Lead a Horse to Murder

by Cynthia Baxter

  “I am fine. Please, Dr. Popper. You are so kind to be concerned. I will keep the telephone close by, but now I will rest. Tomorrow, all this will be just a bad memory.”

  I hoped she was right, especially since it was clear that she wouldn’t have it any other way. I watched her shuffle into her bedroom, closing the door firmly behind her.

  “Come on, Callie,” I said reluctantly. “Let’s go home.”

  “Is Inez going to be okay?” she asked, glancing at the closed bedroom door nervously.

  “I think so.” I hesitated. “I hope so.”

  “What about you, Dr. Popper? Are you okay?”

  “I’m just very, very tired,” I told her. I didn’t bother to tell her I was also very worried.

  I was about to get back into my car when I realized that I needed to use a bathroom first. While I’d used that as an excuse many times before as a way to snoop around someone’s house, this time the need was sincere.

  “Callie, before I hit the road, can I use your bathroom?”

  “Of course, Dr. Popper. You know your way around, right? I’m going upstairs. Even though Shakespeare is the last thing I feel like facing right now, I’ve got a ton of homework.” She cast me a grateful look. “Thanks for coming over. You really came through for us.”

  “You’re welcome, Callie. I’m glad I could help.” I was about to add that I was actually kind of pleased that she’d thought of calling me for help, and that she was welcome to do it again any time. But she’d already turned and headed up the stairs.

  As I came out of the bathroom and walked toward the front door, I noticed that Callie had left one of her sketch pads out again. This one lay on a table in the living room, probably forgotten. Unable to resist, I picked it up and began leafing through.

  Not surprisingly, Callie turned out to be just as adept at still-life drawing as she was at creating landscapes and portraits. She really is talented, I marveled, studying one rendering after another. The first three or four were groupings of common household objects. One featured a pencil mug and a stack of letters, another was of a teapot and several porcelain cups, a third pictured an ornate jewelry box with necklaces and strings of beads spilling out.

  The next drawing was an unusual-looking flower, in a terra-cotta pot. It was a beautiful plant, with a slender stalk that curved gracefully, delicate leaves, and a large blossom that was shaped like a trumpet. I wasn’t surprised to see that the drawing was as well executed as all the other pieces of artwork Callie had done.

  I flipped over and saw another drawing of the same plant, this time from a different angle.

  The next page was a rendering of a profusion of the same flowers. I recognized the area of the estate that Callie had captured on paper. It was the patio, where these plants flourished. I’d noticed them the night of Jillian’s cocktail party.

  I didn’t know all that much about plants in general. They were interesting, but I’d always found animals so much more engaging. But as I stared at these particular drawings, something I’d learned about this one slowly came into focus.

  And the limited knowledge I’d acquired had nothing to do with my formal training in biology. In fact, I remembered something I’d learned during my sophomore year of college.

  In my Shakespeare class.

  Datura. If the plant Callie had drawn was the one I thought it was, it had many different names: jimsonweed, locoweed, angel’s trumpet, devil’s trumpet, mad apple, green dragon.

  Its mind-altering effects were well-known—which is why Shakespeare had found it so intriguing. It had proven very useful in Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet needed a way to appear dead. The Friar instructed Juliet to drink a potion containing Datura in order to induce a state of unconsciousness that would make her appear to be dead.

  If my memory served me correctly, it was also extremely toxic.

  Oh, my God, I thought, my mind racing. This highly poisonous plant was growing all over Heatherfield, just like the red maple leaves that poisoned Stryder. They had been right in front of me since Eduardo’s murder, but not for a moment had I stopped to think about what a threat they were.

  And I never would have if it hadn’t been for the fact that Callie had singled it out. She’d chosen it as the subject for her artwork, again and again.

  Which was an interesting fact, by itself.

  It could just be coincidence, I told myself, trying not to jump to conclusions. She could have picked out this particular plant as a subject for her artwork simply because it was such an interesting specimen. And it was abundant here on the property.

  So are a lot of other plant species, another voice inside my head pointed out.

  Please, no, I thought. It can’t be Callie. I have to be misinterpreting this.

  I wasn’t sure whether or not I was heading in a direction that made sense. But there was one thing I was sure of: It was time to talk to an expert.

  My concern for Inez continued to weigh me down late the following morning as I drove my red VW into Brookside University Visitors’ Parking Lot. It wasn’t as if I didn’t understand her fears about seeking help at an emergency room—and possibly being admitted to the hospital. The cost of medical care was astronomical. I suspected that her salary was barely enough to cover her usual costs, and she certainly didn’t strike me as somebody who had a few dollars left over at the end of every week to stash into a savings account.

  Still, I would have felt much better if she’d seen a doctor. The next best thing, I figured, was to find out if she really had been poisoned—and, if so, if it had been with the same substance that had been used to kill Eduardo.

  I hadn’t anticipated how strange it would feel to be back on a university campus. But as I strode across the wide green lawn of Brookside University’s central quad, I found myself feeling oddly out of place.

  It wasn’t even the age difference between me and the students who walked together in twos and threes, although the fact that I spotted more pierced bellybuttons wandering through the quad than I could remember having seen in a long time didn’t help. It was more the feeling that this college campus was a place that belonged to them, that this was their time to dedicate themselves to learning and exploring—at least, in terms of their intellectual life.

  It also brought back all the pressure of college. I remembered the countless all-nighters I’d pulled, Suzanne and I fortifying ourselves with Diet Coke and take-out pizza that was about as tasty as the cardboard box it was delivered in. Sweating each grade, never forgetting for a minute that admission to veterinary school was so competitive that getting even one A-minus instead of an A could make the difference in deciding the future.

  There’s a sense of unreality that’s part of the academic experience, I recalled, a loss of perspective about how the rest of the world functions. But at the same time, the stakes are so high at that point in life.

  I mused about the fact that here I was, ten years after graduating from college, taking for granted so many things that at one time seemed like a dream. Yet I was lucky enough to be living it every day, pursuing the career I’d wanted since I was a little girl.

  I wondered if Nick had been dealing with all this. Putting myself in his shoes, at least for the distance required to walk from the parking lot to the Life Sciences building, was certainly making me more sympathetic to what he was facing. I felt bad that I hadn’t been more patient, and I vowed to be more understanding from now on.

  At the moment, however, I had more pressing things on my mind.

  “Room three-eighteen . . .” I muttered as I walked down the dim hallway on the third floor of the redbrick building that housed Brookside’s biology department. When I’d telephoned and asked how I might get in touch with a botanist, the woman in Community Relations seemed to know immediately who the best person for me to speak with would be. I was glad I didn’t have to go into too much detail about the kind of information I was seeking. Explaining why I wanted to know about a particular plant species’ effective
ness as a poison wasn’t exactly something that I expected would come tripping off my tongue.

  Then I spotted it: Room 318. The door was closed, but through the glass insert I could see a lab similar to the ones from my college days. Beyond it stretched a sunny room with huge windows that appeared to serve as a greenhouse.

  I knocked softly, nervous about disturbing the professor who did his research here.

  A stocky man in his late fifties, dressed in a rumpled white lab coat, opened the door. His bushy salt-and-pepper hair contained more white than black, as did his full beard. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, I could see serious, intelligent eyes.

  “Dr. Newcomb?”

  “Please, call me Harry. And you must be Dr. Popper.”

  “Jessie,” I corrected him.

  “Jessie, then. I got a call from Community Relations telling me you’d be stopping by.”

  “I hope this isn’t a bad time,” I said, glancing around uncertainly.

  Smiling, he gestured behind him at the room filled with greenery. “Just as long as you don’t do anything to keep my plants from growing, we’ll do fine.”

  “I won’t take up too much of your time,” I assured him. “I wanted to show you some drawings and ask you what you thought.”

  I handed him Callie’s sketchbook, which I’d opened to the first of her renderings of angel’s trumpet.

  “Very nicely done,” he observed, studying her handiwork before flipping through the pages. “I see there are lots more. Whoever drew these is certainly talented.”

  “Yes, she is. But what I’m interested in is the subject of the drawings,” I explained. “The plants themselves.”

  “I see. I suppose you already know that they’re drawings of angel’s trumpet, Datura stramonium?”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Datura is quite common in the United States, as well as Canada and the Caribbean,” Dr. Newcomb continued. “It also grows in South America. Jimsonweed, green dragon, mad apple, locoweed . . . they’re all members of a group of plants that’s known as the belladonna family. You’ve heard of it, right?”

  “Sure. I don’t know much about it, though.”

  “If I remember my plant lore correctly, the name ‘belladonna’ comes from the women in Italy who used it because one of its effects was dilating their pupils, which they thought enhanced their looks.” Dr. Newcomb chuckled. But he quickly grew serious. “These particular plants also happen to be popular with teenagers.”

  That was a new one. “What’s their appeal?”

  “In addition to causing feelings of confusion and disorientation, they can also have a hallucinogenic effect,” he explained. “Kind of like LSD. But it’s even easier to get hold of, so kids use it as a recreational drug. They smoke it, eat the seeds, or use it to make tea.

  “But it’s not as if modern kids discovered it. Homer wrote about it in The Odyssey, and Shakespeare used it in several of his plays. Hamlet, Anthony and Cleopatra . . . and let’s not forget the famous climax of Romeo and Juliet.”

  “Yes, I remember learning about that in college,” I told him. “The plant’s ability to induce a deathlike state came in very handy when Shakespeare needed a heart-breaking ending for his play.”

  “This plant also happens to have played an important role in history. Any chance you remember Bacon’s Rebellion, from the days you were a student of American history?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry. If we covered it, I’m afraid it didn’t stick.”

  “Bacon’s Rebellion took place in Virginia in 1676. It’s often considered the first step in what eventually became the Revolutionary War. However, there’s an increasingly popular theory that it was largely the result of two gentlemen with particularly large egos. One was the governor of Virginia and the other was his rebellious young cousin, Nathaniel Bacon. The two of them were apparently doing battle for personal reasons that had nothing to do with politics. At any rate, Bacon, who had kind of a problem with authority, instigated a little skirmish. The British sent troops to suppress it. But when they got to the New World, they couldn’t resist having a little fun with some Datura they found growing here. It ended up making them so silly that they were completely ineffective.”

  “So these plants can have a major effect on people, but they aren’t lethal?”

  “I didn’t say that. In fact, they all contain toxins— two tropane alkaloids, hyoscyamine and scopolamine, also known as belladonna alkaloids. And believe me, they’re heavy-duty chemicals.”

  By that point, my heart was pounding. “So people do die from ingesting it.”

  “Sure. It happens all the time, especially with the kids who are using it because of its hallucinogenic properties. Another common scenario is that someone who ingests it falls into a stupor and loses the ability to make sound judgments. That, combined with losing coordination, can cause them to die accidentally. You know, driving without their full faculties, stumbling over the side of a cliff—”

  “Or falling off a horse.” My mouth was so dry I could hardly say the words.

  “That would certainly be consistent with the effects of the drug,” Dr. Newcomb said, nodding. “But don’t get me wrong; it can kill by itself. It causes anticholinergic toxidrome. There’s a saying about the symptoms: ‘blind as a bat, mad as a hatter, red as a beet, hot as a hare, dry as a bone . . .’ In other words, the signs are warm, dry skin, dry mouth, tachycardia, seizures, sometimes delirium with hallucinations, and finally, coma. It could take hours or it could be immediate, depending on what part of the plant is ingested. The concentration of the toxins is much higher in the roots, compared to the leaves. As a result, the toxic effects from consuming the roots could occur right away, while someone who had eaten the leaves might not experience them for hours. The amount consumed would also make a difference. Anyone who ingested sufficient amounts would experience a spike in body temperature, paralysis, and—probably most important—a drastically increased heartbeat that could cause an arrhythmia and kill them.”

  He handed me back the drawing pad. “So what exactly do you want to know?”

  “I think you’ve already told me what I wanted to find out,” I told him.

  “In that case,” Dr. Newcomb said with a little shrug, “I’m glad I could be of help.”

  “Thank you for your time.” I hesitated. “Actually, I found it surprisingly strange, being back on a college campus again.”

  “Yet it sounds like you’re someone who keeps on learning,” he observed.

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said, turning to leave.

  I didn’t bother to tell him that at the moment, I felt as if everything I learned turned out to be bad news.

  As I unlocked the door of my Volkswagen, I noticed it was another beautiful autumn afternoon. The sun was shining brightly, just a trace of briskness energized the air, and the leaves on the trees on the campus were tinged with red and gold. Yet the delightful afternoon did nothing to improve my dark mood. As hard as it was to face, my suspicion—that Callie had poisoned Eduardo, and that she’d used angel’s trumpet to do it— now looked like a strong possibility.

  Not only did she hate him, I thought grimly as I started the ignition, she had plenty of access to a plant that had the power to kill him. She’d made drawings of it, again and again. And the night poor Inez was poisoned, she was the only other person at Heatherfield. It all added up.

  But she’s a child! I reminded myself. She’s only fourteen years old! Surely she’s not capable of something that horrendous!

  My reluctance to believe that Callie could be a murderer was supported by the fact that I was still considering a long list of other possible suspects. And they were all much older, wiser, and craftier. Please, please, let me be wrong about Callie, I thought.

  My newfound knowledge about Datura also increased my concern about Inez. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Heatherfield, figuring I’d ask whoever answered how I could get in touch with her.

  “Hello,
MacKinnon residence,” a familiar voice answered.

  “Inez?” I asked, surprised.

  “Dr. Popper!” she replied, dropping her formal tone. “I am so glad you called! I wanted to thank you for your help last night.”

  “That’s why I’m calling,” I told her. “Inez, I’ve gotten some more information about the poison that may have been used to kill Eduardo—and which you might have ingested yesterday. It’s really important that you see a doctor—”

  “I already have,” she replied. “Thees morning, I told a friend of mine, a girl who works in a house nearby, what happened. Like you, she says I must go to the doctor. She knows a man who will not charge so much money. He says I am fine. Eet was maybe something I ate, some food that was bad, or maybe I had a touch of the flu.”

  “Did you tell him about what happened to Eduardo?” I asked her anxiously. “Inez, I think you have to consider the possibility—”

  “I am fine, Dr. Popper,” Inez insisted. “See? I am even back at work today. A leetle tired, maybe, and my stomach still does not feel so good, but I am—what ees the saying?—back on my feet again.”

  She thanked me again for my concern, then insisted that she had to get back to work.

  At least she saw a doctor, I told myself as I hung up. And from the way she sounded, she seemed to be fine.

  Yet the possibility that, like Eduardo, she had been a victim of poisoning continued to nag at me. While she seemed unwilling to consider that such a terrible thing had happened to her, I couldn’t be as certain.

  I was about to pull out of my parking space, still agonizing over whether Inez had gotten the medical care she really needed, when my cell phone rang. I put the car back into park and grabbed it off the front seat. Glancing at the familiar number on the screen told me Forrester was calling. My heart sank.

  “Hey, Popper! Long time no hear from!” he greeted me. He hesitated for just a moment. “We’re still friends, aren’t we?”

  “I’ve just been busy,” I told him. Quickly, I added, “With veterinarian business. Seems like one emergency after another lately.”