“Is this other case something to do with Andy? Are you trying to find him?”
“Her husband? No. It’s related to one of the people who used to work at The Tidepools.
“Good.” She nodded with satisfaction and moved over to another pile of windfall apples.
I moved too. “Why good?”
“Because Andy didn’t kill my sister, and I don’t want to him found. By now, he’s started a new life and he’s entitled to it.”
“It sounds as if you like him.”
“I like Andy a lot. He put up with plenty from my sister and, on top of that, to be suspected of murdering her… well, it’s too unfair. I only wish we hadn’t run; there was no need to.”
“Oh?”
She must have interpreted the comment as skeptical, because her eyes flashed. “Barbara’s death was a suicide. Andy ran because the police started raising all kinds of stupid speculation.”
“He must have been very frightened.”
She shrugged. “Andy always was a bit of a coward. But a nice coward, a gentle man. He wouldn’t hurt anyone, least of all Barbara. He loved her, for some reason.”
“Tell me about Barbara.”
Susan relaxed, now that we were off the subject of Andy. “It may sound as if I disliked my sister. That isn’t really true. It was just that she had so many problems-in addition to the cancer, I mean-and they were all ones she brought on herself.”
“Such as?”
“She drank too much, took all sorts of pills. She’d been in and out of therapy for years, but never stayed long enough for it to do her any good.”
“Did they ever diagnose a specific mental illness?”
“She was a manic-depressive, and as she got older the mood swings became more and more severe. When she found out she had cancer, she went into the depressive state and stayed there. We-Andy and I-felt The Tidepools was the only way to keep her from killing herself. Others in the family-if you’ve read the newspaper accounts, those are the ones the reporters talked to afterward-didn’t agree. Maybe they thought her manic phase was the real Barbara. At any rate, they resented Andy for convincing her to go to the hospice. And when the police began to suspect him, they didn’t help one bit, with their talk of how she would never take her own life.”
Susan Tellenberg had a lot of pent up anger in her, and I gathered she’d been fonder of Andy than a sister-in-law should be. I glanced at her left hand-no wedding ring. She could be widowed or divorced, with a crush on her sister’s gentle husband.
I said, “But Andy convinced her to go to The Tidepools.”
She nodded. “She didn’t want to go, but he insisted. It was the one time in their entire life together that he got his way. Usually he’d knuckle under to her demands. I’d ask him why-it wasn’t helping her get any better or take responsibility for her life-and he’d just say it was preferable to living in perpetual conflict. Anyway, Barbara went to The Tidepools, but she hated it from day one and made sure everybody knew that. And then she died. She must have saved up her medication, like the others did.”
“The newspaper stories say she wasn’t receiving it long enough to have saved it.”
Susan shrugged and moved again with her basket. “Barbara might even have brought the drugs with her. Like I said, she was always taking one kind of pill or another.”
“Did the autopsy show that what she took was the same as what they gave out at the hospice?”
“Apparently they couldn’t be that specific. What they use there is a mixture, and an autopsy can’t show exact proportions or brand names, just the types of drugs present.”
That was true, and it widened the range of possible suspects. Anyone with access to common prescription drugs could have killed Barbara. “What exactly made Andy run?”
“I told you, the police suspected him.”
“But there must have been some triggering factor.”
Susan stopped picking up apples and looked into the branches of the tree above. Sunlight cast dappled shadows over her troubled face. She sat that way for a few moments, then said, “It was all the confusion over the money that did it.”
“The money Barbara had inherited, you mean?”
“Yes. The police found out that Andy had drawn it all out of the bank in cash a few days before Barbara died.”
“Why did he do that, do you know?”
She shook her head.
“Didn’t he ever talk to you about it?”
“No.” She looked up into the trees again. “By the time I heard about it, Andy was gone. I’ve thought and thought about it ever since, but I can’t come up with any answer except…”
“Except?”
“Except that Barbara made him do it. She was always making him do things.”
“But why? What would she have needed forty thousand dollars in cash for?”
Susan rubbed her hands together and went back to picking up the apples. “I have a theory that she planned to bribe someone at the hospice to help her escape.”
“Escape? She wasn’t being held against her will, was she?”
“Well, not exactly. But you’ve got to remember Barbara was not really too well wrapped toward the end. She was paranoid and…I don’t know. That’s my theory.”
She seemed to have a number of theories, all of them conflicting and aimed at proving Andy didn’t kill her sister. I sat there, rolling an apple between my palms.
Susan must have sensed my doubtfulness. “Look,” she said, “I really don’t know what Barbara intended. I never was able to understand what went on in her head. She had everything-she was smart and pretty and had a husband who loved her. She didn’t have to work as a waitress and bring up a kid alone like I do. She didn’t have a husband who abandoned her before the kid was even born, like I did. And, when it was time for our rich aunt to will her money to somebody, she chose Barbara, not me. But did Barbara appreciate any of that? No. Not my sister. All her life she worked so hard, so goddamned hard, at screwing up.”
I remained silent, rolling the apple around and forming a theory of my own. “Had your sister accepted the fact she was going to die?”
“She believed it, if that’s what you mean.”
“But acceptance-the kind they talk about at The Tidepools-did she feel that?”
“Did she want to live out her life with dignity? Do something positive with what remained? I doubt it.”
“Then how about this?” I pitched the apple into the basket. “How about if she did make Andy withdraw the money, so she could use it as a bribe-”
“That’s what I said.”
“But not a bribe to get out of the place. A bribe for someone to get her the drugs and administer them. What if she bought herself a mercy killing?”
Susan looked startled, but then nodded. “That’s very possible. It would explain why they didn’t find the money with her things at the hospice.”
“Of course,” I went on, “why would she spend forty thousand dollars when she could have asked her own husband to help her?”
“No. Andy would never go along with something like that. He would never have helped her kill herself, and he certainly would never have gotten her the money had he known what it was for. She must have made up some story to tell him.”
“Andy worked at Port San Marco General Hospital. He would have had access to drugs.”
Stubbornly she shook her head. “No, he didn’t. He was in the education department; it’s a teaching hospital. He had nothing to do with drugs.”
“I thought he was a medical technician.”
“Yes, but he didn’t handle drugs. He was a medical photographer. He took pictures of autopsies and put together slide shows and teaching aids for the hospital’s educational programs.”
I stared at her.
“He was a damned good photographer too. He used to exhibit the portraits he took as a hobby in shows around the area.”
I sat in silence for several seconds, feeling a growing excitement. Things were beginning to fall into place at last.