He snapped back a response. It was a request. I don’t know if it was followed through or not, but I’m assuming so.
She didn’t say anything. Then she sent back a message. It’s gone. It would be nice to know that the cops picked it up and not some random stranger. She got a thumbs-up after that, which didn’t tell her anything.
She groaned, as she stared down at the message. “Okay, this isn’t helpful.”
She didn’t want to ask him any more questions. That would just piss him off at the moment. She sighed and headed back to her laptop and the notes that she was taking.
When Mack contacted her a couple hours later, he asked, “When did you go look for the poison?”
“Early Monday morning,” she told him. “I wanted to make sure it wasn’t still there to hurt anybody.”
He replied, “Well, the cops went there today to find it.”
“Only today?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied quietly. “So it might be gone already, but the cops didn’t take it.”
Chapter 5
Tuesday Afternoon
That afternoon, Doreen sat outside with a cup of tea on her deck, trying to appreciate being out of doors, trying not to worry. But she had things going on that were worth worrying over.
Good intentions and all of that did not necessarily provide good information. To think that somebody else had cleaned up the box of poison at the park near the beach—and had even dug up maybe some of the loose sand containing the spilled powder in and around there—could have just meant anything from the city gardeners to a concerned citizen.
Doreen would have been much happier if she and Mack had taken care of it themselves that Sunday. But, as soon as they had found the poison, Mack had put in the call to have it removed by a forensics team. Thus he’d thought, for sure, it would have been taken care of immediately.
And it had been, just not by whom they had expected and just not near fast enough. She found that newest tidbit hard to forget about.
Equally troubling was the fact that Nan and Richie were working on Chrissy’s supposed murder by poisoning, which was a whole different ball game. Trying to keep those two in control was like having two bears or lions in your backyard and trying to keep them out of trouble. Doreen didn’t foresee that going well.
She let out a heavy sigh. Switching gears, she tried to figure out what on earth she could do to move either poisoning case forward, Chrissy’s or Alan’s, but she had no way to know what poison was used in either death – if Chrissy was even poisoned. Plus she had no tie to the rat poison at the beach. Really nothing came to mind. But, unless an eyewitness came forward, stating they had actually seen somebody down there near the beach with the box, well, Doreen had nothing to go on yet.
As she sat here at her deck table, her pen flicking back and forth in her fingers, she wondered, considering it was summertime, just how many steady go-to-the-park-every-day people were around here. Would many have seen someone hiding the box to begin with? What about seeing someone take off with it? Surely it took a while to bury the box initially and more time to clean it up afterward. Would somebody have commented on it? She wondered.
She wrote up a small sign on a sheet of paper, with her phone number added, and then, calling the animals to her, she hopped into the car and headed down to Sarsons Beach. She quickly affixed the sign to the message board, asking if anybody had seen the white powder in the box in the garden to contact her.
As she stepped back, an older gentleman joined her, read her note, turned toward her, and asked, “Do I have to phone you?” She looked at him, her eyebrows up. He shrugged. “I come here for my walk almost every day. Then I go home and have tea and biscuits,” he confided. “It’s the only way my wife will let me have my biscuits.”
Doreen wanted to laugh, but, at the same time, she didn’t want to offend him. But he saw the humor in her face.
“But you can’t tell her that I don’t walk,” he stated, with a word of warning. “I just sit here and enjoy the view. Honestly, I think she’s doing me as much of a favor as anything,” he admitted. “I get to sit outside and just have a few minutes to myself.”
At that, she did laugh. “Retirement a bit too much?”
He shook his head. “Fifty years of marriage is a bit too much.” And then he cackled. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” she agreed warmly. “Did you see this box of rat poison that was in the garden?”
He nodded. “It showed up there Sunday.”
She frowned. “I was here Sunday afternoon, when we found it.”
He nodded. “Yep. And I was here in the morning. It wasn’t there, and, when I came back in the afternoon, it showed up.” He shrugged. “I did contact the city about it, and I’m glad to see somebody came and cleaned it up.”
“You know what? You’re right.” She nodded. “I’m happy too. I just wondered if you saw who had put the box there.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t. A couple people were around at the time, but nobody I would have looked at and said, Hey, he’s the guilty party.” Then he frowned. “Not that you can tell who’s guilty anymore. It used to be the shifty-eyed bad guys were easy to spot but not anymore.”
She smiled at him. “No, you’re quite right. They tend to look just like you and me.”
He laughed. “And how do you know I didn’t put it there?”
She looked at him, her eyebrows shooting up. “Did you?”
He shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t do that,” he noted. “Children come around here to enjoy the park and the beach. You never know what they would touch.”
“That was my thoughts exactly,” she shared. “But it still would be nice to know who would have had that poison and why they would have put it out here.”
“To get rid of it,” he replied. “Why else?”
She chuckled. “Well, that makes sense. And did he just throw it, and that’s the casual pattern it made as it fell, or did he deliberately circle the pansies with it?”
He stared at the garden. “Is that what those things are?”
She nodded. “That’s exactly what those things are.”
“Well, he must have hated the pansies to do that,” he suggested. “Maybe the flower bed was full of ants. That rat poison would probably kill them too. I don’t know.”
She couldn’t stop smiling. With him at her side, she walked over to the garden bed. “Whoever removed it did a good job too,” she noted. “The bed barely looks disturbed.”
“Well, wouldn’t have been hard,” he explained. Then he stopped, looked at it closely. “But most of the flowers are gone.”
“Well, they were dying anyway,” she stated, noting, in fact, a big patch of soil had been removed. “And I don’t know if ants would have been affected by the poison or not. However, if you think about it, anything that’s strong enough poison to kill rats should be enough to kill small ants.”
He laughed. “Well, I’m old-school. We sure as heck didn’t hire anybody to take care of rats in my day. You took care of them yourself. And something like this was fairly common back then too.”