I bent my head and pressed my lips against her knuckles.
“You don’t have to protect me from ugly things anymore.”
A faint ghost of a smile touched her mouth.
“Warren,” she whispered, “you say that like it was ever a choice.”
The investigators processed the house on the third day.
I was not there when they did it. Margaret insisted that I stay at the hospital and let professionals preserve what needed preserving. It was the correct decision, which irritated me on a primal level. There is a helplessness to doing the smart thing when what you want is to tear your own kitchen apart with your bare hands.
The search turned up what we expected and what we didn’t.
On the expected side: supplement containers in the pantry Lindsay had introduced after the ankle sprain, some partially used, some recently opened; residue in a shaker bottle; and Cassandra’s green planner in the kitchen drawer, where she said it would be. Her notes were not melodramatic. Cassandra did not write like a woman trying to build a case. She wrote like a woman trying to out-think her own body.
May 11: Nausea after berry smoothie. Lindsay used new powder. Ask if okay with BP meds?
May 18: Dizzy by 11 a.m. Fine by dinner. Weird.
June 2: Metal taste again. Stop taking powder if it keeps happening.
June 7: Preston here too. Both of them hovering. Hate that word. Hovering.
July 14: Need to tell Warren something feels wrong.
It was enough to make the room inside me go very quiet.
On the unexpected side, investigators found the packaging from estate paperwork in a kitchen trash bin tucked beneath newer garbage, and a printed callback note from the attorney’s office on the mudroom desk with Preston’s cell number written across the top in Lindsay’s handwriting.
People who think they are smarter than consequences often get undone by ordinary laziness.
Margaret called me that afternoon.
“Kurt deserves a medal,” she said without preamble.
“For what now?”
“He tracked down pharmacy surveillance from two towns over. Preston bought the same supplement brand three separate times in four months. Paid cash. Went alone twice. Lindsay was in the car on the third purchase.”
I sat down slowly in the chair beside Cassandra’s bed because my body had started making those decisions for me whenever a new piece clicked into place.
Margaret kept going.
“I have the bank trail. I have the estate attorney’s confirmation on the policy update. I have Cassandra’s symptom log. I have the hospital tox report. And I have your son’s astonishingly stupid phone call to the attorney’s office pretending to be his mother’s assistant.”
“He used his own number,” I said.
Margaret laughed once, short and sharp.
“Criminal confidence is frequently just stupidity wearing a blazer.”
“What now?”
“Now the police finish their side. The district attorney’s office is getting a file so clean it practically alphabetizes itself.”
I looked at Cassandra, asleep again, color slowly returning to a face I had been too close to losing.
“I want them to feel this,” I said.
Margaret’s voice lost its edge and became almost warm.
“Honey, by the time this is over, they will.”
There was one more piece, ugly in a different way, that arrived on day four.
Kurt came by the hospital in person carrying a bag of clothes, a real cup of coffee, and a folder. He set all three on the little round table in Cassandra’s room while she slept.
“You’re going to hate this,” he said.
“I hate most things right now. Narrow it down.”
He handed me the folder.