Free THE WITCH AND THE TEA PARTY (A Rachael Penzra Mystery) by Elizabeth Shawn

Myrtle wailed.
    “Nobody has said that,” I reassured her, not mentioning certain worries that had been racing through our minds over the past hours. “We don’t even know what’s happened. We heard that Mrs. Brown-Hendricks died. Do you know what she died from?”
    “Probably from eating too many sour grapes,” Dora grumbled.
    “She told Dora that sweet little Eloise was nothing more than common vermin and should be killed rather than kept around to spread disease.”
    “I’d rather be bitten by a rat than by her,” Dora claimed.
    “She turned out to be really mean,” my aunt continued. “She knew Eloise lived there. She’d been in the store lots of times. She treated us like dirt. She had never been like that before.”
    “Thought she’d bought us.” Sometimes my neighbor surprises me with the acuity of her remarks. “The minute we cashed her check she thought she could run the show.”
    “She bossed everybody around. I don’t know how her guests could stand her.”
    “What actually killed her?” My niece brought the subject back to the basics.
    “Probably a heart attack,” Aunt Myrtle made it half statement, half question. “Nobody would tell us anything.”
    “Moondance heard the paramedics talking about poison,” Dora said. “That was before they all shut up and called the cops.”
    “You said on the phone that they’d taken away your tea,” I reminded them. “Had she had any to drink?”
    “That’s what’s so bad,” Dora admitted. “She said it tasted like poison. Put a quick stop to any sales we might have made. But she still drank hers bit by bit. Too cheap to pass up something free.”
    “Now we have all that tea made up and nobody will ever buy it after this.”
    “You’ll have to drink it yourselves,” Patsy told her, a little maliciously, probably because she’d been forced to try some to make them happy.
    Both their faces fell.
    “I’m sure they took away everything that was edible, didn’t they?” I asked.
    “Yes, they even took your urn, Rachael,” Aunt Myrtle exclaimed indignantly. “I suppose they thought the water in it was poisoned. It wasn’t. I’d already had a cup of tea from it.”
    “Your special tea?” I didn’t say that to be mean, but she flushed.
    “Well, no. I was trying out some regular peppermint tea,” she admitted. “My stomach was a little jumpy. Nerves, I expect, don’t you?”
    “Probably,” I threw her a bone. No sense in rubbing in her abandonment of their product. I would have done the same. “So the water was definitely okay. Did anybody else try the tea before she made her statement?”
    “Two of the ladies did,” Dora said triumphantly. “So that goes to prove it wasn’t anything we gave her.”
    Patsy and I exchanged looks of tremendous relief. Even knowing the ingredients were harmless, it was easy to imagine it poisoning someone once we’d tasted it. That still left my earlier fear that they’d somehow changed the formula.
    “Tell the truth, now,” I smiled falsely at them both. “Nobody will be upset. Did you add anything to the recipe since you gave me a copy?”
    “Absolutely not!” my aunt declared. “It was as perfect as it was apt to ever be. It should have cured just about anything. Of course we didn’t change it.”
    I backtracked humbly. “Sorry. I just had to be sure. Some of the most common herbs can cause allergic reactions. For that matter, anything can, even water, but some affect more people than others.”
    Dora settled the matter. “We didn’t do anything differently,” she said. I believed her. She doesn’t worry overly about other people and what they think.
    “Did she just fall over?” Patsy asked. “Did she feel sick ahead of time, or was it fast?”
    “We don’t know for sure,” Dora explained. “If she felt it coming on, she didn’t tell anybody. She was way back in the building. We don’t know how long she was there. The sheriff was trying to get exact times from people,