Claw Enforcement

by Sofie Ryan

  I believed him. “Okay. What do you know about an assault charge from a couple of years ago?”

  “Joe went after a guy who was beating a dog. You would have done the same thing, Sarah. And those charges were dropped.”

  “Liam, no one’s trying to railroad your friend,” Charlotte said. “We’re just trying to get some answers for Alfred’s friend.”

  Liam didn’t say anything for a long moment. Finally he nodded. “I get it. I’m sorry.”

  I heard his phone buzz in his pocket.

  “I have to go,” he said. “I have a meeting to get to.” He gave me an inquiring look. “Are we good?”

  I nodded. “We’re good.”

  His gaze shifted to Charlotte. “Always,” she said, leaning over to give him a hug.

  I slumped against the workbench after Liam left. Elvis came and leaned his furry face against mine. I looked at Charlotte. “Nothing Liam said suggests that Joe Roswell couldn’t have killed Christopher Healy,” I said. “In fact, if Healy had found out about the faked background checks . . .” I didn’t finish the sentence.

  “I know,” Charlotte said. “Rose is on it. She’ll make it happen.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I said. I gave Elvis a scratch on the top of his head. “Go help Avery,” I told him.

  He dutifully hopped down from the bench and headed for the shop. I followed to open the door for him.

  Charlotte and I started sorting the photographs again. “So what’s my tell?” I asked.

  She glanced over at me for a moment. “What do you mean?”

  “Liam rubs his eyebrow when he’s lying. What do I do?”

  A small smile pulled at the corners of her mouth. “Why do you think you do anything?”

  She’d answered my question with a question. Nick called that “doing the teacher thing.”

  I turned to look at her. “You don’t want me to know,” I said.

  Charlotte held a photo at arm’s length and studied it for a moment before setting it on a pile by her left elbow. “Did we actually establish that you have a tell?” she asked.

  “It’s not the eyebrow thing like Liam,” I said. I put a hand to my hair. “Is it my hair? Do I touch my hair when I’m not telling the truth?”

  “You have lovely hair,” Charlotte said. “I especially like the layers you added last time you had it cut.”

  “Wait a minute, what about my nose?” I rubbed my finger along the bridge of it.

  “You have your mother’s nose. Nice and straight.” She gave me a sweet smile.

  I spent the next five minutes trying to get Charlotte to divulge how—if—she could tell when I wasn’t being honest, with my guesses getting more and more silly. Was it how I stuck out my chin? How often I blinked? Or burped? She effortlessly blocked every attempt. It was like a fencing match: thrust and parry, thrust and parry, until I was shaking with laughter. It was good not to think about death for a while.

  Chapter 15

  Elvis and I had been home for about half an hour Wednesday evening when Tom Harris knocked on my door. “I’m sorry to trouble you,” he said, “but Rose isn’t home.”

  “It’s no trouble,” I said. “Please, come in.” I opened the door wider.

  Tom wiped his feet carefully on the mat and stepped into the living room. He was carrying a long brown envelope. “I’ve finished the research I was doing for Rose, and she asked me to leave everything with you if she wasn’t here when I finished my work.” He held out the envelope.

  I took it from him. “Thank you,” I said. I had no idea what was inside. Rose had neglected to tell me that she’d asked Tom for help.

  “I think I found what she was looking for,” he added.

  “What were you looking for?” I asked. “Rose didn’t say.”

  “I can’t imagine her minding if I tell you,” Tom said. “She brought me the specifications for a ground stabilization system. It uses a network of interconnected fibers. She wanted to know if I thought it would work.”

  Robb Gorham’s system. It had to be.

  I glanced at the envelope in my hand. “And what do you think?”

  Tom shook his head. “Oh, I doubt very much that it will.”

  Confirmation of what I had suspected. “May I ask why?”

  He took off his glasses, bent the left arm out slightly and put them back on again. “I don’t know how much you know about this process.”

  “Not a lot,” I said. “I know that the material that is supposed to keep the ground from collapsing or washing away is made from soy fibers and that it’s supposed to be environmentally friendly.”

  Tom nodded. “You’re correct. I have several problems with the process, but the biggest one has to do with the tensile strength of the soy fibers.” His eye narrowed behind his glasses. “You understand the concept of tensile strength, I assume.”

  I remembered the conversation I’d had with Mac when I’d managed to get the last caster onto the leg of the mail-sorting table. I’d told him my technique involved estimating the tensile strength of the metal when really all it had been was dumb luck. “I think so,” I said. “It’s a measure of how resistant something is to breaking when it’s being pulled at or made longer.”

  He smiled at me. “That’s it exactly. The success of this stabilization system depends in large part on the tensile strength of those fibers.”

  I nodded slowly. So far I was following.

  “Seawater is alkaline with a pH of about 8.3,” he continued. “Shoreline areas that are battered by waves tend to have more alkaline soil.”

  “Because of the seawater.”

  “Yes. And an alkaline environment does tend to reduce the tensile strength of the fibers.”

  He looked expectantly at me, waiting for me to make the connection. “They won’t be strong enough,” I said. “They won’t hold the ground in place.” I knew by the expression on Tom’s face that I’d gotten it right.

  “No, they won’t,” he said. “Not along the coastline, for certain. Probably not anywhere.”

  “Thank you so much,” I said.

  Tom smiled again. “You’re very welcome. It was my pleasure. Please tell Rose if there’s anything else I could help with I’d be more than happy.”

  I assured him I would and he left. I dropped onto the couch still holding the brown envelope in one hand. Elvis padded in from the bedroom, jumped up beside me and began to sniff the envelope. He made a face, his whiskers twitched and his tail flicked in annoyance.

  “There’s no way you can smell dog on that envelope,” I said. “What you might be getting a whiff of though, is a motive for murder.”

  Elvis gave me a look. He wasn’t as impressed with my metaphor as I was.

  * * *

  * * *

  “I knew Tom would be able to get to the bottom of things,” Rose said with a satisfied smile the next morning. We were headed to the shop and I’d just shared what I’d learned from our neighbor the night before.

  “It gives Robb Gorham a motive. He had to have known. The question is, where did he get the aconite?”

  “Yes, we do need to answer that question,” Rose said. “Maybe Nicolas will have some ideas.”

  “You’re going to ask Nick?” I said. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.” Even Elvis wasn’t sure it was a good idea. He was looking at Rose, his tail moving restlessly along the seat.

  “Why on earth would you say that?” she asked. “Nicolas is committed to solving this case just like we are. And we agreed to pool our resources.”

  That wasn’t quite how I remembered it.

  “What if we took a look at Robb Gorham’s social media as well?” I said. “We might find a clue there.”

  Rose was fishing in her bag for something. “That’s a good idea. I’ll ask Alfred to do that.”

  I was
out in the workroom about an hour later trying to decide which in our never-ending collection of mismatched chairs I was going to take into the shop when Nick came in.

  “Can I help?” he asked.

  “I’m trying to get that chair in the corner,” I said.

  He leaned sideways for a better look. “The one that’s upside down or the one that’s right side up.”

  “Right side up. The pale green one.”

  Nick moved several chairs, squeezed into the fairly tight space and managed to extricate the one I wanted.

  “Thank you,” I said. “That was your good deed for the day.”

  He smiled. “It’s always good to have a little positive karma in the bank.” He looked around. “Rose is working?”

  I nodded. “She called you, didn’t she?” I started putting the chairs that I didn’t want back where they had been stacked. Nick picked up a couple of them and I pointed to a spot where he could put them. “Thanks,” I said.

  “I gather you have some new information about Robb Gorham,” he said.

  There were dust bunnies clinging to the left leg of my jeans. I leaned down to brush them off and made a mental note to vacuum this whole section of the workroom. “You know that whole environmentally friendly ground-stabilization system he’s been promoting?” I straightened up.

  Nick gave a wry smile. “Let me guess. It doesn’t work.”

  “Bingo,” I said. I shared what Tom had explained to me.

  “I thought it sounded too good to be true,” he said. “Liam said I was a cynic.”

  “You can be a cynic and still be right,” I teased.

  He stuffed his hands in his pockets and rocked from one foot to another. “So you think this gives Robb Gorham a motive to have killed Christopher Healy?”

  “It means he had a lot more to lose than just the chance to be involved in building an inn on the land at Gibson’s Point.”

  Nick shook his head. “Why poison Healy, though? I can see hitting him over the head with a two-by-four or, say, stabbing him with a drywall knife in the heat of anger. But using poison takes thought, effort, time. I could understand it maybe if the killer had used rat poison for example or antifreeze; those are more spur-of-the-moment. But aconite? How many people even know it’s toxic?”

  I ran my hand over the smooth back of the green chair. “I think the killer went to a lot of trouble not to be caught. That’s why he or she used the aconite. It isn’t as common as, say, antifreeze. On the other hand he—or she—must have had easy access to it, otherwise getting it would have drawn too much attention.” I picked up the chair. Nick grabbed the other one and we started for the shop.

  “I see your logic,” he said. “The problem is, the one person who did have fairly easy access to aconite has an alibi.”

  “You mean Cassie Gibson.”

  “Her sister does work at that naturopathic clinic.”

  I pushed my hair back off my face. “Mr. P. checked her alibi,” I said. “And even if she hadn’t been at her husband’s physiotherapy appointment, how would Cassie have been able to get the aconite into Christopher Healy? The only drink of his she would have had access to was that cup of coffee at the reception.”

  “He didn’t have to drink it,” Nick said, stepping into the shop. He looked around. “Where do you want this?”

  I was still standing by the door holding the other chair. “Umm, over by the bookcase and what do you mean by ‘he didn’t have to drink it’?”

  Nick set the chair where I’d indicated, eyed it for a moment and then shifted it a little to the right. He turned to look at me. “Christopher Healy could have absorbed the aconite through his skin.”

  I stared at him, my mouth hanging open. Rose had been coming from the storage closet under the stairs. She’d heard what Nick had said. The quilt she was holding slipped from her hands as his words sank in.

  “What?” we both said at the same time.

  “Nicolas, did I hear you correctly?” Rose was still staring at him, the quilt forgotten on the floor at her feet.

  I folded one arm up over my head, digging my fingers into my scalp. I suddenly had a headache. “You’re just telling us this now?”

  He looked surprised. “I’m sorry. I thought you knew. Aconite can be absorbed through the skin. In Healy’s case, he’d been drinking. That dilates the blood vessels, which just would have speeded up the absorption process.”

  “So that young man didn’t drink the poison?” Rose frowned.

  “We don’t know that for sure yet,” Nick said. “Analysis of his stomach contents isn’t back. But yes, it’s possible he didn’t.”

  Possible.

  So instead of looking for someone Christopher Healy might have had a cup of coffee with, or lunch, or even a beer, someone he likely knew such as a business connection, we were really looking for anyone who could have gotten close enough to slip the poison into say, a bottle of hand sanitizer. I wasn’t sure if Nick had just made the case simpler or more complicated.

  Rose noticed the quilt at her feet and picked it up. I grabbed one end and she held the other and we refolded it. She took it from me and hung it over the quilt rack. Then she brushed off her hands and patted her hair.

  “This doesn’t really change anything,” she said. “We still have a killer to catch.” She turned to Nick. “What do you know about Robb Gorham?”

  “Probably pretty much what you know,” he said. “He has a couple of kids, a wife and an ex-wife. Nobody really has anything bad to say about him.”

  “Do you have any idea where he could have gotten aconite?”

  Nick shook his head. “No. He has a house just outside of town with a pretty generic garden, no monkshood. He doesn’t use any so-called natural remedies other than licorice chews for a sore throat and that’s because his ex-wife swears by them. And I doubt he made the aconite himself. He barely passed high school chemistry.” He shrugged. “I’m sorry, Rose. I don’t see how it can be Robb Gorham.”

  She looked disappointed, but she patted Nick on the arm. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not giving up.”

  He smiled. “I’d be disappointed if you did.” He looked at his watch. “I’m sorry, there’s somewhere I have to be.”

  “Will we see you tonight at the jam?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I think so. Save me a seat.”

  Once he was gone I squeezed my head between my hands. I didn’t make my headache go away. “This just makes things more complicated. How are we going to figure out who killed Christopher Healy when we’re not even sure how he ingested the poison?”

  “We’ll find the answer, dear,” Rose said, shifting the chair Nick had set by the bookcase a little more to the left.

  What actually happened was that the answer found us. Or at least Mr. P. did. He came through the front door, his face flushed and what little hair he had askew. He looked at both of us and smiled. “Chinese New Year,” he said.

  Chapter 16

  Rose and I exchanged somewhat baffled looks.

  “Isn’t the Lunar New Year celebrated in January or February?” I asked.

  “Yes, it is,” Mr. P. said as he lifted the strap of his messenger bag over his head. “Did you know that some scholars believe there are cave paintings in France that are more than fifteen thousand years old containing markings for a lunar calendar?”

  “I didn’t.” I wasn’t surprised that he did, though.

  “Now really isn’t the time to talk about that,” he said. “I need to show you something.” He fished his laptop out of his bag and set it on the end of a nearby corner desk.

  I looked at Rose, who shrugged. I had no idea what we were going to see or what Chinese New Year meant. Mr. P. beckoned us over. A photo of Robb Gorham filled the computer screen. He was grinning at the camera with his arm around a young woman who looked to be in her ea
rly twenties.

  “What am I looking at, Alfred?” Rose asked.

  “A photo of Robb Gorham that I found on social media.”

  “Who’s the woman?” I said. She had to be significant otherwise why was he showing us the image? His wife, maybe? Or ex-wife?

  “That’s Mr. Gorham’s sister.”

  “Is one of them adopted?” Rose said.

  Robb Gorham’s sister had dark brown hair, dark eyes and obvious Asian ancestry.

  Mr. P. nodded. “She is. Her name is Maya. The photo was taken in Boston during Chinese New Year celebrations. See the caption?”

  “Picking up my baby sister from work,” Rose read. Her gaze shifted to Mr. P.

  “See the window behind them?” he asked.

  “I’m looking at it,” I said.

  “Now look at the awning above the window.”

  I leaned closer to the screen. There was something written on the blue canvas fabric. I could make out only a few letters of the first word: O, N, A, L. The second word was “Chinese.” Again, I couldn’t see all of the last word, just the letters M, E, D. That was enough.

  “Traditional Chinese Medicine.”

  Mr. P. smiled. “Yes. Maya Gorham is going to college in Boston and working part-time in that shop. She mentions several times on her social media postings that she knows very little about traditional Chinese medicine. She’s working on a degree in women’s studies. It seems she got the job based mostly on her appearance. The owners seem to be catering to people’s stereotypes.”

  “So you think Robb Gorham could have gotten aconite from the shop,” I said.

  “I think it’s a possibility.”

  “Aconite is used in Chinese medicine as a stimulant for the kidneys and spleen,” Rose said.

  I looked sideways at her, surprised she knew that.

  “I’ve been reading,” she said.