The tavern was nothing more than a squat, two-story brick building with a large, creaky door that hadn’t been replaced since 1750. It was smaller than most houses in Bellmare these days, and could only seat about 40 to 50 people comfortably at one time. The floor was plain, unvarnished wood, the tables and chairs the same ones that had sat inside it for 300 years. A fireplace dominated one wall, and Priscilla could tell it had been lit recently for the ghost tours, despite the fire hazard involved. The barkeep was an elderly man named Charles Ross. He’d inherited the tavern, along with a sizable chunk of land, after the Branigan family had died. The closest living relatives, the Ross family, had kept the place open for nearly 100 years after the Bellmare Massacre.
During the Revolutionary War, a fight had broken out between British soldiers and the townsfolk, resulting in over fifty dead, and only the bartender and his family had survived. If you peered closely at the paneling, you could see where bullets had once lodged in the walls.
Charles barely looked up as they entered, scrubbing earnestly at the inside of a highball glass. Most everything in the tavern had been allowed to accumulate a fine layer of dust. Half the tourists who came to Bellmare wanted a supernatural encounter, and most businesses that regularly conducted tours would allow spiderwebs to form in corners and a little dirt to remain on the floors. Only the Robshaw Inn was kept conspicuously clean and free of dirt. Priscilla supposed it had enough atmosphere without the mild filth.
“What can I get for you?” Charles asked, setting the glass down at last.
“A glass of white wine,” Olivia said.
“And a red wine as well,” Priscilla added.
“Coming right up,” he said, and ducked back into the kitchen. It was the only part of the tavern kept clean. It was the only part that had to maintain restaurant standards, really.
Olivia raised an eyebrow at her. “I didn’t think you could drink anything but blood.”
“Nothing tastes especially good,” Priscilla admitted. “But alcohol has a strong flavor and I can taste it, at the very least. I doubt Mr. Ross is stockpiling O-negative for his guests.”
“I suppose not.”
“Thank you for not tossing me out,” she said, flipping to the page she’d left off on.
“I thought about it,” Olivia grumbled. “If you were going to spy on me, Priscilla, you could have at least brought the right ingredients.”
“I wasn’t trying to—” Priscilla cut herself off before she could say something sharp. She took a few deep, unnecessary breaths and then began again. “I didn’t even know you were teaching until tonight.”
“Well, I didn’t have much choice, did I?” Olivia muttered.
Charles emerged from the kitchen a moment later with their wine glasses and set them down in front of them. Priscilla thanked him and Olivia just grunted. She picked her glass up, sniffed it gingerly, then took three large swallows, draining half her glass.
“Maybe you should slow down,” Priscilla said. “I didn’t plan on taking you home drunk.”
“I’m not getting drunk off one glass,” Olivia said with a scowl. “Give me some credit, Priscilla.”
“Fine, fine.” Priscilla threw her hands up in surrender. To appease Olivia, she took a sip of her own wine and grimaced. Had it always tasted this dry and sour?
Olivia snickered. “Maddison makes the same face every time she tries to help me cook. Is it really that bad?”
“Like eating or drinking Play-Doh,” Priscilla said, pushing her glass away delicately.
“I did that once, as a kid,” Olivia mused. “It was really salty.”
“Frosting tastes like lard, and wine is like drinking straight vinegar.”
Olivia made a face. “Gross. No wonder she stays out of the kitchen when I’m making amaretto cheesecake.”
“It’s the worst of both worlds,” Priscilla agreed.
“Why’d you ask me out here tonight?” Olivia asked. “You clearly weren’t wanting to have a fun, boozy time of it.”
“I was going to ask you some questions, actually,” Priscilla said carefully. “About your mints.”
Olivia stiffened. “What about them? You should know all about them if you were paying attention in class.”
Priscilla took a long draft of wine, avoiding Olivia’s shrewd gaze for as long as she could. She shuddered and set the glass down when it was half full, keeping her gaze on the page as she asked, “How many people know how to make them now, Olivia?”
“About 20,” Olivia answered. She sounded tired, but Priscilla didn’t dare look up to gauge her expression. “My first class had about six people, and you saw the class this time around. Most of them are repeats. I think they feel sorry for me.”
Olivia lifted her glass from the table and when she set it down again, it was empty.
“Do you want another?” Priscilla asked.
“Yes,” Olivia said curtly.
Charles cleared away her glass in short order and replaced it with a new one. Priscilla declined a refill of her own.
“I’ve got down 10 names,” Priscilla said, sliding the list over to Olivia for inspection. “I was wondering if you could tell me the names of the other four.”
“Lucille Garfield, Patty Brown, Nora Murphy, and Carly Winter,” Olivia said. Priscilla risked a glance up. Olivia was rubbing at her eyes, as though trying to block an oncoming headache without success.
Priscilla scrawled the names beneath the first 10. “Thank you.”
“Answer me something,” Olivia said, fixing her with a firm glare. Her eyes were the unforgiving gray of a cloudy sky. “Honestly, for once.”
“All right,” Priscilla said.
“Do you think I did it?” Olivia asked, leaning across the table with her wine glass in hand. “If you hadn’t seen me teach this to 14 other people tonight, would you be telling Police Chief Sharp that I was guilty?”
Priscilla’s stomach tried to slither into her toes. Her lips parted as she desperately searched for words. She wanted to say something kind and conciliatory. Should she tell her that the belief had been tenuous at best? Would it matter at all?
Olivia read an answer into her silence. Her eyes closed for the briefest of moments, and pain crossed her face. When they opened again, they were steely with dislike. She finished off the second glass with as much speed and gusto as the first and stood, brushing off her jeans.
“I can’t believe you.” Olivia’s tone shook with barely repressed anger. “Do you really hate me that much?”
“Olivia, I don’t—” Priscilla began.
Olivia cut her off with a withering stare.
“Don’t you dare, Pratt. Don’t lie right to my face.” Olivia pulled her wallet out of her purse, scrounging until she found a $20 in the depths. She slapped it down on the table and then turned to go. The glass in the window panes shivered as she slammed the tavern door shut behind her.
Priscilla folded the $20 neatly and slipped it into her coat pocket along with the notebook. She paid for their drinks herself and then slipped back into the cold October night.
She could have closed the distance between her and Olivia easily. Instead, she followed 50 feet back, always in the shadows, lest Olivia fall and break something on her way home. Priscilla stopped at the beginning of Olivia’s block, watching her as she ascended the stairs to her house, jammed her key in the door, and then shut it firmly behind her. The locks slammed audibly into place behind her.
Priscilla’s heart couldn’t beat. Her face couldn’t heat with shame. So many outward indicators of grief had been stolen by the transformation into a vampire. She slipped the $20 Olivia had left into her mailbox and turned to go home, wishing her heart wasn’t still inside her chest. Or at the very least, that she could shed tears.
She waited an hour and a half after returning home to call the chief, reluctant to hand over her ill-gotten gain to the police after everything she’d just gone through. After all, four names and a recipe hardly felt like worthy com
pensation when she’d lost a friend.
Chapter Six
“Ricin.”
Priscilla stared at the receiver of her rotary phone for a moment, wondering if she’d heard right. “Ah ... gesundheit, sir.”
Arthur’s sigh rattled over the speakers. “They ran the toxicology report again. They found out what poisoned Kierra Cunningham. It was ricin.”
“What’s that?” she asked distractedly, as the alarm for her cookies went off.
“Ricin. It’s a poison derived from castor beans. It’s colorless, odorless, and practically untraceable. It takes less than a milligram to compromise the immune system. She didn’t stand a chance. There was three times that much in those mints she ate.”
Priscilla glanced back at her stove. This was the downside to a rotary phone. She couldn’t exactly do her job and talk at the same time. Anna gave a long-suffering sigh and grabbed a pair of mitts from the counter. She removed two trays of chocolate chip cookies from the oven and set them on the countertop. Without being prompted, she began to pry them off the cookie sheet and placed them on the cooling rack.
“Priscilla?”
“Hmm?”
“Did you hear a word I just said?” Arthur asked, irritation creeping into his voice.
“Ricin. Mints. Overkill. I’ve got it.”
“I was asking if you had a hunch. Do you have any idea which of the people on this list would hold a grudge?”
Olivia’s name sprang unbidden into her mind. Guilt immediately followed. Priscilla’s voice was thick when she spoke. “Nope. No idea, sir.”
“You okay?”
“I’m just distracted, is all,” she said, winding the phone cord around her fingers. “I’m preparing two dozen cookies for the bridal party as a parting gift. I suppose they’ll be heading back to New York soon.”
“Not if the Bellmare PD has anything to say about it,” Arthur grunted. “No one has been ruled out yet, and I’m willing to bet it was one of them, not one of us.”
Priscilla frowned. “They need to take her body back home sometime, Arthur.”
“Until this murder is solved, she’s not going anywhere.”
It just didn’t sit right with Priscilla. Sure, the process of embalming had gotten very good over the years. A body could go days or weeks without significant decomposition. Still, the family had a right to bury their daughter, didn’t they? This investigation could drag on for months, and by then the family would have no choice but to go forward with a closed casket funeral.
“Then we’ll have to solve this quickly,” she decided.
Arthur cleared his throat. “We? Priscilla, there’s no ‘we’ involved. You’ve done the job I asked you to do. Good work. Your community service is done.”
“Someone murdered my client and is framing my friends for it, Arthur. I’m far from done. So you can accept my help, or I’ll become very inconvenient for your department. It’s your choice.”
“This is none of your business, Pratt!” Arthur snapped. “You did your job. Now leave this to the professionals.”
“All right. I just have one question for you, Arthur. If you really want me out of your investigation, why did you mention she was poisoned with ricin?”
Silence fell on the other end of the line. Priscilla could picture Arthur’s grip on the phone tightening until the decades-old plastic creaked.
“You didn’t have to share that detail,” Priscilla continued, when Arthur said nothing. “Which tells me that you want my help. Am I on the right track, Arthur?”
“You are an infuriating woman, you know that?”
Priscilla smiled sweetly at the receiver, despite the fact he couldn’t see her. “So I’ve been told. Now, are we going to waste time beating around the issue? You know I have nothing but time.”
Priscilla could hear his teeth grinding. She wasn’t sure if he knew he was doing it. When he spoke again, his words were precise and clipped, as if he were biting them off at the end. “Do not engage. If you have the slightest inkling that you, or anyone around you, is in danger, you come to me, understood?”
Priscilla’s grin widened. She was flashing her fangs, and she didn’t care. “Understood, Chief. Where do you want me next?”
“I’m visiting the fiancé tonight. I want you to track down who could have made the ricin. I want indirect involvement on this case only. If one more person dies during this investigation, there will be a reckoning.”
The chief didn’t say goodbye or good luck. He hung up the phone and Priscilla quietly did the same. Anna was leaning on the counter, and the cupcakes she’d rescued from the oven were cooling on a rack, awaiting icing.
“Ricin, huh? I’ve heard of that stuff,” Anna said.
“Have you? I hadn’t until today.”
“Well, it’s not a really well-known poison.” Anna rubbed the back of her neck. “It was the murder weapon on one of those crime shows. I used to watch them with Mom before Dad got home. He doesn’t think they’re a realistic portrayal of police work.”
“And what has your illicit research told you about ricin?” Priscilla asked with a smile. It was always nice to hear Anna speak of her mother. Neither she nor Arthur broached the topic much anymore. Too painful, she suspected.
“Well, like Daddy said, it’s really lethal. You don’t need much to kill a person. It gets into your cells and stops them from making the proteins you need. How fast it’ll kill you depends on how you came into contact with it.”
“Let’s just take a wild guess and say she ingested it. What happens then?”
“Nausea, vomiting, sweating, and dehydration. Unfortunately, those are also the symptoms of the flu, or alcohol poisoning. Our bride probably knew she was sick, just not how sick.”
Priscilla shook her head. She’d never understood the stubborn obstinacy of some humans. Why did so many of them refuse to seek a doctor? “If she was self-medicating to get rid of the symptoms, she probably made it worse.”
“Which is probably why she fell and bled out, rather than dying of the poison,” Anna concluded with a shake of the head. “Poor girl. I mean, she was a nasty piece of work, and I was glad to see the back of her, but who would want her dead?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Priscilla murmured.
“Where do we start?” Anna asked, face screwed up into a supremely skeptical expression. “I mean, you can probably find castor beans anywhere, right? Landry’s is right next door, and there are dozens of people going in and out every hour. I doubt Mrs. Landry remembers who bought them.”
“They didn’t come from Landry’s.”
Priscilla was sure of that. She’d shopped at Landry’s for years, buying the supplies she needed for her bakery. Eventually she’d learned that buying in bulk and having what she needed shipped to her was cheaper. Still, she was in and out of the place at least twice a month. Landry’s was the only place in town that carried produce, and you had to drive 40 minutes in one direction to find a Walmart. She had every inch of the place memorized, and she knew they didn’t sell castor beans.
She’d asked about it once. Mrs. Landry stocked every edible bean and legume imaginable. Priscilla hadn’t understood the cryptic reply that it was “too dangerous.” Knowing what she did now, some unwary toddler had probably been poisoned after getting his hands on a handful of the deadly beans.
“How can you be so sure?”
“I asked Mrs. Landry about it years ago.”
“Well, darn,” Anna said, crossing her arms over her chest. “It would have been easier. You don’t suppose the killer bought them from Wally World, do you? That would be impossible to track down. At least Mrs. Landry has a snowball’s chance of remembering someone.”
“I don’t think so,” Priscilla mused. She had a feeling the killer wouldn’t have gone so far out of their way to get the beans. She wasn’t sure why she thought it, but the conviction was strong. Their killer had kept the vendetta in town.
“Then where?”
&n
bsp; “I have an idea,” Priscilla said slowly. “But it’s going to take me an hour or two to follow up on. Do you mind icing the cupcakes? I know it’s not what I hired you for, but it would be a help.”
Anna gave her a hearty salute and adopted the obsequious tones of Igor once more. “Yeees, master.”
Priscilla sighed. “You’re incorrigible.”
The Kennedy Apothecary always gave Priscilla a healthy dose of nostalgia. Built in the style of an early colonial building, it was not big or imposing. In the past, it had been rare for a building to get past a few floors tall, unless it was a courthouse or was built by a man of prominence. It wasn’t until quite recently, through the marvels of modern engineering and new technology, that buildings had begun to scrape the sky.
Priscilla remembered a time when apothecaries were the go-to for health. Before the nineteenth century, Bellmare hadn’t had a doctor in residence. The closest thing to a healer had been the owner of the local apothecary. Now it was a glorified drugstore, selling overpriced cough drops, antacids, and gum. There were a few remedies that Tobias kept on hand that weren’t strictly legal, but Arthur looked the other way if someone was in dire need. The FDA could take a ridiculously long time to approve substances that were beneficial.
Her boots crunched in the snow as she walked up the long drive. Tobias had never really been the friendly, welcoming sort, but it had gotten worse in recent years. Though the sign on Tobias’ shop declared it open, to a newcomer it would appear as though no one was in residence at all. Tobias didn’t use much electrical heating in the shop at all, trying to keep the place as authentic as possible. He only turned it on in the bitterly cold winter months to keep his pipes from freezing.
Priscilla reached for the door and pulled it open. She was greeted by a warm waft of air and the scent of lemon. Tobias must have gone on a cleaning spree, for the wood polish to smell so strongly. The counters gleamed in the low light of an oil lamp. The shelf nearest to the door bore a brass scale and several square packages. She’d never seen dust on the antique scale, despite the fact it was rarely used.
Fangs in Fondant Page 7