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death accidental.”
    “Accidental?” Bernie said. “Be serious.”
    Her dad tapped the report with his hand. He was pleased to see the tremors in his fingers were hardly noticeable at all. “I am. Mike is saying Annabel Colbert’s death resulted from an overdose of Malathion and flea and tick spray.”
    “She drank the stuff. It wasn’t accidental,” Bernie retorted.
    “Maybe. But you can’t prove it,” Clyde said.
    Bernie frowned. “What do you mean? It was in the wine. We saw it. She drank the wine and clutched her throat.”
    “You should have saved the bottle,” Clyde told her. “In the confusion someone threw the wine bottle out. We have nothing to test. And the stuff that’s in her is all stuff commonly used around animals. She could have absorbed it through her skin. While it’s not deadly to most people, evidently she had a heart condition.”
    Bernie bit her lip. She felt awful. But saving the bottle had never occurred to her. Her attention had been totally fixed on Annabel.
    “It’s okay,” her father said, intuiting her thoughts. “Given the circumstances I would have done the same thing.”
    “No, you wouldn’t have,” Bernie replied.
    Her father didn’t answer, because what Bernie said was true. But he was a professional and his daughter was a civilian. He told her that and it seemed to help a little.
    “What about the witnesses?” she demanded. “Everyone was there. Everyone saw what happened.”
    Clyde added a tad more heavy cream to his coffee and stirred. “Evidently their statements don’t add up to anything definitive. The only point everyone seems to agree on is that Annabel Colbert was given to exaggerating things. The best friend, the husband, and the dog trainer thought she was being overly dramatic. The husband’s personal assistant and the kennel owner thought she’d collapsed because she hadn’t been eating enough.”
    “And Bree Nottingham. What did she think?” Libby asked.
    “That Annabel was having a bout of hysterics.”
    “But what about our statements?” Bernie demanded.
    Clyde shrugged. “Your viewpoint is outweighed by everyone else’s.”
    Libby put a stack of pancakes down in front of Clyde. “But we saw it.”
    Clyde reached for the syrup and poured. “So did everyone else.”
    “How can you misinterpret something like that?” Libby demanded.
    “Why do you care?” Bernie asked her.
    Libby sniffed. “Of course I care.”
    “Well, you sure sounded as if you didn’t a moment ago.”
    “This is just so…so…” Libby stopped and tried to think of the word she wanted.
    “Egregious,” Bernie supplied.
    “Exactly,” Libby said.
    “So you’ve changed your mind?” Bernie asked.
    Libby considered for a moment. “I suppose I have. I just don’t understand Mike’s findings,” she said, taking her seat.
    Sean closed the folder and pushed it toward Clyde. “Then I’ll explain,” he said. “The results of postmortems are not always as clear-cut as people think. There are primary, secondary, and tertiary causes of death listed on the reports. For example, someone could be stabbed and die of a heart attack brought on by blood loss. Obviously this man died of a knife wound, but if there were reasons—if the knife wound was minor and the incident brought on a fatal coronary event, or if the son of an important personage was the one who did the stabbing—then perhaps the primary cause of death would be listed as a heart attack, and the secondary cause of death would be listed as the stab wound instead of the other way around.”
    Libby frowned. “So what are you saying?”
    Her dad replied, “I’m saying that the M.E. has chosen to emphasize different facts. There could be other explanations as well. Annabel Colbert might have used Malathion to kill fleas. For all we know, she could have been ingesting small amounts of Malathion over the past few months and it finally caught up with her. She may have been taking it to kill her