Wined and Died: A Home Crafting Mystery

by Cricket McRae.

  At my studied lack of response, she smiled brightly and went on. “Is that why you want to know about Elizabeth Moser?”

  I leaned forward. “So you did know her.”

  “Just a bit. We chatted a few times at the spinning guild meetings. I’m surprised you never met her.”

  That triggered my guilt reflex. “I’ve been so busy I haven’t gone to a meeting for over three months.”

  “Well, that explains it then. She only joined the guild two months ago.”

  “I saw Elizabeth had a stash, but didn’t see a wheel. So she was a spinner.”

  “Liked the drop spindle best. Good knitter, too,” Ruth said. “It’s such a shame what happened. She was far too young to die.”

  “Do you know if she had a heart condition?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “It was so strange. A heart attack, of all things, coming out of the blue like that. I mean, Elizabeth was a jogger. I personally don’t understand the idea of running around for no good reason, but she said it was as good for her mind as it was for her body. She kept quite fit.”

  That didn’t guarantee she hadn’t died from natural causes. Athletes had been struck down before. Still, I didn’t buy it, not after Quentin Swenson’s oddly timed heart attack.

  I sat back. “Okay, spill all you know about her.”

  “Tell me what this is about first.”

  I considered. “I came across some used tapes from her practice at the thrift store. I listened to them, and when I realized what they were I was going to give them back to her. But she’d already died. Her voice, the things she said … and now I find out she was a spinner. I wish I’d had a chance to meet her.” I looked down. “Sounds pretty weird, huh.”

  Ruth’s gaze held sympathy. “I think I understand.” She slipped off her sandals and tucked her feet up under her on the sofa. “Let’s see. I’ve only spoken with her a few times.” She began ticking off her fingers. “Forty-two, nasty divorce from a man who cheated on her, no children, a sister in Tacoma, parents live in Florida, doesn’t get along with her father, likes jogging, Indian food, educated as an interior designer, got a job as a web designer and changed careers when she moved to Cadyville.” She ran out of fingers and dropped her hands. “She was a sweet girl, and loved the idea of helping people. I liked her a lot. Most of the spinning guild showed up for her funeral, and I met her sister.” Ruth wrinkled her nose. It was enough to convey how the sister had impressed her. Or rather had not impressed her.

  That reminded me. “Her neighbor said Elizabeth’s sister was going to put her collection of craft supplies—which I assume meant her yarn and fiber—on Craigslist. I got her phone number.” I stood and gimped over to my tote bag. Found the number and copied it down for Ruth. “I thought you or one of your knitting friends might be interested.”

  She took the slip of paper. “You’re not?”

  “I still have so many of those beautiful yarns and rovings you helped Barr pick out last year.” He’d surprised me with the Land Rover full of gorgeous fiber and my very own spinning wheel right before asking me to marry him.

  “Hi, Ruth!” Erin walked in the door, backpack swinging from one hand. “Guess what?”

  “What?” Ruth responded dutifully.

  “We’re making dandelion wine tonight. Ginger ale, too.”

  “That’s terrific,” Ruth said. “Uncle Thaddeus used to make elderberry wine every year, but he stopped awhile back. Maybe I’ll light a fire under him to do it again this summer.”

  “Oh, no,” I groaned. “I totally forgot. Sorry, Bug, but I’m going to have to call Tootie and cancel.”

  The look on her face would have beat Brodie’s best sad eyes any day.

  I pointed to my foot. “I sprained my ankle today.”

  “But I can do all the work. All you’ll have to do is sit there. Pleasepleaseplease?”

  “Why are you so excited?” I asked. “You told me once you thought all this old-fashioned pioneer stuff I do is weird.”

  She shrugged. “It is. But it’s kind of cool, too. And I really want to see Nana Tootie. It’s been ages.”

  It had been quite awhile since she’d spent any time with her great-grandmother. I saw Tootie more often because I dropped by Caladia Acres when Erin was in school.

  “We’ll have to stick with the ginger ale, then, since I can’t really go pick dandelions with you.”

  “Nonsense,” Ruth said. “I know the perfect place. It’s a field chock full of dandelions in bloom, away from the road and I know the farmer doesn’t use chemicals on his pasture. Erin, put on some shoes you don’t mind getting dirty, and we’ll go right now.”

  Erin hurried down the hallway to her room.

  “Oh, Ruth. You don’t have to—” I began to protest.

  She cut me off. “It won’t take long. Just have me over for a glass of wine when it’s ready.”

  “You got it. And thank you.”

  When they had gone, I weighed my options. I still needed to finish packaging the lotion bars, pack up two wholesale orders and label another gross of lye soap. Dinner needed to be quick and simple. I limped into the kitchen and rummaged through the pantry. We still had a half a dozen jars of home-canned tomato sauce from last summer’s garden. Spaghetti it would be, with a big salad from the garden. Erin could harvest the greens when she got back from picking dandelions.

  In the meantime, a handful of aspirin would have to get me through the rest of the afternoon.

  “I do believe that tea works,” Tootie said from across the butcher block table.

  Her cane leaned against the edge, next to her chair. Felix sat beside her, across from Barr, and Erin sat at the end. We were all digging into the pile of pasta, sauce, and baked meatballs.

  “Then you’ll be pleased to know that I got more from Victoria today. Or Willa, rather. Victoria wasn’t at the meadery.”

  Barr looked at me and gave a little shake of his head. Did he think I was going to talk about the meth lab? Please. But then he said, “I don’t think you should drink any of that tea, Tootie. In fact, I’d like to take it with me, have it tested.”

  Erin stopped chewing and stared at him. She wasn’t the only one.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “We got preliminary toxicology results back this afternoon.”

  “On Quentin?”

  “No. On the bottle of mead that was sitting on the coffee table next to him when he died.”

  I put my fork down. “And?”

  “And they found a compound that induces slow paralysis and then stops the heart. There was a sufficient amount that one glass of mead would have killed him.”

  Felix, unaccustomed to the kind of dinnertime conversation popular at our house, gaped at him.

  “Did kill him, you mean,” I said.

  Barr nodded. “Looks like it. The lab found, let me see here.” He fumbled a notebook out of his pocket. “Conium alkaloids in the bottle.”

  “What the heck is that?” Felix asked.

  “They originate in conium maculatum,” he read, then looked up. “That’s apparently the Latin name for poison hemlock.”

  “What? You mean the stuff they killed Socrates with?” I asked.

  “You said Victoria has a big herb garden at the meadery,” he continued. “You were looking up some of the poisonous plants there the other night.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see anything that looked like poison hemlock?”

  “Barr, I have no idea what poison hemlock looks like. I mean, that’s pretty obscure.”

  “Actually you can find it in ditches and fields all around here,” Tootie said, exuding serenity despite all the talk of poisons and death.

  “Well, at any rate, it’s not something you just pick up at the drugstore,” Barr said. “We’ll be taking a look at that garden. In the meantime, I’d like to take that tea to the lab and have it tested as well.”

  Felix looked worried.

  “You don’
t think it’s poisonous, do you?” Tootie asked. “Because it’s done wonders for my joint pain.”

  “I think it’s a good idea to test it,” I said. I didn’t think it was poisonous, but it did occur to me that Victoria might have added some of her magic OxyContin to the mixture to ensure some additional relief.

  “I agree, Petunia,” Felix said. “Better to be safe than sorry.”

  Tootie sighed. “If you think that’s best.”

  “I can’t quite wrap my mind around why either Victoria or Willa would kill their brother,” I said.

  Barr held a palm up to the ceiling. “We just don’t have enough information yet. But we will, don’t worry.” He turned his hand over and pointed at me. “And by ‘we’ I mean the police, not the Ambroses.”

  _____

  “Petunia told me you were asking questions about the Swenson family because that shrink died,” Felix whispered. “I heard some gossip the other day you might be interested in.”

  My gaze shot across the room to Erin, who was carefully measuring out sugar and powdered ginger under her grandmother’s tutelage. Barr had gone upstairs to check his e-mail at work, and Felix and I sat at the table, busily stripping the bright yellow petals from the pile of freshly washed dandelion flowers. Tootie had said we’d need eight cups. We were about halfway there.

  “Is it something Erin shouldn’t hear?” I whispered back.

  Both Tootie and Erin turned and looked at me. I guess my whisper needed a little work.

  “Naw. It’s just, you know …”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “… gossip.”

  My lips twitched as I realized he was more interested in keeping his predilection for rumor mongering quiet around Tootie. “Right. Well, I think we can make the argument that in this case it’s for a good cause.”

  He brightened at that. “Well, the other day I was sitting in the recreation room, and Dorothy Swenson was there with a couple of her friends.”

  “Felix likes to hang out with the ladies, you know,” Tootie teased.

  “Oh, Petunia, you know it’s not like that. Anyway they were talking about their grandchildren. Betsy Maher—you know her, don’t you?”

  I nodded. Her son was Cadyville’s police chief, and Betsy loved to get the lowdown on local goings-on from her son.

  “Well, she said that her daughter lives in Phoenix, and her son—Betsy’s grandson—moved back in with his parents at the tender age of thirty-eight.”

  Echoes of my earlier conversation with Penny Turner came to mind.

  Felix bent toward me. “Dorothy jumps in then and says how she’s got four grandchildren—that was before Quentin died, of course—that she has to take care of.”

  “Take care of? Did she refer to anything specifically?”

  He nodded vigorously. “She said she’d been keeping that wine shop downtown afloat ever since it opened. That she’d told Glen she wasn’t going to keep him in business anymore. She gave him one more year to make a real go of the place, and if he didn’t then he’d have to close it up.”

  “I wondered how a fancy wine store could make any money in a little town like Cadyville.” I shifted my foot, propped on a pillow on the chair opposite. “Apparently it doesn’t. I suppose that might give Glenwood a motive to kill Dorothy. But she’s not the one who died.”

  Felix looked a little disappointed.

  “Now mix the sugar and ginger into the water until the sugar dissolves,” Tootie told Erin. “When it does, just let it sit on the counter with a thin layer of cheesecloth over it. Every day for a week, add another teaspoon of sugar and another of ginger. It should start to bubble. Then I’ll tell you what to do next.”

  She came and sat down with us, reaching for a dandelion. “You know, all those grandkids of hers get the same amount of Dorothy’s money when she dies. She’s made no secret that her will divides the pie up equally.”

  My fingers slowed. “Now that might be a reason for one of his siblings to kill Quentin. After all, if one of them is dead, the others get more money when Grandma kicks off.”

  Felix waggled his eyebrows, but Tootie looked concerned. “That’s terrible.”

  “It also means the killer may not be done,” Barr said from the doorway, where he’d obviously been listening.

  I motioned him back into the kitchen. “Now that you have the results back on Quentin’s bottle of mead, can you get access to the mead I saw through Elizabeth Moser’s window?”

  He looked thoughtful. “I can try.”

  “Tonight?”

  “First thing in the morning.” He saw the disappointment on my face. “I promise.”

  “If she was cremated, then testing those bottles may be the only way to prove Elizabeth was murdered.” I patted the chair beside me.

  Barr sat down.

  “We were just talking about Dorothy’s will. How much of a motive is the money, anyway?” I asked. “I mean, is she really that rich?”

  “She’s worth about four million,” Barr said. “Not including Grendel. The meadery will be divided equally among the grandchildren, but she told me her will stipulates none of them can sell their portion unless it’s to the other siblings.”

  “What about Quentin’s share?”

  “His share of the meadery goes to Iris. But the liquid assets will now be redistributed among Victoria, Willa, and Glenwood.”

  Tootie stood again. “All right. Enough of this talk. Let’s get some water boiling so we can steep these petals.”

  “Why?” Erin asked.

  “Because dandelion wine starts with dandelion tea.”

  Erin carefully wrote that down.

  “Then we’ll add sugar and let that dissolve, and when it’s cooled down a bit, the yeast will go in.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “Will bread yeast work?”

  “In a pinch, but the result won’t be as nice,” Tootie said. “Your husband here stopped at Berries and Hops on the way over from Caladia Acres, though, so we could pick up a white wine yeast.”

  I smiled at Barr. “Thanks.”

  The next hour felt like plain, ordinary family time.

  For once.

  _____

  As soon as Barr had left to take Tootie and Felix back to Caladia Acres, I asked Erin to fill the dishwasher. Then I settled in on the sofa with my foot up and all the herbal references in the house piled around me.

  It didn’t take long to find a picture of poison hemlock. And it looked disturbingly familiar. In fact, it looked exactly like the plant which that very morning I’d been trying to decide was either thick-stemmed parsley or thin-stalked celery.

  Good Lord. I’d been ready to pick some of it. No wonder Willa had sounded sharp.

  Wait a second. The pictures.

  I hobbled into the foyer and extracted the cell phone from my big tote bag on the bench. Back on the sofa, I flipped through the shots I’d taken.

  There: poison hemlock.

  Victoria had mentioned that wine was the best thing to extract the medicinal properties of herbs. Honey wine would certainly qualify. And it would be easy for her to repackage a tainted bottle. All those swing-top Grendel bottles had nothing but a shrink-wrapped top to ensure the seal hadn’t been broken. I had a pile of the same shrink-wrap bands down in my workroom; it was nothing to take one off and replace it with another. All you needed was the band and a hair dryer.

  Erin came in and plopped on the sofa beside me. “Spaghetti sure can be messy.”

  “Mm, hmm.” I was still distracted.

  “’Course, it’s only my favoritest meal ever, so I don’t mind.”

  I looked down at her. “Favoritest?”

  She grinned.

  “How’d your history project go? Didn’t you have to do a presentation today?”

  “Yeah. No biggie. Can I watch TV?”

  “For an hour.” Meghan was strict about limiting television time, but Erin was usually too busy with other things to push the limits.

  “Okay.” S
he reached for the remote control and turned on some ghastly reality show.

  I left her to it and went downstairs to package soap. I heard Barr come back, and after a bit went up to make sure Erin had shut off the television. She was already in bed, but instead of her usual pre-sleep reading, she was writing furiously in her notebook.

  “’Night,” I said.

  She didn’t look up. “’Night.”

  Oh, well. It was Friday night. She could work on her book all night if she wanted to.

  Upstairs, I showed Barr the pictures of the poison hemlock in the book and then the ones I’d taken with my cell phone.

  “Nice work,” he said, his chin on my shoulder. “Can you e-mail those to me?”

  “Be glad to. Do you really think it was Victoria?”

  “Or Willa.”

  “Glenwood’s no slouch when it comes to knowledge about mead, and he’s at Grendel a lot. He’d have access to the herb garden, too.” But even as I said the words they felt like a stretch.

  Barr murmured agreement, eyelids already drooping. I was exhausted, too, and my ankle throbbed. So much for the fabulous newlywed sex life. It had been nearly a week.

  “You know,” I said. “It occurs to me that Victoria might have another motive for killing Quentin.”

  “Mmm?”

  “Maybe he wanted to stop providing her OxyContin. After all, with the lawsuit and the bill before the state legislature, he was probably under a lot of scrutiny. Warren Kringle would be keeping a keen eye on him, too. I’m surprised he managed to keep his job at the drugstore through all that.”

  “Do you know that he gave it to her illegally?”

  “Well, no. But she made such a big deal about curing herself with herbs. Of course, talking the talk and walking the walk are two different things.” I frowned. “Maybe she does have a valid prescription.”

  “It’s a thought,” Barr said. “Now stop thinking and come to bed.”

  It turned out he wasn’t as tired as I thought. And neither was I.

  _____

  But three a.m. found me back down in my workroom packing the final box of Winding Road products to ship out the next day. Well, technically the same day.