Page 98 of The Usual Family Mayhem

One step into the kitchen and my scone fantasy vanished. Gram and Celia sat there, talking with Abigail Burns.TheAbigail Burns. For the second time. The ladies had to know Abigail’s visiting should not become a habit. Not while she still was a murder suspect.

I inhaled, preparing for whatever storm was gathering strength on the horizon. “Good morning.”

Gram sipped her tea. “Kasey, you remember Abigail.”

All too well. “How are you, Mrs. Burns?”

“Abigail, please.”

We shook hands. Mine swallowed hers. She was so petite. So pretty and polite. It was the otherpwords that caused the problem—“poison” and “prison.”

She looked like a lot of the women in town. Blond, and almost doll-like with how perfectly she sat and talked and walked. The type of woman that always wore the right clothes and knew the right people. She likely performed huge amounts of unpaid work for local charities and had once done the same in parent groups at Austin’s schools.

Abigail probably enjoyed a full life before marriage and certainly deserved one now. From all the whispers around town, Cash had viewed her as the perfect trophy wife for someone with his pedigree and credentials. A trophy he could put on the shelf and ignore. A trophy he could break.

Gram gestured for me to join them at the table. “Abigail was just telling us about the initial findings in her husband’s death investigation.”

No buildup. Gram dove right in.

I was afraid to move. Afraid I might say the wrong thing. “Good.”

Not my smoothest moment but how exactly did one handle a situation like this? We all knew the truth, or pieces of it, but were pretending we didn’t. I loved to make up stories but I’m not sure I could have created one like this.

Celia frowned at my word choice. “The police believe Cash was poisoned.”

Not new information. The fact the ladies tiptoed into this topic meant something. With my luck, something very bad.

“The police have narrowed down the contamination to his water bottle. It had traces of arsenic in it,” Gram said.

Abigail twisted a napkin between her fingers. “He had this thing about staying hydrated. He used the bottle at work. No one else could touch it. It was a rule of his.”

Convenient and helpful for Abigail’s plan. There must have been two bottles and some big switch I couldn’t figure out, but I could imagine Gram coming up with this scenario.

“Apparently arsenic is odorless and can’t be detected by taste, so it’s easy to administer.” Gram took another sip of tea. Then one more. “It often isn’t detected in the bloodstream after death because no one thinks to test for it.”

Look at Gram knowing all the arsenic facts.

“The dose must have been high enough to kill him. He called me that day and complained about stomach pain. He’d started vomiting.” Abigail cleared her throat and her fingers kept clenching that napkin. “Naturally, I thought it was the flu or maybe food poison... poisoning.”

Sure, she did.

“The police were skeptical about the death being from natural causes from the start. Something about the way he was clutching the water bottle when his assistant found him tipped them off,” Abigail continued. “That’s why they tested everything in his office, including the watercooler. And ran the appropriate tests on him.”

All three of them acted like they were sharing some shocking reveal, but their body language didn’t match their words. They held their bodies stiff to the point of snapping.

I tried to think of a question to ask. The kind of questionsomeone who didn’t know anything would ask. “How would the arsenic get in the bottle?”

I really wanted to ask where one would get arsenic. You couldn’t just pick it up at the store or order it over the internet... unless you could. I was the only one at the table who was not an expert on arsenic. But since the answer to that hypothetical question would likely beGramI skipped it.

“No one knows. The poison wasn’t found anywhere else in the office or in the water supply. There were security cameras in the lobby and outside the building, but there wasn’t anything unusual or unexpected on the video. The police checked at home, too, of course, and found nothing.”

Gram nodded. “The whole thing is so unfortunate.”

Oh, Gram.

After a bit of stammering, Abigail continued. “The water bottle was out in the open. On his desk. It only has Cash’s fingerprints on it. The police have no clue what happened or how.”

For a second, so short, the pain cleared from Abigail’s face. She looked relieved.

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