A Wee Murder in My Shop (A ScotShop Mystery) by Fran Stewart Page A

handful of the odd bits he’d been gathering. They looked rather woebegone next to the cash register. “Try not to step on anything,” I said. “There may be a few items that didn’t break.” Fat chance, I thought, but I could always hope.
    Shoe pushed past me. “We can handle this.” Macho, I thought
.
Still, I was perfectly happy to let them do the lifting. “One, two, three.” They hauled the bookcase to an upright position and manhandled it into place back against the wall. I wondered if I could rig up some sort of brace that would keep this from happening again.
    Gilda screamed.
    “I do believe ye have a problem here,” Dirk intoned.
    My stomach roiled, and I slapped my hand over my mouth. I couldn’t throw up, I couldn’t, I couldn’t.
    Shoe reached out and pulled Gilda toward him. He sort of tucked her under his arm and she shut up. I turned my attention to the reason the bookcase hadn’t lain flat.
    He was definitely dead, but books and movies said you had to be sure, so I bent gingerly beside him, careful not to touch the blood, and felt the wrist on his splayed-out hand. I was fairly sure the carotid artery was a better place to feel for a pulse, but there was no way I was going anywhere near his smashed-in face.
    His skin was cold. Clammy. Nothing moved. No breath, no pulse. Nothing.
    “Shoe, that’s your bat.” Sam stood still, bracing the bookcase as if afraid it might fall again.
    Shoe cleared his throat. He cleared it again. “It’s only my spare.”
    Sam mumbled something, then said more clearly, “Who is it?”
    A muffled sound came from Gilda, her face still buried in the front of Shoe’s shirt.
    I took a deep breath, swallowed the bitter fluid inching its way up my throat. Even with his face caved in, I knew it was Mason. I recognized his tartan. And the length of his hairy legs. His kilt was hiked up almost indecently. No mistaking that small reddish-purple birthmark, shaped like a comma, quite a ways above his knee. If it had been on his knee, everyone else would have known about it. That’s what happened when you lived in a tourist town where most of the men wore kilts all summer long. No knees were ever sacrosanct. But I was probably the only person in town who knew about this birthmark. I and his mother. And Andrea, damn her.
    Gilda seemed to choke. “It’s Mason.”
    Shoe made a dismissive gesture. “You can’t be sure.”
    “Yes, I can. I recognized his . . . kilt.”
    Was it my imagination, or had she paused a moment too long before that last word? I reached out to pull his kilt down a couple of inches.
    Why would anyone want to kill Mason Kilmarty? Other than the fact that he was an obnoxious bastard, that is. Of course, I hadn’t always felt that way.
    Thank goodness Percy hadn’t landed in the blood, I thought, and was instantly ashamed of myself. Mason was dead. A baseball bat lay next to him. A dark red blotch stained several inches of the rounded end. Blood, I assumed. Mason’s blood.
    “There isna enough blood,” Dirk said, and I looked at him in some confusion. “I’ve seen a man bludgeoned near to death, when Caw McFarlane ran awa’ wi’ John Macnaughton’s wife. John caught up wi’ them that night and went after Caw wi’ a hoe handle. Struck him many times. The blood near covered the walls of the shed, and John as well.” He spread his arm. “There should be blood everywhere here.” He paused. “Unless only one blow was struck.”
    I was still having trouble controlling the contents of my stomach, but I could see the sense in what he said. “Somebody would have had to hit him pretty hard to do this much damage in one blow,” I said.
    Shoe grunted as if he’d been struck. “You can do that with . . . with a baseball bat,” he said. “You’d have to have a good windup though.”
    Sam pantomimed swinging a bat. There would have been enough room. The counter with the cash register stood a good seven feet from the bookcase.
    Mason’s