A Wee Dose of Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

there. This would be the last one. He couldn’t keep going without Denby. He didn’t even want to try.
    *   *   *
    â€œI recall many winters in Scotland,” Dirk told me, “when the snow was so thick we were hard put by to keep ourselves alive. The cellar below our house was dug deep, back into the hill.”
    The hill, as he called it, was the impressive Ben y Vrackie, now something of a tourist destination north of Pitlochry. I’d first seen Dirk there when I took a walk up that particular mountain to a grassy meadow. He’d initially mistaken me for his ladylove. Once we got that straightened out, it took him a while to resign himself to being dead.
    He said something else, but I’d missed his train of thought.
    â€œInto the hill,” I said. “Like a cave?”
    His eyebrows lowered. “Ye werena listening, yet again. But aye, ’twas cavelike. One winter, when I was but a lad, we lost many of our goats. We spent months in the cave.”
    â€œWhat did you eat?”
    He gave me a quizzical look. “The bounty of the summer garden, of course.”
    â€œOh,” I said. “Of course.”
    â€œNeeps, mostly. Carrots. Cabbage. Onions. Nothing else lasted so well.”
    Neeps? Yuck. I knew that was what they called turnips. How on earth could anybody last a whole winter on turnips and cabbage? Still, it would sure be better than starving to death. If I had to depend on my own garden, I’d never make it. Other than a hill of zucchini, an area full of radishes, three tomato bushes, and the big asparagus patch that had been here for generations, my idea of gardening was asters, dahlias, dill, milkweed, sunflowers, daisies—and the dozens of other plants bumblebees and butterflies needed in order to thrive. I’d tried growing carrots one summer, but they ended up unbelievably crooked—guess I should have pulled more rocks out of the stony Vermont soil.
    â€œ. . . are they doing, foreby?”
    I came back with a start. “Who? What?”
    He nodded out the window, and I joined him, accidentally grazing his elbow and feeling that increasingly familiar sense of cool water flowing across my arm.
    He stood a little straighter, so I knew he’d felt me touch him.
    Outside, on the two feet of snow accumulated on the front lawns throughout Hamelin, a bevy of X-C skiers glided along the narrow parallel paths they’d been carving into the top few inches of snow cover in this our first big snow of the season.
    â€œPractically everyone in town skis,” I told Dirk. “Either downhill or cross-country, or both.”
    â€œSkees.” He tried out the word. “What would be
downill
?”
    â€œDown hill.” I emphasized the two syllables. “It’s not like what
they’re
doing.” I gestured out the window. “In downhill skiing, you go really fast down the side of a mountain.”
    â€œFor why?”
    Good question. “For the thrill of it, I guess. I’m too chicken to try Alpine—downhill—skiing. I’ve seen too many people with broken bones. I prefer the X-C way.”
    â€œWhat would be an eksy weigh?”
    â€œHuh? Oh. They’re initials. X. C. That means cross-country. Sometimes it’s called Nordic skiing. Cross-country is the kind they’re doing out there.”
    â€œDo ye ever break your bones in eksy skeeing?”
    â€œNah. It’s pretty sedate—at least it is the way I do it. Nothing ever happens to people on cross-country skis. Unless they’re stupid enough to ski alone and get lost in the mountains.”
    *   *   *
    Except for the wrap-up, which he hadn’t decided on yet, Marcus had everything on USB flash drives. Denby had firmly believed in backing up everything more than once, and he’d taught Marcus to do the same.
    He took a deep breath and picked up one dead branch from the snow-free area under the