Bagpipes, Brides and Homicides (Liss Maccrimmon Scottish Mysteries) Page 5

  “And he said? Ouch!” The yelp was involuntary. One of Melly’s straight pins had stabbed her.

  “I told you to stay still,” the seamstress mumbled, and tugged one last fold of cloth into place.

  “Brownie said it was a pagan rite and he wanted no part of it. Foolish man.” Vi let the ribbons fall back onto the seat of the chair. “What’s the difference, I asked him, whether you use the time-honored words of the handfasting ceremony or let the bride and groom write their own vows?”

  Liss’s gaze remained fixed on the discarded ribbons and the nearby silken cords. No, Vi hadn’t given up. And she still had time to dream up more embellishments. Next she might decide that having Liss arrive at the ceremony in a horse-drawn carriage was a good idea. Or maybe she’d propose that her daughter be carried to the altar in an ornately decorated litter balanced on the shoulders of a half dozen liveried servants. Liss wouldn’t put either suggestion past her.

  When the grandfather clock in the corner began to strike twelve, Liss seized on the excuse to change the subject. “Turn on the television, will you, Mom? I’d like to catch the news at noon.”

  Vi looked disgruntled, but she complied with Liss’s request. She was a bit of a news junkie herself. She wandered back to the display of ribbons and cords while the first two stories ran. Neither was of earth-shaking importance, but they served Liss’s purpose. Slowly, she began to relax.

  “And now we have a breaking news story to report,” the anchorwoman said in the super-serious tone that usually meant a fire, a shooting, or a five-car pileup. “Details are still sketchy, but our sources at Three Cities Police Department tell us that a man has been found dead under suspicious circumstances. The state police have been called in to investigate.”

  Eyes narrowed, Sherri took a step closer to the screen. She looked every inch the police professional, even in her Renaissance gown. “If the local authorities have asked for help, you can bet the guy was murdered.”

  It was a pity someone had died, Liss thought, but at least the killing had not taken place in Carrabassett County. The victim wouldn’t be anyone she knew, and thank goodness for that! She’d had enough contact with dead bodies during the past couple of years to last her a lifetime.

  The scene on the television shifted to a reporter standing some distance from a large brick building. Crime scene tape fluttered in a light breeze and off to one side a uniformed officer was turning away a couple of gawkers.

  “I’m here on the campus of Anisetab College,” the reporter announced. “Behind me is Lincoln Hall, the classroom building where the body was found only a short time ago. No official identification has been made by police, pending notification of next of kin, but witnesses tell us the victim was the head of the history department here at Anisetab.”

  Liss felt Melly’s hand clench on the fabric of the wedding gown. She looked down at the other woman in time to see pins scatter to the floor as Melly’s lips went slack. The seamstress’s skin had gone as colorless as ice.

  At almost the same instant, Liss heard her mother gasp. Heedless of the ribbons she was crushing beneath her, Vi collapsed into the chair. Her hands began to shake so badly that she had to clasp them in her lap to keep them still. Her face was as ashen as Melly’s.

  “Oh, my God,” Vi whispered. “Lee.”

  Chapter Four

  Liss hopped down from her stool. Ignoring the pins poking into her side, she knelt beside her mother. “Mom? What is it? Do you know the man that reporter is talking about?”

  “It has to be Lee,” Vi whispered. She looked at Melly for confirmation.

  “Has to be,” Melly echoed. “He’s the department head.”

  Like Liss, Melly Baynard had dropped to her knees, but she’d done so to collect the fallen straight pins. “Get up, Liss,” she hissed as she retrieved them. “You’re going to ruin your skirt.”

  “Oh! Your wedding dress!” Stricken, Vi tried to hurry her daughter to her feet by pushing at her elbows. “Stand up, for goodness’ sake!”

  Liss stood, but she kept her gaze on her mother.

  “Come away from that window,” Melly fussed, “unless you want to give the neighbors a free show.” She started to unbutton the back of the gown.

  “The sun’s wrong.” Liss moved, but slowly, still puzzling over Vi’s reaction to the news story. “No one can see in.”

  Although she wasn’t concerned about peeping Toms, she allowed herself to be herded back to the middle of the room. As soon as Melly had removed the wedding gown and carried it out of the room to be safely hung away, Liss stripped off her silky slip and snatched up the blouse and slacks she’d worn for the drive to Three Cities.

  Something strange was going on here. Liss had never seen her mother so rattled. The signs of Vi’s distress were unmistakable. Her chin trembled. Her eyes were unfocused and brimming with unshed tears.

  Sherri came back into the room. Liss hadn’t been aware that her friend had left, but now she saw that Sherri had changed out of the rose-colored gown. Apparently, she’d also made a phone call. She was just tucking her cell back into the pocket of her jeans.

  “The dispatcher at Three Cities PD is a friend of mine from my days at the sheriff’s department,” Sherri announced. “She says there’s no question about the identity of the victim. It was Alfred Leon Palsgrave.”

  Leon, Liss thought. But that wasn’t the name her mother had whispered. She’d said Lee, as if she’d known the late Professor Palsgrave rather better than she’d let on. Liss brooded over the implications of that all the way through their farewells to Melly and their departure for home.

  “So, was Lee Professor Palsgrave’s nickname?” she asked her mother once they were in the car and on their way back to Moosetookalook.

  “What? No.” Vi’s vehement denial had Liss clenching her hands on the wheel. “You must have misheard. And I’d hardly refer to the professor by his first name in any case.”

  “Mom.” Liss injected a note of warning into her voice.

  “Oh, all right!” Vi exclaimed, annoyed. “Dr. Palsgrave was my faculty advisor when I was a student at Anisetab College. But I hadn’t seen him in years. Not until the other day when Margaret and I went to talk to him.”

  “To discuss the Medieval Scottish Conclave?”

  “Yes. Oh, dear. I suppose this means the reenactment will have to be cancelled.”

  “No ‘the show must go on’?” Zara asked, sotto voce, from the backseat.

  Liss rolled her eyes but didn’t make any of the sarcastic comments that sprang to mind.

  “The participants are all amateurs,” Vi said, taking Zara’s remark seriously. “Many of them are students looking for a good grade. But Professor Palsgrave was the driving force behind the enterprise. Without him, it will likely fall apart.”

  Sherri spoke up. “I’d count that as a blessing. If there’s no battle, then there won’t be any picket lines, either. The demonstrators won’t have anything to protest, and that will be one less thing for all of us to worry about on Liss’s wedding day.”

  “One should always look for the bright side,” Vi agreed, but her voice had a brittle edge to it that made Liss nervous.

  Abruptly, Vi changed the subject, asking Sherri and Zara what they thought of their gowns. The conversation remained firmly fixed on wedding plans for the remainder of the drive.

  Liss kept silent, her eyes on the road. Both hands clutched the wheel a bit too tightly, until a pins-and-needles sensation in her fingers forced her to loosen her grip. She couldn’t stop thinking about her mother’s odd behavior or the stricken expression on Vi’s face when she’d first heard that it was Palsgrave who was dead. She had called him Lee. Liss was sure of it. So why had she been so anxious to deny it?

  Her question was still unanswered at six that evening when she cut across the square to have supper with Dan. By then, in time for the early news broadcast, the police had admitted that the death was a homicide, although they still hadn’t confirmed the vic
tim’s ID.

  Liss had to admit that she was curious about what had happened to Professor Palsgrave. The man had made an impression on her. As she headed up Dan’s driveway toward the separate building that housed his workshop, however, she cautioned herself to avoid any mention of the murder. If she told Dan about Vi’s strange response to it, his knee-jerk reaction would be to warn her not to start snooping. That would be irritating, since she had no intention of doing so. Why would she? This time around, she had only the most casual connection to the case.

  Dan didn’t notice her at first. He was using his table sander to “carve” magic wands for the gift shop at The Spruces. Each one was made by gluing and pressing together strips of several varieties of wood, then shaping the result by taking away, as Dan put it, “anything that doesn’t look like a wand.” The results of this process, in various lengths—some curved, some straight, and some with acrylic “jewels” attached to their points—sold very well to tourists.

  Although he worked full time for his family’s firm, Ruskin Construction, Dan had slowly been making a name for himself as a custom woodworker. Just as the hotel was Joe’s passion, creating beautiful things out of wood was Dan’s. Eventually, he hoped to open a shop where he could sell the assortment of items he most enjoyed making—everything from jigsaw puzzle tables to decorative boxes to cradles.

  One of the things on Liss’s checklist for the evening was a discussion of which of their houses they were going to live in after the wedding. They’d been debating the issue for weeks now without coming to a decision. They had to pick one soon. The other house would then be converted into display rooms downstairs and a rental unit on the upper floor.

  Dan glanced up from his work, spotted Liss, and turned off the machine. “What do you think?” he asked, holding up the wand.

  “Yum,” she said, but her gaze was on the rangy, six-foot-two craftsman, not the craft.

  One of Dan’s eyebrows quirked upward under her scrutiny and he laughed. “Stop looking at me like I’m a three-course meal. I’m trying to get a serious critique here. I haven’t used this particular combination of woods before. This is cocobolo.” He pointed to what appeared to be one of several different colored stripes running along the length of the quirkily curved wand. He identified each of the others in turn: “Butternut, black walnut, cherry-wood, and bird’s-eye maple.”

  “Very pretty.” Liss hoisted herself onto a high, three-legged stool similar to the one she had in the Emporium, except that Dan had made this one very early in his woodworking career. It teetered alarmingly every time she shifted position.

  Dan set aside the magic wand, leaned back against one of the worktables, and folded his arms across his chest. “So? Any word on who killed the nutty professor?”

  She shook her head. It figured Dan would have heard about the murder. He drove with the radio on in his truck and the story would have been headline news all afternoon. As for Palsgrave’s ID, he’d undoubtedly talked to Pete Campbell, Sherri’s deputy sheriff husband.

  “Can we talk about something else? Anything else!”

  “My pleasure.” He offered a hand. “I vote for a discussion of houses. Come on. I’ve got stew bubbling in the slow cooker and I picked up a fresh loaf of garlic bread at Patsy’s on my way home. We can debate while we eat.”

  “You make it sound as if we’re deciding between roast beef and pork chops,” Liss complained as they crossed the backyard and entered Dan’s kitchen. The room was long and narrow and she could see all the way down the hallway to the front door. “We’re talking about where we’re going to live for the rest of our lives.”

  They had an embarrassment of riches when it came to houses. Liss had inherited the house next door to Moosetookalook Scottish Emporium shortly after returning to Maine. Dan had bought the one they were in now several years earlier. Both houses faced the town square. Both were old and gracious, spacious, and had been upgraded to be energy efficient. Liss was fond of her place, the first home she’d ever owned. But she had an attachment to Dan’s house, as well. It was the one she’d grown up in. The previous owner had bought it from her parents when they’d left town to move to Arizona.

  “I tried making a list,” Liss admitted when they were settled in the dining room with steaming bowls of stew and crusty slices of buttered bread in front of them. “It didn’t help.”

  When Dan held out a hand, she fished in her pocket for a folded piece of lined yellow paper and dropped it on his outstretched palm. She’d listed all the pros and cons she could think of. He read while they ate and was frowning when he set the page aside.

  “It’s a dead heat,” he said.

  “Unfortunately. Your place has three baths while mine only has two, but I have that big bay window overlooking the town square.” The former owner had enjoyed keeping a watchful eye on the activities of her neighbors.

  “That window would work well for displaying my stock.”

  “But this house is more open downstairs—better for the flow of customer traffic.” She gestured toward the living room. Instead of a door between the two rooms, there was a wide archway. Hidden pocket doors could be pulled closed, but almost never were.

  “Your place could easily be gutted to achieve the same effect,” Dan said. “And it’s located on a side of the square that already has two storefronts.”

  Liss ate another forkful of her stew, chewed on a bite of bread, and pondered. Dan was right about that. Stu’s Ski Shop was situated on the other side of the Emporium. This house, on the other hand, sat between Sandy and Zara’s dance studio and the home of John Farley, an accountant. Farley only used one room of his residence for business. Based solely on location, it did make better sense to turn her house into a storefront and live in Dan’s house.

  “I have an upstairs balcony,” she reminded him.

  “And I’m sure whoever ends up renting the apartment we put in will be delighted with it. Especially if Sherri and Pete are our tenants.”

  “Do you know something I don’t?”

  “Not a thing. But the place they’re in now, above the post office, is awfully small.”

  When Liss closed her eyes, she could clearly envision how the open area at the back of her house, combining kitchen and dinette, could be divided to provide an office, storage space, and a much smaller kitchen to use as a break room. Then, once they opened up the walls between what was now her living room and her library, Dan would be left with a display area of excellent proportions for the products he created from wood.

  “What about my books?” Liss asked, thinking of the hundreds of volumes now housed in the library/office off her living room. “I’m not getting rid of a single one.”

  He grinned at her. “Well, we could put them in one of the guest rooms upstairs . . . or we could convert the entire attic into your new library.”

  Her eyes went wide with surprise and delight. “What a perfect solution!”

  “I thought so. Finish your supper and we’ll go up and take some measurements.”

  He sounded entirely too smug. Liss attempted a scowl and discovered that her lips wouldn’t cooperate. She ended up smiling, but she wasn’t quite ready to let him off the hook.

  “I can see where it’s going to be very convenient to be married to a building contractor,” she remarked as she speared the last chunk of stew meat in her bowl, “but I still have one problem with living here.”

  “Oh?”

  “It will be so much farther for me to walk to work every morning. Instead of living right next door to the shop, I’ll have to pass Dance Central, turn the corner, and go all the way past the ski shop to reach the Emporium. What if there’s a snowstorm?” She batted her eyelashes at him in a deliberate caricature of the helpless female.

  Dan knew perfectly well that she was teasing him, but he went along with the game. “In that case,” he drawled, “I guess I’ll have to take care of you, little lady. I’ll drive you to work in bad weather. I’ve got chains on my truck, you kno
w.” He made that sound like a wonder of modern technology. Then his grin widened. “Or I could carry you from here to the Emporium—right through the middle of the town square.”

  “I’m too heavy!” she protested with a laugh.

  “Want to bet?” Before she could even think of objecting, he’d swept her out of her chair and into his arms. They were both laughing like loons by the time he’d lugged her up two flights of stairs to the attic.

  It was nearly midnight before Liss walked back across the square and let herself in to the foyer. She bent down to pet Lumpkin, who had appeared out of nowhere to bump his head against her leg. She froze in that position at the sound of shouting from above.

  Voices drifted down from the second floor. The words were indistinguishable but the tone was clear. Her parents were arguing. The very idea shocked her. She could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she’d heard them raise their voices to each other when she was growing up.

  Liss moved quickly through the downstairs to the kitchen, away from the sounds of the quarrel. She set out cat food and refilled water dishes by rote, helped herself to a glass of water, and waited. She did not want to go upstairs to bed, not when her room was right next to the one her parents had occupied since May. Only a closet separated them and the walls were thin.

  But she’d forgotten that the guest room was directly over the kitchen. When her mother’s voice rose to a screech, Liss couldn’t help but hear her words.

  “What have you done?” Vi shouted.

  “I haven’t done anything!” Mac yelled back at her. “What do you take me for?”

  An abrupt silence fell. Just like that, the quarrel was over.

  Liss realized she’d been holding her breath. Slowly, she let it out. If her parents had more to say to each other, they were doing it very quietly.

  She had a sudden vivid flash of memory. She’d been around eight and had thrown a temper tantrum over something or other. Vi had made a shushing noise and demanded, in an exasperated tone of voice, “Do you want the neighbors to hear?”