G'Day to Die: A Passport to Peril Mystery - By Maddy Hunter Page 0,58

picture about Mrs. Acres’s recovery. That was Heath. His mother died on the way to hospital.”

“What was it?” asked Dick Teig. “Heart attack?”

“I bet it was heatstroke,” said Margi. “If people get too hot, their insides can cook like peas in one of those boiling pouches, and that can do them in real quick. The old and infirm are especially vulnerable.”

“She wasn’t old,” objected Tilly. “She was only fifty-seven!”

“If she was fifty-seven, I’ll eat—” Bernice looked around. “You got anything better than Dick’s shirt?”

While the group debated the cause of Nora Acres’s death, I slipped back into the tasting room, which was eerily quiet minus the sipping and spitting. The staff had cleared away the dirty stemware and swept Nora’s shattered glass off the floor, so the room sparkled once more with pre-tour group tidiness. You’d never know someone had just died here.

Okay, maybe not technically, but she might as well have died here. And if she had, I imagined things would be very different right now. The medical examiner might be snooping around, looking for evidence that might cast Nora’s death in a suspicious light. He might have called in the crime scene unit, who would have gathered the pieces of her broken glass into an evidence bag, taken photos, and subjected us to lengthy interviews about where we were when the incident happened and what we’d seen.

I peered out the window, where I could see people straggling back to the bus, and wondered if any of the guests who’d been in her vicinity would have owned up to what had been going on. Heath wanting to cuckold Jake. Roger wanting to best Diana. Heath wanting to blow off Roger and Diana. Jake wanting to punish Heath. Diana wanting to destroy Roger. Roger and Diana wanting to break Heath. And Nora stuck in the middle of it all. Had she been aware of all the undercurrents? Or had her mind been so detached from reality that someone could have come at her with the business end of a corkscrew and she would have missed the intent?

Poor Nora. She’d seemed such a sad, lost soul. She’d probably never hurt a thing in her life, other than Jake’s leaping spider. Why was it that people who were quiet and unassuming ended up dead while the obnoxious ones always managed to survive? It didn’t seem fair. God obviously knew what He was doing, but on occasion, I wish He’d err on the side of the obnoxious ones.

But He was God. God didn’t make mistakes. Only people made mistakes.

Turning to leave, I glanced at the shelves of sparkling stemware behind the counter and felt my pulse quicken as an absurd thought hit me.

Only people made mistakes.

Damn. What if—

Whoa! Was it possible that—

Holy crap. If what I was thinking proved true, Claire Bellows’s killer had struck again, but he might have killed the wrong person.

“You don’t think it was a heart attack?” asked Nana, when we were back at the hotel. “What about a ruptured gallbladder, or kidney stones? I don’t think you die from stones, though. You just wish you could.”

We’d finished our day of wine tasting, despite what had happened to Nora. Henry had suggested we return to Adelaide, but the seventy-and-over crowd had voted to continue with the schedule. Few people had bonded with Nora. The majority didn’t even know what she looked like. So the loudest voices had convinced Henry to press on. As one man had articulated so eloquently, “I paid an arm and a leg for this tour, so I damned well better see what the brochure promised. I’m sorry about the old girl dying, but life goes on, and so should the tour.”

I slid open our patio door to let in the cool evening air. “I think Nora was poisoned. We’ve seen this kind of thing before. You know how easy it is.”

“Why would anyone want to poison Mrs. Acres?” asked Tilly.

“I don’t think anyone wanted to.” I sat down on the sofa while the ladies yanked off their boots. “I think the poison was intended for someone else. You saw all the confusion with the glasses in the tasting room. I’ll bet you anything Nora drank from the wrong glass and died because of it.”

Tilly leaned back in her chair, rubbing her feet. “So if Nora wasn’t the killer’s target, who was?”

“I’ll give you my short list: either Heath, Roger, Jake, or Diana. And did I tell you that Conrad changed his plane reservations? He’s going