Murder at Teatime (13 page)

“I figured it out. Look at this.” She slid the herbal across the table, pointing to the passage on monkshood.

Tracey read the text, his finger leading his eye across the page. Now and then he emitted a low whistle.

“What made the medical examiner suspect poison?” asked Charlotte.

“He didn’t, not at first. He thought it was a heart attack. He was helping Dr. Thornhill’s doctor on the case. The other symptoms were what made him suspicious—diarrhea, vomiting, convulsions.”

Tracey looked up from the book. “I don’t get it,” he said finally. “How do you know this is the stuff that killed Dr. Thornhill?”

“I don’t—not for sure,” she replied, looking at him over the tops of her glasses. “But I have a pretty good idea.”

She explained about Kitty’s treating Stan’s rheumatism with an herb that was poisonous in larger doses, about how she’d seen the roots of what she later learned was the same plant lying on top of the ground, and about Thornhill’s deathbed hallucinations. She didn’t tell him about the body of the yellow dog floating above the glowing coals.

“Is there any way to test for monkshood poisoning?” asked Kitty.

“Could be,” replied Tracey. “I was just talking to the people over to the State lab. They say they can’t test for an unknown poison: they have to have an idea of what they’re looking for. Index of suspicion, they called it. They asked us to look into what Dr. Thornhill ate, but if we told them we suspected monkshood, that would give them something to go on.”

“We were just looking at this book,” said Charlotte, passing it across the table to him. “It’s a reference book on plant poisons.”

Tracey started to read in his thick Maine accent: “‘Monkshood was imported by the colonials, who used it for relief of pain from rheumatism, pleurisy, peritonitis, and other ailments. It is still used externally for rheumatism in Europe and elsewhere, but its internal use has been discontinued because of its extreme toxicity.’ The next part is in italics: ‘
Clinical poisoning is fairly common. For this reason, monkshood is not recommended for internal use. Effective doses are practically toxic and toxic doses are practically ineffective.
’” He looked up. “Jeezum,” he exclaimed, sucking in his breath.

Kitty sighed. “You know, I think I’ll stop giving Stan that tincture of monkshood for his shoulder.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” agreed Tracey. “Here’s the part on symptoms,” he said as he continued to read to himself. “Ayuh,” he said after a minute. “With his history of heart trouble, you can see why his doctors thought it was heart disease.” He looked at Charlotte. “If you hadn’t put two and two together and if the county medical examiner hadn’t been on the ball, the poisoner might have gotten away with it. That is, if there is a poisoner.”

“What do you mean
if
?” asked Charlotte.

“Well, I suppose it could have been an accident, or suicide.”

“Accident, unlikely; suicide, definitely not,” said Charlotte, who had been reading the Grenville. “Listen to this: ‘In later stages, vomiting becomes violent and convulsive. Other symptoms are diarrhea, headache, giddiness, vertigo, and the sensation of choking. Tingling begins at an early stage: there is a sensation of ants crawling all over the body.’”

Kitty nodded. “Fran said he kept rubbing his legs as if something were crawling on them.”

Charlotte shuddered. “‘Later the limbs become paralyzed,’” she continued, remembering his complaint about heavy legs. “‘The eyes protrude, and there is impairment of vision, speech, and hearing. There may be hallucinations, but the victim remains conscious. There is a great fear of death, and some victims become maniacal. Death is caused by cardiac or respiratory failure.’”

“Whew,” said Tracey. “Not a very nice way to go.”

“I wonder if he knew he’d been poisoned,” said Charlotte. “If he did, he wouldn’t have been able to say anything.”

“How horrible,” said Kitty with a tremble in her voice.

“How do you think the poison was administered?” asked Tracey.

From the kitchen came the muffled drone of a soap opera. With the sound helping to nudge her memory, Charlotte tried to picture the library as it had been when she’d called the ambulance. “His tea,” she said. “It might have been in his tea. The tea tray was sitting right here on the table when I called the ambulance. Grace took it to him around four. He fell ill shortly afterwards.” She remembered how impressed she had been at how neat it all was—the japanned tray with the embroidered linen tea towel, the hand-painted bone china tea service, the silver tea strainer, the plate of thinly sliced lemons, the silver lemon fork, the little vase of old-fashioned roses.

“By now, the dishes would be washed up,” said Tracey. “But would the small amount of poison in a cup of tea be enough to kill a man?”

“Yes,” said Kitty. “There have been lots of cases. There was a famous case in Belgium. Fran talks about it in her witch lecture. The people made a tea out of the root of monkshood. They thought it was another herb. Lovage, I think. Three out of the five people who drank the tea died within a couple of hours.”

Tracey shook his head.

Picking up the Grenville again, Charlotte continued reading aloud: “‘The lethal dose is one teaspoonful of the fresh root. Symptoms may appear almost immediately and are rarely delayed beyond an hour. Death may occur from a few minutes to four days after ingestion.’”
What if she and Daria had taken Grace up on her offer of tea
? she wondered. She continued reading, raising her voice for emphasis: “‘If a small but fatal dose of the poison were to be given, the chances of detection in the body after death would not be great.’”

“Well, I’ll be darned,” said Tracey. “Looks as if somebody darn near got clean away with it.”

“The question is who,” said Charlotte.

“Who was here that afternoon?” asked Tracey.

“Okay,” said Charlotte, starting to enumerate the possibilities. “Grace served the tea, but that doesn’t mean anything—the tea could have been tampered with at an earlier time. Daria and John were upstairs in the bindery with me. Donahue was in the library with Thornhill. They were arguing, by the way. Oh, and Felix was out on the veranda, reading.”

“That’s five,” he said. “Six, counting you.” He had pulled a notebook out of his breast pocket and was taking notes. “This isn’t going to be easy. I guess I’ll have to take statements from everybody.”

“Seven,” said Charlotte. “I forgot Wes Gilley. He was dropping off some lobsters for dinner that night.”

“Seven,” sighed Tracey. This would be his first murder, and the first in town since the thirties, he said. He would have to call in the State police. But even with their help, he would have his work cut out for him.

“Here’s something else that’s very interesting,” said Charlotte, who was still leafing through the Grenville. “This section is entitled ‘An experiment on the action of
Aconitum napellus
on the animal economy.’”

Tracey gave her a puzzled look.

She read: “‘Two drams of a watery extract of monkshood were administered by syringe to a medium-sized dog. The extract was prepared by expressing the fluid of the fresh aconite root. Fifteen minutes later, the dog became drowsy, shut its eyes, and hung down its head. Four hours later, it experienced convulsions and died.’”

“Jesse,” said Tracey. “Do you think the murderer might have experimented on Jesse to get an idea of what the lethal dose for a man would be?”

“Maybe,” said Charlotte. “But his death could have been an accident. The roots looked as if they might have been dug up by a dog.” She gazed out at the fresh mound of earth in the rose garden that was Jesse’s grave. “We could exhume the body and have it tested.”

Tracey made another notation, and then stood to leave. “Well, I’d better get going. I’ve got a lot to do.”

As Charlotte rose to see him out her eye was caught by a book in a cardboard box filled with copies of the same book. The book was
The Living Pharmacy
; the author was J. Franklin Thornhill. “Wait a minute,” she said, taking out one of the brand-new copies. “Here’s Dr. Thornhill’s book. Maybe he says something about monkshood.” She checked the index.

“Is it in there?” asked Kitty.

“Yes,” said Charlotte, returning to her seat. She turned to the page and began reading: “‘The drug was well-known to the ancients. It was believed to be the invention of Hecate, the queen of Hades, and was used to destroy criminals condemned to death or to dispose of unwanted relatives.’”

“I can think of at least one relative who might have wanted to get rid of Dr. Thornhill,” said Tracey. “Chuck Donahue.”

“Two,” said Charlotte. “Fran is another. Dr. Thornhill was planning to remarry. She thought his new wife would make life so unpleasant for her that she’d be forced to leave.” She continued reading: “‘Monkshood was used by the ancient Greek inhabitants of the isle of Ios for the elimination of the aged and infirm. Citizens who were considered to be no longer of use to society were condemned to drink a cup of the poison, called the farewell cup.’”

“Euthanasia,” said Kitty.

Charlotte continued: “‘The cup was administered on the victim’s sixtieth birthday.’
Oh God,
” she said, dropping the book into her lap.

“What is it?” asked Tracey.

“Tuesday was Thornhill’s sixtieth birthday. That’s why Grace had ordered the lobsters—for a birthday celebration.”

“It couldn’t have been a coincidence?” asked Kitty, who could always be depended on to look on the bright side.

Charlotte shook her head.

“Maybe it
was
suicide,” said Tracey. “Maybe Dr. Thornhill was depressed about getting old—that’s not all that uncommon. Maybe he thought he had outlived his usefulness to society.”

Charlotte cocked a skeptical eyebrow. “I think it’s far more likely that someone else thought that.”

Tracey shrugged. They sat in silence for a minute in the dim light. The room was silent except for the rustle of the breeze in the leaves of the hydrangeas planted around the veranda. On the mantel, an old steeple clock ticked away the minutes, and the refrigerator in the corner hummed.

Before, the idea that Thornhill had been murdered had given Charlotte an uneasy feeling, like being alone at night in an unsafe neighborhood. But now it scared her. She had suddenly come up against the homicidal mind, and it was a mind that was frightening in its complexity, a mind that was precise and cunning, a mind that delighted in the subtle irony of the fact that its victim had described his own mode of death.

Her gaze drifted out to the herb garden. The streamers of the maypole fluttered eerily in the breeze, like a flag after the parade is over. She remembered Kitty saying that it symbolized immortality.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” said Tracey. He withdrew a piece of brown paper from his pocket and passed it across the table. “It was sent to the
Bridge Harbor Light
. It’s the same as the other poison-pen letters that were sent to Dr. Thornhill. Same paper, same writing, same color crayon.”

Printed in red crayon in a large, childlike hand, was the message: “THE KING IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE.”

8

The suspicion that Thornhill had been poisoned touched off a flurry of activity. The State police arrived that afternoon and took statements from everyone who had been anywhere near the tea. The list included Grace, Felix, John, Wes, Chuck—and Fran, who, it turned out, had been in the kitchen. For the time being, Charlotte and Daria had been excluded from the formal list of suspects on account of their being upstairs at the time the tea was prepared. The suspects had been asked to remain in the vicinity, which meant that Felix would be extending his visit and that Chuck would not be returning to Boston as planned. Tissue samples from Thornhill’s body had been sent to the state toxicology lab in Augusta to be tested for aconitine, along with samples from the package of tea and several of the cookies left over from the batch Grace had baked that morning. Tissue samples from Jesse’s body had also been sent to the State lab. Thornhill’s body would be quietly buried at some future date. The medical examiner had turned down Marion’s request for cremation on the ground that the body might have to be exhumed for further testing. The memorial service had been canceled in favor of a small family service.

For Kitty and Stan, the suspicion that Thornhill had been poisoned with the same herb Kitty was using to treat Stan’s rheumatism generated a lot of discussion—and not a little hostility. With his righteous indignation fueled by the better part of a shakerful of martinis, Stan accused Kitty of harboring a desire to do him in. Hadn’t she always displayed an inordinate interest in seeing to it that his life insurance premiums were paid up? He had had enough of her home remedies, thank you. What were a few points on his golf handicap next to the possibility of being poisoned by one of the most potent plant poisons known to mankind? Kitty racked her memory for clues. Had she talked about monkshood’s poisonous properties with anyone? Had she noticed anyone reading up on monkshood in the library? Had she seen anyone digging in the monkshood bed? She came up with nothing on all counts. One interesting fact that had come to light courtesy of Maurice, the Ledge House handyman, was that the monkshood bed had been dug up a couple of weeks before Thornhill’s death. But he had no idea who had done it, or why.

After a shish kebab barbecue, Charlotte and the Saunders had lingered on the patio discussing the case. The people with the most to gain from Thornhill’s death, they concluded, were Chuck and Wes. But a lot of others also stood to gain, people whose feelings had been inflamed by the editorial in the
Bridge Harbor Light
. Was the murder related to the other incidents? they wondered—the bullet through the library window, the poison pen letters. If so, Wes was a prime suspect because of his connection with the tire incident. If Jesse had been poisoned, the poisoning could have been an escalation of the threats, a you-may-be-next reminder. Then again, the vandalism might have been committed out of some other motive. It wasn’t an entirely farfetched notion that it was the work of some local fundamentalist who was offended by Fran’s pagan rituals. As for Fran, with both motive and means, she was the other strong suspect. The prospect of being forced out of one’s home was enough to induce resentment in even the most mild-mannered of people, and Fran was far from that, as her temper tantrum had demonstrated. She had vowed that Thornhill would be sorry he had decided to get married. She had also cast a spell to protect herself against “that greedy bitch.” Had she also seen to it that the spell was effective? Besides being forced out of her home, she had an investment to protect: she had built the herb business from scratch, and having given up a job years before to keep house for her uncle, was hardly likely to go back to work now. Still another count against her was her relationship with Thornhill. Despite their blood ties (she was named after him) and their shared interest in gardening, they were not especially close, according to Kitty. In fact they were more competitors than colleagues.