I rushed out the front door and scanned the crowd milling about on the lawn. Unlike at the funeral home, the music coming from the outdoor speakers wasn’t quite as formal. I recognized the one of the lesser-known Beach Boys songs. It ended, and a Simon & Garfunkel tune took its place. I spotted Teddy talking with Esméralda Martín-Brown and hurried over to join them.
Teddy put his arm around my shoulder. “I was starting to wonder where you’d gone off to.”
“Is Beau here yet?” I asked.
Esméralda shook her head. “I haven’t seen him. If the rumor mill is to be believed, he’s probably out looking to arrest your sister.”
Teddy gave her a stern look. “You know as well as I do that Tansy’s innocent.” He turned to me and rolled his eyes. “Some people will believe anything. Beau was here a second ago. I’d check around the side if I were you.”
“Thanks.” I gave him a spontaneous kiss on the cheek. How had I had such a great guy under my nose for literal decades and never noticed until recently?
“No problem,” he said with a wink. “If I see him first, I’ll tell him you’re looking for him.”
Beau wasn’t on the side lawn, nor was he around back. I was about to head toward the back door again and brave the crowd inside when I heard his familiar voice behind me. I followed the sound and found a clump of men standing near the riverbank. They were drinking beer and smoking cigars.
Fortunately, Beau wasn’t one of the smokers. Seeing me, he grinned. “Hey, Junebug. Just who I wanted to see.”
“We need to talk,” I said. “Can we take a walk?”
“Sure thing.” He nodded at the other men. We followed a well-trodden path from the river back toward the house.
I pointed at the beer in his hand. “Drinking on the job?”
“Am I?” He glanced at the bottle before turning the label to face me. It was a non-alcoholic beer.
“Oh,” I said, feeling a little foolish. Of course he was drinking a fake beer. Unlike me, Beau didn’t do anything without thinking it through first. Everything he did was calculated. Even his ridiculous charm was usually part of some bigger plan.
“You wanted to talk?” he prompted. We stayed near the water’s edge. The gurgle of the river afforded us a little privacy, but not much.
“Your lab tested our cups. Tested our coffee. Tested our carafe. There were no traces of poison. That’s what you said. But did you test the empty creamer cups in Mayor Bob’s trash can?”
“I may have received additional test results this afternoon,” Beau said.
“I was right.” I bobbed my head. “I knew it! The poison came from the creamer, not the coffee. Tansy and Sip & Spin are off the hook.”
“Not so fast, Juni. Let’s suppose, hypothetically, that we test a cup of coffee and a cup of creamer, and they both have trace amounts of the same poison on them. Did the poison go from the creamer to the coffee, or the coffee to the creamer?”
“Well, that’s just silly. You pour creamer into coffee, not the other way around.”
“Sure do,” Beau agreed. “Unless, suppose in this hypothetical situation that everything in the wastebasket had trace amounts of poison on it. The scrap paper. A candy bar wrapper. A water bottle. A stir stick. The creamer cups. Did cross contamination happen in the trash can, or in the lab?”
“Shoot,” I said.
Beau bobbed his head in agreement. “Hypothetically, if evidence is contaminated, the results get tossed. Including results that otherwise might be able to convict, or exonerate, a suspect.”
“You’re telling me that even if the creamer was poisoned, because the test was inconclusive, that information might never come out in court, even if it’s proof that my sister is innocent?” I asked. My pulse raced as I thought about the implications. It was one thing for folks to gossip that she might be guilty, but for her to have to stand trial? She didn’t deserve that. Even with a lawyer like J.T. on her side, there was always a possibility that she could be convicted for a murder she didn’t commit.
“Hypothetically,” Beau admitted.
“What if you had another non-contaminated sample to test?” I pulled up the picture I’d taken on my phone and handed it to him.
“Where did you take this?”
“There’s a mini-fridge in Mayor Bob’s office,” I said. I zoomed in on the screen to enlarge the image. “Does that look like a puncture mark in the lid to you?”