“But no food allergies that you were aware of?”

  “No.”

  “He didn’t have an epinephrine injector? Or an asthma inhaler?”

  “No. Nothing like that. He was in very good health. I keep telling you that, but no one seems to be listening. He was in perfect health. So how could something like this have happened? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I know, Mr. Ramsey. It’s hard to wrap your mind around what it was that happened. We’re still trying to sort it out, so please bear with me. Some of the questions that I ask may sound dumb or repetitive or may be difficult to answer, but I’m doing the best that I can to figure out what happened to Tristan.”

  “Fine,” Ramsey conceded, sounding a little mollified. “Go ahead, then.”

  “Had Tristan been wildcrafting for long? Did he have a mentor who showed him different plants, or a group that he got information from, or…?”

  “He’d been doing it for a while,” Ramsey said. “He knew what he was doing. What does that have to do with anything? Last time we talked, I thought you said it was some kind of animal attack.”

  “It turns out that that was not the case. What had looked initially like injuries from an animal attack were, in fact, postmortem. The medical examiner has confirmed that.”

  “Well… I guess that’s good, if it is true. But why would you say it was an animal attack if it wasn’t?”

  “I don’t think I ever said that’s what it was. I may have said that was what it looked like on a preliminary basis, but that was just from observations at the scene. The medical examiner has ruled it out.”

  “And you think… what? That it was an allergy attack?” Ramsey’s voice was heavy with sarcasm.

  “That’s one possibility.”

  “You think that he smelled pollens and just dropped dead? It’s fall, you know. Not spring. People don’t just drop dead from allergies without any warning.”

  “We have to ask questions to rule out various possibilities. That’s part of the job. It’s good to know that he didn’t have any known allergies. That helps us to narrow it down.”

  “To what?”

  “It’s possible that… he consumed something toxic. We don’t know that for sure. It is one of the avenues that we are exploring.”

  “He consumed something… What does that mean? You think he ate something? Like what?”

  “You said he was into wildcrafting. There are a number of poisonous plants that he could have gathered in the park, mistaking them for something safe. Mushrooms can be very hard to tell apart if you are not an expert.”

  “And that’s why you want to know who taught him everything.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well… I don’t know. I guess he got a lot of it off the internet. Looked up pictures, and descriptions, where certain kinds of plants grew. I don’t know. I wasn’t involved in it myself. I’d rather eat what I brought home from the grocery store. At least you know it’s safe to eat. All of those twigs and bark and everything… No one wants to eat all that stuff. No one normal, anyway.”

  “Do you know what he ate that evening? If he included any of his wildcrafted ingredients in his dinner?”

  “I don’t know. I guess he might have. He used them where he could, but he knew I didn’t like them, so he would just put them on his own food or make his own teas or salads. I didn’t pay any attention to it.”

  “With his interest in it, you never discussed it with him?”

  “We had separate interests. Couples don’t have to share everything, you know. He was obsessed with that park, with being out in nature. I wasn’t. Sometimes we’d go for a walk there after supper, but…” Ramsey broke off. “That was his thing.”

  There was a beep on the line and Margie pulled her phone away from her ear slightly to look at the screen and see if another call was coming through. But there was no alert on the phone.

  “Hang on…” Ramsey said. Apparently, it was his phone, not hers. “Uh… no, it’s fine. Go ahead.”

  “Okay. Had he ever gotten sick from any of his wildcrafting experiments before? Misidentifying a plant, or not realizing it had to be prepared a certain way, or finding out he was sensitive to one of the ingredients? Getting a stomachache from raw elderberries, anything like that?”

  “Yeah. I mean, some of those things you don’t learn until you get it wrong. Or there are different opinions on the internet or different varieties of plants. He’d made a few mistakes, but nothing that made him seriously ill. I mean, you can get food poisoning from stuff you buy at the store too, but you never really know whether it was food poisoning or just a bug, unless you have to go to the hospital and are tested. You just say, ‘Maybe it was the egg salad,’ and make sure it doesn’t get left out on the counter for so long the next time. Maybe he ate something he shouldn’t have, or maybe it was just a touch of the flu. You don’t know.”

  “Yeah,” Margie agreed. She’d had those experiences too, where everyone got sick after Christmas dinner, but she never knew whether it was some kind of gastritis that all of the kids passed around the family or whether it was the way Auntie Cherise cooked her stuffing inside the bird. “I hear you. And… there’s one more thing, Mr. Ramsey. Can you tell me whether Tristan had been… how his spirits had been lately? Did he ever seem moody or depressed? Did he have any behavioral changes? Give up something that he liked? Seem like he was on edge all the time?”

  Ramsey grunted. “What else is new? Everybody goes through stuff like that. You don’t get enough sleep. Get up on the wrong side of the bed. Have a fight over who finished off the milk when one of you wanted cereal in the morning.”

  “I’m thinking more of… a major change in mood or behavior. Not just one day.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like was he depressed? Had he ever been diagnosed with depression or any other disorder? Was he on any medications?”

  “All-natural Trist? No, of course not.”

  “You’d never been concerned about his state of mind? Whether he might harm himself?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  There was only silence on the other end of the phone. Margie thought that she had led up to this question obviously enough that Ramsey shouldn’t have been shocked, but she had apparently still taken him off-guard. She let him think about it for a minute, giving him time to review Tristan Elliott’s recent behavior and think about whether there had been any changes that had been concerning.

  “You mean… is it possible that he took something on purpose, trying to kill himself? Because he was depressed?”

  “That’s what I’m wondering. I know that we don’t like to think that someone we know and love might be in such a bad place, that they might do something to harm themselves instead of asking for help or going to a professional… but it does happen. A lot of people struggle with mental illness.”

  “Tristan was always… what I would call high-strung. I don’t think there was anything wrong with him. I mean… he wasn’t seeing a doctor for anything. Like I said, he was in perfect health. But… he was prone to… drama.”

  “Maybe you could give me an example of what you mean by that.”

  “Like… if I didn’t take enough of a new dish he had made for supper or didn’t rave over how good it was and how much time he must have spent to make it, he would throw it out. Maybe he’d complain about it and say what he was upset about, or maybe he would just take the whole thing, pot and all, and throw it in the trash. Drama. He couldn’t accept that I might not like everything he made. He wanted all of the praise, even if it was so over the top that it sounded insincere. He wanted… big gestures from me. A dozen roses for no reason. Taking him out because he’d gotten a nice email from a client. Sleeping in or staying home with him on impulse just because I wanted to be with him. All of those… TV romance kinds of things. Things that people just don’t do in real life.”

  “I think I understand,” Margie said slowly. It wasn’t a very pretty picture of Elliott. Someone very needy, who needed to control things or to be the center of attention. A difficult sort of person to live with. He could be the kind of person who would take a handful of pills in front of his lover and say, “You see? I’m going to kill myself. I know you don’t love me anymore and you’re not going to do anything about it.” And his partner would have to do the only thing he could, taking Elliott to the emergency room or calling 9-1-1. Elliott would have his stomach pumped and would be fine until the next time he felt the need to take control of a situation and threaten to hurt himself.

  Except maybe it had been a handful of berries instead of a handful of pills. Not the elderberries that would only result in a stomachache, but something far more harmful. Maybe he’d done it in front of Ramsey and had not gotten the reaction he had wanted, so he had run out of the house. Or maybe he had taken them at the park and called Ramsey to come and rescue him but, for once, Ramsey hadn’t come running.

  “Had he ever taken anything before, threatened to harm himself?”

  “I don’t know. No. I don’t know what to say. He said things sometimes, but they were jokes. Or he backed off when I said I loved him and would be inconsolable if something happened to him. He never made any serious threats.”

  Was it possible that it had been suicide? Or was it possible that Tristan Elliott had never planned to die, but to be rescued? How would Dr. Kahn look at that? As suicide or an accident?

  “What happened Tuesday night?” Margie asked. “You said you couldn’t remember what the two of you argued over. I’m beginning to suspect that it might have been more than just an argument and that you know what it was about and what happened after that. Did he threaten to hurt himself? Kill himself?”

  “No. No, he didn’t. Tuesday night was just an argument. Just a stupid argument that didn’t make any difference to anything. He should have stayed home. Slammed a door or two. He should have stayed with me where he wouldn’t be hurt. But instead, he had to go off on his own and… something happened to him. I don’t know what.”

  “What was the argument about?”

  “About jealousies,” Ramsey finally admitted. “About him thinking that I was seeing someone else on the side. But he didn’t have any proof. No evidence. So he screamed himself hoarse, and when that didn’t work, he took off. Stomped off to his little park to talk to the birds and tell them what an awful life he had. Eventually, he would blow off all the steam, and then he would come back home. He’d apologize, we would make up… and everything would be okay again. Until the next thing.”

  “This was a regular occurrence?”

  “He was insecure. He grew up with a divorced mom who told him everything about her marriage and relationships. Everything. He saw her go through men, heard about them dogging around on her, and grew up thinking that everyone was like that. Always on the lookout for someone else. Cheating and moving on to the next relationship. So that’s what he expected.”

  “And that’s what he was always on the lookout for in your relationship.”

  Ramsey sniffled and breathed out heavily. “You know, I told him that the longest marriages I knew of weren’t the hetero couples; they were the gay couples. He didn’t need to worry about me cheating on him, we were both dedicated to each other, and we were going to outlast the oldest of the married couples.” He cleared his throat. “And then something like this happens. Till death do us part.”

  “I’m very sorry for your loss. I wish that there was something I could do to comfort you over what happened. I don’t think he suffered, and he died in one of his favorite places. That’s nothing, I know, but…”

  “It was his favorite place,” Ramsey agreed. “More than any room in this house. The park was what he loved best. His peaceful place. The only place he could go and forget all his nagging doubts about fidelity and whether we could actually make it together and be calm. I went there a couple of times with him, just to be with him there and see what it felt like. He really did love that place.”

  Maybe Ramsey could set up some kind of memorial for him. An endowment. A donation in Tristan’s name. Something that would be a permanent fixture in the park. Margie’s heart ached for the two of them, even though Tristan was beyond feeling sad and insecure. They had thought that they would be happy together. And now Pete Ramsey was on his own, and Tristan could no longer roam his beloved park.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Christina was still up when Margie headed to bed. But Margie wanted to have time and energy for a run in the morning and then get a little time in at the office. Not a lot, because she didn’t like spending her weekends working at the office if she wasn’t required to be. But maybe just a few minutes to review her inbox, make sure that she didn’t have anything back from Dr. Kahn or the laboratory yet, and see whether the video had come in from the bird sanctuary.

  Margie poked her head into Christina’s bedroom, where she was still sitting on the bed and interacting with her teenage world on her phone.

  “I’m going to head to bed. Don’t stay up too late,” she warned.

  “I can sleep in,” Christina said with a shrug. Why should it bother her how early Margie got up? She didn’t have to get up just because her mother was crazy enough to get up early on a weekend.

  “Well then… listen to some other motherly advice I’ve given you lately,” Margie told her with a smile and shake of her head.

  “Drink plenty of water and eat your vegetables,” Christina said, tapping her phone with her thumbs.

  “Good. Eat some vegetables. But not too much water before bed. You know how you—”

  “Mo-om!” Christina complained, drawing the word out into two syllables. “That was a problem when I was, like, six! I think I’m old enough not to have to worry about that anymore.”

  Margie bent down to kiss her on the forehead. “Sweet dreams, dear.”

  “You too,” Christina said automatically. “Love you.”

  “Ki shaakiihitin.”

  Margie’s sleep was disrupted. When she lay down, the tiredness that had plagued her most of the night fled, and she was suddenly wide awake, her brain reminding her of all the other things she had hoped to get done. The problems with the Elliott case and the questions it still posed. Worries about Moushoom and what would happen if he caught the Delta variant. She kept going over all of the plants that Moushoom had pointed out in the park, both good and bad, trying to make sense of it all. Had Tristan Elliott taken something there, or was it a wild goose chase?

  She eventually got up and walked around a bit, took an over-the-counter sleep aid, and looked in on Christina, who was quiet and had fallen asleep with her phone beside her on the bed. Margie didn’t go in and put it on the charger on Christina’s nightstand. She might wake the girl up and, if she didn’t, she wouldn’t know where to find her phone in the morning. She didn’t like Margie moving any of her things around. So if the phone ran out of juice, it ran out of juice. That was Christina’s own problem, and she could deal with it.

  Margie returned to her bedroom and still tossed and turned, finding it very difficult to settle for the night. Eventually, she settled into a restless sleep, but it was fraught with disturbing images. Unanswered questions and random input that her brain didn’t know what to do with. She saw Tristan Elliott as he had looked in death, still alive and well, cooking up bits of green plants and bark in a cauldron on the stove. He was pale, his face cut up, but his eyes were open and glittering with intelligence and questions.

  “Let me feed you,” he insisted. “This is the most peaceful thing you’ve ever eaten.”

  Margie had been about to point out that Christina was (mostly) vegetarian now, so most of Margie’s meals were peaceful, not containing the meat of any animals whose lives had been sacrificed for her nourishment. But she wasn’t able to talk to Tristan. He was talking to someone else. Probably Pete Ramsey. Margie wasn’t actually there.

  “This isn’t real,” Ramsey insisted from somewhere outside Margie’s vision. “This whole thing is a sham, and you know that.”

  “It’s love,” dream Tristan insisted.

  “It’s nothing more than mulch. A whole big bag of mulch.”

  Someone was shaking Margie. She tried unsuccessfully to rouse herself. It took several pleas from Christina and considerable shaking to wake Margie up enough to understand what was happening.

  “What is it?” she asked, sitting up in bed and rubbing her sticky eyes. “Is everything okay?”

  “I don’t know what you were dreaming about,” Christina said. “But you were really going. And your phone is ringing.”

  Margie wiped her eyes again with her hand and picked her phone up. She pulled it off the cord and looked at it.

  It hadn’t been ringing because someone had called her, but because she had set an alarm. “Is it that late?” she demanded, feeling like she could barely pronounce her words around a mouthful of marbles. “I can’t believe I slept through the alarm.”

  “I think that means you’re too tired. You should go back to sleep.”

  It was a little annoying to be woken up to be told to go back to sleep. But Christina had said that Margie had been dreaming. She must have been calling out in her sleep for Christina to have been awakened and brought over from the other side of the house.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  “I know. And I would have let you sleep, but with your phone ringing too, I thought I’d better wake you up in case it was urgent.” She shrugged. “But if it’s just an alarm…”

  “No… I wanted to go for a run before work today…”

  “And you’re not on today, so you don’t have to be at the office at any specific time. Or at all. Stay home and have a quiet day for once.”

  “I will, but today I might have some evidence coming in that I need to deal with…”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10