Death on Shady Bridge by McLinn Patricia

Author:McLinn, Patricia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery
ISBN: 9781944126292
Publisher: Craig Place Books
Published: 2020-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

“There’s a sheriff’s department vehicle in your driveway.”

Clara’s announcement came as we turned into my street.

After class, we’d gone to the café for their newest dessert. A chocolate brownie sliced into layers with toffee chip ice cream and caramel sauce between each layer. We ordered to go, planning to debrief more thoroughly at my house while we gleefully desserted.

All the anticipation of that concoction fled.

I sighed. “Worse than that, there’s a sheriff’s deputy in the vehicle in my driveway.”

I pulled up beside the vehicle. Its occupant emerged and came to my window, gesturing for me to lower it.

North Bend County Sheriff’s Deputy Hensen leaned in, addressing both of us. “Have fun at your class tonight?”

“It was all right,” Clara said judiciously. “But they kept focusing on plants making you sick to your stomach or getting a rash.”

“Disappointing for you,” he said dryly.

“It was. We needed to know about the stuff that’s fatal. Especially, that could reasonably be used to kill someone. It doesn’t do us any good if it would take a couple pounds to give, say, a grown man a stomach ache. We need to know the real deadly stuff. How much, how fast. I suppose, we can look up some of the possibilities now, but it would have been so simple for her to tell us what we wanted to know. After all, they billed it as all about a poison garden.

“I bet you have classes that tell you all that, without getting bogged down in this plant will give you a rash or that plant will give your cat a tummy ache. Oh—” She turned to me. “—that’s another thing to know — what it tastes like. Because that would determine how it could be administered. If you had to mask the taste to get them to ingest enough to kill them. See? That class hardly helped at all.”

“What it did do was make several citizens who attended concerned about a couple of potential poisoners in town.”

“Several citizens?” Clara asked.

He grunted. “Fine. One. That’s plenty.”

“You know we’re not homicidal lunatics, so—”

“Hah,” he scoffed.

“—what is this really about?”

“It’s about not having you two scare the citizens of North Bend County.”

I weighed in. “Surely you’re not telling us we can’t ask questions. Or that there’s a law against research.”

I heard a sound that promised to make his dentist a little richer in the not-too distant future, as Deputy Hensen ground his teeth.

“Look, just do everybody a favor and do your research on the internet like all the other whackos.”

“Well,” Clara said, “we’re going to have to, aren’t we? Since the class didn’t answer our questions.”

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