Beau was at her feet and the covers were pulled up high to her chin, but Ellie couldn’t sleep. Her mind, which was never quite good at letting thoughts go so she could rest, was working overtime tonight.
Nightshade. The poison used on both Abbie and Lilith had been deadly nightshade. It was featured in hundreds of books that Ellie had read over the years. It often popped up in fantasies or classic mysteries. A couple of the innocent looking purple berries were enough to kill a man.
The punch. It had to be the punch that had been served at the first meeting. It had been a deep magenta in color, and the juice of a few berries would have mixed in well enough to go unnoticed. Someone at the meeting had poisoned Abbie’s cup. But why?
Her mind jumped to the scene in Lilith’s house. It had become such a blur, but perhaps there were answers there for both hers and Abbie’s deaths. She just had to piece together the pieces, remember what she had forgotten, and paint a clearer picture in her head.
The plate on the kitchen table, Ellie realized as her mind raced through the night’s events. She’d noticed it quickly and put it out of her head as just a bit of laziness on Lilith’s part. Looking back, she remembered that beyond the crumbs there had been a smear of purple jelly. That smear could be their poison.
The only question was, who would have access to the berries? Despite the unseasonable warmth, Ellie realized on the drive home with her grandmother that spying on people’s gardens wasn’t going to do her much good. Even in the dark, she could see that most of the gardens in town had begun to turn brown and the flowers had all wilted and lost their petals weeks ago.
It had to be someone who knew a lot about plants. The only issue there was that a lot of people in Dundurn, especially some of the older residents, were avid gardeners. The whole town smelled beautiful in the late spring and early summer as the flowers bloomed in full force. It could be anyone in town and with the plants all growing out in the open, someone may have nightshade in their garden and not be the one using the berries. It only took a quick hand to pluck enough of them to do some serious damage.
Ellie didn’t think that was the case, though. Poison was not a crime of opportunity. It took plotting and scheming. Someone wanting to poison people wasn’t going to leave anything to chance. They would be growing the plant themselves, and worse, they may have done something like this before.
While she laid in bed, Ellie went over a list of remaining suspects in her head. The only people remaining were Roni Anderson, Katie Rollins, Margot Hume, Simone Dietz, Hettie Stone, and Cynthia Baker. She was pretty sure she could remove Roni from the list, mainly because she still lived with her parents and doubted she’d be able to get away with growing patches of poisonous plants in her mother’s garden without anyone knowing about it.
Hettie Stone was also an unlikely murderess. Residing at the assisted living facility would seriously diminish her chances for a private garden and her hands did shake quite a bit. She most likely didn’t have the sleight of hand and speed required to taint someone’s drink without being seen.
Ellie also decided to cross Simone Dietz off the list. The clothing store manager had the longest, most well manicured fingernails that Ellie had ever seen in her life. There was no way she was spending her time mucking about in a garden with nails like that. There would have been evidence trapped in them and her perfect polish would be perpetually chipped if she was doing anything with her hands.
That left Katie, Margot, and Cynthia. Not a long list, but with how much information Ellie had, she might as well have fifty names on that list. Ellie had known each of the women for years, all through her mother and grandmother, but with her long absence from town, each one had become something of a stranger to her.
An idea struck her as she laid in bed, staring at the ceiling above her. Stu Cranston’s books on local history were stuffed on shelves in the back room of the bookstore below her. In the nearly ten year gap she had from Dundurn, she might have missed a lot of things, but those books might be enough to fill in the holes.
She didn’t bother getting changed out of her flannel pajamas. With a quick whisper to Beau, she led him down the interior stairs to the bookstore’s back room.
The store was quiet, quieter than she’d ever found before. The latest she’d ever been in the store was midnight, and that was when she was doing inventory with her grandmother a couple months back. Now it was nearly one in the morning and she was all alone, save for Beau. She had to admit to herself that it was a bit unnerving.
“Here we go,” she whispered to herself as she found the stack of Mr. Cranston’s books. He updated the books every year, with a new dust jacket featuring a picture from town. A place in Milwaukee that Ma’May recommended to him years ago printed and bound them, and then he sold them to shops all over town. Most stores bought them out of a sense of obligation, but perhaps they’d finally come in handy.
Thankfully, Stu Cranston was a glutton for precise detail. Each book had its own index and every surname in town was referenced. Since Ellie couldn’t remember attending any funerals for the Rollins, Hume, or Baker families back in high school, she went for the book published her first year of college.
In that first year, Ellie found that Katie had won an award for her strawberry shortcake at the tri-county fair, Cynthia had broken her leg, and Margot’s husband Stephan had gotten a big promotion at work, but little else.
What she did find that her own name was mentioned. Stu had included the fact that she had left for college in Chicago, and how she had aspirations to join a big publishing house in Chicago or New York City. Ellie smiled as she read the snippet, and she put the book off to the side to show her grandmother later.
She went through book after book in an attempt to find anything that might stand out as proof one of these ladies had done something similar before. As she flipped through the books, Ellie began to realize just how much of the town’s goings on that she had missed while she was living her life in Chicago.
Sure, she had come home to visit during the holidays. She, her parents and her grandmother had celebrated holidays together in town a few times a year, but Ellie rarely spent more than two or three weekends in Dundurn a year. It wasn’t enough to really see what was happening in town, not with everything else going on.
She’d wanted to visit more, and she’d sworn she’d visit once a month when she’d first moved away, but during school that had quickly become once every other month. Then it became holidays only. She’d thought she was so busy back then, but looking back, she couldn’t remember why. Work, friends, and everything else, it would have been easy enough to put them on pause for a weekend to come home, but she’d always felt obligated to stay in the city for one reason or another.
Ellie shook her head and got back to digging through the books. Despite her racing mind, her eyes were getting heavy and she didn’t want to give up and go to bed until she found something that would lead her in the right direction.
It took three more books, but Ellie found one with some information she could use. It was from five years ago and there was more than just a quick mention. There was a whole write up on Floyd Rollins, the late husband of Katie Rollins.
Dundurn was a small town and until the new subdivision, it was an aging one at that. Each year the town lost a dozen residents or so, and each one received a full write up in Stu’s book that year. Floyd Rollins was no different, but Ellie had a sinking suspicion, or perhaps it would be a hope, that there would be some clue hidden inside.
“Floyd Rollins, beloved husband of Katheryn ‘Katie’ Rollins passed away at the age of forty-seven years old on June the thirteenth. Mr. Rollins’s cause of death has officially been listed as a heart attack, which comes as a great surprise to those who knew and loved him. From all those who have spoken out, the general consensus is that Mr. Rollins was the picture of good health. Not only was he the coach of peewee baseball, but he also played tennis regularly and could be seen taking his daily five kilometer run each morning by residence of Dundurn.”
The page about Floyd Rollins went on about his charity work, his job as manager for a large pharmaceutical sales company, and his other hobbies, but Ellie paid that no mind. What interested her was how healthy he’d been right up until his heart had somehow magically given out.
Ellie knew that it could happen at any time. That someone could go decades without discovering an unknown heart issue and suddenly dropped dead, but something in the back of her mind told her that wasn’t the case here. She herself had been coached by Floyd Rollins when she’d played a season of baseball, and remembered him as being a very healthy, caring man, even back then.
But a heart attack didn’t line up with what had happened to Abbie and Lilith. The doctor had caught the poison so easily that it made Ellie wonder if Floyd’s death could possibly be related. The doctor wouldn’t have named his death a heart attack if it had been nightshade.
“Maybe it was something else,” Ellie said to Beau. He kindly lifted an ear to show he was listening, but he was content to stay curled up, half asleep on the floor while she pondered.
The light of the moon coming through the large glass windows at the front of the shop was enough for Ellie to see by as she left the back room. She didn’t want to turn any lights on while she searched, but thankfully there was enough light for her to find what she was looking for.
Herbology and Gardening: What You Need to Know was a book that had been collecting dust on the shelf for at least a year or two, but it was going to come in handy for Ellie now. It was a six hundred page tome, but it had just the section Ellie was looking for. ‘Deadly Plants and How to Spot Them.’
The picture at the start of the chapter was one Ellie knew well – nightshade. It was famous for its deadly properties, but Ellie already knew that. She needed other plants, plants that could be used to harm people in other ways.
Her eyes were getting heavier and heavier with each flip of the page, but Ellie refused to give up. She skimmed each page until she found something that could kill a person in the way that Floyd Rollins had died.
It took a while and a few rereads until she caught it, but there were three plants that the book mentioned that could cause a heart attack, especially with ongoing use. Lily of the Valley, Christmas Rose, and Japanese Skimmia all had the potential to kill a person if their heart was weak. Ellie just had to find a garden in Dundurn that had one, or perhaps all, of these plants, along with the nightshade. Then she’d find her killer.
Her gut instinct was Katie Rollins. It had been her husband, but what could her motive be for killing Abbie and Lilith years later? That part just didn’t make sense. She simply couldn’t put together a motive.
She memorized the images of the plants as best she could before Ellie called Beau to her heel. It was late, two in the morning late, and she finally thought she might be able to sleep. In the morning, she would go and search the gardens of her three main suspects. One of them had to be the killer, and as much as she had a feeling it was Katie, she knew she couldn’t jump to conclusions again. When she’d focused on Lilith, she’d lost sight of everyone else and it had cost her valuable time.
Come morning she would go for a long walk. Someone in Dundurn was growing poisonous plants, and despite the starting of the autumn wilt, she was going to find out who it was.