“Picnic. One word.” I spelled it for him. The explanation took considerably longer.
The snow was trampled a couple of yards to the left of the path. When I finished with the English lesson, I nodded toward the mess. “Looks like at least one of the skiers in front of us had a problem.”
“He fell?”
The answer was so obvious, I didn’t reply.
“Mayhap he tripped on this rock.”
Dirk stood with one foot hiked up on top of a good-sized rock. Behind him—through him—I could see a rather large fallen branch. How could anybody not have seen those? “Sometimes rocks break away from the cliff face. Usually they fall straight down, but this one must have bounced to come this far. How could anybody have missed seeing such an obstacle?”
“Mayhap he was looking at yon lovely cliff instead of watching his skees.”
I studied the trampled snow. “It can’t have happened too long ago or the snow would have filled in more, even with as little snow as is getting through the trees.”
“Quite the tracker, are ye?”
“You would be, too, if you’d grown up around here.”
“I learnt enough tracking when I was a lad; although”—he pointed to the narrow parallel lines we’d been following—“I never tracked wee beasties with great long footprints like that.”
I moved off the path to my left. I could feel a good-sized branch under my skis. Thank good
ness my skis hadn’t snagged on it. I glanced down and saw just a hint of smooth brown through the covering of snow. I yarned a branch on the slender birch ahead of me, thinking all the time how silly it was to leave yarn here, since I knew this place so well. The trunk leaned across a branch of an enormous sugar maple, and I thought about Robert Frost’s poem “Birches.” Had some boy, or girl for that matter, been swinging from this birch to that one nearby and back again, gradually bending the trunks as the trees grew? “Birches grow in Scotland, don’t they?”
“Aye. Many.”
“Do children ever climb them and bend them down like this?” I gestured to the trees.
“Aye. Of course. Then, once they are bent, the goats like to climb them.”
“You’re teasing, right?”
He looked incredulous. “Do ye not know that goats climb slanting tree trunks?”
“Can’t say that was part of my education. Not too many goats around Hamelin.”
I headed up the trail, and he kept pace, shaking his head in exasperation. “What kind of world has this become, where the most common knowledge is lost?”
I plowed to a stop and glared at him. “I’m supposed to feel bad about a lack of goat lore?”
“Ye needna beceorest so.”
“I’ll baykerayst if I want to.” Whatever that is. It’s probably related to whingeing. “I may not know about goats, but you don’t know about spreadsheets. Or mass transportation.” So there.
He narrowed his eyes at me.
I found myself shivering and picked up my pace. The skiers ahead of us must have started dragging something—a load of firewood, maybe? The tidy parallel ski tracks had been obliterated by something wide. If I had to guess, I’d say they’d pulled a canvas tarp behind them. That cabin was fairly close, over the rise ahead of us. If they were there, I’d ask them what they’d done to make such a mess of the trail. I sure hoped a good fire was warming the interior. If not, I was going to start one.
10
Whoops!
Mac Campbell wasn’t ready to die—not from a broken leg, not from starvation, and not from freezing to death—but he gave serious thought to how small a chance he would have of staving off a murderous attacker in his present shape. He could never be accused of having too active an imagination, but the danger he saw himself in stoked the imaginative flames way more than he found comfortable. He massaged his fingers. Get a fire started. That was what he needed to do. There was kindling, some of it sticking out from underneath the body, but enough off to one side. A convenient stack of woodstove-sized logs filled a corner of the room.
For some time, Mac didn’t worry about the body. He worried about how to drag himself around it so he could reach the woodpile. Why hadn’t they put the woodpile next to the door? That would have made more sense. Then he worried about how to coax a log off the pile without collapsing the whole shebang onto himself. Luckily, he’d dragged one of his ski poles along with him. He heaved himself back to the door where he’d left the pole, cursing under his breath—it took too much energy to swear out loud. Eventually he just threw the pole ahead of him and floundered back to his objective. He had to get a fire started. Had to. He couldn’t feel his toes. The only thing he could feel for sure was that he had to relieve himself. He had no idea how to handle that problem.
Why’d they stack this woodpile so high? The basket webbing around the point of the ski pole finally caught on a small branch stub. He’d have a fire going in no time. All he needed was one stupid log to set atop the kindling. He’d worry about log number two later. He yanked hard, and the left-hand end of the stack seemed to come apart. One log glanced off his shoulder; one landed on his outstretched fingers. Mac didn’t care if a murderer was close enough to hear him; he swore with a vengeance, all the pent-up anger, pain, and fear of the last several hours pouring out in a tsunami of invective.
* * *
The serene winter silence shattered as a round of oaths blasted from the cabin across the clearing, not a hundred feet away. I backed up a step—hard to do on cross-country skis—and almost fell. I recognized that gravelly smoker’s voice. For some reason our illustrious police chief, Mac Campbell, was hell-bent on cussing out the firewood.
Even with that cabin door shut tight, I could hear Mac easily. The cabin—nothing more than a shack, really—had no insulation. The walls were one plank thick, and the windows had been put in there before double-glazing was ever invented. Nothing fancy about the place at all.
Dirk started forward, but I motioned him back. I needn’t have bothered. For one thing, he couldn’t see my gesture since he was in front of me. And for another thing, when he got about three yards in front of me he pulled up short, as if a big bungee cord had reached the end of its limit and hauled him back toward me. “Don’t go any farther,” I said unnecessarily.
“I canna, lest ye go as weel.”
“I’m not going to. That’s Mac Campbell in there, swearing like a sailor. I don’t want to meet up with him if he’s in this kind of mood.”
“Mayhap he is hurt.”
“Mac? Not a chance. If he has enough energy to cuss that loudly, he doesn’t need us around.”
There was no smoke from the chimney, but I heard a distinct clang as Mac—or somebody—banged the woodstove closed. There’s no other sound in the world like the clunk of a woodstove door.
I inspected the scene, noting details about the cabin and its environs. “He’s alone.”
“How would ye know that?”
I motioned toward the dark brown wall beside the closed front door. “There’s only one pair of skis there.” All the more reason to avoid him. He’d have only me to vent on.
It looked like an army had been here, though; the track of the tarpaulin—or whatever they’d used—was still faintly visible in a wide path even under the heavy new flakes. Still, there had been only Mac’s and one other person’s tracks up the trail.
Dirk must have been thinking along the same lines. “Where is the ither person, the one who made the second set o’ skee tracks?”
“Either the other guy’s out collecting kindling or he and Mac weren’t together in the first place. The other skier might have just skirted the cabin and gone on ahead. There’s a path around back of the cabin he might have taken. It’s pretty steep, so you have to be a good skier to manage it. It goes farther up the mountain and then a branch veers off back toward town.”
“If ’tis difficult to skee that part of the trail, then would ye not say a skeeing person would have to be well accomplished to go there?”
“What do you mean?”
“Someone who falls on the path”—he gestured down the slope behind us—“wouldna be likely to approach a challenging trail, aye?”
“So, you’re saying that if Mac’s in the cabin, he must be the one who fell back there?” Dirk nodded, but I wasn’t convinced. “Mac’s too good a skier for that. He wouldn’t have fallen.”
“Then where would be the ither man who made the second set of wee tracks?”
“I don’t know. There are some sharp drop-offs up there, and in this much snow, it wouldn’t be wise for anyone to take that part of the trail, especially not somebody who’s no good on skis.” I waved my hand vaguely to indicate the hillside behind the outhouse. “He probably took the trail back to town.”
The sounds emanating from the cabin had died to a low rumble.
Dirk spread his right arm in the direction of the cabin. “Do ye not agree ’twould be courteous for us to—”
“No. Absolutely not.” I lowered my voice, just on the offhand chance that Mac might hear me and come out to investigate. “I’m not going anywhere near that man if I can avoid it. I don’t intend him any harm, but I’m certainly not going to let him ruin my trek with his sarcasm.” I raised my feet up onto my tiptoes—or as close as I could get to it—several times to keep the circulation goin
g. It was getting distinctly colder.
“Look.” Dirk pointed to a faint trickle of smoke rising from the old fieldstone chimney. “Now he has a wee fire lit, he will be less likely to swear at ye. Let us go inside. I can see ye shivering like a newborn kid.”
In answer, I raised my right leg and ski as high as I could, straight out before me until the square back edge of the ski rested on the ground in front of me. I twisted my leg and the ski clockwise, leaving the back in contact with the ground, and set my foot down, facing back behind me, leaving my legs in a ballet-like position, the right one pointing vaguely west, back toward the way we’d come, and the other heading sort of east. It was quite a trick, but it was also the only way to turn around quickly on cross-country skis. Then I shifted my weight to my right leg, leaned slightly on my right ski pole to get my balance, and lifted my left foot straight up so I could cross the front of my left ski over the back of the right one and bring it around so they both faced back toward Hamelin. It was a complicated maneuver, and I couldn’t tell you how many times I’d fallen trying to perfect it when I was a kid. Now it was like second nature. “I’m outta here. He’s got a fire going. Mac’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.”
“We havena been verra neighborly.”
“Mac is not a neighbor. Mac is a . . .”
Dirk cleared his ghostly throat, and I didn’t finish my sentence.
On the way back down the mountain I collected pink yarn markers as I went. It’s wonderful the way you generate heat when you’re skiing cross-country. And when you’re arguing with a stubborn ghost.