Ladies Courting Trouble. Dolores Stewart Riccio

      “As I mentioned at the hospital, a disharmony of the spirit brings about dis-ease.” She fished out a leather pouch from the pocket of her coat sweater of many colors. It was decorated with geometric symbols. Taking a pinch of a powdery substance from the pouch, she sprinkled it around the room. “Pollen from Arizona,” she answered our unspoken question. Phillipa nudged me and winked. Fiona caught the wink but continued unperturbed: “It’s the work of the healer to restore that harmony, however that may be accomplished. Music and dance are often used among the Native Americans. I credit my trip to the Navahos and all I learned there with helping to cure my arthritis.”

      “And Mick Finn’s attentions seem to have loosened you up a bit, too,” Deidre said. The Plymouth fire chief had been smitten with Fiona’s widow’s charms and was a frequent caller. Naturally, all the firemen, including Deidre’s husband, Will, teased Finn about Fiona to the limit of his patience.

      “I shall remember to dance down the hall the next time I have to visit one of you in the hospital.” Phillipa took her tarot pack from her red silk bag, in which she kept a piece of sodalite to enhance psychic awareness. “I was trained in ballet as a girl, you know. Tap, too. Perhaps I’ll wear a Navaho headband.”

      At my dining room table, where jack-o’-lanterns variously leered or grinned, Phillipa read the tarot for each of us, cards arranged in the Celtic-cross manner. Notable among the warnings was the three of swords for Deidre. Ominous-looking thing—a pierced heart. And for Fiona, a fish leaping from the page’s cup predicted a surprise. I got the two of swords, of course—stalemate! With my bridegroom steaming away to Greece, what else?

      I had the sense that everyone was waiting for my eyeballs to roll back in my head while I swooned into a clairvoyant vision. It’ll never happen, I thought, and then, miraculously, while my gaze was fixed on a gleaming, candle-lit pumpkin, I slid out of myself. In an instant I was watching a wooden spoon stirring batter in a blue-striped bowl. A box on the table. A chocolate batter, dark as sin. I caught a strong scent of vanilla followed by that fetid hemlock odor. And that was all.

      Heather was shaking me. “What, Cass, what?”

      “Sweet Isis, more brownies. Chocolate batter being mixed with wooden spoon. But there was a box on the table, you know, like Pillsbury or something. Who are those brownies for? And why is this happening?”

      Phillipa spread her deck across the table. “What? From a box? It isn’t awful enough that she’s poisoning people left and right, she’s using a mix as well? And, really, brownies are so easy to make from scratch. I bet she’s adding extra vanilla to kill the taste. Maybe even artificial vanilla flavoring, ugh! I wouldn’t put it past her. Pick a card while you’re hot, Cass,” she said. I did as I was told. The nine of cups, reversed.

      “Forget culinary niceties, Phil. What does it matter how the brownies are made if they’re going to kill you?”

      “There are standards, dear. But look at this—greed!” she declared. “No matter how random these events may seem, we’ll find greed is the motive at the bottom of all these poisonings.”

      Chapter Five

      You’d think that after all the publicity the poisonings at the church received, national as well as local coverage, no one in Plymouth would ever dare to eat a brownie again. Not so! The batch I’d “seen” being made in my Samhain vision materialized on the following day. This time, brownies appeared at a Halloween get-together for the Silver Lake Senior center. Senior center parties were never held at night. This one took place the day after Halloween, which was actually All Saints’ Day. As an advisor to the center’s board of directors, the Reverend Peacedale was there with Patty. The Plymouth chapter of the Sweet Adelines, a harmonizing singing group, were entertaining with a medley of songs popular in the Gay Nineties. Also among the guests was our own Heather Devlin with her registered therapy dog, a golden retriever named Honeycomb.

      As Patty breathlessly told me later, the minute she’d spotted the brownies at one end of the table, between the Casper the Ghost marshmallows and the vampire-bat cookies, she’d dashed over, slapped at hands reaching for the treats, and rushed them away before Wyn, who’s very fond of brownies, or anyone else could be poisoned. I’d mentioned the fetid smell of hemlock to her, and how it might have been overwhelmed by vanilla. So she gave the brownies a knowledgeable sniff. They did indeed smell funny to her. Having no completely safe place to stash the suspect treats, she simply emptied the serving dish into her knitting bag and clapped it shut.

      Patty’s quick action earned her some strange looks from the volunteers who were hostessing the party. But she was too late for one of them. Vera Lindstrom, who had sampled the brownies while she helped to lay the table, was soon after overcome with weakness, nausea, and difficulty breathing. Heather was already calling 911 when poor Vera began to lapse into unconsciousness.

      Patty tried to revive Vera with her ever present bottle of smelling salts. A few minutes later the paramedic team arrived and took over. By then the poisoned woman was barely breathing. Meanwhile, while Heather was reassuring the other seniors, resourceful Honeycomb, following that favorite dog adage, “In confusion, there is profit,” seized the opportunity to munch up a few slices of spiderweb cake and was nosing Patty’s knitting bag with interest when Heather collared her, literally.

      As had happened at the Gethsemane Ladies’ League, no one knew exactly when or how the brownies had arrived in the senior center’s kitchen among the other donated goodies. Before being grabbed and dumped by Patty, they’d been arranged on a plastic Halloween platter decorated with gravestones. All the fingerprints later retrieved from the platter belonged to the women who had set the table, one of whom was the victim. A chocoholic like Lydia Craig, Vera Lindstrom had consumed a generous amount of the poison and was in critical condition for several hours.

      No surprise to me, the poison was again found to be hemlock. The poisoner had to be a woman, I theorized, a herbalist as knowledgeable as myself. Both poison hemlock and privet berries were easily obtained locally and incorporated into foods for someone familiar with both poisonous plants and cooking.

      The media loved the ghoulish possibilities. Scary headlines variously reported “Homicidal Botanist Runs Amok on South Shore,” “Mysterious Serial Poisonings Terrorize Plymouth,” “Poison Peril in Plymouth, the Halloween Connection,” “Are Satanists Poisoning Plymouth? Local Clergy Comments.” And the ever popular “Death by Chocolate—Plymouth Police Baffled.” Restaurants stopped serving chocolate desserts; no one would order them. But interest in Phillipa’s cooking show mushroomed, the public hoping perhaps to see a guest double up after sampling her Gateau Cocolat. Plymouth crime news made CNN again, and this time Joe caught the report.

      “Jesu Christos, sweetheart!” was his informal greeting on the phone.

      “Oh, hi, Joe. Where are you, honey? Not jail, I hope.”

      “I’m calling from the Ulysses ancestral home, where I happened to bring up the CNN Web site on my brother’s computer. The poisonings are still going on there! You haven’t got yourself involved, have you?”

      I wanted to say, “Is your patriarch Greek?” but I restrained myself. “Don’t you worry, darling. I was never in danger. The second incident involved Phillipa’s show, privet berries in the pumpkin bread. And this last one, a senior citizens’ party—well, the Peacedales and Heather just happened to be guests.”

      “Hey, Sherlock. Have you considered there’s a mighty big coincidence here?”

      “I have indeed, Dear Watson.”

      “So my question is, what’s next? Or rather, who’s next?”

      A chilling thought. Fiona. Deidre. The children.

      “I don’t think it’s the circle being targeted.” My tone sounded uncertain to my own ears. “And Phil’s tarot cards said greed is the motive. So it’s not a hate crime, right?”

      “Hey, I’m reassured—aren’t you?”

      “No, I guess not.