Zachary moved farther into the room. He made space on a chair and sat so that he wouldn’t be looking down at her or be perceived as being confrontational. Nice and low-key. See if he could get the information out of her without her becoming defensive.
“Tell me again about the day that Declan disappeared.”
“I’ve already told you everything. I’ve told the police. I’ve told you. It’s still the same. Nothing has changed.”
“There is nothing that stands out about his behavior that day before he disappeared?”
“No, nothing at all. It was just a normal day. He was playing outside; I was watching him through the window while I was painting. And then… he was just gone. He wasn’t there anymore.”
“How as Declan feeling that day?”
“Feeling?”
“Was he well? Happy?”
“Yes, just like normal.”
“He wasn’t sick?”
“No.”
“He didn’t have a cold?”
“No.”
“Was he a pretty active child? Did he get into things a lot?”
Isabella looked away from the painting to Zachary. “No… he was a normal boy, perfectly normal. He got into things sometimes, but kids do. That’s just the way they are.”
“He wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD? Anything like that?”
“No!” Her mouth formed a thin, straight line. There were a couple of angry lines like exclamation marks between her eyebrows. “He wasn’t diagnosed with anything. He was perfectly normal. Perfectly healthy.”
She acted as if Zachary had accused Declan of being a serial killer. With her own mental illness issues, was it that awful to suggest that Declan might have a diagnosis as well? ADHD diagnoses were so common; there wasn’t that much of a stigma attached anymore. Isabella clearly did not like this line of questioning.
Perfectly normal. Perfectly healthy.
“Then why was he given cough medicine?”
“Cough medicine.” Isabella stared at him. “He wasn’t given cough medicine. What are you talking about?”
“When Declan died, he had cough medicine in his body. In his bloodstream. So why was he given cough medicine, if he was perfectly healthy?”
“He wasn’t. I would never give him that poison. It’s very bad for children.”
“Do you have cough medicine in the house?”
“Of course.” She fluttered a hand in the direction of the master bedroom and bath. “Everyone has cough medicine.”
“But you didn’t have anything for Declan? What would you do if he got sick? Surely you’d give him a decongestant if he was having trouble sleeping.”
“No.” Her voice was firm. “I wouldn’t. There’s no proof that any of those medicines are good for children. They’ve only been tested on adults, and then the results extrapolated. Children’s bodies don’t work the same way as adults’ bodies. You can never be sure what effect they will have.”
“You’ve never given cough medicine to Declan?”
She shook her head. “When he was younger… I don’t know, two or three, he had a bad cold, and I gave him some baby cold medicine. Not the liquid, one of those instant dissolve tablets. I didn’t know how bad they could be for children, but the way he reacted to it… he was practically comatose for the next few hours. I never gave him cold medicine again.”
Zachary’s heart sped. “Do you know what kind of medicine it was? What was in it?”
“No… I don’t remember. I don’t know what brand it was or what the active ingredients were. I’ve never used one again.”
“Would you still have the package around somewhere? It was only a year or two ago; people keep medications around for much longer than that.”
“You can check. It would be in the medicine cabinet, down the hall.”
Zachary sped out of the room and looked both ways down the hallway, paranoid that Spencer might have been listening at the door and might reach the bathroom to destroy the evidence ahead of him. But there was no sign of Spencer. Zachary found the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. He had known before he had a chance to itemize the contents that the children’s medicine would not be there. The bathroom, including the cabinet, was pristine. Nothing leaking or out of date. The bottles and sundries in the cabinet stood in rigid rows, equidistant apart. He checked each label anyway. There was, as Isabella had indicated, adult cough medicine. None of the children’s cold tablets that she had referred to. She had probably said that she was never going to use them again, and Spencer had taken her at her word and thrown them out.
Zachary took out the cough medicine, wondering even as he took it out if he should have put on gloves first. Surely the police had looked at it already when they determined Declan had cough medicine in his system. Zachary tried to keep his fingers to the edges where they wouldn’t smear any other fingerprints anyway and checked the ingredients.
Pseudoephedrine was listed under the active ingredients and alcohol in the inactive ingredients.
Had Declan been given cough medicine from that bottle? Or had someone else, a third party, given him cough medicine to keep him quiet and compliant? Maybe panicking when he became ‘almost comatose.’ Certainly, using cough medicine to sedate a child was a widely-known practice, as Zachary himself could attest.
He set the bottle down on the sink and took pictures of the brand name on the front and the ingredients on the back. He put it back in the medicine cabinet where he had gotten it and took another picture. Just in case it happened to disappear before he could get the police to look at it.
If the police looked at it.
Zachary returned to the studio, where Isabella was still painting, running her fingers over the memorial objects, and whispering her never-ending prayer.
“You’re right,” he told her. “There is a bottle of cough medicine in the cabinet, but not the medicine you gave to Declan when he was younger.”
She gave a little shrug of unconcern. “I don’t know what would make you think
