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  “You don’t know that,” I said, ready to change the subject. “You never told me what Miriam Colter said about the inhaler.”

  “Look,” she said, distracted again. She’d spotted someone else. I figured I’d just have to wait to get home to try and question her on what, if anything, she found out.

  “Look at what?”

  “That’s Shane and Coach Buddy right there.”

  “Right where?”

  “There.” She pointed. “Now you want to tell me what they’re doing here?”

  “I don’t know, but I bet you have a guess.”

  “You bet I do. They probably came to see if Bumper is really dead.”

  I didn’t want to chuckle at a funeral, but I felt one about to erupt.

  “What?” I asked, amused. “They thought it might all be a charade, funeral and all, just to catch them?”

  “They are criminals and that’s what criminals do. And,” she said, a look on a face like a light bulb went off, “this is their warning to anyone else if they turn them down. They just wanted to make sure everyone got the message.”

  “Oh wow,” I said.

  “Oh no!” she said and ducked behind me. “They’re coming over here.”

  I stepped aside. “They won’t kill you here.”

  “They might,” she said, she grabbed my sleeve and pulled me next to her. “They’re despicable desperados.”

  “Mrs. Derbinay,” one of them said, walking up to us. “It’s nice to see you, so sorry it was under such sad circumstances.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The conversation with Shane Blanchard and Coach Buddy was as benign as dead skin on the heel of a foot. After two minutes of boring cordiality among the three of them, I excused myself, more politely this time, and waited for Auntie by the car.

  She finally came out, all smiles, but I refused to let her expression pique my interest in what else the three of them talked about. Her murder theory, to me, was all silly speculation.

  After making an appearance at the funeral, we didn’t go to the repast after the service, Auntie was still reeling over not being entrusted to ready Bumper for his eternal rest and refused to socialize.

  “I’ve paid my respects,” she said. “And what I want to break is not bread.”

  When we got home, J.R. met us at the door. He followed me upstairs and Auntie went to the kitchen, she said, to make her a bite to eat.

  When I checked my email, I was surprised to see a message from the TxDPS. I clicked on it, knowing it could only be one reason the Texas Department of Public Safety could be emailing me.

  But that was so quick.

  Sure enough it was their Criminal Investigations Division. I let my eyes scan the sheet, looking for the information I wanted to know. What killed Bumper? But when I read that line, my breath caught in the back of my throat and a chill ran up my spine. I couldn’t believe what I saw. I stared at it. Scrolled up then back, thinking it might change. But it didn’t.

  Then I realized I didn’t know anything about that poison. I’d heard that some woman from Texas had sent ricin to the president and the mayor of New York a while back. But that was it. I typed the word into a browser and started my research. I checked out the symptoms first. There were listed differently for ingestion, inhalation and skin and eye exposure. It easily covered Bumper and Alex’s symptoms. If you knew what you were looking for.

  Then I wondered if I knew we could have saved Bumper. I clicked on “Treatment.”

  No antidote. Geesh!

  We probably couldn’t have saved him even if we had known.

  I clicked back to my email and hit print on the computer. Maybe the toxicology report would be different if I was holding it in my hand. I pulled it off the printer, walked over to my bed and sat down, tugging tightly at the edges of the paper and staring down at it.

  “I’ve got to tell Pogue,” I said. “And then get this over to him.” I looked around on the bed for my phone, then underneath it. “Where did I put that thing?” I rarely needed it. Auntie’s proclamation ringing true in my ear, I didn’t have any friends. Then I remembered I had it in my purse, which I left hanging on the doorknob to my room.

  “I got the toxicology report back,” I said after he picked up. I didn’t even give him a ‘hello’.

  “And were you right?”

  I didn’t say anything. I knew he knew the answer to that.

  “Okay,” he said. “Nix that question. What kind of poison was it?”

  “Ricin.” I plopped down on the bed and stared again at the paper I’d printed out.

  “What the heck is that?”

  “Comes from the castor bean.”

  “Is that supposed to tell me what ricin is?”

  “The plant that you get castor oil from.”

  “Castor oil. Jesus. I took that stuff my entire childhood. Are you telling me now it’s poisonous?”

  “Not the oil, only the protein of the plant. And it’s always been poisonous.”

  “You said before that he inhaled it. Now that you know what it is, you still think that?”

  “I do,” I said. “Kind of puts things in perspective for me.”

  “How so?”

  “Because there were crumbs on Alex’s mouth when he gave Bumper CPR. I wondered where they’d come from.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “Like I just said, you get ricin from the protein of the plant. It would have to be extracted. Someone—whoever killed him—must have crushed it to get into the inhaler. Maybe it still had small pieces of the castor bean in it, it came up when Bumper inhaled, stuck on his mouth and Alex picked it up.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “Only...” I hesitated while I thought it out. “It is making me wonder how it could have been done because ricin takes a while to kill.”

  “What do you mean ‘a while’?”

  “Like a couple days. Symptoms come within about four to ten hours. Death, though, might even take up to thirty-six.”

  “Oh. Jesus,” Pogue said. “Is Alex going to die?”

  “No,” I said, nervousness suddenly bubbling up in me. “Why would you say that?”

  “You just said it took a while. I just thought...”

  “Don’t think like that. Geesh.”

  “Okay. Okay,” he said. “But doesn’t that mean somebody fed it to Bumper days before the wedding.”

  “Maybe.” I took in a breath, my words distant. I’d taken to wondering had Alex taken enough of it for it to kill him, too.

  “Maybe?”

  I thought about the conclusions I’d already made and everything I’d learned. “I’m sure it was the inhaler, I just don’t know when he was introduced to it.”

  “So tell me how they did it.”

  “Ricin is deadly as an aerosol, and its water soluble. Someone mixed the albuterol in his canister with ricin. And the symptoms of ricin poisoning when inhaled are shortness of breath, tightness in the chest. Sweating.”

  “Aren’t those the same symptoms as when you’re having an asthma attack?”

  “Yep,” I said. “So no one thought anything different. Not me. Not Alex. Not even Bumper. He probably just thought his asthma wasn’t clearing up.”

  “So I need to find someone who had access to his inhaler,” Pogue said.

  “Good luck with that,” I said. “Everyone at that wedding had an inhaler, and Mrs. Hackett told me she kept them all over the house. Everyone knew that and anyone could have gotten to one.”

  “Were you questioning Mrs. Hackett, Romie?” He let out a snort. “I asked you not to butt in.”

  “I didn’t question her. I didn’t even know he’d been murdered when she told me. She was just upset the inhalers hadn’t worked and explained to me how she was always ready with one in case h
e had an attack. I’m leaving it up to you from here. That’s the end of my report. You want to solve it on your own, believe me, you’re welcome to it.”

  I hung up the phone and hung my head. I felt bad for lying to Pogue. I couldn’t leave it up to him. Solving that last murder had put a bug inside of me and I couldn’t wait to share what I’d just learned with my unlikely ally, Auntie Zanne. I was becoming just like her—lying and conniving.

  And on top of that, I wanted to hurry and get off the phone. I needed to check on Alex. Make sure he was alright and let him know what I’d found out.

  I just needed to do a little more research first on the poison that killed Bumper and made him sick to get a better idea of what we were dealing with. That part was going to be easy, though, and I wasn’t going to need the Internet to do it.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I took slow, deliberate steps down the stairs and into the kitchen, her usual haunt. I was excited about the information I needed, but if I gave too much away, Auntie would use my energy to feed hers and I’d have to deal with her on overload. I needed her expertise.

  My Auntie Zanne was a Voodoo herbalist. In fact, she was the Most High Mambo of the Distinguished Ladies’ Society of Voodoo Herbalists. She had a world-wide-web kind of knowledge about plants, herbs and their toxicity right in her white hair-covered head.

  “Auntie,” I said, planting a kiss on her cheek. She was sitting at the kitchen table, empty glass spice jars set in rows alongside bundles of dried flowers and leaves. “You got a minute?” She was grinding something up in the mortar with her pestle.

  “Always for you, Sugarplum.” She looked up me at and smiled. “And what you want must be a doozy, you giving me a kiss as a teaser.”

  “I just think that you’re really smart, and I don’t know if I ever told you that. Or how much I appreciate you.”

  “I’m not cooking up any more brews for Alex, if that’s what you’re wanting,” she said. “I’d have to convene a weeklong ritual to command enough power to straighten out that man.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “I got the toxicology report back,” I said, and sat at the table across from her. “I wanted to talk to you about it.”

  “You did?” she said excitedly. “What was with all the pretense then?” She stood up and wiped her hands and came over to sit next to me. Folding her hands in her lap she leaned into me. “What did they kill him with?”

  “Ricin,” I said.

  “Really,” she said. “Oh that’s not good.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “That’s not good. I looked it up and it was used to assassinate some dissident and—”

  “Georgi Markov of Bulgaria,” she interjected before I could finish my sentence.

  “Right,” I said. I tilted my head. “I’d never heard of him. How do you know about him?”

  “I must have read it somewhere,” she said dismissively. “What else you got?”

  “Just that it had been thought to have been used in chemical warfare.”

  “That didn’t work out.” She said it as if she already knew the answer.

  “What?” I chuckled. Something was telling me that she was keeping something from me.

  “Nothing. Keep going.”

  “Nothing else really,” I said. “It isn’t native to here, meaning the U.S., and I found only one place where it grows here and that’s—”

  “Griffith Park in L.A.”

  I leaned back. “Okay, how do you know that?”

  “Why wouldn’t I know that?” she said.

  “Pogue didn’t even know what ricin was,” I said. “I’d only heard of it, nothing in-depth. I had to look up everything I’m telling you know.”

  “I have a Ph.D. in plants that can kill you,” she said and stood up. She went back to her side of the table.

  “There’s no such thing, but I know what you mean.” I paused and thought about Bumper’s cause of death. “Wasn’t he the only one that had been in California?” I asked.

  “There’re lots of people in California, darlin’,” she said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You thinking it was suicide?”

  “No.” I thought about my answer I’d just given and realized it wasn’t entirely how I felt. “I don’t know,” I changed my answer to go along with how I really felt, “because I don’t know if any of the people at the wedding were in California. And if they were, and brought some back with the purpose to kill him...” I let my voice trail off as I tried to get my thoughts together.

  “What?”

  “Why didn’t they just kill him there?” I shook my head. “Why wait?” I hunched my shoulders. “It doesn’t make sense. So maybe he is the one that put it in his inhaler.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know.” I stared at the wall trying to make my pieces fit together. “Okay. Say that’s not what happened.”

  “It wasn’t,” she said.

  “Say it isn’t,” I said again, “That means we would need to see who out of our suspects has gone to California recently and knew that the plant grew in Griffith Park.”

  “They could have gotten it here,” she said and tightened her body as if she was waiting for something to hit.

  “Here?” I narrowed my eyes at her. “What are you talking about? It doesn’t grow here.”

  “Doc Westin had cancer.”

  “Don’t change the subject,” I warned. “And he didn’t have cancer.” I shook my head. “He died from complications of the flu.”

  “He didn’t tell anybody. Well, not many people.”

  “That has nothing to do with what we’re talking about,” I said, getting exasperated. “I want to know how you know about the ricin. You need to tell me that and not digress.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So, go ahead.” I got up, grabbed a cup and stuck a pod of French Roast in my coffee maker. I leaned back on the counter to wait for it to finish.

  “He wanted me to help him look into alternative methods of treatment,” Auntie said. “He came to me for help. So we tried to help him.” She turned around in her chair and looked at me. “Did you know ricin had been thought to have positive effects in killing cancer cells?”

  “You didn’t let him take ricin, did you?” My eyes got as big as saucers. “Is that what really killed Doc Westin?”

  “No,” she said and waved her hand. Then she cocked her head to one side. “At least I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, Auntie! You don’t think so?”

  “Well, I wasn’t with the man every minute. I can’t tell you what he did or didn’t do. Or take. But if I had to bet money on it...”

  “Who is we?” I interrupted. I needed to know who her accomplices were and try to keep her going in the right direction. She’d digress if I didn’t stop her.

  “Some of the ladies of the Voodoo Herbalist Society.”

  “You.” I grabbed my coffee, put it up to my mouth blew on it and thought. “Mark. Leonard.” I recited the other two I knew.

  “Delphine Griffith and Avoyelles Kalty.”

  “I don’t know those two,” I said. I walked back over to the table.

  “They still exist even if you weren’t aware of it.”

  I shook my head. “Okay, so explain to me how the existence of these people, ricin, and Doc Westin all fit together.”

  “We all grew it. Well not the doc.”

  “You can’t grow ricin, it’s a protein from the castor bean.”

  “That’s what we grew,” she said.

  “Oh my,” I said. I sat down. “So potentially, there’s ricin all over Roble?”

  “Shelby and Angelina counties, too,” she said.

  “How did it get there?”

  “Delphine Griffith and Avoyelles
Kalty.”

  “That’s where they live?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why did so many people grow it?”

  “The castor bean isn’t native to here, we weren’t sure how it would fare. Texas soil and weather conditions are different, so we tried growing it in several different environments.”

  Okay,” I said. “That’s good. It means we only need to see who could have gotten it from where it was able to grow.”

  She scrunched up her nose. “We are very good at what we do.”

  “So, everyone was successful?”

  “Yes.”

  I let out a huff. I put my elbow on the table and cradled my chin in my hand. “Who knew about it?” I said after a few moments of quiet contemplation.

  “I thought no one other than the five of us. I didn’t even tell the other herbalists why they were growing it, just that I needed help with cultivating it.” She looked at me. “Guess I was wrong about that, huh? ’Cause someone sure found out and killed Bumper with it.” She looked at me. “Better question though, is who, other than us, would know what it is and how to use it?”

  “Are we going to have to expand our list of suspects to include those four ladies?” I looked at her. “And you?”

  “And I’m guessing all the people any of them told about it.”

  “I thought you didn’t tell anyone about it?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Who did you tell?” I figured I’d ask again in a different way. I knew she didn’t know the first thing about keeping a secret, she had all but told me that. She hadn’t waited a full day to share Piper’s announcement about who paid for the caterer with Josephine Gail.

  She zipped her mouth shut and held up her right hand. “No one.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I don’t believe that.”

  “Well, I’m telling you I didn’t. I don’t know who the other herbalists told. Or Doc Westin. He might have mentioned it to some people. And if he did, those people are the ones you need to look into.”

  “Why?”

  “Everyone else would have said they were growing castor beans, because that’s all they knew about it. That’s the only thing I asked them to do. Doc Westin’s the only one who would have mentioned something about ricin because that’s what he wanted it for.”