by Fran Stewart
She hardly even glanced at Murphy. “He’s . . . He was . . . a professor of microbiology at UVM.”
Harper opened his mouth, but seemed to change his mind as Murphy challenged Karaline. “Was? What makes you think he’s dead?”
“Don’t be an idiot, Murphy,” I snapped. “That morgue shot’s pretty obvious, and you already said you had a murder on your hands.”
Karaline kept talking as if she hadn’t heard us. “He was my mentor. One of the finest men I ever knew.”
Murphy cleared his throat. “When was that?”
“In college. I have a master’s degree in microbiology,” Karaline said. “I didn’t pursue it. I had a chance to buy the restaurant right after graduation and just went from there.” A wan smile played across her lips. “I have the cleanest restaurant imaginable, because Dr. W made sure I knew what lurks in cracks and crevasses.”
An unwanted picture of germs breeding in wild abandon crossed my mind, but it vanished when I thought about that man’s dead face.
Murphy whipped out a notepad. “When was the last time you saw him?”
“Is he really dead? Is that why you’re asking all these questions?”
I was right. She hadn’t heard me snap at Murphy half a minute ago.
“We found his body in the cabin up the Perth trail.”
“The Perth,” I said. “Did you ever find Mac?”
“What about Mac?” Harper’s voice was sharp.
“The chief went out skiing on Perth,” Murphy explained. “Broke his leg and managed to get to the cabin, where he found this dead guy.” He motioned toward the photo.
“If his leg was broken,” I said, “how did he get to the cabin?”
“Oh,” Murphy said with the cheerfulness of someone who’s never fractured a bone, “he fell and broke it on the way up the trail. Took him a while to crawl up to the cabin, and then he had to get a fire started.”
No wonder Mac had been swearing so much. How do you crawl that far with a broken leg, much less build a fire at the end of the trek?
“That must have been unbelievably painful. I can’t imagine breaking a leg.” Karaline rubbed her left arm, and I remembered her telling me about falling out of a tree as a kid.
“Yeah,” Murphy said. “It was pretty awful. Really bad break to start with, and then he splinted it himself on one of his skis.” I saw Karaline make a face. “By the time we got there,” Murphy continued, “he’d run out of food and water, and he has two broken fingers from a log falling on him. If we’d gotten to him a few days earlier, he’d be in a lot better shape.”
Thank goodness Dirk wasn’t listening to this. The last thing I needed from him was, I told ye we should hae gone to the wee cabin, never the mind ye didna care to see the constable.
“Did Mac say when it happened?” I asked. I was hoping it might have been after I’d already left, but I’m afraid I suspected I’d made a really stupid mistake in turning around and leaving the cabin.
“Yeah. Sunday. That’s the day this Dr. Double Something got smacked, too.”
Harper gave Murphy one of those time-out signals, and Murphy shifted gears. “Can we get back to the topic now? I asked you when was the last time you saw the doctor—what was his name?”
“W, for Wantstring.” She spelled it for him.
That was why his picture had looked vaguely familiar. I’d seen him walking with Emily that one time.
“I saw him about two months ago,” Karaline continued. “He and his wife”—a faint shudder passed across her shoulders—“came into the Logg Cabin for a late lunch about half an hour before we closed. After they finished, Mrs. Wantstring left.” She looked at me. “She said she wanted to talk with you, Peggy.”
“That’s not a surprise,” I said. “Emily comes in here a lot. Usually to complain about Mark.”
“Marcus,” Karaline corrected me, tears in her voice. “He doesn’t . . . He didn’t like . . . He wouldn’t let anyone call him Mark.”
Harper cocked his head, but Murphy made a let’s get on with it rolling motion with his right hand. “What did you talk about when he stopped by your restaurant?”
“He told me he and a colleague had been working on a project of some sort for years. He said they’d entered a new phase. I think those were the words he used. He sounded excited, and”—she paused—“secretive.”
“Secretive?” Harper’s color had come back, but his voice was contained somehow, as if he were holding something back. What was going on?
“Yeah. You never know who might be listening. Most researchers are very careful about who they talk to.”
“But he talked to you?” Murphy sounded skeptical.
“Of course he did. I knew him from my sophomore year all the way through my master’s. I was one of his graduate assistants my last two years. We were very close.”
Murphy raised an eyebrow.
Karaline humphed. “Not like that. I respected him more than any other professor I had.” She paused for a moment. “Except maybe Dr. H. He was a new prof my last year in the advanced degree program, and I only had one class with him.”
The bell clanged, and Emily Wantstring walked in. Beside me, I felt Karaline stiffen. I heard Scamp’s claws scrabble a bit on the hardwood floor, and was afraid he might bolt out from under the sweaters, but a quick glance showed that both his feet had disappeared. Getting ready to pounce again? As Gilda tried to head Emily off, I quietly explained who she was to Harper and Murphy. It was Harper who walked forward. I didn’t hear what he said to her, but her reply carried through the store.
“It’s Mark, isn’t it?” No tears. Not even much surprise. Shock, I thought. She pulled off her knitted purple scarf and tugged at the top of her turtleneck as if the room were suddenly too warm.
“We’d like you to look at a photograph.” This time Harper’s deep voice carried clearly across the intervening racks of kilts and sweaters. “We can do it at your house or at the station.”
“What’s wrong with here?”
I stepped to the door, turned the sign to Closed, and pulled the shade. It was almost five anyway. “Gilda, you and Shoe go ahead and leave. I’ll do the closing once we’re through here.” She nodded and called to Scamp. Harper took a step backward when the little guy emerged from the back of the counter where we displayed tartan handbags. How had he gotten there? Last time I’d seen him, he was under the sweaters.
Scamp stood for a moment, sniffing Harper’s boot. He looked up at Harper, studied my face and Karaline’s, and sauntered back to Gilda, his little carrot-shaped tail wagging like crazy. He folded his ears, like fortune cookies. That meant he was happy.
I could tell Harper wanted to ask about the dog, but Emily stood beside him clutching her purple scarf in one hand and the zipper of her parka in the other, clearly not sure what to do with herself. Shoe and Gilda grabbed their coats from the back room and coaxed Scamp into the Sherpa. I locked the door behind them.
“But why?” The question burst from Emily like lava spewing from the mouth of a volcano. “Did they rob him? He never carried any money with him when he skied. He didn’t have anything anybody would want.”
“There weren’t any identifying papers on him,” Murphy said. “There wasn’t anything like that anywhere in the cabin. We searched it thoroughly. Somebody cleaned him out.”
Harper shot a stern look at the sergeant. I could understand why. I didn’t think Murphy had meant to be unkind, but I could see that Emily was shaken. She reached out a hand and clutched Harper’s arm. He pointed Murphy toward the back room and ushered Emily in after him. This wasn’t the way they did it on TV, but Hamelin was a small town. Before he closed the door, Harper held up a hand, stopping Karaline and me from following. “We’ll take it from here,” he said.
Karaline studied the closed door for a moment, then turned to look at me. “Want a
cup of coffee?”
“They won’t let us back there,” I said. “Anyway, I already emptied the coffeemaker.”
“At the Logg Cabin,” she said. “I’ll brew a quick pot and we can sit by one of the front windows and keep an eye over here so we’ll see when they leave.”
Sounded good to me.
I debated whether or not to knock on the Staff Only door and ask for my coat, but it wasn’t far from the ScotShop across the courtyard to the Logg Cabin, and my green sweater was thick and wooly.
Even if I were going to freeze, I didn’t have much choice. Those few abrupt words from Harper—we’ll take it from here—had shut me out. What I wondered was, Is he shutting me out of my back room for now or is he shutting me out of the investigation—and out of his life—altogether?
I had too many questions rolling around inside my brain, like what was a professor of microbiology doing camping out in that little cabin? That’s a ridiculous question, I thought. All sorts of people like to go camping. But why now? PD, the grad student, had said Wantstring was on vacation, and I hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but this wasn’t any holiday season that I knew of. Surely classes would still be in session. And why the cabin? Emily had said he’d gone skiing. Why up the Perth trail? No feasible answer came to me.
My keys were in the back room in my coat pocket, so I couldn’t lock the ScotShop door. I just closed it behind me and went on with my internal list of questions as I walked around the courtyard. It didn’t do to try to run on an accumulation of snow. There could always be a patch of ice underneath it.
One of the questions I asked myself as I walked was why he’d left his wife for the weekend. That one was easy to answer: Emily didn’t like the outdoors. She didn’t like being cold. She didn’t like to ski. Three answers for one question. Still, if she’d had enough of a reason, she might have killed him. I narrowed my eyes against the cold air outside and tried to imagine Emily murdering her husband. I didn’t even know how he died. Did she shoot him? Knife him? Poison him? Bludgeon him with a ski pole? I couldn’t imagine any of those scenarios.
Before I could draft any more questions, Karaline unlocked the Logg Cabin door, and a rush of warm moist air billowed out, pulling us into its welcoming arms. I still had no answers, and the most important question of all—why would anyone want Marcus Wantstring dead?—followed us inside.
* * *
Emily sat on the chair the taller officer held for her at the little table in the middle of the crowded storage room. Murphy pushed the photo across the scarred surface. “Can you identify this man?”
She held her breath for a moment and hooked a finger in the top of her purple turtleneck, right where a cluster of white embroidered snowflakes spilled down over her collarbone. She tugged the fabric away from her neck. “That is Mark Wantstring. My husband.”
Murphy pushed it a little closer to her. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure! You don’t think I’d recognize a man I lived with for thirty-nine years?”
“Married that long, were you?”
Emily didn’t want to answer that question. I should have said thirty-seven, she thought. Both police officers were looking at her. For once, she didn’t keep talking.
19
Squirreling
Karaline didn’t . . . couldn’t seem to look at me, but I didn’t feel like she was excluding me—just that her heart was close to breaking. She cradled her coffee mug against her peacock blue sweater. Warming her unhappy heart. The tears she’d held back while we were at the ScotShop spilled down her face and dripped from her chin, salting her coffee.
She murmured something so low I missed it.
I leaned forward. “Tell me about him, K.”
“He had more of a sense of integrity than almost anybody I’ve ever known. He and Dr. H.”
“You mentioned this Dr. H before, when you were talking with Murphy. What did the H stand for?”
“I don’t . . . Oh, yeah. It was Harper.”
“Like—” I almost said, Like my Harper, only he wasn’t my Harper. He’d made that abundantly clear. “Did you call all your professors by their initials?”
She tapped the rim of her mug thoughtfully. “I guess I did. It started my junior year. That was the year I decided I would definitely go on for my master’s degree. I began to notice that all the grad assistants had nicknames. It was sort of a tradition in the department. You already met PD and Stripe. PD for Polka Dot. I wonder where Stripe came from?”
“She said it was a childhood nickname.”
Karaline didn’t seem to register my response. “The year I first was really aware of the nickname tradition, Dr. W’s graduate assistants—there were usually two—were called S and O.”
I opened my mouth, but she cut me off. “Don’t ask me why. I never did find out. Maybe those were actually their own initials. But I just started referring to everybody like that. It was sort of a joke at first, and then”—she took a sip of her coffee—“then it became a habit. The next two assistants were Daffy and Duck. The year before I served as a grad assist—that was what we called ourselves—they went by Cleo and Ant. Then it was my turn.” She stopped talking and was quiet for so long I thought she might have fallen asleep with her eyes open. “I was so excited when Dr. W told me he’d approved my application to be one of his assistants.” Her voice was soft, wistful, sad.
“I’m sorry, K.”
She nodded. “Anyway, the other student serving with me was . . . Mike, I think. He was R and I was K.”
“How do you get an R out of Mike?”
Karaline chuckled, her sadness at bay for the moment. “Mike had this thing about scarfing down his breakfast just before he had to be at his first class, so he stored cereal in his locker and milk in the lab fridge, and I was always hungry, so I’d snitch some.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“That’s why we were R for Rice and K for Krispies.”
“And here I thought the K stood for Karaline. So, other than R for Mike, you just kept on calling everybody by their initials?”
“I’m not the only one. You do it, too. I call you P half the time, and you call me K.”
“That’s because you started it.” I remembered how confused Dirk was at first. He thought her name was Caroline with a C, so he couldn’t figure out why I called her K. I pulled my mind up short. I was not going to think about that . . . that . . . Scot. I didn’t have to think about him and how right he’d been about Mac. He was gone. Maybe he wouldn’t come back. Maybe, the next time I opened the shawl, it would just be . . . empty. Just a shawl. No ghost. No nothing.
I felt a sudden desolation, almost devastation. I shook myself. I was not going to think about him.
Karaline, who ordinarily would have asked me if I had ants in my pants when she saw me squirming around like that, was oblivious. She twirled her coffee mug counterclockwise, and a smile spread across her face. “We called him Squirrel behind his back.”
“Squirrel?” I thought about the distinguished-looking face in the photo. There was nothing even faintly squirrel-like about it.
“Don’t look so baffled. It wasn’t what he looked like; it was what he did.”
“Did?”
“He was always squirreling things away. Once, he slipped a CD in between two books on one of his bookcases, and he couldn’t recall where it was, only that it was somewhere among the books, but he couldn’t even remember which wall of his office he’d been standing by when he tucked it away. To top it all off, the CD wasn’t in a case. So it didn’t take up any room at all. It took us almost an hour to find it. Do you have any idea how many books a college professor has?” She laughed. “Luckily, his printed manuscripts were always in big three-ring binders, so he couldn’t hide those away—unless he really worked at it. Another big problem was his thumb drives. He could never keep trac
k of USBs. I found them everywhere. Just like his stashes of candy hidden around the lab and all over his office. His favorite was Tootsie Rolls.”
I thought about the tight roll I’d made of my shawl when I banished Dirk.
“What’s wrong, P? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Then she obviously thought about what she’d just said and glanced around toward the door. “Did Dirk just show up?”
“He can’t show up.”
“I know that. He can’t open doors.”
“No. It’s more than that.” Why was I breathing so hard all of a sudden? “I sent him away.”
“You what?”
“Don’t look at me like that. He was being a royal pain in the tutu, so I folded him up.”
“Again? He doesn’t like that,” she said in a low, steady tone.
“Well, I don’t like being told what to do.”
“So you consigned him to shawl purgatory?”
“Shawl purgatory? Where did that come from?”
“You’re changing the subject,” she said. “Deliberately.”
I set down my mug and folded my arms. “Yes, I am. What goes on between me and my ghost is my business.”
Karaline stood up so fast her chair fell over.
I hated being sulky. “I’m sorry, K. I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately.”
She righted her chair and sat back down. “I know exactly what’s wrong, and I’m going to tell you”—she held up her hand—“so you just sit there and take it.”
“You sound like Dirk,” I muttered.
“As far as Dirk is concerned, from what I can tell, he sees right through you.”
He’s the ghost, I thought. I see through him.
“And you don’t like having him tell you what you should be doing instead of what you are doing, especially when he’s right.”
Sulk was out. Indignation was in. “Nobody likes being told they’re wrong all the time.”
She ignored that. “The other thing that’s wrong with you is Harper.”
I glared at her.