by Annie Knox
I dashed down the stairs to find Rena, Ingrid, and Aunt Dolly each holding a spoon, a quart of ice cream between them on the shiny red table.
“Great dinner,” I chided.
“Hey, you get to eat at one of the nicest restaurants in outstate Minnesota tonight,” Rena said. “I think we’re entitled to a little mocha almond fudge.”
Ingrid, her long white hair woven into girlish pigtails, her rhinestone glasses glittering in the light—and all of it incongruous with her Carhartt overalls and fisherman’s sweater—waved her spoon in my direction. “Don’t know about these gals, but I’m old. I can eat whatever I want whenever I want it. I guarantee, fifty years from now, you’ll feel exactly the same way.
“I’d give up this ice cream in a heartbeat if I could have dinner at the Mission,” Dolly said. While Ingrid was tall and raw-boned, Dolly was a tiny, girly little thing. That night, she had a wide pink satin ribbon wrapped around her head and tied in a perfect bow. The ribbon perfectly matched the flowers on her velour tracksuit . . . though I think when the target market is a woman of Dolly’s age, they stop calling them “tracksuits” and start calling them “cruise wear.”
While she looked like some weird hybrid of little old lady and tween girl, Dolly had developed sophisticated tastes during the years she was married to my uncle Ned. She was the closest thing our family had to a genuine foodie, and she frequently waxed poetic about the culinary delights of various restaurants in the area. “It’s a pity you can’t indulge in the grass-fed beef medallions in red wine reduction, but the winter vegetable pot pie is wonderful, too.” She sighed. “And you get to go with a handsome man on your arm. Are you sure we can’t trade places for tonight?”
“No way. After the day I’ve had, I deserve a night on the town, even if it’s all in the name of investigating Sherry’s death.”
Rena waggled her spoon. “I was just filling Dolly and Ingrid in on Richard’s latest threats and the plight of the purloined pig.”
“I like the alliteration, but Gandhi wasn’t purloined. Just lost and resisting being found. And it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as Richard is concerned. I’m terrified he’ll make good on his threats and get us shut down before we even have a chance.”
Dolly waved her hand dismissively. “Let me handle that old coot,” she said. “I know Richard Greene from way back when. He’s always been a stick in the mud. But he had a crush on me once upon a time, and this old girl’s still got a little pepper in her shaker.”
Ingrid and Rena both burst out laughing.
“Dolly, I’ve lived next to Richard Greene for nearly thirty years. It’s going to take more than a little pepper to get through to him.”
“Trust me, Ingrid, you haven’t seen me in action in a while. I’ve got some moves.”
“Aunt Dolly, you will not use your feminine wiles on that old man.”
“Be careful who you’re calling ‘old,’ missy. And why shouldn’t I use my best assets to help you out? I’d be protecting my own investment, after all. You just leave this to me. Now go have a wonderful time and find a killer.”
• • •
Sean drove, giving me a chance to study him on the sly. He’d grown up well. He’d put on just enough muscle through his chest and shoulders to save his lean frame from awkwardness. His jaw had hardened since high school, and his green eyes were bracketed by fine lines, but his broad, mobile mouth and unruly curls—the color of dark chocolate—lent him a boyish quality.
I finally decided to tackle the elephant in the Honda: that long ago spring night, when Sean and I parted ways.
I cleared my throat. “It’s been good to see you again.” I reached back and twisted a curl of my hair around my index finger. “You know, after all this time.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Sean clench the wheel tighter.
After a few seconds, he responded. “Yes.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant, so I waited for him to continue.
“I’m sorry for that night. Sorry for what it did to our friendship.”
Impulsively, I reached over to lay my hand on his, just briefly. “And I’m sorry for how that evening played out.”
He let forth a short bark of laughter. “I’m not. God, I was so young and stupid. What if you’d decided to dump Casey for me? Where would that have gotten us?”
I swallowed the pain of his words, struggled to keep the hurt and bitterness out of my own. “Ah. So you didn’t love me after all.”
His mouth curled into that sleepy smile I knew so well. “I didn’t say that, Izzy.”
“Oh.”
“I meant exactly what I said. What would we have done? You were already packing for Madison, I was on my way to New Orleans, and we were both eighteen. I think you’ll agree with me when I say that we didn’t have a realistic view of what the future would hold when we were eighteen.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. I was the poster child for unrealistic expectations.
“No matter how I felt at the time, I acted rashly. And I’m glad you didn’t listen to me then.”
“Well. Good.”
I struggled with his response. On the one hand, we’d cleared the air. On the other hand, he’d basically said he dodged a bullet. And the bullet was me.
It was a lot for a girl to take in.
After that, we rode in relative silence, broken only by his offer to turn on the radio and my own occasional sneezing fit. The cold I’d been fighting off for days was gaining traction.
As we turned off Thornapple Avenue onto Route 34, I saw the sign for the Sprigs organic market. On a whim, I asked Sean to pull in.
I occasionally shopped at Sprigs, splurging on exotic fruits or high-end pasta sauce, but I usually stuck with the regular grocery store for my food and I’d never ventured into the corner of Sprigs that housed homeopathic remedies, herbs, and organic skin care products.
I was perusing the shelves while Sean stood back, tapping his foot impatiently.
“Ginseng? Really?”
“Sherry swore this stuff would keep my cold away.”
“And it makes perfect sense to take medical advice from Sherry Harper. I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but the woman was a raisin or two shy of a fruitcake.”
I turned to look him in the eye. “‘Don’t mean to speak ill of the dead’? That was absolutely speaking ill of the dead.”
Sean shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at the floor, the toe of one shoe sketching little arcs across the laminate flooring.
“All I meant was that she wasn’t exactly a doctor.”
I gave him a playful shove. “I’m just teasing. Look, it can’t hurt, right? And I really can’t afford to be knocked out with a cold right now.”
“Fair enough. But let’s hurry.”
“Can I help you?”
I looked up to find a young man in jeans and a green Sprigs apron. His dark brown hair brushed his collar, and rectangular tortoiseshell glasses rested on a long, narrow nose.
“I’m looking for dried ginseng. Someone told me it would keep a cold from setting in.”
“Your friend is right. And the ginseng is over here by the echinacea and zinc and grapefruit seed extract . . . all of those things would help you out with your cold.”
I followed him to the rack he pointed out.
“Here,” I said, grabbing a cellophane packet with a yellow paper label. It was filled with bits of fibrous grayish brown plant matter. “I think this is the type Sherry used.”
“Sherry?” the man asked. “Sherry Harper?”
“Yeah, you know her?”
“Of course. Sherry came in all the time. She had really bad seasonal allergies.” He shook his head. “But that’s not the ginseng she used. That brand is imported, and Sherry only used locally grown ginseng. Most U.S. ginseng is grown there in Wisconsin, you know. No sense using an import.”
“I did not know that,” I replied. “But are you sure Sherry didn’t buy thi
s? Maybe if you were out of her brand?”
“No way. She would have bought the tea or one of these herbal blends before she bought an import.”
Come to think of it, when Sherry offered me the ginseng that day in Trendy Tails, the package had been red. But the bit of label I found in Gandhi’s sling was yellow, like the package on the shelf.
Huh.
I studied the nubbins of dried root in the cellophane packet.
“Sean?”
“Yes, Izzy?” he intoned with mock formality as he sidled up to me.
“Look at this stuff.” I shook the bag in front of his face.
“It looks vile.”
“Mmm. Yes,” I agreed. “But what about this? Sherry was poisoned with dried water hemlock root. How different could that look from this stuff?”
“Good question.” Sean pulled out his smartphone and fired it up. “This,” he said, holding the phone out to me, “is ginseng root. And”—he took the phone back, manipulated the screen, studied it a moment, and passed it back—“is water hemlock root.”
“They look very similar to me,” I said.
“Me, too. At least on this tiny screen. I’ll double-check tonight. The police aren’t the only ones with a pipeline to the U of M Extension. I’ve got a friend there, and I’ll send him these pictures, see what he has to say.”
“Let’s assume they’re pretty similar. So we know that Sherry was fighting a cold the day before she died, and she was out of her favorite ginseng because she gave the last of it to me. She’d said that Sprigs was out of her brand. That kid,” I pointed to the young man who had helped me, who was now straightening a row of jars on a nearby shelf, “said Sherry would never buy the ginseng with the yellow wrapper, but I found a bit of that yellow wrapper in Gandhi’s sling.”
“I see where you’re heading,” Sean said with a nod.
“Exactly. We’ve all been assuming that the hemlock was mixed into Sherry’s food somehow. But what if she ate it by itself, thinking it was ginseng? What if someone gave her a package of poison and she ate it without a care in the world?”
“But didn’t the guy say that Sherry would never use the imported stuff?”
“Yeah, she never would have bought it. But if someone offered it to her—”
“—she might have taken it. But that means someone could have given her that package of fake ginseng anytime between when you saw her in Trendy Tails the day before the grand opening and when she died,” Sean said. “We’re going to have to track her movements for that entire time.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t think so. I think her killer was in the alley that night.”
“Why?”
“Because of what was missing. I found that corner of a wrapper in Gandhi’s sling—little guy must have grabbed hold of it—but the rest of the package was gone. And the cell phone, too. Someone took the evidence of the crime from the scene.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “There’s no question in my mind. Sherry’s killer was standing right next to her as she died.”
CHAPTER
Fifteen
The Mission nestled in a grove of quaking aspens, its low-slung architecture harkening to the movement that inspired its name.
Inside, stark white walls and plain oak plank tables lined up in neat rows lent the space an almost monastic feel that was broken only by a handful of canvases by local artists.
“I brought the picture of Sherry,” Sean announced as soon as we were seated. He slid the photo over to me.
He’d borrowed the snapshot from Carla, and it showed Sherry at a Harper family gathering. She wore a jumper of patchwork calico over a white turtleneck and her hair was in long braids. She stood in a cluster of preppy Harper kin. While everyone else in the picture posed with ramrod stiffness, Sherry looked to be in motion, slightly blurred at the edges as though someone had taken an eraser to her and smudged her ever so slightly. Her brow was furrowed, as though she were annoyed about something, and her mouth was open, caught in midword.
“It’s not a great shot,” Sean said.
“I think it captures Sherry perfectly.”
He smiled. “I guess it does, but it’s a little hard to make out her features. Still, it was the best I could do. She never sat still for the camera.”
“It should do the trick.”
We decided to dine first, and then hit up the waitstaff for information after the evening rush subsided.
Dolly was half right about my evening. The winter vegetable pot pie was delicious—tender pastry covering a filling of parsnips, potatoes, onions, and mushrooms in a rich mushroom-and-red-wine gravy seasoned with thyme and a hint of rosemary—and Sean raved about his beef medallions.
But Dolly got the whole “on the arm of a handsome man” bit dead wrong. Don’t get me wrong. Sean looked especially handsome that night, even if one sable curl kept falling in his eyes. And he smelled even better than the scrumptious dinner: of soap and juniper and crisp wintery mint. Still, I was not exactly on his arm. Rather, we mostly sat across from each other eating, our silence broken only by occasional bits of awkward small talk. The conversation in the car cast a pall over the whole dinner.
Finally, over two slices of apple tarte tatin a la mode, Sean broke the silence and, intentionally or not, went for the jugular.
“Have you heard from Casey?” he asked, just as I took a bite of caramelized apple and melting ice cream.
I took my time chewing and swallowing my dessert while I tried to get past my panic of talking about Casey with Sean. “Uh, yeah, a few times. We had years of life together to untangle. A joint credit card, bills. That sort of thing.”
“So all business.”
I chuckled. “Not entirely. In the first months after he left, there was a heated discussion about what would happen with the animals. We’d always thought of Jinx as my cat and Packer as Casey’s dog, but he didn’t take Packer when he left. I confess I was pretty brutal in my condemnation of that fact, calling him heartless and a deadbeat. But then he said ‘fine, send Packer to me,’ and I backpedaled big-time and said it was too late, Packer was staying with me.”
“Ouch. I’ve handled a few divorces, and I swear couples fight more over custody of the family dog than they do over custody of the children.”
“With kids, you can get visitation, but with a pet? Custody is the end. Thing was, he was right. Casey picked out Packer, named him—because you know I wouldn’t have named him after that Wisconsin team, and when he got home at night, Casey was happier to see Packer than he was to see me.”
“That might have been a hint of what was to come.”
I chuckled, grateful that I’d reached a place where I could chuckle about those dark days. “Probably. In any event, I suppose I should have given him the dog. But I was hurt. I’d literally come home one day to find half the apartment cleaned out. I wasn’t really mad that he’d abandoned Packer—after all, I didn’t want to give up the little guy—but I was mad that he’d abandoned me, and it was just easier to talk about the dog.” I shrugged. “After a few months, though, the sting wore off. I guess I could see why Casey had left.”
“And why is that?”
“We lived totally different lives. You know we had this plan . . .”
“A plan?”
I waved my fork. “Yeah, a plan. We would go to college together, ride out Casey’s residency at home, and then move to New York for our big, exciting lives. But by the time Casey left, all we had was the plan. You know?”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Well, I was just waiting for New York, I wasn’t doing anything with the life I was living right then. I was so focused on the future that I wasn’t appreciating the now. I never even stopped to think about whether we were still happy; I just kept thinking about how great it would be when the plan finally came to fruition.”
“And when you did stop to think about whether you were still happy, what was the answer?”
“Clearly Casey wasn’t hap
py, or he wouldn’t have taken up with that skinny little diet girl. But, really, I don’t think I was happy, either. Every move I’d made, I’d made for Casey, and that was starting to rub me the wrong way.”
“So you were tired of being a sidekick?”
“Ah. I was waiting for your ‘I told you so’ moment, and I guess this is it.”
He raised his water glass in a silent toast, his lopsided smile taking the burn out of the gesture.
I took another bite of my tarte. It was really too good for me to let it go to waste.
We’d dissected my failed love life, and I decided it was my turn to put him under a microscope.
“What about you and Carla? Things serious?”
He shrugged. “We’ve only been dating a while.”
“A year,” I blurted, both setting the record straight and tipping my hand that I’d been asking about him.
He raised an eyebrow at my quick correction. “I mean, that’s what my mom said,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “When Rena asked.” I was trying to make myself seem uninterested and failing miserably.
A bemused smile twisted the corners of his mouth. “I guess maybe it has been a year. We’re the only two lawyers in town under the age of sixty, so it was inevitable we’d be thrown together at bar functions and the like. I couldn’t even pinpoint when ‘dinner with a colleague’ turned into dating.”
“So romantic.”
“I’ve tried romantic, and it didn’t really work out so well,” he drawled.
“Touché.”
I saw a flash in his eyes that reminded me of summer lightning and the cool scent of apple blossoms in the rain. But, like lightning, it was gone in the space of a heartbeat.
I studied my plate, using my fork to pick apart the layers of pastry. “There are rumors of wedding bells.”
Sean laughed. “There are rumors that Ingrid Whitfield and Richard Greene have been having an affair for twenty years. It’s a small town. There are a lot of rumors.”
“So you’re not that serious.”
“I’m going to plead the Fifth here. Let’s just say, I haven’t bought a ring.”
