Blood Orange: A China Bayles Mystery

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Hey. My daughter will be getting home soon, and our dog has probably written me off.” I began zipping my laptop back into its case. “Call me when you’ve come to some conclusion about the files.”

  We stood, a little awkwardly, and Lara leaned forward and put her arms around me. “Thanks,” she said, her voice muffled against my shoulder. “Thank you very much, China.”

  “For what?” I asked, returning her hug.

  “For giving me something to think about besides what’s happening in Kelly’s hospital room. I was going crazy, sitting here, just waiting. Waiting for my best friend to die.” After a moment, she stepped back, her voice intense. “Now I’ve got something to do, and it’s not just busywork. It’s something that Kelly started, for a reason. It was important to her, which makes it important to me. And I’m going to finish what she started.” She reached out and gave my hand a hard squeeze. “Thank you, China.” The tears were running down her cheeks, but she was smiling. “So, yes. I’ll call you as soon as I’ve got something figured out.”

  “Good,” I said, and returned the squeeze. I wasn’t as confident as she was, and I was concerned. “But please don’t mention Kelly’s files to anybody, Lara. Not to her mother or her husband—not to anybody. If she was endangered by what she knew, you could be, too.”

  Lara’s eyes got large. “You’re right,” she said soberly. “I won’t say a word.”

  I drove home through the deepening dark, mulling over what Lara had told me. There were a lot of odd little bits of complicated information to process, but I was beginning to see a shape emerging out of the scattered confusion. I was grateful for Lara’s help. Now, if Jessica could come up with one or two of the things I’d asked her to search for, we might be able to make some forward progress.

  The puzzle was almost intriguing enough to blot out my worry about McQuaid, which was sharper now after talking to the guys at Beans’.

  Almost enough. But not quite.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Not all botanical drinkables are alcoholic, of course. Drinks brewed from various herbs are drunk for their stimulant or relaxant properties, for medicinal purposes, or simply for their taste.

  Stimulant drinks are brewed from coffee and tea plants, as well as from herbs such as rosemary, guarana, ginseng, and yerba maté. If you’re looking for a calming, relaxing bedtime tea, you have several good choices. My favorite: a blend of dried chamomile, hibiscus, and passionflower blossoms, with dried blackberry and peppermint leaves and orange peel for a citrusy flavor. Other options: lavender, lemon balm, skullcap.

  China Bayles

  “Botanical Drinkables”

  Pecan Springs Enterprise

  Winchester began barking with delight when he saw my headlights coming down the drive, and when I let him out of his dog run, he danced ahead of me on the path to the house. Yes, bassets can actually dance, although they’re always a little embarrassed when they find themselves doing it and stop the minute they know someone’s watching. Bassets are mindful of their dignity.

  In the kitchen, I dished out Winchester’s dog food and added a couple of chunks of cabrito and half a flour tortilla from the take-out box I’d brought home from Beans’, as an apology for being late. When he was finished, Winchester looked up at me with mournful brown eyes, silently pleading for the rest of that tortilla so he wouldn’t starve during the long, lonesome night ahead, when the refrigerator door was closed and all the snacks were put away on shelves he was too short to reach. Bassets are champion moochers.

  “Oh, all right,” I said, and dropped it on his plate. He scarfed it down and wagged a fervent thank-you with his stout, white-tipped tail, just as car tires crunched on the gravel drive. A moment later, Caitie ran into the kitchen, dropped her books and violin, grabbed a basket, and ran out again to pick up eggs and make sure that her girls were safely tucked into their skunk- and fox-proof coop for the night. Mr. P came down the stairs to inquire about the whereabouts of his dinner and was waiting beside the door when Caitie came back into the kitchen, carrying eight brown-shelled eggs in her basket.

  “I’ll take all of these, sweetie,” I said. “I want to make some deviled eggs when your dad gets home.”

  “When will that be?” she asked. “Soon, I hope.”

  I took a deep breath. “I do, too,” I said, keeping my voice level. I penciled a note on the pad we keep on the kitchen counter. Eight eggs times twenty cents an egg: $1.60. A little pricey compared to store-bought, but Caitie’s eggs are in a different class altogether.

  “How much do I have now?” she asked, getting a can of cat food out of the cupboard and a can opener out of the drawer. To Mr. P’s loud meow, she said, “I’m hurrying as fast as I can. Just be a little patient.”

  I added $1.60 to $11.40. “Thirteen dollars even,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “The girls need more laying pellets, and that’s more than enough. Can we pick up a sack tomorrow?”

  “Sure thing,” I said. That’s our deal with Caitie. We pay her for the eggs we eat, out of which she pays for her chicken feed. She sells extra eggs to the neighbors and keeps whatever she earns. During the summer, when there are extra extra eggs, she peddles them to the customers at the herb shop. Caitie has the soul of a musician and the mind of an entrepreneur. I have the feeling that whatever she does for a living when she’s grown up, she’ll always have plenty of pocket change.

  I filled the teakettle at the sink. “Did you and Sharon have a nice evening?” I asked, putting the kettle on the stove.

  “Boys.” Caitie puffed out her breath as if she were short on patience. “Sharon lives across the street from Kevin. He heard us working on our concert piece and came over with his violin.” She spooned Mr. P’s supper into his dish. Winchester trotted over to watch and graciously offered to dispose of anything left in the can. “Not for puppies,” she said, and Winchester gave a heavy sigh.

  “Ah,” I said. “Kevin.” I wondered if she knew he had a crush on her. And then, belatedly, I wondered if she had gone home with Sharon tonight because she knew that Kevin lived across the street. After all, she is thirteen. “How did that work out?” I asked.

  Caitie put Mr. P’s dish on the floor. “Well, three violins is better than two when it comes to practice,” she said judiciously. “And Kevin’s not so bad when he’s not showing off for Dr. Trevor or for the other boys. When he’s by himself, he’s kind of nice. Well, he was tonight, anyway.” She bent over and gave Winchester a little push. “Winnie, this is not your supper. Go lie down in your basket.”

  Winchester was not in the mood to follow orders. He gave her a reproachful look, flopped down flat on the floor (the “flat basset” position, his I-am-not-moving-one-inch posture, with rear legs splayed and tail on the floor), and put his nose between his paws. The cat, wise in the ways of silly dogs, ignored him and gobbled his dinner.

  “Does Kevin do that? Show off for Dr. Trevor, I mean.” I got the tea out of the cupboard—my favorite home-crafted bedtime blend of chamomile, hibiscus, and passionflower blossoms, with blackberry and peppermint leaves and dried orange peel. I felt I needed it after my eventful evening. And then I thought of Kelly and I was ashamed of myself. I needed comforting when Kelly’s mom was coping with the loss of her daughter? Death is the greatest finality, and losing a son or a daughter must be the hardest death to face.

  “Kevin is the biggest show-off in the whole wide world,” Caitie declared dramatically. “I told him he could get an Oscar for Best Show-off.” She went to the fridge and poured herself a glass of milk. “I’m going upstairs to call Sharon.”

  “But you just left Sharon,” I pointed out, spooning the loose tea into an infuser and dropping it into the two-cup china pot my mother had given me. “And it’s almost bedtime.”

  Caitie put her head on one side. “Oh, Mom, please? It won’t take long, I promise. I forgot to tell her something
.”

  I thought of Kelly and Kelly’s mom, and turned and gave my daughter a hard hug. “Okay. You can call Sharon, but use your cell, please. I’m expecting your dad to call. Don’t forget to watch your minutes. And bedtime.”

  I ruffled her hair, gave her one more hug, and let her go. Hoping that McQuaid would call was more like it, actually. Hoping that he hadn’t gone south across the border. Hoping that if he had, he had already come back north, all in one piece. Hoping that as soon as he could get a cell phone signal, he’d call. Hoping—

  The phone rang, and I grabbed for it, feeling my heart jump into my throat and hang there, pulsing.

  “Tell him I said kiss kiss and come home soon ’cause we miss him.” Caitie scooped up Mr. P, draped him over her shoulder, and went upstairs. Winchester, realizing that being a flat basset wasn’t going to get him anywhere, lumbered to his feet. With a glance over his shoulder that said, “Someday I’ll be gone and you’ll miss me,” he trudged to his basket and climbed in.

  It wasn’t McQuaid, it was Jessica.

  “Oh, it’s you,” I said.

  “Must’ve caught you at a bad time,” Jessica said wryly. “Want me to hang up and call back next month?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was hoping— Never mind.” I took a deep breath and forced a smile into my voice. “What’s up?”

  “What’s up is that I’ve just emailed you some things I think you should take a look at. Do you have your laptop handy?”

  “It’s right here. Hang on a sec and I’ll bring it up.”

  I put the phone on speaker, unzipped the computer case, and took out my laptop. I flicked the power switch, and a moment later I was watching Jessica’s email, loaded with three attachments, drop into my in-box.

  “What’s in the attachments?” I asked.

  “Some examples of what you might be looking for. Three stories, one from a couple of weeks ago—the date is March 30—and the other two from last year, August and November. Three deaths, two in Pecan Springs, one in Lufkin. All three unattended.”

  “No kidding?” I said. “You found these already? Wow. That was fast.”

  “Well, as you said, I’m a kick-ass researcher,” Jessica said smugly. “And I do have access to the in-house Enterprise computer files. I did a quick-and-dirty search, just to see what might turn up. There were a couple of others—a homeless guy found dead under the I-35 bridge, a twenty-one-year-old woman who OD’d in her car—but they didn’t seem to fit. If what I’ve sent isn’t quite what you’re after, you can help me narrow it down. And of course, I can go back farther into the files. Tomorrow. This is it for the night.”

  The kettle was steaming, and I poured hot water into the teapot and put on the china lid. “Are you still at the newspaper office?”

  “I’m just turning off the lights and heading home. It’s been a long day, and I’m ready to get naked and dive into a hot bath. So let’s plan to talk tomorrow. Okay?”

  “Sure thing,” I said. “And Jessica, thanks. I’m in your debt.”

  “You think?” Jessica asked, with a touch of sarcasm. “I don’t hang around the office computer after dinner just for fun, you know. You’d better remember this when it’s time for the story you promised me.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Jessica, I’ve just come from the hospital. They took Kelly off life support tonight. She’s dead.”

  “Ah, hell,” she said very softly, and clicked off.

  I got my favorite teacup out of the cupboard and sat down at the kitchen table. When Jessica and I were eating together at Beans’, I had asked her to do some research for me. Kelly had used the word murder, which potentially covered a lot of time-and-place territory. But based on the computer files she had copied and color coded, I was guessing that she was looking into some irregular situations at the hospice, and that she suspected that it was a patient who had been murdered.

  And that nobody knew that the death was actually a murder.

  Which all by itself was odd, of course. Murder is not a minor crime. In most circumstances, when it happens, you can’t miss it. Somebody finds a dead person, recognizes that the victim came to a violent end, and calls the cops. The homicide unit opens an investigation, identifies a person or persons of interest who have motive, means, and opportunity, and pursues them with bulldog determination until the killer has been captured, tried, and convicted. Or until the crime has been relegated to the cold case files.

  Obviously, that wasn’t the kind of murder Kelly had in mind. She knew—or thought she knew—of a murder that had not been recognized as a murder, which ruled out gunshot, strangling, stabbing, asphyxiation, and all the other violent means that couldn’t be missed when the body was found. This murder had no witnesses, the autopsy turned up nothing that made the county medical examiner suspect foul play, and the justice of the peace had to have ruled it accidental or a death from natural causes.

  The Enterprise, like all small-town newspapers, reports all deaths in its coverage area. So, as a quick first pass, I had asked Jessica to search the Enterprise files for newspaper reports of local-area unattended deaths—deaths that occurred when the person was alone—that met these criteria. I would match those names against the names of patients in the files Kelly had copied. If Jessica couldn’t find any matches, I would look into the circumstances of the death of every hospice patient. Even if I could get Lara to help me, that was a much bigger job, and not one that I was eager to dig into.

  Thinking about this, it occurred to me that there might be other, related records on Kelly’s computer—a diary, maybe, or notes about the investigation she was undertaking. Once I had a better idea of what I was looking for, I could ask Sheila for permission to do a computer search. But not yet. Right now, I’d just be guessing.

  Anyway, if I brought the police into this, Sheila would ask me to explain all the whys and wherefores, and then she would undoubtedly take the investigation away from me. The police would have to be involved sooner or later, of course. But right now, there was no evidence of a murder, no body, and no witnesses—nothing that would justify the assignment of costly police time and effort.

  I sat down at the table, poured a cup of tea, and stirred in a spoonful of honey. Then I opened the attachments Jessica had sent and quickly scanned each one, noting the circumstances. In Lufkin, a sixty-seven-year-old woman, recently released from the hospital after a serious stroke, was found by her sister, dead in a chair in her bedroom. In Pecan Springs, a seventy-three-year-old man was discovered dead at the foot of a ladder in his backyard by the guy who came to trim the shrubs. The victim had apparently fallen when he tried to replace a screen on a second-story window and died of a broken neck. I brought up Kelly’s files and did a search on both names. Neither had been patients of the Pecan Springs Community Hospice. Both were out of the running as the potential murder victim—real or fictitious—that Kelly might have had in mind.

  But the third one, also in Pecan Springs, was a different story, and much more gruesome. According to an Enterprise article published in September, the police had been called to a house at 137 Wheeler Avenue in response to a neighbor’s report of a deceased resident. When they arrived, the officers discovered a severely decomposed body, identified as that of Ronald R. MacDonald, age seventy-six. The air conditioning in the house had been turned off, and all the windows were closed. The weather had been extremely hot, and due to the advanced stage of decomposition, the Pecan Springs Fire Department Hazmat Unit was called and the residence was treated as a hazardous-materials scene. It appeared that MacDonald, who had recently been discharged as a patient of the Pecan Springs Community Hospice, had been dead for approximately ten days. There were no signs of foul play. The autopsy revealed that he had died of morphine poisoning. Justice of the Peace Maude Porterfield ruled that the death was due to a morphine overdose, adding that it could not then be determined whether it was an accident or a suicide. />
  Ronald MacDonald. I frowned. Where had I—

  And then I remembered. MacDonald was the hospice patient whom Lara had mentioned as a candidate for “discharge for cause.” Searching Kelly’s file, I found the entry easily. Ronald R. MacDonald, 137 Wheeler Avenue, deceased, August 15 (approximately). Kelly had coded the entry yellow, for “unqualified.” When I studied it, I saw that she could also have coded it pink, for over-stay. MacDonald had been in hospice care for just short of a year.

  I picked up my cup and sipped the fragrant tea. The Texas Code of Criminal Procedure requires that unattended deaths, like all three of those Jessica had sent me, be subjected to both an autopsy and an inquest. Tom Harkins, an MD at the hospital in Pecan Springs, does the county’s autopsies. Tom is smart, conscientious, and operates strictly by the book. And Maude Porterfield, whom I know quite well and whose judgment I respect, would not have ruled as she did if there had been even the slightest evidence of foul play.

  So there wasn’t much to go on here—when you got right down to it, nothing at all. On the surface, it looked like the tragic death of an elderly man who had gotten confused about the dosage of his painkiller, or had committed suicide when the pain of his disease became unbearable. But Kelly had used the word murder, and morphine has served as a handy murder weapon many times in the past. MacDonald’s death met the criteria I had established, and I wasn’t going to give it a quick pass.

  I took out my cell and phoned Lara. I caught her on her way back home to Wimberley after she had dropped Kelly’s mom at her motel. She sounded sad and weepy when she picked up my call, but she perked up when I told her what I had asked Jessica to look for and what she had found. She understood the situation immediately, in part because she is a very smart woman and in part because Ronald MacDonald had been such an uncooperative patient and she remembered him well. When she learned that he was dead from an overdose of morphine, she was quick to grasp the implication.