Page 93 of Heidi Lucy Loses Her Mind
My jaw drops. “Are your memories coming back?”
“Maybe?” she says. Then she shakes her head. Still, her excitement shines through as she goes on, “Not completely—I don’t remember calling you still, or why I would have, but I remember being out here watering my plants! Just flashes of it, but…”
“What else?” I say quickly. “Anything else?”
“No,” she says slowly. “I watered the ones here in front, and then…the ones on the side, maybe?” She hurries past the display windows and the rest of the flower beds, rounding the building, and I follow close behind. “I can’t quite remember that part,” she says, looking at me. That little frown is back. “But I definitely think I watered my plants that night!”
“That’s amazing,” I say. I step closer to her, resting my hands on her shoulders. “The rest will come back.”
“I worried it wouldn’t,” she says, her voice cracking, and I’m startled to see tears brimming in her eyes. “I worried I would never remember.”
I smile softly at her. “You will, honey. I really think you will.”
She sniffles. “You can hug me,” she says. “If you want—”
But she breaks off as I pull her close, as close as I can get her, wrapping my arms tightly around her. Her arms wind slowly around my waist, and the heat of her body pressed against mine makes me shiver pleasantly.
“You’ll remember,” I say again, pressing a light kiss to the top of her head. “You’ll remember.”
* * *
“I love the shop at night,”Heidi says, her voice wistful as we trail back through the bookshop twenty minutes later. “Isn’t it pretty, all the dark in here and the light coming in through the window?”
I can see what she means. There’s something peaceful about the bookshop like this, when everyone is gone and the shadows blanket the tables and shelves.
“It’s nice,” I admit.
She sighs, stopping in her tracks at the edge of the café and looking around. Then she crosses the checkered floor to the comfortable chair Carmina and I always fought over, settling herself lightly in the seat.
It’s such a practiced motion, done so easily, that I have to assume she comes down here regularly at night. And since I’m taking my cues from her right now, I do likewise, sitting in the matching chair that’s next to the display windows. I let my gaze and my thoughts wander as I listen to the sounds of the evening; the hum of the fridge coming from the kitchen, the gentle shuffle of noise from Jojo’s cage, Heidi’s soft breathing.
It’s impossible not to think about Carmina when I’m sitting here, the table where she died right in my line of sight. Somehow I can remember everything about that morning, and yet the whole thing still feels like a dream, too. The gasping, rattling sounds she made, the chaos of the people around us, the clatter as everything fell out of her purse—
But my thoughts still as I remember something else, something I hadn’t thought about before. I didn’t see anything suspicious about an elderly woman having medication in her purse, but now, knowing she was poisoned…
“Warfarin,” I say quietly, my eyes narrowed as I think back. “I think that’s what it was called.”
“What’s warfarin?” Heidi says.
“I don’t know.” But I’ve already got my phone out to check. It takes me a few spelling variations before I get it right, and my eyes skim the information with increasing speed. “Here. It’s an anticoagulant. A blood thinner,” I clarify. “It helps prevent blood clots. And…” I scroll more fervently, sensing in my bones that we’re teetering on the edge of something important. “And it’s also the main component of most rat poisons,” I finish, my voice deadly soft. “It stops their blood from clotting, and they bleed internally.”
In the darkness, I can make out Heidi’s widening eyes, her dropped jaw. She snaps her mouth shut. “What does that even mean?”
“Maybe nothing,” I say grudgingly. “But…maybe something. All we have is baseless speculation.”
“Let’s speculate, then,” she says, a bit louder now.
“It would be a stretch—”
“Then let’s stretch,” she insists. “Think about it. Carmina got her medication delivered—I saw the box in her trash can—and didn’t Mr. Foster say he sometimes got her packages by mistake?”
“Yes,” I say slowly.
“So it might be a stretch, but it’s possible—it’s possible,” she repeats when I show signs of cutting in. “It’s maybe not probable, but it’s at leastpossiblethat her neighbor knew what medicine she took. He could have been trying to make it look like an overdose of her medicine.”
“Phil and Elsie knew about her medications too, I’m sure,” I point out.
“That’s true.” Then she sighs. “Would anyone else have known?”
