Alex Harris 00 - Poisoned

And she’s left the state for Vermont.”
    “New Hampshire.”
    “Whatever. Maybe you should find out if John knows about that.”
    “He does,” I explained. “But he doesn’t suspect her.”
    “Yeah, but he did suspect Mrs. Brissart and we know he’s off base there, so put Kendra down.” Sam gestured to the piece of paper.
    I reluctantly wrote down Kendra’s name in the first column. “So what’s the motive for her?”
    Sam got up and paced a bit between her desk and the window, her long legs covering the distance in a few steps. “Lover’s quarrel? Act of passion?”
    I shook my head. “Samantha, I don’t think people walk around with cyanide on the off chance that they might get mad at their beloved. And killing someone over a little tiff, honestly.”
    “How do you know it was a little tiff? It could have been a major blowup. We may never know. Don’t her family ties go back to Bradley’s?”
    “You’re way off base here. She didn’t even seem all that interested in the whole thing.”
    “You only have her word on that. Maybe she knows more than she says,” Sam suggested.
    I tapped my fingers on the table while I pondered this theory. “Yes, I see your point. And you need to put a jar of M&Ms on your desk.” My sister pulled open her desk drawer and tossed a small bag at me.
    “Gee, thanks.” I smiled. “I think better when my brain has chocolate. You know, Kendra pretends to not know what Bradley found out, but how do we know that’s true? She was there with him right before he died. It would have been easy for her to drop some poison on the cookies on her way out. But she seemed so sincere,” I said feeling very gullible at having been taken in by the young woman. “What would she get out of it? Killing him, I mean. Nothing, no money, as far as we know. I wonder if Bradley had a will.”
    “Good point. Maybe she got nothing out of it but her freedom from an abusive relationship.”
    “Samantha Daniels! You’re really stretching things here. Who said Bradley was abusive? He was a lovely young man.”
    “Who says? His grandmother? Mom thinks my two are absolute angels, but try getting them up in the morning or talking to Kendall when she’s in one of her moods. And don’t even get me started on Henry.”
    “You leave Henry alone,” I said with a protective voice. “Henry’s perfect.”
    “Oh, yeah? Well, your perfect little Henry decided to wash rocks last night. Do you know what he used to rinse them?”
    I had to smile. My nephew loved washing rocks. He could sit out in the driveway for hours with a pile of rocks around him that he picked up from the yard, meticulously washing, then rinsing, and finally placing them in the sun to dry. Once clean they would be returned to the yard until it was time to wash them again. And only Henry knew when that time came.
    “I’ll tell you what he used to rinse them. He used my Swedish crystal bowl that Michael’s parents brought back for me last summer. I had some lovely scented potpourri in it and he dumped that on the end table in the living room. Now do you think he’s perfect?”
    “Is the bowl broken?”
    “Well, no,” Sam said looking like someone who lost the battle.
    “See? Now getting back to Bradley, Chantal thought he was wonderful, too. Could all these people be wrong?”
    “Hey, Ted Bundy seemed like one helluva nice guy if you asked the right people. Maybe Kendra just didn’t want something known—either about the history or about her relationship.”
    Bradley as an abusive lover did not sit well with me.
    “Let’s go back a minute to Kendra having access to the cookies,” Sam suggested. “Who else could have put something on them? It had to be after everyone left or else we would have more dead bodies on our hands.”
    I tried to ignore my sister’s blunt way of putting things. “Well, April said she went back to get something, a purse or sweater. I don’t remember. And of course, there’s Mrs. Brissart. But then everyone was leaving at the same time so in actual fact, any one of them could have sprinkled something on a few cookies and no one would have seen it in the confusion of all those people leaving.”
    “Under Kendra’s name, you might as well write down the rest of the family because if Bradley was about to drop some bombshell about the family line, they all could have wanted him dead.”
    “Except for one thing.”
    “What’s that?” Sam asked.
    “Let’s suppose Bradley finds