Deadly Currents

by Beth Groundwater

  Do not insult the mother alligator

  until after you have crossed the river.

  —Haitian Proverb

  After another restless night, Mandy sat at her kitchen table sipping a cup of strong coffee. She hoped it would kick her fuzzy brain into gear, though she didn’t have to go into work. Monday was one of her days off, since few boaters traveled down the river the first day of the work week. While flipping the pages of The Mountain Mail, Salida’s local newspaper, she remembered yesterday afternoon and smiled.

  Wonder of wonders, near the end of the day, she and Steve had found her PFD neatly stashed behind the gray rock at the Stone Bridge takeout, just as she had requested. That day, the man with the inner tube had been lucky.

  Unlike Tom King.

  She flipped another page and put the coffee cup down hard. Tom King’s photo appeared in the obituaries section.

  His memorial service was planned for ten o’clock that morning. She checked the clock on her kitchen stove. Eight thirty. Maybe going to the service would help her close the book on not being able to rescue Tom King, bury the guilt, banish the nightmares. Or at least turn a page.

  A few minutes before ten, Mandy stood at the corner of 4th and D streets, the center of gravity for Salida’s church population. Episcopal and Catholic churches stood one block away. Clustered at this intersection were the First Christian Church, the First Baptist Church, and directly across 4th street from her, the First United Methodist Church, where Tom King’s service was due to begin.

  Staring at the red brick edifice, she smoothed clammy hands down her black skirt and flattened the collar of a brown button-down shirt. She had found the shirt stuffed in the back of her closet and had hastily ironed it. The shirt and skirt didn’t go together, but they were the two darkest and most conservative pieces of clothing she owned.

  An older couple walked up the concrete steps of the church, the man leaning heavily on the rail. The woman turned to wait for him. She peered at Mandy, as if trying to discern who she was and if she was related to the deceased.

  Mandy had a sudden urge to run and had to force her legs to stay still. She licked her lips. C’mon girl, you have as much right to be here as anyone else. She squared her shoulders then marched across the street and up the steps.

  Once inside, she slid into a back pew. Almost instantly, she wished she had worn a sweater, because the antique building’s thick walls and dark lighting kept the interior cool. The multi-colored sunlight that filtered through the stained glass windows on the east side cast little warmth, and the solid seat of the carved wooden pew chilled the backs of her thighs. She tucked her skirt tighter around her legs.

  Paula King sat in the front pew, her tall back stiff, her blond hair perfectly coiffed. A young man in an ill-fitting suit brought her a cup of water and sat next to her. Mandy recognized the tall, lean frame of Paula’s son, Jeff King, his wavy brown hair pulled into a neat ponytail. She flashed back to the scene of Paula screaming hysterically on the river bank and a stunned Jeff patting his mother on the back like an automaton.

  Then another memory surfaced, one she thought she’d drowned long ago, of her parents’ funeral service, in a cool, dark church like this one, though it was larger and situated in downtown Colorado Springs. Mourners had filled the pews, and Mandy had felt the collective weight of their sympathetic stares as she squirmed in the front pew.

  The whole ceremony had been a relentless torture while she held in her tears, refusing to break down in public. She had counted backward from five hundred, made imprint designs in her palms with her fingernails, indexed the colors in the stained glass windows—anything but listen to people talk about how her parents had died so young, leaving her and her brother so alone. If not for the methodic massage of her uncle’s hand on her shoulders, easing her tension and giving her overwrought senses something to focus on, she would have broken down and screamed out her grief.

  Stifling a present-day, sympathetic squirm, Mandy shook off the memory and glanced around to see if her uncle might be in attendance at Tom King’s service, too. If so, maybe she could creep up and sit next to him. He’d understand her need for his touch. She couldn’t spot him, but she did see something that surprised her.

  Rob sat a few rows ahead, his back to her and his hair curling over the collar of his only sport coat. His head was bowed and his lips moved. When he raised his head, he crossed himself, an instinctive movement from his Catholic upbringing. She’d attended a few Sunday services at the Catholic church with him, but she wasn’t sure she could ever get used to all the genuflecting.

  Why did he come to the funeral, and why didn’t he tell her he was coming? What was his connection to the King family?

  Looking farther, she spied Detective Quintana in the other back pew across the aisle from her. The man was systematically surveying the attendees and making notes in a small notepad. When he noticed Mandy, he gave a nod, then continued writing.

  What was up with that?

  A deep chord struck by the organist drew Mandy’s thoughts back to the service. She scanned the program crumpled in her hand. It looked like the service would be mercifully short, with only a eulogy by King’s son and a few testimonials by others. And there was no casket up front, thank God.

  Mandy eased out a slow breath in response to the solemn music. She pulled out a pack of tissues and prepared to suffer. She used one tissue during the soloist’s haunting melody. Two more were soaked when Jeff King’s voice cracked with emotion toward the end of the eulogy, and he struggled to finish.

  When Rob got up to speak, Mandy felt shocked, until he mentioned Tom King’s contributions to the local chamber of commerce. Rob served on the board. His steady voice helped Mandy regain her composure enough so that she only needed one last tissue after the closing prayer. When the service ended, she quickly slid out of her pew and was one of the first to leave. She stood blinking on the sidewalk in the glaring sunlight while she fished in her purse for sunglasses.

  Detective Quintana approached her. “Can you stop by my office in about half an hour? I have something to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to discuss it here.”

  Mandy assumed he must have new information about Tom King’s death. “Okay, I’ll see you there.”

  With a nod, Quintana walked off, stroking his mustache. Caught up in wondering what the detective had to tell her, Mandy didn’t notice Rob approaching until he had rubbed a hand across her back.

  “I’m surprised to see you here,” he said.

  Her body responded instinctively to his touch, and she leaned toward him until she remembered that she was supposed to be irritated with him. She stiffened and slid on her sunglasses. “I was surprised to see you, too, until you got up to speak. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

  Rob let his hand fall to his side. “Because I didn’t think you’d want to come, or even want to know the service was happening.”

  “Fooled you.”

  Rob tugged at his bolo tie—the one his grandfather had carved out of silver and fitted with a large, lumpy turquoise stone, the one Rob reserved for special occasions. “Mandy, about our phone conversation—”

  Jeff King came up and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Thanks for that testimonial, Rob.”

  Turning, Rob shook his hand. “Glad to do it. Your father did a lot for the business community in this town, especially in beefing up the chamber of commerce.”

  “That was him.” Jeff’s mouth turned down in a frown. “All business, no play.”

  “Jeff, sweetheart?” Paula King called in her breathy Texas accent. She walked up then stopped when she noticed Mandy. Her voice turned steely hard. “What are you doing here?”

  Mandy tensed. “I came to pay my respects to your husband, Mrs. King. I’m sorry for your lo—”


  “Oh, cut the sugar-coating. Tom would still be alive if your uncle ran a respectable business and hired proper guides.”

  Mandy’s face flushed as she jammed her fists on her hips. “Gonzo’s one of the best river guides on the Arkansas.”

  “Who drinks like a lush.” Paula King crossed her arms confidently across her ample breasts, which looked suspiciously perfect.

  “Who said that?” Mandy glanced at Jeff, who sheepishly stared off into the space over her head. “Gonzo may drink in the evenings, but he runs the river stone sober.” That had better be true. “Besides, his skill as a guide isn’t even an issue. If your husband had a heart attack and fell in the river, that’s no one’s fault. No one could have saved him.”

  Paula thrust out her chin. “You’d like to believe that. Then you’d have a clear conscience, wouldn’t you, honey pie?”

  Mandy spluttered in disbelief, her mouth opening and closing. “What? What are you saying?”

  “You didn’t save my husband, did you? You either failed due to incompetence or—” Jeff’s hand clamped down on his mother’s arm, and she glared at him “—you were covering up for your uncle’s mistakes.”

  Shaking her head, Mandy stumbled back until Rob caught her. “No, no, that’s not true …”

  The woman’s vehemence was like a physical force pushing her, pushing her back into the abyss of her nightmares about her parents’ deaths.

  Rob and Jeff nodded to each other and pulled the two women further apart. Rob hustled Mandy around the corner of the church into the side parking lot.

  There, Mandy regained her speech. “Can you believe that witch? I’ve a good mind to march back there and tell her to go straight to hell.” She whirled toward the front of the church.

  Rob stepped in front of her and put his hands firmly on her shoulders. “Mandy, look at me. Nothing will be gained by you going back there.”

  Literally shaking with fury, Mandy stamped her foot. “Did you hear what she said?”

  “Yes. She must be in a lot of pain to lash out at you like that.”

  “What? Are you sticking up for that she-devil?”

  “It’s the day of her husband’s funeral. Let her grieve in peace.”

  In disbelief, Mandy raised her arms and slammed them down at her side. Her purse slid off her arm and crashed to the sidewalk, spilling keys, comb, and lipstick out onto the asphalt. She bent down to scrape the contents inside. Rob knelt down to help, but by then, she had shoved everything, plus some gravel, back in her purse.

  “Why does she have to take it out on me? And Uncle Bill?” Mandy stood and slung her purse over her shoulder. “What did we do to her? What gives her the right to be so evil?”

  A family on their way to their car turned and glared at Mandy.

  Rob rose and gave her arm a little shake. “This is not the time or place. Use some sense, Mandy. People are staring.”

  Ice crystals formed in Mandy’s veins, their sharp points slicing into her heart. She spoke between clenched teeth. “So now I’m stupid again.”

  Rob put up his hands. “You know I don’t mean that. And I didn’t then.”

  “Then why do you keep saying it?”

  “Let’s go somewhere private where we can talk.”

  “I have nothing more to say to you right now. I have an appointment.”

  Mandy stalked across the street. A nest of demon emotions fought for control of her heart—anger, pride, sorrow, and one green-faced imp rubbing his hands gleefully in the corner of her mind because he knew he would conquer her sleep that night—guilt.

  _____

  Mandy screeched her Subaru into a parking spot in front of the Chaffee County government building. She pounded her hands against the steering wheel until her palms burned red. Then she marched up and down the row of cars until her ears stopped steaming and her heart resumed a regular beat. When she thought she could speak coherently, she entered the building and strode up the stairs to Quintana’s office.

  He was on the phone when she knocked, but he opened the door and waved her into his guest chair.

  As he hung up, a patrolman poked his head through the open door and handed a couple of sheets of paper to him. “Here’s the guest list for the King memorial service, sir.”

  “Thanks.” Quintana laid the papers on his desk.

  “Why do you want to know who attended the memorial service?” Mandy asked. “And why were you there, taking so many notes?”

  “For the same reason I need to talk to you. The Pueblo coroner’s office finished their toxicology test and reached a conclusion on the cause of death for Tom King.”

  Mandy leaned forward. “Did he have a heart attack?”

  “No.”

  She slumped back in the chair. “Damn. What did he die of then?”

  “Poison.”

  That made her sit up straight. “P-poison?”

  Quintana nodded. He fished a page out of the Tom King file on his desk, now twice the size it had been when Mandy last saw it. “Aconite, to be exact, and this particular aconite came from the Western monkshood plant. The purple-blue flowers are supposed to be very popular with bees.”

  “Does that grow along the river?”

  “It does grow wild in this area, plus I’m told some people grow it in their flower gardens, if they don’t have pets.”

  A thousand questions battled for access to Mandy’s tongue, but the first one to fight its way out was, “So how did he get poisoned by it?”

  “He ingested it.”

  “Why would he eat wildflowers?”

  Quintana leaned forward and peered at Mandy. “We don’t think he chose to eat it. The dosage was more than you get from a few flowers. We think someone slipped it to him in something he ate or drank.”

  “Ohmigod.” Further implications crowded Mandy’s brain. “Ohmigod. That means—”

  Quintana nodded. “That means Tom King’s death probably wasn’t accidental. He was most likely murdered.”

  “Is there an antidote? I mean, if he’d been pulled out of the river earlier, could he have been saved?”

  “There’s no antidote, only treatments for the symptoms if the dose is small enough for the body to purge it in a few hours. But aconite is one of the strongest plant poisons. A dose of one-sixteenth of a grain can kill an adult. The toxicology report indicated at least twice that much was in Tom King’s bloodstream. He was a doomed man before you even got to him.”

  A dizzying wave of relief washed over her, flooding her senses until her throat clogged and her eyes burned with unshed tears. She couldn’t have saved him. She wasn’t responsible for his death. She put her hand over her mouth and looked out the window to try to regain her composure.

  When she looked back at Quintana, she saw that he understood—perfectly. “Thank you,” she said in a hoarse voice. “Thank you for telling me.”

  He gave her knee a couple of quick pats and moved his tissue box closer to her. “This also means your uncle can’t be faulted in Tom King’s death. Paula King’s negligence lawsuit now has no basis.”

  “What about the media? Will they be told? If the newspapers say it was murder, Uncle Bill’s customers will stop blaming him and calling to cancel trips.” Her ballooning excitement made Mandy jump out of her chair. “I need to tell him right away.”

  “Hold on.” Quintana put a hand up. “We need to talk about this. You can tell your uncle that King was poisoned, but not what substance was used. We’re doing the same in our press release.”

  “No problem.”

  “You can also tell him that in light of this new information, we’ll need to re-interview him and all his staff who were involved with that trip.”

  Mandy plopped back down in her chair. “You don’t think any of them killed Tom King, do you?” />
  “Right now everyone on that trip has to be treated as a suspect, plus anyone else King had contact with that morning. But our immediate need for information is on the timing of the appearance of King’s symptoms. If we can map the progression of the poisoning, we may be able to come up with an educated guess as to when he ingested the aconite.”

  “How long does it take for aconite to kill someone?”

  “The Pueblo coroner is consulting some poison experts, but his best guess is anywhere from thirty minutes to a few hours.”

  “Were the symptoms I saw—the unconsciousness, gray skin, and weak pulse—consistent with the poisoning?”

  “The poison was attacking King’s heart by the time you got to him, and he was going into ventricular fibrillation.”

  “And the weak paddling strokes, sweating, and thirst that Gonzo saw?”

  Quintana consulted the toxicology report. “Muscular weakness and excessive sweating are listed as symptoms. And a tingling in the mouth when it’s ingested that the subject can confuse with thirst.”

  “What about the wooziness?”

  “The way Gonzo expressed it was that King was having a hard time processing what Gonzo said to him. That’s consistent with the symptom of impaired hearing. The man could also have been confused by what was happening to his body.”

  Mandy imagined what her own confusion and terror would be if her body was falling apart on her and she had no idea why. She shuddered. “What a horrible experience to go through.”

  “Not a pleasant way to die, I imagine. But most ways aren’t.”

  And who would want to do that to Tom King? “So your only interest, then, in talking to Uncle Bill and the guides is to get information on symptoms and who had access to Tom King?”

  “No. As I said, right now everyone who got near King that morning is a suspect.”

  “But Uncle Bill and the guides would have no reason to kill him. They barely knew the man! You should be talking to his bitchy wife instead. She’s got to be your prime suspect.”

  With a cock of his head, Quintana asked, “Why’s that?”