by Morgana Best
Ten minutes later the two of us were locking the shop, having made the decision to close early so we could visit our four suspects’ homes during the day, while they were all likely to be at work. We were going to go through their trash, and we had decided it would be much easier not to be discovered in that act. We knew that we wouldn’t find any evidence of rat poison, but we thought we might turn up something. It was worth a try. Nothing else had worked so far.
We went to Bill Gafney’s house first. The cross-dressing politician had been blackmailed by Brant after Brant somehow found out that Bill liked to wear women’s clothing as often as he could, and had threatened to tell his wife. I felt sorry for Bill. After all, I Am Cait was one of my fave TV shows.
We parked on the street, near the rather large house. Neither of us got out right away.
“This isn’t exactly legal, is it?” Thyme asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “But we have to do it.”
“You’re right. I just don’t think jail would suit me.”
“Well then, let’s be fast,” I said with a chuckle. I pushed open my door and climbed out of the car. Thyme and I walked briskly up the sidewalk, side by side. We then hurried up the sloping driveway to the closed garage, and went to the left, sliding around the side of the garage. There were the trash cans, two large black plastic bins.
“Should we make sure no one is here?” Thyme asked, and I considered it.
“No,” I said finally. “Let’s just get this done.”
And with that, we went to work. I was hoping perhaps we would come across a letter, maybe written by Brant, threatening Bill and demanding payment.
Only one bin had any trash in it, and the other two sat empty. There were two plastic bags in the full bin, so I pulled them both out and handed one to Thyme. We set them on the ground and pulled the ties apart, and got to work. It was messy and unpleasant, but we got through it. When we were finished, we had absolutely nothing to go on.
“That’s okay,” I said, trying to look on the bright side. “One down, three to go.”
We hurried back to the car and drove to the next suspect’s house. Jason Mackay was the delivery man who had been sold a faulty van by Brant, and had gone on to lose his business. I felt something of a kinship with the man in a way. I too was in danger of losing my business because of the blustery car salesperson.
Jason’s house was smaller, and his trash more untidy and more unpleasant. Thankfully there was less of it, but once again we turned up nothing.
“Perhaps we’re on the wrong track,” Thyme said as she climbed into my car.
“We’re only halfway through. Let’s finish before we decide that,” I said.
Dermott Smith had the nicest house of the three, even bigger than the politician’s. It appeared that even though Brant had cost him a lot of money in a poker game, he still had plenty to fall back on.
Thyme and I sneaked around the side of his house and didn’t see any trash cans.
“Maybe he keeps them in the garage,” I suggested as we made our way back to the front of the house.
“Then we’re out of luck,” Thyme said as we stopped in front of the garage. It had room for two cars, and was attached to the house. As we looked helplessly at the large cream colored door, there was a rumble, and the door began to move up.
“Move!” I whispered, pushing Thyme to the side. We hid around the corner of the house, and as we peered around the edge, I heard a car engine roar to life. A sports car edged into view. The driver gunned it, and the car shot off down the winding driveway. The door rumbled again, and started to close.
I didn’t have time to think. I hurried around the corner of the home and sprinted for the door. I threw myself forward, under the door. I must have triggered an invisible beam, as the door went back up.
Thyme ran to the garage. “You are crazy, girl!” she said in a loud whisper.
I lay on the smooth concrete floor of the garage, on my back, panting. “I really want the customers to come back,” I said.
Thyme reached down and helped me to my feet, and then hurried over to press the button to shut the door.
The garage was well maintained, and there was barely anything inside it. Off to the side were two black trash bins. Once again, we pulled the trash out with our hands and went through it. It took us longer than the other two homes, but once again we found absolutely nothing that would indicate that the guy was a murderer. I sighed. “Let’s look on the shelves for thallium,” I said.
Thyme shook her head. “The cops would’ve searched, surely. And he’d have to be crazy to leave evidence like that lying around. We should get out of here in case he comes back.”
I ignored her, and did a quick skim of the shelves. There were plastic boxes of nuts and bolts, a few wrenches, and some old cans of paint. All were neatly stacked. “You’re right,” I said. “This guy’s a clean freak.”
“Let’s go.” Thyme pulled me over to the door. She hit the button again, and it opened. To my relief, no one was outside. “You go out, and then I’ll close it and duck under,” she said.
“And now we’re three down,” Thyme said once we were back in the car.
“Let’s keep going to Melanie’s house,” I said.
Melanie’s trash bins were sitting on the side of the road, their lids open.
“Collection day was two days ago,” Thyme said. “She clearly hasn’t bothered to take them in yet.”
“Shoot,” I said. I felt defeated. I wanted to cry, to scream. I didn’t know what else to do. This had been the last idea, our last hope at catching someone with something, anything at all. We just needed clues, and that was exactly what we weren’t getting. Without even bothering to get out of the car, I turned around in the cul-de-sac and headed for the cake store.
“Wait a minute,” Thyme said. “We didn’t check one place.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“What about all that land she owns? Does Melanie have a home out there?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, “but we should go check.”
Instead of turning left toward the center of town at the intersection, I turned right, and headed just out of town, where Melanie had five-hundred sprawling acres.
I wasn’t quite sure where the land was, but with Thyme checking her cell phone we eventually made it. The first thing I saw was a dirt road leading off the main road. It was surrounded by trees, so I couldn’t see too far down the road as it curved and continued on through the trees. There was a mailbox there, but it was broken, just a piece of wood painted white jutting out of the ground, with the actual box part hanging loosely, its front facing directly toward the ground.
I pulled onto the dirt road. “Let’s go see what we can find,” I said. “Keep an eye out for any cars. We don’t want her to catch us.”
Chapter 23
The dirt road was bumpy, and the recent rain had made it even worse. Large ditches, carved out of the hard packed surface by water, crisscrossed here and there.
“I don’t think your car was made for off-roading,” Thyme said, gripping the hand support near the passenger window on the ceiling.
“Me, either,” I said. I grimaced as we bounced upward over a severe bump. As the dirt path turned this way, the trees began to thin until they were suddenly gone altogether. I could see a wide open paddock in front of us, with long grass and little blue wildflowers.
“Wow,” Thyme said.
I agreed. “It’s beautiful here.”
There were two structures standing in the clearing, a semi-standing burned down house, and further on, a dilapidated wooden barn that was lurching precariously to one side.
“What happened here?” I asked Thyme.
“Nothing,” she said. “This is typical of old farms in the country. They just let the old farmhouses and barns fall down. You see it everywhere.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. I pulled the car to a stop between the barn and the burned-out husk. The b
arn was bare timber, and the rusted iron roof was missing in places. One door was shut and the other one was wedged open. It must have been open for some time, as a young gum tree was growing through the middle of it.
The barn was dark in some places, but a shaft of light fell through a hole in the ceiling, providing enough light. It was full of stuff, including a faded green tractor that looked like it hadn’t been used in thirty years. To the right were pens of sorts, divided by low wooden walls. I could imagine that pigs had been kept in there. At the back of the barn was a ladder leading up to the roost. I could see the remains of some old moldy hay up there.
“I’m going to look up there,” I said, pointing to the ladder.
“I’ll check these boxes,” Thyme said. “Be careful, though. The wood up on that level is probably rotten, and I don’t know if that ladder’s safe.”
I pulled a face. “I’ll see if the ladder’s going to hold my weight, and if it will, I’ll only climb to the top and have a look.” The ladder was old. I tested my weight on the bottom two rungs and they looked sturdy enough. I gingerly climbed up it, worried my foot would go right through a rung.
When I reached the top, I gripped the edge of the timber boards that made up the upper level. There were a few bales of rotten hay, their edges white with mold. There were also gaps in the floorboards, so there was no way I could go to that side of the platform. However, there was an old shelf in front of me. It held some old jugs and some old bottles, along with one big bottle labeled ‘Lucijet.’ I’d come across that one in my googling of discontinued poisons. It was a deadly poison formerly used for dipping sheep to rid them of lice, back in the day. I figured that a farmer of decades ago had kept the poisons up here to keep them away from kids. I only hoped he hadn’t kept the ladder up there then.
I moved forward to look at the poisons, and pushed the Lucijet aside. I was debating whether to inch forward further, when a bottle caught my eye. It was a six-sided bottle and it had fallen down behind the container of Lucijet. I learned forward as far as I could, and my fingers closed around the bottle. I pulled it out to take a closer look.
My heart missed a beat. The top of the label said ‘Poison’. Across the middle was a black banner, and on it in white reverse writing was the word ‘Thall-rat.’
“Thyme, come here!” I called out.
“What is it?”
“Listen to this,” I said. I read aloud. “The original thallium sulfate rat poison that kills quickly. Rats cannot detect Thall-rat because it is tasteless and odorless.”
“Hand it down to me,” Thyme said. “Be careful.”
I handed it down to her and then carefully climbed the ladder.
Thyme shook the bottle, and I could hear liquid sloshing within it. “Is Melanie the murderer?” I asked her.
Thyme shrugged.
“But why would she just leave this stuff here, on her land?” I asked. “The cops could’ve easily found it.”
“But they didn’t,” Thyme pointed out. “Obviously they don’t suspect her. Obviously they haven’t searched here. And here’s another thing. What if she really doesn’t have anything to do with this building? I mean, I know she owns the land, but it doesn’t look like anyone’s been in here in years. This is a really old bottle. People really used to use this stuff.’
“True, and there were various poisons and herbicides up there in the loft,” I said. “It could have nothing to do with her.”
“Do you believe that?” Thyme asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “There seriously were a lot of poisons up there.”
Thyme looked worried. “I suppose we shouldn’t have touched that bottle.”
I hit myself on the forehead. “I’ll put it back. I’ll wipe our fingerprints off it first.”
“If the cops do a search, they won’t find Melanie’s fingerprints on it,” Thyme said.
I pulled a face. “Good point. She’d be stupid to leave her own fingerprints on it, though.”
I climbed back up the ladder, wiped the bottle clean, and put it where I’d found it. “Why would she kill him?” I asked Thyme as soon as I got back down the ladder. “We still haven’t figured out that part.”
“What if we were thinking about it all wrong?” Thyme said. “We know she would never drill for that gas. Maybe Brant was going to marry her, so he would legally be able to drill here. Remember, he didn’t have enough on his land.”
I nodded. “That makes sense.”
“He’s a charming guy when he wants to be, so they say,” Thyme continued. “At any rate, he was a good salesman. So he sells himself, makes her fall in love, but then somehow she finds out he wants her land, specifically to drill for the gas?”
“So she knows she has the thallium in her old barn and decides to kill him?”
Thyme shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. But it’s all starting to fit, don’t you think?”
I had to nod. “It really is,” I said. “And if the thallium’s just left here, along with a lot of other old poisons, she can pretend she had nothing to do with it. It would even help maybe to look like someone was framing her.”
“It’d be a good story for the police at least,” Thyme said.
“But is Brant wanting to drill on her land enough of a reason to kill him?” I asked. “Some of these other people’s lives were ruined by Brant.”
“I think it’s enough of a reason for Melanie,” Thyme said. “She’s an environmentalist. She’s well known around town for it. She takes all of that stuff very seriously. She would be so adamant against drilling.”
“Why not just call off the engagement?”
Thyme held up her hands. “I don’t have a clue. So what do we do now? Do we go to the police?”
“I don’t think we can,” I said. “Can we? ‘Oh hey, we’ve been breaking into people’s places, and we found this!’ They would lock us up.”
Thyme nodded. “You’re right.”
“And it’s still not enough to go on, but it’s a good start.”
“All right,” Thyme said. “Let’s keep looking in here.”
“I might go and look in the house,” I said.
Thyme shook her head. “Be careful in that place, will you? It might fall on you.”
“I will,” I said with a smile.
The house was an empty shell. It looked as if it had burned down many years ago. As I turned to go back to the barn, I had the unmistakable feeling that someone was watching me. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.
I walked forward a bit, and spun in a slow circle, my eyes on the trees at the edge of the clearing. I didn’t see anyone. And then I thought I saw movement, over near the dirt path that led to the road. Maybe there was a flash of blue, someone’s shirt. I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t even be sure I had seen someone. Perhaps it was a kangaroo, but they are not blue. Yet I distinctly had that strange feeling, and thought I saw something.
As I watched, I thought I heard a car start in the distance. I stayed quiet, straining my ears, hoping to confirm what I thought I was hearing, but I couldn’t. I had no way of knowing if I had really heard an engine. I felt uneasy.
“That was fast,” Thyme said, as soon as I stepped into the barn.
I considered telling her what I had felt and what I had thought I heard, but I decided there was no point freaking her out. It was probably my imagination, after all.
“Nothing there,” I said. “All destroyed. It was just an empty shell.”
Thyme nodded and stood up straight. She had been kneeling in front of the boxes. “Just a lot of junk,” she said. “Old rusted tools in one box, old rabbit traps in another.”
I nodded. “Want to get out of here? We did good.”
“Now we just have to figure out our next step,” Thyme said.
“I’m starting to think that’s all detective work is,” I said with a smile. “Finding something really small, and then spending days figuring out what to do with it.”
Thyme laugh
ed. “If that makes you a good detective, then we’re great ones.”
As we drove back to the road, I looked for any evidence that another car had been there. I saw nothing, but then again, what would I see? It hadn’t been raining, so there was no way I would see tire tracks on the hard ground. Once back on the road, I turned in the direction of town. I didn’t see another car until we reached the edge of town. I kept glancing in the rearview mirror as I drove, expecting to see someone following me, but no one was.
Had I seen someone? I was still on edge. I felt as though someone had been watching me. I thought I had seen someone in blue, cutting through the eucalyptus trees near the clearing.
Chapter 24
I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned on the bed as I stared at the walls and ceiling. The day’s events kept playing through my head on an infinite loop. That’s what I got for going to bed so early.
“Any suggestions?” I asked the ceiling as I lay there. Oh gosh, I was rapidly becoming a crazy cat lady, having long conversations with my cats, and now I was even talking to my house.
I wasn’t quite sure what I expected, anyway. A cup of tea to appear? Some sort of creak or rumble in response? I smiled at myself and shook my head. I had no idea how to begin processing this whole new twist on my world. Living houses, love potions, magic, a house with feelings?
I sighed and got out of bed. I pulled on my robe as I made my way toward the kitchen. If I wasn’t going to get any sleep, I could at least get some paperwork done. Even with the lack of business, there was always some sort of paperwork to catch up with, and Aunt Angelica had done it all by hand. I was trying to convert the hard files onto an online file, in the hope I could get the system into some sort of order before things got busy.
I wondered what I was going to do about Melanie and the Thall-rat. Or was this just a red herring? Was the real murderer Dermott Smith, Bill Gafney, or Jason Mackay? Who knows, maybe even one of those men had planted the Thall-rat in Melanie’s barn to frame her.
Should I go to the police? And how would they react to me searching Melanie’s barn? I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to avoid trespassing charges.