Free An Anniversary to Die For by Valerie Wolzien

her to help you,” Erika said gently.
    “I know. It’s so hard to talk about.” She looked up at Erika. “I don’t understand myself.”
    Erika just nodded.
    Susan waited, wondering what was coming. Drugs or some other sort of illegal behavior? Could this lovely young woman have been involved in a cult at one time? It was most likely an unwanted pregnancy, although that wasn’t usually as shaming as Signe’s hesitancy seemed to imply.
    “I was almost arrested once for attempted murder.” The words were said so quietly that Susan wasn’t absolutely sure she had heard them.
    “Attempted murder?” Susan repeated when Signe didn’t elaborate. “But that’s what your mother was arrested for.”
    “You have to explain a bit better,” Erika insisted.
    “You see . . . Well . . . there seems to be a theme of poisoning in my family. It started years and years ago. Back when I was a teenager. Back then, my mother came down with the same symptoms my father was suffering from. She . . . she kept going to the emergency room with stomach problems. Finally a doctor there realized she was being poisoned. There was an investigation, of course. The evidence pointed to me. But I . . . I wasn’t arrested,” Signe said, the words coming out so quickly that Susan had trouble understanding what she was saying.
    “You said you were a teenager at the time.”
    “Yes. I was sixteen. Barely.”
    “Signe, I know you don’t want to talk about all this, but you really do have to explain more.” Erika’s voice was gentle, but firm.
    Signe took a deep breath. “I didn’t get along very well with my mother.”
    That didn’t surprise Susan. She had found it difficult to get along with Ashley, and she didn’t live in the same house as her. “Sixteen is a difficult age,” she said.
    Signe brushed her hair off her face and began, haltingly, to tell the story. “It wasn’t because I was sixteen. It was because of the way I was raised.
    “When I was a kid, I didn’t know my mother all that well. I grew up on my grandfather’s farm—he raised tobacco and dairy cows. The closest town was tiny—and a fifteen-mile drive away. I went to school by bus and was driven to church on Sunday. It sounds isolated, but it wasn’t. My grandparents were from Norway, and they kept in touch with their roots. I learned to dance at the Sons of Norway Viking Hall. My Girl Scout troop’s leaders were from Norway, and we learned to cook Norwegian dishes for our cooking badge. My 4-H project was raising goats. You get the idea.” She smiled for the first time since entering the house. “It was a wonderful way to grow up. I was surrounded by people who nurtured and cared for me.”
    “What about your parents? Did they live on the farm, too?” Susan asked.
    “No. My father’s job kept him overseas, and my mother went along with him. Most summers, they had a one-month leave, but my mother always insisted that being home wasn’t what my father needed to relax from his stressful occupation, and anyway, she preferred Paris or London to a farm in upstate Connecticut. As a result I didn’t see much of them—at least not when I was young. But when I was fourteen years old, my grandfather died and my parents came home. My father left whatever project he was working on, moved into my grandmother’s house, and planned to run the farm. It was a bad idea. My mother hated the farm and didn’t like caring for my grandmother, whose health was failing. It turned out that my father wasn’t very good at farming, so when my grandmother died, he sold the place and they went back overseas. By then I wasn’t living at home, of course. I’d gone to college—NYU—and I was living in the city. I’ve never been one of those kids who return to the nest. Of course, in my case, there wasn’t any nest.”
    “But back at the farm—when you were all living together. You said your mother was poisoned.”
    “Yes. It was creepily like what happened last summer,”