Deadly Currents

by Beth Groundwater

  She scanned the list of homeopathic remedies and found other toxins listed—belladonna, digitalis, arsenic. Could someone gather enough of a poison by ordering it from these websites to come up with a lethal dose? Or were the toxic properties of the poisons somehow neutralized before they were made into homeopathic remedies? While Rob slept, Mandy scanned all the information she could find. By the time four thirty rolled around, when she figured she should wake Rob and get him ready and down to the river for the five thirty race, she had a headache and strained eyes, but no real answers.

  _____

  While Mandy drove Rob to the Salida Riverside Park, a suspicion kept nagging her, like an insistent child tugging at her mother’s skirt. She and Detective Quintana were missing something. Even though she had just met Nate Fowler, she hadn’t seen anything suspicious in his behavior. She doubted he would have become incensed enough at her questions to fire a bullet through her window. Nor did she believe he was the type to poison his competition.

  Though it was impossible to know what lurked in the minds of people who behaved reasonably on the outside, Mandy still expected some kind of crack to appear in the facade of sanity. You have to be at least a little insane or obsessed to kill someone.

  Mandy drove the streets near the park for a while, but the closest parking space she could find was still two blocks away. She came around to the passenger side of the Subaru to give Rob a hand in getting out, though she could see his jaw harden at the reversal in their roles. Without comment, she tucked herself under his good arm so he could lean on her while they walked to the park. She smiled up at him and squeezed his waist, pretending that she just wanted to be close to him.

  Their progress was slow, because locals who knew Rob wanted to ask him how he was faring, or if they hadn’t heard about his injury yet, what had happened to him. The story was getting pretty darn old by the time they reached the full bleachers near the boat ramp. A couple of townsfolk sitting on the edge of the third row waved Mandy and Rob over and gave up their seats for them. When Rob protested, they pooh-poohed his concern, saying they needed to get a beer and find some shade anyway.

  Mandy thanked them, then pulled a bottle of ice water out of her backpack and handed it to Rob. The sun was beating down on the bleachers unmercifully. She worried that the heat, combined with his painkillers, might get to him before the race was over. His face was already pale from the walk.

  The shores of the Arkansas teemed with masses of people who probably had begun lining up an hour ago to watch the most popular event at FIBArk. Ice cream and popsicle juice dripped down kids’ sticky fingers and faces. Adults held plastic cups of beer and iced soda against their cheeks to cool off.

  A raft floated downstream, then took up position in an eddy on the other side of the river, ready to assist in rescues. Mandy recognized Kendra and one of the other seasonal river rangers inside.

  She pointed out the raft to Rob. “You see Kendra?”

  “Yeah. How many swimmers do you think we’ll have this year?”

  “From the looks of some of the contraptions in this morning’s parade, a lot.”

  He turned to her in surprise. “You saw the parade?”

  “Cynthia and I got stuck on a side street crossing the route on our way to look at people’s gardens. We saw your pirate crew.”

  Rob cast a wistful gaze upriver, where the Hooligan Race rafts were gathering in heats around the bend. “Wish I could be out there with them.”

  “I’m sorry, Rob.” She gave his thigh a squeeze.

  He covered her hand with his. “I’m not. Better me than you.”

  A roar went up from the crowd as the first heat of six homemade rafts appeared in the river. Everyone in the bleachers stood. Mandy helped Rob to his feet so he could see, too.

  A giant turtle constructed out of inner tubes lashed together and covered with green tarp roiled in the water, pushed along by enthusiastic paddlers straddling the turtle’s legs. The gangly reptile was flanked by a woman in a fat bee costume paddling a bathtub and Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble look-alikes in a makeshift Flintstones car. Surrounding them, Vikings, Hawaiian-shirted surfers, and grass-skirted Polynesians slapped paddles in the water from a motley collection of homemade watercraft.

  Rob laughed. “I predict the Flintstones car goes down in the boat ramp rapid.”

  “I doubt the bathtub will survive it either,” Mandy said. “What happens when it fills up with water?”

  But mishaps were exactly what the crowd wanted and was hollering for. The winner of the race was not the boat that finished first or in the best shape, but the one that put on the best show for the onlookers.

  The noise increased as the rafts hit the rapid and floundered in the whitewater, spilling occupants and shedding pieces. The turtle lost its tail, but the rest of the body survived. The bathtub filled and rolled over, so the bumblebee occupant had to hang on to the bottom. Amazingly, the Flintstones car remained upright, eliciting a congratulatory roar from the crowd.

  Mandy grabbed Rob’s arm. “Oh look, it’s a Viking funeral!”

  The Vikings were standing up with arms and paddles crossed over their chests, while one blew mournfully on what looked like a steer’s horn. Their wooden raft slowly disintegrated around them, while the “body,” which looked suspiciously like a collection of soggy pillows lashed together, slid into the current.

  Rob gave out a hoot. “A funeral for the raft or the deceased?”

  When the rafts, or what was left of them, had passed, Mandy sat next to Rob and wiped tears of laughter out of the corners of her eyes. It felt good to laugh. Really good. She realized she’d had way too much sorrow in her life lately.

  Rob gave her a squeeze. “Your Uncle Bill would have loved this.”

  Mandy nodded. “The Hooligan Race was the highlight of his year.”

  “Maybe he’s here.”

  Mandy looked out at the sparkling waters of the Arkansas River flowing past them. “Maybe he is.” She leaned into Rob’s hug.

  “Well, if it isn’t Mandy Tanner and her lover boy.”

  Evie Olson stood next to the bleachers with Shirley Logan, the two dolled up in sherbet-colored capris, spaghetti-strap tops, and matching floppy straw hats. Evie had accessorized with a spangly, sheer shawl in a rainbow swirl of colors draped over her capris and tied at the hip. She took a noisy slurp of her beer.

  “Hello, Evie,” Rob said in a cautious tone.

  Evie took a step closer to Mandy and swayed. She obviously had drunk one too many beers. She jabbed a finger in Mandy’s thigh. “I don’t appreciate you siccing Detective Quintana on me after you pulled a fast one in the Day Spa.”

  Mandy swept Evie’s hand away. “I didn’t sic him on you. He’s conducting his own investigation.”

  “With your slimy help. Fat lot of good it’s done. The idiot can’t decide who to arrest next for what. First he goes after Paula King then he lets her go and picks up Nate Fowler.”

  Shirley laughed and slapped Evie’s arm. “He’ll be coming after you next. Better get your lawyer lined up.”

  “That’s not funny!” Evie glared at her friend, who dunked her nose in her beer glass and stepped away.

  Evie swung her evil eye toward Mandy. “You and Quintana should move to Summit County. You’d fit right in at Keystone, since you’re a couple of Keystone Kops.”

  Shirley snorted out a hysterical laugh. Titters came from a few folks in the bleachers around them.

  “You obviously rehearsed that line,” Mandy said with a sneer. “Couldn’t you come up with something more imaginative?”

  While Evie drew herself up to her full height, as if preparing for another round, Rob stood. “You’re spoiling a good time for everyone, Evie. And you’re drunk.” He signaled Shirley. “Take her home so she can sleep it off.”

  Po
inting a menacing finger at Rob, Evie said, “That’s an insult. I am not drunk.” She stumbled, causing the folks in the stands to titter again. She frowned at the group, then turned her wrath on Rob again. “I can make life very difficult for you, Robbie boy. Remember, my daddy’s a councilman, and when I tell him—”

  Her words were drowned out by the roar of the crowd, signaling that another group of rafts had started down the river course. Everyone else in the bleachers stood and craned their necks to see.

  When Evie realized she had lost her audience, she threw down her beer cup and stomped off. Shirley picked it up and scurried after her.

  “Good timing, there,” Rob said in Mandy’s ear. “Don’t worry. She’ll probably forget all about this by tomorrow.”

  Mandy worried her lip as she watched Evie gesturing angrily at her friend. “I’m not so sure.” The woman sure had a temper when she got drunk. Could she build up enough anger to kill someone, someone who jilted her?

  Rob nudged her and pointed upstream. This group included a raft shaped like the roof of a house with “FEMA sucks” painted on it.

  “Oh, I get it,” Mandy said. “They’re Hurricane Katrina victims.”

  The drowning house was followed by a raft with upright, open plastic garbage cans lashed to the sides. Grinning passengers stood in the cans, their hips even with the water level. They squirted the crowds lining the banks with Super Soakers and hoses. Squeals of delight followed them down the river. One of the men wielding a hose was Lenny Preble. Mandy read the sign on the raft, “Save Arkansas River Water.”

  “Lenny and his gang don’t miss an opportunity to spread their message, do they?” Rob said.

  “You’ve got to admit that using the river water itself to make their point is creative.” And just how far would Lenny go, Mandy wondered, to keep development interests from sucking up all the Arkansas River water rights? Would his radical views push him to commit murder?

  “That’s it!” Rob shouted before she could muse further. “That’s the winner.”

  A large wooden platform straddled two commercial rafts, and a huge hoop decorated in red, white, and blue stood on one end. At the other end, a young man dressed as an Evel Knievel–look-alike in a sparkly white jumpsuit straddled a bicycle.

  Mandy’s jaw dropped. “No, he’s not—”

  Rob chortled. “Yes, he is.”

  Just as the lumbering platform approached the boat ramp rapid, the man pushed off and peddled furiously. He and the bike sailed through the hoop and splashed separately into the river below the rapid. When his head popped up out of the water and he waved to the crowd, they whistled and clapped their approval.

  Mandy grabbed Rob’s arm. “That’s Jeff King!”

  “He’s a risk taker all right,” Rob replied, “but what a show. His raft deserves to win.”

  A risk taker. Was he capable of murdering his own father to get access to the money he needed to keep on living as a river rat?

  As Mandy resumed her seat next to Rob to wait for the next heat of rafts, she began to think Evie was right, that Quintana had the wrong suspect in jail.

  _____

  Hours later, Mandy poked her head through Rob’s bedroom doorway. He was snoring peacefully, in the deep sleep of sheer exhaustion. After watching his guide crew’s homemade pirate ship disintegrate in the river, the heat and painkillers finally got to him. He, too, had disintegrated. He had tried to insist on staying for the finals, but Mandy forced him off the viewing stand and into the car.

  She couldn’t get to sleep herself, however. The question of how Nate Fowler could have gotten his hands on the poison nagged her. She grabbed the peanut butter jar from the kitchen and sat down on the sofa. She dipped in her finger to fetch a glob out and sucked on it.

  If Nate couldn’t have gotten his hands on enough aconite via homeopathic remedies and he had none growing in his yard, Mandy wondered how else he could have gotten it. She snapped her sticky fingers. By stealing the plants from someone else’s yard as easily as Cynthia and she had sneaked in and out of all but one of the yards they investigated. Or by finding Western monkshood plants growing in the wild.

  But Mandy still wanted to rule out the homeopathic remedies source. She remembered Kendra was into homeopathic remedies, and she probably would be watching the Pine Creek Boater race footage at the Steamplant Theater that night. Maybe Mandy’s rescue of Jeff King had been taped. She could learn something from watching it—and from talking to Kendra.

  She wrote a note to Rob that said she was going to watch the race footage, then she let Lucky outside to do his final business of the day in Rob’s yard. After grabbing her windbreaker, she softly closed the door behind her and started up her car, pushing Quintana’s admonishment not to do any more sniffing around to the back of her mind.

  During the ride over to the Steamplant, she conjured up lots of sound reasons why this excursion wasn’t really sniffing around. She wasn’t planning to talk to any of the suspects. This was for her own educational benefit in evaluating her rescue technique. Besides, she would drive herself crazy if she stayed at Rob’s. And if she happened to see Kendra, what was the harm in asking her about homeopathic remedies?

  When she entered the theater, the race footage had already begun, but the houselights were only dimmed to allow people to find each other. As much socializing as watching was going on, and the sound of the race was a lot less interesting than the visuals anyway. Mandy spotted Kendra talking to a couple of other rafting guides and worked her way through the rows of seats to get to the group.

  Kendra’s brows rose in surprise. “Mandy! I thought you’d be nursing Rob. How is he?”

  “He’s sound asleep and has been for hours. I doubt he’ll wake up until morning, so there’s not much nursing to be done now. I wanted to see the footage of my rescue of Jeff King. Has it come on yet?”

  “Nah, they just started playing the tape about half an hour ago.”

  “Can I ask you some questions in the meantime?” Mandy pointed to a cluster of empty seats toward the back of the room, where hopefully she could ask her questions without being overheard.

  “Sure, I guess.” Kendra excused herself from her friends and followed Mandy to the seats in the back. “What’s up?”

  “You know a lot about homeopathic remedies, right?”

  Kendra nodded. “Is this for you or Rob?”

  “Neither. It’s more of a general question.” Mandy leaned close to Kendra and lowered her voice to almost a whisper. “Actually, it has something to do with the King case. You know he was poisoned, right?”

  “Right, but you don’t think he got a bad batch of homeopathic medicine, do you?”

  “No, not exactly. I know a lot of homeopathics are actually tiny doses of what would be poisonous in a much larger amount. What I’m wondering is if someone could order enough of a homeopathic remedy to somehow create a fatal dose out of it.”

  Kendra thought for a moment. “I really doubt it. You see, homeopathic doses are diluted way too much. A usual dose is 6X, which means the substance is diluted to one part in ten multiplied six times, which results in one in a million parts. To get a strong dose, you somehow have to distill out that one part in a million. Otherwise, someone would have to drink gallons of the stuff to get enough to cause harm.”

  “Are they just diluted with water?”

  “Not all the time. Depends on the substance and what it does in water. Sometimes it’s diluted with alcohol or sugar or something else.” Kendra shifted. “Even if someone could figure out the chemistry of how to get rid of all the water, alcohol, or sugar and concentrate it down, there’s the matter of cost. You’d have to buy thousands of bottles of medicine to get enough for one fatal dose. Who’s going to spend that much money?”

  Especially when you can just grow the plant in your back yard. Mandy nodde
d. “Okay, thanks. You’ve convinced me.”

  Kendra made her way back to her friends.

  Think, girl. No one, not she and Cynthia nor Quintana and his cops had found any monkshood plants or aconite powder at Nate Fowler’s house—or dozens of trash bags full of homeopathic remedy bottles either. And Nate didn’t come across to her as money-grubbing enough to kill for it. Someone else must have planted the rifle in his unlocked garden shed, just as they easily could have planted the monkshood root and powder in the Kings’ detached garage. Someone who was trying to throw suspicion away from himself or herself.

  That left Evie Olson and Lenny Preble, both of whom had Western monkshood growing in their yards, and Cynthia had said Evie had hunting experience. Mandy tried to recall if she had heard anything about Lenny Preble and hunting. Given his environmental leanings, she doubted it.

  But Lenny was the one who brought the sealed sports drink bottles to the rafting trip. Two witnesses saw Paula give Tom King his bottle, but how did the bottle get from Lenny to Paula? Did he or Evie unseal one, drop in the aconite powder, reseal it, and hand it to Paula along with hers, asking her to give one to Tom? Again, to throw suspicion on her? If so, how could the killer be sure the right bottle got to Tom? And how could he or she have done all that unnoticed?

  Mandy spotted Paula King in the crowd watching the race footage. She could ask Paula if she remembered who had given her the sports bottle. But Paula would probably refuse to answer and accuse Mandy of trying to cover up her own incompetence again.

  “Hey, Mandy,” Kendra shouted and pointed to the screen.

  There was Mandy, tossing a throw rope to Jeff King, floundering in the Pine Creek rapid. When it hit him on the head, Kendra shouted “Bingo!” and a few guides clapped in appreciation at the perfect throw.

  Mandy watched herself haul Jeff to shore, her feet scrabbling for purchase in the gravel. Maybe she should have tried to belay the rope around that nearby boulder instead of doing a body belay. Would there have been enough time to run the rope around the rock before Jeff’s body weight started tugging on it? Probably not.