If Looks Could Kill (21 page)

“You’ve lost me.”

“Yeah, sorry,” she said. “It’s a bit confusing. When you eat a death cap, the symptoms generally occur in three stages.” As
she spoke she peeled off three small pieces of her coffee lid and laid them in a row. She pointed to the first.

“Stage one: About six hours after you consume amanita, you start to get real bad abdominal pain and you start vomiting. Most
of the time a person will head to the ER with these symptoms, but sometimes they pass it off as a bad stomach flu and don’t
get treatment.”

She pointed to the second piece of lid. “Then there’s this weird period of false recovery. Your symptoms disappear. You think,
Okay, I’m all better now. That lasts about four days.” She touched the last piece of lid with her index finger. “Then suddenly,
around day five, the symptoms come back,
bam
, and it’s then that everybody realizes something more serious is going on. The liver and kidneys begin to fail, the heart
goes. It’s especially deadly for kids, but if adults eat enough, they can die, too. And that’s why you can’t test for it.
Ten days after ingestion there’s no trace left in the system.”

“And Mr. Bobb had an
earlier
attack?”

“Yeah, that’s what I was starting to say,” she continued. “I called his M.D. out here to get a bit of background. It’s not
his regular doctor—his regular guy is in New York—but this is a local doc he goes to when necessary. Well, this guy tells
me that Bobb had called the previous weekend complaining of stomach flu. His M.D. suggested he come to the ER—he didn’t think
it was anything more than flu or food poisoning, but with a guy Bobb’s age you worry about dehydration. Bobb told the guy
he was waiting for his wife to get back from a horse riding competition or something and would probably go to the ER when
she got back. But he didn’t. Or at least he didn’t come here. Obviously he didn’t feel so terrible that he thought he needed
medical help. And that’s the trouble with stage one.”

“Do you remember what day it happened—Saturday or Sunday?”

“It was late Sunday, I believe. If he’d eaten a death cap, it was probably Saturday evening.”

“Is there any possible way he could have eaten it earlier in the week and gotten sick on Sunday?”

“Nah, too much of a delay.”

“You know mushrooms were his hobby,” I said.

“Yeah, which is, of course, another reason amanita fits. Though it’s hard to imagine someone with his knowledge cooking up
anything with even a
passing
resemblance to a death cap.” Pause.

“So then how did he end up eating it?”

“That’s the mystery, isn’t it? And, of course, if he had
knowingly
eaten mushrooms, why not mention it?” Before I could read her eyes to see how much she was implying, she glanced down at
her waistband and I realized her beeper had gone off. Squeezing her chin into her neck, she squinted at the message.

“I got two more minutes. Tell me about the other case. Any similarities?”

“You mean, could she have died from an amanita? It doesn’t sound like it. The girl who ate the poison—it was in some chocolates—died
within a few hours of eating it, and as far as I know, she didn’t have an earlier attack. But look, it’s still been very helpful
to talk to you. I hope you won’t mind if I call you with any other questions that come up.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” she said. “Though, just so you know—the New York police are apparently looking into this. I
heard they spoke to the director of the hospital, and I think they may be paying us a visit.”

So Cat had shared the info with them. I just hoped Farley didn’t find out I’d been out here.

We walked out of the cafeteria together, and Dr. Tressler showed me a shorter route to the parking lot. I navigated a maze
of corridors, getting lost only once before I came to the front lobby of the hospital. When I pushed through the revolving
doors, I saw that the sky had darkened and a light rain was falling. Pulling my sweater over my head, I raced in the general
direction of my car. By the time I found it, two rows over, and flung myself into the front seat, I was as damp as a sneaker
left out overnight.

I didn’t start the car right away. I sat there taking in the full impact of something Dr. Tressler had said: Tucker Bobb’s
health problems had begun in Pennsylvania,
not
in New York City, as his employees had assumed. If the cause of his death was a mushroom, it had been consumed out here.
And if someone had deliberately poisoned him with that mushroom, they’d been in Bucks County that weekend. The likelihood
that Heidi’s killer, someone who had attended Cat’s party, had also done in Tucker Bobb two states away on an earlier date
seemed remote to me—though I couldn’t give up totally on the idea. Maybe the killer was a magazine editor or writer who had
visited Bobb that weekend. Or he or she had a house out here and had managed to slip Bobb the mushroom at some event that
weekend.

What a dreadful little thought. For all I knew, the killer might be traipsing around out here this weekend.

D
AMP AND TUCKERED
out, I headed toward Carversville. Now that I’d gathered what information I could out in Bucks County, I felt anxious to
get back to New York, to pursue whatever leads I could there. Yet trying to turn up much on a weekend would most likely prove
to be a bust. Besides, I knew Landon was looking forward to having me around, and it would be rude just to bolt.

What I’d do, I decided, was have an early dinner tonight at the inn in Carversville, catch up with Landon later in the evening,
and leave sometime on Saturday.

As soon as I got back to Landon’s, I peeled off my dress and slipped into pants and a sleeveless shirt. With my laptop set
up on the dining room table, I made a sizable dent in the Marky story. At around six-thirty I locked up to go to the inn,
taking both my steno pad and composition book with me. The rain had stopped, so I decided to walk instead of drive—it was
just a few blocks away. The intoxicating fragrance of lilacs wafted through the dusk, and as I strolled I felt more relaxed
than I had in days. If I bumped into someone from Cat’s party at the inn, I’d know to panic, but otherwise I felt out of harm’s
way.

The inn was practically empty when I strolled in. I opted for a table for two against the wall—with a small lamp that would
allow me to read without squinting. I ordered a glass of red wine, and after my first sip, I flipped open my steno pad and
read through the notes I’d taken today.

First there was Darma. Testy babe, wasn’t she? I’d been expecting someone still shell-shocked by her husband’s death. What
was that expression people always used when someone was in mourning—prostrate with grief? That’s what it seemed like the death
of a loved one would do to you: leave you flatout in despair, head flopped on the arm of the sofa, heavy as a cannonball.
But there was nothing flat-out about Darma. Maybe Tucker’s death hadn’t saddened her all that much. According to the bio of
Bobb I’d found on the Web, they’d only been married for four years—but that was enough time, of course, for even the most
blissful of relationships to sour.

There was one thing I knew for certain: My questions about his death had seriously pissed her off. Sure, if she
was
grief-stricken, it might be tough to rehash, but on the other hand, wouldn’t she be interested in knowing whether Tucker
had been the victim of foul play?

And who was the
Lonesome Dove
dude I’d seen slipping into the barn and then later heading into the house? A caretaker? A horse trainer? A boy toy?

The waiter took my order—asparagus vinaigrette to start (I passed on the mushroom tart) and lamb chops—and I moved on to my
notes on Dr. Tressler. Her theory seemed credible, especially in light of Bobb’s fascination with mushrooms. But as she’d
indicated, there was no way to prove it. In hindsight I realized how much better it would have been if my interview with Darma
had occurred
after
my appointment with Dr. Tressler. I would have tried to extricate certain details about the weekend before Tucker had died.
What he’d eaten on Satur-day night. Who’d been around that day. The time Darma had returned Sunday. And why, in the end, he
hadn’t gone to the ER. Yet Darma probably wouldn’t have been forthcoming.

I started to play around in my head with what might have happened to Tucker. Maybe he’d gone mushroom hunting up that dirt
road I’d accidentally taken, mistaken death caps for something benign, and later (unbeknownst to Darma) eaten a batch he sautéed
nicely in butter. But even if he’d committed that kind of goof, once he began to hurl the insides of his stomach he would
surely have made the connection and hightailed it to the hospital. The other possibility, of course, was that someone else
had been the bearer of bad mushrooms—either accidentally or on purpose—and Tucker had eaten them unaware. Perhaps he’d sat
like a king in the candlelit dining room of his big stone house on Saturday night and been served a beef bourguignonne loaded
with carrots and onions and wild mushrooms from the woods—prepared by the fetching former food editor.

An intriguing idea, maybe worth a police investigation of its own. It would also mean, then, that the two deaths were nothing
more than a bizarre coincidence. When I returned to New York I’d see if I could turn up the name of the mushroom club that
Bobb belonged to. Maybe someone in that group could tell me how likely it would have been for him to mistakenly pop a death
cap in his mouth.

My asparagus arrived, so I snapped shut my composition book and turned all my attention to the meal. The dining room had begun
to fill up, mostly with couples—either alone or in pairs—and as I devoured my food I watched surreptitiously as they interacted.
There was such a distinguishable difference between the newly besotted, in the throes of a chat fest, and those together long
enough to have run out of things to say. Several people glanced in my direction occasionally. I’m sure they wondered what
I was doing eating alone at a country inn on Friday night.

When I was first married I had cajoled my husband into taking a few weekend excursions to country inns. They were part of
a plot I’d concocted to try to reconnect with him, to recapture the bond that we’d had during the first six months of our
relationship but that had then begun to erode, almost imperceptibly at first, and then, since the day of our marriage with
terrifying speed. On each of these hapless excursions he’d been restless and wired. He’d paced our room whenever we were in
it and sat at dinner stretching his neck as if the collar of his shirt were choking him. My first suspicion, even before the
proverbial other woman, was drugs—cocaine, or crack—but searches on my part turned up nothing. Eventually, of course, I came
to understand that you squirm and pace like that when you owe a bookie twenty grand.

When would I get the chance to sit in this kind of a room with a guy again? I wondered. Six months ago I wouldn’t have been
ready for anything so damn intense, but lately I’d begun to feel a yearning for romance. I certainly wouldn’t end up someplace
like this with K.C. Besides the fact that things were going nowhere fast with us, anything this romantic would terrify him.
This was more for guys like the handsome and suave Dr. Herlihy. Where was he tonight? I wondered. Maybe showing off his Village
pad to his Washington girlfriend, up for the weekend. The thought, oddly enough, irritated me.

For the rest of my meal I tried just to concentrate on the food and allow my mind to idle. By the time I’d had coffee and
paid the bill, the dining room was packed and so, I saw as I departed, was the barroom, people jammed around the bar and others
eating below a fog of smoke at small tables that had been set up with white tablecloths along the wall. In the hallway the
hostess had her head in the reservation book, obviously searching for the name given by two couples who had just arrived.
My exit went unnoticed.

Stepping outside onto the long, narrow porch, I was startled to find how cool it had gotten. It was also pitch dark out.I
felt like an idiot for not having brought the Jeep. Though the walk to Landon’s was short, the thought of doing it in the
cold and darkness held absolutely
nada
appeal.

I took a seat on one of the porch’s old rocking chairs and punched Landon’s number on my cell. Surely he was there by now.
And being one of those fabulous old-fashioned guys, he would think there was nothing wimpy about my calling to request that
he drive over and rescue me. His machine picked up. Odd. It was past when he said he’d be there, and he was punctual to a
fault. I hoped nothing had happened to him on the road.

I got up from the rocker, buttoned my sweater, and stepped off the porch, headed right on Main Street. There were street lamps
on ahead of me, and a light was falling from the second floor of a little antiques shop. As I walked I could hear the sounds
of the inn falling away behind me: a cacophony of chattering voices as the front door opened, a car door slamming in the front
parking lot. I passed the small general store, the “Closed” sign dangling on the door, and the antiques shop, where through
the second-floor window I could see a woman moving about, probably the owner who lived above the store. The house was similar
to the one my mother had moved to four years ago, with a white picket fence all around it.

Thinking of my mother made me flash onto something she had once shared with me about so-called bizarre coincidences. She believed
that at least half the events we dismiss as coincidence really aren’t. They’re related, though not necessarily in a direct
way, and if you go back far enough or look closely enough, you’ll spot the connection. She informed me of this the night my
two sisters-in-law, who had been invited over to my mother’s house for dinner with my brothers, each arrived with a homemade
lemon tart. I was home for the weekend, and later, while loading the dishwasher, I noted to my mother what a coincidence the
twofer tart situation had been. Perhaps, my mother remarked, it
wasn’t
such a coincidence after all. Maybe, she said, there had recently been a recipe for a lemon tart in
Martha Stewart Living
and both girls had clipped it. Or maybe, she mused, Amy had mentioned to Sydney a week or two before that she planned to
make a tart for the dinner, and Sydney, listening absentmindedly, had filed away the idea (but not where it came from) and
in a burst of supposed originality had baked one herself. Or—and here was an evil thought—Sydney might have learned of Amy’s
plans and then decided to trump her and arrive with the tastier tart (and indeed it had been).