good one, not the one that had required twelve stitches after her adventure with Alice’s window. “The police will have to find out a lot more before they can charge Lee for Karen’s murder. But it’s going to be easier to prove he tried to murder Alice.”
“It doesn’t hurt that he went charging into her bedroom and choked you.” Tracy still had bruises on her neck to prove what had happened that night. In their own way, they were as valuable as the diamond necklace CJ had given her on their first anniversary.
“That’s a good start,” she agreed.
“So after the friend’s visit, Alice came to believe Lee had killed Karen?”
“It never made sense to her that Karen would be out on the water during a storm, particularly not without a life jacket, because she was a fanatic about water safety. On top of that, Alice had turned all her finances over to Lee, and suddenly her retirement money was disappearing. So her suspicions were growing anyway. Of course, she was afraid to go to the authorities. If she was wrong, and it was just a bad economy as Lee claimed, he would be so angry, she would never see her granddaughter again.”
“He really had her trapped, huh?”
“She tried to think the best of him, but she was getting more and more concerned. Then Karen’s friend mailed Alice copies of e-mails Karen had sent her, all of which said pretty much what the friend had reported. But having the printed e-mails in her hands changed everything, only Alice still didn’t know what to do or where to go.”
“So when did Symington decide to go after her?”
“As near as anybody can figure, either Lee found the packet of e-mails, or Alice said or did something that made him suspicious. He wasn’t ready to leave town, because he wasn’t finished draining her investments. I guess you don’t just go in, close accounts and take the next flight to Buenos Aires.”
“Our vulnerable senior citizens. It happens more often than anybody realizes.”
The kids were bringing buckets of wet sand up to the castle again, but Tracy thought Olivia looked tired. She sped up her explanation.
“At that point, we think Lee decided that if Alice died, whatever money was left would just pass to Olivia, and he would have unfettered access. Plus, he was probably sacrificing a lot by cashing out Alice’s accounts when stocks were so low. He could make more if he let the funds sit where they were for a while. So getting rid of her was the best option. Only there was just one problem. Us.”
“The neighbors.”
“Exactly. When he moved out to the cottage, Lee must have figured he could keep Alice isolated, that nobody would pay attention to anything that was happening. To make it easier, he planted the idea Alice was in the early stages of dementia, so people would discount whatever she said. Only that didn’t work, because we all got to be friends, and we started noticing things weren’t right. If a so-called accident had occurred, we would have been all over it—and him.”
“So it wasn’t as easy as dumping an old lady out of a boat.”
Olivia looked up toward the blanket and waved, and Tracy smiled and waved back. After a few seconds Olivia started in on the castle again.
“I get all that,” Marsh said. “What I don’t get is how he planned to end this story without putting himself under suspicion.”
“Well, he set himself up to look like an attentive son-in-law. As Alice got more and more upset, her blood pressure naturally went up, too. He was still taking her to the doctor for checkups, probably because if he didn’t, it might come back to haunt him during an inquest. Only at the last checkup, the doctor played right into his hands. Since the hypertension meds Alice had been on weren’t working, the doctor prescribed a different class, one they rarely use unless the others aren’t doing their job, something called MAO inhibitors. Heard of them?”
Marsh shook his head. Tracy was beginning to like the way his ponytail flip-flopped when he did that. She figured she was losing her mind.
She looked away. “The big problem is that a number of foods interact badly with the drugs, even fatally. Common things like cheese and bologna, a surplus of caffeine, too much chocolate, lots more. Swallow the wrong stuff and the drugs can actually cause strokes, instead of preventing them.”