“We can only hope!” She waved, climbed into her ancient Jeep Cherokee, and headed off to the college.
I got into my sedate sedan and drove back to Chilson, strong-mindedly parking at the boardinghouse instead of the library. Walking was good for me, if I didn’t get frostbite. I popped inside to grab my backpack, which I’d already loaded with a lunch of potato chips and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and hunted around for Eddie.
“There you are.” I found him on the floor in my bedroom, between the bed and the outside wall. He was rolled mostly, but not all the way, onto his back and looked up at me with eyes barely open.
“Mrr,” he said, then yawned, showing me the unattractive roof of his mouth.
“Nice.” I reached down to rub his tummy. “See you later, pal, okay?”
“Mrr,” he said sleepily, and before I was out of the room, his purrs had turned into a snore.
I tried to shake away the nappy contagion of his yawns as I slid into my boots, then stepped outside. “Well, that did the trick,” I gasped as the cold hit me once again. Five minutes inside had let me forget how freaking cold it was. I cast one look at my still-warm car. So tempting. I girded myself to be brave and strong and marched myself in the direction of down-town.
Wind and winter and white swirled about me. I thought about Arctic expeditions and the White Witch and Jon Snow and was startled, just before I reached the main shopping blocks, when a voice called out. “Minnie! Do you have a minute?”
I blinked out of my book-induced reverie and found myself directly in front of the sheriff’s office staring at Detective Hal Inwood, who was standing half in and half out of the door. “Good morning!” I said. “You’re the exact person I wanted to talk to.”
“Not out here,” he said, looking down at his coat-less arms and boot-free feet. “Please not out here.”
Laughing, I followed him inside and into the interview room. “This morning,” I said, unzipping my coat, “Aunt Frances and I had breakfast at the Red House Café, the place Sunny Scoles owns—it’s outstanding, by the way, you should try it—and she had those maple sugar packets. But she only has them out on certain days, to help track sugar usage, so maybe that’s a . . .” I stopped talking, because though Hal seemed to be listening to me, he hadn’t pulled out his memo pad and he wasn’t taking any notes.
“You don’t think this is important?” I asked, trying to keep my expression neutral. “Maybe it won’t turn out to be, but shouldn’t you at least check it out?” I glanced into the hallway. Where was Ash? He was usually more sympathetic to my point of view than his staid and rule-bound superior.
“This is why I pulled you in out of the cold,” Hal said. “The test results on the sugar packet you found in Rowan Bennethum’s house have come back.”
“And what?” I asked. “Don’t keep me hanging. The suspense is . . . is making my blood pressure go up.”
“He doesn’t want to tell you,” Ash said, sitting in the chair next to his supervisor. “Morning, Minnie.”
“Tell me what?” I looked from one to the other. In the past, I’d been able to gauge what Ash was thinking, or at least what he was feeling, but not today.
Hal sighed. “There was nothing in that packet other than what should have been there. Not a single trace.”
I stared at him. Listened to my heart thud a few times. Heard my breaths go in and out. “They’re sure?” I whispered.
Ash nodded. “Double runs are standard,” he said. “They’re very sure.”
“Like sure sure?”
He flashed a short grin. “Lots of sure. There’s no room for doubt.”
I slumped down in the chair. How could that be? I’d been so sure. It was the only thing that made sense. What other reason was there for the packet to be in the kitchen at all? Hang on . . .
“Okay,” I said, sitting up straight. “Maybe it didn’t have poison, but someone brought that sugar packet into the house.” My words tumbled over each other as I tried to explain. “It couldn’t have been Rowan, because she didn’t touch the stuff. And it couldn’t have been a family member, because Rowan was the only one in the house, and she would have picked up an empty sugar packet left by the kids or Neil. Where else could it have come from if not the killer?”
Ash glanced at Hal, then said, “It could have come from lots of people. The mail carrier, if he’d dropped off a package and she’d invited him in. Or a neighbor.”
I opened my mouth, about to point out that those things could be checked, when Hal put in his two cents.
“It could have been dropped by a friend. Or caught on the bottom of a boot and brought into the house by Ms. Bennethum herself.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said flatly. “All those scenarios are. You didn’t know Rowan. She wouldn’t have missed seeing something like that sugar packet. She just wouldn’t have.”
But no matter how much I argued, they wouldn’t budge from their opinion, and five minutes later I was out on the street, face to the wind and fuming.
How could they not understand the importance of that stupid packet, poison or no?
And more important, how was I going to make them see?
Chapter 12
The only noise at our table was the light tink of two knives and two forks against plates. Rafe and I were at City Park Grill in Petoskey, enjoying a quiet dinner. A very quiet dinner. We’d been mostly silent on the drive, silent while ordering and waiting for our food, and now we were being quiet while eating. This needed to stop, so I said the first thing that popped into my head.
“Remember Giuseppe’s?” I asked, naming an Italian restaurant in Charlevoix that had been closed for years. “I still miss their pasta.”
“What?” Rafe looked up. “Oh. Yeah. Me, too. But I hear the new place there is good.”
I nodded, but since there didn’t seem to be anything else to add, I turned my attention back to my food. Sort of. Part of me was wondering why Rafe was being so quiet—I hadn’t honestly known he could be—but most of my focus was on something else altogether, as it had been since that morning.
How could Hal and Ash not understand? How could it be that something so obviously important was scoffed at as unworthy by those two? Was it because they were men and not accustomed to proper cleaning procedures?
I didn’t want to think so. After all, Ash had lived on his own for years and his apartment had always seemed, if not cozy and welcoming, at least tidy. And Hal was a detective with thirty-odd years of experience. Surely he’d come across cases that were solved on evidence weirder than a sugar packet.
And it’s important! I thought, sawing at my meat fiercely. What would I have to do to make them understand?
“Keep that up and you’ll need a spoon to eat,” Rafe said.
“What?” I looked down at my plate and recognized that the pork was already in pieces small enough to feed a toddler. “Oh. Sorry. I was thinking about something else.” Then, since I didn’t want him to ask what the something was, I said, “You’ve been quiet tonight. Did you do something stupid that you’re now regretting?”
Since Rafe and I had known each other for years, our new and wonderfully more intimate relationship was starting with the behavioral patterns we’d established when we’d first met as kids, which was to say whatever we felt like without thinking too much about consequences.
“One of the kids has been diagnosed with cancer,” he said.
All my breath rushed out in an instant, as if I’d been punched in the solar plexus. “I’m so sorry,” I said, wishing there was something better to say. But what else was there? Guilt surged through me. One of the middle school students had cancer, and I’d been making fun of Rafe for being quiet. “And I’m sorry I called you stupid.”