Digging Up the Dead (8 page)

“Seems to happen to you a lot. All right, thank you for your time,” said Parnell, getting up and practically charging out the door. “Oh, here’s my card.”

“I still have your card from the last time we met on the Whittaker matter, remember?”

“Please call me if you think of anything useful to the investigation.”

Parnell left, clattering down the steps as quickly as possible. Tosca was sure he was hoping she’d never contact him again. Their relationship had not been a happy one after she’d shown him how wrong he’d been about a previous case.

Tosca planned to begin her own investigating. Here was an opportunity, albeit a sad one, to solve a crime, write it up and go home. Surely her editor couldn’t refuse her the promotion she would deserve.

She started her online search by finding several web sites about the poisonous plant, following the trail of the calotropis gigantean, commonly known as giant milkweed. She read that the toxins within the plant were similar to digitalis or digoxin, a common heart medication. While all parts of the plant were considered toxic, it was the milky sap that could induce abnormal heart rates, tremors and seizures. It contained chemicals that were considered steroidal heart poisons.

A site devoted to Hinduism warned in one of its forums that giant milkweed is extremely toxic, and if the stem is cut and the sap touches the skin, it can cause sores and ulcers. At her computer she Googled “giant milkweed” and read with mounting excitement more references to the plant than Parnell had mentioned. An article was posted on a Far Eastern website that welcomed readers to the “sacred world of Hinduism.” The lead headline read, “Giant milkweed – VERY TOXIC!” Several people commented in response on the site, one writing, “High doses can kill, and the sap was used in infanticide.” Another stated, “The sap was used as poison on arrows,” and that, mixed with food, can poison human beings.

“How lovely,” thought Tosca. “A naturally green method of murdering someone.”

Another web site suggested logging on to the Pet Poison Helpline. Here, Tosca typed “poison and milkweed” into the search box, not expecting any information when she clicked on it. To her surprise three pages showed up, noting the plant was poisonous to cats and dogs. “The toxins within these plants are similar to digitalis or digoxin, a common heart medication used in both human and veterinary medicine. Even the water in a vase containing the giant milkweed has been reported to cause toxicosis. Clinical signs from ingestion include cardiovascular (e.g. abnormal heart rhythm and rate), electrolyte abnormalities (e.g. a life-threatening high potassium level) … tremors and seizures.”

At the web site of the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at a university in Florida, giant milkweed was discussed at length in an article by a horticulture agent whose specialty was tropical flowering trees. She noted that the plant, calotropis gigantean, originated in the Far East, including India, and that the milky sap was poisonous. A third article Tosca read claimed that a copious white sap flowed whenever stems were cut.

Yet another article caught her eye, “A Poisoner’s Guide to Central Park.” The writer claimed that enough poisons existed in New York’s eight-hundred forty-three-acre park to threaten the health of every jogger. Tosca read avidly, confirming at other online sites that the white fluid was highly toxic and that one milkweed in the calotropis plant family was more lethal than strychnine. Even the water in a vase became lethal if giant milkweeds were placed in it.

The plants were grown in many countries and sometimes used to attract Monarch butterflies. Full sun was preferred.

“Hmm,” she murmured, “dandy for growing in Southern California.”

Then she remembered seeing the large glass case of butterflies in Karma’s office. She hoped Sam was still at Karma’s business. She picked up her cell phone, found the number and touched the screen to dial.

“Karma’s Garden Center. Yeah?”

“Sam, this is Mrs. Trevant. I was there earlier today with my neighbor. I’m sorry to bother you again, but I wondered if you would mind taking a peek at Karma’s butterfly collection and let me know if there are any Monarchs included?”

“Don’t have to. There’s a couple right here.” He took the jar down from the shelf. “Caught ‘em meself.”

“Thank you.”

She was about to hang up when he added, “Had dozens of Monarchs attracted to the giant milkweeds before she sold ‘em to her customers. Kama likes to collect Monarchs, but I’m not a fan of butterflies. They’re just winged worms, that’s all. Good riddance, I say. Karma tole me that’s why that publisher lady died. The cops said she was killed with the poison from the plant by drinking it. Ha!”

Tosca pulled her cell quickly away from her ear at the sound of Sam slamming his phone onto its receiver, speculating that Karma probably still used an old-fashioned phone in the office.

Sam’s last remark sent Tosca’s brain spinning. Someone had to have known the white milkweed sap was poisonous and added it to Sally’s drink. It would have blended perfectly into Sally’s creamy White Russian cocktail without being noticed. But I can’t believe Karma would do such a thing, she thought. She’s a lover of nature behind that brash manner of hers, and she takes in stray cats. The woman readily admits she’s underwater financially, but surely she’s not desperate enough to kill someone. Yet, who else but her would know that milkweed sap could be deadly? Was Karma coerced to murder Sally? And if so, by whom?

Sam said that Karma had planted the milkweeds in several yards on the island. Maybe one of the homeowners had a motive for killing Sally. Time to do some more investigating. But now she needed to explore the flash drive.

Still munching on toast and marmalade, Tosca sat in the dining nook and booted up her laptop, pleased that J.J. was planning to go out, leaving her alone. She didn’t want any distraction from what she was convinced was an exciting find.

Tosca inserted the flash drive Arlene had found under the chair at Karma’s house and waited for its Windows file directory to appear on the monitor. This time I’m going to study this file from beginning to end, she resolved, and see if it really is Sanderson’s last book. If lengthy, it might mean all his notes are here, too, and probably several drafts of the same book.

Hmm, she reflected. If part of the long document is the lost manuscript Karma was talking about at the party, it made sense that Sally would have it, but why was she keeping it secret? Had she even told Karma she’d found it, if indeed she had? The anniversary celebration the other night would have been the perfect time to announce the discovery of Sanderson’s lost manuscript. His granddaughter said they were still looking for it, yet here it was copied, Tosca assumed, from Sanderson’s own handwriting or typewritten pages and certainly from a computer’s hard drive. The question was, whose?

The more Tosca thought about the possibility of the treasure trove of an undiscovered work, the more eager she was to read every word. It would be the centerpiece of the new Sanderson Library that Karma planned to build.

J.J. interrupted Tosca’s musings. “I’m off to the garage,” she said, “then the track for practice. Will you be all right? What about the car?”

“All right? I’m not ready for a wheelchair yet. What do you mean, all right?”

“Now don’t get your knickers in a twist, Mother. I just want to make sure you’ll be okay here all day. And if you drive the Healey, please be gentle. Try not to grind the gears. It strips them.”

“Yes, yes. It’s not me that does the grinding, it’s the car. We really should get rid of that old bucket. It doesn’t like me, you know. Even when your father was alive and we’d go on outings, I always felt it wanted to chuck me out.”

“Mother, stop being so melodramatic.”

“Why do I always get the feeling our roles are reversed when you talk like that? Anyway, love, off you go, and enjoy your day.”

While she waited for the Word program to appear, she filled and switched on the electric kettle, added a teabag to a Minton bone china tea cup and returned to the computer. A directory appeared, listing a single document with the simple heading, “Three.”

Tosca clicked to open it and saw the words, Bright Purple Nights by Fuller Sanderson. A list of forty-six chapters followed. Did ‘Three’ refer to a subtitle? Familiar with all of the author’s books, she knew this could be the last one he had written before his death and perhaps had never delivered to Hirsch House. Who had saved this document to the flash drive? It must belong to Hirsch House, though, so it was Sally’s after all.

What a coup for my newspaper, she thought, if I could write a book review of this unpublished manuscript. It would appear in the
Daily Post Sunday Magazine
, which was much more prestigious than the daily paper.

Before hitting the Print button, she fast-forwarded to the final chapter, then pressed Enter to go to the next page in case he’d written notes and listed resource material. She had several author friends who kept jottings, questions, resources used for the plot, characters, settings and even musings at the end of their document, while others wrote them into the body of the work as it was written and played out. Tosca was a reader for two of her writer friends, dissecting their first drafts to see if all the elements hung together and each thread was tied up by the conclusion of the book. She disliked the job and found it time consuming, but friends were friends.

Tosca checked the document’s word count. It was eighty-seven thousand words, about twenty thousand words longer than he usually wrote, she knew. All of his previous books were around sixty-five thousand, so it seemed there were indeed notes at the end, perhaps for even more books, including, she hoped, several synopses for future plots. That would make the document extremely valuable, because none of the drafts or notes for his earlier books existed.

However, instead of seeing any of Sanderson’s notes at the end of the document or synopses for future books, she was faced with another title page: Seven Doors to Doom. A second book? Tosca checked the word count, which was eighty-five thousand, five hundred. Again, this was more than the author had ever previously written.

Mystified, she clicked on the down arrow to the final chapter, pressed Enter again and came upon yet another title page: Silver Blue Shadow. This third document had no chapters listed and appeared half finished. It ended abruptly in the middle of chapter seventeen. There were no further writings.

“What on earth is all this?” she asked aloud. “Two Sanderson books he never published and one in progress?”

Barely containing her excitement, she printed everything out, thanking her stars she’d bought five reams of copy paper for her laser printer the week before. When the machine finally stopped she collected the pages from the tray. Why had he written these books with far more words than usual? Here were close to two hundred fifty thousand for all three. Ideally, there shouldn’t be more than one hundred eighty thousand words, but what a discovery!

Engrossed in trying to figure out the puzzle, Tosca was alerted by a harsh whistle. Steam was shooting out of the electric kettle’s spout. She got up, poured some hot water into the teapot to warm it, swished it around, and poured the water out into the sink. This time, deciding she needed something special to celebrate her find, she spooned loose black Darjeeling tea into the pot, added hot water to the brim and put the lid on. She covered the teapot with a padded linen tea-cozy that had the words “St. Ives” embroidered all over it in knotwork and sat back down at the laptop.

Tosca studied the first manuscript and became fascinated by the new story as related by Sanderson’s fictional detective, Johnny DiLeo. She chuckled as she followed the tale of murder and mayhem in old-time Hollywood, when movie stars were treated like possessions by the studios. But as she read she came across one or two anachronisms. Surely cars had no seatbelts back then? And Sanderson had changed DiLeo’s eyes from blue to hazel. Tosca figured that the author’s aging memory was probably the cause of the missteps, and the publisher’s editors would have caught the mistakes before publication.

Familiar with the author’s entire body of work, she knew these titles had never seen the light of day—at least, not commercially. As Tosca had told Arlene, Sanderson was her favorite crime writer, and she had not only read all his books but had studied his style and life. After she had read
The Total Surrender,
his most popular because of its exotic sex scenes set in Tahiti, she’d wanted to visit the island and go to all the locations the author mentioned, but life had intervened, or rather, J.J. had. At least now I’m living on an island, Tosca thought, and there’s plenty of sun, sand and ocean, although far from the alluring South Seas that Somerset Maugham made famous with his stories.

The more she studied the books, the more she wondered why Sally and the others pretended they were looking for a single manuscript. Or were they pretending? There was no telling who the flash drive belonged to, as anyone at the party could have dropped it.

Tosca went into the kitchen to make another pot of tea, telling herself she could easily drown in tea if she didn’t figure out the puzzle soon.

Sally must have known what was on the drive, of course, if it was hers, but she was dead. Karma, then? Yet, for some reason, Tosca hesitated. She liked the woman and didn’t believe she’d get involved in what appeared to be some sort of nefarious scheme. Had another writer added to these unpublished books she’d found? It would be a world-wide sensation in the publishing industry, if so, and ruin Sanderson’s reputation. Was that what the argument at the French restaurant had been about?

If the books were fakes, which one had planned the scheme? Of the four—Blair, Sally, Swenson and Karma—she’d put her money on Graydon Blair to be perpetrating the fraud. Or was he unaware of these manuscripts, and they were real? Yes, she’d better ask him first and sort it all out. After all, he was Sanderson’s agent of record. If he had no idea they existed, he’d be thrilled that these works had been found, and he’d know exactly how to handle them.