Kilt Dead

by Kaitlyn Dunnett

  He didn’t let go when she tried to step back. Instead his hands slid over the silky texture of her camisole and came to rest on soft, well-worn denim at hip level. Eyes locked on hers, he started to lower his head.

  She jerked away, almost losing her balance as she broke free. “Now this, Dan, this is a bad idea.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I’m sorry you’re not interested.”

  “I didn’t say that. I—” She stopped speaking and shook her head. “Bad timing, okay? It’s been a long day and I just hit the wall.” She headed for the stairs, talking fast as she went. “I can’t handle anything more tonight. I’m going to bed to try and get a good night’s sleep.” With a final, dismissive, “See you in the morning,” she disappeared from view.

  Smothering a yawn, Sherri Willett raked her fingers through her hair and struggled to stay awake. In each of the last two days she’d managed only three-and-a-half hours of sleep. She was running on nerves and caffeine.

  In the dispatch room of the Carrabassett County sheriff’s office at the county jail at two o’clock in the morning, Sherri was three hours into her eight-hour shift. The job was mind-numbing when they weren’t busy and this particular night in late July had been completely uneventful. With a murder investigation going on, she’d have thought the phone would be ringing off the hook. No such luck.

  Sherri shifted in the ergonomic chair at her console and wondered what evidence had convinced the state police that Liss MacCrimmon should be their prime suspect. So far, three people had told her that—a Fallstown police officer, a deputy, and the cleaning lady.

  After getting up to refill her coffee cup, Sherri made another check of the security cameras and light panel. A second corrections officer was on duty inside the jail’s cellblock. A third was assigned to intake, the booking of prisoners, and other assorted paperwork. Given her choice, Sherri supposed she preferred dispatching duties. At night, corrections officers, who were also sworn in as deputies in the county sheriff’s department, handled 911 calls to local police departments, as well as those coming in to the S.O. Sherri had toyed with the idea of applying for a patrol job, but so far hadn’t done anything about it. The risks were greater, and she did have her son to think of. On the other hand, it wasn’t quite the dead-end job this one was.

  She glanced through a window made of bulletproof glass in time to see Craig LaVerdiere crossing the small lobby at the entrance to the jail. Sherri watched him for a moment, wondering how she could ever have thought he was attractive. She had terrible taste in men, that was how! Poor judgment. She’d made one mistake with her son’s father and another, just about a year ago, after the annual law enforcement picnic, with the then–newly assigned state police officer.

  Reluctantly, she pushed the necessary button on her console to buzz him in through the first of two security doors. During the slight delay while he removed his gun and left it in the weapons locker, Sherri resumed her seat and braced herself for what was sure to be an unpleasant encounter. Not only had Craig LaVerdiere never called her again, he’d taken to looking down his nose at her every time their paths crossed. He seemed to think he’d lowered himself to sleep with her. She’d been the one slumming, Sherri decided, but that conviction didn’t make it any easier to deal with LaVerdiere’s haughty attitude and snide remarks.

  Once through the second heavy, reinforced steel door, LaVerdiere ignored Sherri and ambled over to the coffee pot.

  “Hello to you, too,” she muttered.

  “You say something, princess?”

  “Obviously not.” She glared at his back.

  To her surprise, he glanced over his shoulder. “I need to talk to you.” LaVerdiere stirred his coffee, took a tentative sip, grimaced, and added more sugar. “About Liss MacCrimmon.”

  “What about her?”

  He straddled one of several straight-back chairs scattered around the dispatch center and took a small, spiral-bound notebook out of a pocket. “You were with her most of the day on Saturday, right?”

  So this was a formal interview. About time somebody got around to it. “That’s right. All day.”

  “Till when?”

  “Around six-fifteen, maybe six-thirty. I left first. I don’t know how long she stayed. We didn’t know Liss would need an alibi at the time,” she added with a touch of asperity.

  “Okay. Now go back a few hours. The victim paid a visit to your booth at the fair.”

  “Highland Games. Yes.”

  “You talk to her?”

  “No.” Sherri realized she’d been swiveling the chair, using her toes to move it back and forth. With exaggerated care, she dropped both heels to the floor and willed herself to stillness. No need to signal her nervousness to the enemy.

  “You overhear what Amanda Norris and Ms. MacCrimmon said to each other?” LaVerdiere asked.

  “No, but I can tell you one thing. Liss MacCrimmon wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “You’ve known her, what? About two days? You don’t have a clue what she’s capable of.”

  Seething, Sherri glared at him. “And you do?”

  “I go by the evidence. I’ll have this case all wrapped up in a couple of days. Your buddy Liss will be behind bars. Convenient, huh? You can visit her in jail every time you come to work.”

  “Bull. You just latched on to the first likely candidate and you’re too lazy to look for others. Sloppy police work, don’t you think?”

  To her chagrin, he laughed. “Watch it, princess. You’ll hurt my feelings.”

  “You don’t have—” What would have been a childish retort was mercifully cut short by the phone. Sherri grabbed it on the second ring. “Carrabassett County Sheriff’s Department, Officer Willett speaking.”

  By the time she finished dealing with old Mr. Higginbotham, who thought alien beings were stealing his goats, Craig LaVerdiere had left the building.

  Liss and Dan met the next morning at breakfast. Liss was up at six, refreshed by a surprisingly good night’s rest. She’d fed the cat and made a pot of coffee by the time Dan stumbled into the kitchen.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said.

  “Please. Coffee first.”

  She took a seat at the kitchen table and waited, sipping from a delicate china cup, while Dan poured some of the dark, fragrant brew into an oversized ceramic mug with “Ruskin Construction” emblazoned on the outside. He was dressed, but had not yet shaved or combed his hair. The look of him, tousled and sleepy-eyed, reminded Liss of the dream she’d had about him during the night. Aware he was watching her as he downed half the contents of his mug, she suppressed a grin.

  “Okay. Go ahead. The brain is now marginally functional.”

  “I’ve been thinking that unless there is some forensic evidence the lab can trace to a single suspect, Detective LaVerdiere is never going to find out anything.”

  “So much for hoping you’d give up playing girl detective.”

  “I thought you agreed to help me.”

  “I did. I just—I did.” He drained the mug and turned away to refill it.

  “I admit I was torqued last night. Well, babbling, actually. Okay—acting like an over-stimulated twelve-year-old.” She winced when she remembered flipping Dan onto the sofa, her one and only self-defense move. “But I haven’t changed my mind about taking a hand in the investigation.”

  If she didn’t prove herself innocent, who would? She couldn’t see waiting around, hoping LaVerdiere would come to his senses.

  “So, this morning we talk to the neighbors.” Dan did not sound enthusiastic. “Okay if I finish waking up first?”

  “Go for it. In the meantime, I want to run another idea past you. I can’t imagine Mrs. Norris as a blackmailer, but I have been thinking about the records LaVerdiere said he found in her house. ‘Evidence,’ he said. She had ‘compromising information about a number of people.’ Do you think he meant diaries or journals of some sort? There could be a perfectly innocent
reason for her to write things down.”

  Dan brought his coffee to the table and sat down opposite her. “There was a looseleaf in her library. Lumpkin knocked it down when Pete and I were chasing him. It fell open and some pages scattered.” A pucker appeared in his brow. “I just glanced at them, but I thought I recognized a couple of names. The thing is, I’m not sure why they seemed familiar. They weren’t townspeople.” He shrugged. “Maybe Mrs. Norris was into recording celebrity gossip.”

  “That can’t be what LaVerdiere was talking about. If they were famous names, surely one of the officers would have recognized them. Besides, he implied she had dirt on the locals.” She considered that for a moment. LaVerdiere wasn’t local. “Maybe he didn’t recognize any of the names either. Can you remember the ones you saw?”

  Dan closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He looked tired, Liss thought, as if his night had been full of bad dreams.

  “One was Pitt,” he said at last. “And not Brad Pitt. Thomas Pitt. Do I know him? I’m pretty sure there’s no one in Moosetookalook with that name.”

  “Thomas . . . Pitt? I know who he is, but that makes no sense. Can you remember anyone else?”

  “There was a woman’s name.”

  “Charlotte?” Liss guessed.

  “No, it was . . . Emily?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose. Charlotte and Emily are—”

  “No. Not Emily. Amelia. And the last name was Peabody. A good New England name, and I thought it sounded familiar, but I can’t think where I know her from.” He hesitated, giving Liss a wary look. Her own face was likely a study in confusion. “The page I saw said the two of them were planning a clandestine meeting, that Amelia wanted to keep her association with Pitt secret from her husband.”

  Liss checked her jaw to make sure it hadn’t dropped. “Whew! Talk about not making any sense!”

  “You know who they are?”

  “Sort of.” She stared at the dregs of her coffee and wondered what on earth Mrs. Norris had been up to.

  Dan reached across the table and waved a hand in front of her face. “Earth to Liss.”

  “Sorry. This is my befuddled look.”

  “Clue me in here, Liss. Who is Thomas Pitt?”

  “He’s the detective in a series of books by Anne Perry. A fictional character. He does his sleuthing in Victorian London.”

  “And Amelia Peabody?”

  “Also fictional. She’s the protagonist in a series of historical mysteries written by Elizabeth Peters. Same time period, more or less.”

  Liss read a lot, often mysteries Mrs. Norris had recommended. There hadn’t been much else to do, except sleep or play cards, while traveling from one gig to the next in the company bus.

  “I don’t get it,” Dan said. “What were the names of fictional characters doing in that looseleaf?”

  “I don’t suppose you remember any other names from the page you saw?”

  “Sorry, no. I just got a glimpse, and the impression that the notes meant that the two of them were having an affair. I assumed they were real people and I figured what they got up to was none of my business.”

  Liss felt the coffee she’d just consumed turn to acid in her stomach. “What if they are? Maybe she used fictional names to hide their real identities.” At Dan’s snort, she felt compelled to defend the theory. “What? It makes sense. Sort of.”

  “Only if LaVerdiere is right, and no way in hell was Amanda Norris a blackmailer!”

  Chapter Eight

  The sudden flash of anger in Dan’s dark eyes surprised Liss. His hands curled into fists on the tabletop, and he glared at her.

  “I’d like to keep thinking Mrs. Norris was just a nice old lady, too, but it’s me LaVerdiere wants to arrest. I can’t afford to overlook any possibility.”

  After a moment of heavy silence, Dan’s jaw unclenched. Liss watched in fascination as, muscle by muscle, he seemed to will himself back into calmness. She admired his self-mastery. At the same time, seeing it in action made her a little uneasy. Did he ever lose control completely? She didn’t think she wanted to be around to see it if he did.

  “She was a good woman.”

  “Yes, she was, and I’m sorry she’s dead, sorry she’s being slandered, but none of that changes the facts.

  Here’s the sad truth: what we want and what is aren’t always the same thing. I want to be dancing in Chicago with Strathspey. We have a three-day gig at a real theater there. Guaranteed publicity. Enthusiastic audiences. But I’m here and you’re here and if we’re going to find out who really killed Mrs. Norris and why, we need to keep our minds open . . . about everything.”

  Gesturing with both hands, Liss nearly sent her coffee cup flying. Dan reached out to steady it. He didn’t look happy, but he nodded.

  “You’re right. We can’t rule anything out. And it makes sense to talk to the neighbors. How much do you want to tell them?”

  “Probably not a good plan to say the police suspect me of murder,” Liss quipped. She rinsed her cup and Dan’s mug and put them in the dishwasher.

  “You’ve got that right. You’ve been gone ten years. Most of them don’t know you.”

  She turned, resting her backside against the kitchen counter, and was surprised to find he was only a foot away from her. “What do you suggest?”

  “A variation on the old welcome wagon. You’re back. You’d like to reconnect with people here.”

  “And then we just segue into the fact that I found Mrs. Norris’s body? I don’t think so. What if we go door-to-door to solicit ideas on how to honor her life? She had no kin. Maybe the neighborhood could hold a memorial service.”

  “That’s a good idea. And it doesn’t have to be a ploy. We should do . . . something.”

  “I agree. She was a big part of our lives.” Feeling suddenly restless, Liss shoved away from the counter, brushing past Dan as she went to stand at the kitchen window and stare out at the backyard.

  The swing her father had attached to the high branch of a maple tree no longer hung there, but she found herself remembering how it used to sway gently in a morning breeze.

  Dan came up behind her, putting his hands on her shoulders. “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t help thinking that if I hadn’t decided to bring some of Aunt Margaret’s merchandise home with me from the fairgrounds, I might have been back in time to save her.”

  “It’s not your fault Mrs. Norris is dead. Don’t ever think that.”

  For just a moment, Liss let herself lean back into Dan’s strength, his warmth. Their reflections in the window glass gazed back at them, a couple who looked as if they belonged together.

  Abruptly, she straightened. “Time’s a-wasting.”

  He stepped away from her, releasing his grip on her shoulders. She pretended she didn’t miss the contact.

  “Give me a few minutes to call the construction site and we’ll get started.”

  Liss opened her mouth to protest that he shouldn’t cut work, then closed it again. Selfishly, she wanted him with her. His presence would make talking to the neighbors much easier. They’d open up to him more than they would to her. He’d been right earlier. She’d gone away. She was one of them by birth, but now a stranger.

  While Dan went off to shave and call his father, Liss changed into one of her more conservative outfits, a light summer dress that swirled to mid-calf. The colors were a mix of dark reds, browns, and greens—not exactly mourning, but as close as she could be comfortable wearing.

  “All set,” Dan said as they met in the entry hall. “I’ve got the morning free. After that, I’ll have to put in a few hours. Dad’s shorthanded because he had to let one of the carpenters go.” He shepherded her out onto the porch.

  “Okay. Let’s get started then . . . with you.” She seated herself on the glider. “You were here all day, right? What did you see?”

  “Not a heck of a lot.” He leaned against the railing, arms folded across his chest. “I was in the workshop
. That’s the old carriage house. I converted it so I could do woodworking in my spare time. I stopped for lunch around noon. Your cousin stopped by.”

  “What did Ned want?” She set the glider in motion, but the soothing rhythm failed to relax her. She thought again, with real longing, of the backyard swing.

  “To annoy me?” Dan cracked a smile.

  “When was he here?”

  “I didn’t look at my watch. Mid-afternoon. He’d had time to take your aunt to the airport and drive back.”

  “Before or after 3:30?”

  “Could have been either. I don’t know. Why 3:30?”

  Liss watched as a maintenance worker drove his riding lawnmower back and forth across the peaceful town square. The drone of the engine was no more than a low background hum but the smell of newly mown grass hung in the sultry morning air. Liss sighed. Instead of being able to enjoy the sounds and smells of summer, she had to keep her mind on murder.

  “I read crime novels, okay? And I saw Mrs. Norris’s body. She wasn’t stiff yet.”

  He lifted an eyebrow at her irritable tone but didn’t comment on it. “And that means?”

  “Apparently there’s no way to pin down the exact time someone dies unless there’s a witness. They make guesses based on . . . things that happen to the body.” She grimaced. “To tell you the truth, I usually skip over those passages in a book, but some of it must have stuck because I know that if rigor mortis hadn’t yet set in, then she couldn’t have died much more than four hours before I found her. If I got home at 7:30—”

  “It was closer to eight. Just before sunset.”

  “Okay, then move the time up to four. Did you notice anything or anyone unusual between four and eight that day?”

  “No, and after about 6:30 I was keeping an eye out for you. I wasn’t watching constantly, but if anyone had parked and gone into the Emporium, I think I’d have noticed.”

  “The killer might not have come by car. And you can’t see Aunt Margaret’s back door from here. It’s on the other side of the building.”