Bagpipes, Brides and Homicides (Liss Maccrimmon Scottish Mysteries)

by Kaitlyn Dunnett

  “Oh, Donald!” Vi wailed. “I told you talking to Lee was a mistake.”

  Mac scowled. “Talking to him wasn’t the problem, Vi. It was going back to apologize. If I hadn’t done what you asked, I doubt I’d be in so much trouble right now.”

  “This is not my fault!” She bounded to her feet, nearly overturning her chair.

  “Whose is it then?” Mac rose, glowering.

  “Yours, you stubborn, pigheaded—!”

  “Stop!” Liss caught each parent by an arm and jerked, hard, until first Mac, then Vi, sat down again. She made the sign for a time-out. “Now, then, let’s start at the beginning, shall we? Dad, are you telling me you went to Three Cities to talk to Professor Palsgrave? Why, for heaven’s sake? And when?”

  He shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. There are things you don’t know, Liss. Things you don’t need to know.”

  “I’m not a child, Dad.” She shot her mother a challenging look. “Cards on the table. Did you . . . date Lee Palsgrave, Mom? Before you married Dad?”

  Vi crossed her arms in front of her chest, leaned back in the chair, and sent fulminating looks toward both husband and daughter. “Yes.” Defiance radiated from her. “Before we married. I hadn’t seen him since. Years had gone by. Decades! We didn’t meet again until Margaret and I went to talk to him about canceling the reenactment.”

  “You didn’t know he was involved in the Medieval Scottish Conclave?”

  For a moment Vi looked flustered. “Well, I . . . I recognized his name in the roster, of course, but that didn’t have anything to do with . . . anything.”

  Deciding it was better not to pursue that point, Liss shifted her attention to her father. “So, then what? You didn’t like the idea of Mom acting as liaison. I could see that for myself.”

  He shrugged again. “I didn’t think it would hurt if I talked to the man. I reminded him that Vi wasn’t a foolish young woman anymore. That she was my wife.”

  “In other words, you warned him off.” Liss was having trouble taking all this in, but she persisted with her questions, determined to get the whole story. That was the only way she could hope to help her father. And it looked as if he was going to need her help. The police didn’t tell people not to leave town if they didn’t seriously consider them to be suspects.

  “I confronted Palsgrave in his office last week,” Mac continued. “I told him off, if you want to know the truth. And I expect people overheard us, as our voices were raised. There was a secretary nearby, and another woman. Maybe more people I didn’t see.”

  “Honestly, Mac!” Vi snapped. “It is absurd for you to be jealous now. You’ve always known about my affair with him when I was a student. I told you about it before we got married.”

  “The nutty professor kept his good looks,” Mac defended himself. “And you always said he was loaded with charisma.”

  Vi rolled her eyes heavenward. “Yes, Lee was always a charming man. And, well, sexy. But I love you, you dolt, although I’m beginning to wonder why! Besides,” she added with a self-deprecating twist of the lips, as if she wanted to make a joke of it, “I’d hardly want to be seen naked by anyone else at this point in my life. Scars are so unattractive!”

  “Scars?” Liss interrupted. “What scars?”

  Vi gave a careless wave of one hand. “Nothing, darling.”

  “It’s not nothing. What scars?”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake! I had a radical mastectomy two years ago. Satisfied?”

  The sucker-punch left Liss feeling queasy. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because it was none of your business. Besides, you had troubles of your own back then, what with your knee surgery and moving back here to Moosetookalook. And it’s hardly important now. Not when we’re trying to keep your father out of jail.”

  Liss stared at her mother as if she’d never seen her before. She’d had breast cancer and didn’t think her daughter should be told? The mind boggled. With an effort of will, Liss dragged her racing thoughts back to the current dilemma.

  “We’re going to talk about this later,” she warned her mother. Then she focused once again on her father’s predicament. “Was that the reason the police questioned you? Because you went down to Three Cities last week and were overheard quarreling with Palsgrave?”

  “Part of the reason. It would have been all of it if your mother hadn’t insisted I apologize. To please her, I made an appointment to meet with him in his office.”

  “Without telling me a thing about it,” Vi grumbled. “I’d have gone with him if I’d known.”

  “And I wouldn’t have gone at all if I’d guessed that would end up being the day he’d get himself killed!”

  Silently, Liss groaned.

  “Anyway,” Mac continued, “Palsgrave never showed. I waited in his office for a while. Touched things. That’s why they needed to take my fingerprints.”

  “Please tell me you weren’t also in his classroom.”

  Mac looked uncomfortable. “Wish I could, but I went there, too. His secretary seemed a little confused when I showed up and said I had an appointment. She told me that Palsgrave had a class that ran all morning. I figured maybe we got our wires crossed, so I stopped by there on my way out, but he wasn’t there, either. No one was.”

  “Let me guess. You left more fingerprints.”

  Another shrug. “Looks like it. But I swear to you, I never saw Lee Palsgrave on the day he was murdered. When I couldn’t find him in his classroom, I drove straight back home.”

  “What about the sword in the trunk of your car?” Liss reached for her mug, found the coffee had gone cold, and set it aside.

  “It wasn’t in my trunk when I left Three Cities. The day had warmed up. I remember opening the trunk to toss my cardigan inside. I’d have noticed if there had been a great bloody sword lying there!”

  “That means the murder hadn’t yet taken place,” Liss said, thinking aloud. “And that means that the quickest way to prove your innocence is to find someone who saw you after you left Three Cities—someone who can prove you were elsewhere by the time Palsgrave died.”

  “Surely the police will do that,” Vi said.

  “Maybe. And maybe they’re only looking for evidence to prove that Dad did murder Lee Palsgrave.”

  “They won’t find any,” Mac insisted. “Unfortunately, I doubt you’ll be able to locate anyone who can prove I didn’t do it, either. I didn’t stop anywhere on the way back here. I came straight home. Once here, I stayed in the house. I had a couple of beers and brooded. I didn’t want to see anyone. And I didn’t know Palsgrave was dead until Vi got back from the fitting, all upset, and told me. If you want to know the truth, when I first heard that, I was relieved. She may not have been interested in rekindling an old romance, but he sure as hell was!”

  When Caroline Halladay exploded into the Emporium first thing the next morning, Liss assumed she had come to pick up the remaining swords. She was wrong.

  “How dare you take down the display!” Caroline railed at her. “We had an agreement.”

  Liss gaped at her. Then it hit her. The police hadn’t yet made any public statement about how Professor Palsgrave had died. It seemed obvious to Liss that the reproduction of the hand-and-a-half broadsword had been used as the murder weapon, but Caroline would have no way of knowing that.

  “Well?” The older woman stood on the other side of the sales counter, hands on hips, foot tapping with impatience while she waited for Liss to answer her.

  Sometimes, Liss thought, the best defense was a good offense. “Don’t tell me you’re still planning to stage the reenactment! Talk about tasteless!”

  Caroline’s face blanched. “Well, no. Of course not. But the Medieval Scottish Conclave will still take place. Lee’s battle wasn’t the only attraction.”

  “It was, I hope, the only one featuring swords and knives.”

  “Well, yes, but—” Caroline broke off, eyes narrowing. “Say, what’s going
on here? Why did you take down the display?”

  “How was Lee Palsgrave killed?” Liss countered.

  “The police haven’t said.” But now she averted her eyes. She was a smart woman. She could connect the dots.

  “I’m pretty sure the murder weapon was a sword,” Liss said.

  Caroline frowned. “Willa did say there was blood all over the place.”

  “Willa? Willa Somener was the one who found him?” No wonder Detective Franklin had known her name. Poor girl. What a terrible thing to stumble upon.

  Caroline nodded. “For a while there she couldn’t stop talking about the blood.”

  “And you wonder why I want those weapons out of my window!”

  Still huffy, Caroline followed Liss into the stockroom. The large box that held the former contents of the display window sat on the worktable. Caroline opened it to make a quick inventory. “The hand-and-a-half broadsword is missing.”

  “Yes. The police have it.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I cleaned the fingerprint powder off the others as best I could, but you may still find some granules stuck to the decorative bits.”

  Caroline looked stunned. “Are you telling me that a weapon from your display window killed Lee Palsgrave?”

  “The state police seem to think so.”

  “Good Lord!”

  Liss hesitated. She should just let Caroline take the box and go, but since it was her own father who appeared to be suspect number one, she didn’t think it would hurt to ask a couple of questions. “Who in your organization knew about the display?”

  “Everyone.” Caroline blinked, reconsidering. “No. That’s not right. The subject didn’t come up at any of our regular meetings. We had too much else to discuss.”

  “Then who did know, besides Palsgrave, you, and Willa?”

  “Our arms master. He wasn’t happy about our borrowing so many of his weapons, but I don’t think he knew precisely where we were taking them.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “Kirby Redmond.”

  Liss wrote it down. “Who else?”

  “Willa probably told her boyfriend. Gabe Treat,” she added before Liss could ask.

  Liss looked up sharply. The name Gabe rang a bell. “Big guy? Red hair? Lots of freckles?”

  “That’s right. How do you—?”

  “He was in here. With his grandfather.”

  Caroline looked blank.

  “The older man said his name was Alistair Gunn.”

  For a moment, Liss thought Caroline was having a seizure. Then she realized that what she was seeing was pure, unadulterated fury. Both plump, sturdy hands braced on the worktable, Caroline’s knuckles went dead white with the force she was using to grip the edge. Head lowered, she took a series of deep breaths. Slowly, she got control of herself again, but she had a militant gleam in her eyes when she straightened.

  “It appears,” she said in a cold, precise voice, “that the conclave has a traitor in its midst. Thank you for your help, Ms. MacCrimmon. I’ll be going now.”

  With that, she picked up the heavy box and barreled out of the stockroom, almost flattening Liss’s neighbor, bookseller Angie Hogencamp, who had just entered the shop. The bell over the door was still jangling. With Caroline’s departure, it rang again, this time sounding even more discordant.

  “Whew,” Angie commented, her gaze following the other woman’s rush down the porch steps to her car. “What did you do to tick her off?”

  “Not a thing.” Liss hurried to the window, now minus the drape of black velvet as well as the weapons display. She watched in silence as Caroline tossed the box into her backseat, climbed in behind the wheel, and burned rubber in her rush to get away from their quiet little town square.

  “I’m guessing she’s upset about something,” Angie drawled.

  Liss shrugged. “She came to collect her swords. She’s part of that Medieval Scottish Conclave. They just lost their head honcho.” But that wasn’t what had set Caroline Halladay off. Liss wished she knew what had.

  “Oh, the murdered professor,” Angie said. “Yeah, I saw that on TV.”

  “Please tell me the media coverage hasn’t made a connection to Moosetookalook.” The village didn’t need that kind of publicity.

  “Not yet,” Angie said cheerfully, “but it’s only a matter of time. I guess they won’t be having their mock battle now, huh?”

  “It’s been cancelled. Definitely.” Back behind the sales counter, Liss leaned her elbows on the smooth wooden surface. She felt twitchy, as if there was more she should be doing. Unfortunately, she didn’t know what that might be.

  “Was she close to the dead guy?”

  “The woman who just left? No idea. But they did work together.”

  Angie wandered over to the window to study the uninspired display of Scottish imports Liss had hastily assembled the previous day. The result had a thrown-together appearance, with a scattering of Celtic jewelry on one side and a couple of colorful kilts on the other.

  “I need to redo that display,” Liss said, suddenly feeling embarrassed by the way it looked. Sure, she’d been distracted at the time, but a five-year-old could have come up with a better-looking arrangement.

  “It’s an improvement over what was there before,” Angie reassured her. “I wasn’t sorry to see the last of all those swords and knives. They gave me the willies. And it didn’t help when you removed the big sword in the middle. That just made the others seem more ominous.”

  Liss froze. “You noticed a sword was missing? When?” She fumbled in the drawer beneath the sales counter, where she’d tossed the card Detective Franklin had given her. If Angie knew how long the sword had been gone, it might just clear Mac of suspicion of murder.

  But Angie’s answer was disappointing. “I have no idea when it was. Don’t you know? I thought you must have sold it.”

  “It wasn’t mine to sell. Think, Angie. When did you first notice it was gone?”

  “I’m sorry, Liss. All I remember is glancing out my window and seeing the gap in the display.”

  “Okay, let’s try this. Was it gone yesterday?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “How about the day before, when I was closed? Was it there that morning?”

  This time a shrug answered her and she spotted growing irritation in Angie’s eyes. They were big and brown, just like her daughter’s, but they lacked Beth’s innocence.

  “Think, Angie. It’s important.”

  “Read my lips: I don’t know. And I smell a rat. What’s the story with that sword?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute. I promise. Right now I need to know if it was daytime when you last saw it. It must have been, right? It had to be light out or you wouldn’t have been able to see the display at all.” Liss didn’t light her window at night.

  “I suppose.” Brow furrowed, Angie considered. “It wasn’t yesterday. Maybe it was the day before when I first noticed it was gone. Maybe before that. What’s going on, Liss?”

  “Someone stole that sword and used it to kill Professor Palsgrave.”

  Angie folded her arms over her bosom but her glare was one of exasperation, not anger. She even made an attempt to keep things light, misquoting the famous sitcom line from I Love Lucy: “You got some ’splainin’ to do, Lissy.”

  “Yeah, I do. And I think the explanation requires a hot chocolate and more than one of Patsy’s muffins.”

  She flipped the BACK IN FIFTEEN MINUTES sign into place, locked up, and headed for the coffee shop with Angie in tow.

  She left the detective’s card behind.

  Patsy’s Coffee House was located next to the municipal building on the opposite side of the town square from Moosetookalook Scottish Emporium. Inside were three booths, two tables, and five stools at the counter. The smell of freshly baked breads and pastries filled the air. Patsy was renowned throughout Carrabassett County for her donuts and sticky buns. Liss easily picked out the enti
cing scent of cinnamon. Then she sniffed again.

  “Are those blueberry muffins I smell?” she called out to Patsy, the tall, cadaverously thin woman in her midfifties who made everything she sold from scratch.

  “Sure are, hon. Fresh off the farm.”

  “Isn’t it kind of early in the season for Maine blueberries?”

  Patsy’s gaunt cheeks momentarily flared red. “Now, did I say they were homegrown?”

  “Patsy! I’m shocked,” Liss teased her. “You’re using blueberries from away?”

  Hands on bony hips, Patsy gave her the evil eye. “You want a muffin or not?”

  “Two, please. And hot chocolate.”

  Liss chose the corner booth for privacy, even though, at the moment, they were the only customers in the place. When they had steaming mugs and a plate of muffins in front of them and Patsy had returned to the kitchen, Liss filled Angie in on what little she knew, ending with her admission that the police had found the sword in the trunk of her father’s car.

  “Obviously a setup,” Angie said.

  “Wicked, foolish way to do it,” Patsy agreed as she slid into the booth beside Angie.

  Liss jumped and nearly spilled her drink. “I thought you were still in the kitchen.”

  “You thought wrong. And that state police detective is just flat-out crazy if he suspects your father of wrongdoing. Mac MacCrimmon is as honest as the day is long. He’s always been a real stickler for obeying the law. No way would he kill anyone. Ever.”

  The more upset Patsy was, the more she sounded like the old-time, native Mainer she was. Dropped Rs had her words coming out “sticklah” and “evah.”

  “She’s right,” Angie agreed. “If this Palsgrave was killed in a classroom and the weapon was a sword from your display window, then someone took it to Three Cities planning to use it to kill him. Anyone cold-blooded enough to do that would also be calculating enough to frame an innocent bystander for the crime.”

  Patsy’s head bobbed up and down. “No way did Mac MacCrimmon do the dirty deed.”