Kilt Dead (35 page)

“Ned? Ned, you have to do the right thing. You know
that.”

“The right thing?”

“You have to call the police. I’ll hire a lawyer for you.
A good one” Given the circumstances, he might not even
have to serve time in jail.

Ned’s eyes blinked back into focus. “Do you know
what I thought about doing when I was in Mom’s apartment that night and you were sleeping blissfully in the
guestroom?”

“No, Ned, I don’t.”

“I thought, what if Liss were to commit suicide? Then
everyone would be sure she killed Mrs. Norris. They’d
say she couldn’t live with the guilt.”

Liss stared at him, horrified to realize that he was perfectly serious. And that was exactly what LaVerdiere had
thought, after her car

“Ohmigod! You did something to my car! I could have
drowned,” she added in a horrified whisper.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen. You were just supposed to go into a tree or something.”

“Oh, thank you very much!”

He shrugged.

“What … what did you do?”

“Poked a hole in an intake hose” He sounded proud of
himself. “Created a vacuum leak. Figured it would take
you up to maximum speed and when you tried to brake,
you’d lose control.”

“But you didn’t intend for me to end up dead.” She
couldn’t quite keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

“Well, no. I just wanted to put you out of commission
for a while. And if the cops thought it was a suicide attempt, so much the better. You were sniffing around, getting too close. Besides, it’s your own fault I was able to
pop the hood. You’re the one who left your car unlocked.
I just happened to be in Fallstown that day. I saw you go
into the real estate office, realized the car was out of sight
in that little parking lot… “He shrugged.

Temper provoked her into speech. “You’re lying, Ned.
You didn’t just happen to know how to rig an accident
with my car. You aren’t an expert on engines. You had to
have gone online and done some research”

His eyes narrowed. “That’s my story and I’m sticking
to it. Besides, I’d never have had to do anything to the car
if Ruskin hadn’t shown up at the wrong time at Mrs. Norris’s house”

She thought back to the day she and Ned had gone in
together to feed the cat and blanched. “What did you plan
to do? Push me down the stairs?”

“I was thinking about it. You just had to meddle, didn’t
you? I didn’t really want to hurt you. Liss. I’d probably
have changed my mind that day. But now-now I’ve got
no choice. You know too much.”

Liss stood so rapidly that her chair toppled over. Ned
mirrored her action in slow motion, making her excruciatingly aware that he was taller, wider, and stronger than
she.

“This won’t work,” she whispered. “I told Sherri I was
coming here”

“Not a problem. I’ll be properly distraught when your
body is found”

“How on earth are you going to make it look like suicide, Ned? You can’t strangle or shoot me. That would pretty obviously be murder.” Her heart hammered in her
ears. She hoped she wasn’t going to faint.

“Scared, Liss? You should be. You always were annoying. Tagging along where you weren’t wanted. Snooping.
And then that old bat left you all her money! Was that
fair?”

She’d always thought of Ned as lazy and laid-back.
She’d have described his eyes, if she’d considered them at
all, as dull or sleepy. Now they blazed with hatred. Fear of
exposure had driven him over some invisible edge. He
was beyond listening to reason.

“A fall is always good” He sounded as calm as if they
were discussing the weather or what to have for supper.
“We’ll go up on the roof. It’s not all that high, but it’ll do
the job. And I can tell everyone how you came here to
confess to me, then ran up there and threw yourself off.”

She might survive a fall. Maybe. But she had no desire
to find out. “How are you going to get me up there?”

“You can walk. Or I can clip you on the jaw and carry
you”

“I’ll walk.” And hope she’d be able to get away.

Pushing her ahead of him, one hand firmly clasped
around her upper arm, he guided her into the hallway, deserted at this time of the morning, and up the roof stairs.
They came out onto a nearly flat surface. Low parapets
surrounded it, just at a convenient level to trip over.
Someone had left an aluminum lawn chair set up. Liss
supposed the roof was occasionally used for sunbathing,
but no one was there today, nor were the odds good that
anyone would notice them up here. Even if they did, a
struggle at the edge of the roof would be interpreted in
hindsight as Ned trying to keep her from jumping. Winners wrote the history books. Hadn’t Mrs. Norris said
that, way back in third grade?

Liss bided her time. If she was going to escape, she had to lull Ned into a false sense of security. He hadn’t
seen that much of her in the last ten years. She was still
the much-younger cousin to him. The tag-along.

“Can’t we talk about this?” She tried to make herself
sound desperate and weak.

“Sorry, Liss. This is the best solution all around.” He
gave her a shove toward the edge of the roof.

She wasn’t going to get a better chance. The moment
his hand left her shoulder, she whirled and kicked. Even
after three months of retirement, in spite of the bumps
and bruises she’d sustained in the last few days, years of
dancing had left Liss with strong legs and an agility her
cousin lacked. Her flying foot caught him in the shoulder.

“You bitch!” he bellowed, staggering backward. He
stared at her, enraged and disbelieving.

The jarring force of the blow had Liss’s newly healed
knee protesting the sudden resumption of high-impact
exercise, but she ignored the pain and took advantage of
Ned’s surprise to grab the lawn chair. She swung it hard,
connecting first with the middle of his chest, then with
the side of his head. Ned’s eyes rolled back as he went
down.

They both landed hard, Ned in an ungainly, unmoving
sprawl and Liss, backpedaling to get out of the way, with
a yelp as she lost her balance. The wind knocked out of
her, it took her a moment to pull herself upright on the
sun-warmed gravel that covered the roof. She looked
around for her cousin, but he was still down for the count.

Don’t kid yourself, she thought. He could revive at
any moment and she was a long way from a phone. The
one she’d used to call Sherri was in her purse, and her
purse was in Ned’s apartment.

Liss did a quick assessment of her injuries. She had
scrapes, bruises, maybe even a twisted ankle on her good
leg. She was alive and relatively undamaged, but she wasn’t sure she could walk, let alone do stairs, and this time she
had no dance team to support her until she reached the
wings.

“Crawling it is,” she muttered after her first attempt to
stand verified that she’d done damage to both her ankle
and her knee.

The sound of footsteps pounding up the stairs was
music to her ears. When she recognized Dan’s voice calling her name she could have wept.

“Sherri will pick you up at the airport,” Liss told her
aunt.

She didn’t want to go into detail on the phone about
the twisted ankle that made it impossible for her to drive
to Portland Jetport. Nor did she explain that Sherri had
realized before Liss did that Ned wasn’t going to quietly
confess to killing Mrs. Norris. Stuck in Fallstown, Sherri
had not been about to sit tight and do nothing when she
was certain Liss was walking straight into danger. She’d
been unable to send in the local constabulary-they were
tied up with a tractor-trailer accident out on Ridge Road
so she’d called Dan at the construction site. He’d arrived
at Ned’s apartment building just in time to hear Ned
shout, “You bitch!”

“How’s she holding up?” Dan asked when Liss hung up.

“Hard to tell. I think she’s still in shock.” Twenty-four
hours after Ned’s arrest, Liss was far from sanguine about
the situation herself. Her own cousin had tried to kill her.
How was she supposed to react to that?

“Did you tell her you were staying here?”

“No. I’ll probably be able to hobble up to the apartment by the time she gets home”

Forbidden by the emergency room doctor she’d seen to
climb stairs until the swelling in her ankle went down, Liss had temporarily moved into the downstairs of Mrs. Norris’s
house. Her house, she corrected herself. The local grapevine
had brought out the neighbors in force to help her settle in.
They’d made sure she was comfortable and had plenty to
eat, as well as plenty of company. Patsy had paid a visit this
morning, bringing a fresh batch of “wicked good” sticky
buns.

Dan had stayed the night.

She smiled up at him from the Canadian rocker. Both
feet were propped up on a hassock. She had a clear view
of the neighborhood but she had realized something-the
neighbors were keeping an eye on her, too. In a good way.
Horrible as the experience with Ned had been, since then
she had truly begun to feel as if she belonged here, as if
she was a part of Moosetookalook.

“I’m thinking about staying on here awhile.”

“Till you’re on your feet again?”

“Maybe longer than that. I have to decide what to do
about this house and Lumpkin. And Aunt Margaret ..:’
She let her voice trail off. On the phone from Scotland,
her aunt had been talking about selling the Emporium to
raise money for her son’s legal defense. Liss wasn’t sure
how she felt about helping that effort but, in spite of
everything Ned had done, she knew she couldn’t abandon
his mother. “I’ll stay as long as Aunt Margaret needs me”

Leaning against the wall, he grinned down at her.
“Stick around long enough and you may even be able to
get that scone recipe to come out right.”

In spite of her worries about her aunt, Liss couldn’t
help but respond to his teasing. “That last batch wasn’t so
bad”

“Wasn’t too good, either.”

She made a face at him. “The next batch will be good,”
she promised. “And the batch after that”-she paused for
effect “will be wicked good”

Please turn the page for a sneak peek at the
next exciting Liss MacCrimmon mystery,
SCONE COLD DEAD,
coming in hardcover in August 2008!

I o,” Dan Ruskin said. “Explain this to me ”
1

►Liss MacCrimmon shot him an incredulous look.
Explain what? The sequence of dance steps that made up
a Highland Fling? The years of training that went into
creating a professional dancer? Her life?

Former life, she reminded herself, and felt a sharp pang
in a region of her heart for all she had lost. In a few minutes the lights in the auditorium would dim and the show
would begin. Members of Strathspey, the company of
Scottish dancers Liss had belonged to from the time she
was nineteen until a career-ending knee injury forced her
into “retirement” seven months earlier, had come to Fallstown, Maine, to perform.

At her urging, Liss reminded herself. This had been
her own idea. She’d made all the arrangements to bring
the show to the University of Maine’s Fallstown campus.
Time to suck up any regrets and try to enjoy the evening.
Besides, seeing the show from this side of the curtain
would bring closure. She hoped.

“Liss?” Dan prompted.

She’d overreacted to his question. He was showing an
interest, that was all. Turning her face up to his, Liss forced
a smile.

It wasn’t really a hardship to smile at Dan Ruskin under
any circumstances. He’d been a childhood friend. Since Liss’s return to her old hometown he’d become something
more, although she wasn’t entirely sure where their relationship was heading. At the moment, they lived in separate houses, each facing the town square in Moosetookalook,
a picturesque village just north of Fallstown in the western Maine mountains.

Dan smiled back, showing an engagingly boyish grin.
He’d always had that, even when he was a gangly kid who
seemed to be all arms and legs. During the ten years Liss
had been away, first in a two-year college and then pursuing her career, he’d turned into what one of Liss’s friends
liked to call “a tall drink of water.” He was a pure pleasure
to look at-sandy-brown hair worn a little too long, eyes
the color of molasses, and a lean, well-muscled build.
The work he did-construction with his father’s company
and making custom furniture in his spare time-kept him
in shape and gave him the sort of fluid grace Liss associated with lions. Dan Ruskin: king of the jungle.