Arsenic and Ole

by Jessa Archer

  “They didn’t actually deliver it. I placed the order online with that food taxi service, OBXpress. From what I can tell on the app, the restaurant wouldn’t even have known where the delivery was going. So I really can’t imagine how anyone could pin this on La Costera. But I’d like to see if I can clear their name on the issue of Leo. He’s still not entirely well. He threw up twice in the garage, and there were specks of grass or leaves. I think he was still feeling queasy, because he kept wanting to graze the shrubs along the sidewalk.”

  “It’s a good thing I cordoned off those azalea bushes,” she said. “They’re toxic to dogs, although I can’t imagine that he’d chew those leaves anyway. They’re supposed to have a very bitter taste that stings the tongue.”

  “I didn’t realize azaleas were harmful to dogs. What about those bushes in the front? I think they’re the ones that turn red in the fall. Those are the ones I’ve seen him nibbling.”

  “Those are fothergilla. They’re safe.”

  “What about the azalea flowers?” I asked.

  “Also toxic,” she said, “but again, dogs don’t usually chew them. If you really want to find out, though, you could probably talk Sam Davies into running a chemical analysis. Assuming you haven’t already cleaned up the sample from the garage.”

  Samuel Davis was the chemistry professor at SCU. He regularly taught a forensic chemistry course for non-majors and also helped the police department out on occasion, given that there was sometimes a delay getting a forensics team all the way to the Outer Banks. Sam, who was originally from Great Britain, had a rather sardonic sense of humor and had apparently enjoyed trading snarky comments with my mother during faculty meetings. Having attended two of the deadly dull affairs since arriving at SCU, I was inclined to agree that the only way to approach them was with a sense of humor. And maybe a stiff drink before the festivities started.

  “I’ll send him a text,” I told her as I unfolded the newspaper.

  “You’re not actually going to read that awful thing, are you?” Caroline asked, nodding toward the paper.

  I laughed. “You’re the one who paid for the annual subscription, not me. I’m just checking to see whether Alicia Brown has managed to sensationalize Mrs. Whitley’s death.” After scanning through for a moment, I said, “I figured she would already have it down as a murder, with me as the most likely suspect. But they seem to have actually printed the facts for a change. Alicia must be on vacation or something.”

  “The Clarion printing facts?” Caroline said. “Well, will wonders never cease. Andrew likes my brownies, by the way. The ones with walnuts. If you’re thinking of something to take over, I mean. I guess that’s the silver lining in all of this. Maybe that poor boy will have a chance at a reasonably normal life now, without Rebecca hovering all the time.”

  “How do you know she won’t continue to hover? Maybe she’s waiting over there to haunt him when he gets back from the debate tournament.”

  She looked horrified and was silent for a moment, even though I’d been joking, more or less. “I guess that is a possibility,” she said. “Not one I’d have considered when I was still alive, but I’m still here, so…”

  “Hey, maybe you’ll have company now,” I teased. “The two of you can chat about the problems of being incorporeal.”

  Caroline frowned. “That’s not funny, Tig. I had to put up with her as a neighbor in life, and I really don’t think I deserve to have her bothering me here in the…well, afterlife, although I can’t really say it’s anything like I’d imagined an afterlife would be.”

  I was tempted to push a bit on that point. Justin, the only person I’d told about seeing Caroline, believes something must be holding her here. At first, I thought it might be the ring that went missing—a black opal that she’d always worn and had intended to leave to Paige. But she remained even after we found the ring. I’d asked her numerous times already, and she claimed that if there was something holding her on this side of the veil, some unfinished bit of business or regret, she really didn’t know what it was. And maybe that was true. Or maybe she just hadn’t reached the point where she could tell me. Maybe that would be part of letting go.

  So I didn’t push. I just said, “Well, if it’s any consolation, I didn’t notice any spectral activity around her backyard last night. Or in her house. Maybe Mrs. Whitley actually departed.”

  “Let’s hope so,” she said. “Rebecca Whitley couldn’t mind her own business when she was alive. Can you imagine what a royal pain she’d be as a spirit?”

  Chapter Eleven

  The early morning clouds had mostly cleared away when I arrived on campus a little before ten o’clock. Sam Davies had returned my text almost immediately. He was headed to the lab anyway and would meet me there at eleven. While he wasn’t sure whether he’d be able to tell anything from the sample I’d collected from the garage floor, he said he had a machine—a chromograph, or something like that—and was willing to give it a try.

  I had an hour to kill, so I headed up the hill to my office at Muncey Auditorium. I’d practically lived in the building for the past month, between rehearsals and my normal teaching schedule. Most seasons, the spring musical was a major production like Cats or Fiddler on the Roof, with complex sets and scene design. But this year’s selection, Arsenic!, was an original adaptation of the play Arsenic and Old Lace, written by two SCU students. I hadn’t drawn anywhere near the audience a major Broadway play would have, but the songs were fun, and the dialogue was actually decent for a student effort.

  When I entered the theater, I was relieved to see that the set had already been torn down. A candidate for the state senate had the stage reserved for Tuesday. I doubted that she would have been too happy about giving her speech from the parlor of two little old ladies with a murderous hobby.

  Muncey Auditorium was fairly large for a small college, with more modern equipment than I’d had at the dinner theater I operated back in California. Dean Prendergast—who kept insisting that I call her Marjorie, something I simply couldn’t get used to—had said this was due to a generous donation back when the college was built. I hadn’t really thought much of it at the time, but Melinda’s comments about SCU’s founders had me wondering how many of the “generous donations” were funds gained through criminal activity. Did the dean know about the school’s mob ties?

  Now that I stopped to think about it, there was an even more pertinent question. Had my mother known? Caroline had taken the job in the Psychology Department a few years after my father married his third wife. She and Marina were good friends, although that was true to a certain extent of all my father’s ex-wives. They were a small club of five, all of them smart, savvy women who had fallen for James Alden and then realized that even though he was exceptionally handsome and exceptionally sweet, he was nowhere near as smart as the characters he played onscreen.

  Marina was my favorite stepmother. She really had only one flaw in my opinion, and that wasn’t one she’d had any control over. You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick family. Dominic Carbone was her cousin, and her uncle—who was most definitely the inspiration for my father’s character on The Sands of Time—ran the West Coast branch of the Carbone family’s criminal enterprise.

  It might be a coincidence that my mom wound up taking a job at a college connected to the same crime family as Marina’s uncle. But it really didn’t feel like a coincidence. And so I added this to my mental list of things to ask my mother the next time she popped in for a visit.

  I managed to get four term papers graded between ten and eleven, then headed downhill to the science building to meet up with Sam. It was only the second time I’d been inside Markham Hall since my mom’s accident. I hadn’t exactly been avoiding the place. Most of my classes were over at Muncey, so I simply didn’t have much of a reason to go into the building. Still, it gave me an odd feeling to be on the stairs where my mom had died. A group of students had found her on the landing. The general view was that
Caroline tripped. A patch of something sticky at the edge of the top step—soda, most likely—seemed to confirm that theory, and I didn’t have any reason to doubt it. But I still kind of did. It was just an intuition, really, possibly spurred on by the fact that Caroline was still here. As Justin had noted, souls that died at peace, even if the death was sudden and accidental, generally didn’t stick around.

  I held tight to the railing and hauled myself up to the chemistry lab on the third floor. The door was partially open, so I tapped lightly and then stepped inside. Sam’s tall frame was hunched over a beaker of something, his face partly obscured by a pair of safety goggles.

  “You’re going to have back problems by the time you’re forty if you keep that up,” I told him.

  Sam snorted but didn’t look up from the sample. “I’ll have you know I’m forty-one, Antigone Alden.” He had a deep voice, with a fairly heavy British accent. “Hold on a sec and let me finish this up.”

  I waited as he made some adjustment to the burner. Then he straightened and stretched, pushing up the goggles as he turned toward me. “You’re actually right with regard to my back, however. I always think I’m just going to take a quick peek, so I don’t bother pulling up a stool. And then I spot something interesting and end up hunched over the microscope or whatever for ten minutes or more. Do you have my sample of dog barf?”

  “Yes.” I wrinkled my nose and pulled the plastic bag with the tiny jar out of my backpack. “Here you go. I think there’s a decent chance there’s some motor oil in the mix, too, since it was collected from the floor of my garage.”

  He held the clear container up to the light to inspect it. “And exactly what plant do you think these green bits might be?”

  “My mom…” I stopped just before blurting out the news that I’d discussed the situation with my mother’s ghost. Sam was entirely too practical to believe in ghosts. We’d actually established that fact on our first encounter, over at Muncey Auditorium. It was the day after I discovered Professor Amundsen’s body, and I’d been a bit spooked by an odd occurrence backstage.

  “My mom,” I continued, “planted azaleas in the front yard, close to the edge of the house. There’s something called fothergilla at the front, but I don’t think that’s poisonous. She put some wire around the azaleas, maybe to keep this sort of thing from happening. But the plant is flowering now…and leaves or flowers could easily have fallen off the azaleas into the fothergilla. ”

  “Azaleas, hmm?” he asked. “And how large is this dog?”

  “Five pounds, tops.”

  “Well, I can state definitively that the green bits can’t be just the azalea. Otherwise, that would be one dead pooch.”

  “Really?”

  “Definitely. It wouldn’t take much for a dog that size. Azaleas and rhododendrons contain something called grayanotoxins. Symptoms would have kicked in pretty quickly. You said she had the dog at the vet?”

  “Yes. They had to pump his stomach, according to Ben—he’s my teaching assistant. He’s dating Dia Gonzalez, whose parents own La Costera, and he picks up a shift there occasionally. I’m not sure what Leo’s precise symptoms were, but the vet said he had gotten into some sort of toxin. Mrs. Whitley decided that had to be the bit of burrito he’d eaten, and being the lovely person she was, launched a campaign to have the restaurant closed down.”

  Sam shook his head in mock dismay. “There you go again, speaking ill of the dead.”

  “Well, the dead person in question spoke ill of everyone else when she was living. Her karmic bank account was in serious deficit. I was so busy with rehearsals for the musical that I hadn’t really been paying attention to anything else, but it was apparently front-page news in the Clarion this past week.”

  “I saw that. Although I take everything I read in that rag with a rather large pinch of salt.”

  “So…you’re going to run that through a…chroma…something?” I said, looking at the sample.

  He laughed. “Yes. I’ll do a high-performance liquid chromatography analysis.” He nodded toward a machine on the far side of the lab, which was hooked up to a computer. “It should only take twenty minutes or so, once I prepare the sample, but you’re not first in line for the machine. That’s actually why I came into the lab this morning. Travis phoned me with an unofficial request last night and dropped a couple of samples off this morning.”

  “From…Rebecca Whitley?”

  “Well, not from her body,” he said. “That will be left for the coroner to examine. This was from her house.”

  “Oh. The burrito?”

  “And the wine glass you spotted. I’m not hopeful on that one, given that it was at the bottom of the pool. There may still be some latent prints, but chlorinated water dissolves the sebum deposits, so it really depends on how long it was underwater. Travis will be sending the glass and a sample of the burrito to the crime lab tomorrow morning, but it will be several days before he gets their analysis. The university spent quite a bit of cash for this HPLC machine, so I thought I might as well put it to use and see if I can get him some basic answers while he’s waiting for the official results.”

  “But…Travis doesn’t really think someone tampered with the food from La Costera, does he?”

  Sam shrugged. “At the very least, it’s something he wants to rule out so he can clear the Gonzalezes. Which is what you’re hoping to do in the case of the accusation about the dog, right? Anyway, it will probably be an hour or more before I know anything. Do you want me to give you a call when the test is finished?”

  “That would be great, Sam. I’m hoping to squeeze in at least a short walk on the beach before the second round of auditions this afternoon. I need something to clear my head.”

  “So you’re keeping Caroline’s Sunday tradition?” he said, smiling.

  I nodded. “Although I’m running several hours late. She always preferred the early mornings, when you have the beach pretty much to yourself.”

  “True,” he said. “I joined her on a few occasions when Leslie couldn’t make it. I think she’d gotten a bit worried about being out there totally on her own, especially with cell coverage a bit spotty.”

  Leslie, who taught math at SCU, was a close friend of my mom’s. I knew that she’d often gone along on Caroline’s weekly beach treks, but it hadn’t occurred to me that this was for any reason other than the fact that she enjoyed Leslie’s company. Caroline had only been in her sixties, and in good health. I’d never really thought of her as aging, although I’d learned since her death that her arthritis had gotten pretty bad. She had never been the type to complain when we talked on the phone or when Paige and I were visiting from California.

  “I’m glad you were able to go with her,” I said. “Did she make you follow The Rule?”

  “She did, indeed. Told me I’d be walking back to Caratoke if I broke the silence, so I held my tongue like a good boy.”

  Caroline’s rule for Sunday beach walks was simple. I’m quite certain it was established because I was a chatty eight-year-old when we first arrived in the Outer Banks, and she wanted a bit of peace and quiet. The trip up the beach was spent in absolute silence. Once you turned to head back down the beach, it was fine to strike up a conversation, but that first half hour or so was sacrosanct. It was time reserved for breathing in the ocean air, observing the shells that had washed onto the shore, and scanning the horizon for pods of dolphins that would occasionally swim along the coastline.

  “Maybe you can join me one Sunday,” I said to Sam. “Paige sleeps in half the time, and Travis has never quite mastered the skill of holding his tongue, so it’s usually just me. You could bring Leila, too, if she’s in town.”

  Leila was Sam’s fiancée, who was finishing up her final year of a postdoctoral program in Toronto. Travis and I had planned to join them for dinner when she was down for spring break, but she’d had to cancel the trip at the last minute because she was behind on her research project.

  “It’s obvious
that you have not yet met Leila,” Sam said with a wry smile. “If you think Travis has problems keeping silent, multiply that by ten. I might bring Molly, though.”

  Molly, Sam’s golden retriever, often accompanied him to campus. She was an older dog and tended to be nervous if he left her home alone for more than a few hours. It was technically against the rules to have a dog inside campus buildings, aside from assistance animals, but Molly was such a sweetheart that even the security guards were willing to let it slide.

  “Then it’s a date,” I said, and realized instantly that it sounded a bit awkward. “Well, not a date in that sense of the word, but…”

  “Exactly. You, me, and Molly. And I’m sure Caroline will be with us in spirit. Although I should caution you that Molly is likely to break The Rule by barking at shore birds.”

  I smiled. “I’m pretty sure even my mom would have permitted that violation.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The highway between Caratoke and Corolla—which the locals pronounce car-all-ah—is a narrow two-lane strip that winds through rows of beach houses and small businesses. Along the most narrow portions of the highway, you can catch a glimpse of Currituck Sound one minute and the ocean the next. The section of road that runs through Duck, where the Coastal Playhouse is located, often washes out during rainstorms, and many residents and regular visitors yearned for the long-promised second bridge across the sound that would alleviate the traffic. Highway 12 can be a veritable parking lot during the summer months as cars inch toward the northern tip of the islands that makes up North Carolina’s Outer Banks.