Coastal Cottage Calamity (A Logan Dickerson Cozy Mystery Book 2) (10 page)

Chapter Eighteen

We walked through
the front door and stood there staring into the darkness.

“What should we
do?” Mac asked, this time he spoke in a whisper.

“First thing is we
need some light,” Miss Vivee said as she flicked the light switch on the wall
of the front room.”

“Don’t!” I flipped
it back off making our eyes have to readjust to the dark. “No one is supposed
to be here. Don’t you think it’ll look suspicious if someone saw a light on in
here?”

“Well, how are we
supposed to see?” she asked indignantly.

“Flashlights.”

“I don’t have
one,” she said. “Do you have one, Mac?” I could hear him patting on his
pockets.

“I bet there’s one
in the kitchen,” Miss Vivee said and started off walking.

“Wait!” I said.
“You could bump into something.” I heard her as she bumped into something.

“Son of gun, that’s
smarts,” she said and dropped into a nearby chair.

“Are you okay,
Miss Vivee,” I said pulling out the flashlight from my knapsack. I turned it on
and beamed it on her boot.

“I just broke a
toe, so I’m guessing I’m not alright.”

“Oh crap! Did you
really break a toe?” I kneeled down by her ready to pull off her boot and take
a look. She swatted me away.

“You want my cane,
Vivee,” Mac offered.

“Will you two
stop? I’m fine.” She stood up and tried to put her weight on her foot. “Well.
I’ll be fine.” She took in a breath. “Shine that light that way,” she said to
me pointing her finger up the stairs. “We should check out his bedroom.” She
grabbed my arm and let me help her as we ascended the steps.

“Here, I think
that’s his room.” Miss Vivee nodded toward a door at the end of the hall. “I
want to see if there’s a glass or something near his bed from where he ingested
the poison.”

We walked just
inside the room and stood. I shined my beacon of light around slowly so Miss
Vivee could examine its every nook and cranny. Occasionally she would grab my
hand and bring the light back to a spot she’d had already seen.

“Nothing,” she
said. She sounded disappointed but evidently still determined. “Let’s check out
the bathroom.”

“Here, Mac.” I
gave him my flashlight and let him lead Miss Vivee into the
en suite
bathroom. I pulled out my iPhone and clicked on the flashlight icon. I walked
the room and perused it again.

“Do you see
anything?” I asked as I came to the doorway that separated the two rooms.

“Looks like this
is where Oliver filled his cigarette cartridges,” Miss Vivee said. “All kinds
of bottles here.”

“Don’t. Touch. Anything!”
I said.

“I know better,”
she said snatching her hand away.

“Here.” I pulled
two pair of latex gloves out my knapsack. “Hope you’re not allergic.” I handed
a pair to her and Mac. “Put these on.”

Miss Vivee and Mac
donned the gloves examined the bottles discussing what they found as they
picked up each one. Being careful, they searched under the sink and in the
cabinet for something that could have been used to poison Oliver.

“I don’t know. I
can’t be sure,” Miss Vivee said. “What do you think, Mac?”

He shook his head
slowly. “Nothing that I see that I think could kill him.”

“Maybe we should
check the kitchen,” Miss Vivee said and turned to leave.

“Wait,” I said and
held my hand out to stop them. “Did you hear that?” I lowered my voice to a
whisper.

Unsure what was
going on, I looked at Mac, his eyes were as wide as mine. Miss Vivee had her
ear tuned listening for the sound. We stood frozen.

Miss Vivee sucked
her teeth. “I don’t hear anything.”

“Shhh!” I said. “I
hear something.”  I looked at them, a look of concern on my face. “I think
someone is here.”

Chapter Nineteen

Miss Vivee wanted
to climb out the window to get away from the intruders. Shinny down the gutter,
she had said. “Of course, we’ll have to help Mac,” the only circumstance she
seemed to see as a hindrance to her plan. Then, she thought, we would be able
to just steal away in the dark, run across the beach, find the car and drive
off into the night, no one the wiser.

Such an adept
criminal
.

I had to remind
her that she and Mac were ninety and I thought the hindrance might be that she’d
break a hip. Plus, neither one of them could run.

At least not very
fast.

We had gone back
into the bedroom after we heard the sound, standing around staring at each
other, we didn’t know quite what to do (aside from Miss Vivee’s brilliant plan
of escape). I went to the door of the room and with each arm holding on to
either side of the frame, I leaned out into the hallway.

“I hear voices,” I
turned back to report.

“Whose voices?”
Miss Vivee asked.

“I don’t know,” I
did a whisper-yell. “The voices are muffled.”

“It’s probably the
killers,” Miss Vivee said and moved over closer to me.

Killers? Did she
think there was a gang of them?

I turned around
and came back in the room. There were at least two, I had to admit, unless the
killer was talking to himself.

“What’d we do?”
Mac asked. He looked at Miss Vivee. “You want me to go down and confront them?”
He waved his cane. Maybe his dual purpose walking stick would come in handy.

“No.” Miss Vivee
waved her hand. “They could overtake you in no time.”

“Hide,” I said
like it was a brilliant idea. That set us off in a scramble. The closet. Behind
the drapes. Under the bed. Miss Vivee and Mac couldn’t bend or duck to tuck
themselves away anywhere.

There was no place
to hide for us.

“What about the
bathtub?” Miss Vivee said. “We could all get in, pull the door shut.”

That idea wasn’t
very appealing to me.

“The door is
glass, Miss Vivee,” I said instead. “They’d see us.”

“I think my idea
is the best,” Mac said. “I go down there. Talk to them. It has to be someone we
know. We know everyone in town. That way we wouldn’t have to try and run for
it.” He looked at Miss Vivee. “We can’t run anywhere, dear.”

“I know!” Miss
Vivee said with a start, a gleam in her eye. “Everybody just stand still.” She
stopped and put up her hands as if she was posing.

“What are you
doing?” I asked.

“We can freeze.
Don’t move. And they won’t know it’s us. They do it all the time in New
Orleans.” She unfroze her hand to wave at Mac. “Like a statute, Mac.”

Mac struck a pose.

Did she really
think if we stood perfectly still that people coming into the room wouldn’t
notice us?

“Miss Vivee!” I said,
clenching my jaw to refrain from shouting. “We cannot just stand here. We have
to figure something else out.”

And then, I felt
the butterflies take flight in my belly. But they must have ran into a
something hard because I got a sudden jolt that almost made me bend over.

My hands started
to shake. My throat dry. My heart raced. I licked my lips. This was just like
when I was being chased by the federal guards at Track Rock Gap, the federal
site I had trespassed into.

I didn’t like this
feeling one little bit.

I glared at Miss
Vivee. I can’t believe I let that little five-foot nothing, wanna be felon, talk
me into doing something this stupid again. Miss Vivee I noticed, wasn’t even
breathing hard.

Maybe she would
make a good gangster, she showed no fear.

“I have an idea,”
Miss Vivee said.

“We’re not
climbing out of any windows, or pretending to be statutes,” I said. I walked
back over to the door and listened. The voices hadn’t seemed to have gotten any
closer. Yet. “So,” I looked back at her. “If your idea is a repeat of those
things or anything similar, don’t say it.”

Chapter Twenty

I took Mac all the
way home which seemed like the only thing that had upset Miss Vivee all night.
When we had started the night out, Miss Vivee had made him wait on the corner
of his street for us to “swing by” and pick him up. Because of me, she growled,
she’d now broken her vow never to go to Mac’s house again.

At least Mac was
home safe.

Miss Vivee’s idea
had worked. She said to call the Sheriff’s office and report that there was an
intruder in the house. That would send the coppers running and give us time to
get out. I was reluctant at first. But she convinced me that Mae Lynn,
apparently the perennial dispatcher, would do as she instructed and in turn,
the Sheriff would do as his call taker asked. So we called and Mae Lynn sent a
squad car, sirens blaring it seemed all the way from the police station, to
check, as she said, on a 1-14.

And those sirens
made whoever was in the house leave in a rush. Miss Vivee tried to look out of
the window to see who it had been. I wouldn’t let her. I gave them a few minutes
and then tried to rush Miss Vivee and Mac down the stairs.

They took them one
step at a time.

Out the door and
across the sand.

Limping and
dragging.

Mac lost the
rubber end to his cane and they wanted to stop and look for it. It took all the
clever coaxing I had in me to make them leave it and go to the car.

Jump into the car
and make a fast getaway.

I had to push Miss
Vivee up into my SUV Jeep.

Geesh.

As soon as we got
back to the Maypop, Miss Vivee dragged me in her room, sat me down on her bed
and sat right up under me. “Call, Mac,” she instructed.  

Didn’t we just
drop him off?

“Put him on
speaker,” she said and started poking buttons on the phone.

“Miss Vivee!” I gently
pushed her hand away. “I have to dial the number first. What is it?”

She rattled it off
and I punched in the numbers. After about the tenth ring I looked at her.
“Maybe he’s gone to bed.”

“The phone ought
to wake him up.” She looked down at my phone. “He doesn’t know your number.
Hang up and call right back.” She tried to push the “End” button.

“I can do it,” I
said and gave her a sideways glance.

 I redialed Mac and
he answered on the third ring.

“It was the nicotine,”
Miss Vivee shouted into the phone. She hadn’t needed me to call him on my phone,
as loud as she was speaking she could’ve just poked her head out the window.
I’m sure he would have heard her.”

“You don’t have to
talk that loud,” I said to her. And then to instruct her, I said in a regular
voice, “Sorry about bothering you, Mac. Miss Vivee wanted to talk to you.”

“Nicotine,” she
said over me.

“How is that?” he
said.

“Oliver told me
once how those electronic things he smoked work. You have to fill up the filter
with nicotine. Like what we saw in those bottles in his bathroom.”

“Pure nicotine is
poisonous,” he said, which made Miss Vivee cluck her teeth.

“Well of course it
is. That’s why he’s dead.”

“What I’m saying
is the only way nicotine is that lethal is if it was practically 100%. There
were no bottles like that there. And no one would use that to fill one of those
things he smoked. It would kill him.”

“It did kill him,
Mac.”

Is she saying the
poison used to kill Oliver was nicotine?

“Hold on,” I said
to the both of them.

I tapped on the
Safari icon on the phone and brought up Google. I typed in e-cigarettes and
nicotine strength.

“Here. Let me see
. . . ‘
How do I choose a nicotine strength – Vapor Train.
’” I read the
link and then clicked on it. I skimmed the article.

“Okay it reads, ‘When
making the switch from smoking cigarettes to the electronic cigarette, many new
users are bewildered about how to choose nicotine strength’ . . . .
blah
blah, blah blah
. ‘Most e-liquids come in several strengths: high, medium,
low, and zero,’” I read. “Okay. Wait. Here it is. ‘There are 12mg and 24 mg
strengths . . .”

“That wouldn’t
kill him, Vivee,” Mac interrupted. “It’d have to be stronger than that. The
highest he had was 18mg. Remember? We saw it.”

“If somebody put
enough of it in the cartridge, that would make it stronger,” Miss Vivee argued.
“Just like I did with the tea. I added more drops of the extract to make it
more powerful.

“Those little
filters, cartridges, or whatever they’re called only hold so much,” Mac
countered. “You can’t just add more to it. It would spill out.”

I backed up and
read another entry that said the same thing basically, it was a company that
sold 18, 12, and 6mg
bottles of the liquid nicotine used to refill the
e-cig cartridges. Then I typed in nicotine poisoning. It said it usually
happened in children. Caused by chewing tobacco leaves.

Then I read
“Symptoms.”
Nausea, excessive salivation, abdominal pain, pallor, sweating,
vomiting. Burns on the mouth.

I looked over at
Miss Vivee who was still yelling into the phone at Mac.

Even dead,
Oliver
did show some of those symptoms.

Maybe Miss Vivee
did know what she was talking about.

I pulled up a
previous search about the nicotine e-liquids and re-read the first entry I had
found. Down further in the article it read: “
The nicotine density listed for
e-liquid is the number of milligrams of nicotine per milliliter in the
E-Liquid.”

“What about if . .
.” I stared at the phone and back up at Miss Vivee. “What about if it was full
strength?” I elbowed her. “Miss Vivee.” She was still talking. “Miss Vivee.”

“What?”

“What about if
someone changed the strength? Instead of a 24mg or ten or whatever
per
milliliter
. What if someone replaced Oliver’s liquid nicotine bottle with a
higher concentration? 75mg per milliliter. Or 100mg.” My eyes got big at the
realization. “You wouldn’t need more liquid if it were a
higher
concentration. The bottle could contain a higher solution of nicotine per each
drop.”

We sat quietly for
a moment. Thinking.

“That might could
work,” Mac said, breaking the silence. “Oliver would take one puff on that
cigarette and bam!” He slammed his hand on something that made a loud noise
into the telephone. Miss Vivee and I jumped.

“Mac,” Miss Vivee
said. “No need to be so dramatic. You scared us.”

“Sorry, ladies, I
got a little carried away. But nicotine . . . The thought of Oliver inhaling
and me envisioning the toxin moving through the bloodstream at an exceptional
rate, got me a little excited.” He got quiet for a moment, but I could hear him
breathing - quick, short breaths. “It only takes about seven seconds, once
inhaled,” he said finally. “Yep just about seven seconds, if I remember
correctly, for nicotine to travel from the lung to the brain.”

“Quick. Precise.
Lethal.” Miss Vivee nodded her head. “Perfect way to kill him.”

Miss Vivee hit my
arm, almost knocking the phone out of my hand. Her face lit up and her eyes
were beaming.

“That’s why the
Andersons wanted to get into that house,” she said, an excited look on her
face. “Why they took a chance on crossing that crime scene tape.”

“Miss Vivee,” I
said. “You don’t know it was the Andersons there tonight. You didn’t see them.”

Although she had tried.
I had had to practically hold her down to keep her from getting to the window.

“Oh it was them. I
know it. They were trying to get something,” she said.

“Why?” Mac asked.

“To get the
evidence. The bottle had to still be there. The bottle with the higher
concentration.” She looked at me, smiled and nodded. “It must have been in the
kitchen.” She hit me again. “We should have started in the kitchen.”

I stared down at
the phone and then back up at Miss Vivee. “If it was nicotine poisoning that
killed Oliver then that makes me think that it wasn’t Ron Anderson or his wife
that did it.”

“How so,” Mac
asked.

“How long had
Oliver been smoking e-cigarettes?” I asked.

“I don’t know,”
Miss Vivee said. “Not long.”

“No,” I said. “It
couldn’t have been long because they haven’t been out long.” I pulled up Google
again and typed in “When were e-cigarettes invented.” I read the results out
loud. “’
2003.
The electronic cigarette is first developed in Beijing, China
by Hon Lik, a 52 year old pharmacist, inventor and smoker. He reportedly
invents the device after his father, also a heavy smoker, dies of lung cancer.’”

“Twelve years,” Mac said.

“Longer than I thought,” I said. “But still,
Ron and Charlie
are
long lost
cousins.”

“They said they
hadn’t seen Oliver in twenty years,” Miss Vivee said evidently recalling the
conversation Ron had with Brie and Renmar.

 “They wouldn’t’ve
known he smoked e-cigarettes,” I concluded. I looked at Miss Vivee. “Are you
going to take them off your list?”

“No. They stay. I
haven’t ruled them out. That Ron Anderson seems like the criminal type. And if
he didn’t commit murder, he’s done something else.”

 “So,” I said.
“I’m guessing, with the recognition of the symptoms and firsthand knowledge of
how quickly nicotine kills, you both knew of a case where someone died from
nicotine poisoning?”

I remembered how
they knew that Gemma Burke had dry drowned, a manner of death I’d never heard
of before, because of a boy dying that way years earlier.

“There’s a famous
case,” Mac said. “Do you know of it, Vivee?”

“Of course I do.
I’m an herbalist.”

“Well I don’t know,
so somebody tell me,” I said.