She'd know, better than anyone, the amount of Digoxin needed to silence Lolly forever.
Rufus. I couldn't quite fathom how Rufus Beaulac could have possibly benefited from Lolly's death, but an unquiet thought about him disturbed me. First, he struck me as a man much like a lapdog; he'd do the bidding of whoever he considered, as medieval as it sounds, his master. I'd no doubt that Uncle Mutt's ego was fueled to a degree by Rufus's loyalty. I wondered if when Uncle Mutt found a task too distasteful, Rufus became his errand boy. With a shudder, I envisioned Rufus nodding slightly as Uncle Mutt told him to get rid of Lolly. I didn't believe Rufus would use poison; his methods would be far more direct. Unless, of course, his hands were directed by Uncle Mutt or some other intelligence.
Wendy. I thought her beautiful and dangerous, like a blossoming rose with piercing thorns. One moment she was leaning against Uncle Mutt in the casual caress of a lover; the next she was conniving with Philip to bilk Mutt. I did not like her or trust her, and I could easily imagine her poisoning anyone who got in her way. Also-she had the greatest opportunity. She'd prepared the food we'd eaten. And even though we'd dined buffet style, had she managed to give Lolly a select deadly portion?
Gretchen and Bob Don. Of course I didn't suspect them. While Gretchen had proved in the past she could scheme with the best of them, I did not believe her capable of murder. And Bob Don… the very idea was ridiculous. But they were as inexorably caught up in the wire-edged web of this family's pain as any of the others.
Gretchen's past with Bob Don's brother Paul still seemed a sore wound, and Bob Don's own ignoring of Sass's numerous faults might blind them to further tragedies. I was convinced Gretchen's drunkeness wasn't due to her own failure, but rather to the cruelty of one of our own. I resolved to protect Bob Don and Gretchen from whoever might have targeted them for such vicious behavior. And was that person necessarily Lolly's killer?
Lolly had sent me terrifying mail. Had she terrorized anyone else? If so, had that other victim struck back with annihilating force?
I also weighed the possibility that Lolly wasn't the intended victim. Poison can be used with uncertain aim. What if someone else at the dinner table was the mark?
And even if I dismissed that possibility and accepted Lolly as the target for the digitalis, I had hardly considered the puzzle of opportunity. The family had bustled in and out of the dining room before the meal. Candace claimed only Lolly had drunk red wine, and a fair amount of it. I remembered her arm lashing out in her initial convulsion, spilling her wine across the snowy tablecloth. If Jake's Digoxin pills were the source, the capsules could have been opened and emptied into Lolly's wine. But when? If Lolly's dinnertime cocktail was consistently a red wine that no one else touched… I needed to ask some hard, hard questions. Someone had the time to dope her wine, or her food.
I rubbed my temples. My theories were all well and good, but they were more insubstantial than the ocean spray that scented the air. I didn't have proof and I didn't have a clear path to follow to a suspect. And no confirmation that Lolly had even been murdered. If it was foul play, no doubt the police here would catch the murderer. After all, it had to be one of us. And while they completed their investigation, we might all be stuck on this island a lot longer than anyone had planned-trapped with a murderer cold enough to kill within his or her own family.
I decided to check on Gretchen and found her in her room, drinking a large glass of ice water.
“Can I come in?” I asked. She didn't answer but closed her eyes and placed the cool glass against her forehead. I ventured inside her room, shutting the door behind me, and stood before her bed.
“How do you feel?” I asked. She sat on the edge of her mattress and didn't look at me.
“Gretchen?” I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. Her earlier, pain-filled confession made me more patient than my hair-trigger temper generally allowed. I didn't want her to hurt any more.
“Bob Don said you think someone spiked my soda with alcohol.” Her tone was colorless and flat.
“Yes. Unless you've changed your story about what happened.”
“No. Not at all.” She rubbed her cheek with her hand, as though stinging from an invisible slap. “I don't know why anyone would slip me a mickey, though.”
I chose my words carefully. “Although no one here seems willing to admit the possibility quite yet, I think Lolly was poisoned.” Gretchen's head jerked up, shock lighting her eyes. I continued: “If someone here was cruel enough to kill her, spiking your drink for a laugh wouldn't be hard to imagine.”
She stared at me. Darkness bagged the skin beneath her eyes. She absently rubbed the hollow of her throat. “But the family always wanted me to be sober. What's the point of derailing me?”
“They can't derail you. Not if you don't let them.” I sounded like Aubrey, but I didn't know what else to say. Meaningless advice works-at least to assuage the giver's guilt.
The ploy didn't play. Gretchen answered me with a hard smile. “You're being awfully nice. I guess it's easy for you to feel superior to me right now.” Her voice had taken on an unpleasant edge I was all too familiar with.
“What?”
“I can see the goddamned pity in your face, Jordan. You're just looking at me like I'm a worthless drunk all over again.”
“That is about as far from truth as you could wander, Gretchen. I've been worried about you.”
She shook her head and stared again at the window and its bright canvas of sky. “How could you worry about me? After all the bad blood that's passed between us?”
“I don't know. It's not like you and I have ever been close. And we may never be. But I know how hard you've worked for your sobriety and it pisses me off beyond belief that anyone would casually shove you toward the bottle.”
“We never have been close,” she murmured, echoing my words. She tented her hands before her face, hiding her eyes from me, breathing in her own breath. “Do you know how much I loved Bob Don when I first met him? How painful it was not to be with him?”
“Because you were married to his brother?” I asked.
“No, Jordan, because he wore too much plaid,” she snapped. My heart lifted a little-she still had a sense of humor, albeit twisted. I didn't answer. I only laughed softly. She laughed, too, but an undercurrent of deep sadness cooled any frivolity in her voice.
She continued: “Yes. And Paul wasn't a good man. He was… empty inside. I don't know how else to describe it. Deborah would never speak ill of him-she's kept only the kind memories of her daddy. But Bob Don was so different from Paul.” She lowered her hands and tears glimmered in her eyes. “I thought if I could be with Bob Don, I'd never do anything to ruin it. And when I'd divorced Paul and married Bob Don, I was the happiest woman alive. Until the booze stole my life.”
I remembered once when Bob Don had told me that Gretchen drank because she suspected someone mattered more in his life than she did-that person being me, his secret son. Now I wondered if there wasn't another reason, locked in the meshwork of relationships between Gretchen and the Goertz brothers.
“So why did you start to drink, Gretchen?” A terrible question, finally asked.
Her lips, pale and clean of her usual makeup, trembled. “What does it matter now? I drank. I craved it and I drank my fill, every day, for years.” She stood and crossed to the window. She laughed, a low, throaty chuckle. “I'm amazed my liver's still with me. Remember the bad flu epidemic several years ago? I got terribly sick, and I still drank. Bob Don had to put me into the hospital in Austin. He didn't want everyone in Mirabeau to know how bad off I was. Protecting my reputation, which was like holding rainwater in a leaky barrel. I probably should have died then. I didn't. I got a second chance.”