Prodigal Son (27 page)

“It wasn’t a mistake, or at least that’s not likely. You were poisoned with an extremely toxic, lethal weed killer, probably in your food. It was intentional, Maggie, not an accident.” They had talked about it the day before, but she was clearer-headed now.

“That’s not possible. Who would do that?” She looked shocked and frightened.

“We don’t know yet. But not a lot of people have access to you, and given the symptoms you’ve manifested for several years, it looks like someone has been doing it for a long time.” Peter spoke in a low quiet voice, carefully choosing his words.

“What did Michael say about all this?” she asked. It made no sense to her. She didn’t want it to. And Peter could see that she was still in denial. He had been at first too. It was the kind of thing you just didn’t want to believe.

“Michael’s in jail, Maggie,” Peter said softly. He didn’t want to hide it from her anymore. “On suspicion of poisoning you and trying to kill you.” They were terrible words, and they hit her like bullets. She sat straight up in bed and stared at Peter.

“Are you serious?”

He nodded in answer. “We got the toxicology report back that you were being poisoned. And Michael had access and motive. He’s in jail pending further investigation. But with the evidence they have, they’re going to charge him with it in a few days. He has a lot of explaining to do if he didn’t do it. They searched the house a few days ago. They took a lot of stuff out but they didn’t tell us what it was. Pru says it was mostly prescription medications and some things from the garden shed.” Maggie looked speechless for a moment, and then thought instantly of her daughter. “Oh my God, how’s Lisa?” She was suddenly panicked for her and the effect this would have on her.

“About the way you’d expect her to be. She worships her father. She blames me and Bill for all this, and she’s convinced he didn’t do it.” Bill nodded in agreement. Peter had said everything pretty much the way it was.

“So am I,” Maggie said loyally, lying back against her pillows. “Can I call him?” Peter shook his head. And he understood her reaction. This was enormous for all of them to accept, and especially for her to learn that the man she had trusted for twenty-three years, and loved presumably, might have been trying to kill her, and could easily have succeeded in the near future. He almost had this time.

“You were dying, Maggie,” Peter spelled it out for her. “Someone was doing it to you. It wasn’t an accident.” Tears slid down her cheeks as she listened. She didn’t want to hear it.

“That can’t be. Michael wouldn’t do a thing like that.” She was sure of it, but she could see in Peter and Bill’s eyes that they believed it, which was horrifying to her.

“People do strange things sometimes,” Peter said philosophically. “I used to think he was dangerous. He convinced me otherwise since I came back here. Maybe I was right in the beginning. We’ll have to see what the evidence looks like, but it’s not looking good for him at the moment. He’s the only one who could have done it. It was a pretty sophisticated substance to use, and well thought out, and carefully dosed, or it would have killed you a long time ago. Your doctors say you don’t have Parkinson’s. The disease was mimicked by the effects of the poison.” And Michael had insisted she had the disease. She fell silent as she lay in bed, with her face turned away, as tears rolled down her cheeks. It was the worst moment of her life, and Peter’s heart ached for her. He wanted to put his arms around her but didn’t dare. Things were complicated enough as they were. And with the chief’s inferences that morning that he might be in love with her, he didn’t want to give the wrong impression now. He loved her as family and friend, but they hadn’t been having an affair. Neither of them was that kind of person, and Peter was still hurting after Alana and the pain of the divorce.

“What does Michael say?” she asked, turning back to Peter with a look of terror, her voice barely audible.

“That he’s innocent. But the paraquat in your system says he isn’t. Or someone isn’t,” Peter said, looking grim. And no one else had access to her, except Lisa, which was unthinkable. There really was no one except Michael who could have done it, or would have wanted to, and they all knew it. And he would have known how to dose it.
Michael had the opportunity, the skills, and the motive, if Bill’s theory about his grandfather’s money was correct. Peter didn’t mention her inheritance out of respect for her, but it could have been a major motivating factor. Ten million dollars was a lot of money, and Michael must have wanted it very badly, no matter how modest he appeared. Maybe he wanted it enough to kill her for it. Stranger things had happened. The news was full of things like that all the time.

“I just can’t believe he did it,” Maggie said, deathly pale again and shaken to her core. But despite her allegedly “bad nerves,” according to Michael, she was handling the terrible news he’d given her with grace and reason, as she handled everything else. But she looked desperately upset and hurt. She wasn’t sure what to believe, faced with the news, and no word from him.

The rumors at the police station were not encouraging for Michael. Aside from the evidence they’d gotten from his garden shed, with his prints all over it, and the lab reports about Maggie, the chief had gotten a call from the family of an elderly patient Michael had recently taken care of, and who had left him some money. The family was suddenly convinced that he had killed their father, after reading the account in the paper of his poisoning Maggie. And they wanted their father exhumed and examined. There were three calls like it the next day, from families who had been suspicious of him. And in each case, Michael had inherited money from the deceased. The cases were too reminiscent of what Peter had mentioned to the chief, and Jack Nelson couldn’t ignore them. Dreading what was happening and what
might come next, he filed for permission to exhume. By then, he had to transfer Michael to the detention house in Northampton for the arraignment.

Michael had contacted an attorney, one of the ones Jack had recommended, and he had agreed to take the case. Michael pleaded not guilty to attempted murder in the first degree, and he was bound over for trial, for the poisoning of his wife, and the local papers reported it again. He was held without bail.

Michael’s fingerprints on the two bottles of paraquat from their garden shed, and the fact that no one had had access to Maggie and her food except him and their sixteen-year-old daughter, were both very damning. And Pru Walker had no reason or motive to poison her. And Maggie’s remarkable recovery over the next week, when she was not being poisoned, was additional evidence. She looked and felt better than she had in years. A police detective had come to the hospital to ask her who prepared her meals every day. She said that her daughter usually made dinner, her husband made lunch for her when he had time to do it, or Prudence Walker, if no one else did. The detective asked a few other questions about her medications, and then he left.

And Michael still hadn’t called Maggie, which she couldn’t understand. Suddenly, the man who had been a constant presence and never left her side for twenty-three years had disappeared. She knew where he was, but he wasn’t calling her, although he had the right to one call a day. And she couldn’t call him. She had had no word from him since his arrest, and she didn’t know what to think, and didn’t want to believe the worst. She wanted a better explanation, and only Michael could give it to her, but he didn’t. He was silent.

Not hearing from Michael was almost as upsetting to her as the
charges against him and the fact that he was in jail. After living with him, day and night, relying on him in every way, trusting him completely, he had literally vanished out of her life, and was being accused of trying to murder her. She still didn’t believe he had done it, and she wondered if he was too ashamed to call her from jail. This had been a terrible blow to him too, and she felt deeply sorry for him. She wasn’t angry, because she still didn’t believe it.

And within a week, Jack Nelson had nine geriatric corpses waiting to be exhumed and examined. It was turning into a very ugly case, and Jack didn’t know what to think. Michael still said he was innocent and looked it, but it had become impossible to pin it on either Peter or Bill. All the evidence pointed to Michael, more so every day. Jack just hoped that the people they were about to exhume had died of natural causes. And Maggie did too when she heard about it. She didn’t want Michael to go to prison, nor did his daughter.

Lisa begged her mother to take her to see her father as soon as she came home from the hospital, but Maggie wasn’t up to it yet, and she didn’t think it would be good for Lisa. Maggie felt that visiting him in jail would be too traumatic for her. And Maggie wanted to see him too, but since she had heard nothing from him, she didn’t want to embarrass him by visiting him in jail. She had written him two letters, full of love and support and her faith in his innocence, and he hadn’t answered. She wondered if they withheld his letters at the jail. Michael had not contacted Maggie from the day he was arrested.

One afternoon after visiting Maggie at the house, Peter decided to stop in at the county clerk’s office on Main Street. Just out of curiosity, he wanted to do some of the research in Michael’s case himself.
He wasn’t sure if what he was looking for would show up. He wanted to see if there would be a record of all the wills Michael had been named in, where he had inherited money from patients. Peter wondered just how many there were.

And as he walked into the county clerk’s office, he had a surprise. The clerk was the older brother of a boy he’d gone to school with, and he smiled as soon as Peter walked in. They chatted for a few minutes, and Peter was sorry to hear that the man he had gone to school with had died in an accident several years before. Bob, the county clerk, then offered his sympathy for the difficulties Michael was in. He had been as stunned as everyone else.

And with that, Peter explained what he was searching for. He was wondering how many people Michael had inherited money from over the years. It might establish some kind of pattern that would confirm his guilt with his elderly patients, or even uncover new ones.

“We wouldn’t have a record here of cash bequests he inherited,” Bob explained, “only if he inherited land or property, like a house. But I can certainly take a look and see what I find. And if you talk to the bank manager, he may remember some of the bequests Michael got from his patients. If you want, I’ll call him. He’s my wife’s uncle.” Peter smiled at the convenient incestuousness of a small town. He was taking full advantage of it.

But he wasn’t prepared for the answer he got from Bob a few days later. As it turned out, the deeds to four houses had been left to Michael over the years, which was considerable, and he had sold them all. They were small and not of immense value. And Bob’s wife’s uncle at the bank remembered distinctly several bequests Michael had gotten, some larger, some smaller, but in his estimation, over the years, Michael had inherited between two and three hundred
thousand dollars from elderly patients. It was a considerable sum of money, particularly added to the proceeds from the houses he got too, and it was certainly not proof of murder, but it was an area that merited looking into.

Bob promised him an informal written summary, which Peter wanted to give Jack Nelson for the police investigation. Peter couldn’t help wondering how many of his geriatric patients Michael had killed, but it was clear to him now why he had done it. It was about money. Michael’s son Bill was right, his father had been trying to amass a fortune of ill-gotten gains. He had no idea what Michael was planning to do with it, but he had quite a lot of money put aside, and if he had succeeded in killing Maggie, he would have had a great deal more. But it really was all about greed and money, which seemed unlike Michael. Bob promised to do a full report on whatever he found and give a copy to Jack Nelson. But it was clear to Peter that Michael had been a stranger to them all. Peter was trying to absorb it and figure out just who Michael had been, and Bill was too, but Peter was shocked to realize that even after Maggie was out of the hospital, she was still in the grips of powerful denial about her husband and her marriage. Maggie just couldn’t accept that Michael had tried to kill her. She refused to believe it. It was shocking for all of them, and Maggie just denied it and found a thousand implausible excuses to explain what had happened. She could not accept the truth.

And Lisa was not much better. She was still not speaking to her uncle or brother. She insisted that they had framed her father. And when Maggie wouldn’t take her to see her father in jail, Lisa took the matter into her own hands.

She got a bus to Northampton one day after school, after checking on visiting days and hours. She left her mother a message that she
was doing homework with a friend, and Maggie believed her. She was deeply worried about her, and worried about the trauma to her. And Maggie had wanted to be present for her. She had begun walking with her walker, and almost didn’t need it now for support. Her left leg still dragged a little, as it always had, but she felt steady on her feet now, and had regained her balance, which had been shaky for years. She was working with a physical therapist to strengthen her legs. She no longer took sleeping pills at night, tranquilizers for her nerves, or any of the mystery pills that Michael had fed her for years, assuring her that she needed them and she needed to entrust him with her care and treatment. But with each passing day that she felt stronger, she became more anxious about Michael. Without the medicines he had given her, she felt like a new person, or the old one she had been before they married. There was no remnant of her old head injury, only the stiff leg, which she could live with, and her limp was even less pronounced than it had been, thanks to the exercises she was doing, and she no longer felt so unsteady. And once she was ready, she had Bill put her wheelchair and her walker in the garage. She walked everywhere on her own two feet now. But she continued to insist that none of her improvement had anything to do with what Michael had been doing to her. She couldn’t bear knowing that the accusations were true about him, even though both her better health and his silence said it all.