Page 41 of Murder Will Out
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
It was after ten that night when the wind slammed the café door open and blew Diana into the room. The fog had deepened, and a thick, roiling cloud cover brought the promise of heavy weather to come.
Catherine, Willow, and Mac were waiting. Finn greeted Diana with a good-naturedwoof, and Mac hurried over to hug her and take her coat. Willow called from behind the counter, “Hey, welcome back. What kind of meeting is this? Coffee or wine?”
Diana gave her a wry grin. “I’ve been drinking bad vending machine coffee for the past six hours, so let’s go with the wine. But I need something to eat first, or it’ll go right to my head, and I’ll get silly or fall asleep or both.”
Willow managed a half-hearted smile in return as she brought over glasses and a bottle.
Mac brought out a tray of panini warming in the oven and set them down in the center of the table. “I borrowed Rina’s panini press,” she said. “And she has a lot of good stuff in the freezer; we should be able to keep the guests at the inn fed, and we can take turns staying overnight to keep it all covered. Until Rina comeshome.” They all heard the fierce edge to her voice and nodded; of course Rina would come home. There was no question.
Diana pushed down her own fear and nodded too, watching Willow closely. Rina had told her about the afternoon at the dock, and how Willow had stood up to Nick and tried to comfort Rina; it had, in fact, been difficult for Diana to get Rina focused on her more immediate problem of being accused of murder, so focused was the other woman on Willow’s forgiveness. Diana hoped the reconciliation between the two was sincere and lasting.
All four women dived for the sandwiches, and soon Diana felt slightly less like a squeezed-out dishrag. The wine didn’t hurt either.
As with their meal at the cabin the other night, by unspoken agreement, the women did not begin serious conversation until everyone had eaten. But Willow could barely wait until Diana had finished her last bite, followed by one more satisfied swallow of Malbec, to ask worriedly, “So… is Rina okay? How is she doing?”
Catherine’s question followed quickly. “What are they accusing her of, exactly? What do they have on her?”
Diana looked around at them; her face was grim. “I don’t want to tell her this, but it doesn’t look good.” She looked at Willow. “Naomi was right; Geralt died of lithium poisoning, a case so extreme that they couldn’t get it out of his system before everything started shutting down; they tried dialysis to filter it out, but they couldn’t get ahead of it. Once they pinpointed lithium carbonate as the toxin, the cops went to Naomi and asked for the cup he had been using at the reception and sent it to the lab. It came back with traces of the white powder inside—not medical grade but the kind used for ceramics. Rina was seen giving him the drink, Rina was the potter who made the cups. The icing on the cake was the bag of ceramic-grade lithium carbonate the cops found in the dumpster behind the dock. They’re having it fingerprinted, but Rina admitted to her own bag of lithium not being in the shopwhere it should be, so now it looks like she tried to sneak it out and dispose of it before she was caught, though she swears she didn’t—and assuming they can track it back to her, it will look even worse.”
Willow blinked, puzzled. “Why didn’t she tell us she had her own supply of lithium carbonate yesterday, when we talked about Geralt? She obviously would know it was a common potter’s supply item—why did she keep quiet?”
Mac spoke up, her voice low and a little shaky. “Maybe she was afraid of what people would think if she did?”
Catherine looked at Mac curiously. “For that matter, hasn’t Rina been teaching you about ceramic art, and glazing, and everything? Wouldn’t you have known too?”
Mac would not look up from her lap, and the corner of her mouth twitched slightly. “I didn’t… I mean, I thought…” She trailed off, squeezing her eyes shut to keep the tears from leaking out.
Diana had grown very still. “Mac? Mackenzie Reyes, what did you do?”
Mac burst into tears. Between sobs, she confessed to sneaking into Rina’s shop, taking the lithium carbonate off the shelf, and throwing it into the dumpster at the end of the dock. “I’m so sorry. I was so scared. I know she didn’t do it, but if they had found it in her shop—”
“Instead of finding itinher shop, for which they would have needed a warrant, they found itoutsideher shop, and much more quickly,” Diana snapped. “What were you thinking? Why would you do that?” She stopped, aghast. “Did—didRinaknow about this?”
Mac shook her head hard. “No. No, absolutely not. I didn’t want to… involve her… in…” She dissolved into tears again.
“Well, she’s involved now, that’s for sure,” Diana said irritably. Then she sighed; when she spoke again, her voice was gentler.“Sweetie, why didn’t you tell one of us? We would have figured it out, figured something out. You can’t go off on your own like this.”
Mac sniffled and nodded. “Okay. I know. But—” She looked up at her mother, eyes pleading. “Will this hurt Rina? Did I make things worse for her?” Her voice wavered. “Do we need to tell the police what I did?”
“My advice?” Diana said reluctantly. “Let’s give it a day, see if it’s necessary. The cops can hold Rina forty-eight hours; then they have to either charge her or let her go. In the meantime, we’ll keep piecing things together. If we can find someone else with the motive, means, and opportunity—”
Tucking the last bite into her mouth, Catherine calmly got up and moved an easel out into the room, putting a large pad of paper on it and pulling out a handful of thick markers. Uncapping one, she divided the huge sheet into three columns labeledMotive,Means, andOpportunity. She turned to them expectantly, then looked in surprise at the three women staring at her. “What?” she asked, puzzled.
Mac’s tearstained face broke into a wry smile. “Enter the librarian. I’m surprised you don’t have a PowerPoint ready to go.”
“Easel pads are more flexible and permit greater interaction among participants,” Catherine replied primly. “Are we going to do this?”
They got to work.
“We’ve already talked about how many people on-island and off have a motive to kill Geralt,” Catherine said, swiftly adding names to the page. “Then there were all the people we saw giving him food and drinks at the reception. That’s opportunity.” When the first page was full, she peeled it off and started a second, and then a third, sticking the used pages around the walls and bakery case. Catherine frowned as she looked at the list: island business owners, victims of his harassment and paternity suits,union members and employees. Then she added Naomi’s name. “We need to consider his wife as well. Living with him, she has the opportunity, and inheriting everything is a pretty compelling motive. The pool of suspects is huge, unless we can narrow down the means: who might have access to the chemicals.”
Diana nodded. “I know. And so far, Rina’s the one whose motive, means,andopportunity are all advertising themselves like a neon sign. Unless someone else pops up, she’s the obvious suspect.”
“Except she didn’t do it,” Mac argued, her eyes welling up again. “Besides, if I could get that lithium carbonate out of her shop without being seen, so could anyone.”
“Obviously, she’s being framed,” Willow put in. “I mean, it’s ingenious, when you think about it.”
