The Readaholics and the Falcon Fiasco (6 page)

“Someone could have given the tea to her.”

I put my hands on my hips. “Let’s just spit it out. If someone gave her the tea, then they were trying to make her sick. It’s not like oleander grows wild in Colorado—does it?”

“No,” Lola answered slowly. “Most nurseries have some, though—it’s pretty and people buy potted oleanders for their patios or sun porches. I’ve got some in my greenhouse and I’ve sold six or eight oleanders this spring already.”

I nodded. “So no one’s going to chop up an oleander flower by accident and mix it into a tea blend. Not gonna happen. So if someone gave her the tea, then they meant to make her throw up, at least. I’d call that a pretty mean prank. With a lot of room for error. Obviously. “

We stood silently for a moment, staring at each other. The chugging and sloshing of a washing machine vibrated the room’s thin walls. After a long moment, Lola said, “I hate to even think this way, but it’s possible someone meant to do more than make her sick. If you feed oleander to someone, you’ve got to know they might . . .”

“Die,” I finished for her.

L
ola and I discussed the ways someone might have snuck oleander into Ivy’s tea. They ranged from breaking into her house and slipping it into her tea stash, to mailing her a “free sample,” to sneaking some into her cup while she drank. We voted the first idea unlikely because breaking into someone’s house is tricky, thought the second idea was a bit contrived (although doable if someone took the time to create a flyer about the “new” tea and some kind of interesting packaging), and were not inclined to go with the third one because we couldn’t visualize someone pulling a Baggie of chopped oleander from their pocket at Starbucks and sprinkling it on Ivy’s beverage unnoticed. I suggested someone might have a Borgia-ish ring for administering poison and Lola shot me down with a look. She said she’d research how much oleander it would take to kill a woman. We carefully steered away from any discussion of who might have wanted to poison Ivy.

Feeling weighted down by Ivy’s death and the
mystery surrounding it, I left Lola’s and headed back toward town. Passing a familiar turnoff, I suddenly slewed the car to the right. Ivy’s old house, the one where she’d grown up, was at the end of this lane. I hadn’t been down here for ages, maybe not since Ivy sold the family home after her parents died when we were college sophomores. The road turned to gravel after a quarter mile, still corrugated from the winter’s frost heaves and lack of maintenance. I supposed the county was responsible for roads out this way. The road climbed a steep incline and then curved sharply before spitting me out in the small neighborhood where Ivy had lived.

Each house sat on at least two acres and was separated from its neighbors by enough distance that borrowing a cup of milk would have meant a ten-minute round-trip hike. That made it sound like the neighborhood consisted of spacious, custom-built homes, but it was actually composed of older houses, most with large garden plots, some with horses, one with a large chicken coop and a noisy rooster I could hear even from inside the car. I pulled over on the grass verge in front of Ivy’s former home and got out slowly, not sure why I was here, but going with the urge, probably prompted by Ham’s mention of the tree house.

The house had been a dilapidated two-story, weathered gray, when I used to hang out here. Now it sported a vibrant turquoise paint with yellow trim. An entire flock of pink flamingos stood stiffly in the front yard, and garden gnomes peeked from behind every rock and tree. I
remembered Ivy complaining, back when the people she eventually sold the house to were only renters and she’d had to visit to replace a lock, that the woman renter had “never met a piece of kitsch she didn’t buy.” She had vented about doilies and Hummels and cross-stitched pillows and tables made to look like butlers holding trays. We’d laughed about it, but I could tell she’d been a bit sad about all the changes in her childhood home.

Now I avoided the yard and walked around the side of the property to the woods behind it. Unless it had been torn down, there was a tree house back here, far enough not to be seen from the kitchen window, but close enough to hear a mom calling. Ivy’s dad and Ham had built it the summer they moved into the house, and Ivy had claimed it as her special clubhouse. Sometimes I was the favored friend who lolled on the beanbags and read fashion mags and giggled about boys with Ivy, and sometimes it was Brooke or Jennifer or Edith. Ivy had been a one-friend-at-a-time kind of girl, for the most part.

My low-heeled pumps were not intended for hiking, and the layers of damp, molding leaves from autumns past were not improving them, but a glimpse of the tree house made me forget about my shoes. I wondered if maybe another generation of kids had claimed it. I kind of liked that idea, although I thought it was unlikely since it was an older couple who had bought Ivy’s house. If I saw signs of recent habitation, I’d just take a peek and leave without invading their privacy. In thirty more seconds I stood beneath the tree house,
looking up at the broad boards that formed its floor. Gaps in the wood that hadn’t been there before suggested that no one was taking care of the place. The ladder was still nailed to the tree and the house, and after a moment’s hesitation, I kicked off my pumps and began to climb it, glad I was wearing slacks and not a skirt. Hauling myself upward vertically was harder than when I was a teenager, and I was puffing a bit when my head and shoulders rose through the hole in the floor into the tree house. I swiveled, surveying the interior. To my surprise, two of the beanbag chairs were still there, although something had chewed through them and scattered the pellets so the chairs sagged like mostly deflated balloons. A decade or more of snow and rain and sun had rotted the denim coverings in places. A musty smell suggested that animals—squirrels, mice, weasels, or others—had appropriated the beanbags.

A rustle from above made me jerk my head up, and I almost fell off the ladder. Grabbing at the floor to steady myself, I saw that it was only a wren, busy making its spring nest atop the cupboard in the tree house. It eyed me warily and then flew out the structure’s one window.

“I’m only going to be a minute,” I called after it. “Then you can come back and finish your nest.” I stood gingerly, my head not quite brushing the roof. The tree house was smaller than I remembered, probably only nine feet square. The floor creaked under my feet and I tested each board before putting a foot down as I crossed to the cupboard. I was curious to see if anything remained in
it. Back in the day, Ivy had kept nail polishes up here, her journal, cigarettes, love notes from her various boyfriends, and a couple of books and magazines—including a
Playgirl
or two—that she hadn’t wanted her parents to find. I suspected now that they’d known all along what was out here. The door stuck, but I jerked hard on the knob and it popped open. Nothing. Well, nothing more than a spill of burnt orange nail polish, as glossy and slick as ceramic. I ran a finger over it.

Crossing my arms over my chest, I moved to the window, an open square cut in the wall. Careful not to lean against it—I could see from the way the wood bowed out around it that the wall wasn’t sound anymore—I peered out at the evergreens and just-budding aspens, wondering why I’d come here. The place was filled with happy memories—I didn’t remember ever fighting with Ivy here—and it made me melancholy. Even though Ivy probably hadn’t been here in a decade, it still made me sad to think that she’d never climb up here again to sneak a cigarette or ogle the smirking men displayed in a
Playgirl
spread. It’s possible a tear or two slid down my face as I said a prayer for Ivy and left, glancing over my shoulder once or twice until the trees hid the hideaway from view.

*   *   *

My next stop was city hall, a three-story, square stone building erected in the 1930s as part of FDR’s Depression-era construction plan. Intricate stonework prettified the façade, but the interior was a characterless warren of long halls lined by offices.
Even recently applied cream paint—the sharp odor still lingering—couldn’t make the structure seem welcoming. Kerry’s office was here, as were the offices for other city employees, including the chief financial officer. Ivy had worked there for coming up on seven years and had enjoyed it. The administrative assistant who had taken over Ivy’s duties had called Eventful! late yesterday to tell me she was now responsible for overseeing my work on the offsite I’d been going to talk to Ivy about the day she died.

Kirsten Wiggins was in her midtwenties, at a guess, with a lanky build and a long, narrow face made longer and narrower by straight brown hair that fell past her shoulders.

“Clay’s going ahead with the offsite,” she told me, leading me down a hall lined with offices on both sides of the second floor to a small conference room. “Even after . . . Well, the business of running the city doesn’t grind to a halt when one of the small cogs goes ‘poof,’ does it?”

She sounded like she was quoting someone, probably Clay Shumer, the city’s CFO, whom Ivy had worked for. I wasn’t sure if I was more offended by the idea of Ivy reduced to a “small cog” or the dismissal of her death with a casual “poof.”

I bit down hard on my lip to keep from blurting something impolitic and then said, “Ivy didn’t get a chance to give me the details on the offsite. You’re only talking about one day, right? July twelfth? I’ll need to know how many people you’re expecting, what kind of a budget I’m
working with, whether you need me to hire a facilitator, and whether you’ve already got a venue reserved or if you need me to find something.”

We settled into the comfy padded chairs at the oval conference table and spent a good hour hashing through the details for the offsite. Kirsten was surprisingly efficient and I thought sadly that she would take over Ivy’s duties and slide into her job, and after a week or two no one would notice that Ivy was gone.

“My caffeine-low light is on,” Kirsten said, pushing away from the table. “Want some coffee before we finish up?”

“Sure.” I rarely said no to coffee. In the hallway, we passed a restroom and I told Kirsten I needed to duck inside. She pointed out the break room, two doors up on the left, and said she’d meet me there. The bathroom smelled heavily of an aerosol “freshening” scent that made me cough. Holding my breath, I peed quickly, barely flicked water on my hands, and pushed out of the two-stall restroom. I was halfway down the corridor before I realized I’d turned the wrong way. The name
CLAY SHUMER
engraved on a brass strip beside a barely open office door made me recognize my error. I turned. As I did, an angry voice issued from inside the office.

“. . . not my fault! I think she copied . . . my . . . assistant, for God’s sake. How do you expect—”

Another voice rumbled over Clay Shumer’s defensive words. I couldn’t make out what the new speaker was saying. The timbre of his voice sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

Realizing I was eavesdropping on what might
be sensitive city business, I was turning away when one of the men in the office pushed the door closed. The wooden smack made me jump, and I hurried down the hall to find the room Kirsten had pointed out, feeling like I’d been sneaking around where I had no business, even though all I’d done was get turned around. I took a deep breath before walking into the break room, where I found Kirsten watching coffee drip into a carafe.

“No one in this frigging office ever makes a new pot when they empty the old one,” she fumed. “And they must all think their moms work here, or the cleaning fairy, because they never bother to clean up after themselves, either.”

She ripped a paper towel from a dispenser and began a furious assault on the coffee spills and grounds on the Formica counter. A shelf sat above it, lined with mugs I assumed belonged to people who worked here, some whimsical, some plain. I made a silent bet with myself that the plain gray mug with “I’ll try to be nicer if you try to be smarter” written on it was Kirsten’s. A refrigerator hummed from the end of the counter, with a microwave beside it. Two large cans of coffee sat beside a small stainless-steel sink, one regular and one decaf, and a container of nondairy creamer and a bowl of sugar were pushed against the tile backsplash. Beside them was a white ceramic canister decorated with ivy vines.

My eyes fixed on it. “Pretty,” I said, sure I knew whose canister it was.

Kirsten followed my gaze. “Yeah, that’s Ivy’s special tea. Was. Lipton’s wasn’t good enough for
her.” I thought I heard a hint of snideness in her voice, but then she said, “Although I will say she was the only other one in this office who bothered to clean up after herself. The only one who wasn’t raised by wolves.” She said this last in a loud voice, apparently in response to a suited man who had come in while we were talking, slopped coffee into his mug, and not bothered to wipe up the drips from the still-brewing machine. They sizzled on the burner, sending up an acrid odor.

“Lighten up, Kris,” he said, slouching out. “That’s why we have a janitorial service.”

“
Kir
sten.”

The byplay was enough to make me glad, once again, that I owned my own business. I’d worked in the English Department office for two years while I was at the University of Colorado, and the pettiness and gossip and complaints about lunch items going missing from the communal fridge had driven me batty. I felt sympathetic toward Kirsten, although I sensed she was the kind of woman who made things harder for herself. My eyes returned to the canister, completely accessible on the counter. Anyone could have doctored its contents. Should I share my suspicions with the police so they could test the tea in the canister? They would undoubtedly pooh-pooh my theory. I had to do something, though, before one of Ivy’s coworkers brewed a cup of tea using her special blend and got sick . . . or worse.

“It’s really sad about Ivy, isn’t it?” Kirsten said, reaching for a pair of mugs on the shelf. “Scary, even. Makes you wonder if you really know
someone at all. I mean, I would never have thought she would off herself. Never. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t Miss Sweetness and Light, always perky and happy and everything, but I never got the feeling she was that unhappy, unhappy enough to kill herself, even though it was pretty clear her little office romance had come to its inevitable end.” She slanted me a sly look while pouring coffee into a Save the Manatees mug and the gray one I’d pegged as hers. “You were her friend, right, so you must have known?”

“I’m not sure I know what you’re getting at,” I said, accepting the mug with the partially scraped-off manatee and blowing on the coffee. My fingers tightened around the warm ceramic; I was afraid I
did
know what she was getting at.

Kirsten’s raised brows accused me of being disingenuous. “Really? Well, everyone here knew. I mean, you can’t screw around with the boss and expect people not to notice. They thought they were being so discreet—”

Unlike Kirsten, who was filling me in on office gossip in the break room with its open door.

“—but people notice when you stay late to ‘work’ together, and go to conventions in Indianapolis, and call in sick on the same days. Leaving each other little gifts, too—I mean, that’s just rubbing it in. Did they think we were all stupid? Everyone knows that’s why she got that promotion.”