A Wee Dose of Death by Fran Stewart Read Free Book Online Page A

the scent of dead meat? Most of the bears would be hibernating by now, but there were always a few, usually the cranky males, who wandered the forest until well after the first snowfall. The dead guy didn’t smell too bad yet; Max could tell he’d been killed only recently. The blood on the floor hadn’t frozen yet, and the blood that had soaked into the collar of the guy’s brown plaid flannel shirt was still a bright red. But the smell would build if Mac didn’t get help soon. The bear would come. Mac could have kicked himself for not bringing his rifle along.
    He made it across the floor in record time, considering the state of his leg and the awkwardness of the ski splint. He closed the door and wedged one of the two chairs in the room under the knob. No bear was getting in here while Mac had breath.
    Still, what if it wasn’t a bear trying to get in? What wouldhappen if the ax wielder came back? Even if the wedged chair held, there were four windows.
    Even if the ax was still inside the cabin, Mac had to admit to himself—he’d never admit it to anyone else—that in his present condition he couldn’t fight off a kitten, much less a murderous maniac. Not with his leg the way it was.
    Mac’s gut clenched. The police chief of Hamelin was scared.

9

    Crisp Enough to Freeze
    T he air was crisp enough to freeze the little hairs inside my nose, so it had to be colder than ten degrees. Anything warmer than that, and your nose hairs don’t freeze. Just one of those handy little Vermont truisms. So maybe the old Scots didn’t need thermometers. Dirk was right, doggone him.
    I grabbed my skis from the shed out back and, while Dirk pestered me with questions, I took a moment to scrape them lightly and buff on a layer of blue wax. Most everybody in town prepared their skis like this well before the first big snowfall was predicted.
    I usually did, too, but with the big kilt shipment we’d had to process Friday and Saturday, I hadn’t taken the time. It wouldn’t take long to whip my skis into shape, though.
    People new to the art of cross-country skiing usually bought tons of paraphernalia that we old-timers didn’t bother with. An old-timer in skiing is anyone who’s been on skis their whole life, whether that life is five years or, as in my case, thirty.
    Sporting goods stores like to sell new skiers fancy little pouches filled with four or five different colors of ski wax for different snow conditions—purple, red, blue, green, and yellow for gliding and another set of colors formulated for kicking off. The klister waxes are like glue. I guess you use those to keep from sliding off the side of an icy mountain. Sure can’t go fast with sticky gunk on your skis.
    Then there were scrapers, spreaders, corks, warming irons, rilling tools, special brushes made of some sort of exotic bristle; the increasingly expensive list seemed to multiply every year as more people took up the sport and more companies saw the possibility of a big profit margin. Maybe professional long-distance racing skiers needed some of those things, but most of the rest of us just threw on a basic coat of blue wax at the beginning of the season and headed out once the first snow fell.
    I loved gliding across a fresh snowfall. I pointed myself out of town toward the forest. Dirk stayed close to my side. After all, this was his first snowfall in more than six hundred years. I doubted that was a factor, though, as to why he stuck so close. “Stuck” was the operative word. He couldn’t stray more than a yard or two from the shawl as long as we were outside my house. There was some sort of exception to the ghostly rule, though. In my house and in the ScotShop he could roam around to his heart’s content, but anywhere else he was restricted unless he was carrying the shawl. Maybe I should have let him carry it, but there was a piece of me that wondered if he might run away