“She does speak her mind,” Sean said, winking at Caer.
“Where is your dear and devoted wife this morning?” Kat asked.
“Still sleeping, I believe.”
Kat sat down at the table. “Dad, come out with me for a bit today, will you? I’ve asked Tom—he can drive us around.”
Sean looked at her with a question in his eyes. “Are you just trying to keep me occupied?” he asked her.
“Yes.” She aimed a smile in Caer’s direction. “I want you to myself for a while. Is that such a bad thing?”
“No.” He reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “I’ll be happy to run around town with you.”
Zach breezed into the breakfast room then, his hair still damp from the shower, dressed in jeans and a thick sweater, a heavy Windbreaker over his arm.
“What’s up with you?” Sean asked him.
Zach set his jacket down and headed for the coffee. “I talked to Morrissey,” he said.
“Yeah, he just called,” Kat said. “Weird, huh? And scary.” She shivered. “I hope they catch whoever did it soon.”
“Morrissey and his crew are on it,” Zach said. “And I thought I’d do some boating today. I want to get out on the water, but I don’t want to mess with the sails, I just want to zip around.”
“And you don’t feel you need to look over the cops’ shoulders?” Kat said, grinning. “You must be mellowing.”
“There’s nothing I can do that they can’t—and plenty that they can do and I can’t,” Zach said. “They’ll be running prints, checking credit card bills…. They’re on it. Caer, are you ready? You can grab a waterproof parka at the office.”
Just as they got up to leave, Tom walked in with the mail.
“Bill, bill, bill, letter from an antique dealer for Sean, letter from Kat’s webmaster, Christmas card, Christmas card, Christmas card…letter for Caer.”
“What?” she said, startled.
He handed her an envelope. She saw Michael’s name on the return—just the first name—and the address of the hospital in Dublin.
What the hell did he want? she wondered. She would have to find out later, because she wasn’t about to read his letter in public.
“A letter from home already? How nice,” Sean said.
She nodded and stuffed the envelope in her pocket. “A friend,” she said briefly. “I guess he misses me.”
“A friend, huh?” Kat teased.
Caer tried to laugh easily. She knew they were all studying her. “Not that kind of a friend. Just a guy I work with,” she assured them.
“Friends and family are the stuff of life,” Sean said gruffly.
“Okay, then, we’re out of here. Later, folks,” Zach said, sounding impatient.
He hadn’t said a word about the letter. And she knew he was still suspicious of her, no matter how close they might have become in some ways.
As he ushered her out, she felt the letter burning against her flesh through the layers of her clothing, as if it were on fire.
13
“What the hell are we doing out here?” Caer demanded, sitting next to Zach as he drove them to the wharf.
“Even I would have expected you to be investigating those blueberries.”
“Product tampering is a federal crime,” he told her. “The police and the FBI will be doing everything that can be done. Although I have to admit, I think the person behind it is in Sean’s household.”
She gasped. “What?”
“We have to go back to the beginning,” he said. “Eddie missing, Eddie dead. Sean sick—but so soon after he left the States that it’s more than possible that he consumed whatever caused it while he was here. They tested for every bacterium in the world, but they never tested for metals. Arsenic. More exotic things.”
“You think someone has been dosing him with arsenic?”
“Maybe. It’s possible. Or it might not be a metal at all. There’s always the gyromitra family.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He laughed. “Gyromitra. The false morels. And some of them don’t cause any physical effects for hours.”
“And then they cause severe abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhea?”
“You guessed it. It’s unlikely the doctors would have recognized it, because by the time he got to the hospital, nothing would have been left in his stomach to act as evidence.”
“Do you think Sean was meant to die, then?”
“Definitely.”
“But why would someone want to kill him?”
“He’s rich.”
“But…his share of the business would go to Kat, and neither of us thinks she would ever hurt her father. So…why?”