A Catered Birthday Party (4 page)

T
he day after Annabel’s death Bernie, Libby, and their dad were sitting around the kitchen table having a late breakfast. The noise from the shop, A Little Taste of Heaven, bubbled up from below, making a faint reassuring hum.

Sean was tucking into his pancakes and drinking his third cup of coffee of the morning, even though, according to his daughters, he wasn’t supposed to have anything with caffeine. It was bad for his condition, they said. But then so was a lack of caffeine. He’d been drinking the stuff since he was ten years old and had no intention of quitting now, despite what anyone said. As far as he was concerned, when you got to his age you should be able to do anything you gosh darn pleased.

“Well,” he said as he pushed the
Longely Bugle
, the local morning paper, off to the side and turned to survey his oldest daughter. “Libby, you asked my opinion and I’m telling you. Yes. You have to investigate. A promise is a promise.”

“But…” Libby objected.

“See,” Bernie said. “I told you.”

Sean turned his attention back to his pancakes for a moment. The trick was to have the proper ratio of butter to syrup in every bite, which was harder to do than it sounded. “Seriously,” he said to Libby when he was done configuring. “If you don’t like the answer I gave you, why bother asking the question?”

Ever since the girls were little they seemed to feel that if they kept on asking a question, eventually he would give them a different answer. And it wasn’t as if he didn’t want to in this case. He wasn’t exactly thrilled with the idea of his daughters getting involved in yet another murder investigation, especially one involving the Colberts. Not that he’d ever say it, but they didn’t seem worth the bother. On the other hand, the case did sound interesting. And given the circumstances, what was the choice?

“It’s not that,” Libby said after she reread the article about Annabel Colbert’s death out loud for the third time.

Sean poured a little more maple syrup on his last two buckwheat pancakes. “Then what is it?”

“The article doesn’t say she was murdered. It says she died under suspicious circumstances and an autopsy has been conducted, although the results have not been released yet.”

Bernie reached for the homemade strawberry preserves. “Duh. Same thing,” she observed as she spread some on her pancake and took a bite. Delicious. They definitely had to make some more preserves next spring.

Libby put the paper down. “Don’t duh me. That’s just rude. They’ll probably find she died of an arrhythmia….”

“Brought on by whatever was in the wine,” Bernie added.

“Hey, girls,” Sean said in an effort to change the subject. “Did you see that Annabel was going to buy up that big tract of land down by Forrester’s Way and make it into Puggables’ Paradise, a charitable camp for disabled boys and girls? She was supposed to sign the final papers today. Guess that’s not happening now.”

“Sorry, Libby,” Bernie said, putting the top back on the preserves. “But you’re being willfully stupid.”

“That is so unfair. She was having a heart attack,” Libby persisted.

Sean dabbed at his mouth with his napkin before he took another sip of his coffee. As far as he was concerned his daughters made the best brew in the world.

“Doubtful,” Bernie said. “You were there. You saw.”

“You’re not a doctor,” Libby pointed out. “You don’t know.”

Sean put down his coffee cup. “People who have heart attacks don’t clutch at their throats.” As the ex–police chief of Longely he’d seen more than enough cardiac incidents in his time to have an opinion. “They clutch their chests.”

Libby thought for a moment. Then she said, “Women display different symptoms from men. There was a big article about that in the paper last month.”

Bernie rolled her eyes. “Give it up, Libby.”

“It’s a fact,” Libby insisted. “Go Google it.”

Bernie snorted. “I’m not Googling anything. Annabel did not have a heart attack. Contrary to what Joanna said, Annabel did not collapse from hunger. She was poisoned. She drank the wine, grabbed her throat, and cried that someone had poisoned her wine. Then she keeled over and two days later died in the hospital, never having regained consciousness. How much more obvious can you get?”

“The police didn’t see it that way. They didn’t treat the dining room as a crime scene,” Libby pointed out.

“Of course they didn’t. Not when one of the richest men in Longely tells them his wife has had a heart attack,” Bernie retorted. “And anyway, Annabel wasn’t dead when they arrived, so it wasn’t a crime scene, then.”

“If the police even had the remotest suspicion that it was they wouldn’t have taken our statements and let us go,” Libby argued. “What do you think, Dad?”

Sean just sighed. Ever since he’d lost his top-cop job and Lucas Broadbent, aka Lucy, had taken over the department, law enforcement, as he knew the concept, had gone out the window. The department had become a handmaiden to Longely’s political folderol.

“Clyde will call me with the postmortem results,” Sean said as he went back to eating his pancakes. “That should tell us something.”

“That’s nice of Clyde,” Bernie observed.

“Yes, it is,” Sean agreed.

More than nice actually. Because if he was caught, his old friend could lose his job. But, as Clyde had said, that presupposed that someone over there was paying attention. Which no one ever was. And even if they did catch him, Clyde declared that he could talk his way out of the situation. If he couldn’t at this stage of his life, he deserved to be caught. In this case, though, Clyde did better than call Sean with the results. He brought them over in person ten minutes later. Bernie suspected that this was because he never lost an opportunity to eat there.

“Hot off the presses,” he cried as he brandished a manila folder in front of Sean.

“Does Lucy know you have these?” Sean asked as he opened the folder and began leafing through the pages.

“Ha, ha,” Clyde said as he seated himself at the table. “Very funny. No one knows. Thank heavens for copiers. Anyway, he and Mrs. Lucy are off at a conference in Vail. Something about the transitional role of the chief of police in small towns.”

Sean looked up. “Transitional? Does this mean that local law enforcement is on its way out?”

“There’s a lot of melding and blending going on,” Clyde replied. “You’re lucky you got out when you did. I wish I had.”

“I didn’t get out. I was thrown out, if you remember correctly.”

Clyde waved his hand. “I was being polite. You’re still lucky.” He pointed to his friend’s empty plate. “Got any more of those?”

Libby smiled as she got up. “I was just going to ask if you wanted any.”

Fortunately, they had just enough batter for one more batch.

“Have I ever turned down any offer of food?” Clyde asked.

Bernie laughed. “Never,” she said. “That’s one of the things we love about you.” And she got him a coffee mug, filled it up, and set it down before him, while her dad read the report.

Clyde took a sip. “This is heaven. What kind of coffee is this anyway? I’ll have to tell the wife.”

Bernie told him. Not that it would make any difference, she reflected. His wife was one of those unfortunate people who couldn’t even brew a cup of drinkable tea or boil an egg without burning it.

“That’s interesting,” Sean said when he got done reading. “The M.E. is calling the death accidental.”

“Accidental?” Bernie said. “Be serious.”

Her dad tapped the report with his hand. He was pleased to see the tremors in his fingers were hardly noticeable at all. “I am. Mike is saying Annabel Colbert’s death resulted from an overdose of Malathion and flea and tick spray.”

“She drank the stuff. It wasn’t accidental,” Bernie retorted.

“Maybe. But you can’t prove it,” Clyde said.

Bernie frowned. “What do you mean? It was in the wine. We saw it. She drank the wine and clutched her throat.”

“You should have saved the bottle,” Clyde told her. “In the confusion someone threw the wine bottle out. We have nothing to test. And the stuff that’s in her is all stuff commonly used around animals. She could have absorbed it through her skin. While it’s not deadly to most people, evidently she had a heart condition.”

Bernie bit her lip. She felt awful. But saving the bottle had never occurred to her. Her attention had been totally fixed on Annabel.

“It’s okay,” her father said, intuiting her thoughts. “Given the circumstances I would have done the same thing.”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” Bernie replied.

Her father didn’t answer, because what Bernie said was true. But he was a professional and his daughter was a civilian. He told her that and it seemed to help a little.

“What about the witnesses?” she demanded. “Everyone was there. Everyone saw what happened.”

Clyde added a tad more heavy cream to his coffee and stirred. “Evidently their statements don’t add up to anything definitive. The only point everyone seems to agree on is that Annabel Colbert was given to exaggerating things. The best friend, the husband, and the dog trainer thought she was being overly dramatic. The husband’s personal assistant and the kennel owner thought she’d collapsed because she hadn’t been eating enough.”

“And Bree Nottingham. What did she think?” Libby asked.

“That Annabel was having a bout of hysterics.”

“But what about our statements?” Bernie demanded.

Clyde shrugged. “Your viewpoint is outweighed by everyone else’s.”

Libby put a stack of pancakes down in front of Clyde. “But we saw it.”

Clyde reached for the syrup and poured. “So did everyone else.”

“How can you misinterpret something like that?” Libby demanded.

“Why do you care?” Bernie asked her.

Libby sniffed. “Of course I care.”

“Well, you sure sounded as if you didn’t a moment ago.”

“This is just so…so…” Libby stopped and tried to think of the word she wanted.

“Egregious,” Bernie supplied.

“Exactly,” Libby said.

“So you’ve changed your mind?” Bernie asked.

Libby considered for a moment. “I suppose I have. I just don’t understand Mike’s findings,” she said, taking her seat.

Sean closed the folder and pushed it toward Clyde. “Then I’ll explain,” he said. “The results of postmortems are not always as clear-cut as people think. There are primary, secondary, and tertiary causes of death listed on the reports. For example, someone could be stabbed and die of a heart attack brought on by blood loss. Obviously this man died of a knife wound, but if there were reasons—if the knife wound was minor and the incident brought on a fatal coronary event, or if the son of an important personage was the one who did the stabbing—then perhaps the primary cause of death would be listed as a heart attack, and the secondary cause of death would be listed as the stab wound instead of the other way around.”

Libby frowned. “So what are you saying?”

Her dad replied, “I’m saying that the M.E. has chosen to emphasize different facts. There could be other explanations as well. Annabel Colbert might have used Malathion to kill fleas. For all we know, she could have been ingesting small amounts of Malathion over the past few months and it finally caught up with her. She may have been taking it to kill her appetite.”

“That’s absurd,” Bernie cried. “No one would do something like that.”

“Not true,” her father said. “Back in the early nineteen hundreds women used to swallow arsenic to make their skin glow.”

“But they don’t do things like that now,” Bernie objected.

Clyde shifted position. “Ellen Tarbrush did it five years ago. Of course, she was trying to frame her husband for murder.”

“Well, in this case Annabel’s husband probably is guilty. Her husband probably put the Malathion and flee and tick spray in her wine. He was the one who was opening the bottles,” Libby said. Then she added, “Or it could have been one of her friends. Although ‘friends’ is a misnomer. Everyone at the party seemed to have a real grudge against her. And she knew it, because she was getting ready to kiss them all off.”

Bernie nodded her agreement. “Maybe that’s why they felt that way. Maybe they knew or at least suspected what she was going to say.”

Sean shrugged. “That’s all very well. What you say may be true, but you have to prove it. That’s a bit more difficult.”

Libby raised her coffee mug to her lips and put it down again without having any. “What is Malathion anyway?”

“It’s a pesticide,” Clyde informed her. “People don’t use it that much anymore, because it’s so toxic.”

“Evidently,” Bernie observed.

Clyde continued, “But it used to be fairly common and people still have bottles of it around their houses.”

“So,” Libby mused, thinking aloud, “a ruling of accidental death means no homicide investigation.”

“Exactly,” Sean and Clyde said simultaneously.

“And they’re cremating the body tomorrow,” Clyde said.

“That was quick,” Sean said.