A Wee Murder in My Shop (A ScotShop Mystery) (8 page)

“I know this is your day off, but can you and Sam come help me pick up the bookcase?”

There was a brief pause as Shoe digested my question. “Pick it up? Where’d it go? Out gallivanting? Has it been arrested?”

“Very funny. It fell over last night.”

“Fell over?” I could practically hear the wheels turning, but Shoe couldn’t seem to think of a smart-aleck reply to that one. “Fell over,” he repeated.

“Yeah. On top of Percy’s leg.” I tried not to whine, but that was what it sounded like.

“Peh-eh-gee,” he whined back at me, making three syllables out of my name, “that bookcase couldn’t possibly fall over. I know. I helped you move it in there, and it’s as sturdy as . . . a tree,” he finished—without much imagination, I thought.

“Yeah? You think? Like Grandpa’s beech?” Our Grandpa Winn had lost half his roof a few years back when a sturdy old beech tree succumbed to a heavier-than-usual snowfall. The fact that Grandpa had backed into it with his pickup truck a number of times over the past five years might have added to the tree’s stress. But no truck had hit my shop. I was sure of that. “So,” I said, “are you going to get over here and help me?”

“Is . . . uh”—his voice took on a studied nonchalance—“is Gilda there yet?”

We’d all grown up together—my cousins, my brother, Andrew, and I from the Winn crowd, and Gilda Buchanan, whose parents lived four doors down the street from our house and three doors up from Sam and Shoe. Andrea was part of that crowd, too, but I wasn’t going to think about her. Gilda was just another kid to play with back then. Blonde pigtails, snub nose. But now Gilda, Sam, and Shoe worked for me. A couple of months ago, Shoe sort of woke up and realized the girl of his dreams had been right there all along. I grinned as I remembered. I’d seen it happen. One day when Shoe and Gilda were on the same shift, Shoe looked at her, did a double take, and took a step backward. I thought it was funnier than heck, especially since Gilda paid about as much attention to him as she would to an overzealous puppy.

“Soon,” I said. “She’ll be in at her regular time. Looks like I’m going to have to keep the shop closed until we can get the mess cleaned up.” I hoped the woman who had tapped on the glass earlier would be patient. I walked between two racks of tartan skirts, placed far enough apart to allow for wheelchair access. “How soon can you get here?”

“Will you let me put on my kilt first?”

I stuck out my tongue at him, even though he couldn’t possibly see me. I knew he couldn’t. His apartment above the hardware store up the street was not in a line of sight from here. Sam lived there, too, to the left at the top of the stairs. Shoe lived to the right.

“Quit sticking out your tongue. It makes you look cross-eyed.”

He knew me way too well. “Bring Sam with you,” I told him, and looked up as my store manager tapped on the door. She must have forgotten her key again. “Be right there, Gilda,” I called. I heard a muffled gasp on the other end of the phone line and knew that my cousin would be on my doorstep within moments. “Don’t forget Sam,” I hollered at him, but heard only that vacant nobody-there sound in reply. I started to stick my tongue out at him again but changed it to licking my lips when Dirk cleared his throat.

Death by Bookcase

I
unlocked the door. Gilda stepped in, and her already-wide eyes came close to popping out of their sockets. In a voice almost as high-pitched as the bell above the door, she asked, “Whatever did you do to the bookcase?”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m glad you think I’m strong enough to knock a three-hundred-pound bookcase over all by myself.”

“It weighs three hundred pounds?” Gilda sounded a bit breathless as she closed the door and followed me toward the back, but then, she always sounded breathless. Dirk walked behind the two of us. Even when I was ignoring him, I was aware of him.

“I was guessing, Gilda. Exaggerating.” I pushed my toe against the bookcase, just beside where Percy’s leg disappeared beneath the wood. “It might as well weigh that much. The point is, it’s very heavy.”

“Why would the bookcase fall over? I thought it was pretty secure.”

“So did I.”

Dirk clambered over the bookcase. I supposed he couldn’t hurt it. How much did a ghost weigh? “Wood as sturdy as this doesna fall on its own. This—’twas pushed over.” He knelt next to Percy.

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

Gilda gave me a look. “Huh?”

“Nothing. Just thinking out loud.”

“’Twas moved away from the wall before that.”

He must have noticed the confused look I gave him. He pointed to the base of the bookcase. “This part is several feet awae from the wall. The other side is close.”

He stood abruptly, and I missed one or two of his words while I pondered the strength of those leg muscles that had propelled him so quickly to his feet. Of course, he was a ghost, so maybe it didn’t take as much muscle power for him as it would have for me.

“. . . ye had to use a key on yon door.”

I shifted gears. He was right. There was that heavy dead bolt lock on the front door. The trouble was, the back door had a rather questionable lock, but I’d never advertised the fact. I’d meant to replace it, but one thing had led to another, and I had to admit, I’d never worried much. I trusted the people in this town.

Shoe was the only one I knew of who had taken advantage of my lock lapse. Well, he and Drew, my twin brother. They’d squeaked the door open several times and left some rather dubious “gifts” for me—a plastic mouse once just beside the cash register, a rubber snake on the rolltop desk in the back room as a birthday present, and a disgustingly realistic-looking puddle of fake vomit—I was pretty sure that was Drew’s idea—draped artistically over my measuring tape on the shelf underneath the counter. The jokes finally quit three years ago, right after Drew’s accident, when I hired Shoe and he began to take more of an interest in the ScotShop. No. He wouldn’t have done this. He never would have hurt Percy. Neither would Sam; and of course, my brother couldn’t have done it. But who? Was there someone who hated me enough to mess up my shop like this?

My ex-boyfriend crossed my mind. No. Despite the fact that I’d slugged him, I couldn’t imagine that Mason Kilmarty would want to harm my store.

The bell jangled, and Shoe charged in. I glared at my assistant. “Gilda, what happened to the rule about locking the door behind you when you come in?”

“Oh, gosh, I forgot. I’m sorry.”

“Yes, I know, but
sorry
doesn’t help when an early customer barges in and we’re not ready. Why don’t you go ahead and get the cash register open? It shouldn’t take too long to clean up this mess.” I turned to Shoe. “Lock that door.” I shouldn’t have had to remind him. “Did you call Sam?”

“Uh . . .”

I whipped out my phone again and went through much the same conversation with Sam as I had with Shoe a few minutes earlier, except without the reference to Gilda.

Gilda opened the curtain behind the display window and headed toward the disaster. I watched her curly blonde hair bob around the bookcase, as she picked up odd broken bits as she came upon them. Shoe followed her, hands outstretched, and she passed the pieces to him.

He walked past me on his way to the trashcan.

“Finding any treasure?”

He held out his large cupped hands and rolled his eyes. “Buncha crud, mostly.”

I glanced at the mess. Besides my twenty-five-foot tape measure, what he held was mostly junk—some broken bits of a Culloden stone replica, pieces of shattered crockery from the hand-thrown bowls a local craftsman had made for us—I hated to lose those; I never should have put them on the top shelf like that—two keys, several curlicues of carved wood that I recognized as the top border of a fancy bookend. This was going to be expensive. “Where’d you find the tape measure?”

“On the floor behind the bookcase. Must have fallen off the counter and bounced, but it shoulda been on the shelf underneath.”

That was my fault. I could have sworn I’d put it away after I’d used it to measure the distance between some of the racks we’d moved. I like to keep everything as accessible as I can. Most stores are so crammed, nobody in a wheelchair can get farther than three feet from the front door. “Well, put it back where it belongs. I shouldn’t have left it out.”

I stepped away from the counter while Shoe dumped the junk into the trash. He returned to where Gilda held even more broken bits for him.

Dirk had lain flat on the floor beside the bookcase and seemed to be peering under it. “Ye need to pull Master Percy out of there.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Nothing Gilda. Just wondering why this happened.”

She grinned. “Maybe we had an earthquake.”

“Ye maun do it now.”

Maun.
That meant
must
. What was the big deal? “Shoe, lift the top of the bookcase a few inches, just enough for us to drag Percy out.”

He flexed his biceps. “I’ll pick up the whole thing.”

“He doesna need to lift it.”

“Huh, why not?”

Shoe paused. “Why not what?”

“The case of books isna resting on the leg.”

I bent to take a closer look. He was right. There was an inch or two of air above Percy’s leg. “Shoe, help me here.” We dragged Percy a few feet, and left him behind a rack of poet shirts. The top edge of the bookcase still hovered above the floor.

Dirk muttered something that I didn’t catch.

“Looks like something else is caught under there,” Shoe said. “You didn’t have a second mannequin standing over here, did you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” The granite bookends shaped like Urquhart Castle were the only items sturdy enough to hold half the bookcase off the floor like this. I had visions of the dents they’d leave on the shelf edges.

“Are ye not going to lift the bookcase?”

“Not yet. Where the heck is Sam? We need him before we can lift this thing.”

“Aye. I suppose ye do. It doesna appear that ’twill matter.”

What was he talking about?

Shoe grabbed up a small, unbroken plastic statue of the Loch Ness Monster. “Maybe Nessie did it.” I sold those hokey things because of Hamelin’s nearby lake, Lake Ness, named by a long-ago resident with a warped sense of humor.

“And maybe you have a screw loose, Sh’muel.” The only time I ever used his given name was when I was upset with him. My mother’s twin, my aunt Minnie, had been in one of her phases when she had twin boys. Named them Shadrach and Sh’muel, and not a Jewish bone in the family anywhere, or not that we knew of. Of course, even before grade school, they’d become Sam and Shoe. If they’d been triplets, we’d probably have a Methuselah in our midst. I shuddered to think of what his nickname would have been. Whatever had Aunt Minnie been thinking? Still, in a town where old Scottish given names like Stenhouse, Macaslan, Ruskin, and Macourlic abounded (with first names like that, you could tell there were loads of Buchanans and Camerons in this area), what was so unusual about Shadrach and Sh’muel?

I headed past the bookcase, intending to see if anything had fallen over in the storeroom. Maybe there
had
been an earthquake. As I approached that door, though, I glanced to my left and noticed the wall behind the bookcase. Behind where the bookcase should have been, that is. A long gouge ran down the wallpaper where a strip of wallpaper had been torn and left dangling.

“Dammit,” I yelled, and Gilda came running, Shoe right after her. “Look at this! Whoever upended the bookcase ripped my wallpaper.” I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed the damage right away.

“You never liked it that much anyway,” Shoe said in a disgustingly reasonable voice.

“That’s not the point. Now I’ll have to replace it.” I looked at the forty-foot expanse of wall and groaned. “I don’t want to spend that kind of money.”

“You could just patch it,” Gilda said. “Don’t you still have that roll of paper in the back?”

“I suppose I could.” The thought of trying to match those swirling flocked flowers gave me a touch of vertigo.

Shoe reached beneath the cash register to the shelf where we kept all the odds and ends a shop needs but doesn’t want the customers to see. “For now, just tape it up.”

I took the roll of tape with some reluctance. Of course, the bookcase would cover the damaged area, but it seemed distinctly shoddy to do this to the old-fashioned wallpaper. I lifted the strip and was surprised to find a hole in the wall near the top of where the wallpaper had been ripped down. About an eighth of an inch in diameter, perfectly round—as if it had been drilled—a bit above the level of my knees.

I ran my hand over the wall and found four—no, five more holes. What on earth was going on? I looked up, ready to call the others, but the phone rang and Gilda went to answer it. Shoe had apparently lost interest and was bent down picking up more of the mess. Dirk peered over my shoulder.

“The wee holes look as if something was nailed there.”

“They weren’t there when I bought the place,” I said.

“What?” Shoe straightened up and squinted at me. Did he need glasses?

“Nothing. Just talking to myself.”

Dirk grinned.

I set the tape down and walked into the employees-only part of the shop, intending to step into the small bathroom and see if the holes came through back there. Dirk followed me.

The back door. That was how whoever had done this had gotten in. I forgot the bathroom and headed toward the door. Not only was it not locked, it wasn’t even closed all the way. Why did I have a good dead bolt lock on the front door and a puny thing like this on the back? Why was I thinking about this now instead of two weeks ago?

Dirk wandered around the room, gazing at plastic bins, cardboard boxes, metal drawers. Life must have been a lot simpler way back when he lived.

I poked my head outside. Nothing suspicious in the alley. The Dumpster, the rear doors of other businesses, the privacy fencing that separated the backs of the stores from the backyards of the homes on Beech Street. The usual stuff. I ran my hand over the outside of my door. No sign of a crowbar or anything like that. Well, heck, of course not. Shoe had told me all he and my brother ever had to do was lift the doorknob to make the whole thing pop open. I closed the door and pushed the little button. I’d send Shoe to the hardware store later for a real lock.

I looked around. The old rolltop desk that had been here forever—or so I assumed—was still piled as high as before. The practical joker should have stolen my paper monster. I would have been eternally grateful. I had a fairly good idea of what was in my inventory, and nothing seemed to be missing, but I had to admit it was hard to tell in a space as crammed as this was. It wasn’t enough that I had to store all my own stuff—inventory, repair items, file cabinets with all my financial info—but Shoe still hadn’t picked up the things he’d left here when
last
year’s baseball season ended. I pushed his second-best glove away from the edge of a table and walked back into the showroom, pausing to let Dirk through before I let the door swing shut.

Sam showed up fairly quickly, ready for work, wearing a Gordon kilt. “I like it better than the Winn tartan,” he’d told me a couple of years ago. “As long as I have to wear a kilt, it might as well be one that matches my eyes.” And he’d blinked his lashes in a parody of a 1930s showgirl.

I took a discreet look at him. Had to admit, the blues and greens set off his blond hair better than our Winn burgundy would have. “Anyway,” he’d added, “the customers won’t care what I wear, as long as it’s a kilt.” He was right about that.

Gilda locked the door behind him. Good. “Point me to this moving job,” he said.

Gilda pointed. Sam gaped. Typical reaction. The bookcase was such a sturdy presence in the shop, its demise—because that was what it looked like—was downright disconcerting.

“What’s the damage?” He spoke in an awed whisper.

“I imagine everything is at least dented, if not smashed,” I said. “Everything except the Urquhart castles.”

“Urquhart?” Dirk sounded confused. Of course.

“Those little statues of the castle are pretty sturdy,” I explained.

“Ah,” said Dirk.

Shoe rolled his eyes. “We know that.”

Sam smirked at the supine mannequin. “He’s come down in the world.” He wiped his face clear when I frowned at him.

“I’ll thank you to remember he’s one of a unique line that’s been discontinued. Worth a lot to collectors.”