Bagpipes, Brides and Homicides (Liss Maccrimmon Scottish Mysteries) Page 6

  At that age, Liss could have cared less who overheard her outburst, but her mother had been appalled at the possibility they were airing their dirty laundry in public. Vi was a great believer in keeping private matters private. How extraordinary that she’d so far forgotten herself as to shout at her husband!

  When five long minutes passed with no further outbursts, Liss decided that her mother was probably giving her father the silent treatment. She’d used that tactic a few times during Liss’s youth, on both husband and daughter. Most of the time, though, 4 Birch Street had been a happy house.

  Liss’s parents had been devoted to each other and to her, their only child. She’d been pampered. No. To be honest, she’d been spoiled. And she’d been taken along, even as a baby, to the Scottish games and festivals her parents enjoyed so much. Mac had entered bagpipe competitions on a regular basis. Now and then, he’d even brought home a trophy or a ribbon.

  When she’d graduated from high school, Liss’s parents had made the decision to move to Arizona, where the climate was supposed to be kinder to arthritis sufferers. Liss had assumed they’d been happy there. Vi certainly hadn’t had any difficulty finding another teaching job and Mac had done spectacularly well with his investments, beating the odds even in a difficult economy. The possibility that all had not been as well between them as she’d supposed left Liss feeling shaken and uncertain.

  She stayed put for another ten minutes before finally leaving the kitchen and wending her way upstairs to her room. Every couple had disagreements, she told herself. She was making a mountain out of a molehill. But she was glad of it when both Lumpkin and Glenora joined her in the big bed. Since she didn’t yet have a husband’s arms to comfort and cosset her when she was troubled, the soothing effects of stroking two cats would have to suffice.

  Liss was just about to leave the house for work the next morning when her doorbell rang. She frowned, glancing at the kitchen clock. Not many Moosetookalook people went visiting at this hour and those who did knew to come around to the back entrance. A few—Dan, Sherri, and Zara came to mind—would simply walk in through the unlocked kitchen door and call out her name after they stepped inside.

  “Doorbell’s ringing,” her father said in a sleepy voice. He’d poured himself a mug of coffee and was trying to decide whether he felt like cooking breakfast or could make do with a bowl of cold cornflakes.

  Feeling unaccountably nervous, Liss hurried out into the narrow hallway. It ran between the downstairs bath and a closet on her left and the side wall of the library on her right, coming to an abrupt end when it opened out to become part of Liss’s living room. Straight ahead was the door leading to her small foyer, an enclosed space that served as a buffer against the cold outside on blustery winter days. The foyer had its own closet for heavy coats and boots and also gave access to the stairwell that led to the second floor of the house.

  The man waiting on the front porch was not in uniform, but everything about him screamed “cop,” from his sturdy build and short-cropped hair to his stone-faced expression. He held out a leather folder containing his badge and ID. Liss glanced at them only long enough to discern his rank.

  “How can I help you, Detective?”

  “Ms. MacCrimmon?”

  “Yes. I’m Liss MacCrimmon.” She remained in the doorway, blocking his entrance. In spite of the official-looking state police identification, he made her uneasy. She knew the officer responsible for this area. In fact, she’d dated him for a while. Where was Gordon Tandy? And who was this stranger? And what did he want?

  “Is Donald MacCrimmon at home? I understand he’s staying here for the summer.”

  The soft shuffle of a slipper-clad foot on the stair riser and a faint whiff of violets warned Liss that her mother was lurking just out of sight around the bend in the stair. It surprised her that Vi didn’t reveal herself. Her mother sneaking around? The world was even more out of whack this morning than she’d supposed.

  Liss hesitated a moment longer. She wanted to ask questions, but she knew from experience that a representative of the state police was not going to answer them. State cops collected information. They didn’t share. Resigned, she opened the door wider and gestured for him to come in. “This way.”

  Her father had decided on cereal. He sat with his bowl, a glass of orange juice, and his oversized mug of coffee at the small, wooden, drop-leaf table Liss used for all her meals. Lumpkin and Glenora, feline expressions hopeful, had arranged themselves at his feet, ready to pounce on any morsel that happened to fall to the floor. They didn’t budge when Liss returned to the kitchen, even though she’d brought a stranger with her.

  Barefoot, clad in sweatpants and a T-shirt, his hair still tousled from sleep, Donald MacCrimmon appeared to be no more alarmed than the cats were. “Company so early?” he asked.

  “Not exactly,” Liss said.

  The detective showed his badge again and introduced himself as Stanley Franklin.

  “Call me Mac,” Liss’s father invited. “Everyone does. Folks call you Stan?” He dipped his spoon into the cornflakes, carried it to his mouth, and chewed as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

  “Let’s stick to Detective Franklin for the present.” He pulled out a chair for himself and sat.

  “You go along to work, Liss,” her father said. “I know what the detective here wants and it’s nothing that needs to concern you.” He made a shooing motion.

  Franklin scooted his chair a little closer to the table and produced a small, spiral-bound notebook from the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

  Normally, Liss would have exited through the back door, since it was closest to the entrance to the Emporium’s stockroom. Instead, she retraced her steps into the hall and stopped as soon as she was out of sight of the table. She was still well within eavesdropping distance.

  There was no reason why she should rush in to work. It wasn’t likely she had customers lined up around the block. If, by some miracle, she did, then they’d just have to wait until she got there to let them in. Something strange was going on with her father. Something vaguely ominous. She didn’t intend to leave the house until she knew exactly what it was.

  Liss closed her eyes, the better to concentrate on the low murmur of voices in the kitchen. She nearly jumped out of her skin when a hand reached out through the door of the tiny downstairs bathroom and pulled her inside.

  “What does he want with your father?” Vi’s fingers tightened painfully around Liss’s forearm.

  “He didn’t say. What do you think he wants?”

  Instead of answering, Vi released Liss and started toward the kitchen. Liss hauled her back into the minuscule space between sink and toilet.

  “What is this about, Mom? You’re starting to scare me.”

  With a violent jerk, Vi freed herself from Liss’s grasp and bolted. Liss followed, entering the kitchen just in time to see Detective Franklin finish fingerprinting her father.

  “What are you doing!” Vi screeched.

  “Relax, Vi,” Mac said. “It’s just for purposes of elimination. Nothing to worry about.” He stood and walked casually over to the sink to wash up. “Are we done now, Detective?”

  “For the present.” Franklin rose, nodded to Vi and Liss, and let himself out through the back door.

  “Daddy? What’s going on?”

  “Nothing to worry your pretty little head about,” Mac said. But he concentrated on scrubbing his fingertips and wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  Vi made an exasperated sound.

  “Nothing,” he repeated.

  Vi looked from her husband to her daughter, threw her hands up in the air, and stormed out of the room. Her slippers made a loud flapping noise with every rapid step and when she passed through the foyer door, she slammed it behind her. Liss winced.

  “Hadn’t you better get to work?” Her father’s voice sounded as mild and unconcerned as ever.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to tell me—?”

&nbs
p; “I’m positive. Run along, sweet pea. And trust me—there’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  Liss wasn’t convinced, but she knew her father well enough to be sure he didn’t intend to satisfy her curiosity. By the time she unlocked the back door to the Emporium, she was already toying with the idea of phoning Gordon Tandy and asking him for information. She decided against it only because she suspected Gordon would be just as stubborn as her father when it came to revealing anything useful. He’d get on his high horse and tell her it was police business and none of hers.

  That was exactly what worried her—that the police had business with her father. Why on earth did the police want Donald MacCrimmon’s fingerprints?

  Liss tried to ignore the sense of impending doom that hung over her and concentrate on business as usual, but it wasn’t easy. She had only one walk-in customer that morning, and there weren’t many orders waiting to be filled from the online shop. At eleven, she put the BACK IN FIFTEEN MINUTES sign on the door, locked up, and walked over to the post office to collect her mail. That took all of five minutes.

  Rather than go straight back to the Emporium, she circled the town square to Patsy’s Coffee House and bought a fresh-baked sticky bun and a newspaper, selecting the one published in Three Cities rather than Portland, Lewiston, or Waterville. It wasn’t her usual choice. She wasn’t even consciously aware that she’d had a reason to pick that particular newspaper to read, not until she was back in the Emporium and looked below the fold.

  A recent picture of Alfred Leon Palsgrave took up an eighth of the page. It was a good, clear photograph showing his head and shoulders. Liss skimmed the article on the murder that had taken place at Anisetab College the previous day.

  “Huh,” she said under her breath. Details were still sketchy. No murder weapon was mentioned. No cause of death. No suspect’s name. It just stated that the police were “continuing their investigation” and that autopsy results were expected sometime in the next week.

  Her mother’s voice shouting “What have you done?” echoed in Liss’s mind. It was quickly followed by an image of her father, head bowed and washing ink off his fingers.

  You’re leaping to conclusions, she warned herself. There was absolutely no reason to think either of her parents had any connection to Professor Palsgrave’s murder.

  Except that her mother had obviously known him well enough to call him Lee.

  Liss tried to remember what she had been told about her parents in their younger days. They’d dated in high school and, after Vi graduated from college, they’d married. But what had happened during those four years away from Moosetookalook? With a snap, a pencil Liss hadn’t realized she’d been fiddling with broke in two. She dropped the halves as if they’d burned her fingers.

  She considered closing the store and going home. Instead she stayed behind the sales counter with the newspaper and reread every word of the article about the murder. It didn’t tell her much that she didn’t already know. The victim had been sixty-five, a tenured professor of history, and unmarried. His next of kin was apparently a sister in Cleveland. Sixty-five, she mused. That meant he’d been a very young professor at the time Vi was a student.

  Liss booted up her laptop. Once online, she typed Palsgrave’s name into the search engine. It wasn’t difficult to find information on the late professor. The hard part was choosing what to read first. Two hours later, when Liss finally logged out, she had a splitting headache.

  She’d found more than she’d bargained for. Way more. To say Palsgrave was controversial—within his small academic circle, at any rate—was putting it mildly. He’d had an excellent reputation as a scholar. That book he’d written, the one Liss stocked in the Emporium, had been the latest of several, although it was apparently the one that marked the beginning of his obsession with Henry Sinclair.

  Other scholars believed Sinclair might have reached the shores of North America at the very end of the fourteenth century. They agreed that one of Sinclair’s knights, a man named Gunn, had probably died near Westford, Massachusetts. The late professor, however, appeared to be unique in his interpretation of what had happened afterward. Palsgrave had been convinced that Sinclair massacred the “savages” who’d killed his friend—a brutal act of revenge. That was the event he’d intended to reenact at the Western Maine Highland Games.

  Had he been murdered to stop the reenactment? The idea seemed far-fetched, but Liss knew from experience that violence could be triggered by the most trivial of motives.

  The state police were looking into Palsgrave’s death, she reminded herself. His murder was not her concern. With a firm hand, she closed the laptop . . . and let out a yelp when her mother burst into the shop.

  The bell over the door jangled madly when Vi shoved it closed behind her. Her eyes were wild and her expression stricken.

  “Mother, what’s wrong?” Liss shot out from behind the counter, her stomach clenching in fear.

  “The police are back.” Vi’s voice was anguished and so shrill it hurt Liss’s ears. “They have a search warrant. They think your father killed Lee Palsgrave!”

  Chapter Five

  They weren’t allowed inside the house. With her mother, Liss stood on her own sidewalk, annoyed and frustrated, watching shadows move past her windows and wondering what on earth all those big, burly state troopers thought they were going to find.

  A tug on her sleeve had her looking down to meet the curious gaze of her ten-year-old neighbor, Beth Hogencamp. “What’s going on?” the girl asked.

  “I wish I knew. Beth, honey, will you do me a big favor?” At her nod, Liss sent the girl to the police station in the municipal building. “If Sherri Campbell is there, tell her she’s needed right away, okay?”

  Beth’s coltish legs ate up the distance as she shot across the town square, long, wavy brown hair streaming behind her like a banner. The daughter of the owner of Angie’s Books, another downtown Moosetookalook business, Beth had started learning Scottish dances from Liss almost two years earlier and had more recently become Zara’s star pupil.

  Vi’s attention remained fixed on Liss’s front porch. “This is ridiculous,” she muttered. “They’ve no cause to tear your house apart.”

  “It isn’t as if I own any priceless antiques. And I’m sure they’re being very careful.”

  She lied. She wasn’t certain of any such thing. She’d never had her possessions searched before, although she had once been obliged to clean up a mess in the Emporium—the result of fingerprint powder. She hoped she’d never have to repeat that experience.

  “Are you sure they didn’t say what they were looking for?” she asked her mother.

  “You mean, is it bigger than a bread box?” Vi’s sarcasm verged close to bitterness as she strode determinedly toward the porch, leaving Liss to stare after her in consternation.

  Vi’s entrance was blocked by a uniformed officer. Turned away at the door, she did not return to her daughter’s side. Instead, she went back to the Emporium and sat down on the porch steps.

  Sherri gave a low whistle as she came up beside Liss. “What’s going on?”

  “Darned if I know. Mom says Detective Franklin and his men showed up with a search warrant, but you know the state police. They never tell anyone anything.”

  Sherri, even in uniform, had no better luck than Vi had experienced. While Liss watched from her post on the grass just inside the town square, her friend was politely but firmly denied access. “He says I’ll have to talk to Detective Franklin,” Sherri reported, “but that Franklin is too busy to speak with me right now.”

  “I’ll just bet he is. Probably going through my underwear drawer.”

  Sherri’s eyebrows shot up.

  “Sorry. I’m a little upset over this.”

  “No kidding. I would be, too. Any idea what they’re looking for?”

  “Well, at a guess, I’d say a murder weapon, but since they haven’t released any information on how A. Leon Palsgrave was killed
, I have no idea what that weapon might be.”

  “Hmmm,” Sherri said, looking thoughtful.

  “What have you heard?”

  “Rumors.” She shrugged. “Nothing worth repeating.”

  “But Palsgrave was murdered?”

  “Oh, yes. The state police may not be talking, but the student who found the body was overheard when she came tearing out of Lincoln Hall. Apparently, there was blood all over the place.”

  “I guess he wasn’t poisoned, then.”

  Sherri acknowledged the dark humor with a fleeting smile. “Could have been shot, bludgeoned, or stabbed, but what I heard suggests the murder weapon was a knife.”

  “I can’t see it,” Liss said.

  “See what?”

  “My father stabbing someone. Anyone, let alone a guy he didn’t even know.”

  “Whoa. Start over. I think I missed a beat. What does your father have to do with this?”

  “Franklin took his fingerprints this morning, the first time he was here. It doesn’t take a genius to guess that he thinks my father had something to do with the murder.”

  “Are you saying that Mac was in the victim’s classroom?”

  “I don’t know! Dad refused to talk about it.”

  “This is not good.” Sherri sounded as worried as Liss felt.

  Liss looked around for her mother and found Vi still sitting on the steps. She had her elbows propped on her knees and her face buried in her hands. If Liss hadn’t known Vi better, she’d have thought her mother was crying. That, of course, was impossible. Vi never cried.

  “Don’t look now,” Sherri whispered, “but we’re drawing a crowd.”

  Liss didn’t have to turn to know that half the town was probably collecting on the square behind them. News spread fast in small, rural communities. That was a good thing in an emergency, when volunteers were needed to put out a fire or search for a missing child, but just this once Liss wished the grapevine wasn’t quite so efficient.