Hemlock

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “I’ve heard it mentioned,” I said.

  In fact, as I sat here and listened, I could easily imagine it to be true. Jenna had said that Claudia’s mother had been a housemaid, and it wasn’t unheard of for a man to impose droit du seigneur on the women who worked for him. Sunny and Claudia might have a passel of siblings scattered across the mountain. And Jenna had mentioned an annuity. Had Carswell money paid for Claudia’s aviaries?

  But Claudia wasn’t finished. “Guns reminded Sunny of all the bad things our family has done over the decades, selling arms and munitions, making money off of wars. She stayed as far away from the business as she could. She hated guns.”

  I frowned. This was news. I had thought that the gun—the same gun that killed her father and grandfather—might have been her first choice. A kind of ritual hara-kiri.

  “Are you saying she didn’t kill herself?”

  Claudia shifted uncomfortably. “Sunny believed that everybody has the right to die when and how they choose. But when I heard she’d used a gun—and that gun, to boot—you could have knocked me over with a feather.” She put up her hand and stroked Pipsqueak, on her shoulder. “Somebody must have talked her into doing it that way. I’ve even wondered if maybe somebody picked up that gun and shot her. Not sayin’ who,” she added hastily, “and not sayin’ for sure. Just sayin’.”

  The death had been ruled a suicide. But according to the sheriff, the coroner had had questions. “Who might have suggested it?” I asked.

  Claudia laughed harshly. “Well, it wasn’t the Hemlock ghost, that’s for damned sure. Amelia told Sunny it was the quickest way. Told her it would make a statement. A statement! I ask you!” She shook her head disgustedly. “But that wasn’t all. There’s what Jed did about the books, too—especially after he found out that Sunny had cancer.”

  I wanted to ask Claudia how she knew all this. And about Amelia—Amelia Scott, I assumed—and the gun, too. But Claudia was pushing the conversation forward, too fast for me to keep up. I tried to slow her.

  “Wait,” I said. “The books? You mean, Sunny’s books? What did he do about—”

  “Hell, yes. Sunny’s books. Who else did Jed know who owned thousands of pricy books and never read any of them? He kept telling her that she should sell the whole lot before she died. He said he just wanted the books to be safe and cared for after she was gone and the idea of the foundation wasn’t going to work.” She narrowed her eyes. “But what he really wanted was to get the commission on the sales, especially the best ones. And maybe more. Maybe a lot more.”

  “A lot more?” I was fishing. “A lot more . . . what?”

  She didn’t answer directly. “The thing is, Sunny wasn’t worldly, not in the least bit. She had a lot of money and she didn’t bother to keep track of it. What’s more, she liked Jed so much that she couldn’t see what he was doing.”

  The words were coming fast and the bitter jealousy in them was unmistakable.

  “Jed’s bookstore was about to go under, and Sunny was keeping it afloat. He got her to buy good stuff she didn’t want and bad stuff that nobody wanted and took every penny of commissions he could. Then he’d get her to sell and take a commission on that end, too—pumping up the value as high as he could. Bless her heart, Sunny never asked a single question. She just told her accountant to pay whatever he asked. She was a cash cow. He just kept milking her.”

  Ah. This was beginning to make sense—a different kind of sense. “So you think Conway might have—” I didn’t get to finish.

  “When I tried to tell her that Jed was pulling the wool over her eyes, he turned her against me.” Claudia’s voice broke. “That hurt, believe you me. She didn’t want to see me—her own sister. Told me I wasn’t welcome, when I was the only one who had her interests at heart.”

  He turned her against me. So Claudia had a personal reason—and a strong one, a realistic one—for disliking Jed. I was hearing some potentially useful information that nobody else had given me, from somebody who seemed close enough to the situation to know what she was talking about.

  I leaned forward on my elbows. “How long had this been going on? Conway pumping up items from Miss Carswell’s collection so he could dump them.”

  Pumping and dumping is the term that’s used in securities fraud cases. It describes what happens when a fraudster buys a cheap stock, mounts a big PR campaign to inflate the value, then sells it at a higher price. Something like that also goes on in the art market. I had read recently about a well-known European art dealer who was charged with arranging for fraudulently high evaluations from a prominent auction house on several collectible paintings so he could charge a higher commission. I could see how this strategy might work for a collection of rare books—with or without the collusion of the books’ owner. And primarily for the benefit of the dealer, who might also be the owner of Socrates.com.

  “How long did it go on? Years and years.” Pipsqueak was nibbling at Claudia’s braids and she flipped them both over her shoulder. “But the worst of it was the way he badgered her about the Herbal.”

  My pulse quickened. We were getting at what I most wanted to know. “Badgered? Badgered her how? Why?”

  Claudia’s expression was fierce. “He just kept after her about selling it. He’d say he had a buyer, or that there was a really great auction coming up, and now was the time. He kept telling her how much it was worth—six or seven times what she’d paid for it—and that it would be a shame to leave it at Hemlock House with nobody but Margaret Anderson to take care of it after she was dead.” Her laugh was gritty. “Sunny liked Margaret because Margaret likes books. But Margaret only likes to write about books. She doesn’t know the first thing about taking care of them. Cataloging and conserving and stuff like that.” Claudia snorted. “She’s like Jed that way. Both of them care more about how much they’re worth than anything else.”

  How much they’re worth. Dorothea had estimated that the plates in the Herbal could be worth two hundred thousand—and there were plates missing from other valuable books as well. Margaret Anderson had worked at Hemlock House for several months after Sunny died. She obviously had ample opportunity to take whatever she wanted, whole books as well as individual prints. And if she had joined forces with book dealer Jed Conway, deciding what was worth stealing and how to dispose of it could be a piece of cake.

  I cleared my throat. “A minute ago, you mentioned the ghost. There really is one, then?”

  “You bet your sweet boobs there’s a ghost,” she snapped. “More than one.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  She nodded. “Could be our dad, our grandfather, maybe both.” Pipsqueak was after her braid again and she pulled it away from him. “Dorothea doesn’t believe, but Jenna does.” She gave me a knowing look. “Just you wait, you’ll see it too. Sunny always said it appeared on stormy nights. Said that anybody could hear it but you had to be a believer to see it.”

  “I suppose that’s why Jenna sees it,” I ventured. “She believes.”

  “Sunny, too.” Claudia grinned and her eyes glinted behind her red-rimmed glasses. “The difference is that Jenna is scared of it. Sunny actually liked it, because it seemed like a member of the family. If people came around bothering her, she made sure they knew all about it. Told them to be on the lookout for it. Made it sound really scary. She said it was a sure-fire way to keep them from coming back.”

  I had more questions, but Claudia was dealing with the parrot. Denied access to her braids, Pipsqueak jumped off her shoulder to the table and strutted toward me, clicking his beak and goose-stepping with the comic precision of a Prussian soldier. When he reached me, he stopped, put his head on one side, and studied me curiously, as if he were deciding whether I was worth knowing. Then he fluttered up onto my left shoulder and nibbled my ear.

  “Nice,” he said softly, and cooed.

  “Pipsqueak is usually st
andoffish with strangers,” Claudia said. “He must like you.”

  I held out my finger and after a moment Pipsqueak jumped off my shoulder and onto my hand. Murmuring that he was a lovely boy, I scratched his neck. He ducked under my fingers, letting me scratch his head, too. After a few moments he gave another soft coo, turned and sidled up my arm to sit on my right shoulder and nibble that ear. I turned to face him, making kissing noises. A little parrot lovefest.

  After a moment, I turned back to Claudia and asked, “Do you think Jed Conway might have stolen the Herbal?” I wanted to surprise her with the question, with no lead-in. “If he did, could his shooting have been somehow involved with the theft?”

  On the back of his chair, Tick-Tock clicked his beak, squawked, and then lifted one foot and began nibbling his toes. From one of the rooms came the tinny clang-clang of a bell being rung by a parrot. Pushing her lips in and out, Claudia eyed me. Perhaps she was actually filtering her answer, I thought. Perhaps she was better at that than she was given credit for.

  “Well, maybe,” she said warily, after a moment. “Maybe somebody helped him steal it. Margaret, maybe. And then the two of them got into a disagreement about something.” She sounded tentative, as if she was trying out possibilities. “Or maybe somebody thought Jed must have the Herbal and they wanted it. But he couldn’t give it to them so they shot him.”

  I was startled by her mention of Margaret. It was as if she had plugged into my thinking. “What makes you say that Margaret might have helped him?” I asked. But she disregarded my question.

  “Or maybe it was Kevin Maxwell who shot him,” Claudia said. “In fact, that seems a lot more likely to me.”

  “Kevin Maxwell?” Who was this? Somebody new? Oh, wait. I had heard the name before. He was the guy Carole Humphreys mentioned in the context of “those Hemlock people,” which—at the time—I had found puzzling.

  “Kevin Maxwell is Wanda Sanger’s older brother,” Claudia said. “Wanda had ALS for years. She was toughing it out—until the Hemlocks told her it was okay to decide that she’d had enough. Nobody’s going to say this out loud, but she was encouraged. It was Jed who coached her, same way Amelia coached Sunny.”

  Of course nobody would name a suicide coach out loud. Assisting suicide is a crime—manslaughter, at least—in all but seven states. You can’t provide the drugs or tools, or advise or persuade somebody to commit suicide. And even where assistance is legal, it’s restricted to physicians.

  “When did this happen?” I asked.

  “Oh, maybe three, four weeks ago.” Claudia pushed her red cat-eye glasses up on her nose. “Kevin says Jed should be in jail and has been making a lot of noise about it, but Jeremy Curtis—he’s the police chief in Bethany—says there’s not enough evidence. What’s more, Wanda left a tidy pot of money to those Hemlock people, which rubs Kevin the wrong way.” She shook her head. “Can’t say I blame him, either.”

  Those Hemlock people. When I first heard the phrase, I had thought Carole Humphreys was referring to Dorothea and Jenna at Hemlock House, and I dismissed what sounded like an unfounded accusation. But Carole hadn’t meant the Hemlock House. She’d meant the Hemlock Guild. I had been mistaken.

  Now I wondered about Jed’s whisper. Had I been mistaken there, too? I’d thought he had said Blackwell. But what if he had said Maxwell instead? Was he accusing Kevin Maxwell, whose sister he might have helped to kill herself? I didn’t think so, but I couldn’t rule it out.

  And now that I knew about this possibility, I also knew I had to tell Chief Curtis what I’d heard. Which would not be a pleasant task. I had withheld potentially important crime-scene evidence. The chief would be justifiably angry. He might even decide to charge me. I couldn’t blame him. And I had no defense.

  But at the moment, I needed to figure out just where Claudia was coming from. How much of her evident animosity toward Jed Conway and Amelia Scott was based in fact and how much was conjured up out of a grudge against the Hemlock Guild—or even more personally, out of jealousy toward Conway for getting between her and Sunny? Was she just guessing? How much did she actually know? How much was true?

  There were several ways to go about this, but I elected a straightforward question. “A minute ago, you said something about the gun that Sunny used. You seemed to suggest that Amelia prodded Sunny into using that gun to kill herself. Did I hear that right? Is that what you meant to say?”

  “Well . . .” She hesitated, frowning. “Jed had a hand in it, too. After all, he wanted that Herbal. His store was in trouble, you know, and he had to have money.”

  “His store was in trouble? The place looked pretty well stocked to me.” But appearances can be deceiving. Things can look totally shipshape, and suddenly the ship starts to sink. “How do you know?”

  “His sister Kaye fosters parrots for me. She told me about it. That place bleeds money and Jed’s in hock up to his ears. If he took the Herbal, he did it for the money. And because Sunny wouldn’t let him sell it.” She wore a cagey look. “But Amelia’s a totally different story. For her, Sunny was a trophy.”

  “Trophy?” I frowned. “Is that why you said the gun was a ‘statement’?”

  “Yeah. You know, here was somebody who actually did it. That bunch down in Bethany talks a good game. But Sunny was the first—and she was somebody important. There was that damned gun.” Her grin was mirthless. “Of course, now the Hemlocks can claim Wanda as well, which is why Kevin Maxwell is out for blood.” Her eyes glinted behind her red cat-eye glasses. “Sounds like he might’ve got it, too. I—”

  But I didn’t get to hear the rest of it. Tick-Tock chose that inconvenient moment to lift off his chair-back perch and fly to the kitchen counter. He landed next to an unstable stack of bowls, knocking three or four to the floor with a loud crash. He peered over the edge of the counter.

  “Offsides!” he squawked cheerfully. “Penalty!”

  “Damn it, Tick-Tock! Just look at that mess.” Claudia went to get the broom.

  Clearly, we had arrived at the end of the conversation. I lifted Pipsqueak onto the back of my chair, told him he was a good boy, thanked Claudia for sharing her parrots with me, and promised to keep in touch. On the way out, I remembered about the ginseng and asked, off-handedly, where I should look for it.

  “Wild ginseng?” She snorted. “Come back in about six weeks. Maybe it’ll be putting up leaves by then—berries in July and August.” Another snort. “But don’t bother to bring a shovel, unless you want to get arrested. Not legal to dig it until September.”

  “Oh,” I said. Embarrassed, I thanked her again and headed for my car. Claudia Roth was definitely unfiltered. She hadn’t given the answers I’d expected and surely some of what she said was not factual—or at least unsupported. But she had given me a different, and very interesting, view of Sunny Carswell and her relationships with Jed and the Hemlock people.

  And now I knew a little more about ginseng.

  Chapter Ten

  In many cultures, herbal baths are an important ritual. The bathers believe that when certain herbs are added to the bath water, they release not only their scent but their special energies. A bath using the protective herb rosemary, for instance, was thought to make the bather safe from the forces of negativity and evil. Bay, basil, and fennel are other protective herbs.

  To recreate this ritual for yourself, put a cup and a half of crushed rosemary leaves and one-half cup each of crushed bay leaves, basil, and fennel into a quart jar. Pour boiling water over the herbs and let them steep. Strain into a warm bath. An alternative, using essential oils: blend six drops rosemary oil with two drops each of bay, basil, and fennel oils. Mix with one tablespoon of carrier oil, such as grapeseed, jojoba, or almond. Add the oil blend to the bathwater just before you climb in, so you can enjoy the scent before the essential oils evaporate. Rub the droplets of oil onto your skin as you relax in the bath.

 
“Personal Herbal Rituals”

  https://susanalbert.com/personal-herbal-rituals/

  I got back to Hemlock House in time for a civilized sherry before dinner, which gave me an opportunity to tell Dorothea and Jenna what had happened at the Open Book that afternoon. As I did, I watched Dorothea closely to see how she reacted to the news about the shooting.

  “Oh, no!” Jenna exclaimed. “Oh, God, China, that’s awful!”

  Dorothea was silent for a long moment, looking stunned. “Who would do a thing like that?” she whispered finally.

  I relaxed a little when I learned that Rose had gone to Bethany with Dorothea that morning, and that the two of them had been together at the grocery. I even felt a little silly for suspecting that Dorothea might have shot Jed Conway.

  But neither she nor Jenna could come up with a possible assailant and they looked at me blankly when I mentioned Claudia Roth’s candidate—Kevin Maxwell.

  “Kevin Maxwell?” Dorothea was puzzled. “I don’t think I know him. Do you, Jenna?”

  Jenna shook her head. “But that’s no surprise, really. We haven’t spent much time in Bethany.”

  I didn’t share the rest of Claudia’s unfiltered confidences with them, and when they asked whether I had made any progress in the search for the stolen Herbal, I put them off with a shrug and an apologetic “To be honest, not much.”

  Which was, if anything, an overstatement. I had made no progress at all. If Jed was our thief and if he died, we might never know what had become of the Herbal. And I certainly didn’t want to tell them that as far as Sheriff Rogers was concerned, they were both still under suspicion. And while Dorothea was off the hook for Jed Conway’s shooting, I understood where the sheriff was coming from. I had thought I knew her, but I had to admit I didn’t know her all that well. The theft of the Herbal certainly looked, as the sheriff had said, like an inside job, and Dorothea and Jenna were the two most logical insiders.