Kilt Dead Read online

  Thibodeau returned, looking as shaken as Dan felt. “Do either of you know what happened in there?”

  Liss shook her head. Dan hazarded a guess. “She tripped on something? Fell. Hit her head.”

  “I dunno, Dan. I can’t see anything that would’ve caused her to do that.”

  Liss’s eyes widened. “Surely you can’t think . . . she wasn’t—”

  “Pushed?” Thibodeau didn’t look happy about it, but he clearly had suspicions. “Seems like you’d have to hit your head awful hard to die from it.”

  “A freak accident—”

  “Better let the experts decide. I’m damned if I know what happened. But the back door’s unlocked and she had no business being in there. Did she?”

  “No,” Liss whispered. “We were closed. The Games. I just got back.”

  In her agitation, she’d kept hold of Dan’s hand. Now she tightened her grip. It was a measure of how upset she was, Dan thought. Liss MacCrimmon had never been the type to cling.

  He was keenly aware of the irony. He’d wanted to get close to Liss for years, but this was a helluva way to do it. Murder? He couldn’t seem to take in the possibility. Mrs. Norris was a pain sometimes, but she was harmless. What kind of monster would kill an old lady?

  “Whatever happened here,” Jeff said, “it’s an unattended death. I’ve got to call in the M.E. and I think I’d better send for LaVerdiere, too.” He reached for the portable radio attached to his belt.

  “State cop?”

  Jeff grimaced. “Yeah. Craig LaVerdiere. He’s the one assigned to this area so this’ll be his case. It shouldn’t take him long to get here. He just lives over to Wade’s Corners.”

  “Okay if I take Liss up to Margaret’s apartment?” Dan asked.

  “Yeah, sure. You need to stick around anyhow. LaVerdiere’s going to want to talk to both of you.”

  Dan lost no time putting some distance between them and the body.

  Once upstairs, Liss started to pull herself together. “I should make coffee.”

  “Probably a good idea. Looks like it’s going to be a long night.” Anything he drank right now would likely burn like acid, but Dan figured it would help Liss to be busy. He followed her into the kitchen and settled onto one of the high stools at the center island.

  “Thanks for stepping in. I would have pulled myself together eventually. I had some idea of running across the square to the police station. But I’m glad you showed up. I just couldn’t seem to wrap my mind around . . . I still can’t.”

  “I was on my way here anyway,” Dan said.

  The hand measuring coffee into the pot stilled for a moment, then completed the task. She didn’t turn around. “Why?”

  “Figured you’d be beat after a day at the games. I was going to suggest sharing a pizza, so you wouldn’t have to cook.” He shrugged. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  She started the coffee perking and rinsed her hands before joining him at the island. “That was a very nice thought.”

  “Hey, what are neighbors for?”

  Her tentative smile vanished along with what little color she’d regained. Dan could have kicked himself. Confessing his plan to get reacquainted with Liss had been intended to take her mind off Mrs. Norris.

  Liss studied her clasped hands for a moment, then abruptly excused herself. “I need . . . I’ll be back . . . I just . . . make yourself at home.”

  She needed to be alone for a bit. Dan got that. And when, a few minutes later, he heard the shower running, he understood that, too.

  The image wouldn’t wash away no matter how hard Liss scrubbed.

  The angle of the body. The wrongness of that cloth half covering it like some misaligned tartan sash. The blood. The smell. Bile rose in her throat. She had to brace one hand against the side of the shower stall until her insides settled again.

  Even worse than stumbling upon a body was that the dead woman was Mrs. Norris. She was a widow with no children, Liss remembered. In fact, she didn’t have any living relatives. But she’d made all of Moosetookalook her family. Just because someone moved away didn’t mean she forgot about them. Liss knew for a fact that Mrs. Norris still corresponded regularly with Liss’s parents in Arizona. Amanda Norris might not have any descendants to mourn her, but there were hundreds of people whose lives she had touched. They’d be devastated by the news of her death.

  She had to have fallen. A tragic accident. Anything else was unthinkable. No one would deliberately hurt Mrs. Norris. A small sound of distress escaped Liss at that horrible thought, barely drowned out by the cascade of water. She desperately wanted to believe Jeff Thibodeau was mistaken.

  With hands that felt stiff and clumsy, Liss shut off the water, now gone tepid. She rested her forehead against the glass door of the shower. She didn’t know how long she stood there, but she was chilled by the time a voice called her name.

  “Liss? You okay?”

  Dan. Dan Ruskin. She fumbled for a towel. Good grief. She’d been more addled by finding Mrs. Norris than she’d thought if she’d completely forgotten that she’d left him sitting in Aunt Margaret’s kitchen. “I’m fine,” she called. “Give me a minute.”

  Of all the ways she might have imagined getting reacquainted with Dan, this was not one of them.

  “The state police detective’s here.” The note of warning in his voice made the hair on the back of her neck prickle.

  “I’ll be right out,” she called.

  She quickly finished toweling herself off, glad she’d remembered to grab clean clothes on her way to the bathroom. It did not take long to blow dry her hair and slip into a gauzy, ankle-length skirt and a soft, lacy camisole. She didn’t bother with makeup. This was no time for primping.

  Liss paused with her hand on the doorknob. Bracing herself for whatever new shocks waited beyond the relative security of the bathroom, praying no one would guess that her composure was all on the surface, she stepped into the hall.

  A lanky blond stranger in gray slacks, white shirt, herringbone jacket, and conservative maroon tie was just coming out of her bedroom. He had a boyish face that made her think he must be younger than she was, but his attitude left no doubt as to which of them was in charge. “Where are the clothes you were wearing?” he demanded.

  Taken aback, Liss just pointed. She’d hung her wool skirt on the back of the bathroom door and stuffed everything else into the hamper.

  “Come into the living room,” he ordered, leading the way. He gave the uniformed officer already there orders to bag up her discarded clothing.

  Liss felt as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. He was acting as if he considered her a suspect. “What on earth—?”

  “You found her, right?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “Why did you take a shower?”

  Anxiety abruptly gave way to annoyance. “I’d just worked all day in the heat and humidity at the fairgrounds. Why do you think I took a shower?” She left the words you moron unspoken.

  The sound of a throat clearing pulled her attention away from the detective. Dan sat on the sofa, a mug of coffee in one hand. His deadly serious expression sent a shiver down Liss’s spine.

  “This is Detective Craig LaVerdiere, Liss. He’s in charge of the investigation.”

  Investigation—she didn’t like the sound of that word. It seemed to confirm that Jeff had been right and Mrs. Norris’s death wasn’t an accident.

  “Would you like some coffee?” Dan asked. He’d already poured a mug for her and set cream and sweetener out on the coffee table. He’d also unearthed Aunt Margaret’s brandy, presumably to add a dollop to the brew.

  “I’m through with you, Ruskin,” the detective said when Liss sat down beside Dan on the sofa. “I’ll have a statement typed up for you to sign tomorrow. For now, you can go home.”

  Liss wondered how much time she’d lost in the shower. Then again, she didn’t suppose Dan had had much to say. As he’d already told her, he’d been
at home until he’d seen her car and come over to suggest ordering pizza.

  She frowned, suddenly acutely aware that Dan didn’t know exactly when she’d arrived. If she needed an alibi, she was out of luck.

  Don’t think like that, she told herself. This is all some horrible misunderstanding. Mrs. Norris fell!

  Dan made no move to leave. Instead he looked at Liss. “Would you like me to stay?”

  “You’ve got no business—”

  “Yes,” Liss interrupted. She might be confused about some things, but she was certain she didn’t want to be left alone with this aggressive detective.

  As if to underscore the reason for her uneasiness, the uniformed trooper walked through the room carrying the bag that contained Liss’s clothes. She assumed he was taking them away for some sort of testing.

  “What’s going on here, detective?” she asked. “I thought Mrs. Norris fell and struck her head.”

  “I ask the questions, Ms. MacCrimmon. You answer them.”

  “Very well. But Mr. Ruskin stays.” She wasn’t ashamed to admit that she felt less vulnerable with Dan beside her. Everyone needed a little support sometimes.

  LaVerdiere gave her a fulminating glare but after a moment he settled into the chair opposite the sofa and retrieved a small, spiral-bound notebook from his breast pocket. When he’d turned on the small tape recorder sitting next to the brandy, he recited the day and time for the tape and identified himself. Then he asked Liss for her full name.

  She gave it to him with a straight face. “Amaryllis Rosalie MacCrimmon.”

  He never looked up from his notebook, and she grudgingly gave him one point for sensitivity. The fanciful name her mother—Violet—had given her had always embarrassed Liss. As a child she couldn’t even pronounce it.

  “You say you were at the fairgrounds today?” LaVerdiere asked.

  Liss doctored her coffee and took a tentative sip before she answered. “Yes. I was there all day. I left here around six-thirty this morning.”

  “The store was closed for the day?”

  “That’s right. It always is for the Highland Games. I set up and ran the Scottish Emporium booth.”

  “What time did the games end for the day?”

  “Six.”

  His eyebrows lifted. “So you were home for some time before you discovered the body.”

  She shook her head. “I found her only minutes after arriving here. It took awhile to close up. Some of the stock had to be repacked and stored in my car. And the weather was bad driving back to Moosetookalook.”

  “What time was it when you entered the shop?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t look at a clock.”

  “Did you see anyone when you came in?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know why the victim was in that storeroom?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know how she got into the building?”

  “No, although it would be easy enough to find Aunt Margaret’s spare key. She always left it on the sill over the back door. Half the town probably knew that.”

  “I certainly did,” Dan said.

  LaVerdiere ignored him and asked Liss more questions she couldn’t answer. The interrogation seemed endless and soon became annoyingly repetitive. LaVerdiere’s tone, never exactly soothing, slowly turned downright hostile, as if he didn’t believe a word she said.

  “And no one can confirm precisely when you arrived back in Moosetookalook?” he asked for the third time.

  Sick of his not-so-veiled hints that she’d been lying to him, Liss reached the limit of her patience. “Why don’t you just say straight out what you think happened here?”

  “Oh, we know what happened,” LaVerdiere drawled. “The M.E. will confirm it with the autopsy but it’s obvious from the angle of the body and the force of the blow that she didn’t just stumble into those shelves by accident. She had help. Someone shoved her. Hard. Someone killed her, Ms. MacCrimmon.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me!” Outraged by the ridiculous insinuation, she let her feelings show.

  “You were here.”

  “I found the body.”

  “You’d be surprised how many times the person who reports a crime is the one who committed it.”

  “She was already dead when I got home! How many times do I have to tell you that?”

  “Until you make me believe it.”

  “If she was murdered, I want her killer caught and punished even more than you do. I knew her. She was a part of my childhood, a good, kind, decent woman who didn’t deserve to die that way!”

  “So you say.”

  Left momentarily speechless by his gall, Liss just gaped at him.

  Before LaVerdiere could make any further outlandish comments, a deputy sheriff stepped into the room. The state police detective clicked off his tape recorder and left his chair to confer with the other officer.

  Liss scowled at the two of them, blindly at first. Then her gaze sharpened and she realized that she knew the man in the brown uniform. It was Pete Campbell, last seen hurling the stone and wearing a kilt over fluorescent swim trunks. The sense of unreality she had felt ever since she’d discovered Mrs. Norris in the stockroom ratcheted up another notch.

  “Pete’s a cop?”

  “Yeah,” Dan said. “Amazing, isn’t it? Listen, Liss. You hang in there. You’re right not to let LaVerdiere bully you. He’s only picking on you because he’s hoping for an easy solution.”

  “Somebody killed Mrs. Norris.” Whispering the words aloud brought a painful tightness to her chest. “Somebody murdered her.”

  “LaVerdiere seems to think so.”

  “He seems to think it was me.”

  “He’s barking up the wrong tree. Damn, I wish I’d seen you arrive home. I’d have been with you when you found her.”

  “Then that idiot would probably suspect both of us.”

  The “idiot” had finished his conversation. Pete, on his way out, stopped in the doorway to address Liss. “You want me to call Sherri for you?”

  “I hate to bother her this late.”

  “She’ll hear about it soon enough. She’s on the eleven to seven shift at the jail.”

  LaVerdiere listened to their exchange with ill-concealed disapproval. “Is there a reason you’re still here, Campbell? If not, I’m in the middle of an interview.”

  “No, you’re at the end of one.” Liss was fed up with LaVerdiere and his unwarranted suspicions. “I’ve told you all I know.”

  LaVerdiere gave her a hard stare. Liss glared back at him until he finally realized she meant what she said. Only then did he gather up the tape recorder and notebook. “We’re not done. Don’t leave town, either one of you.”

  Liss gave a short bark of laughter. “Literally? Because I need to be at the Highland Games again tomorrow and the fairgrounds are over in Fallstown.”

  “Don’t leave the county,” LaVerdiere amended, and stalked out of the apartment.

  “What is his problem?” Liss asked Pete.

  Pete checked to make sure the detective was really gone, then shrugged. “Sheriff says he’s well trained. He just hasn’t had much experience dealing with people.”

  “He has the sensitivity of an iguana. Is he always like that?”

  “Abrupt?”

  “Offensive.”

  “What can I say? He’s an asshole, but we’re stuck with him. You sure you don’t want me to call Sherri?”

  “Thanks, but no. I’ll talk to her tomorrow.”

  He started to go but she called him back. “Was Mrs. Norris really murdered?” In spite of what Jeff had said, in spite of LaVerdiere’s certainty, it just didn’t seem possible.

  “Looks that way. Someone from the A.G.’s office is here.”

  “And that means?”

  “The district attorney’s office handles most manslaughter cases. The attorney general is in charge of some manslaughters and all homicides. They must think murder’s likely. Probably figure Mrs. Norris
interrupted a robbery.”

  LaVerdiere had asked if anything was missing from the shop, but Liss hadn’t been able to tell him for certain. She hadn’t noticed anything. The cash register had already been empty because she’d had all the cash with her at the Highland Games. The cash box, she realized, was still downstairs on the counter.

  “If he thinks a thief killed her, why is he picking on Liss?” Dan asked.

  “She’s handy.” Pete grinned suddenly and seconded what Dan had already told her. “Good you stood up for yourself, Liss. Rule of thumb if you’re being questioned—police can only talk to you as long as you’re willing.”

  “Wish I’d known that an hour ago, but thanks.”

  “Try to get some rest,” Pete advised, and let himself out.

  “Do you want me to go, too?” Dan asked.

  He was still settled in on the other end of the sofa, angled so that he was facing her. She mirrored his position and studied him. He wasn’t remarkable looking—sandy brown hair in need of a trim, an ordinary nose and chin—but there was something solid about Dan Ruskin, something comforting. And it was oh-so-easy to get lost in those sympathetic molasses-brown eyes. She had to look away and clear her throat before she could answer him.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d stay a bit longer.”

  “No problem.”

  She felt herself relax against the sofa cushions in what seemed like the first tranquil moment she’d had all day.

  The peace abruptly shattered when Detective LaVerdiere reentered the room. “One more thing, Ms. MacCrimmon. You’ll have to be out of here within the next half hour. You need to vacate the premises for a couple of days.”

  Liss came to her feet in an indignant rush. “You can’t kick me out. I live here.”

  “Not for the present you don’t. Not until after we sweep the entire building for evidence. You can collect a few personal items to take with you, but leave everything else. What you do take will be inspected and inventoried before you go.”

  “And just where am I supposed to stay, detective? It’s July during the Highland Games. There are no rooms available at any of the local hotels, motels, or bed and breakfasts.”

  “Not my problem,” LaVerdiere said, and made another abrupt exit.