Page 114 of Heidi Lucy Loses Her Mind
I need to get to that woman. I need to talk to her.
Only I’m not looking where I’m going. I’m not paying attention. I don’t see what’s on the floor in front of me. I only feel it, the disruption in my hurried steps. I pitch forward, and everything goes black.
* * *
I don’t realizeI’m crying until I hear Soren’s muttered curse from next to me.
“What is it?” he says, standing up. He grabs a box of tissues from the corner table and yanks a few of them out, passing them to me.
“I remember,” I say, swiping furiously at my eyes. “I remember what happened. I remember everything.”
And it hits me then, the enormity of what has happened, and my tears fall faster.
I cry, and I cry, and I cry.
I cry into the night, offering Soren limited, blubbered explanations—that Carmina Hildegarde knew she had been poisoned, that she had no desire to live any longer, that sheletherself die. I cry in the minutes and then hours and then days that follow my return home.
I cry because while I never grew up believing in the concept oftoo late…I was wrong.
I was too late to help Carmina. I was already too late when I overheard her phone call. And I think…I think I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering what might have happened if I had talked to her before I tried to call Soren.
If I had talked to her before she was ever poisoned.
If onlyleaves a bitter aftertaste, one that lingers and leaves you feeling queasy, one that makes you want to cry and curse and wish for ignorance.
I know that what happened to Carmina wasn’t my fault. I didn’t poison her.
But I think I’ll always wonder anyway.
One thing I do know?
I will never tell anyone the final thing I heard Carmina say, the one that sent me reeling and sent ice down my spine.
Carmina Hildegarde had poisoned Elsie, too.
She had tried to retaliate against her daughter-in-law, but she’d failed, succeeding only in making Elsie violently ill; and when I overheard her on the phone, she’d known she wouldn’t get another chance. She’d sounded sad, defeated.
I will take that knowledge to my grave. I don’t see any point in revealing it now.
So it’s something I’ll have to live with.
* * *
Soren keepsme updated on the case, but I don’t really need him to. It’s all over the news. Sunshine Springs isn’t large, and this kind of scandal is something we don’t see every day. A double murder shakes things up nicely.
The symptoms of rat poisoning, it turns out, may not appear until several days after the poisoning—a fact I find online in the days following. And judging by what I heard Carmina say on the phone, Elsie gave Carmina cookies that Patrice had baked and brought over—only Carmina didn’t believe what Elsie said. She didn’t believe Patrice Riggs baked those cookies.
She was woefully mistaken.
“I wonder what the restaurant guy used when he tried to poison her at the restaurant,” I say one morning while Soren and I sit eating scones from the bakery.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But she didn’t eat any of it, anyway, remember? The bug.”
“Yeah,” I say with a sigh. Everything is still fresh and raw and painful.
“Why do you think it was Elsie who bought the rat poison and not Patrice, if Patrice was the one who poisoned Carmina?”
I narrow my eyes, thinking. “My guess? She wanted to keep her hands as clean as possible.” It fits with what we know of the woman who worked with charities and played the doting wife.
