Kilt Dead Page 11

  He shifted his big body in the oversized desk chair and began to fiddle with a pencil. “I’ll see what I can do, if you’re sure you want to open.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Bound to draw rubberneckers. Just like the scene of a traffic accident. Everybody’s got to slow down and take a look, even though they know it would be better if they just kept on driving.”

  “I don’t mean to sound heartless, nor do I approve of that kind of curiosity, but since I can’t do anything to control other people’s habits, I’d just as soon Aunt Margaret got the advantage of them. If they want to come in and gawk, let them buy souvenirs.”

  Thibodeau grinned. “Hey—you could sell tickets for a peek at the stockroom.”

  “That’s cop humor, right?”

  “Pretty sick, huh? Still, there’s nothing wrong with turning lemons into lemonade. I’ll find out when you can take the crime-scene tape down. You going to be at Dan’s house all day?”

  It didn’t surprise Liss that he knew where she was staying, but she was relieved to hear no censure in his voice. “I’ll be there until I can get back into Aunt Margaret’s apartment.”

  “He’s a good kid, that Dan.”

  “Not such a kid these days.”

  “Well, yeah, but I gave him his first speeding ticket. That’s what I remember. Haven’t had a bit of trouble with him since.”

  “That’s good to know.” She hesitated, then asked about something else that had been bothering her. “Any problems lately with Ernie Willett?”

  “You’re thinking of that incident at the Emporium? That was a fluke.” He made a dismissive gesture with his free hand—the other was still toying with a pencil, flipping it over and over between his fingers. “Ernie’s usually got better control of his temper than that. Oh, we were out to his place on domestic disputes a time or two, but let me tell you something—Ida Willett’s got a temper too. Had to arrest her once for beating on him. He didn’t press charges, though.”

  TMI, Liss thought. Or was it? “Ernie doesn’t seem to like my aunt.”

  “He knows how to carry a grudge, I’ll give you that, but last time I saw him and Margaret together—at a pot-luck supper at the church—they seemed to be friendly enough.”

  “How did he get along with Mrs. Norris?”

  “Same as everybody. Tolerated her. Mostly liked her.” A wary look came into Thibodeau’s eyes. The pencil abruptly stilled. “What are you getting at, Liss?”

  “Detective LaVerdiere has some wild theory that Mrs. Norris was a blackmailer,” Liss blurted.

  The pencil snapped in half. Very carefully, Thibodeau tossed both pieces into the wastepaper basket. “First I’ve heard it. You sure?”

  Liss nodded.

  “Naw. Makes no sense. Nice old lady like her?”

  “She did . . . keep an eye on things. That bay window of hers has a great view of the neighborhood.”

  “Well, sure. She was a champion gossip collector. But she didn’t have a mean bone in her body.” He sounded as if he were trying to convince himself as well as Liss. “Besides, everybody knew she’d be watching. Nobody would be so foolish as to get caught doing something they shouldn’t with her looking on.”

  He had a point, but the tension radiating from him in palpable waves made her wonder if he was as confident of that as he wanted her to believe.

  Carpentry was hard, sweaty work, but as Dan stepped back from the house the crew had been framing, reaching for the water bottle attached to his tool belt, he felt a deep sense of satisfaction. For the most part, he enjoyed construction work, especially the kind the Ruskins did. No high-rises in Moosetookalook. Not even many condominiums. Ruskin Construction built houses, raised barns, put on additions to people’s homes and businesses, and did renovations.

  He’d taken the morning to help Liss—he’d felt uneasy leaving her on her own, though he couldn’t say for certain why—but with the crew shorthanded, he’d felt a responsibility to his father, too. It had ended up being just Dan, Sam, and Joe Ruskin on this job. Dan’s father came up beside him as Dan took another swig of water.

  “Ought to be finished by next weekend if the weather holds.”

  “It would go faster if you’d hire another carpenter,” Dan said.

  “I’m being careful this time. I should have done a background check on Ralph before I put him on the crew. Then I’d have known about his criminal record.”

  “You’d still have given him a chance.”

  “If he’d been honest with me about his past, yeah.”

  “And you’d still have caught him if he tried to steal from you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’d still have decided not to press charges. Face it, Dad, you give everybody the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe you shouldn’t, either. I hear you’ve got a house guest.” Joe Ruskin took a swig from his own plastic water bottle.

  Dan gave him a level stare. “Just helping out a neighbor.”

  “Good-looking girl, as I recall. Kinda skinny, though.”

  Dan took a few more swallows, then capped the container. “You got a point to make here, Dad?”

  “There’s talk.”

  “Big surprise. Moosetookalook thrives on gossip.”

  “I don’t suppose she cares. She’s not likely to stick around long.”

  “Maybe she would if folks made her feel she belonged here. She’d be a credit to the community if she moved back permanently. And she didn’t murder Mrs. Norris.”

  “Who said anything about murder? It’s her morals the old biddies are yammering about. And I can’t say they don’t have reason. After all, she moved in with a single man her second day back.” Although he shook his head in mock disapproval, his eyes twinkled with humor. “You want to be careful of that girl’s reputation, son.”

  Dan felt the back of his neck turn red. This was not a discussion he wanted to have with his father. Or with anybody else, for that matter. “This isn’t the 1950s, Dad. What Liss and I do is our business and nobody else’s.”

  “If you believe that, you’re number than a pounded thumb.” Joe waited a beat. “So who thinks it was Liss killed Amanda Norris, and what are you going to do about it?”

  Ernie Willett stood behind the counter in his small store, one hand resting on the cash register as if to protect it and its contents. Liss wondered who guarded it when he had to go out and fill gas tanks. She was surprised he hadn’t gone to self-service. She supposed it was because he didn’t trust people to come in and pay for what they pumped.

  One other customer roamed the aisles, preventing Liss from speaking privately with Sherri’s father. To kill time, she did a little browsing herself, amused to find that she’d been right. Willett’s Store did carry mousetraps as well as milk. He also stocked canned goods, paper products, pet food, soft drinks, and a selection of the blaze-orange vests and caps folks were well-advised to wear during hunting season to keep from being mistaken for a deer.

  When she heard the cheerful jingle of the bell over the door announce the other customer’s departure, Liss grabbed a candy bar from the rack and approached the counter. Ernie Willett ignored her at first. He’d taken a feather duster to the overhead cigarette racks and that apparently required all his concentration.

  Tapping one foot, she waited. She had time to inventory everything else behind the sturdy wooden sales counter before he finally acknowledged her presence. She noted in particular the high, padded stool, the upholstery mended with a strip of duct tape, and the microwave on top of a set of shelves that held rolls of cash register tape and several small, unmarked boxes. The warning sign on the wall, reading “Microwave in Use,” was so sun-faded it was nearly impossible to decipher. Ernie no longer offered to sell hot sandwiches or English-muffin pizzas to his customers. Liss imagined that bit of courtesy had vanished at the same time Mrs. Willett decamped.

  Willett glanced at the candy bar, rang up the sale, and accepted her mone
y.

  Suddenly tongue-tied, Liss realized she didn’t know how to begin. “Mr. Willett, can we talk?” Oh, that was lame! She’d have to do better if she expected to get answers.

  “I’m a busy man.”

  “I can see that.” She let the sarcasm register and met his dark-eyed glower with an unblinking stare. “It’s important.”

  “I got nothing to say to you.”

  “Something’s been bothering me, Mr. Willett. You came to the fairgrounds yesterday after you heard about Mrs. Norris’s death. You said you were worried about Sherri. I want to know why.”

  The incident had been relegated to the back of her mind by other events, but after she left the police station, Liss had found herself remembering how Ernie Willett had behaved. That he had a temper was no surprise, but she didn’t understand what had set it off.

  “Don’t want to talk about it.” The surly voice and mulish expression would have discouraged most people, but she had him trapped behind his sales counter. He wouldn’t bolt, not when it would mean abandoning his cash register.

  Liss leaned in until she was eye to eye with him. “You didn’t make a whole lot of sense yesterday, Mr. Willett, but on reflection it seemed to me that you made three distinct claims during your diatribe.”

  He retreated a step, scowling. “Well, ain’t you the one for la-de-dah big words.”

  “You claimed it was dangerous for Sherri to go on working at the Emporium. Why?”

  “I got no time for this.” His thin lips flattened into a line no wider than a hair’s breadth.

  “Make time. You also claimed you weren’t surprised that Mrs. Norris got herself killed. And you flat out said it should have been Aunt Margaret who was murdered, almost as if you thought—or knew—that the killer mistook Mrs. Norris for my aunt.”

  “I never—”

  “You did.”

  “Then I misspoke. Do that sometimes when I lose my temper.”

  “You were angry at my aunt when she hired Sherri. You broke up the place.”

  “She betrayed me.”

  “Sherri?”

  Liss thought she saw a flash of surprise in his eyes, but it was gone so quickly that she couldn’t be sure. “Yeah. Sherri. Who else?”

  “Your wife? She left you.”

  “Good riddance to bad rubbish. And that’s all I’ve got to say on the subject. You’d best run along, missy, before I lose my temper. You wouldn’t like me if I lost my temper.”

  “I don’t like you much now.”

  Eyes locked, they exchanged another glare. He looked away first, those thin lips twitching. A nervous tic, she decided. He couldn’t possibly find this confrontation funny.

  “I believe you were worried about your daughter. You said you were when you came to the fairgrounds yesterday and she wasn’t buying it, but it has to be true. You’d have to have been worried to close this store for an hour or more, or leave it in an employee’s hands, in order to make the trip to Fallstown.”

  And that same reasoning, she realized, made it unlikely he’d killed Mrs. Norris. Didn’t it?

  “She’s my daughter. I got a right to be concerned for her safety.”

  “But why did you think Sherri was in danger? Or was that just an excuse to get her to quit and leave my aunt in the lurch?”

  “Whole country’s going to hell,” he muttered. “Crime. Violence. No respect for your elders.”

  “Well, that’s the pot calling the kettle black! The way I hear it, you nearly destroyed my aunt’s store. Went on a rampage.”

  “Exaggeration. If it had been that bad, she’d have pressed charges.”

  “And Mrs. Norris? Why did you say you weren’t surprised someone killed her? What did she have on you?” Once again Liss leaned over the counter, into his space, close enough to catch the faint smell of Old Spice aftershave.

  A look of befuddlement momentarily replaced the hostility on his deeply lined face. “What are you babbling about, missy?”

  “Mrs. Norris. You said she was a busybody.”

  “Hell, yes. Everybody knew that. Always spying on people from her window. Built that special, she did, so she could see half the neighborhood.”

  “And what did she do with what she learned?”

  “Do? Didn’t do anything. Just liked to snoop.”

  “And you think someone killed her for that?”

  “I don’t have a clue why she was killed. Don’t give a tinker’s dam, either.”

  “And Sherri? Do you think she’s in danger?”

  “What I think is that she shouldn’t be working in that shop. She shouldn’t be working for the sheriff. She should be here, working for me.”

  Contradictory old coot! “Why did you say it should have been Aunt Margaret who was killed? Do you hate her that much? She gave Sherri a job to help her out and not to hurt you. You can’t know Aunt Margaret very well if you think that.”

  “Hah! Known Margaret MacCrimmon longer than you’ve been alive. She ain’t no saint. You ask her about her business dealings sometime. Besides, all I meant was that she’s the one who would usually have been in the store alone.”

  “Business dealings? What business dealings?” Did he mean the hotel?

  “There’s been some shady characters come into that shop.”

  Startled, Liss stared at him. “Shady characters?”

  “You gonna repeat everything I say?”

  “Mobsters? Smugglers? Government agents?” The conversation was growing more absurd, more melodramatic, by the minute.

  “Don’t know. Don’t care.”

  “Mr. Willett, you—”

  A car pulled in at the gas pumps and Willett shot out from behind the sales counter. “Time for you to go, missy. You got your candy bar. That’s all you’re going to get.”

  “But, I—”

  He jerked the door open, making the bell jangle discordantly. “On your way. Git.”

  Liss got.

  The public library hadn’t changed much since Liss’s last visit. The first-floor entrance, set between the firehouse door and the big windows of the town office, opened on a hallway with a wide flight of stairs to the left. Unable to resist, Liss stopped at the downstairs drinking fountain before she went up. As she’d remembered, it offered the coldest, best-tasting water in the world.

  The second-floor library consisted of two large rooms filled with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and long tables. The librarian’s desk stood opposite the door, in front of a bank of windows that had once been much larger but had been made smaller with wooden insets and insulation to conserve energy. The retrofitting looked decidedly odd enclosed by late nineteenth–century window frames.

  Dolores Mayfield, the librarian, had the air of a queen holding court. She adjusted her glasses to look down a long, thin nose, examining Liss as if she suspected her of plotting to steal a book. “Yes?”

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Mayfield. Do you remember me? I’m Liss MacCrimmon.”

  “Oh. Oh!” Her eyes widened, suggesting she’d heard something very recently about Liss—perhaps that morning. “What do you want? You can’t check out books. You don’t live here anymore.”

  Swallowing a mixture of hurt feelings and irritation, Liss kept smiling. “I’d like to take a look at some back issues of the Carrabassett County Clarion.”

  Moosetookalook had always been too small a place to have its own newspaper. The Clarion, published twice weekly in Fallstown, reported local news and events for both towns, as well as covering Waycross Springs, Wade’s Corners, and several other smaller communities in Carrabassett County.

  “How far back?” Mrs. Mayfield asked. “Issues from 1883 to 1995 are on microfilm. More recent years have been electronically scanned and can be accessed from a zip disk.”

  A few minutes later, Liss was settled at one of the library’s computers, rapidly scrolling through several years’ worth of newspapers. Fortunately, no issue was more than eight pages. It didn’t take long to find the item about Ernie Will
ett.

  The headline read: LOCAL MAN GOES BERSERK.

  Willett must have loved that! She read on.

  Local businessman Ernest Willett was arrested Friday on vandalism charges after he did approximately three hundred dollars’ worth of damage in Moosetookalook Scottish Emporium, a shop owned by Margaret Boyd. Mrs. Boyd called police after her disgruntled customer started smashing figurines and hurling books across the room. Neither Mr. Willett nor Mrs. Boyd could be reached for comment but according to police Mrs. Boyd will not be pressing charges. Willett was released after a brief stay in the Moosetookalook lock-up.

  Unable to believe that was it, Liss went back through the issues covering the two weeks after Willett’s arrest, hoping for some follow-up, but nothing more had been written about the incident.

  She wasn’t entirely sure why she was pursuing the matter. Ernie Willett was clearly delusional. Shady characters? That sounded like a conspiracy theory to her.

  But did she dare discount everything he’d said just because it sounded far-fetched? She’d believed Willett when he said he’d known Margaret Boyd longer than Liss had been alive. But he hadn’t said Margaret Boyd. He’d called her Margaret MacCrimmon. That probably meant they’d grown up together in Moosetookalook. The MacCrimmons had been in the area for several generations. No doubt the Willetts had, too.

  But what if there was more to it than that? The thought nagged at her until she left the computer and requested the reel of microfilm containing issues of the Clarion for the years 1970 to 1980.

  “What is it you’re looking for?” Dolores Mayfield asked when she handed it over.

  “Family history.” It was almost true.

  “I’d think you’d be too busy to have time to spend on genealogy.”

  “Busy?” Liss looked up from threading the film into the library’s ancient, hand-cranked microfilm reader, a question in her eyes.

  “You’ve got some cleaning up to do and no mistake.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”