He moved ponderously on the couch, but his voice got clearer. Maybe his drinks were wearing off. “All I had were first names, and the fact that they came from Maine. So I played detective, managed to get my hands on Yale alumni lists. There are a couple of thousand alums in Maine, but I was looking for people from the class of 1970 and finally managed to find a Hank and a Gardner. One was a doctor who ran Bridgewater Hall. I had a degree in music therapy, had good references . . . and was willing to work cheap. After getting the gig, I just kept my eyes open. It was just a stroke of luck for me that Gardner also happened to be a patient there. I managed to snag a tissue when Dr. Reese had a bloody nose, then I got hold of a couple of glasses that Gardner had drunk from, which was a hell of a lot easier. I sent them off to one of those mail-in DNA places, and here’s the answer, postmarked about a month ago.” He tapped a finger on a couple of letters lying beside the notebook. “Modern science says there’s a ninety-nine percent chance that Gardner was my father.”
“So you found him.” Sunny couldn’t think of anything else to say as she tried to digest all of Luke’s revelations.
“And I was even happy. Dr. Reese, well, he came off as a bit of a stiff. It was a relief to find out that Gardner was my dad. He seemed cheerful, even if he was on his back most of the time. He always had a smile and a joke. I was glad I’d found him.” Luke fell silent for a moment. “But all I knew was the sick guy at Bridgewater Hall. When I heard all that stuff people were whispering at the memorial, what Alfred said out loud, I had to wonder. Was I a chump to come looking for him?”
“People are rarely all one thing or all the other,” Sunny pointed out. “If he was nice to you, enthusiastic, maybe he liked you. Maybe he wanted you to think well of him—to remember the good in him.” She hesitated. “Did you tell him?”
Luke shook his shaggy head. “I was sort of edging toward it, working up to it. I almost told him the night he died. See, I did take some time off from pushing papers around and went to see him. He’d been complaining about feeling nervous, but they wouldn’t give him anything for it. So I mixed up some of Mom’s nerve tonic and smuggled it in for him, gave him a dose—”
“In a glass of brandy,” Sunny finished, remembering Ollie’s story.
“The stuff tastes awfully strong, and I thought that would cut it a bit. Gardner used to say a good snort was probably as good as a sleeping pill.” He stopped, blinking. “How’d you know about that?”
“Ollie woke up and overheard a little while you were visiting with Gardner.” Sunny looked over at the wreck of a notebook. “What was in that tonic?”
Luke reached over and turned tattered pages. “Here it is.” He passed the book over to Sunny. Luke’s mom had unformed, loopy, hard-to-read handwriting that started large on the top lines and progressively shrank as she got closer to the bottom of the page.
“What is this—‘toxic’?” Sunny pointed at a word.
Luke tried to focus. “No, ‘tonic.’”
They ended up sitting together on the couch, trying to decipher the recipe. It only got harder as the letters got smaller. “What is this here? ‘Stop’? Or maybe ‘Stup’?”
“Steep, like you do with a teabag. In this case, you do it more than once to draw some bad stuff out of the monkshood.”
“That was my next question. I thought it was ‘mink stool.’”
“No, definitely monkshood,” Luke told her. “‘Steep monkshood 2X’—two times.”
Sunny peered more closely. “Okay, I can see the rest. But that ‘2X’—I think that’s a seven.”
“No, it’s a two. Do it twice.” He bent over the notebook, “See? There’s a bottom on the two . . . or is that the crosspiece on the T in the next line? Oh, man, don’t tell me I got it wrong.”
Sunny sat very still, her face pale. “Luke,” she said gently, “monkshood is pretty dangerous stuff. My mom had some in a corner of her garden. But she rooted it all out when I was very little because she caught me trying to taste a flower. Mom really freaked out. Have you ever made that tonic before?”
Luke shook his head. “I just followed the recipe. I really don’t remember exactly what I did now. If I screwed it up—do you think I brought on the attack that Gardner had? It’s not the first time I gave him the stuff—he seemed fine the next day. Look, here’s the leftover tonic.” He went to the kitchen counter and returned with a small bottle of clear fluid. Sunny accepted it into her palm. She didn’t want to get any fingerprints messed up.
“I think we’d better have this checked out,” Sunny told him.
“Yeah.” Luke wasn’t just getting more sober with every passing minute. He was getting paler and scareder. “I just wanted to know my father—to do a favor for him. People are going to think I was after his money. That’s the last thing I wanted.”
“I’ll get this to a doctor.” She got a pen and wrote down a phone number. “And this is a lawyer I know. I think you’d better call him.”
16
Sunny drove through the darkness, the bottle of nerve tonic lying on the seat beside her in a plastic bag. The moment she left Luke’s apartment building, she’d gone to call Will, only to realize that her cell phone was in the pocket of her black jacket—which was still on the passenger’s seat in Will’s pickup. So she drove home at a very sedate speed, not wanting to even jostle the evidence.
You’d think I was driving home with a bottle of nitroglycerine, she thought. Well, it could blow this whole case sky-high. Sunny sighed in relief when she at last pulled up in her driveway. Using just her thumb and forefinger, she picked up the bag and walked inside the house—where she found Mike waiting for her in the hallway.
“What’s going on with Luke?” He waved the note Sunny had left. “Is he okay? That was a pretty rough evening he had.”
“‘Rough’ might be an understatement,” Sunny reported, giving her dad the highlights of her recent conversation with Luke.
“Wow—he told you he’s actually Gardner’s son? And that he was in the room giving him something to drink the night Gardner died?” Mike stared at the bag in her hand. “Is that the stuff? What are you going to do with it?”
“I think it’s more like, ‘What am I going to do, question mark?’” Sunny shook her head. “No, that doesn’t sound right. But here’s my plan. First, I’m going to call Will so we can decide what to do with this blasted bottle. And get my cell phone back from his truck. Second, I’m going online to learn more about monkshood.”
“We used to have some in the backyard, in the shady area by the garage,” Mike said. “Big blue flowers. They were very pretty.” His expression went from reminiscent to grim. “Your mom got rid of them all when she found you messing with them.”
“I know, I remember,” Sunny told him. “That’s why I got so worried when I heard what was in this tonic. Mom gave me a good scolding—said they were dangerous. Now I’ve got to find out exactly how dangerous they are.”
By the time Will arrived fifteen minutes later, Sunny had finished her research and was ready for his questions. “You think Luke killed Gardner with something made from flowers?” Will asked.
“The active ingredient is something called aconite,” she told him. “And yes, it comes from the monkshood. Aconite is used in homeopathic medicine, but it’s dangerous stuff. Too much, and it’s poisonous. From what I’ve been reading, the symptoms are numbness in the face, weakness in the limbs, and vomiting. In the end, your heart stops, and you die.”
“Which pretty much sounds like what happened to Gardner Scatterwell.” Will frowned, opening the bag to look at the bottle inside. “What do you think we should do? Have the contents tested, or go straight to Nesbit?”