Kilt Dead (16 page)

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 money.

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 Willett.

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.