Watkins - 05 - Poison Heart

by Mary Logue

  “I heard she was a good walker.”

  “She was.”

  “Did Patty Jo come to visit her that day?”

  Jolene thought back. “I think she did. I kinda remember her showing up after I got Florence back into her room. Patty Jo came by once or twice a week. It’s hard to keep it straight.”

  “Did she ever bring Florence things to eat?”

  “Oh, yes. We encouraged that. Florence had a sweet tooth.”

  “Might she have brought her something that day? Do you remember?”

  “Well, I’m not sure if it was that day, but shortly before Florence died, she brought her some jelly. I think it was homemade. Crabapple or something like that.”

  “Jelly. Would anyone else have eaten it?”

  “Oh, no. When people bring in some food for a patient, we mark it with their name and put it in the fridge.”

  Claire didn’t dare hope. “Is there any chance that jelly might still be in the fridge?”

  “I doubt it. We clean it out every few months. I could go check.”

  “That would be great.”

  Beatrice walked up as Jolene went off to look. “What’re you doing here today? You already came this week.”

  “Just checking up on something.”

  “Me?”

  “No. But it’s nice to see you playing bingo.”

  “Want my prize?” Beatrice tried to give Claire the decorated tissue-box cover. It appeared to be covered with pieces of macaroni in a random pattern, then spray-painted gold.

  “I wouldn’t want to deprive you.”

  Beatrice started laughing. “I’ll take it back to my room. See you later.” She walked off.

  Jolene came back shaking her head. “Sorry. It’s not there. I seem to remember giving everything of Florence’s to Margaret. I’m not sure, but I think I put the jelly with her stuff.”

  “Margaret might have it. I’ll check with her. Please don’t tell anyone about this,” Claire asked Jolene.

  Jolene’s eyes widened. “Was something wrong with it? Do you think it had gone off?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  Margaret was surprised to hear Claire Watkins’s voice on the phone. Maybe she was calling about the goat. Claire had said something about buying it as a pet for her daughter. Margaret would love for the little goat to go to a good home.

  After their initial hellos, Claire asked, “Margaret, do you still have the bag of your mother’s belongings from the nursing home?”

  “Not really. Why?”

  “I’m checking on something. What do you mean, not really?”

  “Well, I think I still have most of things that were in the bag, but I put them away.”

  “Was there a jar of jelly in the bag?”

  Margaret couldn’t figure out what the deputy wanted. Why was she asking about her mother’s jelly? “Yes, I remember that.”

  “Where is that jar now?”

  “I suppose I put it in the fridge.”

  “Would it still be there?”

  “Let me check.” Margaret set the phone down on the counter and walked over to the refrigerator. She could tell by Claire’s tone of voice this was important, but she couldn’t imagine why.

  She looked into the fridge and didn’t see the jar on the front of the shelves, so she bent over and dug in the darker recesses of the bottom shelf. Mark used peanut butter to bait traps for the mice in the house, and he would get down to the bottom of a jar and still put it back in the refrigerator. She was ashamed that she hadn’t gotten around to cleaning it out since summer started. She took out two old jars of peanut butter and then found the jelly. Crabapple jelly. Neither she nor Mark cared for it—too sweet, the way her mother made it—but she hadn’t been able to throw it away. She pulled it out and went back to the phone.

  “It’s here.”

  There was silence on the other end. Then Claire’s voice said, “Great.”

  “Now are you going to tell me why this is important?”

  “Yes, I’ll be right over to explain. Set it on the counter and don’t touch it. And, for God’s sake, please don’t eat any of it before I get there.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Rat poison,” Dale Peters, a lab tech from the Wisconsin Crime Bureau, told her over the phone.

  “In the jelly? What does that do?”

  “Poisons rats.”

  “What else?”

  “The main ingredient is warfarin, the drug in Coumadin. You’ve heard of that?”

  “A blood thinner, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. And when used in large enough doses, it might cause a hemorrhage. Makes people bleed out. Or animals—the rats eat the poison and go back to their holes and then slowly die of internal bleeding.”

  “Oh.” Then Claire asked the important question. “Could this kill someone?”

  “Absolutely. Fairly painlessly and without much of a sign. It might just look like they had a stroke.”

  Claire remembered searching the basement at the Tilde farm. There had been old, moldy mounds of bar bait around the floor. However, Patty Jo hadn’t been living there when she might have poisoned Florence. At least, she didn’t think Patty Jo had been living there. She should check with Margaret.

  “Thanks.”

  “Did someone kill someone?” Dale asked.

  “I think so. Now, I’ve got to prove it.”

  “Oh, the other thing you should be aware of is that the poison is only in the top portion of the jelly. In other words, it wasn’t cooked into the product. It was added afterward.”

  “That’s important to know. Thanks again.”

  “Good luck.”

  When Claire got off the phone, she called the district attorney’s office. She’d need another search warrant. Mary Ann Jacobs wasn’t there, so she left a message. Then she called her sister, Bridget.

  “Rat poison,” Claire said without a preamble.

  “Give me a sec. I’m feeding Rachel. I need to get the cordless phone.” Bridget was gone a minute than came back on the line. “Yeah, warfarin. What do you want to know?”

  “Tell me everything.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “I think someone was poisoned with it.”

  “Rachel’s decided puréed carrots aren’t her favorite food.” Claire could hear Bridget talking to Rachel, then she was back. “Poisoned. You mean like killed? Someone was killed with rat poison?”

  “I think so. What can you tell me?”

  “More than you want to know.”

  “You’re an expert on rat poison?”

  “I did my residency at the poison control center, remember? I had to read a lot about warfarin. You’d be interested to know where the name warfarin comes from—from our very own state. They discovered it when cows were dying from internal hemorrhages from eating newly mown hay that had been made into silage during a really hot summer. The silage was loaded with coumarin. This is about eighty years ago. So the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation sponsored the research. They took the first four letters to name the drug warfarin. Now it’s one of the most common drugs prescribed. It’s used to dissolve blood clots and for heart trouble.”

  “An easy poison, because it’s so available.”

  “Yes. The other thing that would make it a good choice to poison someone is that it doesn’t happen very fast. So you could give the poison and be long gone before they would die from it.”

  “How much would need to be administered?”

  “I can’t tell you the exact amounts off the top of my head, but I don’t think it takes that much. I heard a story when I was at poison control of a woman who had to put out rat poison every week. Just from touching the bar bait, she absorbed enough through the skin to have a brain hemorrhage.”

  “The victim, in this case, was an older woman suffering from Alzheimer’s. No one even suspected.”

  “How did you figure it out?”

  Claire briefly filled Bridget in on Patty Jo Tilde’s story.r />
  “So you have the jelly? Is that enough proof?”

  “I’d like to be able to link it with something in her house. I hope to get in to search the house today.”

  “Just in case you need to know, the antidote to warfarin is vitamin K.”

  “Thanks. How’s everything?”

  There was a pause, and then Bridget said, “Rachel and I are going out to eat with Chuck tonight.”

  “Is that good?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then I’m glad. I’ll talk to you later.”

  When Claire got off the phone with Bridget, she called Margaret. She didn’t want to tell Margaret what she was looking into yet. No need to get her hopes up until Claire was more sure.

  They exchanged pleasantries and then Claire said, “There’s no easy way to ask this, but was your father living with Patty Jo before your mother died?”

  Claire could almost hear Margaret squirm on the other end of the line. “I’m afraid so. She moved in about two months after Mother moved out. Dad said it was just to help Patty Jo out. He said he had all this room, she might as well save on rent. Who was I to argue? People have housekeepers.”

  “So when your mother died, Patty Jo was living with your father?”

  “Yes, she was.”

  Claire had barely hung up the phone before it rang again. The district attorney was on the line. Claire told her she needed another search warrant for the Tildes’ house.

  “What are you looking for this time?”

  “Jelly.”

  “That’s all?”

  “And rat poison.”

  When Claire and another deputy, Bill Peterson, drove up to Patty Jo Tilde’s house, a Lexus SUV was parked in front of the house. Patty Jo’s car was nowhere to be seen. Claire wondered if she had bought a new car.

  “Who’s here?” Bill asked. The two other deputies pulled up behind Claire’s squad car. She had brought a bigger crew with her this time. She wanted to be thorough.

  “Can’t tell you that. But it’s not Margaret or Mark. I don’t recognize the car.”

  “I thought you had most everyone’s car in the county down pat,” Bill teased her. When she first moved down to Fort St. Antoine, Claire made a game out of memorizing all the vehicles, trying to catch up to the knowledge of the deputies who had grown up in the county.

  Claire took a deep breath and stepped out of the car. A tall man she didn’t recognize was standing in the porch, watching them.

  Claire walked up the front steps, followed by three deputies. The man turned to look at them. His mouth stayed open while no words came out. He wasn’t bad-looking—late forties, face a little too red, dressed in nice clothes.

  Finally he asked, “Can I help you?”

  “We’re here to search the house.”

  He looked even more confused and shook his head. “We’re not showing it yet. It’s not really on the market.”

  Claire pulled out the search warrant. “We have a search warrant.”

  “I know nothing about that.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to. You don’t have to leave, but we’ll ask you to stay outside while we search the house. Is Patty Jo here?”

  “No, she said she had someone to see. I expect her back shortly. I’m Sam Dante,” he said, and handed her a card.

  Edina Realty. Claire should have known. “She’s not wasting any time,” Claire said under her breath.

  “She’s got a nice piece of property here. I have told her she should get the field plowed under before we put it on the market. Those weeds look so messy.”

  “Good idea. If you’ll excuse us, we have work to do.”

  “What are you looking for?” he asked.

  Claire thought for a second. “Skeletons in the closet.”

  “Oh,” he said, and walked down the steps and out to his car.

  Claire turned to the last deputy. “Clark, would you stay out here and keep an eye on that guy?”

  The house hadn’t changed since the last time Claire had been there. That was good. It would have been a shame if Patty Jo had done any cleaning or thrown anything away.

  She walked through the living room into the kitchen, still being trailed by two deputies. They all put on their gloves. “Bill, why don’t you head downstairs? I know there’s some old decomposing piles of bar bait down there. I saw them last time I was here. Bag at least a couple of them. See if you can find any unopened ones.

  “Jim, you stay with me. We need to find some jelly.” Claire had gone through the kitchen and thought she remembered some jars in the back corner of the pantry. She started pulling out jars from the second shelf: rhubarb jam, raspberry jam, gooseberry jam. The jars looked old, and Claire guessed they predated Patty Jo’s residence at the Tilde farm. Florence had made more jam than she and her husband could eat.

  Claire pulled out twelve jars, but there was no crabapple jelly. The jars were a mishmash of used containers, none of them matching the one she had taken from the nursing home.

  “Not a match,” she said to Jim as she lined up the jars on the kitchen counter, feeling keen disappointment.

  Maybe the handwriting would match. She knew a good handwriting analyst. They could prove something with all these jars. The labels appeared to be the same, but they were generic canning labels, probably used by most of the women in the area, and she didn’t think they would prove much.

  Jim opened the refrigerator and stuck his head in. “Let’s keep looking.”

  Claire went back to the pantry and made a thorough search of every shelf. Nothing else, except a few cans of tomatoes and a small black plastic container of ant poison.

  “I found a half-opened jar of something here,” Jim said from the depths of the refrigerator.

  Claire looked over.

  He held out a glass jar. “Crabapple jelly,” he said with a big smile on his face. “Always been my favorite.”

  “Great.” Claire straightened up and felt a shiver of relief go through her. They would get Patty Jo. They would nail her to the wall. The jelly would link her to Florence’s death even if it had no poison in it. In fact, Claire assumed it was not poisoned, since it had been sitting in Patty Jo’s fridge. But it would still be enough.

  How had Patty Jo mixed the warfarin in the jelly? Claire was having trouble seeing her grind up the bar bait. It would be hard to get that granular mess in the jelly. Then she remembered what Rich had told her about warfarin. He said that many of the farmers used a concentrate that they mixed with grain and scattered in the barns for the rats.

  Claire could feel Jim watching her. “I want to look a little longer.”

  She started back through all the cupboards. Since Patty Jo did all the cooking, she wouldn’t have had to worry about Walter finding the warfarin, but where might she hide it so he wouldn’t stumble across it. Claire was looking through the baking shelf, which held flour and sugar and baking soda. Above that was the spice shelf. And in the back of the shelf, she saw a big aluminum tin with TEA written across the front of it. It looked like it belonged to one of those sets that had been so popular in the forties and fifties: flour, coffee, tea, sugar. Why was it in with the spices and why was it on its own? She lifted it down and opened it. An opened bag was stuffed into it, and when she lifted it out, she read WARFARIN CONCENTRATE written across the front of it.

  She held it out for Jim to see. “Bingo.”

  “All right.”

  “We’ve got what we need. Now let’s find Patty Jo and bring her in.”

  They walked out of the house and Claire went up to the Lexus and knocked on the window. The Realtor rolled it down.

  “Where did you say Patty Jo went?”

  He shrugged. “She said something about visiting someone in the nursing home. I think the name was Bea.”

  Claire froze. Beatrice.

  Beatrice thought Claire was wrong about Patty Jo. Because of her job, Claire could be a bit of an alarmist.

  Beatrice had liked Patty Jo from the fir
st time they met. For one thing, Patty Jo couldn’t believe Beatrice had even had a stroke. Patty Jo said she didn’t act like a stroke victim. Beatrice hadn’t liked the word victim and had corrected Patty Jo. The woman had taken that very well and said she couldn’t have agreed more with Beatrice. Well, right there you knew the woman had good sense.

  Beatrice had also been so impressed with Patty Jo’s devotion to her aging husband. A couple of days ago, she and Patty Jo had been talking about their husbands, and Beatrice had mentioned seeing Patty Jo the night her husband died.

  “I didn’t know you then,” she said, “but I remember you walking by. You must feel good about having been with him so close to his death. I was with my husband when he passed away.”

  Besides, Patty Jo was very agreeable and made it a point of helping her get to bingo. The days did get long at Lakeside Manor.

  So Beatrice was happy when Patty Jo appeared and told her she had brought her a little treat. “I made some crabapple jelly the other night. Thought you might like a jar to go with your toast for breakfast.”

  Beatrice looked at the jelly that Patty Jo set on the rolling table next to her bed. It was a beautiful color, a jewel-like pink. Her mouth watered just looking at it. “That would be nice.”

  “Would you like to try some now?” Patty Jo asked, “I brought some butter and crackers.”

  “Sure.”

  Patty Jo took out four crackers, set them on a plate, spread butter on them, and put a large dollop of jelly on each one. Then she handed the plate to Beatrice.

  Beatrice tasted the first one. The taste took her back to her marriage. She had learned how to make crabapple jelly to please her husband. She liked it because it had a little bite to it, the tartness of the apples coming through over all the sugar.

  “Good,” she told Patty Jo, who handed her another cracker. “Aren’t you going to have some?”

  “No, this is for you. I already tasted my fill when I made it.”

  Beatrice ate the three other crackers.

  “How are you doing today?” asked Patty Jo.

  “A little better, I guess. Hard to say. I walked up and down the hallway, but I get so sleepy.”