The Molly Sutton Mystery Series, books 1-3

Chapter 24

Chapter 24On rue Simenon, about two blocks from the Desrosiers mansion, Lucas Arbogast was getting ready to serve dinner to his elderly mother. She was seated at the table, freshly bathed and dressed. On her plate, he put four slices of duck breast, cut thin the way she liked it, and carried the plate to the table along with a basket of bread. Then he stopped. The bread basket dropped to the floor in his rush to put down the plate and see to his mother, who was suddenly gasping for breath and very agitated.

“Maman!” shouted Lucas who, luckily for Madame Arbogast, was a nurse at the local hospital. The old woman anxiously got up from the table, still gasping, moving with purpose as though she had somewhere to go that second. Then for a moment she stood up straight, her eyes blinking and unfocused.

“Maman! What is the matter? Sit down and let me check your vitals,” said Lucas, trying to ease her back into her chair. He leaned down, for he was considerably taller, put an arm around her, and she collapsed, sinking into the chair like a rag doll.

Lucas was stunned, since he had just talked to his mother an hour before and she had been the picture of health. But his training helped him put his shock to one side as he pulled the chair away from the table and worked his arms under her, picking her up and settling her on the sofa. Her head rolled back; she was unconscious.

Lucas bent his head down close to her face, and it was then that he got a whiff of the characteristic smell of bitter almonds, which he had smelled only once before, in the unit on poisons, which he had found to be one of the most interesting in all of nursing school.

Immediately, he pulled out his mobile and called the hospital. He made sure his mother was breathing and adjusted her legs to make her more comfortable. Then he ran upstairs to her room, looking for anything that could tell him whether he was correct about an exposure to cyanide.

It couldn’t be gas, he reasoned, because she wouldn’t have made it downstairs. Cyanide gas kills quickly, he remembered that quite clearly. It couldn’t have been in food or drink, because his mother never, ever ate or drank anything outside of mealtimes, and besides, he himself was preparing the meals. In any case, she had not taken a single bite since lunch.

Lucas found nothing out of order in her room. He checked under the bed, opened the drawers to her dressing table—everything looked the same as usual, as far as he could tell. It felt important to know where the cyanide was coming from, but he didn’t have time for a proper search, not when his dear Maman was slipping into a coma.

As he ran back downstairs to check on her, he thought, wait a minute. Hold on. How in the world is Maman getting cyanide poisoning when she has barely left the house all day, if at all? Is this even an accident?

Lucas shook his head, unable to believe anyone in Castillac could possibly do such a thing, or have any reason for it either.

Maman was still unconscious. Her gasping was very hard to witness. Her skin was turning a bright cherry-red, which for an instant he thought meant she was doing better before he remembered it was a symptom of cyanide poisoning. He bent his head to her again, and sniffed noisily. Yes—he flared his nostrils and breathed in again, catching the scent.

His mother had a mild obsession with rejuvenating creams and lotions, demulcents and emollients of all types—perhaps the poison was on her skin, from a contaminated batch? If it was in a cream, then he could do something for her before the ambulance got there. And if it wasn’t, washing her face wasn’t going to cause any harm. He darted into the kitchen and got a bowl of water, a bar of soap, and a couple of rags, and then he kneeled beside her, dipping the rag in the soapy water and wiping her old, wrinkled, beloved face.

“Maman,” he whispered hoarsely, “you’re going to be all right. I just need to get this stuff off your skin. I think it’s the cream, Maman, you know I’ve told you before, you don’t know what they put in that stuff—”

Lucas was thorough. He wiped her down completely, then got a bowl of fresh water and new rags, and wiped her off again, going down to her collarbones. He repeated the process a third time. The gasping became less frequent. Her skin was reddened where he had been rubbing, but otherwise her color appeared to be returning to normal.

Lucas was thirty-eight years old and had never lived anywhere but home, except for the three years when he had to go to a larger town to study nursing. He and his mother were very close. They liked the same sorts of television programs, the same food, the same books. Even though his mother was old, he had never really contemplated the fact that he was likely to lose her at some point in the future—obviously he was aware it would happen, but that reality had never penetrated his consciousness but rather skated along the surface, with no attention paid to it. This close call—impossible to ignore—rattled him so much he could barely speak.

He stayed kneeling beside her, holding her hand and murmuring to her, and getting up to change the water in the bowl and get yet more clean rags to wipe her down, until at long last—where was that ambulance?—Madame Arbogast whispered to her son to cut it out before he wiped her face right off.

The bell rang, and laughing and tremendously relieved, Lucas went to answer the door. He knew the driver and the medic, and quickly told them what had happened. Madame Arbogast was sitting up on the sofa now, asking for a glass of brandy, and was going to be fine.

“I went ahead and called the police on the way over, Lucas. With a suspicious poisoning, that’s the protocol, as you know.”

Lucas nodded. “I took a quick look around, trying to figure out where the stuff came from, but I had to stay with Maman so I didn’t take the time for a real search. I knew she hadn’t eaten anything I hadn’t prepared for her, so I was thinking it must be some kind of face cream or something. Sure enough, cleaning her up brought her around quickly.”

“You did good,” said the medic, gesturing to Madame Arbogast who was feeling well enough to be flirting with the ambulance driver. “How’d you know it was cyanide?”

“Smelled it,” said Lucas, laughing again and feeling a little giddy.

“You’re lucky then. Not everybody can smell that smell—not even fifty percent, if I remember right.”

Lucas shook his head slowly and let out a long breath. “What a close one. She goes a little crazy with the face cream.” He paused. “But why in the world would her face cream have cyanide in it?”

“Yeah, that’s the question right there,” said the ambulance driver, who usually wasn’t very interested in the patients he drove to see, but poison? Now that makes a good story for the folks at the bar after work.

A firm rapping on the door, and Lucas let in Thérèse Perrault, who was the officer in charge that Saturday evening. “Hello, Lucas, Madame Arbogast,” said Thérèse, who knew them. “Suspected poisoning, that’s the word I got?”

“Yes. She’s all right now, thank God. But it was a close thing. I was lucky and smelled that bitter almond scent when I got close to her face, so I cleaned her up and she rallied. But wow, for a little while there, I thought I was gonna lose her.” He reached down and gave his Maman a pat on the shoulder. She poured herself another finger of brandy.

“What do you mean, ‘cleaned her up’?”

“When the poisoning exposure is to the skin, as this was, the best antidote is just to get it off,” said Lucas. “So I washed her face with soap and water a bunch of times, and she perked right up. She was unconscious for about ten minutes, I’d say. Had the cherry-red skin that’s symptomatic of cyanide exposure as well.”

“Well, lucky for her you know your stuff,” said Perrault. “May I go upstairs and have a look in her bedroom?”

“Of course,” said Lucas, making no move to leave his mother.

The ambulance driver would have liked to go search for poison too, but knew he had no believable reason to join Perrault.

It didn’t take her long to find something suspicious. She put on her gloves and picked up a jar of face cream, unmarked, no label at all. She called downstairs to ask for a cardboard box, and just to be thorough, put all of the lotions and creams from Madame Arbogast's dressing table in it, to take to the lab. A second old lady assailed by cyanide-laced face cream.

Did Castillac have a serial killer on its hands?

Thérèse felt a thrill run through her body, and chastised herself for feeling so happy when people were suffering and dying.