Free An Anniversary to Die For by Valerie Wolzien Page A

Signe continued. “That’s why Erika knows about it all. I went a little—a lot—nuts when my mother was arrested.”
    “I followed the case in the papers,” Susan said slowly. “You father was poisoned with insecticides, right?”
    “Yes. He still has traces of it in his blood.”
    “And your mother?”
    Signe nodded. “It was exactly the same. My mother became ill and went to the hospital. She was diagnosed as having food poisoning. It happened three times in two weeks, and finally a doctor insisted on some tests. Those tests revealed that she was ingesting poison.
    “At first, everyone assumed she had picked up something on the farm. My father was worried and hired a company to come out and do tests in and around the house to discover exactly where my mother was coming in contact with the poison.” Signe paused for a few minutes and then, looking straight at Susan, finished the story. “There was poison in the house. It was in my bedroom closet—a bag of it as well as a cup and a whisk, which had obviously been used to mix the insecticide with other ingredients. I was taken into custody that evening.”
    “I don’t understand. You didn’t poison your mother, did you?” Susan asked.
    “No.”
    “But . . .”
    “But what was that stuff doing in my closet, right?”
    “Yes.”
    “I can only tell you what I told everyone at the time: I have no idea. My room had two closets. I used one for clothing and one for stuff. You know, sports equipment, school things, teenage junk. The poison was found in the back of that closet. It could have been there for months and I wouldn’t have noticed. Or it might have been placed there the day of the search.”
    “They found the poison in your closet, and you were taken into police custody?”
    “Yes, and released almost immediately.”
    “Why?”
    “Because my mother claimed to have put that poison there. I really had no idea where it had come from. And my mother stuck to her story. She said she used it on house-plants. Since she wasn’t suicidal, the police really had no choice but to let me go.”
    “What about your father? Your grandmother? What did they think?” Susan asked.
    “My grandmother was wonderful. She believed me absolutely. She made an unusually critical comment about my mother, and that was it. My father—back then I didn’t know what he thought. But he suggested I go into therapy. I did. To tell the truth, I seriously needed someone to talk to. My therapist was wonderful—and a graduate of Columbia. She’s the reason I went to college in the city.
    “Of course today my father seems to have decided that I’m a murderer,” Signe said sadly.
    “Do you think your mother put that poison in your closet? Do you think she knew who did?”
    Signe’s smile disappeared. “Now you know just a few of the questions I’ve been asking myself for the past ten years.”
    “Any answers?” Susan asked.
    “There are a few things I do know and a few things I’ve guessed,” Signe answered.
    Susan leaned back and waited, expecting the story to continue. She was wrong, There was a knock at the front door, and when she answered it, Susan discovered three policemen and a woman in uniform. They had come to ask Signe to accompany them to the police station. They had, they said, a few questions to ask her.

NINE
    SUSAN AND ERIKA HAD NO IDEA WHAT TO DO.
    “Do you think we should follow her to the police station?” Susan asked, watching the two marked police cruisers pull out of the driveway.
    “I think she already has an entourage,” Erika replied. “Look.” She pointed to the Markses’ house, where a phalanx of TV microwave vans was lining up behind the police vehicles. “If we follow along, they’ll just turn to us for information when the official sources don’t provide what they’re looking for.”
    “We could call a lawyer,” Susan suggested, feeling they should do something.
    “Do you know the name of a good criminal defense lawyer?”