Read Pearls and Poison (A Consignment Shop Mystery) for Free Online

frame her.”
    “Glory be.” KiKi sank into a chair, the knife still sticking out of the cake. “The old boy went and got himself done in.” We both made the sign of the cross to counteract any feelings of just deserts we might be experiencing. “Where’s Gloria now?”
    “At the courthouse doing business as usual as a judge. No one’s found the bottle she brought, so there’s no actual evidence to link her to the murder. Right now everything’s speculative. Mamma said she left the bottle on the desk, but it sure wasn’t there when we showed up.”
    I took KiKi’s hand. “You nearly drank from that very same glass. The cootie scare was the only thing between you and being there on a slab right beside Scummy.”
    Deep in thought, KiKi finished the slice, put the cake in my cup, then poured tea onto the sugar bowl. “Except there is a mighty big difference between my healthy self and Seymour. My ticker’s fine as can be thanks to the superior Summerside gene pool and eight generations of Southern cholesterol adaptation.”
    KiKi tapped her finger against her lips. “Let’s see, how does this go? The digitalis would have caused me problems sure enough, and I would have skedaddled off to the hospital to get checked out, but I could have been treated and been fine as frog’s hair. Seymour had heart problems, and everyone knew about it, one foot on a banana peel so to speak. The alcohol dumped the digitalis in the bottle straight into his bloodstream and stopped his heart like hitting the brakes on a freight train. Bam!” KiKi clapped her hands together like a gunshot, making me and BW jump a foot. “The old coot was dead as a fence post in forty minutes, probably less.”
    I stared at KiKi wide-eyed, my heart still pounding. “You’ve been watching
Criminal Minds
again, haven’t you? How do you sleep at night?”
    “Forget TV.” KiKi fluffed her rollers know-it-all style. “You can’t be married to a cardiologist for thirty years without picking up a thing or two along the way.”
    “Well, that’s it, then. Don’t you see?” I said, jumping up suddenly happy as a pig in mud. “Mamma’s innocent. Where the dickens would she get digitalis? She’s a judge for crying out loud, not a doctor or a pharmacist. You don’t just buy digitalis over the counter like bubble gum. Maybe someone who had access to Seymour’s medication did the deed. Why did Ross go after Mamma at all? It makes no sense. Ross is on a witch hunt.”
    KiKi pulled me back down onto the chair and nodded out the bay window. “What do you see?”
    “Grass.”
    “Oh for pity’s sake, look a little harder.”
    “Sky, clouds, walkway, birdbath, garden maintained by delish Italian gardener with a great butt that every woman in Savannah wants to sink her teeth into.”
    KiKi gave me a long slow stare. “Where in the world did the gardener come from?”
    “I have no idea.” Actually I did, but I wasn’t about to fess up about my sexless life in front of my dear, sweet auntie.
    “Every single garden in Savannah is just like mine except for the delish gardener part,” KiKi went on. “Why my oleander bush alone could wipe out all of Savannah.”
    “It’s nothing but a bush.”
    “That’s what you think. Nearly ever part is poisonous. If you even drink the water oleander flowers sit in, you’re off to that great garden in the sky. If you mash up foxglove leaves, you have digitalis. The garden club did a program called Pretty Poisonous Posies last spring, and I couldn’t eat anything green for a week. My guess is when the police crime lab autopsied Scumbucket the overdose of digitalis popped up, and the honey bourbon was the last thing he had to drink. Anyone wanting to get rid of the Scumbucket had the perfect opportunity with Gloria heading over to his place with a bottle of hooch. Scumbucket was high profile, and anyone who watches TV these days knows there’d be an autopsy. The killer pops in and poisons Seymour easy as can