Page 33 of Murder on the Page

I bundled sage, bay leaves, rosemary, and thyme in cheesecloth and added the bundle to the soup. “If I’m right, thatmeans Marigold didn’t die at the hands of a robber. It was, indeed, planned.”

I poured myself a second cup of coffee and queued up another song, Beethoven’s “Sunset, The Return to Ulster.” A renowned Beethoven historian once said of Beethoven’s Irish folk song arrangements that they had a sophisticated artlessness. I would agree.

I resumed stirring the soup, and my musings about the poison continued. “A robber wouldn’t have come armed with tetrahydrozoline. A knife or a gun would have done the job faster. On the other hand, a person who knew about Marigold’s valuables, and had been staking out her house in order to follow her, might have known about her dehydration issue.”

Needing more than my own agreement to work through the clues, I phoned Tegan to see if she could break free from the shop for a bit. She said when customer traffic died down, she would come over, but at the moment, the place was overrun with people wanting to know where the murder happened. She couldn’t leave Chloe on her own.

“Why do you want to see me?” she asked.

“I was wondering if you, your mother, or the bank might have a record of valuables Marigold kept in her safety-deposit box.”

She didn’t.

“Also would you bring a list of Feast customers who might be doctors or scientists or even food-safety experts?”

“Are you investigating?” Tegan asked.

“I’m thinking outside the box.”

Seconds after I ended the call, my cell phone jangled. I glanced at the readout, expecting it to be Tegan saying she couldn’t make it, but it was my mother.

I pressed Accept. “Hi, Fern. Is everything okay?” My parents seldom telephoned me. They texted photos of their adventures. “Is Jamie okay?”

“Your father is fine. You worry too much.”

I did, because I’d had to grow up faster than other kids. When I turned five, my parents encouraged me to make adult-type decisions. I established my own eating and sleeping schedules. I created menus. I cooked dinners.

“What about you, Allie?” Fern asked. “We read the news about the murder.”

Be still, my heart!My mother never wanted to know how I was doing. And since when did she and my father read the news? All my life, they’d acted like ostriches, keeping their heads in the sand as it pertained to world events. Oh, sure, Jamie read articles about economic trends, and Fern received direct feeds from journals that would inform her about statistical physics, combinatorics, and other mathematical breakthroughs. She didn’t want to be distracted byrealnews.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “Marigold Markel owned that bookstore you love.”

My head started to spin. My mother actually remembered which bookstore I patronized?

“I’m fine,” I replied, “but we’re all heartbroken. Marigold was so lovely. She didn’t deserve—” My voice trembled.

“Tell me what happened. You were there. What did you see? Will you solve the mystery?”

I gulped. Had she mentally picked up on my morning musings? No way. She did not have ESP. She disdained all things magical or paranormal. “Me? Solve it? Get real.”

“Cookie, c’mon.”

That was the one endearing phrase she had ever called me. Never “sweetie” or “honey.” I had to admit that I liked the nickname. Although my parents had granted me a lot of leeway growing up, they had put their feet down when it came to eating anything sugary. A cookie a week had been their one indulgence. Odd, wasn’t it, that my baking skills became my strong suit?

“You were never good at math, Allie. You could barely graspthe square root of anything. But you’ve always been a mystery buff.”

Hello.Was that a compliment?

“Do you remember when you were a girl and you wanted to grow up to be Nancy Drew or Judy Bolton?”

Or Trixie Belden, I added to the list, a famous teenaged detective who’d struggled with math, as I had; although chemistry, which was akin to baking, I’d grasped. Go figure.

“What are you trying to say, Fern?”

“Don’t trust the police to do their job. They never have and never will. Solve this murder yourself.”

Yes, my parents had a beef with the police, because twenty years ago, someone stole my father’s prized chess set, and the culprit was never apprehended. The chessmen, rare collectibles from Thailand, never showed up on the open market, either, suggesting a collector must have swiped them.

---