Plaster and Poison (6 page)

5

“I have no idea,” Derek said. “I’ve never heard of Emily Ritter. I didn’t know that Paw-Paw Willie’s uncle died from strychnine poisoning, either. I’m not sure Dad knows.”
He was busy plastering the interior walls of the carriage house and merely glanced at me over his shoulder, as if the news was of no particular importance.
“But don’t you think it’s interesting?” I pushed.
“I’m sure it is. It doesn’t mean that he was murdered, though, Avery. It could have been an accident. Or an overdose. They used small doses of strychnine as medicine back then.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Really?”
“I’m afraid so. For heart and respiratory complaints.” He smoothed his trowel over the wall and added, dryly, “It works; the only problem is that an effective dose is toxic.”
“And that would kind of defeat the purpose.”
“Exactly. Or it could have been self-administered, even.”
“Suicide, you mean?”
“Right. If—say—he regretted joining the navy and didn’t want to be shipped out. Got scared. Maybe he gave himself a little dose of strychnine to induce vomiting and ensure he was left behind when the others boarded ship, but he took too much and accidentally killed himself instead.”
“Or did it on purpose?”
Derek pursed his lips. “Maybe,” he allowed after a minute, “but I wouldn’t think so. Strychnine poisoning is a nasty way to go. I don’t think anyone would choose it as a method of suicide. Not if they had any other options.”
I watched him plaster for a moment before I asked, diffidently, “Did you ever see a case of strychnine poisoning while you were doing your medical school residency?”
His face turned grim, and the trowel stopped. “Once. I think it was in my second year. This guy came in, clutching his stomach. He was pale and clammy, sort of twitchy. Couldn’t sit still. Incoherent. We did everything we could think of to figure out what was wrong with him. X-rays, ultrasounds, blood and urine tests . . . we were getting ready to slice him open when he went into respiratory failure. Turned out his wife had fed him strychnine.”
“Yikes.”
He nodded. “It wasn’t pretty. Convulsions, muscle spasms, lockjaw . . . eventually the muscles tire and you can’t breathe.”
“Ugh.” I shuddered.
Derek put his tools down and an arm around me. “Why are we talking about this, again?”
“We were discussing your great-uncle William,” I said, leaning into him. He smelled like Ivory soap and lemon shampoo, with some paint thinner and sawdust thrown in for good measure.
“Right. Well, maybe death was such a common thing back then, after four years of war and with the influenza pandemic striking people down left and right, that William’s death wasn’t a big deal.”
“Big enough that the newspaper had an article about it,” I said. “I wonder who did it? If he was murdered, that is, and didn’t do it to himself.”
“Poison is a woman’s weapon,” Derek answered. “Or so they say.”
“Right. But why? I mean, why couldn’t a man equally well poison another man?”
“He could,” Derek said, “and sometimes he does, but men like to hit things. Poison is a safe kind of weapon. You don’t have to be there to set it off, you don’t have to watch the victim die, and you don’t need any particular strength or skill to use it. It’s a great leveler. A smaller, weaker person can bring down a big, strong guy. All someone has to do is bake an arsenic cake or pour some cyanide into a bottle of wine, leave it sitting around for the victim to find, and voila, he’s dying and they’re miles away. Kind of like booby-trapping a basement staircase or puncturing the brake cables on someone’s car.”
Both of which I had experienced personally over the past six months.
“Right,” I said, a little shivery at the thought. “Both of those things were done by men, though.”
“That’s true,” Derek admitted.
“And he died on the navy base. Where there were mostly men.”
“Some women, too. Remember the yeomanettes?”
I nodded. “A lot more men than women, though, Derek. And it would depend a little on how quickly the poison works, too. He joined the navy on the third. He died on the sixth. Could he have taken something before the third that didn’t kill him until the sixth?”
“Not likely,” Derek said. “There are poisons that can build up for a while before they kill you, but with strychnine, it takes a pretty massive dose all at once. It’s possible it was given to him before he joined up, and he only consumed it three days later.”
“Maybe.”
Derek’s voice softened as he sensed my disappointment. “I’m sorry, Avery. This may be one of those things we’ll never learn the truth about. If he was my ancestor, and I don’t know, I don’t know who would.”
“Can I still ask your dad sometime?”
“Sure. And if he doesn’t know anything, we can try to call Paw-Paw Willie. But right now I need your help here, OK?”
“OK,” I said, mentally relegating both the initials and the matter of William Ellis’s maybe murder/accident/ suicide to the back burner for now.
The last few days of November sped by, and December started. Shannon continued to spend most of her time away from the B&B, although I’m not sure whether she was hanging out with Paige or with the new guy in her life, or whether she was just avoiding all of us.
Derek finished insulating the carriage house and cranked up the new HVAC system. We became toasty warm, even when the skies opened and dumped a foot of snow on Waterfield. Aunt Inga’s house looked like a fairy-tale cottage, and Kate took Derek away from work for a half day to help her string lights all up and down the towers and turrets of the B&B.
The Waterfield Inn is a beautiful building. On one end there’s a square tower, with a mansard roof topped by a widow’s walk, while on the other side, there’s a round tower with an onion dome, like the Kremlin. There’s a bay window on the first floor, a wraparound porch, intricately carved gingerbread trim, tons of narrow, arched windows, and gables sticking out in every direction. A true Queen Anne, it boasts every Victorian excess imaginable. With Christmas lights strung along all the different angles of the roof, and along the porch, and over both towers, the B&B glittered against the night sky like something out of a Hollywood movie. Noel should be quite impressed when he and Mom showed up.
Speaking of people showing up, Steve didn’t. Beatrice’s husband, I mean. She settled into the guestroom in Cora and Dr. Ben’s house and signed up with a temp agency out of Portland. As it happened, my cousins Ray and Randy Stenham needed someone to fill in for Carolyn Tate temporarily, and that’s where Beatrice ended up, in the office at Clovercroft, one of the Stenhams’ developments. Bea was seriously overqualified for the work they had her do and must have been bored out of her skull a lot of the time, but maybe she enjoyed having something to do again, after living a life of leisure for the past couple of years. And it was only for a few months, until Ray and Randy could hire someone permanently. Or until Steve got his act together and did something about the situation.
Inside the carriage house, work progressed. I learned how to lay hardwood floors—the real kind; Kate wouldn’t stand for anything manufactured, and Derek would probably refuse to install it. After that, we put in the new kitchen cabinets. They were white, with frosted glass fronts, and looked gorgeous. And then we drove to pick up the marble counter Kate had wanted, only available in Portland, and unloaded it, with the help of Wayne, Josh, and Brandon Thomas, Wayne’s young deputy, who had been drafted for the occasion.
“Did you ever have a chance to talk to Shannon?” I asked Kate as we stood in the driveway watching the men drag the slab of marble off the truck and through the carriage house door.
I was hoping she’d say yes, so I could avoid being a snitch. I liked Shannon, and didn’t want to rat her out to her mother. But I liked Kate, too, and I knew she’d want to know what Shannon was up to. Shannon might be grown, but Kate was still her mother.
Kate shook her head. “She’s still spending most of her time at Barnham. And I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t had time to pin her down.” She was watching the men, her face scrunched up against the bright sun and a blue stocking cap on her head.
“Derek and I saw her a couple of times over Thanksgiving weekend,” I offered.
“Did you?”
“She was here on Thanksgiving night, right?”
Kate nodded. “Paige had asked her to have dinner with the Thompsons, and Shannon didn’t feel she could say no. Paige and her dad have kind of a strained relationship, and Paige needed the moral support.”
“I see,” I said. “Paige’s dad . . . what does he look like? What kind of car does he drive?”
Kate looked at me like I had lost my mind. “He looks like Paige. Short and fair, around fifty. And he doesn’t have a car. Or a license. Wayne took it away after the second or third DUI. Why?”
“Derek and I saw Shannon get out of a gray Lexus on Thanksgiving night. Right across the street.” I gestured over my shoulder with a gloved thumb. “It was around seven, I guess.”
Kate nodded. “That’s about when she got here. She said she’d had dinner with Paige and the Thompsons.”
I shrugged. “Maybe the guy was an uncle or something.”
“Maybe,” Kate said.
“Except . . .”
She squinted at me. “Except what? ”
I squirmed. “We saw them again the next night. At the Waymouth Tavern.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Unfortunately not. Shannon begged us not to tell you that we’d seen her, that she’d tell you herself. But I guess she hasn’t, has she?”
“Not a word,” Kate said between her teeth. I watched as emotions chased one another across her face. Anger, worry, suspicion. “This guy she was with. What did he look like?”
I did my best to describe the man I’d only seen twice, both times at a distance. The dark hair, turning gray at the temples. The dark eyes and swarthy skin. The protuberant nose and thin cheeks. The nice clothes and expensive car with out-of-state license plates. The self-satisfied smirk. As I talked, I watched Kate’s expression change from suspicion to dawning certainty, and her eyes turned narrow and flinty.
“Excuse me,” she said while I was still in the middle of a sentence.
I stuttered to a stop and watched as she turned on her heel and stalked to the back door of the B&B. It slammed behind her with what was undoubtedly a very satisfying bang.
“What was that all about?” Derek wanted to know when he came up to me a minute later. “I saw you through the window. What were you talking about?”
“I told her about Shannon and the guy at the Waymouth Tavern. She wasn’t happy.”
“I’d say. She looked ready to chew nails. I’ve only seen her look like that once before, and that was when her dad called to let her know that her grandmother had died, and they’d had the funeral without inviting her. I don’t envy the guy when she catches up with him.”
I shook my head. “Me either. Excuse me.” My cell phone had gone off. It was my mom, no doubt calling to tell me she and Noel had left for the airport. “Hi. Mom?”
“Hello, darling,” my mom’s voice answered, far away and staticky. “I just wanted to let you know we’re on our way.”
“Where are you calling from?”
She was sitting at the airport in Santa Barbara. “The flight out is delayed, of course. They always seem to be. But we’ll be in Boston this evening.”
“That’s great!” I said enthusiastically.
“I don’t think we’ll be driving up to Waterfield tonight, though, Avery. It’s a long flight, with a stopover in San Francisco on the way, and once we touch down, we’ll be tired, and we still have to pick up a car.”
“OK.” It was hard to tell with the static, but her voice sounded strange. Still, it was a reasonable excuse. My mother isn’t as young as she used to be, and Noel is older.
“We’ll stay in a hotel near the airport tonight and go pay for the car in the morning, and then we’ll be in Waterfield around lunchtime.”
“OK,” I said.
“I’ll give Miss McGillicutty a call and tell her to expect us tomorrow instead of today.”
“Do you want me to tell her?” I offered. I wouldn’t mind an excuse to knock on the door and try to find out what was going on.
“That’s OK, darling,” Mom said, “I’ll do it myself. I’ll give you a call when we get in tonight, just so you know we got there all right.”
I told her that would be great and hung up, worrying my lower lip.
“What?” Derek said. “Something wrong?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. There was just something weird in the way she talked about spending the night in Boston and picking up the car tomorrow morning instead. Something—I don’t know—clandestine, almost. Or secretive.”
“Maybe they’re looking forward to some hanky-panky in a nice hotel room?” Derek suggested, hiding a smile. “They haven’t been married very long, have they?”
“Oh.” I flushed. Duh. “Yeah, maybe so.”
“You hungry?”
I considered. “I could eat. You?”
“Always.”
“You want to go grab some lunch?”
“Actually,” Derek said, “I was hoping that you would go grab some lunch and bring it back here. I have a lot of work to do, since we spent most of the morning driving to Portland and back.”
“What do you want? Lobster roll?”
Derek nodded. “And a Moxie.”
“No problem.” I made a face. Moxie soda is the official state beverage of Maine, and it is an acquired taste. Something like what you’d get if you added bitters to root beer or Campari to Coke. It’s made from—among other things—wintergreen and gentian root. Incidentally, it was one of the first carbonated soft drinks mass-produced in the United States, all the way back in 1884.
He leaned in for a kiss. “See you later, Tink.”
He swatted my butt and sent me on my way.