Sheila Connolly - Reunion with Death (21 page)

Cynthia slid her napkin diagram across the table and outlined what we’d been discussing since we returned from Vernazza. Pam nodded, looking impressed, then passed it to the others. “Good start,” she said. “If you eliminate the two of us here who took a class—that’s Circle A—then you’ve narrowed it down to fewer than ten people. I can’t answer for B, because I didn’t spend any time visiting around other people’s rooms when we were in Capitignano. I saw people at meals and in the vans, and that was pretty much it. As for C, the poppy stuff, ask Valerie.”

Cynthia eyed her. “Right, you’re a doctor.”

“I was,” Valerie nodded. “I retired three years ago.”

“And now you’re a holistic medical therapist,” Cynthia said.

“You know about that?” Valerie looked startled.

“You need a license, don’t you?”

Valerie nodded once, processing the fact that Cynthia knew.

Cynthia pressed on. “From what I’ve read, the poppies haven’t changed in the last three years, or even three millennia. What can you tell me about their effects? Assume I’ve read a Wikipedia article and take it from there.”

“The petals of the Tuscan poppy contain substances that aid insomnia,” Valerie explained, “and that red poppy we’ve been seeing everywhere—the same one the Impressionists loved to paint—is very slightly narcotic. The amount of active ingredients is minimal, so to determine an exact dosage is next to impossible. It could be kind of hit or miss. It has a long history, as you’ve observed, and has been used in herbal treatments for a wide range of ailments, mainly to treat the respiratory system and the nervous system.”

“I’d say you know quite a lot,” I said. “It sounds pretty benign. Does it have any toxic effects?”

“There’s no morphine in it, if that’s what you’re asking. Ingested in a moderate dose, it would make you sleepy. If you took too much, it would make you sluggish and might cause trouble breathing.”

“How much would it take to incapacitate someone?” Cynthia demanded.

“Without an underlying condition? More than he or she would be willing to ingest. Certainly more than the amount someone could sneak into a drink. I assume that’s what you’re thinking.”

“So it’s not a poison per se,” I said. That squared with what the autopsy had shown. “If it was just a moderate dose, what would the symptoms be?”

“Sleepiness. Lack of alertness. Maybe physical clumsiness. Nothing dramatic like vomiting or fainting.”

“Okay,” Cynthia finally spoke, after a long pause. “Let’s lay this on the table. The autopsy shows that Professor Gilbert had the active ingredient from Italian poppies in his system when he died. Somebody knew how to extract that ingredient from those widely available poppies, although it probably doesn’t take anything more sophisticated than hot water and maybe some vinegar. Somebody managed to slip it to him without anyone noticing. It could have been enough to make him thick-tongued and clumsy. Would you agree so far?”

“That sounds about right,” Valerie said, meeting Cynthia’s gaze.

“And we know the professor was a vain man and would have been embarrassed to be stumbling and mumbling in front of a group of ladies. How long does this stuff take to work?”

“I’d say there would be symptoms within the hour, although there are a lot of variables.”

Connie spoke up suddenly. “Cynthia, you’re suggesting that somebody gave it to him in time to make him look like a fool at the dinner?”

Cynthia nodded. “Maybe. Or that could have been the idea. Did anyone notice him acting unusual, or different after than before?”

“Since we hadn’t seen the man in forty years, how were we to know what ‘normal’ was for him at his age?” Pam demanded.

“He seemed to be fine when he gave his talk in the late afternoon,” I threw in. “So this poppy cocktail had to have been given to him either right before then, or not long after, say, during cocktails.”

“Which narrows our timeline, right?” Connie said.

“Exactly,” Cynthia said. “All right, Pam, you say you’ve got a good memory: who was sitting at the head table with him?”

Pam looked up at the ceiling and shut her eyes. “Barb and Gerry, of course. Jean and Jane—Jane took at least one course from him, but you probably already know that. That’s five. Uh … okay, it was a table for eight, so the rest were Brenda, Rebecca, and Virginia. Does that sound about right?”

Nobody contradicted her.

“None of whom had taken a class with the professor,” Cynthia grinned. “Now I’ll make it harder. Who was hanging around him before dinner who didn’t end up at the table?”

We all looked at each other. “A lot of people,” Connie said.

“There were forty of us, not including Barb and Gerry and the waitstaff,” Pam said. “Are you talking a quarter of us? Half?”

“Closer to half than a quarter,” Cynthia replied, “but not everyone was close enough to put something in his drink. So call it a quarter.”

I noticed that Cynthia didn’t mention our quest for photographs of the appropriate times. Maybe she still wasn’t sure she trusted the women in front of us?

“Are we eliminating the employees?” Pam asked. “I mean, Horny Tony Gilbert could have been sneaking over to Capitignano from wherever he lived and getting it on with the cook.”

I said slowly, “I thought someone said that Gerry was the one who invited him, and he’d only recently learned of both the Wellesley connection and the fact that he was living nearby. That kind of rules out the staff. Agreed? Look, if we don’t eliminate somebody, we’ll never sort all this out,” I said with asperity.

“Okay, okay—we’ll assume the most likely scenario, in the interests of expediency,” Cynthia said.

“Cyn, you can talk plain English, right?” I said. “We have only enough time to explore the most obvious solutions. Somebody slipped Professor Gilbert a Mickey, probably during the cocktail hour, with the goal of making him look like a doddering old fool. A few hours later, he fell off a hill and died. What happened in between dinner and kaboom?”

“That other bottle of wine,” Cynthia said. When our vineyard-mates looked blankly at her, she explained about the chilled bottle of wine and the two glasses that had been delivered to the professor’s room after dinner. And that I’d seen him on the way up to his room, which further narrowed the killer’s window of opportunity.

“So … what? Wouldn’t he have had to drink the poppy juice earlier than that?” Pam asked. “How did he seem to you when you saw him, Laura?”

“I didn’t know the man, but I would have said he’d had a little to drink—most of us had. He was walking steadily enough, but he was kind of … effusive? He was talking to me in Italian, and he called me pretty lady.”

“Inconclusive,” the lawyer responded. “What about the combined effect of wine and the drug, Valerie?”

Valerie said, “I wouldn’t recommend it, but the combination wouldn’t be toxic, if that’s what you’re asking. From what Laura says, he seems to have been in control right after dinner, or maybe slightly drunk. Maybe the stuff simply didn’t work. Or the dosage was wrong. Or maybe it hadn’t had time to work. Or maybe he’d drunk less than someone expected because he knew he had a late date.”

Cynthia turned back to Pam. “Do you remember who left the dining hall when? Alone or with a group?”

“Sure.” Pam proceeded to recite the list, in order of exit. I decided that if I ever needed a lawyer, I’d call her first. “Which is not to say that they didn’t go out again later.”

I glanced at Cynthia, who nodded. “Cynthia did.”

“Did you see anyone else?” Connie asked eagerly.

“Yes, but no one connected to the professor or his death—I went in a different direction,” Cynthia said. “Besides, we were together for … quite a while, which covers the period of the fall.”

Connie waited a moment, but Cynthia did not elaborate.

“What about you, Laura?” Valerie asked. “Wasn’t he staying in the room right above you? Maybe Cynthia wasn’t there, but did you hear anything?”

“I heard some footsteps overhead—tile floors, you know, and the sound carried. But I crashed pretty quickly. I didn’t even hear Cynthia leave, or come back. I certainly never heard any voices. I couldn’t swear whether he had a guest.”

Pam picked up the thread again. “Do you think you would have heard the sounds of a struggle? Or a scream? After all, he fell not far from your window, and sound carried at night at that place. Did you take a sleeping pill or anything to knock you out?”

I shook my head. “Believe me, I didn’t need anything—all this exercise is plenty to knock me out. But I want to think I would have heard anything like a scream. I didn’t hear anything, ergo he went quietly.”

“No signs of bruising, defensive wounds, broken nails?” Pam directed this question at Cynthia.

“What, you have the autopsy report, Cynthia?” Valerie exclaimed.

Cynthia looked at me, but I shook my head slightly; her cover might be blown, but I wasn’t ready to share what I did with the rest of the group. “Yes,” Cynthia answered. “There were no injuries not consistent with the fall.”

“So, to sum up,” Pam began, “Professor Gilbert was found dead subsequent to a fall, with no injuries that can be attributed with any certainty to a human hand. He had ingested a poppy solution that may or may not have affected his behavior or coordination. We may infer that he had a late assignation, but we have no idea with whom, and nobody has come forward to admit being with him. And possibly a dozen of our number have a motive to seek revenge against him. He could have been killed, or helped to die, by any one of them—or a combination of more than one.”

“
Murder on the Orient Express
,” I said suddenly. “Everybody did it, or at least that’s the way it looked. Do you really believe that multiple people were involved?”

Pam shook her head. “Too elaborate, and too much planning required. Besides, no one knew he would be there until we arrived, which wouldn’t leave much time to plan and brew up the poppy stuff and arrange a late assignation with the man. I’m just playing devil’s advocate. But it is possible.”

Cynthia yawned. “Hey, gang, can we go to bed soon? Unless you want to upset the apple cart and blow off tomorrow’s schedule.”

“I’d rather not do that,” I said. “It would be a good day to try to talk to people because we can go around in small groups. And there are more of us now to do the asking. But what do we need to know?”

Silence for several beats. Then Connie said softly, “Who had a kitchen when we were staying at the villa. Who knows herbs. And who hated Professor Gilbert.”

Yeah, that about covered it.

“I agree with Cynthia,” I said finally. “We need some sleep. We can meet at breakfast and see if daylight helps. Thanks, guys.”

The others headed off to their own rooms. When our new allies were out of range, I asked Cynthia, “Do you trust them?”

“Laura, I don’t know what I think anymore, but I think we have no choice with these people here. Let’s get some sleep and regroup in the morning.”

“Agreed.” Damn, I still hadn’t had a chance to talk to Xianling. I’d have to catch her in the morning and hope she had enough time left to pull together what we needed.

Chapter 19

I was continually surprised at how well I slept in Italy, but I assumed it was all the unusual exercise I was getting. If I stayed much longer, my calves and thighs would be rock-hard.

But as soon as I woke up, my brain started spinning. We had little time left to clear up this murder before we were all scheduled to leave. Of course, it was entirely possible that we could all go our separate ways without the police interfering—they hadn’t placed any restrictions on us yet, and then we might never know if there was a resolution. But leaving the professor’s death an open-ended question didn’t sit well with me: it would cloud our memories of this trip, leave a bad taste in our mouths. It had been too lovely (apart from that unfortunate corpse, the one little fly in the ointment), and Jean and Jane had put far too much work into making it happen to let it end like that. So we would have to fix it if we could. But how?

No sound from Cynthia’s room. I tiptoed into the bathroom, brushed my teeth, then pulled on some light clothes and went out to sit on the patio and watch the sun burn the mist off the valley. It looked so pastoral, so innocent.

Pam came up the cement steps, her feet silent in rubber-soled shoes. “Hey,” she said quietly and took the chair across from me. “She still asleep?” She gestured toward Cynthia’s room.

“I think so. You have something to say to her?”

“Nope, I’m happy to talk to you. You two aren’t, uh, together or anything, are you?”

“As a couple? No, nothing like that. We’ve been friends forever, but I don’t see much of her these days. Why?”

“Just asking. I like to know who I’m working with. You know I figured out what you two do.”

“And what do we do?” I said noncommittally.

“You’re an ‘analyst’”—she made air quotes—“at a government agency that shall be nameless. Cynthia is a data miner, and she’s good at it. That’s why I wondered if you’d worked together.”

“Not until now,” I said. She’d gotten us right, and it wasn’t worth asking how or why. “Did you tell the others?”

“They don’t know. But we all agree that you two are our best hope of getting out of here on time—with my help, of course.”

“You said you’re a lawyer, right?”

“I am. If you want to know what kind of lawyer, ask your sleeping buddy.”

“In the interests of saving time, let’s say you’re as good as you say you are and leave it at that. Do you have any suggestions?”

“I think you’re doing it right—and you’re using your heads, not running around stirring things up. You’ve defined the parameters well: motive and means. Odds are good that someone is lying to you and everyone else, but the question is, does that matter? Can you figure this out anyway?”

This woman was certainly intense. “I’d like to hope so. We still have to work out which people really did have a motive, no matter what they tell us. We know there were twelve people who took a class from Professor Gilbert. Some took more than one. But he can’t have hit on everybody—you’re a case in point. There may be more people who connected with him outside of class, but there’s no way to track that, so we’re sticking to what we can verify. So how do we weed out the—for want of a better word—rejects and figure out who had a real motive?”