Last Licks (19 page)

Seems like a neat, clean enough place,
she thought, looking around.
Is this what a music therapist’s salary gets?
Luke stood in the doorway to his place, looking a little shaggier and more disheveled than usual. He’d ditched the corduroy jacket and mismatched tie, but he still had the pants—pretty wrinkled now—and the shirt, which looked as if he’d sweated right through it.

“I’m sorry,” he said when he saw her. “This was probably a stupid idea.”

“Well, I’m here now,” Sunny replied. “Let’s talk.” Luke held the door open for her, and she went into his place. It was a studio, on the small side and sparsely furnished. She saw a couch that looked as if it had been put together from a kit, and a spindly sort of modern chair, arranged on what looked like a piece of remnant carpet. One wall was the kitchen, with a sort of counter arrangement and a couple of stools. Around a corner was the sleeping nook, where Sunny could see the foot of Luke’s bed—it seemed to be made—with his jacket hanging precariously off the edge. She saw some very nice sound equipment and a lot of CDs but no television, and some low chests that probably held his clothes. A floor lamp and a spindly table lamp on an end table provided dim light.

When Sunny had seated herself in the chair, Luke made a big, swooping gesture, taking in the whole place. “It ain’t Scatterwell Castle, or whatever they call it, but it’s home.”

He dropped onto the sofa.

“We tried to catch up with you earlier this evening, but you were just a little bit ahead of us when we left.” Sunny paused for a moment, trying to figure out what to say. “I guess I wanted to apologize. That’s not the way people are supposed to talk—or act—around here.”

“Why should I be surprised at Alfred?” Luke asked. “He didn’t act much better around his uncle.” He took a deep breath. “It was hard to hear all that stuff.”

“About your friend?” Sunny said. “I’m sorry. I know that you liked Gardner, and he certainly seemed to like you.”

“Yeah. Liked,” Luke echoed and then launched into a seemingly unrelated story. “My mom died about a year ago. Something her potions couldn’t cure. I managed to get the word and return to the commune before she went. She gave me her book of cures”—he gestured to a battered spiral notebook sitting on the table—“and she finally told me something I’d been asking her about for years.”

He sagged back on the couch, looking at Sunny. “You know that saying, ‘It takes a village’? I was raised by thirty-seven people on the commune. But I never had a father. My mom had an ‘old man’ for a while, and especially when she was younger, she had a lot of, well, let’s call them overnight guests.”

“That must have been . . .” Sunny ran out of words.

“Weird?” Luke suggested. “Hard?” He shook his head. “Actually, it was just life. There was a guy in the commune, Paul, who was a carpenter and woodworker. He was what you’d probably call my role model.” Luke laughed. “He believed in doing a good job and not taking any crap . . . and he also loved to sing. He was really into music—got me my first guitar by trading a table he’d made for it. I can’t complain about my life. There was just one thing. Whenever I asked Mom, she always changed the subject . . . until she lay dying.”

“So who was he?” Sunny asked, afraid she knew the answer. Luke laughed—not exactly a happy sound. “That was the thing; she didn’t know. As far as she could narrow it down, he was one of two guys, fresh out of Yale, who were on a road trip. They crashed with Mom, got kind of wasted, and I guess you can fill in the rest.”

He moved ponderously on the couch, but his voice got clearer. Maybe his drinks were wearing off. “All I had were first names, and the fact that they came from Maine. So I played detective, managed to get my hands on Yale alumni lists. There are a couple of thousand alums in Maine, but I was looking for people from the class of 1970 and finally managed to find a Hank and a Gardner. One was a doctor who ran Bridgewater Hall. I had a degree in music therapy, had good references . . . and was willing to work cheap. After getting the gig, I just kept my eyes open. It was just a stroke of luck for me that Gardner also happened to be a patient there. I managed to snag a tissue when Dr. Reese had a bloody nose, then I got hold of a couple of glasses that Gardner had drunk from, which was a hell of a lot easier. I sent them off to one of those mail-in DNA places, and here’s the answer, postmarked about a month ago.” He tapped a finger on a couple of letters lying beside the notebook. “Modern science says there’s a ninety-nine percent chance that Gardner was my father.”

“So you found him.” Sunny couldn’t think of anything else to say as she tried to digest all of Luke’s revelations.

“And I was even happy. Dr. Reese, well, he came off as a bit of a stiff. It was a relief to find out that Gardner was my dad. He seemed cheerful, even if he was on his back most of the time. He always had a smile and a joke. I was glad I’d found him.” Luke fell silent for a moment. “But all I knew was the sick guy at Bridgewater Hall. When I heard all that stuff people were whispering at the memorial, what Alfred said out loud, I had to wonder. Was I a chump to come looking for him?”

“People are rarely all one thing or all the other,” Sunny pointed out. “If he was nice to you, enthusiastic, maybe he liked you. Maybe he wanted you to think well of him—to remember the good in him.” She hesitated. “Did you tell him?”

Luke shook his shaggy head. “I was sort of edging toward it, working up to it. I almost told him the night he died. See, I did take some time off from pushing papers around and went to see him. He’d been complaining about feeling nervous, but they wouldn’t give him anything for it. So I mixed up some of Mom’s nerve tonic and smuggled it in for him, gave him a dose—”

“In a glass of brandy,” Sunny finished, remembering Ollie’s story.

“The stuff tastes awfully strong, and I thought that would cut it a bit. Gardner used to say a good snort was probably as good as a sleeping pill.” He stopped, blinking. “How’d you know about that?”

“Ollie woke up and overheard a little while you were visiting with Gardner.” Sunny looked over at the wreck of a notebook. “What was in that tonic?”

Luke reached over and turned tattered pages. “Here it is.” He passed the book over to Sunny. Luke’s mom had unformed, loopy, hard-to-read handwriting that started large on the top lines and progressively shrank as she got closer to the bottom of the page.

“What is this—‘toxic’?” Sunny pointed at a word.

Luke tried to focus. “No, ‘tonic.’”

They ended up sitting together on the couch, trying to decipher the recipe. It only got harder as the letters got smaller. “What is this here? ‘Stop’? Or maybe ‘Stup’?”

“Steep, like you do with a teabag. In this case, you do it more than once to draw some bad stuff out of the monkshood.”

“That was my next question. I thought it was ‘mink stool.’”

“No, definitely monkshood,” Luke told her. “‘Steep monkshood 2X’—two times.”

Sunny peered more closely. “Okay, I can see the rest. But that ‘2X’—I think that’s a seven.”

“No, it’s a two. Do it twice.” He bent over the notebook, “See? There’s a bottom on the two . . . or is that the crosspiece on the T in the next line? Oh, man, don’t tell me I got it wrong.”

Sunny sat very still, her face pale. “Luke,” she said gently, “monkshood is pretty dangerous stuff. My mom had some in a corner of her garden. But she rooted it all out when I was very little because she caught me trying to taste a flower. Mom really freaked out. Have you ever made that tonic before?”

Luke shook his head. “I just followed the recipe. I really don’t remember exactly what I did now. If I screwed it up—do you think I brought on the attack that Gardner had? It’s not the first time I gave him the stuff—he seemed fine the next day. Look, here’s the leftover tonic.” He went to the kitchen counter and returned with a small bottle of clear fluid. Sunny accepted it into her palm. She didn’t want to get any fingerprints messed up.

“I think we’d better have this checked out,” Sunny told him.

“Yeah.” Luke wasn’t just getting more sober with every passing minute. He was getting paler and scareder. “I just wanted to know my father—to do a favor for him. People are going to think I was after his money. That’s the last thing I wanted.”

“I’ll get this to a doctor.” She got a pen and wrote down a phone number. “And this is a lawyer I know. I think you’d better call him.”

Sunny drove through
the darkness, the bottle of nerve tonic lying on the seat beside her in a plastic bag. The moment she left Luke’s apartment building, she’d gone to call Will, only to realize that her cell phone was in the pocket of her black jacket—which was still on the passenger’s seat in Will’s pickup. So she drove home at a very sedate speed, not wanting to even jostle the evidence.

You’d think I was driving home with a bottle of nitroglycerine,
she thought.
Well, it
could
blow this whole case sky-high.
Sunny sighed in relief when she at last pulled up in her driveway. Using just her thumb and forefinger, she picked up the bag and walked inside the house—where she found Mike waiting for her in the hallway.

“What’s going on with Luke?” He waved the note Sunny had left. “Is he okay? That was a pretty rough evening he had.”

“‘Rough’ might be an understatement,” Sunny reported, giving her dad the highlights of her recent conversation with Luke.

“Wow—he told you he’s actually Gardner’s son? And that he was in the room giving him something to drink the night Gardner died?” Mike stared at the bag in her hand. “Is that the stuff? What are you going to do with it?”

“I think it’s more like, ‘What am I going to do, question mark?’” Sunny shook her head. “No, that doesn’t sound right. But here’s my plan. First, I’m going to call Will so we can decide what to do with this blasted bottle. And get my cell phone back from his truck. Second, I’m going online to learn more about monkshood.”

“We used to have some in the backyard, in the shady area by the garage,” Mike said. “Big blue flowers. They were very pretty.” His expression went from reminiscent to grim. “Your mom got rid of them all when she found you messing with them.”

“I know, I remember,” Sunny told him. “That’s why I got so worried when I heard what was in this tonic. Mom gave me a good scolding—said they were dangerous. Now I’ve got to find out exactly how dangerous they are.”

By the time Will arrived fifteen minutes later, Sunny had finished her research and was ready for his questions. “You think Luke killed Gardner with something made from flowers?” Will asked.

“The active ingredient is something called aconite,” she told him. “And yes, it comes from the monkshood. Aconite is used in homeopathic medicine, but it’s dangerous stuff. Too much, and it’s poisonous. From what I’ve been reading, the symptoms are numbness in the face, weakness in the limbs, and vomiting. In the end, your heart stops, and you die.”

“Which pretty much sounds like what happened to Gardner Scatterwell.” Will frowned, opening the bag to look at the bottle inside. “What do you think we should do? Have the contents tested, or go straight to Nesbit?”

“The more I think about it, the more I feel that Luke should turn himself in. After all, what happened was an accident.”

“Was it? An accident committed by a poor musician who just happens to be a rich guy’s son,” Will pointed out.

“In that case, Luke got the order of things all wrong,” Sunny said. “He didn’t reveal himself to Gardner, didn’t get the will changed . . .”

“There are plenty of ways to contest a will. Besides, maybe he did reveal himself to Gardner, who wasn’t happy about it,” Will challenged, going into full cop mode. “Daconto’s suddenly got some pretty strong motives.”

“Aren’t you jumping the gun? We haven’t even tested the stuff in the bottle. We don’t even know what killed Gardner.”

“Thanks to Alfred having him cremated.” Will scowled.

“As for the scenario you’re suggesting, there’s one big problem—again,” Sunny argued. “Would Gardner have accepted a drink from Luke if he’d rejected him? The way Ollie described the whispered conversation he overheard, it sounded cordial, not like someone having poison forced down his throat.”

“You’re cutting this Luke guy a lot of slack because you like him,” Will complained. “Somebody died here, after all.”

“I’m not saying we should keep quiet while Luke makes a quick getaway out of town,” Sunny shot back. Then she added in a small voice, “I did give him Tobe Phillips’s number, though.”

“Oh, great,” Will burst out. “You think Daconto is guilty, but you hook him up with the best criminal lawyer we know?”

“
If
the stuff is deadly, then Luke made a mistake, which he’ll have to pay for,” Sunny replied. “That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have good legal advice.”

Will fumed for a moment, then reluctantly nodded. “We’ll need a secure place to keep that bottle until we turn it in. I nominate my gun safe. Have you talked to Tobe yet?”

Sunny shook her head.

“Well, we should do that, too, get everything set up. Any other details you want to mention?”

“Just one,” Sunny told him. “My jacket and cell phone are still in your truck.”

*

Sunny got up
the next morning at the crack of dawn, yawning. She’d spent a lot of time on the phone before she could get to bed, talking with Tobe Phillips about his new client, Luke Daconto. The plan was to bring Luke to the Sheriff’s Department that morning.

Sunny woke herself up under the shower, then made toast and coffee. Mike was asleep, and she decided not to wake him. She poured dry food into Shadow’s bowl, figuring that would bring him into the open, but the cat hadn’t shown. Then she spotted him trying to hide behind the kitchen doorjamb, eyeing her suspiciously.

“Oh, come on in,” she told him. “No strangers, no weird smells. Just me, trying to get out of here.” She met him as he advanced with cautious steps, ran her fingers though his fur, and then stood up. “Be a good cat,” she whispered to him as she hurried down the hallway, trying not to clomp and awaken her father, “and don’t drive Dad crazy.”

She got outside just as Will pulled up in his pickup. The ride up north went by without conversation. Will had the news channel on the radio, and they listened for any breaking news bulletins about murders at nursing homes.

They arrived at Bridgewater Hall when most of the residents were still asleep. In fact, in Room 114, Ollie’s roommate lay flat on his back, snoring loudly. Ollie, however, was awake. He gave them a bleary-eyed glower. “I guess this must be something big,” he muttered.

His eyes got progressively wider as Sunny and Will described the events of the previous night. “Luke is a nice kid,” Ollie said when they finished. “Okay, maybe he’s a bit of a goof-up. Look what happened when he tried to open that bag of chips for me.” Unconsciously, his hands made brushing motions on his chest. “But this is the last thing I’d expect to hear about him.” He frowned, figuring angles. “So what’s the next move?”

“In an hour, Luke and his lawyer will be coming here,” Sunny said. “I figure that will give you time to get washed, shaved, and dressed, not to mention arranging a meeting with Dr. Reese.”

Will glanced over at the snoring Mr. Vernon. “And maybe they can get Sleeping Beauty out of the way.”

By the time Luke and Tobe arrived at Room 114, a somewhat surprised Vernon had been woken, then wheeled off to rather early therapy. After Vernon was gone, Luke entered the room hesitantly, followed by his lawyer.

Ollie offered his hand. “This is a hell of a thing, Luke.”

Luke’s shoulders sagged. “I don’t know how it could happen. I’ve made remedies out of that book for years.”

Sunny remembered the salve he’d given her. The skin on the back of her hand was as good as new, with no trace of scratches or scarring.

At last Dr. Reese arrived, with Dr. Gavrik at his heels. “I hope we can make this quick, Mr. Barnstable. I have a lot of meetings this morning.”

“You may have to cancel them,” Ollie replied. He turned to Luke Daconto. “Luke, you have the floor.” Luke stumbled a little as he began, but he managed to get clearly enough through his explanation of what happened the night Gardner Scatterwell had died.

Explanation,
Sunny thought as she listened to the halting story,
or confession?

For a long moment, silence filled the room when Luke concluded, until Tobe Phillips spoke up. “There’s a definite possibility that due to a mistake in preparing the tonic, Mr. Gardner ingested a heavy dose of aconite.”

“Aconite is toxic,” Reese said slowly. “You’re saying that Mr. Daconto precipitated the whole episode?”

Dr. Gavrik was less diplomatic. “This untrained idiot played at making medicine, administered it without approval, and killed my patient!” She stormed over to Luke, who shrank back. “You fool! You stupid, damned fool!”

Then Gavrik turned on Reese. “I have argued and argued about hiring useless people to make the patients feel better instead of devoting our resources to medicine. Now you see what happens—not only are they useless, they can be dangerous—fatal, even.”

She obviously had more to say but bit back her words. Her sharp features tightened, almost clenched, from the effort of keeping them in.

Tobe’s handsome face looked disapprovingly at Dr. Gavrik and Dr. Reese as he spoke up. “We came here this morning as a courtesy.” He gave the word a slight emphasis and then went on. “Mr. Daconto will now go to the sheriff’s office, surrender himself, and make a full statement.”

“Oh, yes,” Gavrik sneered. “He’ll tell everyone how he did wrong, and how he’s very sorry, and they’ll feel sorry, too, and tell him he’s a naughty boy—and do almost nothing!”

She spit the last words out, stepping past Tobe to Luke again. “You practiced medicine without a license, without any training, without any sort of knowledge even, you made a stupid mistake, and now a man is dead. You should be tried for murder.” Luke flinched, but he still faced the woman.

“I didn’t mean him any harm,” he said in a tight voice. “He was my father.”

“What?” Reese said.

“Gardner was my father.” Luke cleared his throat. “When I came here, I was trying to find out who that was, and I did. I’ve got the proof at home. He met my mother years ago in a commune in California. He was on a road trip.” He paused. “Maybe you remember that.”

Reese stared at Luke as if he’d never seen him before. “And you’re his son?”

Luke nodded. “Yes, sir. He kept telling me that his nerves were eating him up ever since the stroke, and I knew my mom had used this tonic to help people. So I gave him a couple of doses. I tried . . .” He hung his head. “And I made a big mistake. I have to take responsibility for that, whatever the law thinks is fair.”

“And just,” Tobe hurriedly put in. Before he could start on the mitigating circumstances, Gavrik cut him off with a disgusted sound.

“Words, words,” she said, fanning with her hand as if to dissipate the hot air. Gavrik glared at Ollie, who up to this point had been taking everything in as a spectator. “I suppose you’re satisfied now, Mr. Troublemaker. From the beginning, I could tell you were going to be a difficult patient, excitable. And your friends”—she expanded her glare to Sunny, Will, and Luke—“would only make things worse.”

Ollie wasn’t about to take that tirade lying down, even if he was in bed. “At least this was an accident,” he snapped back, glaring up at Dr. Gavrik. “Stupid, sad—but done out of love. But we’ve still uncovered information that a lot of other people, more than usual, have passed away in this joint. And they may have died on purpose. I know one thing for sure. I’m going to have a chat with my friend the sheriff and ask him to look into that. He’ll be able to get into your so-called confidential files to dig out the truth. Hell, after what happened with Luke here, Nesbit will probably feel he
has
to investigate, if only to see how tightly wrapped this place is.” Ollie did something Sunny wouldn’t have thought possible: he shut up the nasty doctor . . . although the glitter in her eyes promised an unpleasant time in store for the next underling she bumped into.

“Radmila, I don’t think there’s anything more we can accomplish here,” Dr. Reese said quietly. It was the first time Sunny had ever heard Dr. Gavrik’s first name. “We have other business.”

Like trying to get a jump on the damage control when this comes out,
Sunny’s reporter alter ego chimed in. It wouldn’t be easy. The accident happened in the rehab ward, which had been the source of Bridgewater Hall’s excellent reputation. But Sunny suspected that most of the fallout would come from the residential side of the operation, and she could understand why.
Would I want Dad to stay in a place where one of the patients got poisoned by mistake?

And since the residents were actually the facility’s bread and butter, and Reese had said the finances were already on the rocky side, the administrator and the directors might have to decide whether the place would survive at all.

Sunny didn’t envy Dr. Reese his job that day. Although it was early in the morning, the tall man already looked tired as he shepherded Dr. Gavrik out of the room.

“Don’t listen to her,” Ollie told a shaken Luke Daconto. “The only reason her mouth got so mean is because you made her look bad.”

“She’s right, though.” Luke ran a trembling hand over his face. “What was I thinking? Mom at least had years of experience making her mixtures and using them. Me, I just followed the recipes—and I screwed this one up big-time.”

“It really comes down to two questions,” Tobe said. “Were you indifferent as to whether Mr. Scatterwell would live or die when you gave him that tonic?”

Luke stared at him. “No! I wanted him to be okay, to feel better. That’s the whole reason I gave him the tonic in the first place.”

Tobe nodded. “And at the time you gave that mixture to him, did you know it was risky?”

“No,” Luke said after a moment’s thought. “I trust all my mom’s recipes.”

“Then don’t let other people tell you how you should feel about what happened,” Tobe told him. “You’re the only one who knows what went on, why, and how you felt.” Luke nodded, looking a bit better. Sunny couldn’t help noticing, though, that Tobe’s assured expression quickly faded when Luke turned away to talk to Ollie.

“Thanks for being on my side,” he said, shaking Ollie’s hand again. “I don’t know how much more or how much better I can say it, but I’m sorry. I never meant for anything like this to happen. And I know how much you were upset over it, so I really have to apologize to you.”