“He didn’t know what he was doing and I’m out rather painlessly, but I can’t get my arms out of this middle tape mess yet. He wrapped it around us from shoulders to waist a couple dozen times.”
Connor sat silent, thinking.
“What are you thinking?” Laura asked. “I found something that might work.”
He was all ears since he could only twist his neck so far and hadn’t really thought anything through yet. Funny how nothing seemed to have changed, and he and Laura were assuming, as they always had, that they could get out of this mess. He hoped they could; he didn’t want either one of them to freeze to death. And he didn’t want the woman from the bakery to get away with murder.
“Well, we need something sharp to cut this tape.”
“Really. But neither of us can get to the knife in my boot at the moment.”
“You got a knife, Connor? Dang! We’ll just have to work my other angle until we figure out a way to get at your knife.”
“Which is…?”
“The loose screw I found under my left hand. I’m working on it.”
“You’re thinking to work it loose, bend your wrist at a crazy angle, and poke holes in the tape on your wrist until you can free the one hand, and then do the other hand? That could take days.”
“What’s your idea?”
“The one that just came to me? Well, these chairs are the ones with the vertical dowels in their backs, the kind that always come loose and you’re forever gluing back in.”
“So they are! They’re called Windsor chairs, by the way.”
“Nice to know. Didn’t you guys have some in your kitchen?”
“Uh-huh. Daddy was forever gluing them back together. I learned my whole cuss word collection at an early age, just watching him fix them, over and over. So what’s your idea? You think they’re old and dry enough that we can jiggle them loose?”
“It’s worth a shot. Looks like they’ve been exposed to the elements for decades in this shack.”
“Where are we, anyway?”
“No idea. Lost my sense of direction in the trunk of his car.”
They wiggled left and right, forwards and backwards, as much as possible with the duct tape around them, keeping their chairs back-to-back. They felt some of the poles squeaking and giving, but not as much as they had hoped.
“By the way,” Laura said. “Those ‘dowels’ are called turned wood.”
“Helpful to know,” Connor responded, heaving back and forth. He finally felt one of the dowels give.
“Was that what I thought it was?” Laura asked. She had heard the squeak, crack, and sucking sound of the dowel giving way, coming loose.
“Yes! Keep going. We should be able to get them all. I just wish I could get my hands at the right angle to do this properly. Can’t grab anything with my arms where they are.”
They worked and worked at loosening the backs of their chairs, dowel by dowel, until Laura took a break.
“I just thought of something.”
“What’s that?” Connor asked, still shifting left and right. One more pole came loose.
“What happens after we loosen all the poles in the backs of our chairs?” she asked, shivering and shaking.
“We should be able to stand up.”
“And do what? We’d still be taped to the chair legs. And I’m still taped to the arms. The arms are stuck to the chair back frame.”
“Work on getting the arms out of the chair backs, too. Once we’re freed from our sitting position, we should be able to bend over sideways, even though we’re still attached to everything and get down on our knees, and I should be able to work my arms free and reach my boot. We’re not taped to the seats, just the backs and legs.”
Laura frowned and resumed twisting back and forth.
“And each other. That just doesn’t sound—” she was thinking if Connor bent to his knees, wouldn’t she be on his back, up in the air?
“We’ve got it. That may be enough. Okay, ready? We stand on three. Stand forcefully, not gently. One. Two. Three.”
But when they stood, something unexpected happened. The chair seats came loose from the chair legs as well as the back poles from the seats. But the outer frame of the chair backs held. So they were still strapped to the chair back frames and the chair seats, now in multiple, moving parts, loose poles every which way, with Laura’s arms taped to the chair arms, their legs taped to the now wavering chair legs, and the pair struggled for balance, still taped back-to-back around the middle of the frames.
And they fell in unison on their sides.
Connor felt Laura shaking.
“Are you okay?”
“Actually, I was thinking it’s a good thing the Coen brothers didn’t walk in and witness this. They might have optioned us for their next movie. Do you want to try my loose screw idea yet?”
Connor ignored her, trying to figure out what to do next.
“I think we need to sit up. Do it easy, so you don’t get hurt on any of the dangling poles.”
They struggled to a sitting position together, still strapped back-to-back, juggling the loose back poles, only this time, their chair seats were on the floor and they both felt as if they were wearing leg braces. Laura craned her neck and watched as Connor tried a few moves.
“Hey, y-you can reach your b-boot!” she cried, through chattering teeth.
And he could, with great effort by bending one knee and twisting his lower leg until it was close to the arm he had worked partially loose. It took another fifteen minutes to get them both completely out of the tape and disengaged from their chair fragments. Laura had completed the first stage of hypothermia and was headed for the second.
“Okay, now let’s see that phone of yours,” Connor said, pulling off his parka and wrapping it around her.
forty-two
Sounds of the approaching sirens were muffled by the forested growth and the falling snow. But the pair huddled tightly together in a far corner of the cabin trying to stay warm and as far from the wind gusts as possible, as the sounds very slowly grew louder. Connor stayed on the phone with them, describing the hidden turnoff and where they were from Laura’s description. The GPS from her old phone helped them get to the general area.
“I could really enjoy this under different circumstances,” he mumbled into Laura’s hair.
“What’s that, Sarge?”
“Nothing, just keep going down the road.”
“Wish we could see you. This is barely a road, and the storm’s getting worse. Visibility dropping fast. Near zero.”
“I’d love to set the cabin on fire for you, but it’s a murder scene,” he responded, noting that the snow was now beginning to cover up the dead body of Christopher Dorr. He had nothing with which he could block the doorway except the tarp covering Laura’s furniture in the truck thankfully left behind, but it would have taken him longer to undo all the bungee cords than it would take his team to get here.
“You won’t be able to get all the vehicles in here, so just let the EMTs in and the rest of you park behind them on the road.”
He snuggled closer to her, reached his arms around her inside the parka and rubbed her back.
She held on tight, shaking with cold.
“Mmm. Shouldn’t we be jumping around or s-s-something?”
“Nope. That speeds up hypothermia. New research.”
“Okay, th-then just keep holding m-me.”
“My pleasure,” he said then spoke into the phone. “Go slowly or you’ll miss the turnoff. It’s really overgrown and everything’s covered in snow. Keep your sirens on. I can hear you getting closer.”
“Can’t do anything except slow, Sarge. We’re in a caravan and it’s snowing pretty hard.”
When the police and emergency vehicles finally found them and pulled to a st
op behind Ian’s pickup truck, the snowfall had grown heavier and windier, making it a fight to get through to reach the pair stuck in the cabin. EMTs helped Laura over the snow-covered body in the doorway. At the ambulance, she took off Connor’s parka and gave it back to him, and then they closed the ambulance door partly so they could get heated blankets wrapped around her.
Laura shivered and drank the warming liquids the EMT gave her. Through the crack in the ambulance door, she watched the police team doing their thing, erecting a partial tent over the body and examining it as best they could, the cabin, the road where tire tracks had surely been but were now covered with new snow. Connor was giving them a description of the getaway vehicle, a dark gray older model Accord. She tried to make out what they were saying as the EMT tried to get her to sit still, wrapped in the blankets.
“Got only part of the plate—” Fitzpatrick said.
“Tango-T-Tango-B-Bravo-Three-Z-Zero-Z-Z-Zero!” Laura shouted from the ambulance.
Connor and two officers turned toward the cracked door, then the two officers looked at him.
“Yes, go with it,” he said then poked his head into the end of the vehicle.
“You stay in here and get warmed up. We’ll take your statement later. They have all they need to go after her.”
“My furniture—”
“It’s here in Ian’s truck and still covered. One of my men just found the keys the woman left and somebody will drive it back to your shop. We’ll get Harry to let us in. Don’t worry. She also left my gun and phone on the front seat. Be quiet, sit still and get warm.”
“F-furniture,” she repeated, getting his attention. “It doesn’t matter.”
The cars behind the ambulance backed out onto the road and pulled beyond the turnoff so the ambulance could back up and do a tricky three-point turn to go back towards the highway. Then the police, M.E. and forensics unit returned to finish their tasks.
“Well, it’s about time you showed up. I hear you had quite an adventure, tied up in a cabin in a snowstorm. How did you get out?”
They were treating her at the hospital, and her old friend Father Eddie Barlow had shown up to make sure she was okay. It was likely, she figured, that nobody in town hadn’t heard some version or other of the mishap with her and Connor and the two murderers.
“A long and very boring story,” she mumbled while they hooked her up to more medicinal fluids to help her body warm up slowly to where it should be and some other things they didn’t explain to her. Lots more blood was taken for more tests, as well.
“Well, let’s say a prayer together anyway, in thanks for your escape and safe return.”
After their prayer, Barlow took it up again.
“You never called me up to talk about old times,” he chided her gently.
“I’ve been busy.”
“Rounding up criminals, I hear. Solving robberies and murders. Shooting up robbers. We should talk.”
“You realize, Eddie, that I don’t look for them. They find me.”
He cocked his head.
“Your father used to say that, too, as I recall. Maybe you should be a police officer. That skill could come in handy.”
“No, thanks. I’m just trying to live my life. I can’t help it if I stumble into mysteries. I don’t do it on purpose.”
“Well, looks like your physician would like to speak with you, Laura. So I’ll leave you now, and I’ll keep you in my prayers.”
She thanked him and looked up to see the somber look on the doctor’s face. When he was done explaining that the poison which was soaked into two of the quilt squares was a deadly form of arsenic that was absorbed easily through the skin, she began to realize how lucky she was that the cat kept hissing her away from it. She’d have to get the cat a treat. Oh wait—it didn’t eat.
But the doctor was still talking, and Connor and one of his officers came into the room and were listening, as well.
“If this is the quilt Christopher Dorr gave to his wife, this is what killed her. I don’t care what her personal physician says about her condition. The Medical Examiner said nothing was suspected because of her long-standing condition and no extraordinary toxicology tests were run when she died. We can get a court order to exhume his wife’s body based on the quilt alone,” the doctor continued. Then he turned to Fitzpatrick. “Sergeant, I’ll sign whatever you need to move this forward. Dorr can be convicted posthumously and this makes two counts of murder on the woman who’s still at large.”
Laura noticed a crowd forming and a tall, lab-coated man wearing glasses nearby with a much shorter assistant next to him.
“I’m glad we went forward with the tox workups. The symptoms were just too…unexpected and inconclusive…in a typical blood and urine workup. When we expanded in the direction I thought was indicated, that’s when we were able to narrow down the specific toxin.” He pushed his glasses back up on the bridge of his nose as his phlebotomist nodded enthusiastically as if it had been her idea all along.
“It was a substance known as trivalent arsenic or arsenic trioxide, and in a powder form such as we discovered in the quilt that was brought in—and mind you, it can’t easily be washed away—would have been administered to whoever was touching it through a process called ‘dermal absorption.’ It would have been dissolved in water to soak it into the quilt and the water would have later evaporated, leaving the powder behind. It is highly toxic and very deadly. Ms. Keene is extraordinarily lucky she is still here to tell the tale.”
The doctor picked up the story.
“Administered the way it was, and with other flu-like symptoms the victim evidently had, it was never suspected that she had been poisoned. The murderer was very clever not to give too much at a time, probably put the quilt on her and then put it away where it couldn’t be seen, then brought it back for a spell. I understand her symptoms came in waves which would be consistent with that. It would have been very difficult for any physician to make an accurate diagnosis based on that, which explains why the host of physicians who looked at her failed to so do.”
Her head whirling, she heard Officer Sam Larsen telling her that Dorr and Lenz would have had to wear heavy rubber gloves to handle it in order not to absorb the poison themselves in the process, and the theory is that’s why the re-stitching was so badly done. They could have flipped over the quilt so the wife wouldn’t notice it, then as she grew sicker, they would hide the quilt away when medical staff came to see her. When the police tested the teal-colored quilt in the lab based on Connor’s instructions, they found the same substance that showed up in Laura’s lab tests.
“You’re really lucky, Laura,” Sam told her. “It was a deadly poison. It’s a good thing you didn’t handle it any more than you did. I recommend you get someone to come into your shop and check everything out, get it scrubbed wherever the quilt was and whatever it was up against or anything it may have touched. I’m sure we can get you the name of a company that cleans up toxic substances.”
She thought about the other quilts, the hangers, the work table, and everything else in the store that she might have touched after that quilt, but it was too much to think about right now. She was grateful she hadn’t actually brought the quilt to the crafting club meeting and only showed them pictures from her phone. Who knows how many more people would have gotten poisoned?
Connor stopped by her bed, checked out the IV in her arm and the multiple bags hooked up to it, then squeezed her hand but said nothing. His cop face was on, and she knew he was trying to wrap this whole thing up tightly. He rejoined the other officers, and she thought she saw his father, Deputy Chief Michael Fitzpatrick, in the crowd. She closed her eyes.
After the police had gotten Laura’s statement of events, and the medical personnel were comfortable she was no longer hypothermic and out of danger from the arsenic, it was time for her to be discharged from the ER. It was dark
outside and the clock on the wall told her it was around three in the morning. She saw Harry Kovacs waiting for her in the hospital lobby before she could call a cab. He offered her a ride home in his 4-wheel drive SUV, just about the only vehicle that could make it through a storm like this.
“How long were you waiting for me?”
“Not too long,” Harry said.
The rest of the ride was very slow and quiet until they got to the store. Harry pulled up to the back door. She could barely see through the blizzard-like storm, piling up tons of snow each hour.
“You didn’t ask about your furniture,” he pointed out.
“I have other things on my mind. The furniture doesn’t seem so important.”
“Well, others considered it was. It’s in your work room, and it’s not damaged from the snow. A crew came in specially while you were in the hospital this evening to scrub down your shop. They checked your apartment, too. No traces upstairs. Sam Larsen arranged it. Everything’s clean.”
“I’ll have to thank whoever brought the furniture, Harry. And Sammy for getting the place cleaned up. And I’m grateful for the ride,” she said but didn’t open the car door.
“You are going to be all right, Laura. You’re very strong. I know you’ve been through a lot over the past few days, but you’ll make it. And Beth and I are here if you need anything. She left a pot of soup in your upstairs fridge.”
She nodded and finally trudged her way through the deepening snow, past her car and into the back of the shop. When she saw the furniture, dry and perfect, she knew Connor had done that. Or asked someone else to do it. Probably his old friends, Nicky and Max. But she knew he was behind it. And he was the reason she was so upset.
Upstairs, Laura noticed that Isabella had curled up in her dad’s old chair and was purring once again.
forty-three
When Laura got the text message from Connor that he was at her back door with her written statement for her signature and could she let him in, she hesitated. It was only the next day, but it seemed like so much time had passed. As she passed through the back room, she glanced at the work table and noticed the teal quilt was gone.
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