"Stick out your finger."
She and Del were in Allie's kitchen, having just finished a comfort meal Allie prepared in a fit of escapism. When all was beating down, when there were unanswered questions that poked their blurry faces in at you in the fog of insomnia, there was nothing like meatloaf and mashed potatoes to get you back to where you needed to be, at least for a little while.
"Why?" Del asked.
"Just indulge me."
"What do you want with my finger?"
"Just do it. I promise, nothing will happen."
Her friend did as she was told, and Allie took her gently by the wrist and smeared her finger with something that made Del's tongue protrude and a comical sound come from her throat.
"What the hell?"
"Now," Allie said, handing her a teacup, "do me a favor and wipe it off on the inside, just under the rim."
"What is this, can I ask?"
"It's honey, mixed with a little almond extract."
With a grimace, Del smeared her finger on the inside of the cup, just beneath the rim.
The kettle whistled. Allie took back the cup, dropped an infuser into it, brought the cup to the kettle and tilted out fresh, boiling water into it.
"Wait a minute then I want you to drink that."
"Do I have to?"
"It's just honey and almond extract. And jasmine tea. Smell that? Amazing, right?"
"It's breathtaking. What's this about again?"
Allie looked her friend in the eye. "Someone poisoned Tori Cardinal at my book club. It had to have happened right here in my house because the poison was only in her system for about five minutes before it killed her. Now I don’t know about you, but I don't take too kindly to people who poison folks at my book club. So I got to thinking who it could have been. It started with Jill asking me for honey, and ended with sugar ants."
Del reached into the air and mimed a tiny scene wherein she extracted a tiny scroll from the ether, unrolled it, and pretended to read. "Hmmm. Nope, nothing here. I'm afraid you're going to have to elucidate."
Allie sighed impatiently. "Did Tori bring her own sugar?"
"I don’t know. Did she?"
"No. Did she bring her own honey?"
Del shrugged.
"I know it sounds like something she would have done. But she didn't."
"Are you sure?" Del asked.
"Almost. You didn’t notice her putting honey in her tea?"
"I don’t remember," Del said apologetically.
"Well,
someone
put sugar or honey in her tea. Because one of those stains on the rug over there attracted a swarm of sugar ants. Jill asked me for honey. Tori collapsed while I was still in the kitchen looking for it. But I didn’t have any honey at all. Not a drop. I forgot to buy it."
"Some host you are."
"You don't see the implication of this."
"Not entirely, no."
"Sip your tea."
Del looked at her quizzically.
"Go ahead. Take a sip."
Del sipped carefully.
"What do you taste?"
"Jasmine tea. Maybe a little almond and/or honey, but I probably wouldn’t know it was there if you hadn’t told me."
Allie clapped her hands together. "Awesome. That's what I thought. Cyanide in the tea. The honey attracted the ants and the cyanide killed the little buggers! Listen. Here's how it went down. Pay attention. I had eight cups with pictures of the characters from the book on them. Do you remember which character you had?"
Del stared at her blankly.
"It's ok. I didn't expect you would. But I do. I gave you the Duchess. I gave Ben the White Rabbit."
"Any reason?"
"The characters of both suit you. It was my little game. I gave June Brody the Cheshire cat, because, well, because she's June Brody and she never smiles. I gave the twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee—technically not from Wonderland but from
Through The Looking Glass
—anyway because they're twins, get it? And I gave myself the Hatter because he's awesome and because I'm awesome. And Tori? I gave her the Queen of Hearts, of course."
"Why?"
Allie stared for a moment before it clicked. "You didn't read the book."
Del's eyes widened.
Allie slapped her arm. "I
knew
you wouldn’t read the book!"
"
Ow!
I saw the Disney film. Doesn't that count for something?
"Progress of a kind," said Allie, shaking her head in disapproval. "I can't believe you."
"Not for nothing," said Del, "but isn't
Alice in Wonderland
a book, like, for kids?"
"It's
Alice's
Adventures
in Wonderland
, and I hate you right now." She steeled herself with a deep breath. "I'm going to forget about this for now. Where was I?"
"You gave Tori the Queen of Hearts cup for some reason," said Del with a smile.
"Yes! Because the Queen is a horrible person! Keeps calling for everyone's heads. Ring a bell from the Cliffs Notes?"
Del rolled her eyes. "So what's the point?"
"The point is, when I went in to get the tea and Tori came in with her cup, I noticed it was one of the twins' cups. I thought in the commotion of switching things from the dining room to the living room things may have gotten a little topsy-turvy. Until I remembered how adamant Jill was in not wanting to switch things up. She must have known. She snatched up her twin cup like it was a family heirloom."
"Like..." said Del, not wanting to say the words.
Allie finished the thought for her: "Like it was already spiked with poison."
The two women stared at one another for a moment that seemed to scream with silence, as the weight of what had just been spoken pressed on their souls.
"How?" asked Del.
"You all arrived at the same time. Then at some point, one or more of you went in to have a look at my tablescape. There had to have been a time when one of those twins went in and was alone with her cup. How long would it take to smear the inside of the cup with poison? Five seconds? Three? Just a finger dip into the cup and it's over. Wipe your finger on a napkin or run it under the tap and you’re in the clear. Now, I want you to answer me a question: Can you tell me how Tori could have gotten a hold of Jill Metzger's cup?"
"I don't think I could."
"When that whole fiasco with the table came up, and Tori commandeered my book club, Jill was clutching her cup like it held her heart. Why is that?"
"She liked it?"
"Someone, somehow, got cyanide into Tori's cup. If you wanted to put poison into someone's tea, this would be a pretty neat way of doing it, don't you agree?"
"'Neat' wouldn't have been my first choice of words, but I get what you’re saying."
"Crystals of sugar mixed with cyanide would be visible. As would just plain cyanide. A smear of honey would remain relatively obscure for as long as it needed to be. Especially if it's had time to dry. Which means that two questions remain."
"Ok," said Del, pausing to take another sip. "One is 'Who switched the cups?' and two...is..."
"Two is, 'Was it intentional?' June Brody seems to think that Tori Cardinal was some sort of hit by a massive conspiracy involving the police departments from the three counties."
"Wait. What?"
She conveyed the whole sordid story, which upon saying it aloud to someone who wasn't pacing in fits of paranoia, sounded more like the crafting of a mind desperate to make sense of the insensible; paranoid indeed, and fraught with assumptions.
"So, let's discount that theory for the time-being," Allie said, turning to the stove to put the kettle on again. "What I'm saying is, we have to ask this: What if Tori wasn't the target? What if
Jill
was the intended victim?"
"Well," said Del, moving to the dining room and beckoning Allie to follow her, "not for nothing, but to me, it's more likely someone would have it out for Tori Cardinal bad enough to murder her. That isn't entirely farfetched, you have to admit."
"Then that would mean that in this scenario, Jill Metzger is the prime suspect. As far as I'm concerned, she had possession of that cup before Tori got her hands on it. No one else touched it. But Jill was the one who asked me for the honey, and Tori collapsed when I was in the kitchen..."
"And we're talking in circles."
Allie froze, looking at the eye in the table. She felt it boring into her accusingly. "I'm a suspect. No one has said it yet, but I know someone talked and now Tomlin is looking for something so he can pin this thing on me. If I killed Tori Cardinal, I would have to have some honey-laced cyanide lying around the house, right?"
"Wait, Jill...?"
"...was looking to spike my honey jar."
"Get out!"
"I must have screwed up her plan pretty bad. I mean, what tea party doesn’t have any honey?"
"A tea party you're throwing."
"Right, but only you'd know that. With Plan A thwarted, she switched to Plan B, in which she rats me out to the cops about, I don’t know, the fact that I sometimes talk about Tori like she's my competition in town or something."
"Competition? For what? Best book club with a murder accompanying? Cuz sweetheart, you got that one hands down."
"Very funny. No. But ever since Tom passed, I don't know, I've found that getting involved with this tiny little town, with all its squawking little gossips and all its inbred charm, it's the kind of town where you want to be admired by everyone. I don’t want to be some secret that people assume things about and talk about behind their hands. I want to be really known. What do I have to offer in that respect besides a flair for orchestrating social gatherings?"
"Yeah, and maybe this isn’t the time, but that part needs a wee bit of work. My darling, I'm afraid you’re no Martha Stewart. You're more like Jimmy Stewart. You know in 'It's a Wonderful Life.'"
"Thanks, BFF."
"Don't mention it. So, where does this leave us?"
"With two suspects: Jill Metzger and the entire Verdenier Police Department."
"And Rachel Forrester."
Allie blinked slowly and shook her head. "'Scuse me?"
"You didn't hear about the money Tori lent her?" Del's eyes widened in preparation to dish out some grade A small town gossip.
Allie shook her head in disbelief. "What? No."
"Oh, pour us out some more of this fine tea and get comfy. I've got a story for you."
She hadn't been to the duck pond since Tom passed. She found it awkward to be walking here now, not with Tom, but with Rachel Forrester at her side.
She'd felt a slight kinship with Rachel. The youngest of the
in crowd
, Rachel possessed at 38 what Allie still didn't possess at her age: poise. She preferred not to look at a person talking to her, instead choosing some distant object, or a spot on the ground just a few feet in front of her, to focus a near unblinking gaze as she processed whatever came her way. This made her a delight to talk to, as it seemed she was able to suck the words out of the air just as soon as they were borne there. She brought a hand up to tuck a few strands of her chocolate-colored hair behind her right ear. And she nodded when it was appropriate, and made the right faces, and the right kinds of small sounds by way of response.
"What did you think of Tori?" said Allie.
"In what way?"
"In the way that we all thought of her. Come on."
The girl smiled. "If you know, why are you asking?"
Allie laughed. "I guess you got me. Let me put it this way. Do you remember when we went to that charity luncheon that the Metzger twins held at the Town Hall? You brought Evan and Christopher with you—Evan was still in the stroller, and his brother was talking up a storm. I remember this like it was yesterday. Little details stick in my mind. It's like a lint trap in there sometimes. And I can't shake them once they get in. Anyway, Christopher was acting the way all five year olds do."
Rachel nodded but didn’t smile.
"And he was asking all sorts of questions about everything. Now, I remember that Tori Cardinal was at our table, and she was really going on, and we were all putting up with it. And she leaves, and Christopher says something about Tori being wealthy. It was this stupid little thing that a kid would say. Rhyming wealthy with healthy and making up stuff. But I got a look at you after he said it. You had this look, I'll never forget it, like he'd spilled some embarrassing secret. You had this nervous smile, as if you were trying to cover it up. I wondered then, as I wondered up until very recently, what that smile was all about."
Rachel nodded at the ground. A mallard waddled through her field of vision, and her eyes followed its tail sashaying jerkily over to the edge of the water where it waited a moment and then flopped in.
"I recalled this incident the other day, when you ranted a bit over how some people have a relentless pursuit of wealth. It's obvious you and Phil do all right. But that wasn't always the case, was it?"
There was an audible breath from the girl as they walked the edge of the pond.
"I know about the loan," Allie said.
Rachel nodded.
"I know that it helped you save Phil's landscaping business, as well as your house when the bank was going to foreclose. I imagine it must have taken quite some time to pay it back. Most of it, anyway."
"At the time of her death," said Rachel, "it still wasn't fully paid."
The woman's gaze was rigidly focused now somewhere far off in front of them, over by the grove of firs that lined the south bank of the pond.
Allie softened her voice. "Owing money can be worse than being a slave sometimes. At least with slavery you have a justification for feeling persecuted. Being in someone's debt, especially someone like Victoria Cardinal, you don’t have that sort of luxury, as it were."
"I didn’t kill that woman," Rachel said defensively.
"I didn’t say you did."
"No, but you were thinking it. You're such a deep thinker, aren’t you? A deep reader as well. Books
and
people. Tell me, what good is it going to do you when you haven't experienced any of it?"
"Rachel—"
"Don’t even presume," Rachel said, turning her gaze on Allie, "that you know what it's like. You have no idea what that woman put us through. And the next time you decide to tell me my fortune, do me a favor and have the decency to cold guess like everyone else. You'll save yourself the indignity of having to listen to another speech like this one."
With that, Rachel Forrester turned and walked briskly out of the park, ducks and geese fluttering out of her way.