“Here, let me.” I helped her sit up. “You okay like that? We have to get you up and inside. Ready?” With my inexpert assistance, she stood, wavered, gripped my hand, and finally stood almost steady.
“Um, is anyone else home?” I asked. If Eric Stull was home, letting his sick wife shovel, he was going to get an earful.
“No, Eric and—” She doubled over, groaning, clutching my hand as if it alone could save her.
“Let’s get you lying down,” I said. “I’ll help you inside. Up the stairs, there you go. How about the couch in the living room? A few more steps and you’ll be . . . there.”
I pulled off her boots, slipped off her hat and coat, and laid her back against a pile of pillows. She clutched at a fuzzy blanket on the back of the couch and I spread it over her. The hand-to-forehead test showed she didn’t have much of a fever, and she didn’t seem to be in great distress.
“Have you been to the doctor?” I asked.
“No,” she said in a faint voice. “It’s just flu. Came on yesterday after supper.”
I frowned. Flu meant fever. There were exceptions, but still. “Are you sure?”
She gave a small nod. “It’s been going around.”
“Aches and pains?”
“Dizzy a lot.” She put her hands to her head, pushing her thick dark blond hair tight to her skull, then wiped at her eyes. “Even lying down . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Could you get me some water?” she whispered. “I’m really thirsty.”
“Right away.” I crossed the living room and formal dining room, and pushed the swinging door that led into the kitchen. Drinking glasses were in a glass-fronted cabinet next to the sink, and as I ran the water cold, I saw a laptop opened on a small desk next to the refrigerator.
Quickly, I typed Rosie’s symptoms into a search engine and hit return. They were so generic I expected thousands of hits, and that’s what I got.
I filled a glass with cold water and took it back to Rosie. “Is there anything else I can get you? Anything to eat?”
“No . . . not hungry.”
“Let me get you some ice cubes for that water.”
I hurried back to the laptop and added “loss of appetite” to Rosie’s list of symptoms.
This time, there weren’t nearly as many hits. And there was a common theme.
“Oh, no,” I whispered. “He poisoned her.”
I sat there, staring at the screen. Eric had poisoned Rosie. But how? With what?
Panic fluttered in my chest, but I ignored it. There was no time to be scared.
I ran the search engine a few more times, looking for common household items that were poisonous. Prescription drugs, household cleaners, paint thinner, weed killer. The list was long, but I sensed the fastest way to help Rosie—and to show her what her husband had done—was to find some evidence.
“Beth?” Rosie called.
I ignored her and rushed down the hall to the master suite. The bathroom cabinet held only two prescriptions. One for birth control, and one for an antibiotic that had Amelia’s name on it. Neither was likely to cause Rosie’s symptoms.
I scrabbled through the bathroom garbage, looking for wrappers, receipts, anything, and found nothing but used facial tissues.
What next? I pressed my hands to the sides of my head. Where next?
Back to the kitchen. The last time I’d been here I’d tried hard not to envy Rosie her fancy kitchen with its six-burner cooktop and warming oven. Now, all trace of jealousy had been blasted away. Sticking with the garbage can theory, I looked under the sink. There was a garbage can, and it was empty.
Hmm.
“Beth?”
I ignored her for the second time and opened the garage door. A dark green garbage tote was in the corner next to the overhead door. I ran down the steps, across the concrete floor, and opened the lid.
Full to the brim.
Hardly thinking, I spun the tote around and tipped it over. Six garbage bags spilled across the floor. I swallowed my gag reflex, ripped open the plastic, and started pawing through the contents. Coffee grounds, egg shells, meat scraps, squash seeds. I pushed all of it to one side.
Nonrecyclable plastic, a ragged T-shirt, wadded-up paper towels. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
I was going through the last bag, the one that had been on the very bottom of the tote, and I was beginning to despair of finding any proof, when I found the very thing I needed.
“That’s it.” I picked up the small, but very empty, plastic bag and ran into the house.
Rosie pushed herself up on one elbow. “Fertilizer? But it’s November. Why would Eric be using fertilizer now?”
I dragged a chair across the thick carpet and sat down in front of the couch. “Rosie, I have something to tell you. It’ll be hard to hear, and it’ll be scary, and I’m sorry, but you have to listen.”
She dropped back down. “Later,” she said, groaning. “Oh, I feel awful.”
And she was going to feel a lot worse. “Where’s Eric?”
“Airport.”
“He’s leaving for South America early?”
She shook her head slightly. “No, going to California. Thanksgiving. His parents.”
“Without you?”
“I was supposed to, but . . .” She closed her eyes and took a few breaths. “But I got sick.”
“Rosie, you’re not sick,” I said.
Her eyelids opened a fraction of an inch. “Thanks for . . . stopping, Beth. Let yourself out, okay?”
I took her hand between mine. She resisted, but didn’t pull away. “You’re not sick,” I said quietly. “You’ve been poisoned.”
“Don’t . . . be silly.”
“Common household fertilizer causes your symptoms exactly.”
“How could I have eaten fertilizer?”
“Who made dinner last night?” I asked.
“. . . Eric.”
“How did it taste?”
“New recipe,” she said slowly. “The girls had burgers, but Eric made pork for us. Heavy sauce. He wouldn’t let me in the kitchen. It was . . . bitter. He said he might have added white pepper by mistake.”
“And when did you start to feel sick?”
“Right after I finished the dishes.” Her gaze of disbelief grew slightly less disbelieving. “Why would Eric poison me? If he didn’t want me going with him and the girls, all he had to do was ask. I’d be fine with not visiting his parents.”
On the drive over, a heart-stopping possibility had occurred to me, but I’d stuffed it down into the bottom of my brain. Now it came back and wouldn’t go away. “Rosie, where are your daughters?”
“They’re not sick. Just me.”
I grabbed her shoulders and fairly shouted at her. “Where are the girls?”
“What’s wrong with you?” She jerked away. “They’re with Eric. They’re on their way to California.”
I stared at her, aghast. “Right now?”
“They left not long before you got here.”
A white van had sped past me half a mile from the Stulls’ house. A white van had tried to run me over. I’d forgotten all about the white van parked near the school the night Sam was killed. It could have been a white van that hit Brian Keller. Maybe Eric was afraid Sam had shared his secret with Brian.
“Does . . .” My voice croaked and I started again. “Does Eric drive a white van?”
She nodded. “Why?”
And a white van was taking two young girls away from their mother. “Rosie, he’s kidnapping Amelia and
