Disembodied Bones (34 page)

Scott was indeed confused for a moment, but
listened to Leonie as she asked her question. “I’m not sure if I
should tell you that,” he said in way of response. “And you could
actually say who it is calling and I would talk to you.”

“For God’s sake, Scott, just tell me.”

“It’s part of what we’re keeping under wraps.
The location of where we found the shirt will confirm false
confessions.”

“So, I’m right. You didn’t tell anyone. So
who knows?”

“The deputies who were there, all under
orders now. The murderer, I reckon. It’s one of the questions I
intend to ask of Mr. Lily in cell 3.” Scott hesitated. “You heard
him at the house. I said evidence had been found on his property.
He said the barn didn’t have a security system. So he knew exactly
what I was talking about.”

“Scott,” Leonie said softly. “He didn’t say
the barn. He said the out buildings don’t have a security
system.”

Scott considered that. “Yeah. There’s the old
cotton gin and a couple of ramshackle farm houses over the ridge,
too. Nothing but crap in those, but he knew I wasn’t talking about
the house, Leonie. He knew. Only one guy could have known that.
Only one.”

Leonie shivered. When she looked over at
Dacey, she realized that Dacey was unconscious on the couch and
gasped. The Hispanic woman’s normally creamy brown skin was
blanched white and she seemed to be having trouble breathing.

-

Looks like water,

But it’s heat.

Sits on sand,

Lays on concrete.

People have been known,

To follow it everywhere.

But it gets them no place,

And all they can do is stare.

What is it?

It is a mirage.

Friday, July 26th

‘
Tis not, ‘tis.

‘
Tis good, ‘tis bad.

‘
Tis left, ‘tis right

‘
Tis day, ‘tis night.

What is it?

Time lingered while the ambulance was on its
way. Dacey continued to have an erratic pulse and breathed with
painful gasps. She never regained consciousness while Leonie
anxiously waited for the paramedics. When the paramedics arrived
with a flurry of sound and lights, one promptly asked Leonie about
any allergies that Dacey might have. Leonie said, immediately,
“Peanuts. She can’t have anything with peanuts in them.”

One of the paramedics said, “Peanut allergy.
Classic. She’s got all the signs. Call it in and check her for an
alert. You got her purse, Miss?”

There had been an epinephrine kit in Dacey’s
purse, a slender kit inside a plastic case, clearly labeled,
containing a set of prepackaged needles that included the
medication Dacey needed. Leonie had known about the peanut allergy
for years because Dacey was phobic when she went to restaurants or
even when she purchased processed foods from the local grocery
store. She told Leonie that one attack had hospitalized her for a
week years before and how peanuts were progressively finding their
way into more and more food products.

Minutes after the injection, Dacey’s vital
signs began to show improvement, but her eyes remained closed. The
paramedics said, “She eat something with nuts in it that you
know?”

Leonie looked in the kitchen, and said, “I
don’t think she ate anything while she was here. She took some
ibuprofen and drank some iced tea.”

Both paramedics shrugged while they carefully
loaded Dacey onto a stretcher. One said, “Sometimes people forget.
Have a handful of Chex mix. Oopsie daisy. One peanut in there.
Don’t even think about it until their throats start to close
up.”

Leonie followed the ambulance to the
hospital, only taking a moment to call Dacey’s mother and to call
the Gingerbread House. Dacey was listed under “good” condition. The
small hospital on the outskirts of Buffalo Creek had only two
wings, but they quickly filled with Dacey’s relatives as the news
spread. Olga and a horde of her cousins were playing in the shade
of the fountain in the front courtyard under the watchful
supervision of her uncle Anthony and two other of Dacey’s brothers.
Dacey’s mother and grandmother waited outside her room.

Scott Haskell had appeared, seemingly out of
nowhere, pacing up and down the tiled hallway like a caged jungle
cat. He spared only a brief disgusted glance at Leonie and
proceeded to badger the nurses as if he alone had the power to
uncover Dacey’s condition.

Remembering the cut off phone call that
probably alerted him, Leonie sat alone.

Leonie had the foresight to grab the
ibuprofen bottle and brought it to the hospital. Dacey ended up
having her stomach pumped and then was given activated charcoal in
order to absorb any remaining toxins. From the sounds that came out
of Dacey’s room, Leonie could only assume that it was a terrible
process.

Producing the generic bottle of ibuprofen for
the nurses, Leonie handed it over and dutifully reported that it
was all she knew that Dacey had taken. The nurse looked at the
bottle doubtfully. “No peanuts in that,” said the nurse. “But I’ll
tell the doctor.”

Two hours later Leonie got to see Dacey, but
Dacey wasn’t looking so wonderful. She had an IV inserted into the
back of one hand and black rings under her eyes. She looked like a
pale shadow of herself and didn’t even blink when someone new came
into the room. Dacey’s mother escorted Olga out the door and Olga
smiled brightly at Leonie. When the door slid silently shut behind
them, Dacey said, “I didn’t eat any fucking peanuts, did I,
Lee?”

“I don’t have any peanuts in the house,
chère
,” said Leonie. Her mind was a state of numbed shock.
First, the backpack with the odious message in it and the blood
staining it, then Gideon in her house speaking inside her head like
a member of her family, knowing things about her that she didn’t
even want to admit to herself. Then there was Dacey, in the
hospital, on death’s doorstep, looking like a specter in an ugly
green hospital gown. It was all Leonie could do to grimly hang on
to a dwindling sense of sanity.

“Hey. Hey. Hey,” said Dacey quickly,
accurately reading the expression on Leonie’s face. “This is not
your fault. God knows there weren’t peanuts in the iced tea.
Right?”

“I don’t even like peanuts,” Leonie said
resentfully. “I think Jimmy Carter and his peanut fields should be
burnt to the roots.”

“Don’t go blaming the democrats,” Dacey
rebuked her gently. “If more peanut farmers were president then we
wouldn’t be having problems with the economy.”

Leonie stared at Dacey.

“What?” Dacey said. “You know, I don’t
recommend having your stomach pumped. It sucks. It really does, you
know. And the nurses are closet sadists. I think the doctors like
to watch too. So they’re all twisted, little pervs and I don’t know
what the heck is…oh, hi Scott.” The last bit of her sentence was
accompanied by a weak smile that said volumes to Leonie.

Leonie turned her head a little and saw Scott
Haskell standing at the now-open door. For a brief moment his eyes
were locked on Dacey and Leonie realized that he really cared for
her. No matter what he thought about Leonie, he really had feelings
for Dacey, and Leonie thought that in itself might redeem him in
her eyes. He held out a little African violet plant in a tiny white
pot with a red ribbon tied around it and said gruffly, “I brought
you this, Dacey.”

Dacey covered her face with her hand and
said, “You would come in when I look like pure, unadulterated
hell.”

When Scott approached the bed, Leonie took
the opportunity to escape, and the last thing she heard him say
was, “You’d never look like pure, unadulterated hell, Dacey.”

Leonie tracked down Dacey’s doctor, who was
in his office with two men who looked like lawyers. She rapped on
his open door and waited while the GP finished speaking with the
two men in suits. When he motioned her inside, the two men looked
at her curiously and left.

“Doctor,” Leonie said carefully.

“Brad,” the man said. He was in his late
thirties and had wheat colored, blonde hair. Wearing Ben Franklin
spectacles, he had a little pot belly that his white lab coat
couldn’t hide. “Brad Husbands. You’re Mrs. Rojas’s friend, right?
The one who brought in the pills?”

Leonie nodded and the doctor went around her
to shut the door. She started but remained in place. “Like to know
where you got them. The pills, that is,” he added.

“Johnson’s Grocery Store on Sycamore,” Leonie
replied promptly. “I’ve been getting headaches since I was a
child.” She pointed at the scar on her cheek. “Have a bullet in my
head someplace. Consequently, I tend to take a lot of
ibuprofen.”

The doctor meandered back to his desk, taking
that in stride. He’d read the articles in the paper. He knew all
about Leonie Simoneaud, but he had an open mind and was fully
prepared to listen to her. The generic pill bottle was sitting on
the calendar on his desk, and he pointed at it. “That,” he said
firmly, “isn’t ibuprofen.”

“What is it, then?” Leonie went toward the
bottle and he held up his hand to prevent her from picking up the
bottle. “It says its ibuprofen. I buy a ton of the stuff. I’ve used
half the bottle and I haven’t had a problem with it.”

“You don’t have an allergy to peanuts,” Brad
said carefully.

“No, of course not. Dacey does, in case you
hadn’t noticed.” Leonie couldn’t prevent the sarcasm in her voice.
“She’s in her room looking like a tank rolled over her on D-Day and
you want to know if I have a peanut allergy.”

Brad sat at his desk. He looked at the
bottle, then back up at her. “I figure that someone took a lot of
time and effort and made some pills that looked like the ibuprofen
you usually take. Or the factory that made the pills really messed
up. They used a coating that happens to have an incremental amount
of hydrolyzed vegetable matter in it.”

“Hydrolyzed vegetable matter?”

“Fancy way of saying peanuts. But to someone
like Dacey with a severe allergy…”

Leonie stood up straighter. “Someone gave me
pills that aren’t ibuprofen. They made them look just like them.”
She suddenly remembered how she had taken some of Scott’s Advil and
felt a lot better. As a matter of fact, she hadn’t been taking the
ibuprofen since then, and her headaches had been much less. “What
are they then?”

“Don’t know,” Brad said. “Gave some to the
chemist. They’ll break it down and do a test to see what it is. He
scraped off a little of the coating and did a swab test on that.
They could tell right away there was a little peanut content in the
coating, which is what affected Dacey. That gal’s got to avoid
anything with peanuts in it, but then you know that, don’t
you?”

“I know that, but I didn’t know that the
coating on pills had peanut products in it.”

Brad’s eyebrows went up. “They don’t
normally. No reason to, except I reckon this little mix came from
south of the border. I’ve had some problems with other allergy
patients buying their prescriptions from Mexico. Cheaper down
there, but they don’t always have the same guidelines making sure
that it’s all on the up and up. You didn’t, by any chance, buy your
pills on a visit to Cozamel or somesuch place?”

“I’ve never been out of the country,” Leonie
admitted.

Brad sighed. “Well, it was a thought. You
know, it’s not like someone tried to poison anyone here. You don’t
have to be antsy or anything. It’s not any kind of poison in the
pills. Most likely it wouldn’t even affect anyone in any way at
all. It’s just some kind of meds that probably affects moods. I
think maybe a psychotropic by what we’ve seen. But the guys in the
lab will have to make sure.”

“What’s a psychotropic and why would anyone
want to substitute that for ibuprofen?”

“A psychotropic drug is usually a mood
altering medication. Like Prozac or even Valium. It can be a
tranquilizer, a sedative, or an antidepressant. But,” he paused as
he regarded the little bottle of pills, “this one’s got a strange
composition. That’s why the lab guy didn’t recognize the makeup
right away. And it’s been a whole lotta years since I’ve been in
organic chemistry, I’ll tell you what.”

Leonie stared at the bottle as well. “Let’s
say you speculate for a moment.”

Brad said, “Okay. What about?”

“You say these pills have a strange
composition. That means what?”

“It means that it would do something that
doesn’t make sense to me or the lab guy,” Brad said amicably. “Or
to me.”

“Like what?”

“Well, if I had to guess, I’d say it was like
a mild damper. It would probably affect the cerebellum or the
cerebrum. This is really speculation, but depending on the dosage
used, parts of the lesser used parts of the brain that scientists
speculate about all the time would be affected. Here’s the real
guesswork. You tell me. Did you feel different while you were
taking it?”

“More headaches,” Leonie said. “A little more
tired.”
And I didn’t have as many episodes of “seeing” missing
things, right up until the day I found Olga. But there was
something else that day. The Pennsylvania Dutch chest. That was
first. It was like something had cleared itself up.

Brad nodded agreeably. “I expect someone will
have to do some answering at the factory. It’s definitely not a
poison and the average person probably couldn’t be aware of Dacey’s
peanut allergy. Besides which she took four of the pills when the
instructions clearly state one tablet every four to six hours. Then
one more if the pain or symptoms persist. Whoever’s responsible for
the mix up couldn’t have known that she would take four at a time,
or even that Mrs. Rojas would take them at your house at all.” He
looked at the pills for a minute. “Funny. I remember reading about
experiments with a psychotropic drug in the early nineties.”