“When you went back?” Christina echoed.

  “For the next year.” Moushoom nodded solemnly. “Some of the children ran away because they didn’t want to go back. Some families left and took their children with them, so the government wouldn’t know where to find them. But most of us… went back because the government said that we had to. And our parents wanted us to be educated, to learn to read and write so that we would be able to survive in the white man’s world. They knew our ways were disappearing. Many of them had already forgotten what their grandparents had taught them. Living on the reservations, we could no longer follow the animals.”

  Margie and Christina were quiet as they continued to walk through the crunchy leaves, listening to the birdcalls around them. Margie was sorry that she hadn’t spent more time learning about the wildlife. She could recognize the chickadee’s call and the blue jay’s, and the rat-a-tat-tat of the woodpeckers and flickers, but other birds chirped and chattered, and she didn’t know them from their calls.

  “What other kinds of trees are here?” she asked. “You can make tea from birch or willow bark, right?”

  Moushoom nodded. “Yes. Good for pain. That’s where you get aspirin. And you can eat the layer under the bark. It is soft and can be sweet. The animals like it. But only eat the bark of trees you know are safe. Not elderberry or sumac.”

  They reached the shore of the river. The path didn’t go right beside it, and Margie was happy to keep her distance. “They had to rebuild all of these pathways,” she told Christina. “After the flood in 2013. A lot of the pathways along here…” She made a falling motion with her hand. “Right into the river.”

  Christina looked somewhat anxious about this suggestion as she gazed at the river running beside the bird sanctuary.

  “In the spring or early summer,” Margie reassured her. “Not in the autumn when the water levels are so low.”

  “Still…” Christina gave the wheelchair a little nudge to encourage Margie to continue, not to stop there looking. Margie was happy to oblige. The shore was rocky, and she was glad to have an excuse not to try to get to the edge of the water. She obviously couldn’t get the wheelchair over the rocks. And there were signs warning people to stay away from the shorebirds’ nesting grounds.

  So she couldn’t go to the edge of the river, even if she wanted to.

  They turned, continuing around the pond to the point where Margie knew they were getting close to the end. Or the beginning. Back to the pathway they had come in on. There was a construction area to the right of the trail, well-fenced-off so that no one could get at the building supplies and equipment being stored there. And, Margie saw, there were signs warning that the area was under 24-hour electronic surveillance.

  Christina saw Margie noticing the signs. “Is this close to… you know, where it happened?” she asked. “Do you think he walked by here, or part of what happened might be on video?”

  “No… not unless he started this way and went around the pond in the opposite direction to what we did. Clockwise. He died at the other end of the pathway, where we came in.”

  “Near the Walker house?”

  “Between there and the bridge.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  Margie raised her brows. “You wanted me to show you where the body was? I thought that would be too morbid.”

  “Well… yeah, maybe,” Christina admitted. “But now I feel creeped out that I went by there and didn’t even know it. Like… I should have known it. I should have felt something when I walked by that place.”

  “I don’t think it’s haunted.”

  “Hmm.” Christina shook her head and looked serious as she walked farther down the path. They reached the other long bridge.

  “Let’s go out on it,” Moushoom proposed, spreading his arm toward the bridge. “I want to see.”

  Margie sighed and looked toward her daughter. Christina didn’t immediately offer to take the wheelchair this time. Maybe pouting, punishing Margie for not telling her the location of the body when they had gone by. Margie swallowed and pushed the wheelchair up to the bridge, pausing for another moment to see if Christina would offer to push it across. Moushoom would want to go to the observation point halfway across to watch the waterfowl. Margie took a few steps and stopped, knowing that she was now standing over the surface of the water instead of the land.

  Moushoom looked over his shoulder at her. “You stay here,” he said kindly. “I can walk this little ways. Time to stretch my legs.”

  He set the brakes on the wheelchair. Margie couldn’t protest and tell him to stop. She knew she couldn’t push him all the way. Or she could, but it would take a great deal of willpower. Of course, Moushoom could walk however far he felt comfortable, as long as someone was watching him, and he had the rail to help keep him steady. He moved around in his apartment without the wheelchair, preferring not to have to maneuver it in the cramped space.

  “No, Moushoom!” Christina protested, immediately coming to his rescue. “I’ll take you across.”

  Moushoom looked at her for a moment, then released the brakes again, leaning back to relax. Margie could see his eyes twinkling. Canny old man.

  Christina took hold of the wheelchair handles and pushed it forward. “You can wait here. We’ll just be a minute,” she advised Margie.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Margie drove by Tristan Elliott’s and Pete Ramsey’s house on the way home from the park. She was somber, thinking about what had happened and how it could all be explained. From what she had learned from Moushoom, most of the toxins that he was aware of in the park needed to be taken in quite large amounts to cause death and did not act immediately. Tristan should have felt sick. He should have had enough time to get to the emergency room or call for help before succumbing.

  Was it possible that he had? She would need to see the phone logs that they had pulled. Had he called 9-1-1? Health Link? Ramsey? Uber? He hadn’t made it out of the park, which made her think that he had not been trying to get help, but it was possible that he had been well enough to make a call but not strong enough to get out of the park. It had been late and, apparently, there was no one else around. The park was supposed to be closed, but there wasn’t much anyone could do to keep out someone like Tristan, who saw the bird sanctuary as his own private garden. A gate or fence could easily be jumped, and the parks were not patrolled twenty-four hours a day.

  “Mom?”

  Margie was startled out of her reverie and looked over her shoulder at Christina, riding in the back seat. “Sweetie?”

  “Can we get something to eat before we take Moushoom home?”

  “Sure. Of course. Where do you want to go?”

  “Can we go home and make bannock?”

  They had taken Moushoom by the house once or twice so that he could see where they lived. The three steps up to the door were a challenge for him, but not impossible. They’d never had him over to eat.

  “Well… yes, we could try that. Do you want to do that, Moushoom? You’re okay with not going back to your apartment right away? You’ll miss your supper there.”

  Moushoom waved this concern away. “What is that compared to bannock?”

  “We should have gathered some of those rose hips,” Margie commented. “We could have made you rose hip tea too.”

  “Oh, I forgot,” Christina said with a laugh. “You should have reminded me.”

  Moushoom shook his head slowly. “I never did like rose hip tea,” he confessed.

  After a very satisfying dinner of bannock, Margie and Christina took Moushoom back to his apartment. He was already nodding in the wheelchair as they pushed him into his building. It had been a tiring afternoon for him, but one that Margie hoped he would remember for a long time. She knew she would.

  Christina had homework to do or else was working on her Indigenous Fair project; Margie wasn’t sure which. But everything was quiet, so she tried calling the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. She didn’t know whether she would be able to reach Dr. Kahn or not, but she could at least leave a message for him.

  Nancy answered and assured Margie that Dr. Kahn was still there, and she would try to reach him. In a few minutes, there was a click as the doctor picked up the line.

  “Dr. Kahn here.”

  “It’s Detective Patenaude.”

  “Ah, nice to hear from you, Detective. But I don’t have anything new to share with you yet. The tests that we have requested will take longer to come in.”

  “Oh, I know. I actually called to let you know that I went to the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary with my grandfather today. So that he could tell me about the plants he recognized in the park. What Elliott might have eaten and what is poisonous.”

  “Very enterprising of you! And I’ll bet he enjoyed the outing.”

  “Yes, he did. We saw a heron. It was a really nice visit.”

  “And did you come up with anything?”

  “Not as much as I had hoped. I have a list of some of the plants we saw there, things that Moushoom—my grandfather—said could be eaten or had medicinal uses. And a few things that he saw that might be poisonous. But the things that he pointed out… they are not that fast acting. I’ve looked them up on the internet to compare what it says there with what he told me, just in case there were different varieties or he had it wrong. But for most of them, it takes a few hours before they start to cause symptoms. And then most of them have nausea and vomiting as symptoms. So Elliott would have known that he was sick. And he would have had time to call for help. To get to the emergency room to be treated. Maybe they wouldn’t have been able to save him. I don’t know. But he should have had time to get to the hospital.”

  “Yes,” Kahn said thoughtfully. “Many poisons would have to make their way through the digestive tract to the small intestine before they began to act. Which could be half an hour to two hours. And then, as you say, he probably would have felt pretty sick. I would expect him to go home and go to bed if he didn’t want to go to the hospital. Not to stay in the park until he dropped.”

  Were there problems at home? Had he left during or after his argument with Pete Ramsey because there was domestic violence? He might prefer to stay away, even if he were feeling wretched, if he thought that it was too early to go home and he might be beaten if Ramsey hadn’t had long enough to cool down.

  “Or,” Kahn went on. “It might be as you suggested, and he was allergic to something and had an immediate reaction to it. One of the edible plants that you mentioned. It might be something that we think is perfectly safe, but it killed him.”

  “But wouldn’t it be obvious if it was an allergic reaction? He’d have hives and… I don’t know; his throat would be swollen shut and his face all swelled up. I mean, he looked pretty normal when I saw him, and you would have noticed if there were signs like that.”

  “An allergy can cause sudden cardiac death before any of those things have a chance to develop. We might be able to test for mast cells or histamine levels, but… it wouldn’t necessarily be conclusive.”

  “So I should ask his partner if he had any allergies, for sure.”

  “Yes. But he might not have known that he did. Sometimes something can just set them off. Or whatever he ate might not seem related to any other allergies. People with multiple allergies sometimes cross-react to other things or discover new allergies that they hadn’t been aware of before.”

  “So none of this is very helpful to you.”

  “It’s a start. It’s more than I had before you called. And I think your comments about how long it would take him to show poisoning symptoms and actually die are very well-placed. It is too bad that you didn’t find anything more toxic at the park. Foxglove and some other plants are very cardiotoxic and might have acted quite quickly. Oleander, lily of the valley… by the time he figured out he was sick, it might have been too late to get any help.”

  “So he wasn’t poisoned by something in the park? Or he was incapacitated before we could expect him to be, because of an allergy?”

  “Do you know how long he was there? Maybe he sat down to rest because he was feeling weak and nauseated, and he fell asleep and didn’t wake up before the more serious symptoms overtook him? Or maybe…”

  Margie waited for Kahn’s new thought, but he didn’t put it into words right away, humming and thinking it through without telling her what he was thinking.

  “What?” Margie prompted eventually. “Or maybe what?”

  “Is there any possibility that he was suicidal? That he took something before leaving home, maybe even a couple of hours before, and then went to the park, so that his partner wouldn’t know that he was sick, or because it was a special place for him, and he pictured it as being a peaceful death?”

  Margie nodded vigorously. “It was his favorite place. Very special to him. From what we understand, he walked there several times a day. So of course he could have chosen to go there to die.” Margie pressed her lips together, thinking about it. Some pieces fit, but others still did not. “Of course, that doesn’t explain the tree or the marks on his face. Would a beaver do that after he was dead? Attack his body and pull the fallen tree over top of him?”

  “Certainly not known beaver behavior, as far as I know.”

  “No.” That was more likely the behavior of the larger Homo sapiens.

  “But if we can establish what killed him, we would be much further ahead and could build out the rest of the facts more easily,” Khan said.

  “Yeah. I’ll talk to his partner. See whether he has been depressed. I know they were fighting. Maybe it was because Elliott was depressed. Or he was feeling bad because they had fought.”

  “Or he could even have eaten something at supper, a toxic plant he had mistaken for an edible, then went to the park a couple of hours later, right at about the time he was starting to feel the effects.”

  “I’ve asked for video. Do you think we’ll be able to tell anything by it? I don’t suppose so. Surveillance cameras are usually pretty primitive, and we would not be able to tell if he was pale or sweating or something like that.”

  “No, but if he was staggering or vomiting, that would be clear enough to pick up on a video.”

  “I’ll take a look as soon as I’ve got it. It helps to know what to look for.”

  Khan nodded. “Since we don’t know yet what the poison was, I can only give you common poisoning symptoms. We’ll have more to work with if we can figure out what it was.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Calling family members was never easy to do. Margie could wait until the next day and go to Ramsey’s house again, but she didn’t want to do that either. She wanted to get done what she could during the evening, and seeing him face to face to ask the sensitive questions she had in mind would not be any easier than bringing it up in a phone call.

  She considered several different approaches, jotted down the questions she wanted to touch upon, then bit the bullet and dialed his number.

  “Hello?” Ramsey’s voice was uncertain. Margie’s cell phone didn’t indicate that she was a homicide officer, of course. A lot of people didn’t answer calls with no caller ID. She often ended up having to call, leave a message, give the person time to pick it up and realize who it was trying to reach them, and then she would call back again—because it was extremely rare for anyone to call a homicide detective back. They would hopefully pick up the second time she called, knowing who it was.

  “This is Detective Patenaude, Mr. Ramsey. We talked the other day about your partner, Tristan.”

  “Oh, yeah. I remember who you are. Does that mean that you’ve found something? Or that you’re ready to release the body? I’ve called the medical examiner’s office a couple of times, but they keep pushing me off and saying that they’re not ready to release it yet. How long does it actually take to do an autopsy? I know it isn’t like on TV where they’re waiting to do it at two o’clock in the morning and have it done by the time the detectives call for results, but…”

  “You’re right,” Margie agreed. “Those TV tropes can really throw off people’s perceptions of what timelines should be. Facial recognition and fingerprint identification in seconds, DNA results overnight, tox screens that can identify any substance on the planet…” She sighed. “We are making progress on Tristan’s case, but I can’t tell you for sure when the medical examiner will be finished with the body. I really don’t think it will be very long. He’s already ordered a number of lab tests and is probably just waiting to see if we’ll need any more. It’s not a good idea to release a body too soon. People don’t like it when you ask for it back again.”

  Ramsey didn’t appreciate Margie’s macabre humor. It was probably inappropriate.

  “I did have a few other questions I wanted to ask you so that we can continue to move this investigation forward.”

  “Well, ask away. I want this to be solved as much as you do. Probably more.” Ramsey’s voice was a growl. She definitely was not making a good impression on him.

  “Did Tristan have any allergies?”

  There was a pause before Ramsey could come up with an answer to this. “Some hay fever, maybe. You know, in the spring when all of the pollens are in the air. He would take some antihistamines…”

 

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