Cyanide with Christie

by Katherine Bolger Hyde

  Dustin’s face scrunched in what looked like genuine confusion. ‘Emily? Nah. Don’t recognize her. Don’t remember the name.’

  Luke gritted his teeth. This guy tried his patience more than most. ‘Think back to your year at Reed. You had Professor Cavanaugh for Hum One Ten. She flunked you, along with a couple of other profs. You had to leave the school.’

  Light visibly dawned. ‘Professor Cavanaugh? Why didn’t you say so? I don’t think I ever heard Emily’s last name.’ His face split in an ugly guffaw. ‘Hell, yeah, I remember Professor Cavanaugh. I gave her hell. She thought she could make something of me. “Redeem” me or something. I showed her.’

  ‘And she flunked you. That must have hurt.’

  ‘Nah. I deserved it. And I was only there ’cause my parents made me go. I never wanted to go to Reed. Not my kind of place at all. All those brainy types sweating it out for no good reason. Did my year, flunked out, my parents had no choice but to accept I just wasn’t the academic type.’

  Luke eyed Dustin narrowly as he calmly finished his coffee. What he was saying had the ring of truth, but Luke wouldn’t take it at face value. Dustin had as good an opportunity as anyone to put cyanide in the amaretto at some point between dinner and charades, and until they knew how Emily had been poisoned yesterday, he couldn’t be ruled out for that either. Luke was keeping this poor excuse for a human being on his suspect list for now.

  If the poison Emily consumed had been in anything she ate, the person who’d know best about that would be Katie. He headed back toward the kitchen, but Katie met him in the hall.

  ‘Luke! There you are. I remembered what was off.’ She beckoned him back into the kitchen and shut the door. ‘Look at this.’ She pointed to a small jar sitting on the table.

  He bent down and squinted at it. ‘Honey?’

  Katie nodded. ‘Mrs C’s been putting honey in her tea the last few weeks. I had a jar of local blackberry honey she especially liked. When I was in the pantry a minute ago, I saw that jar and realized it’s not the same one. But I think it is the one I used at tea yesterday. I remember thinking something was odd about it, but I was in a hurry so I went ahead and put it on the tray.’ She paled. ‘So maybe it was my fault after all.’

  Luke scrutinized the bottle. The label, which looked homemade, said Oregon Coast Blackberry Honey. ‘You sure it’s different? It says it’s local blackberry honey.’

  ‘Yes, the label’s the same – that’s why it didn’t strike me at first. But this jar is fuller than the one I had. The old one was practically empty. Over Christmas I’d been worrying it wouldn’t last till the weather cleared and I could get out to get some more.’

  Luke straightened, frowning. ‘You sure you have no idea who might have been in here?’

  Katie shook her head. ‘I’ve been over and over the last day and a half – it had to be after tea the day before yesterday, because I know I had the old jar then. But I can’t think of anything. I never saw anyone in here except Mrs C herself. She’d hardly poison her own honey.’

  ‘No. Was she the only person who ever used it?’

  ‘Yes. The others took sugar or nothing.’

  Luke heaved a sigh. ‘All right. I’ll get this to the lab and see what they can figure out.’ He took out a glove and an evidence bag, picked up the jar by the lid, and dropped it into the bag. ‘Probably won’t be any fingerprints – except yours, of course – but we can always hope.’

  Before leaving, he made the rounds of the guests to ask if any of them had been in the kitchen or the pantry at any time in the last thirty-six hours. They all denied it and seemed sincerely baffled by the question.

  Luke took the honey to the lab, where Caitlyn met him with a smile. ‘We’ve confirmed andromedotoxin in the patient’s blood,’ she said. ‘Still have to test the Ambien.’

  He handed her the bag with the honey jar. ‘Do this first. Ambien’s looking less likely.’

  Caitlyn raised an eyebrow. ‘Honey, eh? Now that is interesting.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Andromedotoxin comes from certain flowering plants – rhododendrons, azaleas, that sort of thing. And honey made by bees that feed on those flowers is as poisonous as the plants themselves.’

  Luke started. ‘You don’t say. So the honey itself could be the culprit. As opposed to somebody adding something to it.’

  ‘Sure could. If this is it, your victim had a lucky escape – wouldn’t take more than a teaspoon to kill.’

  ‘What about the taste? Would that give it away?’

  ‘It would taste bitter. Or so I’m told.’ Caitlyn removed the jar from the bag with gloved hands. ‘I’ll get right on this. Let you know in a couple of hours.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Emily dozed fitfully through the morning, awakening every time a nurse came in to check her monitors or fuss with her IV. One would think, if rest were the best healer, a hospital would let a patient actually rest instead of disturbing her every ten minutes. But no.

  She felt weak and sleepy, but otherwise well enough – the nausea and the horrible creeping paralysis in her limbs were gone. Thank God. According to Sam, she’d had a lucky escape. If she’d consumed more poison, or if medical help had been delayed … Emily shuddered. No, she wouldn’t think about that.

  In her intervals of wakefulness, she struggled to remember something, anything, about the previous day that might point toward how she’d been poisoned – and by whom. Luke seemed to think it was the Ambien, but that was silly; no one would have had the opportunity to tamper with it, and surely she’d have noticed if there’d been anything different about those familiar little pink pills.

  She thought over everything she’d eaten and drunk the previous day, and even tried to make a list, though her writing was still shaky. Breakfast – she’d helped herself from the common dishes on the sideboard, so if any of those foods had been poisoned, other people would have been affected as well. Mid-morning pastry – no one could have predicted which one she’d take. Lunch – soup and salad from common bowls, bread from a common loaf. Theoretically, someone could have added something to her plate – as they could have at breakfast, for that matter – but her neighbors had been Marguerite and Olivia at lunch, Luke and Ian at breakfast. None of those people could have reason to harm her. And those meals seemed too distant from the onset of symptoms, anyway.

  Tea. That might be getting into a reasonable time frame – roughly six hours before she began to feel ill. She’d eaten pastries and sandwiches from the common tray, drunk tea from the common pot.

  But only one sip of tea. She remembered now – the honey tasted bitter, so she’d set the rest aside undrunk.

  No one else used honey. And anyone in the house could have noticed that.

  She was reaching for the phone to call Luke when the door opened and he stepped in.

  ‘Hey, beautiful. You’re looking almost human.’

  She made a face at him. ‘Charmer. Well, I feel almost human, so there.’

  He bent over her and kissed her forehead. His voice came out in a hoarse whisper. ‘I thought I’d lost you there for a while.’

  She pulled his head down and kissed him properly. ‘You can’t get rid of me that easily. We Worthings are tough.’

  ‘That you are.’

  ‘I was about to call you. I think it might have been the honey.’

  Luke’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Oh, you got there too, huh? Katie realized the jar was fuller than she’d left it when she used it yesterday for tea. I took the jar to the lab, and they told me it could easily have contained the stuff that got to you. They’re testing it now.’ He told her what Caitlyn had said about andromedotoxin and honey.

  ‘So someone got into the pantry and switched the jars? Or added honey to the old jar, I guess, but that would take longer, be messy. Wouldn’t be hard to find another of the same kind of jar – they sell it at that roadside stand in Garibaldi.’

  ‘One thing I wondered – Caitlyn said a teaspoon would’
ve killed you. Did you use only a tiny bit?’

  ‘Au contraire, as Marguerite would say, I put in more than usual. But the tea tasted bad, so I only drank one sip.’

  Luke blew out a long breath. ‘Thank God for that.’ He leaned forward and gripped her hand – the one without the IV. ‘Em, if I’d lost you – God, I can’t even think about it. I’m tempted to make them keep you in here till I’ve got this killer safely behind bars.’

  ‘Oh, please, Luke, not that. I can’t even sleep in this place. It’s like a mall on Black Friday in here.’

  ‘I can’t let you go back to Windy Corner. That honey had to have been switched by someone staying in the house. My money’s on Dustin, but whoever it is, they might easily try again.’

  Emily could not believe any of her guests – even Dustin – could want her dead. ‘Actually, that’s not quite true. Wanda could have done it when she came over yesterday morning.’

  ‘Yesterday morning? You never said. What for?’

  ‘For no good reason, apparently. She said she wanted to check with you if it was OK for her to go to Seaside. You weren’t there, so I gave her your number, and she left the room. I didn’t see her out, so who knows what she got up to before she left the house?’

  He frowned. ‘Gotta admit she does seem kinda like the poisoning type. Poisonous, at any rate. But why would she want to hurt you? She’s expecting you to provide for her comfortable old age.’

  ‘I don’t know why. But she had the opportunity. And I don’t see how Dustin could have gotten hold of that honey. He hasn’t left the house since he arrived, so he’d have to have known ahead of time I’d be using that particular type. No one knew that except Katie. Not even Marguerite.’

  ‘Yeah, but we don’t know for sure the honey was substituted. Dustin could have added poison to the jar after he found out you used it and nobody else did. After bungling it with Cruella he would have wanted to be sure it got to you.’

  ‘I suppose.’ Given her intense dislike of Dustin, Emily wasn’t sure why she should be reluctant to consider him as a murderer now. Perhaps she didn’t want to believe in his motive, as it would, so to speak, poison her memories of her teaching time at Reed.

  Luke clapped his hands to his thighs. ‘No rest for the wicked. I’m going to go back and search Dustin’s belongings again. Think I’ll check on Wanda’s supposed mother in Seaside too. And I better apply for a search warrant for her place in Corvallis.’

  ‘Corvallis?’ Emily’s heart sank. ‘I don’t like the idea of you being that far away.’

  He leaned over and gave her a quick kiss. ‘It’s only a couple of hours. I’ll wait till tomorrow to go over there so I’ll be sure to have daylight. You’ll be fine. Gonzalez out there is the soul of vigilance, let me tell you.’

  He stepped to the door, opened it, and said, ‘Deputy, come in here a sec, would you?’

  A dark-haired young man who looked as if he’d dressed up in his daddy’s uniform stepped tentatively into the room.

  ‘Emily Cavanaugh, I’d like you to meet Deputy Mario Gonzalez. He’s guarding your door with his life, aren’t you, Deputy?’

  The young man stood at attention, his right hand jerking a bit as if he’d just stopped himself from saluting. ‘Yessir. Absolutely, sir.’

  Luke thumped him on the back. ‘All right, Deputy, back to your post.’ He turned to Emily. ‘And Pete’s on duty at Windy Corner, so nothing’s going to happen while I’m gone. I promise.’

  ‘You shouldn’t make promises that involve other people. You have no control over the outcome.’

  ‘No, but if anybody threatened you, I’d sense it from miles away and be back here in a flash. I’ve got superpowers like that.’ He grinned at her.

  The twinkle in his eye dissipated her fears. ‘All right, Superman. But come back as soon as you can.’

  The next day, Luke told Emily he’d found out from his granny that Wanda’s mother in Seaside Rest, or at least her visit to her, was a fabrication; no visitor of Wanda’s description had been seen there. ‘So her showing up at your place was completely pointless, unless she came for one of two things: either to conspire with Oscar or to plant that honey in your pantry.’

  Both were uncomfortable thoughts for Emily. But now that she’d recovered from being poisoned, she felt the worst possible news would be that Oscar had any kind of nefarious intentions toward her. Wanda as a poisoner was more believable than Oscar as a fortune hunter – though her motive was still obscure.

  Luke took off for Corvallis, and Emily was left alone in the hospital – alone, that is, except for Deputy Gonzalez at the door and the constant parade of medical personnel checking on this and that. By this time Emily felt fine, more or less, and was impatient to be home; but Luke and Sam agreed that stay she must, so stay she did.

  Thus when the parade of unknown nurses and orderlies was interrupted by a familiar freckled face peeking past the strong restraining arm of Deputy Gonzalez, Emily was overjoyed. ‘Jamie! Come in!’

  ‘You know this man, ma’am?’ Gonzalez asked with a frown.

  ‘He’s my lawyer. I promise he’s not a threat. Please, let him in.’

  The deputy reluctantly lowered his arm and stood back. Shooting him a nervous smile, Jamie came in, briefcase under his arm.

  ‘I found those files you were asking about,’ he said, pulling a fat sheaf of paper out of the case. ‘The “L” was for Lansing.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The following afternoon, Emily lounged in her own chair in her library, her feet up on an ottoman, a cashmere-blend afghan of her own making tucked up around her by a loving Katie, a glass of sherry in her hand, and Levin in her lap. But despite all these creature comforts, her soul was in turmoil. Murder investigation aside, the revelation contained in the files Jamie had found had turned her world upside down, and she’d had little time to process it. Now here she was, surrounded by all the surviving guests from her Christmas party, anticipating what promised to be one of the trickiest, tensest scenes of her life.

  On his return from Corvallis the previous evening, she and Luke had traded the information they’d each acquired during his absence. They’d agreed on two things: they had a clear suspect, and their evidence against that suspect was all circumstantial, not enough to be sure of a conviction. Then Emily had an idea: they would stage a mass confrontation scene, straight out of a Christie novel. With any luck, they could trick the murderer into confessing. It always worked for Poirot.

  She surveyed the room. Luke’s deputy Heather lurked in a dark corner with a recorder, her eyes sparkling with excitement. Emily’s local friends exhibited varying degrees of curiosity, from placid Veronica to controlled Hilary to wired Devon, who was practically bouncing in his seat with excitement. He’d whispered to her when he came in, ‘This is it, isn’t it – the confrontation scene? Who’ll be Poirot, you or Luke?’

  She’d smiled without answering. Continuing her survey, she noted that Marguerite and Jamie were alert and engaged; Katie gripped Jamie’s hand, looking as if she’d far rather be in her apartment, where her sister Erin was currently getting Lizzie ready for bed. Katie always hated to admit that any human being could harbor enough evil to murder – even though she’d been witness to and victim of plenty of evil in her young life.

  The writer guests huddled together with their backs to the fire, Ian and Olivia on the loveseat and the two young men on straight chairs. Ian and Olivia hid their nervousness under polite chat with Oscar, but the white knuckles of their linked hands gave it away. Dustin sat silent and sullen, checking his watch. He could not be more anxious to leave Windy Corner than Emily was to have him gone.

  Oscar was jumpier than Emily had ever seen him. He gave disjointed, irrelevant answers to Ian’s innocuous questions, and he adjusted his tie so many times Emily feared he would strangle himself.

  Looking at him was too painful given what she now knew. She fixed her eyes on a small table in the center of the room on which stood a carved wooden box
. Only she and Luke knew what it contained. Several people looked at it curiously, but no glance lingered.

  The last person to arrive was Wanda Wilkins. Pete had been dispatched to collect her and instructed not to take no for an answer.

  Wanda sauntered in, dressed in a strip of leather – too short and tight to be properly called a skirt – over fishnet stockings and her usual high boots. She slipped off her shaggy fake-fur coat to reveal a plunging halter top that bared far more of her sagging, leathery chest, back, and midriff than any sane person would ever care to show or see. Emily’s guess was that she had coaxed Pete into allowing her time to change. Not even Wanda would parade around her cottage in the dead of winter in such a getup with no one to witness it.

  Apparently her outfit gave her confidence, perhaps even a feeling of power; she took the one remaining seat in the room, a straight-backed wooden chair, with an air of one who expects nothing to happen that she won’t be able to handle with one red-taloned hand tied behind her back. When her eyes fell on the box on the table, her confident air shimmered momentarily, like a hot country road, but then settled back into place. Pete unobtrusively took up his station a couple of feet behind her chair.

  Luke and Emily had agreed that he would play Poirot and lead the conversation, with her as – despite the literary non sequitur – Miss Marple, rather than the bumbling Hastings, acting as his foil. At least Emily vaguely resembled Miss Marple, or would in another decade or two; but the very thought of the tall, casually masculine, quintessentially American Luke playing the part of the dapper, fastidious little Belgian with his ‘little gray cells’ and his precious moustaches threatened to destroy her composure before they even got started.

  When Wanda was settled, Luke waited a minute to let the atmosphere simmer, then stood and said, ‘I guess you’re all wondering why I called you here.’

  A polite titter ran around the room.